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!"
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