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Why Dont Students Like School A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom




Kids are naturally curious, but when it comes to school it seems like their minds are turned off. Why is it that they can remember the smallest details from their favorite television program, yet miss the most obvious questions on their history test?

Cognitive scientist Dan Willingham has focused his acclaimed research on the biological and cognitive basis of learning and has a deep understanding of the daily challenges faced by classroom teachers. This book will help teachers improve their practice by explaining how they and their students think and learnrevealing the importance of story, emotion, memory, context, and routine in building knowledge and creating lasting learning experiences.

User Ratings and Reviews

1 Star Unbelievable
I read the front matter to this book and found my jaw dropping. I cannot help but think the author is either a fiction writer, that this is a hoax, or that it is the by-product of a religious cult of one kind or another.

I have followed educational research for decades and I’m a software engineer with over twenty five years experience and find just about every assertion this author makes about the brain, computers, and children to be wholesale nonsense.

the author claims, “The brain doesn’t like to think”. Really. It doesn’t like to think?

And that would help explain why students don’t like school!

The author claims thinking has three properties: Thinking is slow, thinking is effortful, and thinking is uncertain. In fact the author claims the human body has a “thinking system” connected to a visual system, connected to… well, you get the idea.

And the basis for these claims is what? The author mixes up so many bodily and cognitive functions that the body and thinking become unrecognizable to anyone who actually , well, thinks.

Memorization of information and the subsequent retrieval of that information is not the same as thinking. And problem solving is different from creating new ideas. But the author doesn’t want to get bogged down in trivial details. It’s all about memory.

And students disgusted by the quality of information dispensed at schools is not the same as students having a hard time thinking. But so what, information is information and having a hard time with bad information just proves how hard it is to think.

Unless this book is a brilliant farce, it is junk science.

5 Stars A Neceesary and Helfpful Shattering of Some Education Myths.
If you are a teacher, like myself, you have doubtless been inundated by advice about teaching to multiple intelligences, active (rather than passive) learning, teaching students to think rather than memorize facts, etc. If so, then you can’t afford to pass up this book, which will provide a very helpful guide as to why some of these well-intentioned ideas are wrong, and what it means for you as a teacher.

Dan Willingham’s Why Don’t Students Like School? is a book applying findings of cognitive psychology to the world of education. Sound a lot like Eric Jensen and his wildly popular book Teaching With the Brain in Mind? Well, unlike Jensen – who educators hear a lot about – Willingham is a PhD in cognitive psychology (while Jensen, who has a bachelors in English, is “working towards” a PhD from an online university, while making his real living as a motivational speaker). Long and short: Willingham is the real deal and I move to suggest that this book infinitely deserves more popularity amongst educators than anything Jensen has written.

Willingham’s basic theme is that, despite everything you’ve heard, nothing works to increase student ability like factual learning and practice. In fact, one of his first ideas is to point out that what seperates the excellent student (or adult) from those performing less well is their ability to recall facts. The more facts you know about your subject, the more you can understand your subject because of significantly less energy spent on fact recall or retention. With facts learned to automaticity, more time can be spent on higher-order concept learning, and once that becomes automatic….etc.

While that may sound mundane, think of how many times you as a teacher have heard the idea of “rote memorization” and “regurgitation of fact” denegrated. Of course, Willingham is not advocating the strawman position that teachers do nothing but drill, drill, drill and enforce memorization of text passages. (No one actually holds that position!) What he reminds us, though, is that the critical thinking we hear so much about teaching our kids simply CANNOT happen without giving kids the requisite background info that must be employed to think critically. (One cannot critically reflect on whether the revolutionary war was justified without some big factual understanding of Colonial American and Empirial Britian, for example.)

Another big idea in educaiton that Willingham works to dispel is the idea that we all have different learning styles – auditory, visual, kinesthetic, etc. Cognitive science, in fact, has shown the opposite: with minor variation, we all learn very similarly. While I may have a better memory for visual phemonena than you (who may be better at remembering sounds), we remember IDEAS not through the media in which they were delivered, but by…thinking about them. When memorizing words and definitions, we are not being asked to memorize sounds or visuals, but ideas, and the fact that I am an auditory or visual learner does nothing to predict what presentation method will help me memorize the best. (The amount I studied, of course, will.)

I don’t want to give the impression that Willingham’s book is about bashing education icons and maxims. It is not It is a book for teachers designed to bring up ideas we may not have thought about, and to suggest how to apply these ideas to our classrooms. Each chapter is focused around a question (“Is Drilling Worth It?” “Why is it So Hard for Students to Understand Abstract Ideas?”) and gives a detailed, but engaging, answer. At the end of each chapter, the author makes several concrete suggestions for how the answer can shape how we teach as well as reccomendations for further readings.

All in all, this is one of the single best education books I have read, and cannot wait to share it with fellow educators. As mentioned, I sincerely hope that this book becomes as widely devoured as those by Eric Jensen and Howard Gardner. Willingham offers a valuable and very constructive counterpoint, especially to Jensen’s “brain based ways of learning.”

5 Stars How people really learn (not what most people think)
Dan nails it down in plain language. You have to pay your dues over a long enough time for real expertise to develop. In a society transfixed with romantic ideas of instant insight, instant gratification and perpetual amusement, Willingham delivers the building blocks of understanding to the job site and shows how to put them together. Parents and teachers who read, understand, and apply the lessons here will provide their children and students with a head start, the benefits of which will last for years!

5 Stars Know a teacher? Give them this book.
This will be fascinating to anyone who regularly tries to impart knowledge to others, including trainers of all types. And to parents of students. If you know a school teacher, get this book, read it and give it to that teacher. This is the teacher gift for the end of the school year, beginning in 2009. It’s an easy, fun read. Then putting its nine lessons into practice will take a lot of work. Get started!

5 Stars If you are in any way attached to K-12 education, read this book
This is one of the most practical and powerful books for K-12 education that I have read in years. As a middle school principal and part-time graduate professor of education, I have had the opportunity to read tons of K-12 literature and work with hundreds of K-12 educators. This book struck a chord with me, and I have already ordered copies for my staff for next year.

This book is the perfect companion to Marzano’s What Works. Marzano documents specific, research-based instructional strategies that can help teachers improve the quality of learning in their classrooms; Willingham’s book makes clear the cognitive processes that make some classroom approaches more successful than others. Every couple pages of Willingham’s book, I would stop and say to myself “Wow, that just makes sense!” This book clears through the jargon and theoretical clutter that has taken hold in so many of the corners of the K-12 education space, providing simple, logical, scientific explanations for the learning process. If you work in K-12 education, if you have a child in a K-12 school, or if you’re just interested in understanding how learning works (or should work), read this book.

Parry Graham

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