If I were to recommend the single most influential book on the impact of cognitive science in my teaching, I would recommend Daniel Willingham’s Why Don’t Students Like School?Until the year 2000, Dr Willingham’s research had focused on the brain basis of learning and memory, but since then he’s focused on the application of cognitive psychology to schooling. This book helps every educator to realise the importance of developing his/her understanding of how the mind works with respect to our students’ (and our own!) learning.
The book is organised into nine chapters, each answering a key question related to education. These include Why don’t students like school? (chapter 1), Why is it so hard for students to understand abstract ideas? (chapter 4) and What’s the secret to getting students to think like real scientists, mathematicians, and historians? (chapter 6). In addition, Willingham explores a number of myths about what our students need, often debunking them and proposing a research-supported alternative.
Below are some of the most useful ideas I drew from the text:
1. “Humans don’t think very often because our brains are designed not for thought but for the avoidance of thought. Thinking is not only effortful, as Ford noted, it’s also slow and unreliable“ (p 4).
Rather than think, humans more often rely on their memory, which includes personal events and facts, but also strategies. Therefore, as an educator, I have a responsibility to help my students move as much content knowledge to their long-term memory as possible, but also tu support them in storing the strategies for solving subject-specific problems to long-term memory. This will free up their working memory to work with new problems in creative ways. As a teacher of literature, the texts we work with are always “new territory” on which to apply the strategies of text comprehension analysis and interpretation.
2. “There is overlap between the brain areas and chemicals that are important in learning and those that are important in the brain’s natural reward system” (p 10).
In order to trigger the brain’s “reward system”, I must engage students in problem-solving that can bring them satisfaction, which comes from a sense of making progress and success. This reminds me of Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development : understanding the limit between what a student can do with support, what they can do alone, and what is cognitively out of reach at this point in time. Neither too easy nor too difficult yield the level of satisfaction to ensure cognitive development.
3. “Successful thinking relies on four factors: information from the environment, facts in long-term memory, procedures in long-term memory, and the amount of space in working memory” (p 18).
As an educator, my challenge is to assess how many of the “facts” and “procedures” have been stored in long-term memory, and to support my students in gaining that preliminary knowledge that will help free up their working memory to solve problems successfully. Cognitive load theory addresses this delicate balance and explains why we must respect students’ cognitive limits and use that information to guide us in how best to prepare them to expand those limits.
4. “Thinking processes [are] intertwined with knowledge” (p 28).
As an educator, I should not prioritise practising skills in a vacuum, but always allow students to work with meaningful, subject-relevant information that they can apply and combine in new ways. I have found I dedicate more time now to helping students access knowledge and making connections between what they learn (including across subject areas), particularly when those concepts are useful in the study of my own subject (literature). Richer background knowledge allows students to (a) decipher unknown vocabulary through context clues; (b) fill-in gaps and make the necessary assumptions that allow a reader to accurately interpret a text; (c) chunk knowledge (for example, within a lexical field) to free up space in working memory and make it easier to relate ideas; and (d) decode ambiguous sentences. All of these cognitive activities are clearly connected to my discipline.
5. “Educational thinkers have suggested that a limited number of ideas should be taught in great depth, beginning in the early grades and carrying through the curriculum for years as different topics are taken up and viewed through the lens of one or more of these ideas. From the cognitive perspective, that makes sense” (p 48).
As an educator, I have thought long and hard about what I think are the “unifying ideas of my discipline”—our school’s curriculum review has supported that exercise. The IB curriculum guide for my subject has also outlined the objectives, a number of which I see as “key ideas” in my discipline. Now I place much more emphasis on making these ideas explicit and supporting my students in reflecting on them while making connections between them and what we are currently studying.
6. Although “Memory is the residue of thought” is a very famous quotation from this book, I prefer: “Your memory is not a product of what you want to remember or what you try to remember; it’s a product of what you think about” (p 53).
This suggests that, as an educator, I must structure my learning activities very strategically to ensure that students “think about” (and think about in several different ways) the content I want them to learn, motivating them to use their working memory several times, but also creating opportunities for successful (and satisfying) problem-solving until this content can be stored in long-term memory for later retrieval. Willingham recommends that we get students to think about meaning for better learning, as that parallels our brain’s natural activity.
7. “Effective teachers… are able to connect personally with students, and they organize the material in a way that makes it interesting and easy to understand” (p 65).
I enjoyed reading about this balance in teaching styles. The data presented to support this statement came from student surveys (something I hope to explore during this school year), and it became clear that students value both the emotional connection with teachers and the level of structure and preparation that allows for a clear delivery of content knowledge and skill instruction. I want to ensure that I am improving on both in my practice.
8. “Understanding new ideas is mostly a matter of getting the right old ideas into working memory and then rearranging them—making comparisons we hadn’t made before, or thinking about a feature we had previously ignored” (p 91).
What I appreciated about this concept was the emphasis placed on considering different options for deeper learning: different uses of the same word, for example, or different approaches to answering a question, or different interpretations of the same text. I want my students to “juggle” a series of options before they hone in on one that will become their most successful response. Concretely, Willingham recommends the use of many examples (exemplars, incorrect examples, many short examples to show the same concept) to help students move from shallow to deep understanding when it comes to skills.
9. “It is virtually impossible to become proficient at a mental task without extended practice…[T]wo reasons to practice—to gain competence and to improve—are self-evident… Less obvious are the reasons to practice skills when it appears you have mastered something… Odd as it may seem, that sort of practice is essential to schooling…: it reinforces the basic skills that are required for the learning of more advanced skills, it protects against forgetting, and it improves transfer.” (p 108).
As much as I thought I had been doing enough “practice” with my students, this section of the book challenged me to consider the balance between how much time I spend practising skills in relation to the texts we are reading, and how much time I spend on reading comprehension of those texts, or doing other activities that I valued as motivating/interesting to students but which I could not necessarily justify in light of the skills I’m trying to help them develop. (Of course, knowing exactly which skills are the most useful in my field is something I also have had to reflect on very carefully, and “rank”, to ensure I was being effective). I’ve become much more strategic about how I plan activities, being more careful not to group skills but rather work on one at a time, moving towards “chunking skills” later on in the programme. Progress seems slower, but I am seeing more consistent results when we proceed to comprehensive assessments. This supports the idea that when students learn skills so well that they become automatic, this frees up space in working memory to interpret a new text, and to plan how to communicate their ideas most effectively.
10. “You want to encourage your students to think of their intelligence as under their control, and especially that they can develop their intelligence through hard work. Therefore, you should praise processes rather than ability.” (p 183).
Willingham addresses growth mindset without ever using that term. He describes intelligence as “malleable” and suggests how we can use praise as a tool to develop a growth mindset in our students. This is something I continue to struggle with, as I want students to see that “Failure means you’re about to learn something” (p 184). The biggest contradiction is between these ideals, and an actual school system where the final output is a report with grades. If we continue to give grades, why would students ever want to embrace failure? Which message will be stronger in their minds? And is there a way to change that when not giving grades seems to create anxiety as they don’t know what their final results will be?
11. In addition to “rich subject-matter knowledge… pedagogigal content knowledge is also important.” (p 191).
This supports the idea that everyone involved in an education institution should see themselves as a lifelong learner. As a teacher, I need to be involved in “conscious practice”, where I actively seek feedback on what I do. Willingham proposes a model for this which involves the type of trusting partnerships and professional conversations that I propose in my revised “appraisal model”– the Professional Learning Plan.
Why Don’t Students Like School? by Daniel Willingham has been a seminal work for me as it challenged me to reconsider many of my practices. I continue to draw from this work and to return to it as I reflect on my efforts to improve my teaching.
Bibliography
Willingham, Daniel T. Why Don’t Students Like School? San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. 2009.
