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)