Why Don't Students Like School? by Daniel T. Willingham (John Wiley & Sons, 2009).
Bottom line message of this chapter: The method you use to teach an individual topic or concept should be dictated by the nature of the concept, not the "learning style" of the student.
If what you want students to learn is a visual concept, say the structure of a cell, then use visuals to teach it. If you want students to learn music, an auditory approach is the way to go. If you want students to learn how to move their bodies in a certain way, then kinesthetic activities are called for.* There is no evidence, however, to support the idea that a visual learner can learn auditory concepts better if they are presented in a visual way (reading musical notes as opposed the hearing them), or that kinesthetic learners will understand mitosis better if they can "dance" the process. This applies equally to any of the other learning styles applied to a concept that doesn't naturally fit the style.
Now for the discussion. None of this is meant to suggest that a student can't be a "visual learner," for example. What that means, though, is that such a person is particularly good at learning visual information, i.e., concepts that have a visual component to them such as colors, shapes, arrangements, physical relationships, etc. It does not mean, and research bears this out according to Willingham, that a visual learner can remember the meanings of vocabulary words better if they are presented with pictures illustrating the vocabulary words or that auditory learners will retain more if the meanings of the words are read aloud or that kinesthetic learners will be better served by acting out the meanings of the words.
The problem is that what is important, what is typically tested, is the meaning of the words, and meaning is something different from auditory, visual, or kinesthetic information. As noted above, the visual learners may well remember exquisite details about the images, but not necessarily be any better able to connect the picture with its corresponding word than a nonvisual learner. Furthermore, remembering details about the visual aspects of a picture is no guarantee that the viewer will have any noticeably enhanced ability to interpret, i.e. find meaning in, that image.
Howard Gardner's model of multiple intelligences fails for the same reasons. It's not that people aren't different in terms of their abilities ("intelligences") in various types of cognition - mathematical, linguistic, interpersonal, musical, etc. However, the idea that we can use their native strengths in one area to help them find success in another, such as using their musical intelligence to help them learn science by singing songs about photosynthesis, is not supported by the data.
Willingham acknowledges that he feels a bit like the Grinch in drawing these conclusions, knowing that the "learning styles" and "multiple intelligences" paradigms have become accepted wisdom among educators at all levels. People have invested time and energy and perhaps unrealistic hope in the idea that finding a teaching method that suits the individual's learning style or "intelligence" will finally allow everyone to enjoy as much success as they are capable of achieving.
So, having pulled the learning styles rug out from under us, what does Wilingham have to offer in its place? Some ideas are presented below and more will appear in Chapter 8.
Implications for teaching
As noted earlier, let content objectives dictate your teaching strategy. Remember, however, that EVERYONE benefits from looking at or interacting with a concept in a variety of ways, so incorporate visual, auditory, and kinesthetic activities as appropriate to the concept (see footnote below).
Change is good. Spending an entire period asking students to stay focused on one cognitive task (listening, e.g.) can be draining. Mixing in visuals to break up the monotony will help to maintain attention. This will again benefit learners of all types. This also should not be news. Everyone knows the 20 minute rule, I hope.
Finally, as the previous implications suggest, don't waste your time or money trying to formally diagnose your students' individual learning styles. There's no proven value to it and you should be incorporating multiple strategies into your teaching anyway. I would add that it may even be counter-productive. I can recall many instances of students using their "learning style" as an excuse for why they can't learn something or pay attention to a discussion: "This isn't working for me, I'm a visual learner..."
Footnote
*It should be noted that many activities and concepts are multi-dimensional and can be approached from many different angles. Learning to sing involves hearing, obviously, but also positioning of the mouth and movement of the lips and tongue and so forth, all of which can be thought of as both kinesthetic, in in terms of learning how to move the muscles the right way, and visual, in that seeing someone else make those movements correctly helps us figure how to do it ourselves. Engaging all students in each of these activities, hearing, moving, and seeing, will benefit everyone, regardless of their perceived learning style.
Next:
Chapter 8: How can I help slow learners?
Friday, December 18, 2009
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Chapter 6 Addendum
Why Don't Students Like School? by Daniel T. Willingham (John Wiley & Sons, 2009).
I completely forgot to comment on Willingham's discussion of what it means to be an "expert" teacher!
Although Willingham doesn't spend much time on this (I suspect it will be addressed again in Chapter 9), he does make the following points about expert vs novice teachers, none of which should be surprising, but the second point stands out to me in light of recent discussions on lesson planning and the highly scripted curricula used in some elementary schools.
1. Expert teachers have established routines for beginning class, ending class, calling the class to order, etc. Novice teachers either do not have such routines or have not established them effectively.
2. Novice teachers typically have heavily scripted lesson plans, writing out almost everything they plan to say during a lesson. Experts do not. This suggests that for novice teachers the myriad tasks that have to be performed simultaneously in a typical classroom (and frequently invisible to the casual observer), including routine administrative tasks, handling behaviors before they become disruptions, taking questions, covering content objectives and strategies, all simply overwhelm working memory to the point that actual thinking during the presentation of a lesson is nearly impossible. For expert teachers these minutiae have become automated - they do not require conscious thought, which frees working memory to actually interact with students about content. Additionally, for expert teachers the content itself is more or less automatic - they do not need to refer to a script to discuss or explain a concept.
Willingham asserts that becoming an expert in just about any field requires 10 years of practice.
Next: Chapter 7: How should I adjust my teaching for different types of learners?
I completely forgot to comment on Willingham's discussion of what it means to be an "expert" teacher!
Although Willingham doesn't spend much time on this (I suspect it will be addressed again in Chapter 9), he does make the following points about expert vs novice teachers, none of which should be surprising, but the second point stands out to me in light of recent discussions on lesson planning and the highly scripted curricula used in some elementary schools.
1. Expert teachers have established routines for beginning class, ending class, calling the class to order, etc. Novice teachers either do not have such routines or have not established them effectively.
2. Novice teachers typically have heavily scripted lesson plans, writing out almost everything they plan to say during a lesson. Experts do not. This suggests that for novice teachers the myriad tasks that have to be performed simultaneously in a typical classroom (and frequently invisible to the casual observer), including routine administrative tasks, handling behaviors before they become disruptions, taking questions, covering content objectives and strategies, all simply overwhelm working memory to the point that actual thinking during the presentation of a lesson is nearly impossible. For expert teachers these minutiae have become automated - they do not require conscious thought, which frees working memory to actually interact with students about content. Additionally, for expert teachers the content itself is more or less automatic - they do not need to refer to a script to discuss or explain a concept.
Willingham asserts that becoming an expert in just about any field requires 10 years of practice.
Next: Chapter 7: How should I adjust my teaching for different types of learners?
Sunday, December 13, 2009
Chapter 6: Getting students to think like experts
Why Don't Students Like School? by Daniel T. Willingham (John Wiley & Sons, 2009).
What's the secret to getting students to think like real scientists, mathematicians, and historians?
This is the chapter I alluded to in the introduction where Willingham teased us with the suggestion that we might NOT want to teach our students to "think like real scientists." He makes a good argument here, but it helps first to understand what that means and doesn't mean.
We do want our students to be able to think like experts. As a science teacher, I don't want students to just learn an encyclopedia of science facts - after all, "facts" (as we know them presently) are subject to change or modification. I want students to be open to new ideas, but "skeptical" in the sense of demanding evidence to support those ideas. This requires a deep understanding of how science works, how the physical world works, and what constitutes evidence in support of a claim.
I don't necessarily expect students to go so far as Willingham does in defining an expert as someone one who is capable of generating new knowledge in a given area of study. Of course that would be great if a student wants to enter a scientific or medical field, and I do need to think of the very real possibility that any one of my students might in fact move in that direction - indeed some already have. But ultimately it may not make any difference in terms of how I should teach students at the high school level.
The problem, as Willingham explains, is that thinking like an expert can only come about from years of experience and practice. The kind of thinking an expert engages in is qualitatively different from how novices think. Novices tend to focus first on the surface structure of problems, whereas experts can more readily determine the underlying deep structure of a problem and therefore come to a solution more quickly. In some cases "novices" (that's a relative term) may have extensive knowledge that is equal to or even surpasses experts, but that knowledge is poorly organized and less accessible.
Willingham uses the fictional television doctor House to illustrate the idea, which I will not try to summarize at length here. ( I do recommend watching an episode if you've never seen it). The key idea is that House does not necessarily know more than the medical students and residents around him. Instead he is able to focus in on the important details and ignore the irrelevant symptoms of sometimes bizarre and rare disorders. This expert way of thinking is essentially, as you might hope from a doctor, the scientific method, or more to the point, "hypothesis testing." For House, a set of symptoms suggests a tentative diagnosis, a hypothesis, which in turn leads to further testing to verify the hypothesis. If the test turns out negative, the hypothesis is discarded and a new hypothesis is generated. But the wrong hypothesis is useful because it brings up questions that may never have occurred to anyone before. Thus an initially wide and seemingly contradictory field of possibilities is narrowed and focused until the correct diagnosis is determined.
So why not just look at how experts like House solve problems and then teach students to think that way? Willingham says there is simply no way to become an expert without first being a novice. We can certainly teach the process of hypothesis testing, but the skill of separating fruitful hypotheses from dead ends can only come with experience. That seems self-evident but it speaks to the notion that our curricula are doing a disservice to students by focusing on "knowledge" rather than 'critical thinking" or the movement in science education to have students "doing what scientists do."
Implications for teaching
Students are able to comprehend the knowledge aquired by experts but they are not able to generate knowledge (Willingham's definition of "thinking like scientists"). Our goal should be to expose students to the work of experts in our fields and help them understand both the knowledge itself and the context in which it is developed. Thus, the history (as well as the content) of science is important so that students see science as a process of gradual accumulation of increasingly refined knowledge over time.
Asking students to engage in creative, knowledge generating activities, like writing their own historical narratives or producing authentic scientific investigations can be fun and motivating, but set your expectations accordingly. It will likely be a poor example of the actual work done by experts or it will be a replica of someone else's work. It is no coincidence that almost all of the winners (if not most of the entrants) of the Intel (formerly Westinghouse) Science Talent Search work hand-in-hand with a mentor, typically at an institution of higher learning, with access to sophisticated equipment and high-level expertise.
In some cases it might do more harm than good to try to teach students to use expert strategies as novices. An expert tennis player thinks more about strategy than technique. A novice tennis player needs to do the opposite - strategy is useless if you can barely hit the ball over a net consistently.
Next: Chapter 7: How should I adjust my teaching for different types of learners?
What's the secret to getting students to think like real scientists, mathematicians, and historians?
This is the chapter I alluded to in the introduction where Willingham teased us with the suggestion that we might NOT want to teach our students to "think like real scientists." He makes a good argument here, but it helps first to understand what that means and doesn't mean.
We do want our students to be able to think like experts. As a science teacher, I don't want students to just learn an encyclopedia of science facts - after all, "facts" (as we know them presently) are subject to change or modification. I want students to be open to new ideas, but "skeptical" in the sense of demanding evidence to support those ideas. This requires a deep understanding of how science works, how the physical world works, and what constitutes evidence in support of a claim.
I don't necessarily expect students to go so far as Willingham does in defining an expert as someone one who is capable of generating new knowledge in a given area of study. Of course that would be great if a student wants to enter a scientific or medical field, and I do need to think of the very real possibility that any one of my students might in fact move in that direction - indeed some already have. But ultimately it may not make any difference in terms of how I should teach students at the high school level.
The problem, as Willingham explains, is that thinking like an expert can only come about from years of experience and practice. The kind of thinking an expert engages in is qualitatively different from how novices think. Novices tend to focus first on the surface structure of problems, whereas experts can more readily determine the underlying deep structure of a problem and therefore come to a solution more quickly. In some cases "novices" (that's a relative term) may have extensive knowledge that is equal to or even surpasses experts, but that knowledge is poorly organized and less accessible.
Willingham uses the fictional television doctor House to illustrate the idea, which I will not try to summarize at length here. ( I do recommend watching an episode if you've never seen it). The key idea is that House does not necessarily know more than the medical students and residents around him. Instead he is able to focus in on the important details and ignore the irrelevant symptoms of sometimes bizarre and rare disorders. This expert way of thinking is essentially, as you might hope from a doctor, the scientific method, or more to the point, "hypothesis testing." For House, a set of symptoms suggests a tentative diagnosis, a hypothesis, which in turn leads to further testing to verify the hypothesis. If the test turns out negative, the hypothesis is discarded and a new hypothesis is generated. But the wrong hypothesis is useful because it brings up questions that may never have occurred to anyone before. Thus an initially wide and seemingly contradictory field of possibilities is narrowed and focused until the correct diagnosis is determined.
So why not just look at how experts like House solve problems and then teach students to think that way? Willingham says there is simply no way to become an expert without first being a novice. We can certainly teach the process of hypothesis testing, but the skill of separating fruitful hypotheses from dead ends can only come with experience. That seems self-evident but it speaks to the notion that our curricula are doing a disservice to students by focusing on "knowledge" rather than 'critical thinking" or the movement in science education to have students "doing what scientists do."
Implications for teaching
Students are able to comprehend the knowledge aquired by experts but they are not able to generate knowledge (Willingham's definition of "thinking like scientists"). Our goal should be to expose students to the work of experts in our fields and help them understand both the knowledge itself and the context in which it is developed. Thus, the history (as well as the content) of science is important so that students see science as a process of gradual accumulation of increasingly refined knowledge over time.
Asking students to engage in creative, knowledge generating activities, like writing their own historical narratives or producing authentic scientific investigations can be fun and motivating, but set your expectations accordingly. It will likely be a poor example of the actual work done by experts or it will be a replica of someone else's work. It is no coincidence that almost all of the winners (if not most of the entrants) of the Intel (formerly Westinghouse) Science Talent Search work hand-in-hand with a mentor, typically at an institution of higher learning, with access to sophisticated equipment and high-level expertise.
In some cases it might do more harm than good to try to teach students to use expert strategies as novices. An expert tennis player thinks more about strategy than technique. A novice tennis player needs to do the opposite - strategy is useless if you can barely hit the ball over a net consistently.
Next: Chapter 7: How should I adjust my teaching for different types of learners?
Photo Expressions: back to the beginning
A recent entry from a photography blog that I read fits right in with the expert vs. novice post that I'm working on now. The expert photographer is taking guitar lessons as a novice, which leads to some insights regarding the teacher/pupil dynamic.
Read more at...
Photo Expressions: back to the beginning
I frequently have times, particularly in my lessons, when it feels like the teacher is talking a foreign language. An alien, foreign language, where I don't even know what the words sound like, never mind what they mean.
Read more at...
Photo Expressions: back to the beginning
Sunday, December 06, 2009
Chapter 5: Is drilling worth it?
Why Don't Students Like School? by Daniel T. Willingham (John Wiley & Sons, 2009).
Or, How do you get to Carnegie Hall?
We all know the old joke, and it turns out to hold true not just for the obvious fields of music, dance, art, and athletics, but also for more cerebral, academic pursuits such as reading, writing, mathematics, science, history, etc.
As I mentioned in the comments to the previous post, drilling is just a harsh, perjorative term for practice and Willingham says there is no way around it, no short-cuts to success. In order to be proficient in any activity one must practice. There are few things in life that can't be lost to some extent when practice wanes or stops all together, but some core elements can be retained practically forever given sufficient, sustained practice over time. As an example from my own experience, I lived in Munich for a while and met a man there once who had married a German woman and was living fully assimilated into German society and culture. He had little contact with English speakers. Although he had grown up speaking English into adulthood, after living in Munich for 7 years his spoken English was sometimes halting, he stumbled over words, and couldn't remember key vocabulary - he would occasionally stop mid-sentence and say, "oh man, what's that word..."
Obviously he was still what we would call "fluent" in English, but clearly he had been affected by the lack of practice speaking his native tongue. Now, compare his situation with mine vis-a-vis speaking German. I only began studying German in college, but I took many semesters and then lived in Munich for a couple of years. I spoke well enough to get around, I read the local newspapers and watched the local news and I could carry on a conversation in German to a certain extent, but I was never fluent. That was over 20 years ago, and I can assure you that if I returned to Germany today I would have trouble completing a full sentence, much less carrying on a conversation.
The key is practice. Tally up the number of hours the American living in Germany spent speaking English and compare it to the number of hours I spent speaking German, and the difference would be obvious. You might argue that the example is invalid because growing up speaking a language in the formative years may account for much of the difference, but Willingham provides evidence from many other fields that show the same pattern. Here's a math example that I found pretty compelling.
Take a group of college graduates and give them a basic algebra test some years after they have completed their schooling. Compare their scores on this test with how long ago they completed their math classes. One obvious, common-sense trend emerges. Scores drop dramatically the further in time they are removed from their last formal math class. This is true if they only took one semester of math or if they took more math up to calculus level.
(See the graph at Google Books here.)
The study went further, though, by looking at students who had taken advanced math courses, calculus and beyond, which required the continued practice of basic algebra skills. Given the same test, the students who took advanced math courses scored as a whole significantly higher on the algebra test. Furthermore, the drop-off in scores was not nearly as steep - 55 years later, students who took advanced math classes did better on the test than students who took only algebra and were tested just 1 month after completing the algebra course! For the group that took courses in math beyond calculus, there was in fact no drop off at all (over time).
Willingham attributes this to the continuing practice required to complete advanced math courses. He anticipates the argument that students who take advanced math classes are simply "smarter" by breaking down the data according to grades achieved in their respective classes (not shown in the simplified graph). According to Willingham, students who got low grades (C's) in calculus still outperformed students who got A's in algebra and then stopped taking math.
Implications for teaching
Practice is essential. But how one practices is also important. There is value in spacing out practice over time, and the conventional wisdom on 'cramming' turns out to hold up pretty well upon closer scrutiny. It is in fact true that studying a few minutes per day is better than studying several hours crammed together the night before a test. I may have to reconsider my homework policies in light of this. Incorporating review into every day of class should also be helpful. I frequently give Do Now assignments that are reviews of earlier topics that students may wish we could just forget about.
Basic skills can be folded into more advanced skills. Think of the algebra example - at the calculus level, algebra skills are embedded. In biology, I spend time at the beginning of the year teaching experimental design directly, after which I incorporate that skill into almost every lab we do. I don't expect all students to understand independent and dependent variables at the same pace - some kids get it now, others will still be asking me which is which in June. They still have 2 more years of science classes to work on it. For this reason alone students should be encouraged to take advanced courses.
One reason practice is so important is to make some mental processes automatic, which frees up working memory to focus on more complex tasks. Working memory seems to be pretty much fixed, and people with greater working memory capacity are generally "smarter" than people with lower working memory capacity. We can cheat the system, however, through practice.* Think of writing as an example. As I type I am also trying to pull together several ideas from different sections of this chapter and present a complex idea as succinctly as possible. To the extent that I am successful at this task, it is largely because the basic elements of writing are more or less automatic - I don't have to think too much about making sure my sentences have a subject and a verb, or what to capitalize, where to put the punctuation, and so on. Yes, I have to proofread and I make plenty of errors, but my main concern is synthesizing the ideas, rather than worrying if my subjects and verbs agree. If I had more experience with mathematics, and statistics specifically, I suspect that this task would be even simpler!
Next: Chapter 6: What's the secret to getting students to think like real scientists, mathematicians, and historians? (Hint - it has a lot to do with chapter 5...)
*Indeed, studies have shown repeatedly that the vast majority of successful people are the ones who work harder, not necessarily the ones who are "smarter!"
Or, How do you get to Carnegie Hall?
We all know the old joke, and it turns out to hold true not just for the obvious fields of music, dance, art, and athletics, but also for more cerebral, academic pursuits such as reading, writing, mathematics, science, history, etc.
As I mentioned in the comments to the previous post, drilling is just a harsh, perjorative term for practice and Willingham says there is no way around it, no short-cuts to success. In order to be proficient in any activity one must practice. There are few things in life that can't be lost to some extent when practice wanes or stops all together, but some core elements can be retained practically forever given sufficient, sustained practice over time. As an example from my own experience, I lived in Munich for a while and met a man there once who had married a German woman and was living fully assimilated into German society and culture. He had little contact with English speakers. Although he had grown up speaking English into adulthood, after living in Munich for 7 years his spoken English was sometimes halting, he stumbled over words, and couldn't remember key vocabulary - he would occasionally stop mid-sentence and say, "oh man, what's that word..."
Obviously he was still what we would call "fluent" in English, but clearly he had been affected by the lack of practice speaking his native tongue. Now, compare his situation with mine vis-a-vis speaking German. I only began studying German in college, but I took many semesters and then lived in Munich for a couple of years. I spoke well enough to get around, I read the local newspapers and watched the local news and I could carry on a conversation in German to a certain extent, but I was never fluent. That was over 20 years ago, and I can assure you that if I returned to Germany today I would have trouble completing a full sentence, much less carrying on a conversation.
The key is practice. Tally up the number of hours the American living in Germany spent speaking English and compare it to the number of hours I spent speaking German, and the difference would be obvious. You might argue that the example is invalid because growing up speaking a language in the formative years may account for much of the difference, but Willingham provides evidence from many other fields that show the same pattern. Here's a math example that I found pretty compelling.
Take a group of college graduates and give them a basic algebra test some years after they have completed their schooling. Compare their scores on this test with how long ago they completed their math classes. One obvious, common-sense trend emerges. Scores drop dramatically the further in time they are removed from their last formal math class. This is true if they only took one semester of math or if they took more math up to calculus level.
(See the graph at Google Books here.)
The study went further, though, by looking at students who had taken advanced math courses, calculus and beyond, which required the continued practice of basic algebra skills. Given the same test, the students who took advanced math courses scored as a whole significantly higher on the algebra test. Furthermore, the drop-off in scores was not nearly as steep - 55 years later, students who took advanced math classes did better on the test than students who took only algebra and were tested just 1 month after completing the algebra course! For the group that took courses in math beyond calculus, there was in fact no drop off at all (over time).
Willingham attributes this to the continuing practice required to complete advanced math courses. He anticipates the argument that students who take advanced math classes are simply "smarter" by breaking down the data according to grades achieved in their respective classes (not shown in the simplified graph). According to Willingham, students who got low grades (C's) in calculus still outperformed students who got A's in algebra and then stopped taking math.
Implications for teaching
Practice is essential. But how one practices is also important. There is value in spacing out practice over time, and the conventional wisdom on 'cramming' turns out to hold up pretty well upon closer scrutiny. It is in fact true that studying a few minutes per day is better than studying several hours crammed together the night before a test. I may have to reconsider my homework policies in light of this. Incorporating review into every day of class should also be helpful. I frequently give Do Now assignments that are reviews of earlier topics that students may wish we could just forget about.
Basic skills can be folded into more advanced skills. Think of the algebra example - at the calculus level, algebra skills are embedded. In biology, I spend time at the beginning of the year teaching experimental design directly, after which I incorporate that skill into almost every lab we do. I don't expect all students to understand independent and dependent variables at the same pace - some kids get it now, others will still be asking me which is which in June. They still have 2 more years of science classes to work on it. For this reason alone students should be encouraged to take advanced courses.
One reason practice is so important is to make some mental processes automatic, which frees up working memory to focus on more complex tasks. Working memory seems to be pretty much fixed, and people with greater working memory capacity are generally "smarter" than people with lower working memory capacity. We can cheat the system, however, through practice.* Think of writing as an example. As I type I am also trying to pull together several ideas from different sections of this chapter and present a complex idea as succinctly as possible. To the extent that I am successful at this task, it is largely because the basic elements of writing are more or less automatic - I don't have to think too much about making sure my sentences have a subject and a verb, or what to capitalize, where to put the punctuation, and so on. Yes, I have to proofread and I make plenty of errors, but my main concern is synthesizing the ideas, rather than worrying if my subjects and verbs agree. If I had more experience with mathematics, and statistics specifically, I suspect that this task would be even simpler!
Next: Chapter 6: What's the secret to getting students to think like real scientists, mathematicians, and historians? (Hint - it has a lot to do with chapter 5...)
*Indeed, studies have shown repeatedly that the vast majority of successful people are the ones who work harder, not necessarily the ones who are "smarter!"
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Chapter 4: Why is it so hard for students to understand abstract ideas?
Why Don't Students Like School? by Daniel T. Willingham (John Wiley & Sons, 2009).
Blogging Note - it's somewhat frowned upon in the blogosphere to erase your mistakes once an item has been posted - frequently the mistake will be caught by readers and commented upon. If you erase the mistake, the comments become confusing or meaningless. Hence the common practice of using strike through text and adding the correction afterward. I do make minor edits for grammar, spelling, or clarity without notification.
I'm going to give chapters 4,5, & 6 relatively short summaries. The information is, I think, pretty well known and reasonably uncontroversial. In chapter 7, on the other hand, the author explodes some myths about "multiple intelligences" and "learning styles" that will surely raise some eyebrows. Chapter 8 addresses differentiated instruction head on, and chapter 9 deals with teacher self-reflection and professional development (from a personal standpoint as opposed to an outside mandate).
Willingham sums up chapter 4 as follows:
For example, to take the concept that Willingham uses, Newton's laws of motion are sometimes taught first as a series of abstract statements (an object at rest tends to stay at rest, an object in motion tends to stay in motion, etc.) or even a more abstract mathematical expression of the ideas (F=ma). Maybe later if the students are lucky they will be given a lab activity to illustrate the idea, and maybe the lab will have the intended effect or not, depending on how well it is set up and how good the equipment is and how seriously the students actually think about the consequences of the lab.
The constructivist approach, and the part of it that is more or less supported by Willingham's research, suggests a better way might be to turn this model on its head and begin a unit of study on Newton's laws with a series of concrete experiences that students can then think about and relate to the abstract concepts of motion described by Newton. Where Willingham might part ways with the strict constructivist approach (not that he discusses it, I'm just inferring here) is in allowing that we can simply use previous concrete experiences, tap into the prior knowledge that students have stored in memory, rather than having to come up with a novel hands-on, concrete experience for every new idea we present. F = ma is an abstract concept that doesn't make intuitive sense until you use a couple of examples; compare hitting a baseball with a bat and hitting a car with a bat - obviously the car will not move much (the a or acceleration in the formula) compared to the baseball because of the different masses of the two objects. Stated that way it is "intuitive" because we all have the concrete experience of trying to move objects of different masses.
The point is that in order for students to be able to understand the abstract laws, they must relate them in some way to concrete experiences. And this is itself a universalized law - ALL abstraction is built upon a foundation of the concrete world and physical experience.
Chapter 4 also deals with the related difficulty of knowledge transfer. Having described a situation above (the baseball and the car example) and hearing the familiar chorus of "ohhhh, I get it," you might think it would be a simple matter to then have the students apply the law to a similar problem, let's say throwing a baseball versus throwing a softball. It is entirely possible, however, that a student with limited experience would not recognize that the key element of the first scenario is the mass of the objects. Instead the student might get hung up on the fact that a ball is a small spherical object whereas the car is a vehicle with wheels, or the use of a bat in the first scenario might make them think that the use of a throwing arm in the second scenario requires a completely different set of rules. In other words, a student with shallow knowledge might not know which elements of the scenario to generalize or transfer.
Implications for teaching
Recognize that for many students a single concrete example will not suffice to allow them to generalize a rule or concept. Provide as many different examples as possible so the student begins to see the pattern and can identify key elements.
Make sure that "understanding" (deep knowledge) is incorporated into every aspect of your teaching, from homework to class activities to assessments. Especially assessments. If your assessments are testing shallow knowledge, that's what students will focus on.
Be realistic. At any particular level of education, there will be limits to how deeply a student will be able to achieve understanding. Sometimes we have to accept that we are simply planting the seed of an idea thatstudents will be able to build upon in the future will grow as students gain more experience and exposure to the concepts (edited, I hate accidental mixed metaphors).
Next: Chapter 5, Is drilling worth it? picks up and expands on the question of how to help students achive deep understanding.
Blogging Note - it's somewhat frowned upon in the blogosphere to erase your mistakes once an item has been posted - frequently the mistake will be caught by readers and commented upon. If you erase the mistake, the comments become confusing or meaningless. Hence the common practice of using strike through text and adding the correction afterward. I do make minor edits for grammar, spelling, or clarity without notification.
I'm going to give chapters 4,5, & 6 relatively short summaries. The information is, I think, pretty well known and reasonably uncontroversial. In chapter 7, on the other hand, the author explodes some myths about "multiple intelligences" and "learning styles" that will surely raise some eyebrows. Chapter 8 addresses differentiated instruction head on, and chapter 9 deals with teacher self-reflection and professional development (from a personal standpoint as opposed to an outside mandate).
Willingham sums up chapter 4 as follows:
We understand new things in the context of things we already know, and most of what we know is concrete.In science education this idea has been the cornerstone of virtually every program and class that I've been involved with. The whole constructivist approach is in part built upon (and perhaps takes a little t0o far sometimes) the idea that our traditional way of teaching science is wrong precisely because we typically start out teaching abstract ideas first and then use concrete experiences only later and sporadically to illustrate those abstract ideas.
For example, to take the concept that Willingham uses, Newton's laws of motion are sometimes taught first as a series of abstract statements (an object at rest tends to stay at rest, an object in motion tends to stay in motion, etc.) or even a more abstract mathematical expression of the ideas (F=ma). Maybe later if the students are lucky they will be given a lab activity to illustrate the idea, and maybe the lab will have the intended effect or not, depending on how well it is set up and how good the equipment is and how seriously the students actually think about the consequences of the lab.
The constructivist approach, and the part of it that is more or less supported by Willingham's research, suggests a better way might be to turn this model on its head and begin a unit of study on Newton's laws with a series of concrete experiences that students can then think about and relate to the abstract concepts of motion described by Newton. Where Willingham might part ways with the strict constructivist approach (not that he discusses it, I'm just inferring here) is in allowing that we can simply use previous concrete experiences, tap into the prior knowledge that students have stored in memory, rather than having to come up with a novel hands-on, concrete experience for every new idea we present. F = ma is an abstract concept that doesn't make intuitive sense until you use a couple of examples; compare hitting a baseball with a bat and hitting a car with a bat - obviously the car will not move much (the a or acceleration in the formula) compared to the baseball because of the different masses of the two objects. Stated that way it is "intuitive" because we all have the concrete experience of trying to move objects of different masses.
The point is that in order for students to be able to understand the abstract laws, they must relate them in some way to concrete experiences. And this is itself a universalized law - ALL abstraction is built upon a foundation of the concrete world and physical experience.
Chapter 4 also deals with the related difficulty of knowledge transfer. Having described a situation above (the baseball and the car example) and hearing the familiar chorus of "ohhhh, I get it," you might think it would be a simple matter to then have the students apply the law to a similar problem, let's say throwing a baseball versus throwing a softball. It is entirely possible, however, that a student with limited experience would not recognize that the key element of the first scenario is the mass of the objects. Instead the student might get hung up on the fact that a ball is a small spherical object whereas the car is a vehicle with wheels, or the use of a bat in the first scenario might make them think that the use of a throwing arm in the second scenario requires a completely different set of rules. In other words, a student with shallow knowledge might not know which elements of the scenario to generalize or transfer.
Implications for teaching
Recognize that for many students a single concrete example will not suffice to allow them to generalize a rule or concept. Provide as many different examples as possible so the student begins to see the pattern and can identify key elements.
Make sure that "understanding" (deep knowledge) is incorporated into every aspect of your teaching, from homework to class activities to assessments. Especially assessments. If your assessments are testing shallow knowledge, that's what students will focus on.
Be realistic. At any particular level of education, there will be limits to how deeply a student will be able to achieve understanding. Sometimes we have to accept that we are simply planting the seed of an idea that
Next: Chapter 5, Is drilling worth it? picks up and expands on the question of how to help students achive deep understanding.
Sunday, November 08, 2009
Chapter 3: Why do students remember everything that's on television and forget everything I say? (Part 4)
Why Don't Students Like School? by Daniel T. Willingham (John Wiley & Sons, 2009).
Rote memorization
The proximal goal of teaching is to get students to think about content, because students will remember what they think about. One way to get students to think about content is to present problems, puzzles, issues, etc. that require solutions. Another is to structure content around stories. Of course the two approaches are not mutually exclusive and both of these strategies activate or take advantage of natural brain processes.
But what to do when you want students to learn things that they cannot think meaningfully about right now but that they need to know anyway in order to progress in a discipline? For example, we might ask students to memorize the multiplication table before they are really able to understand the concept of multiplication. In chemistry students might need to memorize a certain number of chemical elements on the periodic table, or in humanities the names of the 50 states and their capitols, etc. Willingham accepts the notion that these things may be necessary , although they should be needed sparingly and not make up the bulk of your teaching strategies. Nonetheless, in a world where some background factual knowledge is a prerequisite for critical thinking, we need strategies to help commit certain facts to memory. This is traditionally referred to as rote memorization.
The answer, not surprisingly, is to us mnemonic devices that we are all familiar with. Willingham outlines a few of these techniqies, all of which I already know about except three, which are so ridiculous I won't even bother to summarize them.
The older ones that we all know about are 1) acronyms (ROY G BIV, for the colors of a rainbow), 2) the first letter method (My Very Elegant Mother Just Served Us Nine Peanuts, for the planets), and 3) songs (think of the ABCD song or "Conjunction Junction" from schoolhouse rock)
On to the implications for the classroom, which in this chapter seem merely to summarize ideas that have already been presented.
First, be careful in planning lessons so that students think about what you want them to think about. Beware of the potential for students to become distracted by material that was meant as an aside or as a motivational activity that students then have a difficult time turning away from to think about the real objective of the lesson. Make sure your attention grabbers really require students to think about the core concepts.
Secondly, make assignments so that students can't avoid thinking about meaning. In the example given earlier of having the students actually make biscuits and get distracted by the logistics of measuring and baking, Willingham instead proposes asking students to ponder questions of how runaway slaves could have obtained food, how they would have cooked it, etc.
Overall, these little day-to-day details should be organized in some way around a conflict. A conflict is central to a story, central to the idea of looking for solutions, therefore central to getting students to think about meaning.
Next
Chapter 4: Why is it hard for students to understand abstract ideas?
Rote memorization
The proximal goal of teaching is to get students to think about content, because students will remember what they think about. One way to get students to think about content is to present problems, puzzles, issues, etc. that require solutions. Another is to structure content around stories. Of course the two approaches are not mutually exclusive and both of these strategies activate or take advantage of natural brain processes.
But what to do when you want students to learn things that they cannot think meaningfully about right now but that they need to know anyway in order to progress in a discipline? For example, we might ask students to memorize the multiplication table before they are really able to understand the concept of multiplication. In chemistry students might need to memorize a certain number of chemical elements on the periodic table, or in humanities the names of the 50 states and their capitols, etc. Willingham accepts the notion that these things may be necessary , although they should be needed sparingly and not make up the bulk of your teaching strategies. Nonetheless, in a world where some background factual knowledge is a prerequisite for critical thinking, we need strategies to help commit certain facts to memory. This is traditionally referred to as rote memorization.
The answer, not surprisingly, is to us mnemonic devices that we are all familiar with. Willingham outlines a few of these techniqies, all of which I already know about except three, which are so ridiculous I won't even bother to summarize them.
The older ones that we all know about are 1) acronyms (ROY G BIV, for the colors of a rainbow), 2) the first letter method (My Very Elegant Mother Just Served Us Nine Peanuts, for the planets), and 3) songs (think of the ABCD song or "Conjunction Junction" from schoolhouse rock)
On to the implications for the classroom, which in this chapter seem merely to summarize ideas that have already been presented.
First, be careful in planning lessons so that students think about what you want them to think about. Beware of the potential for students to become distracted by material that was meant as an aside or as a motivational activity that students then have a difficult time turning away from to think about the real objective of the lesson. Make sure your attention grabbers really require students to think about the core concepts.
Secondly, make assignments so that students can't avoid thinking about meaning. In the example given earlier of having the students actually make biscuits and get distracted by the logistics of measuring and baking, Willingham instead proposes asking students to ponder questions of how runaway slaves could have obtained food, how they would have cooked it, etc.
Overall, these little day-to-day details should be organized in some way around a conflict. A conflict is central to a story, central to the idea of looking for solutions, therefore central to getting students to think about meaning.
Next
Chapter 4: Why is it hard for students to understand abstract ideas?
Wednesday, November 04, 2009
Intermission
Here's an interesting puzzler - this is not from Willingham's book but it illustrates something he writes about.
Click here for the answer.
Jack is looking at Anne, but Anne is looking at George. Jack is married, but George is not. Is a married person looking at an unmarried person?
A) Yes.
B) No.
C) Cannot be determined.
Click here for the answer.
Sunday, November 01, 2009
Chapter 3: Why do students remember everything that's on television and forget everything I say? (Part 3)
Why Don't Students Like School? by Daniel T. Willingham (John Wiley & Sons, 2009).
Storytelling
In the previous section Willingham describes 4 teachers who have their own unique teacher personalities, but all are consistently rated as good teachers and they all have one other thing in common - they organize their lessons around stories.
Willingham is quick to caution he is NOT suggesting that storytelling is the only way to teach content. And if you've been around a while and seen district education specialists prescribing one "true" pedagogical method after another, it's easy to understand why Willingham issues this caveat. Whether it helps or not remains to be seen. He also defines storytelling broadly enough that it may not resemble at all what you think of when you first hear the term "storytelling."
We are surely all aware by now that humans are particularly drawn to stories. Long before written language was developed, verbal stories were one of the primary vehicles for transmitting cultural knowledge over generations. The word "history" in English conveys the sense of a "story," the German word for story and history are one & the same (Geschichte). It is perhaps a testament (no pun intended) to the power of stories that they frequently take on the form of (sometimes harmful) myths and legends that are persistent over generations and impervious to reason and evidence.
Politicians, movie-makers, television producers, journalists, motivational speakers, all take advantage of our innate vulnerability to stories. I dislike television but if I make the mistake of tuning in for a couple of minutes to whatever my wife is watching I can easily be drawn in by the drama and wind up watching entire episodes of Top Chef. In a classic episode of Seinfeld we were let in on the joke that could equally apply to virtually all TV sitcoms, namely that it was all along a show about nothing at all (yes, my bias is showing).
Obviously there's something going on here that we might take advantage of in the classroom. Although Seinfeld may have been a show about nothing, it was also a show that took full advantage of the structure of stories, which Willingham breaks into the 4 Cs - causality, conflict, complications, character. The first term, causality, may need some clarification but I trust that the other three are pretty self-explanatory and you will no doubt be able to identify those components in any traditional story you can recall. Causality is equally simple to explain but not necessarily something you may have thought about in the context of a story's structure. It simply means that the events that take place in a story all have a cause. Things don't happen randomly or for no reason.
The causality component of stories seems to fit particularly well with Willingham's major pedagogical goal, getting students to think about content. That's because a good story doesn't tell you all the causal links, instead it requires the listener (or viewer, reader) to infer causal connections. We do this all the time and automatically. Who doesn't feel a little rush of pride that comes from making predictions throughout a movie or book and finding out that our predictions are correct (unless it's too obvious). Even being wrong can be satisfying if the story is well told and we can think how clever the writer was to have outwitted the audience.
So how do we apply this power of stories to engage an audience to classroom teaching? Do we all have to turn every content objective now into a story? The answer is no, although if you could pull it off it wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing. However, you can take those key elements of a story, the 4 Cs, and structure just about any content objective around them. It's pretty easy to understand how that would work in history or literature classes, and in science the historical development of many ideas can certainly be used extensively as the backbone of our lessons. But even absent a compelling historical narrative, there are many concepts in science that can be arranged around the 4 Cs.
Take photosynthesis, for example. Causality is easy, it's embedded in the "story" of science itself. It's what science is looking for. "What caused living things to evolve the ability to produce glucose" could be answered in a number of different ways. Evolution provides its own story structure that students can apply to any similar question in biology. Conflict? Easy, there's competition, survival of the fittest, limited resources, etc. Long ago in a heterotroph world ("dog-eat-dog" more or less), resources would have become limited and organisms that could get some or all of their nutrition "automatically" (autotrophs) would have prospered. Complications? You have to live near a light source, you have to get rid of this new, toxic, waste product called oxygen, etc. (Wait, oxygen is toxic???) What about characters? The organism itself, or the population of organisms if you want to get technical, can be seen as the characters in the story. I know some scientists/teachers are uncomfortable withanthropomorphizing, but I'm not one of them. Having students imaginethemselves as a plant, or even a carbon atom can make it easier tobring out the "character" in a story-structured lesson. In developing this story of photosynthesis I would want to ask questions and lead a discussion that has students making many of the causal connections for themselves.
Willingham actually uses an example from a math lesson, and while I can see that what he presents is reasonable and contains some of the elements of a story, it seems a bit of a stretch to use it as an model for the 4 Cs he has just presented - I fail to see how the "character" component fits in, personally. Maybe a math teacher can read it over and set me straight. Nonetheless, maybe that's a good thing anyway. Willingham has already explicitly stated that he is not proposing some rigid formula for organizing a lesson, and getting caught up in making sure that your lesson fits to a T some artificial structure misses the real goal, getting students to think about what you are teaching. Sometimes the conflict is between competing ideas, or how to decide whether something is true or not, and doesn't involve "characters" in the traditional sense. And that's OK.
Next Section:
What if there is no meaning? (On rote memorization)
Storytelling
In the previous section Willingham describes 4 teachers who have their own unique teacher personalities, but all are consistently rated as good teachers and they all have one other thing in common - they organize their lessons around stories.
Willingham is quick to caution he is NOT suggesting that storytelling is the only way to teach content. And if you've been around a while and seen district education specialists prescribing one "true" pedagogical method after another, it's easy to understand why Willingham issues this caveat. Whether it helps or not remains to be seen. He also defines storytelling broadly enough that it may not resemble at all what you think of when you first hear the term "storytelling."
We are surely all aware by now that humans are particularly drawn to stories. Long before written language was developed, verbal stories were one of the primary vehicles for transmitting cultural knowledge over generations. The word "history" in English conveys the sense of a "story," the German word for story and history are one & the same (Geschichte). It is perhaps a testament (no pun intended) to the power of stories that they frequently take on the form of (sometimes harmful) myths and legends that are persistent over generations and impervious to reason and evidence.
Politicians, movie-makers, television producers, journalists, motivational speakers, all take advantage of our innate vulnerability to stories. I dislike television but if I make the mistake of tuning in for a couple of minutes to whatever my wife is watching I can easily be drawn in by the drama and wind up watching entire episodes of Top Chef. In a classic episode of Seinfeld we were let in on the joke that could equally apply to virtually all TV sitcoms, namely that it was all along a show about nothing at all (yes, my bias is showing).
Obviously there's something going on here that we might take advantage of in the classroom. Although Seinfeld may have been a show about nothing, it was also a show that took full advantage of the structure of stories, which Willingham breaks into the 4 Cs - causality, conflict, complications, character. The first term, causality, may need some clarification but I trust that the other three are pretty self-explanatory and you will no doubt be able to identify those components in any traditional story you can recall. Causality is equally simple to explain but not necessarily something you may have thought about in the context of a story's structure. It simply means that the events that take place in a story all have a cause. Things don't happen randomly or for no reason.
The causality component of stories seems to fit particularly well with Willingham's major pedagogical goal, getting students to think about content. That's because a good story doesn't tell you all the causal links, instead it requires the listener (or viewer, reader) to infer causal connections. We do this all the time and automatically. Who doesn't feel a little rush of pride that comes from making predictions throughout a movie or book and finding out that our predictions are correct (unless it's too obvious). Even being wrong can be satisfying if the story is well told and we can think how clever the writer was to have outwitted the audience.
So how do we apply this power of stories to engage an audience to classroom teaching? Do we all have to turn every content objective now into a story? The answer is no, although if you could pull it off it wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing. However, you can take those key elements of a story, the 4 Cs, and structure just about any content objective around them. It's pretty easy to understand how that would work in history or literature classes, and in science the historical development of many ideas can certainly be used extensively as the backbone of our lessons. But even absent a compelling historical narrative, there are many concepts in science that can be arranged around the 4 Cs.
Take photosynthesis, for example. Causality is easy, it's embedded in the "story" of science itself. It's what science is looking for. "What caused living things to evolve the ability to produce glucose" could be answered in a number of different ways. Evolution provides its own story structure that students can apply to any similar question in biology. Conflict? Easy, there's competition, survival of the fittest, limited resources, etc. Long ago in a heterotroph world ("dog-eat-dog" more or less), resources would have become limited and organisms that could get some or all of their nutrition "automatically" (autotrophs) would have prospered. Complications? You have to live near a light source, you have to get rid of this new, toxic, waste product called oxygen, etc. (Wait, oxygen is toxic???) What about characters? The organism itself, or the population of organisms if you want to get technical, can be seen as the characters in the story. I know some scientists/teachers are uncomfortable withanthropomorphizing, but I'm not one of them. Having students imaginethemselves as a plant, or even a carbon atom can make it easier tobring out the "character" in a story-structured lesson. In developing this story of photosynthesis I would want to ask questions and lead a discussion that has students making many of the causal connections for themselves.
Willingham actually uses an example from a math lesson, and while I can see that what he presents is reasonable and contains some of the elements of a story, it seems a bit of a stretch to use it as an model for the 4 Cs he has just presented - I fail to see how the "character" component fits in, personally. Maybe a math teacher can read it over and set me straight. Nonetheless, maybe that's a good thing anyway. Willingham has already explicitly stated that he is not proposing some rigid formula for organizing a lesson, and getting caught up in making sure that your lesson fits to a T some artificial structure misses the real goal, getting students to think about what you are teaching. Sometimes the conflict is between competing ideas, or how to decide whether something is true or not, and doesn't involve "characters" in the traditional sense. And that's OK.
Next Section:
What if there is no meaning? (On rote memorization)
Saturday, October 24, 2009
Chapter 3: Why do students remember everything that's on television and forget everything I say? (Part 2)
Why Don't Students Like School? by Daniel T. Willingham (John Wiley & Sons, 2009).
What makes a good teacher?
You may find this section either reassuring or maybe infuriating, if only because it is a rather short section without a lot of detail or supporting evidence. Willingham takes all the variables about good teaching that show up in surveys, end-of-year-evaluations, student comments, etc., and boils it all down to a couple of simple ideas:
On the other hand, if Willingham is correct, then the good news is that there are many paths to take that will get us to the goal of connecting with students on a personal level. Many teachers are able to project a caring and likeable persona in a variety of ways. Willingham gives some examples from his observations - the "comedian" who uses humor, the "mother figure" who dotes on her students, the storyteller who has a personal anecdote for everything, the showman who would set off fireworks if it were allowed. If you think back to teachers who really had an impact on your life I'm sure you can come up with other examples and I would love to hear about them in the comments section.
The key is that they all use their own personalities to forge a style that connects with their students. This element of good teaching cannot be "taught" or prescribed. It must come naturally and organically from yourself, but you may have to work at developing habits that demonstrate to students that you care about them on a personal level - it's not enough to say in words that you care, they have to perceive that you care.
Being a wonderfully warm and likeable person won't matter, though, if you don't master the second requirement of good teaching. Unlike your personality, organization doesn't necessarily come naturally, may take a lot of work to develop, and in fact encompasses a whole lot of assumptions about the preparedness of the teacher. For example, organizing content so that students will be able to make sense of it obviously demands that the teacher understand content well enough to distill the essential elements from the details and be able to make connections appropriate for the grade level and abilities of the students. The following sections of the chapter, and indeed much of the book, are devoted to this second element of good teaching.
In the next section Willingham discusses a strategy for organizing instruction around stories.
What makes a good teacher?
You may find this section either reassuring or maybe infuriating, if only because it is a rather short section without a lot of detail or supporting evidence. Willingham takes all the variables about good teaching that show up in surveys, end-of-year-evaluations, student comments, etc., and boils it all down to a couple of simple ideas:
- Do I connect with my students on a personal level? That is, do my students have the sense that I am a nice person?
- Is my instruction well-organized from the students' perspective? Am I taking the complex, intricate details of my content and organizing it in such a way that the students feel they can make sense of it?
On the other hand, if Willingham is correct, then the good news is that there are many paths to take that will get us to the goal of connecting with students on a personal level. Many teachers are able to project a caring and likeable persona in a variety of ways. Willingham gives some examples from his observations - the "comedian" who uses humor, the "mother figure" who dotes on her students, the storyteller who has a personal anecdote for everything, the showman who would set off fireworks if it were allowed. If you think back to teachers who really had an impact on your life I'm sure you can come up with other examples and I would love to hear about them in the comments section.
The key is that they all use their own personalities to forge a style that connects with their students. This element of good teaching cannot be "taught" or prescribed. It must come naturally and organically from yourself, but you may have to work at developing habits that demonstrate to students that you care about them on a personal level - it's not enough to say in words that you care, they have to perceive that you care.
Being a wonderfully warm and likeable person won't matter, though, if you don't master the second requirement of good teaching. Unlike your personality, organization doesn't necessarily come naturally, may take a lot of work to develop, and in fact encompasses a whole lot of assumptions about the preparedness of the teacher. For example, organizing content so that students will be able to make sense of it obviously demands that the teacher understand content well enough to distill the essential elements from the details and be able to make connections appropriate for the grade level and abilities of the students. The following sections of the chapter, and indeed much of the book, are devoted to this second element of good teaching.
In the next section Willingham discusses a strategy for organizing instruction around stories.
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Chapter 3: Why do students remember everything that's on television and forget everything I say?
Why Don't Students Like School? by Daniel T. Willingham (John Wiley & Sons, 2009).
Part 1
Covering four separate threads- memory, the characteristics of a good teacher, storytelling, and memorization strategies - this chapter is a little unfocused. Of course they are all related, but the transitions from one theme to another seem abrupt. On the other hand, it gives me an easy way to split the blog posts about chapter 3 into smaller, more manageable chunks, which is especially helpful with the busy week we have going right now. So here's the first short blast.
In the opening section on memory, Willingham discusses why some things stick in our brains and others do not. He goes through some misconceptions, such as the idea that in order to make things memorable you must have an emotional connection to the content. This is the familiar "do you remember what you were doing on 9/11" type question, where the emotional impact of the event helps us remember in vivid detail the otherwise trivial activities we might have been engaged in on that day. It turns out that emotional events can indeed facilitate the recall of events, but we don't necessarily need emotional engagement to commit things to memory, and even if it were true, it's not so easy to bring about authentic emotional connections with everything (or even most things) we teach in a classroom setting.
What about the notion that our minds are like video cameras, recording everything we experience, subject to recall under the right circumstances, such as hypnosis? Also a myth. This is fairly easily tested in a laboratory in which subjects are given things to remember and asked to recall the information a short time later either under hypnosis or without hypnosis. Both groups perform equally well - or equally poorly, depending on how you look at it. Interestingly, the hypnotized group always expresses more confidence that their recall is accurate, even when they are wrong.
The real key to memory appears to be some combination of repetition (discussed later) and actively thinking about the thing to be remembered:
Nonetheless, I do think it is important to consider, as we strive to bring our subject matter to life through sometimes elaborate and complex projects, whether the efforts will lead students to actually think about the content and make connections as we intend, or instead lead them to countless hours thinking about how to make cool effects in powerpoint.
Next:
What good teachers have in common.
Part 1
Covering four separate threads- memory, the characteristics of a good teacher, storytelling, and memorization strategies - this chapter is a little unfocused. Of course they are all related, but the transitions from one theme to another seem abrupt. On the other hand, it gives me an easy way to split the blog posts about chapter 3 into smaller, more manageable chunks, which is especially helpful with the busy week we have going right now. So here's the first short blast.
In the opening section on memory, Willingham discusses why some things stick in our brains and others do not. He goes through some misconceptions, such as the idea that in order to make things memorable you must have an emotional connection to the content. This is the familiar "do you remember what you were doing on 9/11" type question, where the emotional impact of the event helps us remember in vivid detail the otherwise trivial activities we might have been engaged in on that day. It turns out that emotional events can indeed facilitate the recall of events, but we don't necessarily need emotional engagement to commit things to memory, and even if it were true, it's not so easy to bring about authentic emotional connections with everything (or even most things) we teach in a classroom setting.
What about the notion that our minds are like video cameras, recording everything we experience, subject to recall under the right circumstances, such as hypnosis? Also a myth. This is fairly easily tested in a laboratory in which subjects are given things to remember and asked to recall the information a short time later either under hypnosis or without hypnosis. Both groups perform equally well - or equally poorly, depending on how you look at it. Interestingly, the hypnotized group always expresses more confidence that their recall is accurate, even when they are wrong.
The real key to memory appears to be some combination of repetition (discussed later) and actively thinking about the thing to be remembered:
The brain lays its bets this way: If you don't think about something very much, then you probably won't want to think about it again, so it need not be stored. If you think about something, then it's likely that you will want to think about it in the same way in the future.Seems kind of obvious but it does have some implications for teaching and learning that deserve to be explored. You are not doubt familiar with the expression "be careful what you wish for, it just might come true." We can take a little license here and say be careful what you ask your students to think about, because that's what they will remember. Willingham gives an example of a teacher who wants students to learn about the Underground Railroad, and thinks it would be nice have students bake biscuits, a typical food of runaway slaves. Unfortunately this activity diverts students from thinking about the runaway slaves and the lives they lived on the run, as the students will likely think almost exclusively about measuring and mixing ingredients. (Willingham doesn't offer an alternative activity, which would have been nice.)
Nonetheless, I do think it is important to consider, as we strive to bring our subject matter to life through sometimes elaborate and complex projects, whether the efforts will lead students to actually think about the content and make connections as we intend, or instead lead them to countless hours thinking about how to make cool effects in powerpoint.
Next:
What good teachers have in common.
Saturday, October 17, 2009
Chapter 2: How can I teach students the skills they need?
Why Don't Students Like School? by Daniel T. Willingham (John Wiley & Sons, 2009).
Factual Knowledge Matters
Nothing really new here, again demolishing the false choice between teaching knowledge and teaching critical thinking - we know that you can't think critically in a vacuum (you have to think about something, i.e. facts) but facts are pretty useless if you can't generate inferences from them and connect them with related facts and otherwise think critically about them. Common sense and a strong pedagogical tradition already acknowledge that we must do both.
Just as an example, reading is virtually impossible without background knowledge - this seems self-evident, and should be, but Willingham reviews the research and reminds us why it is so important. First, all writers leave out vast amounts of information when they write. They leave this information out because it is assumed the reader will have the requisite background knowledge to fill in the gaps, and simply because it is impossible to make explicit every detail. Attempting to do so would also make for very long and boring reading.
Research shows that elementary school students do pretty well in reading across the socioeconomic spectrum up until about grade 4. Suddenly, reading switches from an emphasis on decoding skills to an emphasis on comprehending. From this point forward, students from lower socioeconomic groups struggle to keep up with their peers from higher socioeconomic groups in large part, or perhaps wholly, as a result of the knowledge gap that makes reading comprehension so much more difficult for them. Where does the knowledge gap come from? Students from higher income families (as a group) are exposed to more reading-relevant knowledge in the home, which gives them a leg up at school, which leads to an increasingly wide gap as the years go by. A crucial component of this phenomenon of an accelerating gap (unfair as it may seem) is that the more knowledge you have, the easier it is to acquire new knowledge.
Some have argued that learning facts is less important in an age of instant internet access to vast stores of information. But research shows that you can't just google the facts when you need them. A large body of facts must be in long-term memory and easily retrievable, therefore teaching should provide students with knowledge. The example of reading comprehension should make that pretty clear - even if it were possible to know what information the author of a particular text is leaving out, who would want to interrupt a story every 5 seconds to look up the meaning of a word or concept?
For schools and teaching, the key is knowing what facts are required and how to get students to learn those facts - remember, the title of the book is "Why don't students like school?" and memorizing long lists of meaningless (to them) facts is probably high on the list of student dislikes. So what's the solution? One "easy" answer is reading itself - students should be reading reading reading. Reading is an excellent way to gain knowledge, knowledge we don't even know we will need, general knowledge about the world beyond our immediate narrow interests. Broadly speaking, this is precisely what we would want most students to know after leaving school - enough to read a serious daily newspaper and make sense of the events taking place in the world around them, enough to watch and understand a serious discussion on TV about global warming, the economy, a health issue, etc.
Simply asking students to read more is sound advice but a bit of the horse and water problem (there, I just made reference to an old adage that I assume you will be familiar with - if not, you are probably wondering what the hell reading has to do with horses and water). It also doesn't always work when you want students to learn specific information about particular topics such as history or science or math, etc. Part of the answer here is implied in the paradox presented in chapter one - thinking is hard and we avoid it whenever possible, but we're also curious creatures who like to solve problems. That helps settle the the question of what facts are important in the narrower sense of classroom objectives, and that would be the facts necessary to solve a problem related to the major, recurring themes in a discipline. It also helps with the motivation issue - students will be more interested in learning facts that are seen as necessary to solve a problem - the facts then become meaningful and the students will have to think about the facts in order to make progress with the problem. (This concept will be addressed in some detail in chapter 3.)
More thoughts on knowledge
Students must have the necessary background knowledge before thinking critically about an issue.This idea was touched on in Chapter 1. It's fine to start a lesson with a mystery or a discrepant event, but make sure you return to the activity after students have been taught the concepts needed to actually solve the problem.
Shallow knowledge is better than none. No one can have deep knowledge about everything, but shallow knowledge at least allows us to get the basic meaning of a broad range of reading materials we might encounter. It can also be the foundation for developing deeper understanding later if needed.
Students can acquire knowledge incidentally - A math class can present problems with science or social studies knowledge embedded in the problem, likewise for other disciplines. I appreciate the fact that students come to my biology class having already learned a little about human descent and DNA from their 9th grade humanities classes.
Start early - well, we don't have much control over that. We know that students who have family lives rich with vocabulary and exposure to knowledge of the world have a tremendous advantage in the school setting- this is a public and education policy issue.
Next-
Chapter 3: Why do students remember everything that's on television and forget everything I say?
Factual Knowledge Matters
Nothing really new here, again demolishing the false choice between teaching knowledge and teaching critical thinking - we know that you can't think critically in a vacuum (you have to think about something, i.e. facts) but facts are pretty useless if you can't generate inferences from them and connect them with related facts and otherwise think critically about them. Common sense and a strong pedagogical tradition already acknowledge that we must do both.
Just as an example, reading is virtually impossible without background knowledge - this seems self-evident, and should be, but Willingham reviews the research and reminds us why it is so important. First, all writers leave out vast amounts of information when they write. They leave this information out because it is assumed the reader will have the requisite background knowledge to fill in the gaps, and simply because it is impossible to make explicit every detail. Attempting to do so would also make for very long and boring reading.
Research shows that elementary school students do pretty well in reading across the socioeconomic spectrum up until about grade 4. Suddenly, reading switches from an emphasis on decoding skills to an emphasis on comprehending. From this point forward, students from lower socioeconomic groups struggle to keep up with their peers from higher socioeconomic groups in large part, or perhaps wholly, as a result of the knowledge gap that makes reading comprehension so much more difficult for them. Where does the knowledge gap come from? Students from higher income families (as a group) are exposed to more reading-relevant knowledge in the home, which gives them a leg up at school, which leads to an increasingly wide gap as the years go by. A crucial component of this phenomenon of an accelerating gap (unfair as it may seem) is that the more knowledge you have, the easier it is to acquire new knowledge.
Some have argued that learning facts is less important in an age of instant internet access to vast stores of information. But research shows that you can't just google the facts when you need them. A large body of facts must be in long-term memory and easily retrievable, therefore teaching should provide students with knowledge. The example of reading comprehension should make that pretty clear - even if it were possible to know what information the author of a particular text is leaving out, who would want to interrupt a story every 5 seconds to look up the meaning of a word or concept?
For schools and teaching, the key is knowing what facts are required and how to get students to learn those facts - remember, the title of the book is "Why don't students like school?" and memorizing long lists of meaningless (to them) facts is probably high on the list of student dislikes. So what's the solution? One "easy" answer is reading itself - students should be reading reading reading. Reading is an excellent way to gain knowledge, knowledge we don't even know we will need, general knowledge about the world beyond our immediate narrow interests. Broadly speaking, this is precisely what we would want most students to know after leaving school - enough to read a serious daily newspaper and make sense of the events taking place in the world around them, enough to watch and understand a serious discussion on TV about global warming, the economy, a health issue, etc.
Simply asking students to read more is sound advice but a bit of the horse and water problem (there, I just made reference to an old adage that I assume you will be familiar with - if not, you are probably wondering what the hell reading has to do with horses and water). It also doesn't always work when you want students to learn specific information about particular topics such as history or science or math, etc. Part of the answer here is implied in the paradox presented in chapter one - thinking is hard and we avoid it whenever possible, but we're also curious creatures who like to solve problems. That helps settle the the question of what facts are important in the narrower sense of classroom objectives, and that would be the facts necessary to solve a problem related to the major, recurring themes in a discipline. It also helps with the motivation issue - students will be more interested in learning facts that are seen as necessary to solve a problem - the facts then become meaningful and the students will have to think about the facts in order to make progress with the problem. (This concept will be addressed in some detail in chapter 3.)
More thoughts on knowledge
Students must have the necessary background knowledge before thinking critically about an issue.This idea was touched on in Chapter 1. It's fine to start a lesson with a mystery or a discrepant event, but make sure you return to the activity after students have been taught the concepts needed to actually solve the problem.
Shallow knowledge is better than none. No one can have deep knowledge about everything, but shallow knowledge at least allows us to get the basic meaning of a broad range of reading materials we might encounter. It can also be the foundation for developing deeper understanding later if needed.
Students can acquire knowledge incidentally - A math class can present problems with science or social studies knowledge embedded in the problem, likewise for other disciplines. I appreciate the fact that students come to my biology class having already learned a little about human descent and DNA from their 9th grade humanities classes.
Start early - well, we don't have much control over that. We know that students who have family lives rich with vocabulary and exposure to knowledge of the world have a tremendous advantage in the school setting- this is a public and education policy issue.
Next-
Chapter 3: Why do students remember everything that's on television and forget everything I say?
Sunday, October 11, 2009
Chapter 1: Why Don’t Students Like School? (Part 2: Implications for teaching)
Why Don't Students Like School? by Daniel T. Willingham (John Wiley & Sons, 2009).
So everyone loves solving problems if they are the right kinds of problems - Goldilocks problems, not too easy and not too hard...
Since everyone is different, and we have a variety of students in a range of different places academically speaking, finding a problem with the right degree of difficulty presents a challenge in any classroom. You know where this is going – differentiated instruction.
We know that, but Why Don’t Students Like School? is not about differentiated instruction per se, though a couple of later chapters are devoted to the issue. Willingham instead focuses on the “instruction” aspect of it and thus proposes a framework around which differentiation can be built. His approach will sound familiar to anyone who has experience with the inquiry method, and that means asking questions: the right questions for the right students at the right time.
Willingham takes a science example, which I will naturally use to illustrate the point. It is a common science teaching strategy to start a unit or lesson with some sort of "discrepant event," a demonstration or activity where the results are unexpected or counter-intuitive. One classic discrepant event involves a glass bottle with a shelled, hard-boiled egg placed on top that cannot be pushed into the bottle. However, place a lighted match or piece of paper inside the bottle, then place the egg on the rim of the bottle, and when the flame goes out the egg will be "sucked" into the bottle. Cool! The problem is, if students are then asked to explain what happened they have absolutely no way to even form a reasonable hypothesis because they just don't have the background knowledge of the gas laws (the relationship between temperature, volume, & pressure in gases) to understand what is happening.
The solution is to revisit the egg in a bottle demonstration later in the unit when students have enough background to solve the problem. Of course this is common sense, and not a new idea for anyone trained in science teaching strategies. The demo serves as a motivator, a common experience to refer back to, a mystery that is revealed over time as the unit progresses. I suppose that many teachers. perhaps strapped for time, jump straight to the explanation and dispense with the discovery process.
An example from another discipline might be the use of political cartoons in social studies, where a better strategy might be to show the cartoon in the beginning of a unit, then revisit the cartoon throughout the unit as more and more elements of the cartoon become clear and the students themselves uncover its meaning. I don't know whether this if already the way that my colleagues normally use political cartoons, I do know they are frequently used as summative assessments on state exams.
It occurs to me that the author is using a similar strategy in the design of his book (and it may even be that he mentioned it already in the introduction, but it is just now becoming clear what he meant, and thus I feel like I've discovered it myself). Each chapter presents questions for the reader to ponder, but no one chapter fully answers the question, instead the topics are revisited throughout and new information is presented in later chapters that elucidate earlier questions.
Next: Chapter 2: How can I teach students the skills they need? (On the necessity of knowledge)
So everyone loves solving problems if they are the right kinds of problems - Goldilocks problems, not too easy and not too hard...
Since everyone is different, and we have a variety of students in a range of different places academically speaking, finding a problem with the right degree of difficulty presents a challenge in any classroom. You know where this is going – differentiated instruction.
We know that, but Why Don’t Students Like School? is not about differentiated instruction per se, though a couple of later chapters are devoted to the issue. Willingham instead focuses on the “instruction” aspect of it and thus proposes a framework around which differentiation can be built. His approach will sound familiar to anyone who has experience with the inquiry method, and that means asking questions: the right questions for the right students at the right time.
Willingham takes a science example, which I will naturally use to illustrate the point. It is a common science teaching strategy to start a unit or lesson with some sort of "discrepant event," a demonstration or activity where the results are unexpected or counter-intuitive. One classic discrepant event involves a glass bottle with a shelled, hard-boiled egg placed on top that cannot be pushed into the bottle. However, place a lighted match or piece of paper inside the bottle, then place the egg on the rim of the bottle, and when the flame goes out the egg will be "sucked" into the bottle. Cool! The problem is, if students are then asked to explain what happened they have absolutely no way to even form a reasonable hypothesis because they just don't have the background knowledge of the gas laws (the relationship between temperature, volume, & pressure in gases) to understand what is happening.
The solution is to revisit the egg in a bottle demonstration later in the unit when students have enough background to solve the problem. Of course this is common sense, and not a new idea for anyone trained in science teaching strategies. The demo serves as a motivator, a common experience to refer back to, a mystery that is revealed over time as the unit progresses. I suppose that many teachers. perhaps strapped for time, jump straight to the explanation and dispense with the discovery process.
An example from another discipline might be the use of political cartoons in social studies, where a better strategy might be to show the cartoon in the beginning of a unit, then revisit the cartoon throughout the unit as more and more elements of the cartoon become clear and the students themselves uncover its meaning. I don't know whether this if already the way that my colleagues normally use political cartoons, I do know they are frequently used as summative assessments on state exams.
It occurs to me that the author is using a similar strategy in the design of his book (and it may even be that he mentioned it already in the introduction, but it is just now becoming clear what he meant, and thus I feel like I've discovered it myself). Each chapter presents questions for the reader to ponder, but no one chapter fully answers the question, instead the topics are revisited throughout and new information is presented in later chapters that elucidate earlier questions.
Next: Chapter 2: How can I teach students the skills they need? (On the necessity of knowledge)
Chapter 1: Why Don’t Students Like School? (Part 1: Thinking is hard)
Why Don't Students Like School? by Daniel T. Willingham (John Wiley & Sons, 2009).
Yeah I know, writing is hard too, because it requires so much thinking! And since reading is also hard, I broke up the first chapter into 2 parts. Part 1 here deals with the background theoretical issues, part 2 will discuss teaching implications....
Chapter 1: Why Don’t Students Like School?
Not really much here we don’t already know, but the way Willingham expresses the ideas makes them seem new – and I mean that in a good way. Sometimes it helps to hear things we already know in a different way to remind us or re-awaken awareness of these basic truths.
Everything follows from the idea presented in the introduction that thinking is hard. In chapter 1 the author expands this idea, presenting an overview of the functioning of the brain (most of the frustration of working through difficult, novel problems lies in the limits of "working memory") and using unfamiliar problem solving puzzles to induce that feeling of perplexity or even frustration in the reader that our students experience perhaps every day when we present them with difficult tasks.
Thinking is hard, and we avoid thinking whenever we can. We don’t go about our daily routines thinking through each and every move we make – we wouldn’t get very far if we did. Instead we rely much more on memory, whether factual memory (telephone numbers, names, etc.) or procedural memory (how to get to work, what to do when you get there, how to calculate a tip at a restaurant, etc.).
The good news is that although thinking is hard and we tend to avoid it if we can, we also get pleasure from solving problems, i.e. thinking, but only under certain limited circumstances. Again this will be kind of obvious and familiar: the problem has to be difficult enough that it really is a problem that you have to work to solve, but not so difficult that after concentrated effort no solution is forthcoming. Willingham’s definition of a “problem” is general, reasonable, and appropriate. A problem could be understanding a poem, solving a math problem, or to throw in an example of my own, figuring out how DNA replicates.
Next: Chapter 1: Why Don’t Students Like School? (Part 2: Implications for teaching)
Yeah I know, writing is hard too, because it requires so much thinking! And since reading is also hard, I broke up the first chapter into 2 parts. Part 1 here deals with the background theoretical issues, part 2 will discuss teaching implications....
Chapter 1: Why Don’t Students Like School?
Not really much here we don’t already know, but the way Willingham expresses the ideas makes them seem new – and I mean that in a good way. Sometimes it helps to hear things we already know in a different way to remind us or re-awaken awareness of these basic truths.
Everything follows from the idea presented in the introduction that thinking is hard. In chapter 1 the author expands this idea, presenting an overview of the functioning of the brain (most of the frustration of working through difficult, novel problems lies in the limits of "working memory") and using unfamiliar problem solving puzzles to induce that feeling of perplexity or even frustration in the reader that our students experience perhaps every day when we present them with difficult tasks.
Thinking is hard, and we avoid thinking whenever we can. We don’t go about our daily routines thinking through each and every move we make – we wouldn’t get very far if we did. Instead we rely much more on memory, whether factual memory (telephone numbers, names, etc.) or procedural memory (how to get to work, what to do when you get there, how to calculate a tip at a restaurant, etc.).
The good news is that although thinking is hard and we tend to avoid it if we can, we also get pleasure from solving problems, i.e. thinking, but only under certain limited circumstances. Again this will be kind of obvious and familiar: the problem has to be difficult enough that it really is a problem that you have to work to solve, but not so difficult that after concentrated effort no solution is forthcoming. Willingham’s definition of a “problem” is general, reasonable, and appropriate. A problem could be understanding a poem, solving a math problem, or to throw in an example of my own, figuring out how DNA replicates.
Next: Chapter 1: Why Don’t Students Like School? (Part 2: Implications for teaching)
Wednesday, October 07, 2009
Why Don't Students Like School?
Why Don't Students Like School? by Daniel T. Willingham (John Wiley & Sons, 2009).
Introduction
N.B. Snide political comments are my own and not those of the author.
I am blogging my reading of the book Why Don't Students Like School? by Daniel T. Willingham (John Wiley & Sons, 2009). I started with the introduction this morning on the subway and was intrigued by a couple of points that I will mention here. I definitely want to keep reading.
First, for a science teacher steeped in the inquiry methodology that was all the rage a few years ago, comes the admonition from Willingham that "you should not try to get your students to think like real scientists." Well, I've got to find out what that's all about.
The second point should be obvious to anyone who is remotely following the political discourse in this country today, and that is that we need to stop thinking about how good humans are at thinking and realize that we are in fact pretty bad at it. Will this help me to understand the phenomenon that is Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, & right wing talk in general?
The introduction lays out the basic problem: cognitive science has taught us a lot about how the brain works, which you might think would lead us to develop better learning and teaching strategies, but a peek at any average classroom today would tell you that not so much has changed in how instruction is delivered and how schools are structured. The book promises an understanding of how the mind works and practical implications of this knowledge for how to become a better teacher.
I have been to workshops that make similar promises, so I will approach this one with cautious optimism...
Next: Chapter 1: Why Don’t Students Like School? (Part 1: Thinking is hard)
Introduction
N.B. Snide political comments are my own and not those of the author.
I am blogging my reading of the book Why Don't Students Like School? by Daniel T. Willingham (John Wiley & Sons, 2009). I started with the introduction this morning on the subway and was intrigued by a couple of points that I will mention here. I definitely want to keep reading.
First, for a science teacher steeped in the inquiry methodology that was all the rage a few years ago, comes the admonition from Willingham that "you should not try to get your students to think like real scientists." Well, I've got to find out what that's all about.
The second point should be obvious to anyone who is remotely following the political discourse in this country today, and that is that we need to stop thinking about how good humans are at thinking and realize that we are in fact pretty bad at it. Will this help me to understand the phenomenon that is Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, & right wing talk in general?
The introduction lays out the basic problem: cognitive science has taught us a lot about how the brain works, which you might think would lead us to develop better learning and teaching strategies, but a peek at any average classroom today would tell you that not so much has changed in how instruction is delivered and how schools are structured. The book promises an understanding of how the mind works and practical implications of this knowledge for how to become a better teacher.
I have been to workshops that make similar promises, so I will approach this one with cautious optimism...
Next: Chapter 1: Why Don’t Students Like School? (Part 1: Thinking is hard)
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