Implications For the Classroom - Chapter 2 of Why Students Don’t Like School

1. How to Evaluate Which Knowledge to Instill

The $64,000 question is - Which knowledge should students be taught? After all, if we are trying to make sure the students have the background knowledge they need for academic success, we have to determine which information or knowledge to teach so they can store it in long-term memory.

But Willingham says this is the wrong question. The right question is, “What knowledge yields the greatest cognitive benefit?”

For reading, the students need to have enough background knowledge to allow them to understand what they are going to read. Students need to know the vocabulary of whatever they are reading and they need to know the information the author assumes they know. So as knowledge increases, so will the breadth of material our student can read along with a deeper comprehension of it.

For core subjects like math and science and history or whatever else you would like to include, students need to learn the concepts that come up again and again - what Willingham calls, “the unifying ideas of each discipline.” I think this is another way of saying we need to identify the essential knowledge and skills our students need as they go from grade to grade. Scope and Sequence anyone?

2. Be Sure That the Knowledge Base is Mostly in Place When You Require Critical Thinking

I think this is self-explanatory.

3. Shallow Knowledge is Better Than No Knowledge At All

We cannot have deep knowledge about everything, so a little knowledge about things is better than none at all. Although, I still think a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing, especially when it comes to critical thinking!

4. Knowledge Must Be Meaningful

From Willingham, “Teachers should not take the importance of knowledge to mean that they should create lists of facts – whether shallow or detailed – for students to learn. Sure, some benefit might accrue, but it would be small. Knowledge pays off when it is conceptual and when the facts are related to one another, and that is not true of list learning. Also, as any teacher knows, such drilling would do far more harm by making students miserable and by encouraging the belief that school is a place of boredom and drudgery, not excitement and discovery.

Most teachers know that learning lists of unconnected facts is pretty hard to do” (Does this bring vocabulary lists to mind? See here for a different approach to learning vocabulary.)

“But what is a better way to ensure that students acquire factual knowledge now that we’ve concluded it’s so important? In other words, why do some things stick in our memory whereas other things slip away?”

That’s to be answered in the next chapter.