A few years ago, I wrote a post exploring the act of finding the right method for the moment and working on approaches like they were ‘pedagogical cocktails‘:
Every teacher is different – we just choose to deny it. Even though we may practise a certain pedagogy, it does not necessarily mean that it will be the same as the next person. Rather, everyone has their our own intricacies and twists on the way they do things. What then starts to matter more is the practitioner rather than the pedagogy.
Source: So Which Pedagogical Cocktails Are Drinking Today? by Aaron Davis
My thought was that what mattered is actually going beyond the what and how to address the why. I was thinking about this a bit after reading Daniel Willingham’s book Why Don’t Students Like School?: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom. I was recommended the book by someone and noticed that it was available in Audible so I dived in.
The book is broken into ten principles:
- People are natually curious, but they are not naturally great thinkers. Therefore, think of to-be-learned material as answers, and take the time necessary to explain the students the questions.
- Factual knowledge prcedes skill. Therefore, it is not possible to think well on a topic in the absence of factual knowledge about the topic.
- Memory is the residue of thought. Therefore, The best barometer for every lesson plan is “Of what will it make the students think?”
- We understand new things in the context of things we already know. Therefore, always make deep knowledge your goal, spoken and unspoken, but recognise that shallow knowledge will come first.
- Proficiency requires practice. Therefore, think carefully about which material students need at their fingertips, and practice it over time.
- Cognition is fundamentally different early and late in training. Therefore, strive for deep understanding in your students, not the creation of new knowledge.
- Children are more alike than different in terms of learning. Therefore, think of lesson content, not students differences, driving decisions about how to teach.
- Intelligence can be changed through sustained hard work. Therefore, always talk about successes and failures in terms of process, not ability.
- Technology changes everything … but not the way you think. Therefore, don’t assume you know how new technology will work in the classroom.
- Teaching, like any complex cognitive skill, must be practiced. Therefore, improvement requires more than experience; it also requires conscious effort and feedback.
Willingham explains that each of these principles was selected based on four criteria, that they are true all all the time, based on a great deal of data, have a sizable impact on performance and had to be clear about what was involved for a teacher. This focus on practicality is emphasised by the implications for the classroom provided at the end of each chapter.
There were a number of ideas that left me thinking and reflecting. This includes that logical thinking is often really just memory retrieval:
When we see someone apparently engaged in logical thinking, he or she is actually engaged in memory retrieval.
Source: Why Don’t Students Like School by Daniel Willingham
The more dots you have, the more you can retain new information in the future:
This final effect of background knowledge – that having factual knowledge in long-term memory makes it easier to acquire still more factual knowledge – is worth contemplating for a moment. It means that the amount of information you retain depends on what you already have.
Source: Why Don’t Students Like School by Daniel Willingham
Unstructured ‘discovery’ learning can lead to incorrect discoveries:
An important downside, however, is that what students will think about is less predictable. If students are left to explore ideas on their own, they may well explore mental paths that are not profitable. If memory is the residue of thought, then students will remember incorrect “discoveries” as much as they will remember the correct ones.
Source: Why Don’t Students Like School by Daniel Willingham
Effortless is a myth, “practice makes progress:”
Replace the mantra “practice makes perfect” with “practice makes progress.”
Source: Why Don’t Students Like School by Daniel Willingham
Everyone makes mistakes, the question is often how you respond.
I didn’t see the Big Boss very often, and I was pretty intimidated by him. I remember well the first time I did something stupid (I’ve forgotten what) and it was brought to his attention. I mumbled some apology. He looked at me for a long moment and said, “Kid, the only people who don’t make mistakes are the ones who never do anything.” It was tremendously freeing – not because I avoided judgment for the incident, but it was the first time I really understood that you have to learn to accept failure if you’re ever going to get things done. Basketball great Michael Jordan put it this way: “I’ve missed more than nine thousand shots in my career. I’ve lost almost three hundred games. Twenty-six times I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”
Source: Why Don’t Students Like School by Daniel Willingham
It is interesting reading through the reviews online for the book. Many praise its practicality, which I found helpful too. The issue I had was with the research and the statement of fact. For example, one commentator put it as follows:
The strength of this book is that it contains good educational advice (mostly); its weakness is its constant reference to a theory in science that I find fundamentally unconvincing.
Source: All it is cracked up to be? Some notes on Daniel Willingham’s ‘Why Don’t Students Like School?’
At the very least, I felt that it was a useful book to read as a provocation in and out of the classroom. As with various instructional models, these books offer a reminder of aspects to stop and consider. However, it also left me wondering about the rise of science as discussed by Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition:
Nothing indeed could be less trustworthy for acquiring knowledge and approaching truth than passive observation or mere contemplation. In order to be certain one had to make sure, and in order to know one had to do. Certainty of knowledge could be reached only under a twofold condition: first, that knowledge concerned only what one had done himself—so that its ideal became mathematical knowledge, where we deal only with self-made entities of the mind—and second, that knowledge was of such a nature that it could be tested only through more doing.
Source: The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt
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REVIEW: Why Don’t Students Like School (Daniel Willingham) by Aaron Davis is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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