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?