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.