Cognitive scientist and educator Daniel Willingham has written a fantastic book outlining what cognitive science research can contribute to designing effective instruction. Although the book is relatively short, the key insights are rich and suggestive for further thinking, and will probably teach you more about student learning and effective instruction than any other 10 books. What’s especially remarkable is that the author practices what he preaches: the book is organized around a series of questions that teachers are likely to have, rather than the sequential development of content more typical of a textbook. This approach holds the reader’s attention and makes for better comprehension. The book is also very well-written.
The first question Willingham tackles is why it is so hard to make students like school. Aren’t we homo sapiens, the thinking animal, distinguished from the rest of creation by our curiosity and intellectual ability? Don’t people naturally like to think? Surprisingly, Willingham’s answer is no, at least in most situations. Although we are naturally curious and as a species we have developed formidable linguistic and cognitive capabilities, in general thinking is hard and we try to avoid it if possible.
To motivate this apparently counter-intuitive insight, Willingham notes that thinking is not what the brain does best: human beings are far better at things like face recognition and moving our bodies purposefully than at thinking. The visual system, for example, is lightning fast: when we train our eyes to a scene we instantly take it in, we don’t have to think about it or wait for the details to resolve themselves. In contrast to most other brain functions which are fast, automatic and (generally) successful, reasoning is slow, effortful and quite error-prone.
Despite these drawbacks to thinking, however, people do engage in it and do learn many things over the course of their lifetimes. What’s more, almost every situation we might face in everyday life, whether paying a bill, engaging in a conversation, doing the shopping or God forbid, teaching, involves serious thinking. If people find thinking hard and try to avoid it, how can anyone be successful at anything? What’s going on here?
The missing piece of this puzzle is memory. As Willingham explains in a later chapter, we can think of memory as the trace of thought: we remember what we think about. Once we have learned how to solve a particular problem, negotiate a social situation or complete a certain activity (such as tying our shoelaces), the necessary facts and procedures are stored in memory and can be called upon quickly and easily when we face a new situation that reminds us of those we have previously encountered. Willingham notes that in many situations that seem to require thinking, such as solving a logic puzzle, we are actually relying upon our memory of similar situations to produce the solution. Even chess players rely largely on their memory of past games and configurations in order to plot their next move. So we might say that memory is the strategy our brain uses to help us avoid thinking whenever possible.
But we have still not answered the question of why people are motivated to think in the first place, if it is so slow, hard and messy. The answer is that people do like to think and find it rewarding, but only under very specific circumstances: people will think when they are presented with a problem of just the right difficulty. If a problem is too easy and too similar to ones we have solved many times before, people will get bored and lose interest (think how you would respond to an invitation to spend an hour tying your shoes over and over again). If the problem is too hard and/or inscrutable, people will give up as they get frustrated and sense that the mental effort is not worthwhile. But a problem of moderate difficulty-one that is puzzling but seems ‘doable’-will capture a person’s attention and encourage critical thinking. The reason is that solving a problem produces a pleasurable feeling, that “Eureka” or “Aha” moment when everything ‘clicks’. We crave this feeling, just as we crave attention from others or that rush from a roller coaster: all of these are reward feelings produced by the brain.
Interestingly, the content of the problem does not seem to make much difference, and neither does relevance to ‘everyday life’. It would be wrong to say that most people don’t enjoy solving math problems, for example, because clearly they do: sudoku is one of the most popular mental games on the planet, even though it is math and is a skill that most people do not need in their everyday life. The common thread that connects mental activities people find pleasurable is the level of difficulty. To repeat: people will engage in thinking if they are presented with a problem that is puzzling but that also seems like it will lead to that pleasurable feeling of success. That is, people will engage in thinking when they believe the mental work they put out will pay off.
What are the implications of this insight for the classroom? Teachers must design lesson plans that include many opportunities for the students to tackle problems or tasks of just the right difficulty to arouse their curiosity as well as their anticipation of success. I have seen many times in my own classroom that when the students see one of their classmates solve a problem successfully in front of the class, the rest then want to have a chance as well. Students will be motivated to contribute to the classroom discussion if they believe they will be successful in answering a question, proposing a good solution strategy or suggesting a fruitful avenue of approach.
Willingham also cautions that, before teachers pose a problem or question to the students, they should make sure that the students have the required background knowledge to tackle it with a reasonable chance of success. How often have we as teachers asked a big question that we thought would arouse the students’ interest (“What does history mean to you?”), but that produced a sea of blank stares instead? It was probably because the students did not have the background knowledge to tackle the problem successfully. It is important to remember that the goal is not to produce mere bafflement in the students, but puzzlement that leads to the pleasure of actually solving the problem. An important corollary of this insight is that teachers need to spend enough time setting up the question, to which the material you want the students to learn is the answer. Being force-fed answers to questions we barely understand and don’t appreciate makes for a very unsatisfying educational experience.
So how to come up with problems and activities of just the right level of difficulty? There is no formula for this, each teacher must make his or her own decisions based upon knowledge of the individual students, their background knowledge and the unit at hand. Willingham suggests that all teachers keep a diary of what works and what doesn’t. Designing good problems is an art that develops with experience.
The next chapter focuses on the importance of background knowledge in developing students’ critical thinking, and how to make sure the students get this knowledge.
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