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?