"One of the Most Important Education Books of Our Time"

Christopher F. Chabris has a book review in today's (April 27) Wall Street Journal of a truly important book. The book is Why Don't Students Like School?, by University of Virginia psychologist Dan Willingham.

I have long been an admirer of Willingham's effort to make empirical educational psychology accessible to teachers. He writes a regular column ("Ask the Cognitive Scientist") in the American Educator, the national magazine of the American Federation of Teachers. The fact that the AFT presents Willingham's understandable, but nonetheless intellectually challenging articles on a regular basis is a great credit to that organization and has undoubtedly helped thousands of teachers.

Willingham's brand-new book, Why Don't Students Like School?, is one of a handful of books about which one can honestly say: This is one of the most important education books of our time.

Reviewer Christopher Chabris accurately summarizes Willingham's approach:

[Willingham] poses nine questions that a teacher might want to ask a cognitive scientist -- beginning with the question in the title -- and then answers each, citing empirical studies and suggesting ways for teachers to improve their practice accordingly.

Striking the Right Balance When Teaching Abstract Concepts

Let's consider the question that Willingham sets forth in the title: Why don't students like school? Here's Chabris's summary of the answer:

[W]hat school requires students to do -- think abstractly -- is in fact not something our brains are designed to be good at or to enjoy. When we confront a task that requires us to exert mental effort, it is critical that the task be just difficult enough to hold our interest but not so difficult that we give up in frustration.

When this balance is struck, it is actually pleasurable to focus the mind for long periods of time. For an example, just watch a person beavering away at a crossword or playing chess in a noisy public park.

But schoolwork and classroom time rarely keep students' minds in this state of "flow" for long. The result is boredom and displeasure. The challenge, for the teacher, is to design lessons and exercises that will maximize interest and attention....

Drill & Practice

One of the constant refrains of today's proponents of Progressive education is that we should do away with "drill and kill." Willingham tackles this issue by showing how drill-and-practice enables learners to commit information to long-term memory, thus freeing their short-term memory to deal with novel problems. As Chabris puts it:

[R]esearch shows that practice not only makes a skill perfect but also makes it permanent, automatic and transferable to new situations, enabling more complex work that relies on the basics.

Critical Thinking Skills

Anyone who has been around schools in the last few decades has heard the Progressive mantra that we need to give priority to a stand-alone skill of "critical thinking." It is part of the repertoire of "21st-century skills" that President Obama wants to impose on our classrooms. But Willingham punctures this fashionable ballon. As Chabris writes:

[S]tudents cannot apply generic "critical thinking skills" (another voguish concept) to new material unless they first understand that material. And they cannot understand it without the requisite background knowledge. The same is true of [reading comprehension]: Trying to use "reading strategies" -- like searching for the main idea in a passage -- will be futile if you don't know enough facts to fill in what the author has left unsaid.

Multiple Learning Styles

My favorite article of Willingham's in the American Educator has always been his 2005 piece "Do Visual, Auditory, and Kinesthetic Learners Need Visual, Auditory, and Kinesthetic Instruction?"

Willingham also has a video on the topic on YouTube, entitled "Learning Styles Don't Exist." (He replies to his critics on this topic here.)

Chabris summarizes what Willingham says in the new book:

The trendy notion that each person has a unique learning style comes under an especially withering assault. "How should I adjust my teaching for different types of learners?" asks Mr. Willingham's hypothetical teacher. The disillusioning reply: "No one has found consistent evidence supporting a theory describing such a difference. . . . Children are more alike than different in terms of how they think and learn."

Willingham doesn't just asset that learning styles don't exist. He carefully explains the experimental evidence against these supposed learning mechanisms.

Content is King

Dan Willingham is a proponent of content-rich instruction. He argues for this approach because scientific research demonstrates that it is the best one.

Mr. Willingham...is not in favor of merely making learning "fun" or "creative." He advocates teaching old-fashioned content as the best path to improving a student's reading comprehension and critical thinking.

This is a book aimed at teachers, but it will be of interest to all who seek better k-12 education policy. Willingham is one of the rare academic authors who can take a technical finding in cognitive psychology, explain its importance, and show how to apply it in the classroom -- and present this classroom application in way that charms and fascinates the reader.

Diane Ravitch on 21st C Skills

On Feb. 24, I was in Washington, D.C. and attended a panel on 21st-century skills, sponsored by the new pro-liberal-arts group Common Core.

Diane Ravitch (NYU historian), E.D. Hirsch Jr. (author of Cultural Literacy), and Daniel Willingham (a cognitive psychologist at the University of Virginia) delivered prepared presentations, and Ken Kay, president of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills (P21), replied. The prepared presentation are available here and are well worth reading.

Ravitch has now written a hard-hitting blog post pointing out that the supposedly newfangled 21-century proposals are actually old hat -- "not at all 21st century." She says that calls to teach critical thinking skills, creativity, problem-solving, and cooperative group work have been around for scores of years and are something like "mantras," as she puts it, in America's schools of education. She summarizes the Feb. 24 presentations of Hirsch and Willingham as follows:

E.D. Hirsch and Dan Willingham were brilliant as they argued that skills and knowledge are inseparable. People do not think in the abstract; they need knowledge—ideas, facts, concepts—to think about. Dan Willingham showed in his presentation that the mind does not compartmentalize into skills and knowledge. Problems cannot be solved without having the relevant knowledge to think with.

Ravitch also relates an excellent point made by audience member Diana Senechal, a New York City elementary school teacher:

[Diana Senechal] had gone to the trouble of visiting the P21 Web site, where she reviewed suggested lesson plans in English. One activity was to have students read a story or play, then make a commercial or video with Claymation figures. Diana asked, “Why not discuss the ideas in the story instead of spending hours making Claymation figures?” Which approach is likelier to engage students in thinking critically?