Here's an example of what I referred to as the "perfect world" answer to our educational woes - just completely transform the existing system and all our troubles will magically disappear as children educate themselves effortlessly, with nothing more than a little guidance (when asked for) and a properly rich environment in which to pursue their natural curiosity. Don't bother trying to work within the system, it's fatally flawed and should be completely abandoned. What kind of bubble do these guys live in?
Why don't students like school? well-duhhhh...
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Monday, January 25, 2010
Chapter 9: What About My Mind?
Why Don't Students Like School? by Daniel T. Willingham (John Wiley & Sons, 2009).
Willingham starts this chapter with some reminders about how thinking works and why thinking is so hard. New material that you want to learn must first be processed in working memory. However, working memory is limited - there are only so many things you can juggle at a once and so too much new information easily overwhelms working memory.
Now think about all the new things a beginning teacher must learn. Every school has its own physical layout that a teacher must become comfortable with, its own set of rules and procedures, and administrative hierarchies. Then there's the classroom itself, procedures and routines for daily activities, managing student behavior, planning lessons, giving students feedback, dealing with disruptions from students, administrators, other teachers, communicating with parents, preparing reports, etc. etc., etc. As you become more and more experienced, these things that once overwhelmed you, at least most of them, become automatic. They no longer require thinking and you can then use the precious resources of your working memory for other, more important things like actually engaging students in a lesson.
The problem, as Willingham describes it, is that most of us approached learning to teach essentially the same way we approached learning to drive. Learning to drive is a difficult process that is analogous to any new experience in that there are so many little things to think about at once and initially they all require conscious thought within the constraints of limited working memory. As you practice driving, many of these activities are learned to a point that they become automatic and no longer require much effort or thought, freeing your mind to do other things like carry on a conversation or listen to talk radio.
Unless you are a professional racer or stunt driver or police officer, however, you probably reached a point in your driving abilities where you felt competent and safe and you have improved little since then. Willingham says it's the same for teaching. We spend the first 5 years or so getting better and better until we have reached a point where we are comfortable enough with how things are going and then our abilities level off. Studies based on gains in student test scores confirm this phenomenon. It is not hard to understand why this is the case. Improvement requires not just experience but practice, which means working on skills and knowledge outside and beyond the day-to-day performance of our normal routines. But as we all know those daily activities already take up an enormous amount of time and energy in themselves, leaving limited time for family, friends, or personal pursuits as it is. You should not be surprised to find, however, that for Willingham there's no getting around this requirement for more work. From a professional perspective, it certainly argues for more training to be incorporated into the school calendar, but again that's a policy area that Willingham does not address directly.
So what does professional development look like in Willingham's model? The essential element for the advancement in any field is expert feedback. Although he acknowledges that there may be many avenues for achieving this feedback, and little hard data to support one approach over another, Willingham does devote a good portion of the chapter to describing one method of working directly with a colleague on a regular basis with a formal and safe set of protocols around mutual observation. I've summarized the process below, but there is more detail in the book if anyone is interested.
Step 1:
Identify a colleague you would feel comfortable working with.
Step 2:
You and your partner each, separately, tape yourselves teaching and view only your own tapes to get used to seeing and hearing yourself on video - it can be a little jarring.
Step 3:
You and your partner together view tapes of OTHER teachers in the classroom (some are available online). This is so you can critique someone else and talk about what would make you uncomfortable if the critique were directed at you - essentially this is a safe place to talk about what kinds of comments would be appropriate/helpful and which would not be helpful or appropriate.
Step 4:
You and your partner take turns viewing, together, tapes of each other. It is important to agree ahead of time on the scope of the discussion and for the observing partner to honor the limits set forth. For example, if the subject wants feedback on his questioning techniques, it would not be appropriate to point out that the kids in the back of the room are off task and disengaged - that discussion should wait for another time.
Step 5:
Identify after each session ONE element of your instruction that you would like to change and focus on changing it. It is important to take this step slowly, and not try to fix everything overnight - you are in this for the long haul, so think in terms of the years that you will spend making improvements.
If all this sounds like too much for now, Willingham offers some immediate, smaller steps you can take, from keeping a diary to starting a discussion group (I think our PD strands can fairly be characterized as study groups) to simply observing teens in their native habitats (like malls) to see how they interact with one another. In the end, however, the crucial element to all of these strategies is a conscious decision to make an effort to improve one's teaching skills by going above and beyond the day-to-day chores of teaching.
Willingham starts this chapter with some reminders about how thinking works and why thinking is so hard. New material that you want to learn must first be processed in working memory. However, working memory is limited - there are only so many things you can juggle at a once and so too much new information easily overwhelms working memory.
Now think about all the new things a beginning teacher must learn. Every school has its own physical layout that a teacher must become comfortable with, its own set of rules and procedures, and administrative hierarchies. Then there's the classroom itself, procedures and routines for daily activities, managing student behavior, planning lessons, giving students feedback, dealing with disruptions from students, administrators, other teachers, communicating with parents, preparing reports, etc. etc., etc. As you become more and more experienced, these things that once overwhelmed you, at least most of them, become automatic. They no longer require thinking and you can then use the precious resources of your working memory for other, more important things like actually engaging students in a lesson.
The problem, as Willingham describes it, is that most of us approached learning to teach essentially the same way we approached learning to drive. Learning to drive is a difficult process that is analogous to any new experience in that there are so many little things to think about at once and initially they all require conscious thought within the constraints of limited working memory. As you practice driving, many of these activities are learned to a point that they become automatic and no longer require much effort or thought, freeing your mind to do other things like carry on a conversation or listen to talk radio.
Unless you are a professional racer or stunt driver or police officer, however, you probably reached a point in your driving abilities where you felt competent and safe and you have improved little since then. Willingham says it's the same for teaching. We spend the first 5 years or so getting better and better until we have reached a point where we are comfortable enough with how things are going and then our abilities level off. Studies based on gains in student test scores confirm this phenomenon. It is not hard to understand why this is the case. Improvement requires not just experience but practice, which means working on skills and knowledge outside and beyond the day-to-day performance of our normal routines. But as we all know those daily activities already take up an enormous amount of time and energy in themselves, leaving limited time for family, friends, or personal pursuits as it is. You should not be surprised to find, however, that for Willingham there's no getting around this requirement for more work. From a professional perspective, it certainly argues for more training to be incorporated into the school calendar, but again that's a policy area that Willingham does not address directly.
So what does professional development look like in Willingham's model? The essential element for the advancement in any field is expert feedback. Although he acknowledges that there may be many avenues for achieving this feedback, and little hard data to support one approach over another, Willingham does devote a good portion of the chapter to describing one method of working directly with a colleague on a regular basis with a formal and safe set of protocols around mutual observation. I've summarized the process below, but there is more detail in the book if anyone is interested.
Step 1:
Identify a colleague you would feel comfortable working with.
Step 2:
You and your partner each, separately, tape yourselves teaching and view only your own tapes to get used to seeing and hearing yourself on video - it can be a little jarring.
Step 3:
You and your partner together view tapes of OTHER teachers in the classroom (some are available online). This is so you can critique someone else and talk about what would make you uncomfortable if the critique were directed at you - essentially this is a safe place to talk about what kinds of comments would be appropriate/helpful and which would not be helpful or appropriate.
Step 4:
You and your partner take turns viewing, together, tapes of each other. It is important to agree ahead of time on the scope of the discussion and for the observing partner to honor the limits set forth. For example, if the subject wants feedback on his questioning techniques, it would not be appropriate to point out that the kids in the back of the room are off task and disengaged - that discussion should wait for another time.
Step 5:
Identify after each session ONE element of your instruction that you would like to change and focus on changing it. It is important to take this step slowly, and not try to fix everything overnight - you are in this for the long haul, so think in terms of the years that you will spend making improvements.
If all this sounds like too much for now, Willingham offers some immediate, smaller steps you can take, from keeping a diary to starting a discussion group (I think our PD strands can fairly be characterized as study groups) to simply observing teens in their native habitats (like malls) to see how they interact with one another. In the end, however, the crucial element to all of these strategies is a conscious decision to make an effort to improve one's teaching skills by going above and beyond the day-to-day chores of teaching.
Sunday, January 24, 2010
Do you teach content or do you teach kids?
This question came up on Twitter recently and I gave a twitterly response (140 character limit) that "I teach kids content" because I don't think the question, as posed, makes a lot of sense. Certainly in light of reading Willingham's book and pretty much agreeing with him on the issue of teaching content vs. critical thinking, the same idea applies here. Without content there's nothing to "teach" the kids. There has to be a "who" (the kids) as well as a "what" (the content). Otherwise your just standing in front of a group of kids doing nothing or standing in an empty room talking to yourself.
Now, maybe I'm missing the point of the question and stating the obvious. But there is a tendency in education circles to make these over-simplified false-choice kinds of dilemmas, and it becomes a marker for group identity, a way of dividing people into camps of progressive vs. traditional, old vs. new, caring vs. cold, etc.* The question has an implied "right" answer - we are supposed to respond that we teach kids, that is our central goal and purpose.
The original poster of the question was not satisfied with my answer and followed up, "but at the core of it, what is your focus?" That led me to wonder just exactly what problem in education the question is designed to address, leaving aside for a moment the logical absurdity of the choice it proposes. I thought of the following scenario: A teacher is obsessed with "covering the curriculum" and keeps a strict pacing calendar, covers every topic deemed essential to the field, in order, on schedule, and refuses to compromise when the kids are left behind, dazed and confused. This is a bit of an exaggeration and while I have known teachers who express some sympathy for a modified version of this approach, I don't know anyone who is serious about teaching and follows it to this extreme. Even here, though, at the heart of this attitude is a feeling that this is what the kids need to know, so it's still about the kids. Misguided, perhaps, but it's not only about the curriculum. People who feel this way aren't indifferent to the kids, they just have a different conception about what's right for them.
Furthermore, the conflict becomes more acute when we talk about covering the curriculum to help kids prepare for the high-stakes assessments they have to take. In (NY State) high schools, if you don't pass them you don't graduate. If you get a higher score you may qualify for a diploma with honors, which looks good on your college transcripts. Then we also have to worry about the kids going to college and being unprepared for the work that is required of them at the next level. So teaching the content to the best of your ability is every bit about what's good for the kids. The challenge is knowing how to help every child progress in the content as much as possible. It's also about, on a practical level, when to stay on a topic the kids don't understand at the risk of not covering some other topics, and when to just move on. Again, this is a question of what's right for the kids given two equally unpleasant choices.
Am I still missing the point?
*The term "child-centered" education comes to mind. What school isn't "child centered" in the non-specialized sense of the phrase? The term is used as a weapon against schools or teachers who have more traditional approaches to the needs of the child.
Now, maybe I'm missing the point of the question and stating the obvious. But there is a tendency in education circles to make these over-simplified false-choice kinds of dilemmas, and it becomes a marker for group identity, a way of dividing people into camps of progressive vs. traditional, old vs. new, caring vs. cold, etc.* The question has an implied "right" answer - we are supposed to respond that we teach kids, that is our central goal and purpose.
The original poster of the question was not satisfied with my answer and followed up, "but at the core of it, what is your focus?" That led me to wonder just exactly what problem in education the question is designed to address, leaving aside for a moment the logical absurdity of the choice it proposes. I thought of the following scenario: A teacher is obsessed with "covering the curriculum" and keeps a strict pacing calendar, covers every topic deemed essential to the field, in order, on schedule, and refuses to compromise when the kids are left behind, dazed and confused. This is a bit of an exaggeration and while I have known teachers who express some sympathy for a modified version of this approach, I don't know anyone who is serious about teaching and follows it to this extreme. Even here, though, at the heart of this attitude is a feeling that this is what the kids need to know, so it's still about the kids. Misguided, perhaps, but it's not only about the curriculum. People who feel this way aren't indifferent to the kids, they just have a different conception about what's right for them.
Furthermore, the conflict becomes more acute when we talk about covering the curriculum to help kids prepare for the high-stakes assessments they have to take. In (NY State) high schools, if you don't pass them you don't graduate. If you get a higher score you may qualify for a diploma with honors, which looks good on your college transcripts. Then we also have to worry about the kids going to college and being unprepared for the work that is required of them at the next level. So teaching the content to the best of your ability is every bit about what's good for the kids. The challenge is knowing how to help every child progress in the content as much as possible. It's also about, on a practical level, when to stay on a topic the kids don't understand at the risk of not covering some other topics, and when to just move on. Again, this is a question of what's right for the kids given two equally unpleasant choices.
Am I still missing the point?
*The term "child-centered" education comes to mind. What school isn't "child centered" in the non-specialized sense of the phrase? The term is used as a weapon against schools or teachers who have more traditional approaches to the needs of the child.
Monday, January 18, 2010
Reflections
Why Don't Students Like School? by Daniel T. Willingham (John Wiley & Sons, 2009).
I'm taking a little break here to reflect on some of the overarching themes of the book this weekend before jumping into the next and last chapter, devoted to Willingham's prescription for teachers who want to improve their practices.
Up to this point I have found "Why don't student's like school?" to be on the whole quite teacher friendly, as I see it. You will not find simple answers to complex issues (we're not fools). No magic, artificial, "teacher-proof" curriculum that is doomed to wind up in the dustbin of all the other Great Ideas™ that came before it (we're human beings, not machines). No perfect-world methodology that requires a fundamental transformation of the present-day academic structures in our system (we have to teach in today's world, not some fantasy future). Instead, Willingham offers a pragmatic, realistic approach based in the world of education that we inhabit today. I will summarize below his views on the learning process, the relationships between students and teachers, and the approaches to teaching that seem to work, all in light of why I think these are teacher-friendly positions. Since this is a summary, for more detail you can read the previous individual posts about each point (linked).
A common refrain throughout the book is that learning is hard. It takes effort, and in fact it takes effort that most of us are reluctant to put forth unless there is a good reason to do so. One of our most difficult tasks as teachers is to motivate students to put in that effort. Willingham's answer is simple to state: students will invest time and energy in learning material that is challenging but not frustrating. This requires, among other things, teachers who know the material they teach, who know where students will have difficulty with the material, and who can create appropriate lessons that appeal to students' natural curiosity and desire to solve problems.
So wait, how is that "teacher friendly?" To my mind, it acknowledges the centrality and primacy of teaching in education. That might seem ridiculously obvious, but we have seen wave after wave of reform programs that apparently desire nothing more than to make teachers interchangeable (and cheap) parts of a machine driven by curriculum and/or methodological gimmicks. It also puts to rest a notion that learning can be made easy if we just follow the latest fad - students will miraculously and effortlessly master algebra and have fun doing it if we abandon our outdated methods and get with the new program (or the next one, or the next one, or the next one...). In the end, however, Willingham doesn't see any short cuts to the students themselves engaging in hard work, and I think most teachers would agree.
This does not mean that teachers can be complacent or passive or lazy and just throw work at the students and insist that they do it and blame them when they don't (luckily I don't know many teachers who feel that way to begin with). On the contrary, Willingham asserts that the most important factor in how much students learn is what the teacher does to motivate, engage, and challenge them. Neither curriculum, high-stakes testing, nor a particular method can accomplish that.
Again you might wonder how this is a teacher-friendly principle, when it implies that if students aren't learning it is essentially the teacher's fault, but read on and you will find that Willingham does not believe that struggling students can catch up with where they need to be by simply having better teachers. They need more instructional time targeted at filling in the deficiencies in basic knowledge that are holding them back from learning the grade-level curriculum they are struggling with. That means more time with a teacher and it implies more individual attention and smaller classes for those struggling students.* The good news for teachers is that Willingham's overall philosophy is that hard work pays off, and we will learn in Chapter 9 ways that teachers, struggling or otherwise, can make improvements.
Willingham then offers two criteria for being a good teacher that are not unreasonable or unattainable. Both are flexible enough to allow for a good deal of teacher independence (from rigid mandates about how a teacher must behave, organize a lesson, etc.).** The first is that effective teachers must have a personal connection with their students, but there are as many pathways to finding that connection as there are teachers. Willingham maintains, however, that ultimately your students need to "like" you. They need to know you care about them, they need to trust you, they need to feel safe. None of that will matter, however, if you don't also organize your lessons in a logical way that is appropriate to the subject and the students you teach.
And that brings me to the final overarching theme, how to organize effective lessons. Willingham offers only general principles here, and I'll discuss below why he is vague on the details. The first is the idea of organizing lessons around stories. The human brain seems to have a special affinity for stories. Furthermore, an incredible amount of time in a student's relatively short lifetime has already been spent watching, reading, and listening to stories. The basic structure of a story is therefore already hardwired in the brain and provides a familiar schema or framework to help students make sense of unfamiliar concepts. Stories provide a model for making predictions, inferring causality, and so forth, all of which engage the student in actively thinking about the content embedded within it. You do not have to teach every lesson as a self-contained story, but you should be aware of the story components (character, causality, conflict, complications) and try to incorporate as many as you can into your lessons.
Willingham also cautions against worrying about the "learning styles" of students as there is no evidence that catering to individual styles will result in increased learning. Instead, you should base a particular teaching strategy on the nature of the concept or content objective itself. This makes intuitive sense and simplifies the matter greatly: If you want students to learn what something looks like, use a visual approach. If they need to learn how things sound, then auditory lessons would be called for. If a particular strategy benefits some, it probably benefits all, regardless of their 'learning style."
More importantly, Willingham sees a great need to change student attitudes toward learning. A major stumbling block for many students is a misconception that success comes from "being smart," or "talented," characteristics you are supposedly born with, rather than from working hard, a habit that you can cultivate. A great deal of our efforts should be directed at convincing students that hard work will pay off, and Willingham thinks we can effect this change on a local level through the way we interact with students and praise them for their efforts. This is a relatively easy change in our behavior to make, although the impact on student achievement may of course take longer to notice.
Finally, what all these things have in common is the demand for expert teaching and a willingness to let teachers teach. Willingham seems to be vague on details and reluctant to prescribe any particular approach or method precisely because he understands that teaching is not some mechanical process that can be codified, packaged, and universalized. He emphasizes the social nature of teaching and the importance of the interactions between a human teacher and human students. He places teaching squarely in the center of the education enterprise where it belongs.
Most of the book until now has addressed how learning takes place and the classroom implications of that process. In Chapter 9 Willingham looks at the teacher as learner and what we can to do to become experts in our field.
Next: Chapter 9: What about my mind?
*Wilingham doesn't much address the nitty-gritty policy or political issues in education, such as class size or standardized testing per se. Nonetheless, I think there are some obvious policy implications.
**I think we are fortunate to work with an administration that seems to have an intuitive sense of this principle.
I'm taking a little break here to reflect on some of the overarching themes of the book this weekend before jumping into the next and last chapter, devoted to Willingham's prescription for teachers who want to improve their practices.
Up to this point I have found "Why don't student's like school?" to be on the whole quite teacher friendly, as I see it. You will not find simple answers to complex issues (we're not fools). No magic, artificial, "teacher-proof" curriculum that is doomed to wind up in the dustbin of all the other Great Ideas™ that came before it (we're human beings, not machines). No perfect-world methodology that requires a fundamental transformation of the present-day academic structures in our system (we have to teach in today's world, not some fantasy future). Instead, Willingham offers a pragmatic, realistic approach based in the world of education that we inhabit today. I will summarize below his views on the learning process, the relationships between students and teachers, and the approaches to teaching that seem to work, all in light of why I think these are teacher-friendly positions. Since this is a summary, for more detail you can read the previous individual posts about each point (linked).
A common refrain throughout the book is that learning is hard. It takes effort, and in fact it takes effort that most of us are reluctant to put forth unless there is a good reason to do so. One of our most difficult tasks as teachers is to motivate students to put in that effort. Willingham's answer is simple to state: students will invest time and energy in learning material that is challenging but not frustrating. This requires, among other things, teachers who know the material they teach, who know where students will have difficulty with the material, and who can create appropriate lessons that appeal to students' natural curiosity and desire to solve problems.
So wait, how is that "teacher friendly?" To my mind, it acknowledges the centrality and primacy of teaching in education. That might seem ridiculously obvious, but we have seen wave after wave of reform programs that apparently desire nothing more than to make teachers interchangeable (and cheap) parts of a machine driven by curriculum and/or methodological gimmicks. It also puts to rest a notion that learning can be made easy if we just follow the latest fad - students will miraculously and effortlessly master algebra and have fun doing it if we abandon our outdated methods and get with the new program (or the next one, or the next one, or the next one...). In the end, however, Willingham doesn't see any short cuts to the students themselves engaging in hard work, and I think most teachers would agree.
This does not mean that teachers can be complacent or passive or lazy and just throw work at the students and insist that they do it and blame them when they don't (luckily I don't know many teachers who feel that way to begin with). On the contrary, Willingham asserts that the most important factor in how much students learn is what the teacher does to motivate, engage, and challenge them. Neither curriculum, high-stakes testing, nor a particular method can accomplish that.
Again you might wonder how this is a teacher-friendly principle, when it implies that if students aren't learning it is essentially the teacher's fault, but read on and you will find that Willingham does not believe that struggling students can catch up with where they need to be by simply having better teachers. They need more instructional time targeted at filling in the deficiencies in basic knowledge that are holding them back from learning the grade-level curriculum they are struggling with. That means more time with a teacher and it implies more individual attention and smaller classes for those struggling students.* The good news for teachers is that Willingham's overall philosophy is that hard work pays off, and we will learn in Chapter 9 ways that teachers, struggling or otherwise, can make improvements.
Willingham then offers two criteria for being a good teacher that are not unreasonable or unattainable. Both are flexible enough to allow for a good deal of teacher independence (from rigid mandates about how a teacher must behave, organize a lesson, etc.).** The first is that effective teachers must have a personal connection with their students, but there are as many pathways to finding that connection as there are teachers. Willingham maintains, however, that ultimately your students need to "like" you. They need to know you care about them, they need to trust you, they need to feel safe. None of that will matter, however, if you don't also organize your lessons in a logical way that is appropriate to the subject and the students you teach.
And that brings me to the final overarching theme, how to organize effective lessons. Willingham offers only general principles here, and I'll discuss below why he is vague on the details. The first is the idea of organizing lessons around stories. The human brain seems to have a special affinity for stories. Furthermore, an incredible amount of time in a student's relatively short lifetime has already been spent watching, reading, and listening to stories. The basic structure of a story is therefore already hardwired in the brain and provides a familiar schema or framework to help students make sense of unfamiliar concepts. Stories provide a model for making predictions, inferring causality, and so forth, all of which engage the student in actively thinking about the content embedded within it. You do not have to teach every lesson as a self-contained story, but you should be aware of the story components (character, causality, conflict, complications) and try to incorporate as many as you can into your lessons.
Willingham also cautions against worrying about the "learning styles" of students as there is no evidence that catering to individual styles will result in increased learning. Instead, you should base a particular teaching strategy on the nature of the concept or content objective itself. This makes intuitive sense and simplifies the matter greatly: If you want students to learn what something looks like, use a visual approach. If they need to learn how things sound, then auditory lessons would be called for. If a particular strategy benefits some, it probably benefits all, regardless of their 'learning style."
More importantly, Willingham sees a great need to change student attitudes toward learning. A major stumbling block for many students is a misconception that success comes from "being smart," or "talented," characteristics you are supposedly born with, rather than from working hard, a habit that you can cultivate. A great deal of our efforts should be directed at convincing students that hard work will pay off, and Willingham thinks we can effect this change on a local level through the way we interact with students and praise them for their efforts. This is a relatively easy change in our behavior to make, although the impact on student achievement may of course take longer to notice.
Finally, what all these things have in common is the demand for expert teaching and a willingness to let teachers teach. Willingham seems to be vague on details and reluctant to prescribe any particular approach or method precisely because he understands that teaching is not some mechanical process that can be codified, packaged, and universalized. He emphasizes the social nature of teaching and the importance of the interactions between a human teacher and human students. He places teaching squarely in the center of the education enterprise where it belongs.
Most of the book until now has addressed how learning takes place and the classroom implications of that process. In Chapter 9 Willingham looks at the teacher as learner and what we can to do to become experts in our field.
Next: Chapter 9: What about my mind?
*Wilingham doesn't much address the nitty-gritty policy or political issues in education, such as class size or standardized testing per se. Nonetheless, I think there are some obvious policy implications.
**I think we are fortunate to work with an administration that seems to have an intuitive sense of this principle.
Sunday, January 10, 2010
Chapter 8: How Can I Help Slow Learners?
Why Don't Students Like School? by Daniel T. Willingham (John Wiley & Sons, 2009).
First the bulleted summary:
Intelligence is a real phenomenon - experience and controlled studies tell us that some people just learn things more easily than others. But Willingham argues and provides evidence to support the idea that intelligence is in fact malleable. Individual IQ can change over time given proper interventions, and studies around the world have shown increases in national average IQ scores over relatively short periods of time that cannot be explained by any biological (i.e. genetic) changes in the populations. The changes must be the result of environmental influences, such as better health care, nutrition, education, etc.
There have been over the last few years a number of voices in education arguing the opposite - that intelligence is a fixed, inherited trait, determined by a lucky roll of the genetic dice, and not subject to environmental influence. This is of course a very convenient argument for the political right, as the consequence of such a view is that spending money on education and health care to improve the lot of low-performing students would be a waste of taxpayers' money - if it were true. Even more insidious is the way this idea has trickled down to the general population and even into the minds of students themselves. In our culture today, there is a prevailing sense among students that some people are just smart and if you are not smart then there's not much point in striving for academic success.
The point that is missed is that most people who appear smart may or may not have significantly higher IQs, but they do have a lifetime of accumulated knowledge that was acquired through sustained hard work or at least sustained attention to the world around them.* But remember, as discussed in Chapter 1, the more you know, the easier it is to learn more. So as the years go by the gap between the high achievers and low achievers widens to a point where teaching to the middle in a typical classroom leaves a third of the class struggling to keep up and a third of the class breezing through effortlessly. It must seem completely unfair to the low achievers, it reinforces the idea that there are smart kids and not so smart kids, and that the smart kids don't have to do much at all and still get high grades while the rest of us work harder and get low grades for our efforts. How motivating is that? Why bother? Why not just do the bare minimum needed to get a passing grade, because after all, if I work hard and get a 75 or if I don't work hard and get a 65 - does it really matter?
The unavoidable truth is that students who are behind their peers cannot simply do the same work as their peers and ever expect to catch up - it's like starting a race where the other runners have a head start AND they are running at a faster pace - we have to find a way to accelerate the slow learners. And if you've been keeping up with Willingham's other chapters, you may know already that the only way to do that is through extra work, more practice, more focus on filling in the gaps of knowledge that are slowing them down in their current studies. Although Willingham doesn't say this directly, clearly any model of differentiated instruction (the reform du jour in education) that ignores this fundamental fact will be doomed to failure. While better and more targeted instruction would likely be beneficial, it is not enough. If our slower students are to be academically successful and narrow the gap with high achievers, they will need more instructional time, not just better instruction.
And that brings us to the crux of the matter - how do you motivate students to take advantage of this extra time - after all, if you just program kids for more instruction in math or reading, it's unlikely they will thank you for it unless they are prepared to receive it as a gift rather than a punishment. Part of the answer is in changing the internalized beliefs about intelligence. Willingham thinks that the way we praise students frequently reinforces the wrong model and decreases the likelihood that students will work harder. A change in the way students think about intelligence is key.
Willingham puts it this way. Kids think that there are some students who are just smart and some who are not so smart. Smart kids don't have to work hard, everything's easy for them. So working hard is a sign of being dumb. Most kids want to be "smart" - no one wants to be or appear dumb. But since working hard means you're not smart, if you want to look smart you avoid any activity that requires hard work, because then you look dumb. You take easier classes, you do the easiest projects read the easiest books, and when you have no choice in a particular, difficult task, you just don't do it because it's a dumb assignment. "This is stupid" really translates as "I don't understand this but I don't want to look dumb so I'm calling your assignment stupid - see how smart I am?" Still other students have decided that they really aren't smart at all, which leads to resignation and lack of effort because hey, what's the point - I'm just not smart enough to do this.
When we tell students they are smart we simply make the problem worse. It reinforces the idea of intelligence as a fixed attribute of the person rather than a product of hard work that anyone can attain. Further, for low achievers the "praise" can ring hollow, or come off as patronizing. For students who are in fact "smart," as measured by standardized testing, such praise may make them fearful of taking risks or tackling difficult problems lest they be unmasked - a condition sometimes referred to as the "impostor complex" (I don't think I'm smart but I seem to have fooled everyone and now I'm terrified they'll find out that I'm not really smart/talented/competent/etc.). It may be that the smart kid who doesn't do any work would rather fail and be seen as lazy than struggle through a difficult task and risk being revealed as not so smart.
The correct approach, which we've all heard before but often forget or dismiss, is to praise the work or the effort, but do so sincerely. Willingham suggests that we consciously and directly change the culture of our school to one in which the central focus is on work and effort. Students should be taught explicitly that intelligence is a consequence of hard work, and that "failure" in a given task is frequently a necessary step on the way to success. Before I started reading Willingham's book I read a study about IQ that seems relevant here. A survey of Nobel Laureates showed that most of them were not "geniuses" as measured by IQ and many people who are labeled as geniuses fail to live up to the label in terms of achievement - a fact that many observers attribute directly to their being labeled geniuses in the first place.** At a young age, kids have already internalized the idea that to be smart is to have everything come easily to you. When presented with difficulties, even gifted children tend to shut down for fear of not living up the the ideal of smart or gifted that has been foisted upon them. High achievers instead tend to be of average to above average intelligence who know they have to work hard and put in the hours to become leading experts in their fields.
Implications
In summary, we need to change student attitudes about the nature of intelligence and the importance of hard work by directly engaging them in discussions of what is required to succeed academically. One of the most important things we can do in regard to bringing about that mindset is to avoid praising intelligence and instead praise effort. Lastly, we must provide additional time and instruction to students who are behind their peers academically.
Next: Overall reflections on the major themes of the book.
*Students from families with high levels of education and/or parental involvement gain a tremendous amount of knowledge informally and almost without effort through the home environment - dinner conversations, discussions around current events and television shows/movies/plays/etc., homework help, reading at home, visits to museums and other cultural institutions - conditions that are difficult to replicate outside such homes, but programs such as Head Start and others that we can imagine would certainly help.
**I can't find the article now, but here's a similar one on the same theme from New Scientist: How to be a genius.
First the bulleted summary:
- Intelligence is not fixed.
- Students who are behind their peers will have to work harder to catch up or risk falling further and further behind.
- Never tell students they are "smart" - it could actually make them stupid.
Intelligence is a real phenomenon - experience and controlled studies tell us that some people just learn things more easily than others. But Willingham argues and provides evidence to support the idea that intelligence is in fact malleable. Individual IQ can change over time given proper interventions, and studies around the world have shown increases in national average IQ scores over relatively short periods of time that cannot be explained by any biological (i.e. genetic) changes in the populations. The changes must be the result of environmental influences, such as better health care, nutrition, education, etc.
There have been over the last few years a number of voices in education arguing the opposite - that intelligence is a fixed, inherited trait, determined by a lucky roll of the genetic dice, and not subject to environmental influence. This is of course a very convenient argument for the political right, as the consequence of such a view is that spending money on education and health care to improve the lot of low-performing students would be a waste of taxpayers' money - if it were true. Even more insidious is the way this idea has trickled down to the general population and even into the minds of students themselves. In our culture today, there is a prevailing sense among students that some people are just smart and if you are not smart then there's not much point in striving for academic success.
The point that is missed is that most people who appear smart may or may not have significantly higher IQs, but they do have a lifetime of accumulated knowledge that was acquired through sustained hard work or at least sustained attention to the world around them.* But remember, as discussed in Chapter 1, the more you know, the easier it is to learn more. So as the years go by the gap between the high achievers and low achievers widens to a point where teaching to the middle in a typical classroom leaves a third of the class struggling to keep up and a third of the class breezing through effortlessly. It must seem completely unfair to the low achievers, it reinforces the idea that there are smart kids and not so smart kids, and that the smart kids don't have to do much at all and still get high grades while the rest of us work harder and get low grades for our efforts. How motivating is that? Why bother? Why not just do the bare minimum needed to get a passing grade, because after all, if I work hard and get a 75 or if I don't work hard and get a 65 - does it really matter?
The unavoidable truth is that students who are behind their peers cannot simply do the same work as their peers and ever expect to catch up - it's like starting a race where the other runners have a head start AND they are running at a faster pace - we have to find a way to accelerate the slow learners. And if you've been keeping up with Willingham's other chapters, you may know already that the only way to do that is through extra work, more practice, more focus on filling in the gaps of knowledge that are slowing them down in their current studies. Although Willingham doesn't say this directly, clearly any model of differentiated instruction (the reform du jour in education) that ignores this fundamental fact will be doomed to failure. While better and more targeted instruction would likely be beneficial, it is not enough. If our slower students are to be academically successful and narrow the gap with high achievers, they will need more instructional time, not just better instruction.
And that brings us to the crux of the matter - how do you motivate students to take advantage of this extra time - after all, if you just program kids for more instruction in math or reading, it's unlikely they will thank you for it unless they are prepared to receive it as a gift rather than a punishment. Part of the answer is in changing the internalized beliefs about intelligence. Willingham thinks that the way we praise students frequently reinforces the wrong model and decreases the likelihood that students will work harder. A change in the way students think about intelligence is key.
Willingham puts it this way. Kids think that there are some students who are just smart and some who are not so smart. Smart kids don't have to work hard, everything's easy for them. So working hard is a sign of being dumb. Most kids want to be "smart" - no one wants to be or appear dumb. But since working hard means you're not smart, if you want to look smart you avoid any activity that requires hard work, because then you look dumb. You take easier classes, you do the easiest projects read the easiest books, and when you have no choice in a particular, difficult task, you just don't do it because it's a dumb assignment. "This is stupid" really translates as "I don't understand this but I don't want to look dumb so I'm calling your assignment stupid - see how smart I am?" Still other students have decided that they really aren't smart at all, which leads to resignation and lack of effort because hey, what's the point - I'm just not smart enough to do this.
When we tell students they are smart we simply make the problem worse. It reinforces the idea of intelligence as a fixed attribute of the person rather than a product of hard work that anyone can attain. Further, for low achievers the "praise" can ring hollow, or come off as patronizing. For students who are in fact "smart," as measured by standardized testing, such praise may make them fearful of taking risks or tackling difficult problems lest they be unmasked - a condition sometimes referred to as the "impostor complex" (I don't think I'm smart but I seem to have fooled everyone and now I'm terrified they'll find out that I'm not really smart/talented/competent/etc.). It may be that the smart kid who doesn't do any work would rather fail and be seen as lazy than struggle through a difficult task and risk being revealed as not so smart.
The correct approach, which we've all heard before but often forget or dismiss, is to praise the work or the effort, but do so sincerely. Willingham suggests that we consciously and directly change the culture of our school to one in which the central focus is on work and effort. Students should be taught explicitly that intelligence is a consequence of hard work, and that "failure" in a given task is frequently a necessary step on the way to success. Before I started reading Willingham's book I read a study about IQ that seems relevant here. A survey of Nobel Laureates showed that most of them were not "geniuses" as measured by IQ and many people who are labeled as geniuses fail to live up to the label in terms of achievement - a fact that many observers attribute directly to their being labeled geniuses in the first place.** At a young age, kids have already internalized the idea that to be smart is to have everything come easily to you. When presented with difficulties, even gifted children tend to shut down for fear of not living up the the ideal of smart or gifted that has been foisted upon them. High achievers instead tend to be of average to above average intelligence who know they have to work hard and put in the hours to become leading experts in their fields.
Implications
In summary, we need to change student attitudes about the nature of intelligence and the importance of hard work by directly engaging them in discussions of what is required to succeed academically. One of the most important things we can do in regard to bringing about that mindset is to avoid praising intelligence and instead praise effort. Lastly, we must provide additional time and instruction to students who are behind their peers academically.
Next: Overall reflections on the major themes of the book.
*Students from families with high levels of education and/or parental involvement gain a tremendous amount of knowledge informally and almost without effort through the home environment - dinner conversations, discussions around current events and television shows/movies/plays/etc., homework help, reading at home, visits to museums and other cultural institutions - conditions that are difficult to replicate outside such homes, but programs such as Head Start and others that we can imagine would certainly help.
**I can't find the article now, but here's a similar one on the same theme from New Scientist: How to be a genius.
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