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Willingham, Daniel T. Why Don’t Students Like School? Jossey-Bass, 2021.
Daniel T. Willingham is the author of the book Why Don’t Students Like School? A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom. Willingham, as stated in the title, is a cognitive scientist as well as professor of psychology at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia. He is not an educator by degree or background but is interested in the brain and how humans retain and understand information relating to the world around them. He often jokes that he is married to a “real” teacher, which has prompted much of his professional research into the direction of human brain development in the classroom. This book seeks to address the most common questions that educators have in relation to their students’ understanding, or misunderstanding, of course material.
Willingham begins his journey by addressing the core question: Why don’t students like school? He gets directly to the point and asserts, “Humans are naturally curious, but we are not naturally good thinkers; unless the cognitive conditions are right, we will avoid thinking.” He explains that humans will stop with the question stage of learning in order to avoid the drudgery that often accompanies the work involved with finding answers. He describes finding answers as slow and effortful, making it a task that we naturally want to avoid. As a cognitive scientist, he unpacks how the mind and thinking work. First, humans need to understand their environment; things that they see, hear, learn, or accomplish all exist within their environment. Second, the environment directly influences an individual’s working memory, or consciousness. This is the level of awareness recorded from observing the environment. Third, awareness of information from the working memory can then move into the long-term memory. This long-term memory is a storehouse of information, both practical and procedural. The goal of the teacher is to fill the student’s long-term memory storehouse for the working memory to access at a later date. The problem, as Willingham points out, is that most students lack a full long-term memory reserve, and teachers often ask them to pull information from that long-term memory into their working memory. This is the main conundrum that faces educators and students today: Students just don’t have an adequate long-term memory storehouse. Therefore, frustration sets in when prior knowledge has not been attained. This relational cycle working between environment, working memory, and long-term memory serves as the core of Willingham’s argument through the entire book.
The remainder of Willingham's book focuses on the more practical aspects of helping move students towards strengthening their long-term memory in order to aid in the back-and-forth relationship between it and one’s working memory. He gives several incredibly helpful tokens of advice such as: 1) memory as the residue of thought, 2) the impossibility of proficiency without practice, and 3) the difference in cognition later in training.
Willingham uses puzzles, poems, and principles to walk educators through how the mind works and to align teaching with student cognition. He explains that over time, a student who is saturated with information will begin, like an athlete, to build incredible muscle memory with their thoughts. However, also like an athlete, this practice takes focused diligence, training, practice, and encouragement. This is not an easy task for educators. But, if we can harness this information into our curriculum and begin at an early stage to assist students in absorbing information, perhaps the frustration levels at the highest stages would not be so intense. This takes a logical, concerted effort across the educational framework. In order for students to be able to think deeply about a subject, we first have to force them to think about the subject itself.
One aspect from which I benefitted immensely was Willingham’s ability to scaffold information well. I appreciated that throughout the entire book he continued to reference the cognition cycle from Chapter 1. What Willingham did was put his work into practice. By the end of reading this book, I could not help but know the cognition cycle by heart because of the continuous exposure to it in different contexts throughout the book. This also prompted me to think about the visuals that my students see in my classroom and consider how I can place the most important things before them every day so that they see it continually. This technique was akin to what Joshua Gibbs presents in his book Something They Will Not Forget, essentially creating classroom catechisms. I also spent a great deal of time contemplating Willingham’s idea of transferrable knowledge. This echoed much of what Wiggins and McTighe explain in Understanding by Design. He echoed what Wiggins and McTighe state in relation to true understanding: in order for a student to show true knowledge of a concept, they need to transfer what they have learned from one scenario into another. But because concepts are often taught and not transferred, students tend not to use transferable information when problem solving. This concept of transferability is one that perhaps should be more intentionally taught in schools.
While not a surprise to classical educators, Willingham addresses and confirms many of the technical and pedagogical norms that appear in classical schools today. He essentially confirms the need for the return of memorizing, but also, Memory. While putting too much credit on the discovery of the “Forgetting Curve” notion, Willingham highlights what the ancients have always indicated about Liberal Education as a whole: that it's about the transferability of knowledge, not just the consumption of facts.
Jessica Arango is a Humanities and Senior Thesis teacher at New Covenant Schools in Lynchburg, Virginia. She received her B.A. in English at Florida International University and is in her final semester at the University of Dallas pursuing a degree in Humanities with a Classical Education Concentration. Her passion for teaching includes focused research in assessment best practices, grading policies, and classroom culture. In her spare time she and her husband enjoy reading and traveling with their young daughter.