Why Students Don’t Like School - More “Implications for the Classroom” from chapter one

From my previous post:

The question: “Why don’t students like school, or perhaps more realistically, why don’t more of them like it?”

For Willingham the answer lies in ensuring the student gets to experience the pleasure that comes from solving problems. Once they experience success, they will strive for more.

In practical classroom terms that means:

1. Make sure there are problems to be solved - cognitive work requires activities or thinking that pose moderate challenges.

We now continue with:

2. Respect students’ cognitive limits

Cognitive limitations refer to a student’s background knowledge and working memory. When presenting new material we have to take into account our students’ background knowledge and the capacity of their working memory (the amount of information a person can be conscious of and work with simultaneously.)

“…suppose you began a history lesson with a question: ‘You’ve all heard of the Boston Tea Party; why do you suppose the colonists dressed as Indians and dumped tea into Boston Harbor?’ Do your students have the necessary background knowledge in memory to consider this question? What do they know about the relationship of the colonies and the British crown in 1773? Do they know about the social and economic significance of tea? Could they generate alternative courses of action?” If not, “…the question you pose will quickly be seen as ‘boring’.” It will also show on their faces! :-)

Leave that question until your students gain the background knowledge that makes them ready to think about and answer it.

“Equally important is the limit on working memory. Remember, people can keep only so much information in mind at once…Overloads of working memory are caused by such things as multi-step instructions, lists of unconnected facts, chains of logic more than two or three steps long, and the application of just learned concepts to new material (unless the concept is quite simple).”

“The solution to working memory overloads is straightforward: slow the pace, and use memory aids such as writing on the blackboard that save students from keeping too much information in working memory.”

3. Clarify the problem to be solved

“How do you make the problem interesting?”

You usually hear the answer, “make the problem relevant to the students.” Sounds good, but this doesn’t always work. Chances are the classroom will be filled with students having varied interests.

Previously WIllingham wrote that in order to get students to want to solve a problem, they must perceive they can solve the problem.

He then asks rhetorically, “What is the question that will engage students and make them want to know the answer?” Wouldn’t we all like to know the answer to that question!

He points us in the direction of the answer: “When you plan a lesson, you start with the information you want students to know by its end. As a next step, consider what the key question for that lesson might be and how you can frame the question so it will have the right level of difficulty to engage your students and so you will respect your students’ cognitive limitations.”

The last part of the chapter “Why don’t students like school” to come in the next post.