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    Why Don't Students Like School?: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom
    Why Don't Students Like School?: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom
    Why Don't Students Like School?: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom
    Audiobook6 hours

    Why Don't Students Like School?: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom

    Written by Daniel T. Willingham

    Narrated by Paul Costanzo

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    Kids are naturally curious, but when it comes to school it seems like their minds are turned off. Why is it that they can remember the smallest details from their favorite television programs, yet miss the most obvious questions on their history test?

    Cognitive scientist Dan Willingham has focused his acclaimed research on the biological and cognitive basis of learning and has a deep understanding of the daily challenges faced by classroom teachers. This book will help teachers improve their practice by explaining how they and their students think and learn-revealing the importance of story, emotion, memory, context, and routine in building knowledge and creating lasting learning experiences.

    In this breakthrough book, Willingham has distilled his knowledge of cognitive science into a set of nine principles that are easy to understand and have clear applications for the classroom. Some examples of his surprising findings are:

    -"Learning styles" don't exist. The processes by which different children think and learn are more similar than different.

    -Intelligence is malleable. Intelligence contributes to school performance and children do differ, but intelligence can be increased through sustained hard work.

    -You cannot develop "thinking skills" in the absence of facts. We encourage students to think critically, not just memorize facts. However, thinking skills depend on factual knowledge for their operation.

    Why Don't Students Like School is a basic primer for every teacher who wants to know how their brains and their students' brains work and how that knowledge can help them hone their teaching skills.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateSep 20, 2011
    ISBN9781452674193
    Author

    Daniel T. Willingham

    Dan Willingham received his PhD from Harvard University in cognitive psychology and is now a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia. He is the author of several books, including Outsmart Your Brain and Raising Kids Who Read. A fellow of the American Psychological Association and the Association for Psychological Science, you can follow him on Twitter @DTWillingham.

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    Reviews for Why Don't Students Like School?

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    • 5/5
      Excellent book. Easy to. understand - a must read for teacher's
    • 4/5
      Interesting book with many connections to scientific research in neuroscience and psychology. Liked how each chapter started with a question.
    • 4/5
      In this fascinating book, Professor Willingham attempts to bridge the gap between what cognitive scientists have learned about the mind and what teachers do every day in school. Each chapter is shaped by a cognitive principle, which Willingham then explains. After that, the professor goes on to describe how this might affect classrooms. For instance, Chapter 2’s principle is “Factual knowledge must precede skill.” As Willingham explains, a student needs some knowledge about a subject in order to think about it. No knowledge equals no thinking. Classroom implications: be sure students have some background knowledge before asking them to think critically about a topic. And because the more you know, the easier it is to learn new material, getting students to read is crucial.For me the most amazing part of this book was the section on learning styles. As the author points out, there is no evidence that matching teaching methods to learning styles actually works. Matching teaching methods to content does positively affect learning, but trying to match individual learning styles does not help. Note that Prof. Willingham provides a very useful table that summarizes the cognitive principles and classroom implications on pp. 210 and 211.
    • 3/5
      The is an incredibly thought provoking book. Willingham provides us with different answers to many well-known theories. He causes you to really think about what you already know and challenges us to revisit those thoughts and preconceived notions. A great read for any teacher, teacher in training, or anyone who wishes to find answers to things they may have thought they already knew. Willingham also writes this book for anyone to understand, in other words, it is not filled with professional jargon.
    • 5/5
      In a pleasant tone, with lots of friendly examples and anecdotes, Daniel T. Willingham gets to the root of a teaching dilemma: how to convey information in a way that is meaningful to the student.According to Willingham, thinking is "slow, effortful and uncertain." Apparently that explains why we often avoid doing it. And kids avoid doing it even more.If we're not thinking, then what are we doing?We're relying on memory to guide us through even the simplest tasks. It's what we mean when we say we're on "autopilot". Willingham uses the example of making spaghetti to illustrate his point: we don't peruse recipes and calculate nutrition stats, we just make spaghetti. The way we always do. Which might be boiling noodles and opening a jar of Ragu. To ponder, ruminate, calculate and cogitate on everything, all the time, would simply be too exhausting.The good news is that we're naturally curious. The bad news is that curiosity has a short lifespan. Make a solution too difficult and we become frustrated. Make it too easy and we become bored.What's a teacher to do?Willingham offers suggestions like "begin with the end in mind" when planning lessons (what do you want your students to know?), pick your "puzzles" carefully (showy demos make classroom magic, but will the student remember or care about underlying principles?), change it up (short attention spans love it) and take notes (not the students, you, on what worked and what didn't).Another premise is that "students come to understand new ideas by relating them to old ideas. If their knowledge is shallow, the process stops there." (p.94). In a lecture Willingham recently gave, he suggested that lots of shallow knowledge isn't necessarily bad. One needs to know a little about a lot of things to read the Wall Street Journal or NY Times, for example. (Lord knows, I wouldn't have passed the SAT without "Trivial Pursuit" and the card game "Masterpiece"!!)Perhaps my favorite Willingham nugget is the one that offers the most hope: "Intelligence can be changed through sustained hard work."(p. 211). In other words, effort does make a difference.How, teachers might ask, can I get my students to work? Willigham suggests that teachers make thoughtful decisions about what students need and then offer them opportunities for practice. Often.
    • 5/5
      This book is telling me how MY mind works and how I can make better use of it. I am not a classroom teacher. I have, however, watched the teachers who taught my kids over the years. The most successful of these was a first grade teacher. Since my son was in first grade in 1971-2, this teacher did not have the benefit of Prof. Willingham's book. However, she did manage to implement a teaching atmosphere in her classroom that followed many of the observations in this book. The result was that the next year, most of the second grade teachers in the school recognized the students who had been with my son's first grade class, and defined their job as bringing the other students up to their level by the end of the year.The job of a good teacher is complicated and requires a lot of organizational skills, as well as thought in planning and delivering a lesson that will connect with each child's knowledge base.I recommend this book for teachers and administrators and for parents and grandparents.
    • 4/5
      A Practical Guide to TeachingI really enjoyed reading this book, Willingham is a Harvard trained psychologist but he avoids a lot of the jargon, spares us the psycho-babble, and instead provides practical pedagogy guidelines for us teachers on how to harness the potential cognition of our students.I won't give them away, but as Willingham says himself, most of his conclusions and guidelines are more or less common knowledge, but the beauty of the book is in the way he is able to communicate it -- he does so in a very straightforward manner with good use of visuals. He uses good examples to illustrate his points.Overall, I highly recommend this book for anyone studying educational psychology, or anyone in the K-12 teaching field.
    • 5/5
      Excellent introduction to implications of cognitive science for teaching at all levels. Although I teach at the university level, I found this book extremely useful. Does away with many educational fads that are still out there, and shows that cognitive science supports what your grandmother always told you: If you want to be good at something, practice, practice, practice. Gives sound and useful advice how we can get our students to do just that.