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.