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.
Friday, December 18, 2009
Chapter 7: How should I adjust my teaching for different types of learners?
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?
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?
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!"
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Chapter 4: Why is it so hard for students to understand abstract ideas?
Why Don't Students Like School? by Daniel T. Willingham (John Wiley & Sons, 2009).
Blogging Note - it's somewhat frowned upon in the blogosphere to erase your mistakes once an item has been posted - frequently the mistake will be caught by readers and commented upon. If you erase the mistake, the comments become confusing or meaningless. Hence the common practice of using strike through text and adding the correction afterward. I do make minor edits for grammar, spelling, or clarity without notification.
I'm going to give chapters 4,5, & 6 relatively short summaries. The information is, I think, pretty well known and reasonably uncontroversial. In chapter 7, on the other hand, the author explodes some myths about "multiple intelligences" and "learning styles" that will surely raise some eyebrows. Chapter 8 addresses differentiated instruction head on, and chapter 9 deals with teacher self-reflection and professional development (from a personal standpoint as opposed to an outside mandate).
Willingham sums up chapter 4 as follows:
For example, to take the concept that Willingham uses, Newton's laws of motion are sometimes taught first as a series of abstract statements (an object at rest tends to stay at rest, an object in motion tends to stay in motion, etc.) or even a more abstract mathematical expression of the ideas (F=ma). Maybe later if the students are lucky they will be given a lab activity to illustrate the idea, and maybe the lab will have the intended effect or not, depending on how well it is set up and how good the equipment is and how seriously the students actually think about the consequences of the lab.
The constructivist approach, and the part of it that is more or less supported by Willingham's research, suggests a better way might be to turn this model on its head and begin a unit of study on Newton's laws with a series of concrete experiences that students can then think about and relate to the abstract concepts of motion described by Newton. Where Willingham might part ways with the strict constructivist approach (not that he discusses it, I'm just inferring here) is in allowing that we can simply use previous concrete experiences, tap into the prior knowledge that students have stored in memory, rather than having to come up with a novel hands-on, concrete experience for every new idea we present. F = ma is an abstract concept that doesn't make intuitive sense until you use a couple of examples; compare hitting a baseball with a bat and hitting a car with a bat - obviously the car will not move much (the a or acceleration in the formula) compared to the baseball because of the different masses of the two objects. Stated that way it is "intuitive" because we all have the concrete experience of trying to move objects of different masses.
The point is that in order for students to be able to understand the abstract laws, they must relate them in some way to concrete experiences. And this is itself a universalized law - ALL abstraction is built upon a foundation of the concrete world and physical experience.
Chapter 4 also deals with the related difficulty of knowledge transfer. Having described a situation above (the baseball and the car example) and hearing the familiar chorus of "ohhhh, I get it," you might think it would be a simple matter to then have the students apply the law to a similar problem, let's say throwing a baseball versus throwing a softball. It is entirely possible, however, that a student with limited experience would not recognize that the key element of the first scenario is the mass of the objects. Instead the student might get hung up on the fact that a ball is a small spherical object whereas the car is a vehicle with wheels, or the use of a bat in the first scenario might make them think that the use of a throwing arm in the second scenario requires a completely different set of rules. In other words, a student with shallow knowledge might not know which elements of the scenario to generalize or transfer.
Implications for teaching
Recognize that for many students a single concrete example will not suffice to allow them to generalize a rule or concept. Provide as many different examples as possible so the student begins to see the pattern and can identify key elements.
Make sure that "understanding" (deep knowledge) is incorporated into every aspect of your teaching, from homework to class activities to assessments. Especially assessments. If your assessments are testing shallow knowledge, that's what students will focus on.
Be realistic. At any particular level of education, there will be limits to how deeply a student will be able to achieve understanding. Sometimes we have to accept that we are simply planting the seed of an idea thatstudents will be able to build upon in the future will grow as students gain more experience and exposure to the concepts (edited, I hate accidental mixed metaphors).
Next: Chapter 5, Is drilling worth it? picks up and expands on the question of how to help students achive deep understanding.
Blogging Note - it's somewhat frowned upon in the blogosphere to erase your mistakes once an item has been posted - frequently the mistake will be caught by readers and commented upon. If you erase the mistake, the comments become confusing or meaningless. Hence the common practice of using strike through text and adding the correction afterward. I do make minor edits for grammar, spelling, or clarity without notification.
I'm going to give chapters 4,5, & 6 relatively short summaries. The information is, I think, pretty well known and reasonably uncontroversial. In chapter 7, on the other hand, the author explodes some myths about "multiple intelligences" and "learning styles" that will surely raise some eyebrows. Chapter 8 addresses differentiated instruction head on, and chapter 9 deals with teacher self-reflection and professional development (from a personal standpoint as opposed to an outside mandate).
Willingham sums up chapter 4 as follows:
We understand new things in the context of things we already know, and most of what we know is concrete.In science education this idea has been the cornerstone of virtually every program and class that I've been involved with. The whole constructivist approach is in part built upon (and perhaps takes a little t0o far sometimes) the idea that our traditional way of teaching science is wrong precisely because we typically start out teaching abstract ideas first and then use concrete experiences only later and sporadically to illustrate those abstract ideas.
For example, to take the concept that Willingham uses, Newton's laws of motion are sometimes taught first as a series of abstract statements (an object at rest tends to stay at rest, an object in motion tends to stay in motion, etc.) or even a more abstract mathematical expression of the ideas (F=ma). Maybe later if the students are lucky they will be given a lab activity to illustrate the idea, and maybe the lab will have the intended effect or not, depending on how well it is set up and how good the equipment is and how seriously the students actually think about the consequences of the lab.
The constructivist approach, and the part of it that is more or less supported by Willingham's research, suggests a better way might be to turn this model on its head and begin a unit of study on Newton's laws with a series of concrete experiences that students can then think about and relate to the abstract concepts of motion described by Newton. Where Willingham might part ways with the strict constructivist approach (not that he discusses it, I'm just inferring here) is in allowing that we can simply use previous concrete experiences, tap into the prior knowledge that students have stored in memory, rather than having to come up with a novel hands-on, concrete experience for every new idea we present. F = ma is an abstract concept that doesn't make intuitive sense until you use a couple of examples; compare hitting a baseball with a bat and hitting a car with a bat - obviously the car will not move much (the a or acceleration in the formula) compared to the baseball because of the different masses of the two objects. Stated that way it is "intuitive" because we all have the concrete experience of trying to move objects of different masses.
The point is that in order for students to be able to understand the abstract laws, they must relate them in some way to concrete experiences. And this is itself a universalized law - ALL abstraction is built upon a foundation of the concrete world and physical experience.
Chapter 4 also deals with the related difficulty of knowledge transfer. Having described a situation above (the baseball and the car example) and hearing the familiar chorus of "ohhhh, I get it," you might think it would be a simple matter to then have the students apply the law to a similar problem, let's say throwing a baseball versus throwing a softball. It is entirely possible, however, that a student with limited experience would not recognize that the key element of the first scenario is the mass of the objects. Instead the student might get hung up on the fact that a ball is a small spherical object whereas the car is a vehicle with wheels, or the use of a bat in the first scenario might make them think that the use of a throwing arm in the second scenario requires a completely different set of rules. In other words, a student with shallow knowledge might not know which elements of the scenario to generalize or transfer.
Implications for teaching
Recognize that for many students a single concrete example will not suffice to allow them to generalize a rule or concept. Provide as many different examples as possible so the student begins to see the pattern and can identify key elements.
Make sure that "understanding" (deep knowledge) is incorporated into every aspect of your teaching, from homework to class activities to assessments. Especially assessments. If your assessments are testing shallow knowledge, that's what students will focus on.
Be realistic. At any particular level of education, there will be limits to how deeply a student will be able to achieve understanding. Sometimes we have to accept that we are simply planting the seed of an idea that
Next: Chapter 5, Is drilling worth it? picks up and expands on the question of how to help students achive deep understanding.
Sunday, November 08, 2009
Chapter 3: Why do students remember everything that's on television and forget everything I say? (Part 4)
Why Don't Students Like School? by Daniel T. Willingham (John Wiley & Sons, 2009).
Rote memorization
The proximal goal of teaching is to get students to think about content, because students will remember what they think about. One way to get students to think about content is to present problems, puzzles, issues, etc. that require solutions. Another is to structure content around stories. Of course the two approaches are not mutually exclusive and both of these strategies activate or take advantage of natural brain processes.
But what to do when you want students to learn things that they cannot think meaningfully about right now but that they need to know anyway in order to progress in a discipline? For example, we might ask students to memorize the multiplication table before they are really able to understand the concept of multiplication. In chemistry students might need to memorize a certain number of chemical elements on the periodic table, or in humanities the names of the 50 states and their capitols, etc. Willingham accepts the notion that these things may be necessary , although they should be needed sparingly and not make up the bulk of your teaching strategies. Nonetheless, in a world where some background factual knowledge is a prerequisite for critical thinking, we need strategies to help commit certain facts to memory. This is traditionally referred to as rote memorization.
The answer, not surprisingly, is to us mnemonic devices that we are all familiar with. Willingham outlines a few of these techniqies, all of which I already know about except three, which are so ridiculous I won't even bother to summarize them.
The older ones that we all know about are 1) acronyms (ROY G BIV, for the colors of a rainbow), 2) the first letter method (My Very Elegant Mother Just Served Us Nine Peanuts, for the planets), and 3) songs (think of the ABCD song or "Conjunction Junction" from schoolhouse rock)
On to the implications for the classroom, which in this chapter seem merely to summarize ideas that have already been presented.
First, be careful in planning lessons so that students think about what you want them to think about. Beware of the potential for students to become distracted by material that was meant as an aside or as a motivational activity that students then have a difficult time turning away from to think about the real objective of the lesson. Make sure your attention grabbers really require students to think about the core concepts.
Secondly, make assignments so that students can't avoid thinking about meaning. In the example given earlier of having the students actually make biscuits and get distracted by the logistics of measuring and baking, Willingham instead proposes asking students to ponder questions of how runaway slaves could have obtained food, how they would have cooked it, etc.
Overall, these little day-to-day details should be organized in some way around a conflict. A conflict is central to a story, central to the idea of looking for solutions, therefore central to getting students to think about meaning.
Next
Chapter 4: Why is it hard for students to understand abstract ideas?
Rote memorization
The proximal goal of teaching is to get students to think about content, because students will remember what they think about. One way to get students to think about content is to present problems, puzzles, issues, etc. that require solutions. Another is to structure content around stories. Of course the two approaches are not mutually exclusive and both of these strategies activate or take advantage of natural brain processes.
But what to do when you want students to learn things that they cannot think meaningfully about right now but that they need to know anyway in order to progress in a discipline? For example, we might ask students to memorize the multiplication table before they are really able to understand the concept of multiplication. In chemistry students might need to memorize a certain number of chemical elements on the periodic table, or in humanities the names of the 50 states and their capitols, etc. Willingham accepts the notion that these things may be necessary , although they should be needed sparingly and not make up the bulk of your teaching strategies. Nonetheless, in a world where some background factual knowledge is a prerequisite for critical thinking, we need strategies to help commit certain facts to memory. This is traditionally referred to as rote memorization.
The answer, not surprisingly, is to us mnemonic devices that we are all familiar with. Willingham outlines a few of these techniqies, all of which I already know about except three, which are so ridiculous I won't even bother to summarize them.
The older ones that we all know about are 1) acronyms (ROY G BIV, for the colors of a rainbow), 2) the first letter method (My Very Elegant Mother Just Served Us Nine Peanuts, for the planets), and 3) songs (think of the ABCD song or "Conjunction Junction" from schoolhouse rock)
On to the implications for the classroom, which in this chapter seem merely to summarize ideas that have already been presented.
First, be careful in planning lessons so that students think about what you want them to think about. Beware of the potential for students to become distracted by material that was meant as an aside or as a motivational activity that students then have a difficult time turning away from to think about the real objective of the lesson. Make sure your attention grabbers really require students to think about the core concepts.
Secondly, make assignments so that students can't avoid thinking about meaning. In the example given earlier of having the students actually make biscuits and get distracted by the logistics of measuring and baking, Willingham instead proposes asking students to ponder questions of how runaway slaves could have obtained food, how they would have cooked it, etc.
Overall, these little day-to-day details should be organized in some way around a conflict. A conflict is central to a story, central to the idea of looking for solutions, therefore central to getting students to think about meaning.
Next
Chapter 4: Why is it hard for students to understand abstract ideas?
Wednesday, November 04, 2009
Intermission
Here's an interesting puzzler - this is not from Willingham's book but it illustrates something he writes about.
Click here for the answer.
Jack is looking at Anne, but Anne is looking at George. Jack is married, but George is not. Is a married person looking at an unmarried person?
A) Yes.
B) No.
C) Cannot be determined.
Click here for the answer.
Sunday, November 01, 2009
Chapter 3: Why do students remember everything that's on television and forget everything I say? (Part 3)
Why Don't Students Like School? by Daniel T. Willingham (John Wiley & Sons, 2009).
Storytelling
In the previous section Willingham describes 4 teachers who have their own unique teacher personalities, but all are consistently rated as good teachers and they all have one other thing in common - they organize their lessons around stories.
Willingham is quick to caution he is NOT suggesting that storytelling is the only way to teach content. And if you've been around a while and seen district education specialists prescribing one "true" pedagogical method after another, it's easy to understand why Willingham issues this caveat. Whether it helps or not remains to be seen. He also defines storytelling broadly enough that it may not resemble at all what you think of when you first hear the term "storytelling."
We are surely all aware by now that humans are particularly drawn to stories. Long before written language was developed, verbal stories were one of the primary vehicles for transmitting cultural knowledge over generations. The word "history" in English conveys the sense of a "story," the German word for story and history are one & the same (Geschichte). It is perhaps a testament (no pun intended) to the power of stories that they frequently take on the form of (sometimes harmful) myths and legends that are persistent over generations and impervious to reason and evidence.
Politicians, movie-makers, television producers, journalists, motivational speakers, all take advantage of our innate vulnerability to stories. I dislike television but if I make the mistake of tuning in for a couple of minutes to whatever my wife is watching I can easily be drawn in by the drama and wind up watching entire episodes of Top Chef. In a classic episode of Seinfeld we were let in on the joke that could equally apply to virtually all TV sitcoms, namely that it was all along a show about nothing at all (yes, my bias is showing).
Obviously there's something going on here that we might take advantage of in the classroom. Although Seinfeld may have been a show about nothing, it was also a show that took full advantage of the structure of stories, which Willingham breaks into the 4 Cs - causality, conflict, complications, character. The first term, causality, may need some clarification but I trust that the other three are pretty self-explanatory and you will no doubt be able to identify those components in any traditional story you can recall. Causality is equally simple to explain but not necessarily something you may have thought about in the context of a story's structure. It simply means that the events that take place in a story all have a cause. Things don't happen randomly or for no reason.
The causality component of stories seems to fit particularly well with Willingham's major pedagogical goal, getting students to think about content. That's because a good story doesn't tell you all the causal links, instead it requires the listener (or viewer, reader) to infer causal connections. We do this all the time and automatically. Who doesn't feel a little rush of pride that comes from making predictions throughout a movie or book and finding out that our predictions are correct (unless it's too obvious). Even being wrong can be satisfying if the story is well told and we can think how clever the writer was to have outwitted the audience.
So how do we apply this power of stories to engage an audience to classroom teaching? Do we all have to turn every content objective now into a story? The answer is no, although if you could pull it off it wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing. However, you can take those key elements of a story, the 4 Cs, and structure just about any content objective around them. It's pretty easy to understand how that would work in history or literature classes, and in science the historical development of many ideas can certainly be used extensively as the backbone of our lessons. But even absent a compelling historical narrative, there are many concepts in science that can be arranged around the 4 Cs.
Take photosynthesis, for example. Causality is easy, it's embedded in the "story" of science itself. It's what science is looking for. "What caused living things to evolve the ability to produce glucose" could be answered in a number of different ways. Evolution provides its own story structure that students can apply to any similar question in biology. Conflict? Easy, there's competition, survival of the fittest, limited resources, etc. Long ago in a heterotroph world ("dog-eat-dog" more or less), resources would have become limited and organisms that could get some or all of their nutrition "automatically" (autotrophs) would have prospered. Complications? You have to live near a light source, you have to get rid of this new, toxic, waste product called oxygen, etc. (Wait, oxygen is toxic???) What about characters? The organism itself, or the population of organisms if you want to get technical, can be seen as the characters in the story. I know some scientists/teachers are uncomfortable withanthropomorphizing, but I'm not one of them. Having students imaginethemselves as a plant, or even a carbon atom can make it easier tobring out the "character" in a story-structured lesson. In developing this story of photosynthesis I would want to ask questions and lead a discussion that has students making many of the causal connections for themselves.
Willingham actually uses an example from a math lesson, and while I can see that what he presents is reasonable and contains some of the elements of a story, it seems a bit of a stretch to use it as an model for the 4 Cs he has just presented - I fail to see how the "character" component fits in, personally. Maybe a math teacher can read it over and set me straight. Nonetheless, maybe that's a good thing anyway. Willingham has already explicitly stated that he is not proposing some rigid formula for organizing a lesson, and getting caught up in making sure that your lesson fits to a T some artificial structure misses the real goal, getting students to think about what you are teaching. Sometimes the conflict is between competing ideas, or how to decide whether something is true or not, and doesn't involve "characters" in the traditional sense. And that's OK.
Next Section:
What if there is no meaning? (On rote memorization)
Storytelling
In the previous section Willingham describes 4 teachers who have their own unique teacher personalities, but all are consistently rated as good teachers and they all have one other thing in common - they organize their lessons around stories.
Willingham is quick to caution he is NOT suggesting that storytelling is the only way to teach content. And if you've been around a while and seen district education specialists prescribing one "true" pedagogical method after another, it's easy to understand why Willingham issues this caveat. Whether it helps or not remains to be seen. He also defines storytelling broadly enough that it may not resemble at all what you think of when you first hear the term "storytelling."
We are surely all aware by now that humans are particularly drawn to stories. Long before written language was developed, verbal stories were one of the primary vehicles for transmitting cultural knowledge over generations. The word "history" in English conveys the sense of a "story," the German word for story and history are one & the same (Geschichte). It is perhaps a testament (no pun intended) to the power of stories that they frequently take on the form of (sometimes harmful) myths and legends that are persistent over generations and impervious to reason and evidence.
Politicians, movie-makers, television producers, journalists, motivational speakers, all take advantage of our innate vulnerability to stories. I dislike television but if I make the mistake of tuning in for a couple of minutes to whatever my wife is watching I can easily be drawn in by the drama and wind up watching entire episodes of Top Chef. In a classic episode of Seinfeld we were let in on the joke that could equally apply to virtually all TV sitcoms, namely that it was all along a show about nothing at all (yes, my bias is showing).
Obviously there's something going on here that we might take advantage of in the classroom. Although Seinfeld may have been a show about nothing, it was also a show that took full advantage of the structure of stories, which Willingham breaks into the 4 Cs - causality, conflict, complications, character. The first term, causality, may need some clarification but I trust that the other three are pretty self-explanatory and you will no doubt be able to identify those components in any traditional story you can recall. Causality is equally simple to explain but not necessarily something you may have thought about in the context of a story's structure. It simply means that the events that take place in a story all have a cause. Things don't happen randomly or for no reason.
The causality component of stories seems to fit particularly well with Willingham's major pedagogical goal, getting students to think about content. That's because a good story doesn't tell you all the causal links, instead it requires the listener (or viewer, reader) to infer causal connections. We do this all the time and automatically. Who doesn't feel a little rush of pride that comes from making predictions throughout a movie or book and finding out that our predictions are correct (unless it's too obvious). Even being wrong can be satisfying if the story is well told and we can think how clever the writer was to have outwitted the audience.
So how do we apply this power of stories to engage an audience to classroom teaching? Do we all have to turn every content objective now into a story? The answer is no, although if you could pull it off it wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing. However, you can take those key elements of a story, the 4 Cs, and structure just about any content objective around them. It's pretty easy to understand how that would work in history or literature classes, and in science the historical development of many ideas can certainly be used extensively as the backbone of our lessons. But even absent a compelling historical narrative, there are many concepts in science that can be arranged around the 4 Cs.
Take photosynthesis, for example. Causality is easy, it's embedded in the "story" of science itself. It's what science is looking for. "What caused living things to evolve the ability to produce glucose" could be answered in a number of different ways. Evolution provides its own story structure that students can apply to any similar question in biology. Conflict? Easy, there's competition, survival of the fittest, limited resources, etc. Long ago in a heterotroph world ("dog-eat-dog" more or less), resources would have become limited and organisms that could get some or all of their nutrition "automatically" (autotrophs) would have prospered. Complications? You have to live near a light source, you have to get rid of this new, toxic, waste product called oxygen, etc. (Wait, oxygen is toxic???) What about characters? The organism itself, or the population of organisms if you want to get technical, can be seen as the characters in the story. I know some scientists/teachers are uncomfortable withanthropomorphizing, but I'm not one of them. Having students imaginethemselves as a plant, or even a carbon atom can make it easier tobring out the "character" in a story-structured lesson. In developing this story of photosynthesis I would want to ask questions and lead a discussion that has students making many of the causal connections for themselves.
Willingham actually uses an example from a math lesson, and while I can see that what he presents is reasonable and contains some of the elements of a story, it seems a bit of a stretch to use it as an model for the 4 Cs he has just presented - I fail to see how the "character" component fits in, personally. Maybe a math teacher can read it over and set me straight. Nonetheless, maybe that's a good thing anyway. Willingham has already explicitly stated that he is not proposing some rigid formula for organizing a lesson, and getting caught up in making sure that your lesson fits to a T some artificial structure misses the real goal, getting students to think about what you are teaching. Sometimes the conflict is between competing ideas, or how to decide whether something is true or not, and doesn't involve "characters" in the traditional sense. And that's OK.
Next Section:
What if there is no meaning? (On rote memorization)
Saturday, October 24, 2009
Chapter 3: Why do students remember everything that's on television and forget everything I say? (Part 2)
Why Don't Students Like School? by Daniel T. Willingham (John Wiley & Sons, 2009).
What makes a good teacher?
You may find this section either reassuring or maybe infuriating, if only because it is a rather short section without a lot of detail or supporting evidence. Willingham takes all the variables about good teaching that show up in surveys, end-of-year-evaluations, student comments, etc., and boils it all down to a couple of simple ideas:
On the other hand, if Willingham is correct, then the good news is that there are many paths to take that will get us to the goal of connecting with students on a personal level. Many teachers are able to project a caring and likeable persona in a variety of ways. Willingham gives some examples from his observations - the "comedian" who uses humor, the "mother figure" who dotes on her students, the storyteller who has a personal anecdote for everything, the showman who would set off fireworks if it were allowed. If you think back to teachers who really had an impact on your life I'm sure you can come up with other examples and I would love to hear about them in the comments section.
The key is that they all use their own personalities to forge a style that connects with their students. This element of good teaching cannot be "taught" or prescribed. It must come naturally and organically from yourself, but you may have to work at developing habits that demonstrate to students that you care about them on a personal level - it's not enough to say in words that you care, they have to perceive that you care.
Being a wonderfully warm and likeable person won't matter, though, if you don't master the second requirement of good teaching. Unlike your personality, organization doesn't necessarily come naturally, may take a lot of work to develop, and in fact encompasses a whole lot of assumptions about the preparedness of the teacher. For example, organizing content so that students will be able to make sense of it obviously demands that the teacher understand content well enough to distill the essential elements from the details and be able to make connections appropriate for the grade level and abilities of the students. The following sections of the chapter, and indeed much of the book, are devoted to this second element of good teaching.
In the next section Willingham discusses a strategy for organizing instruction around stories.
What makes a good teacher?
You may find this section either reassuring or maybe infuriating, if only because it is a rather short section without a lot of detail or supporting evidence. Willingham takes all the variables about good teaching that show up in surveys, end-of-year-evaluations, student comments, etc., and boils it all down to a couple of simple ideas:
- Do I connect with my students on a personal level? That is, do my students have the sense that I am a nice person?
- Is my instruction well-organized from the students' perspective? Am I taking the complex, intricate details of my content and organizing it in such a way that the students feel they can make sense of it?
On the other hand, if Willingham is correct, then the good news is that there are many paths to take that will get us to the goal of connecting with students on a personal level. Many teachers are able to project a caring and likeable persona in a variety of ways. Willingham gives some examples from his observations - the "comedian" who uses humor, the "mother figure" who dotes on her students, the storyteller who has a personal anecdote for everything, the showman who would set off fireworks if it were allowed. If you think back to teachers who really had an impact on your life I'm sure you can come up with other examples and I would love to hear about them in the comments section.
The key is that they all use their own personalities to forge a style that connects with their students. This element of good teaching cannot be "taught" or prescribed. It must come naturally and organically from yourself, but you may have to work at developing habits that demonstrate to students that you care about them on a personal level - it's not enough to say in words that you care, they have to perceive that you care.
Being a wonderfully warm and likeable person won't matter, though, if you don't master the second requirement of good teaching. Unlike your personality, organization doesn't necessarily come naturally, may take a lot of work to develop, and in fact encompasses a whole lot of assumptions about the preparedness of the teacher. For example, organizing content so that students will be able to make sense of it obviously demands that the teacher understand content well enough to distill the essential elements from the details and be able to make connections appropriate for the grade level and abilities of the students. The following sections of the chapter, and indeed much of the book, are devoted to this second element of good teaching.
In the next section Willingham discusses a strategy for organizing instruction around stories.
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Chapter 3: Why do students remember everything that's on television and forget everything I say?
Why Don't Students Like School? by Daniel T. Willingham (John Wiley & Sons, 2009).
Part 1
Covering four separate threads- memory, the characteristics of a good teacher, storytelling, and memorization strategies - this chapter is a little unfocused. Of course they are all related, but the transitions from one theme to another seem abrupt. On the other hand, it gives me an easy way to split the blog posts about chapter 3 into smaller, more manageable chunks, which is especially helpful with the busy week we have going right now. So here's the first short blast.
In the opening section on memory, Willingham discusses why some things stick in our brains and others do not. He goes through some misconceptions, such as the idea that in order to make things memorable you must have an emotional connection to the content. This is the familiar "do you remember what you were doing on 9/11" type question, where the emotional impact of the event helps us remember in vivid detail the otherwise trivial activities we might have been engaged in on that day. It turns out that emotional events can indeed facilitate the recall of events, but we don't necessarily need emotional engagement to commit things to memory, and even if it were true, it's not so easy to bring about authentic emotional connections with everything (or even most things) we teach in a classroom setting.
What about the notion that our minds are like video cameras, recording everything we experience, subject to recall under the right circumstances, such as hypnosis? Also a myth. This is fairly easily tested in a laboratory in which subjects are given things to remember and asked to recall the information a short time later either under hypnosis or without hypnosis. Both groups perform equally well - or equally poorly, depending on how you look at it. Interestingly, the hypnotized group always expresses more confidence that their recall is accurate, even when they are wrong.
The real key to memory appears to be some combination of repetition (discussed later) and actively thinking about the thing to be remembered:
Nonetheless, I do think it is important to consider, as we strive to bring our subject matter to life through sometimes elaborate and complex projects, whether the efforts will lead students to actually think about the content and make connections as we intend, or instead lead them to countless hours thinking about how to make cool effects in powerpoint.
Next:
What good teachers have in common.
Part 1
Covering four separate threads- memory, the characteristics of a good teacher, storytelling, and memorization strategies - this chapter is a little unfocused. Of course they are all related, but the transitions from one theme to another seem abrupt. On the other hand, it gives me an easy way to split the blog posts about chapter 3 into smaller, more manageable chunks, which is especially helpful with the busy week we have going right now. So here's the first short blast.
In the opening section on memory, Willingham discusses why some things stick in our brains and others do not. He goes through some misconceptions, such as the idea that in order to make things memorable you must have an emotional connection to the content. This is the familiar "do you remember what you were doing on 9/11" type question, where the emotional impact of the event helps us remember in vivid detail the otherwise trivial activities we might have been engaged in on that day. It turns out that emotional events can indeed facilitate the recall of events, but we don't necessarily need emotional engagement to commit things to memory, and even if it were true, it's not so easy to bring about authentic emotional connections with everything (or even most things) we teach in a classroom setting.
What about the notion that our minds are like video cameras, recording everything we experience, subject to recall under the right circumstances, such as hypnosis? Also a myth. This is fairly easily tested in a laboratory in which subjects are given things to remember and asked to recall the information a short time later either under hypnosis or without hypnosis. Both groups perform equally well - or equally poorly, depending on how you look at it. Interestingly, the hypnotized group always expresses more confidence that their recall is accurate, even when they are wrong.
The real key to memory appears to be some combination of repetition (discussed later) and actively thinking about the thing to be remembered:
The brain lays its bets this way: If you don't think about something very much, then you probably won't want to think about it again, so it need not be stored. If you think about something, then it's likely that you will want to think about it in the same way in the future.Seems kind of obvious but it does have some implications for teaching and learning that deserve to be explored. You are not doubt familiar with the expression "be careful what you wish for, it just might come true." We can take a little license here and say be careful what you ask your students to think about, because that's what they will remember. Willingham gives an example of a teacher who wants students to learn about the Underground Railroad, and thinks it would be nice have students bake biscuits, a typical food of runaway slaves. Unfortunately this activity diverts students from thinking about the runaway slaves and the lives they lived on the run, as the students will likely think almost exclusively about measuring and mixing ingredients. (Willingham doesn't offer an alternative activity, which would have been nice.)
Nonetheless, I do think it is important to consider, as we strive to bring our subject matter to life through sometimes elaborate and complex projects, whether the efforts will lead students to actually think about the content and make connections as we intend, or instead lead them to countless hours thinking about how to make cool effects in powerpoint.
Next:
What good teachers have in common.
Saturday, October 17, 2009
Chapter 2: How can I teach students the skills they need?
Why Don't Students Like School? by Daniel T. Willingham (John Wiley & Sons, 2009).
Factual Knowledge Matters
Nothing really new here, again demolishing the false choice between teaching knowledge and teaching critical thinking - we know that you can't think critically in a vacuum (you have to think about something, i.e. facts) but facts are pretty useless if you can't generate inferences from them and connect them with related facts and otherwise think critically about them. Common sense and a strong pedagogical tradition already acknowledge that we must do both.
Just as an example, reading is virtually impossible without background knowledge - this seems self-evident, and should be, but Willingham reviews the research and reminds us why it is so important. First, all writers leave out vast amounts of information when they write. They leave this information out because it is assumed the reader will have the requisite background knowledge to fill in the gaps, and simply because it is impossible to make explicit every detail. Attempting to do so would also make for very long and boring reading.
Research shows that elementary school students do pretty well in reading across the socioeconomic spectrum up until about grade 4. Suddenly, reading switches from an emphasis on decoding skills to an emphasis on comprehending. From this point forward, students from lower socioeconomic groups struggle to keep up with their peers from higher socioeconomic groups in large part, or perhaps wholly, as a result of the knowledge gap that makes reading comprehension so much more difficult for them. Where does the knowledge gap come from? Students from higher income families (as a group) are exposed to more reading-relevant knowledge in the home, which gives them a leg up at school, which leads to an increasingly wide gap as the years go by. A crucial component of this phenomenon of an accelerating gap (unfair as it may seem) is that the more knowledge you have, the easier it is to acquire new knowledge.
Some have argued that learning facts is less important in an age of instant internet access to vast stores of information. But research shows that you can't just google the facts when you need them. A large body of facts must be in long-term memory and easily retrievable, therefore teaching should provide students with knowledge. The example of reading comprehension should make that pretty clear - even if it were possible to know what information the author of a particular text is leaving out, who would want to interrupt a story every 5 seconds to look up the meaning of a word or concept?
For schools and teaching, the key is knowing what facts are required and how to get students to learn those facts - remember, the title of the book is "Why don't students like school?" and memorizing long lists of meaningless (to them) facts is probably high on the list of student dislikes. So what's the solution? One "easy" answer is reading itself - students should be reading reading reading. Reading is an excellent way to gain knowledge, knowledge we don't even know we will need, general knowledge about the world beyond our immediate narrow interests. Broadly speaking, this is precisely what we would want most students to know after leaving school - enough to read a serious daily newspaper and make sense of the events taking place in the world around them, enough to watch and understand a serious discussion on TV about global warming, the economy, a health issue, etc.
Simply asking students to read more is sound advice but a bit of the horse and water problem (there, I just made reference to an old adage that I assume you will be familiar with - if not, you are probably wondering what the hell reading has to do with horses and water). It also doesn't always work when you want students to learn specific information about particular topics such as history or science or math, etc. Part of the answer here is implied in the paradox presented in chapter one - thinking is hard and we avoid it whenever possible, but we're also curious creatures who like to solve problems. That helps settle the the question of what facts are important in the narrower sense of classroom objectives, and that would be the facts necessary to solve a problem related to the major, recurring themes in a discipline. It also helps with the motivation issue - students will be more interested in learning facts that are seen as necessary to solve a problem - the facts then become meaningful and the students will have to think about the facts in order to make progress with the problem. (This concept will be addressed in some detail in chapter 3.)
More thoughts on knowledge
Students must have the necessary background knowledge before thinking critically about an issue.This idea was touched on in Chapter 1. It's fine to start a lesson with a mystery or a discrepant event, but make sure you return to the activity after students have been taught the concepts needed to actually solve the problem.
Shallow knowledge is better than none. No one can have deep knowledge about everything, but shallow knowledge at least allows us to get the basic meaning of a broad range of reading materials we might encounter. It can also be the foundation for developing deeper understanding later if needed.
Students can acquire knowledge incidentally - A math class can present problems with science or social studies knowledge embedded in the problem, likewise for other disciplines. I appreciate the fact that students come to my biology class having already learned a little about human descent and DNA from their 9th grade humanities classes.
Start early - well, we don't have much control over that. We know that students who have family lives rich with vocabulary and exposure to knowledge of the world have a tremendous advantage in the school setting- this is a public and education policy issue.
Next-
Chapter 3: Why do students remember everything that's on television and forget everything I say?
Factual Knowledge Matters
Nothing really new here, again demolishing the false choice between teaching knowledge and teaching critical thinking - we know that you can't think critically in a vacuum (you have to think about something, i.e. facts) but facts are pretty useless if you can't generate inferences from them and connect them with related facts and otherwise think critically about them. Common sense and a strong pedagogical tradition already acknowledge that we must do both.
Just as an example, reading is virtually impossible without background knowledge - this seems self-evident, and should be, but Willingham reviews the research and reminds us why it is so important. First, all writers leave out vast amounts of information when they write. They leave this information out because it is assumed the reader will have the requisite background knowledge to fill in the gaps, and simply because it is impossible to make explicit every detail. Attempting to do so would also make for very long and boring reading.
Research shows that elementary school students do pretty well in reading across the socioeconomic spectrum up until about grade 4. Suddenly, reading switches from an emphasis on decoding skills to an emphasis on comprehending. From this point forward, students from lower socioeconomic groups struggle to keep up with their peers from higher socioeconomic groups in large part, or perhaps wholly, as a result of the knowledge gap that makes reading comprehension so much more difficult for them. Where does the knowledge gap come from? Students from higher income families (as a group) are exposed to more reading-relevant knowledge in the home, which gives them a leg up at school, which leads to an increasingly wide gap as the years go by. A crucial component of this phenomenon of an accelerating gap (unfair as it may seem) is that the more knowledge you have, the easier it is to acquire new knowledge.
Some have argued that learning facts is less important in an age of instant internet access to vast stores of information. But research shows that you can't just google the facts when you need them. A large body of facts must be in long-term memory and easily retrievable, therefore teaching should provide students with knowledge. The example of reading comprehension should make that pretty clear - even if it were possible to know what information the author of a particular text is leaving out, who would want to interrupt a story every 5 seconds to look up the meaning of a word or concept?
For schools and teaching, the key is knowing what facts are required and how to get students to learn those facts - remember, the title of the book is "Why don't students like school?" and memorizing long lists of meaningless (to them) facts is probably high on the list of student dislikes. So what's the solution? One "easy" answer is reading itself - students should be reading reading reading. Reading is an excellent way to gain knowledge, knowledge we don't even know we will need, general knowledge about the world beyond our immediate narrow interests. Broadly speaking, this is precisely what we would want most students to know after leaving school - enough to read a serious daily newspaper and make sense of the events taking place in the world around them, enough to watch and understand a serious discussion on TV about global warming, the economy, a health issue, etc.
Simply asking students to read more is sound advice but a bit of the horse and water problem (there, I just made reference to an old adage that I assume you will be familiar with - if not, you are probably wondering what the hell reading has to do with horses and water). It also doesn't always work when you want students to learn specific information about particular topics such as history or science or math, etc. Part of the answer here is implied in the paradox presented in chapter one - thinking is hard and we avoid it whenever possible, but we're also curious creatures who like to solve problems. That helps settle the the question of what facts are important in the narrower sense of classroom objectives, and that would be the facts necessary to solve a problem related to the major, recurring themes in a discipline. It also helps with the motivation issue - students will be more interested in learning facts that are seen as necessary to solve a problem - the facts then become meaningful and the students will have to think about the facts in order to make progress with the problem. (This concept will be addressed in some detail in chapter 3.)
More thoughts on knowledge
Students must have the necessary background knowledge before thinking critically about an issue.This idea was touched on in Chapter 1. It's fine to start a lesson with a mystery or a discrepant event, but make sure you return to the activity after students have been taught the concepts needed to actually solve the problem.
Shallow knowledge is better than none. No one can have deep knowledge about everything, but shallow knowledge at least allows us to get the basic meaning of a broad range of reading materials we might encounter. It can also be the foundation for developing deeper understanding later if needed.
Students can acquire knowledge incidentally - A math class can present problems with science or social studies knowledge embedded in the problem, likewise for other disciplines. I appreciate the fact that students come to my biology class having already learned a little about human descent and DNA from their 9th grade humanities classes.
Start early - well, we don't have much control over that. We know that students who have family lives rich with vocabulary and exposure to knowledge of the world have a tremendous advantage in the school setting- this is a public and education policy issue.
Next-
Chapter 3: Why do students remember everything that's on television and forget everything I say?
Sunday, October 11, 2009
Chapter 1: Why Don’t Students Like School? (Part 2: Implications for teaching)
Why Don't Students Like School? by Daniel T. Willingham (John Wiley & Sons, 2009).
So everyone loves solving problems if they are the right kinds of problems - Goldilocks problems, not too easy and not too hard...
Since everyone is different, and we have a variety of students in a range of different places academically speaking, finding a problem with the right degree of difficulty presents a challenge in any classroom. You know where this is going – differentiated instruction.
We know that, but Why Don’t Students Like School? is not about differentiated instruction per se, though a couple of later chapters are devoted to the issue. Willingham instead focuses on the “instruction” aspect of it and thus proposes a framework around which differentiation can be built. His approach will sound familiar to anyone who has experience with the inquiry method, and that means asking questions: the right questions for the right students at the right time.
Willingham takes a science example, which I will naturally use to illustrate the point. It is a common science teaching strategy to start a unit or lesson with some sort of "discrepant event," a demonstration or activity where the results are unexpected or counter-intuitive. One classic discrepant event involves a glass bottle with a shelled, hard-boiled egg placed on top that cannot be pushed into the bottle. However, place a lighted match or piece of paper inside the bottle, then place the egg on the rim of the bottle, and when the flame goes out the egg will be "sucked" into the bottle. Cool! The problem is, if students are then asked to explain what happened they have absolutely no way to even form a reasonable hypothesis because they just don't have the background knowledge of the gas laws (the relationship between temperature, volume, & pressure in gases) to understand what is happening.
The solution is to revisit the egg in a bottle demonstration later in the unit when students have enough background to solve the problem. Of course this is common sense, and not a new idea for anyone trained in science teaching strategies. The demo serves as a motivator, a common experience to refer back to, a mystery that is revealed over time as the unit progresses. I suppose that many teachers. perhaps strapped for time, jump straight to the explanation and dispense with the discovery process.
An example from another discipline might be the use of political cartoons in social studies, where a better strategy might be to show the cartoon in the beginning of a unit, then revisit the cartoon throughout the unit as more and more elements of the cartoon become clear and the students themselves uncover its meaning. I don't know whether this if already the way that my colleagues normally use political cartoons, I do know they are frequently used as summative assessments on state exams.
It occurs to me that the author is using a similar strategy in the design of his book (and it may even be that he mentioned it already in the introduction, but it is just now becoming clear what he meant, and thus I feel like I've discovered it myself). Each chapter presents questions for the reader to ponder, but no one chapter fully answers the question, instead the topics are revisited throughout and new information is presented in later chapters that elucidate earlier questions.
Next: Chapter 2: How can I teach students the skills they need? (On the necessity of knowledge)
So everyone loves solving problems if they are the right kinds of problems - Goldilocks problems, not too easy and not too hard...
Since everyone is different, and we have a variety of students in a range of different places academically speaking, finding a problem with the right degree of difficulty presents a challenge in any classroom. You know where this is going – differentiated instruction.
We know that, but Why Don’t Students Like School? is not about differentiated instruction per se, though a couple of later chapters are devoted to the issue. Willingham instead focuses on the “instruction” aspect of it and thus proposes a framework around which differentiation can be built. His approach will sound familiar to anyone who has experience with the inquiry method, and that means asking questions: the right questions for the right students at the right time.
Willingham takes a science example, which I will naturally use to illustrate the point. It is a common science teaching strategy to start a unit or lesson with some sort of "discrepant event," a demonstration or activity where the results are unexpected or counter-intuitive. One classic discrepant event involves a glass bottle with a shelled, hard-boiled egg placed on top that cannot be pushed into the bottle. However, place a lighted match or piece of paper inside the bottle, then place the egg on the rim of the bottle, and when the flame goes out the egg will be "sucked" into the bottle. Cool! The problem is, if students are then asked to explain what happened they have absolutely no way to even form a reasonable hypothesis because they just don't have the background knowledge of the gas laws (the relationship between temperature, volume, & pressure in gases) to understand what is happening.
The solution is to revisit the egg in a bottle demonstration later in the unit when students have enough background to solve the problem. Of course this is common sense, and not a new idea for anyone trained in science teaching strategies. The demo serves as a motivator, a common experience to refer back to, a mystery that is revealed over time as the unit progresses. I suppose that many teachers. perhaps strapped for time, jump straight to the explanation and dispense with the discovery process.
An example from another discipline might be the use of political cartoons in social studies, where a better strategy might be to show the cartoon in the beginning of a unit, then revisit the cartoon throughout the unit as more and more elements of the cartoon become clear and the students themselves uncover its meaning. I don't know whether this if already the way that my colleagues normally use political cartoons, I do know they are frequently used as summative assessments on state exams.
It occurs to me that the author is using a similar strategy in the design of his book (and it may even be that he mentioned it already in the introduction, but it is just now becoming clear what he meant, and thus I feel like I've discovered it myself). Each chapter presents questions for the reader to ponder, but no one chapter fully answers the question, instead the topics are revisited throughout and new information is presented in later chapters that elucidate earlier questions.
Next: Chapter 2: How can I teach students the skills they need? (On the necessity of knowledge)
Chapter 1: Why Don’t Students Like School? (Part 1: Thinking is hard)
Why Don't Students Like School? by Daniel T. Willingham (John Wiley & Sons, 2009).
Yeah I know, writing is hard too, because it requires so much thinking! And since reading is also hard, I broke up the first chapter into 2 parts. Part 1 here deals with the background theoretical issues, part 2 will discuss teaching implications....
Chapter 1: Why Don’t Students Like School?
Not really much here we don’t already know, but the way Willingham expresses the ideas makes them seem new – and I mean that in a good way. Sometimes it helps to hear things we already know in a different way to remind us or re-awaken awareness of these basic truths.
Everything follows from the idea presented in the introduction that thinking is hard. In chapter 1 the author expands this idea, presenting an overview of the functioning of the brain (most of the frustration of working through difficult, novel problems lies in the limits of "working memory") and using unfamiliar problem solving puzzles to induce that feeling of perplexity or even frustration in the reader that our students experience perhaps every day when we present them with difficult tasks.
Thinking is hard, and we avoid thinking whenever we can. We don’t go about our daily routines thinking through each and every move we make – we wouldn’t get very far if we did. Instead we rely much more on memory, whether factual memory (telephone numbers, names, etc.) or procedural memory (how to get to work, what to do when you get there, how to calculate a tip at a restaurant, etc.).
The good news is that although thinking is hard and we tend to avoid it if we can, we also get pleasure from solving problems, i.e. thinking, but only under certain limited circumstances. Again this will be kind of obvious and familiar: the problem has to be difficult enough that it really is a problem that you have to work to solve, but not so difficult that after concentrated effort no solution is forthcoming. Willingham’s definition of a “problem” is general, reasonable, and appropriate. A problem could be understanding a poem, solving a math problem, or to throw in an example of my own, figuring out how DNA replicates.
Next: Chapter 1: Why Don’t Students Like School? (Part 2: Implications for teaching)
Yeah I know, writing is hard too, because it requires so much thinking! And since reading is also hard, I broke up the first chapter into 2 parts. Part 1 here deals with the background theoretical issues, part 2 will discuss teaching implications....
Chapter 1: Why Don’t Students Like School?
Not really much here we don’t already know, but the way Willingham expresses the ideas makes them seem new – and I mean that in a good way. Sometimes it helps to hear things we already know in a different way to remind us or re-awaken awareness of these basic truths.
Everything follows from the idea presented in the introduction that thinking is hard. In chapter 1 the author expands this idea, presenting an overview of the functioning of the brain (most of the frustration of working through difficult, novel problems lies in the limits of "working memory") and using unfamiliar problem solving puzzles to induce that feeling of perplexity or even frustration in the reader that our students experience perhaps every day when we present them with difficult tasks.
Thinking is hard, and we avoid thinking whenever we can. We don’t go about our daily routines thinking through each and every move we make – we wouldn’t get very far if we did. Instead we rely much more on memory, whether factual memory (telephone numbers, names, etc.) or procedural memory (how to get to work, what to do when you get there, how to calculate a tip at a restaurant, etc.).
The good news is that although thinking is hard and we tend to avoid it if we can, we also get pleasure from solving problems, i.e. thinking, but only under certain limited circumstances. Again this will be kind of obvious and familiar: the problem has to be difficult enough that it really is a problem that you have to work to solve, but not so difficult that after concentrated effort no solution is forthcoming. Willingham’s definition of a “problem” is general, reasonable, and appropriate. A problem could be understanding a poem, solving a math problem, or to throw in an example of my own, figuring out how DNA replicates.
Next: Chapter 1: Why Don’t Students Like School? (Part 2: Implications for teaching)
Wednesday, October 07, 2009
Why Don't Students Like School?
Why Don't Students Like School? by Daniel T. Willingham (John Wiley & Sons, 2009).
Introduction
N.B. Snide political comments are my own and not those of the author.
I am blogging my reading of the book Why Don't Students Like School? by Daniel T. Willingham (John Wiley & Sons, 2009). I started with the introduction this morning on the subway and was intrigued by a couple of points that I will mention here. I definitely want to keep reading.
First, for a science teacher steeped in the inquiry methodology that was all the rage a few years ago, comes the admonition from Willingham that "you should not try to get your students to think like real scientists." Well, I've got to find out what that's all about.
The second point should be obvious to anyone who is remotely following the political discourse in this country today, and that is that we need to stop thinking about how good humans are at thinking and realize that we are in fact pretty bad at it. Will this help me to understand the phenomenon that is Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, & right wing talk in general?
The introduction lays out the basic problem: cognitive science has taught us a lot about how the brain works, which you might think would lead us to develop better learning and teaching strategies, but a peek at any average classroom today would tell you that not so much has changed in how instruction is delivered and how schools are structured. The book promises an understanding of how the mind works and practical implications of this knowledge for how to become a better teacher.
I have been to workshops that make similar promises, so I will approach this one with cautious optimism...
Next: Chapter 1: Why Don’t Students Like School? (Part 1: Thinking is hard)
Introduction
N.B. Snide political comments are my own and not those of the author.
I am blogging my reading of the book Why Don't Students Like School? by Daniel T. Willingham (John Wiley & Sons, 2009). I started with the introduction this morning on the subway and was intrigued by a couple of points that I will mention here. I definitely want to keep reading.
First, for a science teacher steeped in the inquiry methodology that was all the rage a few years ago, comes the admonition from Willingham that "you should not try to get your students to think like real scientists." Well, I've got to find out what that's all about.
The second point should be obvious to anyone who is remotely following the political discourse in this country today, and that is that we need to stop thinking about how good humans are at thinking and realize that we are in fact pretty bad at it. Will this help me to understand the phenomenon that is Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, & right wing talk in general?
The introduction lays out the basic problem: cognitive science has taught us a lot about how the brain works, which you might think would lead us to develop better learning and teaching strategies, but a peek at any average classroom today would tell you that not so much has changed in how instruction is delivered and how schools are structured. The book promises an understanding of how the mind works and practical implications of this knowledge for how to become a better teacher.
I have been to workshops that make similar promises, so I will approach this one with cautious optimism...
Next: Chapter 1: Why Don’t Students Like School? (Part 1: Thinking is hard)
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