Daniel T. Willingham
Chapter One: Why Don’t Students Like School?
· The ability to think sets us apart from animals.
· Brain configured to move and see efficiently; thinking is slow,takes effort, and is uncertain. P. 5
· Memory system more reliable than thinking system.
· Memory allows brain to pay attention to novelty
· Brain is set up NOT to think. Vision and movement don’t require thought. And 2 memories used to guide actions so we don’t have to think. P. 8
· Has implications for school in teaching students to think.
· People are Naturally Curious, but Curiosity is Fragile.
· Solving problems brings pleasure. P. 9
· Mental work is pleasurable when we have the opportunity to succeed.
· Content needs to keep attention and may do this is difficulty of problem.
· Curiosity prompts people to explore new ideas and problems but if it’s too much or too little work to solve the problem, we stop working on it.
1. How Thinking Works
a. Mind made up of components: One is working memory—synonymous with consciousness—holds stuff you are thinking about.
b. Thinking occurs when you combine information (from environment) and long-term memory) in new ways. This happens in working memory.
c. Knowing HOW to combine and rearrange ideas in working memory is essential to successful thinking.
d. Procedural knowledge—knowledge of mental procedures necessary to execute tasks—procedural is a list of what to combine and when.
Summary:
· Mind’s not especially well suited to thinking: thinking is slow, effortful, and uncertain.
· Deliberate thinking does not guide people’s behavior in most situations.
· Rather we rely on memories.
· Successful thinking is pleasurable—solving problems, understanding new ideas etc.
· We will seek out opportunities to think, but we are selective in doing s; we choose problems that pose some challenge but seem likely to be solvable.
· For problems to be solved, the thinker needs adequate information from environment, room in working memory, and required facts and procedures in long-term memory p. 18
IMPLICATIONS FOR THE CLASSROOM:
1. Be sure there are problems to be solved.—this is main stuff of teaching—we want our students to think. P. 19
2. Respect students’ cognitive limits—Do they have necessary background? Are there too many steps to instructions? Too many unconnected facts,
3. Clarify Problems to be solved—Developing key questions is vital to developing curiosity and engagement. We are too determined to help them with answers
4. Reconsider when to puzzle students—make them curious—not overwhelmed
5. Accept and Act on Variation in Student Preparation—Self-defeating to give all of your students the same work
6. Change the Pace—Change grabs attention. Plan shifts and monitor attention
7. Keep a diary—You may not remember when a plan worked the best. Take notes.
Chapter 2: How can I teach Students the Skills they need when Standardized tests require only facts.
· Factual knowledge must precede skill.
· Background knowledge crucial for reading comprehension. P. 27
· Critical thinking processes are tied to background knowledge. P. 29
· Knowledge is essential to reading comprehension
· Reading comprehension depends on combining the ideas in a passage, not just comprehending each idea on its own.
· Comprehension depends on “chunking” –which is typing together separate pieces of information Chunking only works when you have applicable factual knowledge in long-term memory. P. 34
· Background knowledge allows chunking, which makes more room in working memory, which makes it easier to relate ideas, and therefore to comprehend.
· 4 ways that background knowledge is important to reading comprehension: 1) provides vocabulary, 2) allows to bridge logical gaps that writers leave; 3 allows chunking which increases room in working memory and thereby makes it easier to tie ideas together; 4: guides interpretations of ambiguous sentences.
· By 4th grade reading tests emphasize comprehension. Knowing things makes it easier to learn new things.
· Background knowledge is necessary for cognitive skills.
· Factual knowledge improves your memory: When it comes to knowledge, those who have more gain more.
· Having factual knowledge in long-term memory makes it easier to acquire still more factual knowledge. P. 44
· The only way to catch up for lack of background is to be exposed to more facts .p. 45
· Einstein was wrong. Knowledge is more important than imagination. Not the other way around. Knowledge is a prerequisite for imagination.
IMPLICATIONS FOR CLASSROOM:
1. How to evaluate which knowledge to instill:
For reading, students must know whatever information writers assume they know and hence leave out. Culture plays large role here. Without background knowledge, students cannot read breadth of material
Cognitive science leads to obvious conclusion that students must learn concepts that come up again and again—unifying idea of each discipline. Some thinkers say a limited number of ideas should be taught in great depth.
2. Be sure that the knowledge base is mostly in place when you require critical thinking. –Critical thinking requires background knowledge.
3. Shallow knowledge is better than no knowledge—Need to have some understanding to build new knowledge
4. Do whatever you can to get kids to read: Books expose children to more facts and to a broader vocabulary than virtually any other activity and persuasive data indicate that people who read for pleasure enjoy cognitive benefits throughout their lifetime.
5. Knowledge acquisition can be incidental—We learn in many ways-, TV. reading, movies, interactions, etc.
6. Start early—There are no shortcuts and no alternatives to trying to increase factual knowledge
7. Knowledge must be meaningful—Knowledge pays off when it is conceptual and when the facts are related to one another and that is not true of list learning.
Chapter 3: Why do Students Remember Everything that’s on Television and Forget everything I say?
· Memory is residue of thought—We can’t store everything in memory.
· Importance of memory—
· Emotional events more likely to be remembered—
· Repetition enhances memory
· Thinking about meaning is good for memory and there can be different aspects of meaning for the same material –You have to think about the right aspect of meaning.
What Good Teachers have in Common: content is seldom the decisive factor in whether or not our interest is maintained.
· Teaching style –Emotional bond between students and teacher—for better or worse—accounts for whether students learn. P. 65
· Power of stories: Human mind seems exquisitely turned to understand remember stories. P. 66 Good stories have certain elements: 1: causality—events are causally related, 2: conflict: protagonist must struggle, 3: complications—sub problems. 4: character—good story built around characters that have exerted action.
· First: stories are easy to comprehend, 2, they are interesting, 3. They are easy to remember,
Getting students to think about meaning is vital: If there is no inherent meaning, we must use mnemonics, in a way to use story elements to make it meaningful.
IMPLICATIONS FOR CLASSROOM:
1. Review each lesson plan in terms of what the student is likely to think about
2. Think carefully about attention grabbers: --You remember what you think about.
3. Use discovery learning with care. If students are left to their own devices, they may explore items that are not profitable.
4. Design assignments sot that students will unavoidably think about meaning. –e.g. don’t have students bake biscuits to understand Underground Railroad.
5. Don’t be afraid to use mnemonics
6. Try organizing a lesson plan around the conflict—Start with material you want your students to learn and think backward to intellectual question it poses.
7. Student interest should not be main driving force of lesson planning. –Used as initial points of contact that help students understand main ideas you want item to consider.
Chapter 4: Why is it so hard for students to understand abstract ideas:
· Abstraction is goal of schooling BUT mind does not care for abstractions—Best way to help students understand an abstraction is to expose many different versions of the abstraction
· We understand new ideas by relating them to things we already know –Analogies is helpful.
· New things are understood by relating them to things we already understand.
· Need concrete examples to understand abstractions.
· Understanding new ideas is a matter of getting the right old ideas into working memory and then rearranging them. P. 91
· Why is knowledge shallow? --knowledge some understanding but knowledge is limited.
Why doesn’t knowledge transfer?
IMPLICATIONS FOR CLASSROOM:
1. To help student comprehension, provide examples and ask students to compare them. —
2. Make deep knowledge the spoken and unspoken emphasis—assignments and assessments are another source of implicit messages about what is important
3. Make you expectations for deep knowledge realistic. p. 104
Chapter 5: Is Drilling Worth it?
· It is virtually impossible to become proficient at a mental task without extended practice, p. 107
· 2 reasons to practice—gain competence and to improve.
· Practice enables further learning—lack of space in working memory is fundamental bottleneck of human cognition.
· First way to cheat limited size of working memory is through factual knowledge. 2nd way—make processes that manipulate information in working memory more efficient.
· Mental processes can become automatized—take little or not capacity.
· There are types of automaticity that enable other processes—handwriting and keyboarding. –Practice leads to automaticity.
· Continue practice—protects against forgetting.
Practice Improves Transfer:
1. Transfer more likely when surface structure of new problem is similar to surface structure of problems seen before. 2) practice another significant contributor to good transfer.
IMPLICATIONS FOR CLASSROOM:
Practice has 3 benefits: 1) help mental process become automatic and thereby enable further learning, 2: makes memory long lasting 3) increases likelihood all learning will transfer to new situations.
2. What should be practiced—number facts, letter sounds, basic science facts—building blocks.
3. Space out the practice
4. Fold practice into more advanced skills
Chapter 6: What’s the secret to getting students to think like real scientists, mathematicians, and historians?
· Cognition early in training is fundamentally different than cognition late in training.
· Real scientists are experts
· Becoming an expert takes 10,000 hours. Start early.
· When experts fail, they do so gracefully. When an expert doesn’t get right answer, the wrong answer is usually a pretty good guess.
· Experts show better transfer to similar domains than novices do.
· Experts think in terms of functions or deep structure, not surface issues.
· Experts use self-talk and draw implications from it. Talking to yourself demands working memory, however, so novices are much les likely to do it
· Only path to expertise is practice.
· Great scientists almost always workaholics.
IMPLICATIONS FOR THE CLASSROOM:
1. Students are ready to comprehend but not create—need more time to build background knowledge
2. Activities that are appropriate for experts may at times be appropriate for students but not because they will do much for students cognitively.
3. Don’t expect novices to learn by doing what experts do. –have students emulate things that you want them to know and do.
Chapter 7: How Should I adjust my teaching for different types of learners:
· Styles and abilities: Children are more alike than different in terms of how they think and learn. Abilities—how we deal with content—styles are how we prefer to think and learn.
· Cognitive styles—stable within an individual –Different abilities are not interchangeable. Mathematical concepts have to be learned mathematically, etc.
· VAK learners—Vast majority of schooling is about what things mean, not what they sound or look like. Victim of confirmation bias—it may sound right but really isn’t
· Abilities and multiple intelligences—
IMPLICATIONS FOR CLASSROOMS:
1. Suspects that styles don’t exist. Craft knowledge trumps science for teaching.
2. Think in terms of content, not in terms of students
3. Change promotes attention
4. There is value in every child, even if he or she is not smart in some way.
5. Don’t worry and save money
Chapter 8: How can I help Slow learners?
· Children do differ in intelligence, but intelligence can be changed through sustained hard work.
· Intelligent people can understand complex ideas and use different forms of reasoning
· Verbal test scores not related to math—being smart tin one does not mean being smart in everything.
· What makes people intelligent?—genetic? Nature v. nurture—Both!!
· Genes responsible for something like 50% of smarts. Environment doesn’t affect intelligence much.
· I.Q. has shown substantial gains.
· Genetics and environment interact
· Intelligence is malleable. It can be improved.
· Intelligence not fixed and beliefs about it matter.
IMPLICATIONS FOR CLASSROOM
· Slow learners are not dumb
· Praise effort, not ability
· Tell them hard work pays off
· Treat failure as natural part of learning
· Don’t take study skills for granted
· Catching up Is the long-term goal
· Show students that you have confidence in them. P. 187
Chapter 9: What about my mind?
Teaching like any complex cognitive skill, must be practiced to be improved, p. 189
· Teaching as cognitive skill—knowledge important to teaching
· Pedagogical content knowledge is also
· 1st five years in field shows a lot of improvement.
· Important to get feedback from knowledgeable people
· Use videotapes and get feedback a
· Be reflective—keep a diary, start discussion group.
SUMMARY: “Know your students” is fair summary of the content of this book. P. 209
· Utilize cognitive science to improve instruction. “Education makes better minds, and knowledge of the mind can make better education.” P. 213.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Thanks so much for continuing the conversation!