Posted by
Waski_the_Squirrel on Thursday, August 06, 2009 3:29:44 PM
Many years ago, I listened to a speaker who said that to succeed in your field, you need to read about it. He suggested a minimum of 1 book a month. He also pointed out that this applies to all fields. I've been trying to do this, and one of the advantages of my profession is that summer provides a prime time to read. I've read a number of books, and mostly I don't mention them here. They contain a few tidbits of interest and are quickly discarded. I recently finished one that I would recommend to any teacher: Daniel T. Willingham's
Why Don't Students Like School?
It's not a political book. Unless one is ideologically committed to a particular type of education, it's eye-opening. Willingham is a cognitive scientist: he studies how people think. He avoids mentioning specific education fads and instead concentrates on how the mind actually works and what thinking actually is.
His greatest conclusion was that the mind actually avoids thinking. I discovered this as a teenager (and didn't realize that my discovery meant anything). I worked in a restaurant and, when I started, we didn't have a cash register, just an adding machine. We had to make change in our heads. At first, it was a bit intimidating. Now I can usually just rattle off how much change to give. What I realized as a teenager was that I was memorizing amounts of change and patterns in numbers. I won't go into the details of the pattern, but the point is that I don't think about change. It just falls out of my head without thought.
Willingham uses the example of a child learning to tie shoes. When a child learns, it takes his entire concentration. When an adult does it, he can carry on a conversation at the same time. He doesn't think.
And right there is the single biggest key to student success: they need to make certain skills automatic. As much as "drill and kill" is derided, a certain body of knowledge and skill must be internalized. I've read the argument that today we can look up facts, but, seriously, I don't want my Physics students to look back in their notes every time I want to work with a distance-time graph.
To make a skill automatic, one must practice it. This is where "drill and kill" got its bad name. Too much practice is boring. We need variety. We also need to practice for internalization. I used to know a lot of dates of explorers and stuff. I don't know them now. They were gone within a few days of that test in high school. Why?
The reason why is that they weren't attached to anything. I never liked history because it was a lot of random dates and names. They were in order, but I had no clue of their significance. Fortunately I took Russian History as an elective in college. In the hands of a real teacher, history came alive. Admittedly, I'm a bit fuzzy on the dates of the Tsars, but I know their significance to why my world is the way it is now. This instructor was so good I later took a course on the two world wars from him just for fun.
That's why I teach organic molecules and cell organelles from the perspective of eating. Kids eat and instead of coming out of nowhere, I give the kids something to attach it to. (And this book tells me I need to try harder on some other topics.)
The book is rich in ideas, so I'm going to close with just one more idea. Kids often ask, "Why do we have to learn this?" Many times teachers (including myself) try to contrive some way they'll use it in their regular life. They, in turn, see right through it. There is a far bigger reason to learn things than simple vocational training. We're giving kids skills and knowledge to solve problems. It's amazing how seemingly unrelated things can use the exact same thought process.
In Chemistry, I work hard with conversions. To my successful students, the course is pretty straightforward (at least in terms of math). The reason is that they quickly recognize that almost every problem they get is a conversion problem in some form. To my less successful students, each new topic is an entirely new type of problem. To them, stoichiometry isn't converting one unit to another. It's a long string of voodoo math. I need to do a better job with these students emphasizing the universality of conversions.
Of course, to start seeing the universality of conversions, kids have to practice them so that the process of canceling units is automatic. Then they have to practice all the topics leading up to stoichiometry until they're automatic. The point is that, to avoid thinking, their brain should follow the exact same process in a new setting.
The brain avoids thinking. As a particular skill takes up less of the brain's memory and thinking, this leaves it free to find new links and new ideas. A more complex task can be thought about because the basic skills underneath it are automatic. What we've done in schools is take 2 extremes: "drill and kill" at one extreme, and "higher order thinking" at the other. "Drill and kill" destroys interest and ensures kids don't actually learn things for long. "Higher order thinking" asks students to think like experts before they have the necessary skills. Like most controversies in education, rather than go to the extremes, we will be most successful with a healthy mix.