Why Students Don’t Like School - “Implications for the Classroom” from Chapter 1

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.

This is why scaffolding curriculum and expectations is so important. We don’t want to present our students with problems they are not capable of solving. Short term goals have to be achievable, otherwise long term goals remain in the realm of wishful thinking.

I think we do this fairly well with our curriculum. I believe in most courses, especially in math and Latin, the 1^st marking period is used for reviewing the previous year’s work. (Do we do this with grammar?) By doing so we make the students retrieve factual knowledge from their long-term memories, put it into their working memories, apply to familiar problems, and thus try instill confidence before moving into new material.

An aside: I’m not so sure we do as well with our expectations concerning the maturity of our students. We need to teach them proper behavior and personal responsibility from grade to grade, so that with instruction and encouragement that takes into account their ages and maturity levels, our students will develop the character traits necessary for success in their academics and personal relationships.

I believe it is possible to scaffold or map out expectations for good behavior and personal responsibility for each grade. I also believe it can be done is such a way that accounts for the natural development of the child, generally speaking of course, thereby avoiding the anxieties that result from placing inappropriate expectations on children before they are prepared for them. (Any volunteers?)

Maybe the model for this scaffolding should be similar for academic scaffolding. The new expectations that come with each new grade level should not appear until the 2^nd marking period, and then introduced only a little at a time.

I would appreciate hearing your thoughts about this.

I’ll get back on track with more on Implications for the Classroom later…