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.