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:

1. Do I connect with my students on a personal level? That is, do my students have the sense that I am a nice person?
2. 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?
   

That's it. If I answered yes to both those questions, honestly, then I am probably an effective teacher. If I answered no to even one of them, then I am not likely an effective teacher, or not as effective as I could be. Notice in both questions the emphasis is on the students' perspective. It doesn't matter how organized I think my instruction is if the students are utterly baffled by it. Similarly, from the students' view "tough love" may come across as all tough and no love, or attempts to be "friends" with students may come across as phony or lead to role confusion and feelings of betrayal when report cards come out. I do think Willingham's treatment of the issue is a little oversimplified and I suspect there's a better word than "nice" that would have been more helpful, but I do agree that the interpersonal relationships between students and teachers (or teachers and administrators, for that matter!) make a world of difference.

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.

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:

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.

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?

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)

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)

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)