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One task at a time

May 26, 2010 By

Despite all the hype about multitasking teens, it’s not good for students to do too many things at once, writes cognitive scientist Dan Willingham on Answer Sheet.

. . . college kids who report being chronic multitaskers are actually somewhat “worse” than their peers at some basic components of cognitive control (like switching attention).

If you care about what you’re doing, focus on it, Willingham advises.  Leaving a TV on as background noise is distracting. Background music can help or hurt, depending on the “type of music, type of task, type of person, or a combination of factors is still unknown.”

Young people are better at multitasking than older people, he writes, but that doesn’t mean it’s good for them.

If there’s anything I hate, it’s a TV babbling on with nobody watching. But then I’m one of those older people.

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Reading: quantity, nonfiction, knowledge

September 30, 2009 By

The common standards movement has sparked a useful discussion of teaching reading. Many critics like the newest draft of the standards, reports Curriculum Matters.

Carol Jago, the president-elect of the National Council of Teachers of English, tells me she thinks the draft has improved in two ways. First, it emphasizes “quantity in reading.” Jago, an author and former high school teacher, served as one of several outside reviewers of the English-language arts version of the document.

“More is more when it comes to students and reading,” Jago told me in an e-mail. “I was delighted to see this important point addressed so directly…The dramatic difference between the number of books students read in high school and the number they are assigned in college I believe contributes enormously to student failure in the first semester at university.”

Jago also likes the focus on reading challenging books independently, a skill needed for college and the workplace.

Will Fitzhugh, the founder of The Concord Review, wants more stress on nonfiction documents and research papers.

In a Washington Post op-ed, cognitive scientist Dan Willingham critiques the standards for assuming students can understand what they read without background knowledge. Teaching “strategies” doesn’t lead to comprehension, he writes.

Remarkably, if you take kids who score poorly on a reading test and ask them to read on a topic they know something about (baseball, say, or dinosaurs) all of a sudden their comprehension is terrific—better than kids who score well on reading tests but who don’t know a lot about baseball or dinosaurs.

In other words, kids who score well on reading tests are not really kids with good “reading skills.”

Once students have “cracked the code of letters and sounds” and read fluently, the good readers are the ones with the prior knowledge to enable them to understand what they read, Willingham argues.  Students who lack background knowledge can reason their way through a text, but it’s slow and difficult, “a recipe for creating a student who doesn’t like reading.”

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What would a good PD be?

September 24, 2009 By

We hear often from teachers (including myself) how useless the professional development sessions often are. But what makes them useless, and how could they be useful, meaningful, or interesting?

The number one complaint is that they are just a waste of time–redundant information, mindless activities. I have attended my fair share of those.

Then some PD leaders assume that the best way to teach teachers is to bombard them with consultants and make believe they are brainless. Put them in little groups and have them write quick little responses to little folktales, and then regroup and fill out charts to post on the wall. Once all the charts are on the wall, the teachers are told to circulate in a “gallery walk” and write comments on Post-its to put on the charts. And then, of course, they are told to go implement this in the classroom right away.

Then there are those that teach a hypothesis as though it were truth–for instance, in connection with “brain-based learning.” Neuroscience is a lively and fascinating field, but its findings are not immediately applicable to the classroom, as Dan Willingham has pointed out. Nonetheless, many PDs push “brain-based learning” without acknowledging the uncertainty around the theories.

There are also practical training sessions–how to administer or score tests, how to use computer equipment, etc. Those may be informative, or they may be old news.

But what sort of professional development would actually be good?

It depends much on the school’s programs, curriculum, etc., and the level. But one idea would be to have teachers give each other seminars in their own subject–that is, we’d have an algebra seminar one week, a Dostoevsky seminar the next, and a seminar on the Reformation the following week. (Or maybe one per month.) The seminar leader would basically give a class intended for adults. But since the adults would not all be versed in the field, the instructor would need to adjust to their knowledge levels. There could be prerequisites or required reading for some seminars.

Why would this be useful? Teachers would be teaching in front of each other, seeing each other teach and respond to teaching, and they would all be learning about each other’s subjects. They would be engaged in the subject matter itself, while the seminar leader would gain new angles on pedagogy. They could then discuss how the same material might be presented to students.

Another kind of PD would involve a visit from a special guest with knowledge in a particular field. This scholar would give a presentation and then open the floor for discussion and debate. For instance, there could be PDs on controversies surrounding pedagogy, neuroscience, etc. Teachers would frankly discuss the pros and cons of various approaches and leave with new insights.

There are many other possibilities. But in general the level of PDs would be lifted if (a) they dealt with subject matter at the teachers’ intellectual level; (b) they allowed teachers to lead PDs regularly; and (c) they included philosophical and controversial topics and presented them as such.

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Why not rush headlong into merit pay?

May 28, 2009 By

Current merit pay proposals are flawed for six reasons, Dan Willingham argues. Check out his video “Merit Pay, Teacher Pay, and Value-Added Measures.”

Then read the lively discussion at the Core Knowledge blog.

And see Diane Ravitch’s Bridging Differences column from April 21, “What’s Wrong With Merit Pay.”

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Thinking and learning

April 29, 2009 By

Dan Willingham’s new book, Why Don’t Students Like School?, gets a rave review in the Wall Street Journal.

A cognitive scientist, Willingham explains how teachers can use what we know about thinking to enhance learning.  For example: Is drilling worth it?

The answer is yes, because research shows that practice not only makes a skill perfect but also makes it permanent, automatic and transferable to new situations, enabling more complex work that relies on the basics. Another question: “What is the secret to getting students to think like real scientists, mathematicians, and historians?” According to Mr. Willingham, this goal is too ambitious: Students are ready to understand knowledge but not create it. For most, that is enough. Attempting a great leap forward is likely to fail.

. . . Willingham, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia, is not in favor of merely making learning “fun” or “creative.” He advocates teaching old-fashioned content as the best path to improving a student’s reading comprehension and critical thinking.

Why Don’t Students Like School? is “one of the most important education books of our time,” writes Bill Evers on his Ed Policy blog.

See more here on what Willingham thinks teachers should know about cognitive science.

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How people think

March 25, 2009 By

Understanding is Remembering in Disguise, writes Dan Willingham at The Core Knowledge Blog.

Data from the last thirty years lead to a conclusion that is not scientifically challengeable: thinking well requires knowing facts, and that’s true not simply because you need something to think about. The very processes that teachers care about most-critical thinking processes such as reasoning and problem solving-are intimately intertwined with factual knowledge that is stored in long-term memory (not just found in the environment). 

. . . So, understanding new ideas is mostly a matter of getting the right old ideas into working memory and then rearranging them-making comparisons we hadn’t made before, or thinking about a feature we had previously ignored.

In part 1, Willingham explains that the brain is not designed for thinking. It’s designed to let you think as little as possible.

Part 3 defends practice: Drill doesn’t always kill.

A psychology professor at University of Virginia, Willingham is the author of Why Don’t Students Like School: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What it Means for the Classroom (Jossey-Bass, 2009).

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Why teachers can’t get no respect

March 19, 2009 By

Teachers can get more respect if they police their own profession, taking the lead in developing ways to get rid of incompetent teachers, writes Dan Willingham on Britannica Blog.

The presence of a small percentage of incompetent teachers has an outsize impact on the respect that the profession garners. Social psychologists have known for years that stereotypes are fed, in part, through selective attention. If a parent believes that there are a lot of bad teachers, he is likely to think about and notice the single bad teacher in a school and fail to notice the 129 good-to-outstanding teachers.

. . . The presence of a small number of poor teachers also has an outsize impact on the respect for the unions themselves. Deserved or not, unions have the reputation of protecting the rights of individual teachers at all costs, no matter how incompetent the teacher.

He thinks this is important for the teaching profession, but won’t make a big difference in school effectiveness.

Like Eduwonk, I think Willingham underestimates the number of non-performing teachers — and the benefits of firing them. I remember a fourth-grade teacher telling me that half her students came from the class of a third-grade teacher who did no teaching, though she was big on hugs. The students had lost a year. The other half had been taught the third-grade curriculum and were ready, more or less, for fourth-grade work.

Evaluating teacher effectiveness is not for the faint-hearted, of course. In Harvard Education Letter, Richard Rothman analyzes the challenges in implementing  “value-added” measures to distinguish excellent, good, mediocre and poor teachers.

Education Sector analyzes how value-added analysis works to evaluate school and teacher effectiveness in Tennessee.  Here’s William Sanders’ response to the report.

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Flawed assumptions

March 3, 2009 By

After a Common Core discussion of 21st century skills, cognitive scientist Dan Willingham attacks the “flawed assumptions” of  the influential Partnership for 21st-Century Skills (P21) on Britannica Blog.

1. Knowledge and skills are separate.

No, “thinking skills are intertwined with domain knowledge,” Willingham argues. Those who forget that are likely to neglect the need for knowledge on the theory that “students can always google the facts, so teachers can focus on skills.”

2. Teachers don’t have cognitive limits.

P21 encourages teachers to use “incredibly demanding” teaching methods that can’t be used effectively without preparation and training, writes Willingham. These include small-group projects and student-directed learning.

. . .  teachers already believe the teaching methods promoted by P21 are the best ones. They are taught as much during their training. Yet classroom observation studies show that very few teachers use them, almost certainly because they are so difficult to use.

3. Experience is equivalent to practice.

Just because students do something doesn’t mean they’re learning, Willingham writes.

Practice entails trying to improve: noticing what you’re doing wrong, and trying different strategies to do better. It also entails meaningful feedback, usually from someone knowledgeable about the skill. This means that 21st-century skills like “working well in groups,” or “developing leadership,” will not be developed simply by putting people in groups or asking them to be leaders. Students must be taught to do these things. We simply don’t know how to teach leadership or collaboration the way that we know how to teach algebra or reading.

P2′s goals — “real world problem-solving and critical thinking skills” — have been goals for the last century, Willingham writes. People have tried for years to make P21′s methods work in the classroom with little success.

Another Common Core participant, educational historian Diane Ravitch, calls 21st century skills an “old familiar song” – and one that’s badly off key.  Hostile to learning subject matter, education professors “have numbed the brains of future teachers with endless blather about process and abstract thinking skills.”

We have taught them about graphic organizers and Venn diagrams and accountable talk, data-based decision-making, rubrics, and leveled libraries . . .  We have neglected to teach them that one cannot think critically unless one has quite a lot of knowledge to think about. One thinks critically by comparing and contrasting and synthesizing what one has learned. One must know a great deal before she or he can begin to reflect on its meaning and look for alternative explanations.

On her Bridging Differences blog, Ravitch thinks critically: Are “21st century skills” a way to derail “the effort to develop meaningful and reasonable academic standards by replacing them with vague and pleasing-sounding goals?”

In the Common Core question period, teacher Diana Senechal discussed lesson plans she found on the P21 site.

One activity was to have students read a story or play, then make a commercial or video with Claymation figures. Diana asked, “Why not discuss the ideas in the story instead of spending hours making Claymation figures?” Which approach is likelier to engage students in thinking critically? It seemed to me that she was spot-on.

Willingham suggests writing state standards that “delineate conceptual knowledge and factual knowledge, and make clear how the two are related,”  and give teachers the training and time to learn how to teach the standards.

Beyond that, he urges states to start small, with a meaningful assessment to judge whether students really are learning “21st century skills.”

Core Knowledge has more on the “fadbusters” discussion and on asking teachers to do the nearly impossible.

If we’re serious about closing the achievement gap and raising the level of performance of American education, we can’t be serious about asking teachers to walk on water and labeling them failures when they drown.

Eduwonk has lots more.

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What’s it all about, Alfie?

February 4, 2009 By

Education writer Alfie Kohn Is Bad for You and Dangerous For Your Children, writes cognitive scientist Dan Willingham on Britannica Blog. The headline parodies Kohn’s penchant to overstate his case.

Kohn has made a virtual industry out of finding interesting and provocative insights in the psychological literature and following them off the edge of a cliff.

In books and speeches, Kohn has argued against the usefulness of assigning homework, praising and rewarding students and teaching self-discipline.

Kohn specializes in attacking conventional wisdom in education. . .  Most people think that homework helps kids learn, praise shows appreciation and makes them more likely to do desirable things, and self-discipline helps them achieve their goals.  Kohn argues that each of these conclusions is wrong or over-simplified. Homework may bring small benefits to some students, but it incurs greater costs and overall is likely not worth assigning.  Praise doesn’t help academic achievement, it controls children, it reduces motivation, and makes them less able to make decisions. Self-discipline is oversold as an educational panacea, and in some contexts may actually be undesirable.

Kohn is useful as an provocateur, writes Willingham, but he “consistently makes factual errors, oversimplifies, the literature he seeks to explain and commits logical fallacies.”

Robert Pondiscio cheers the Kohn smackdown — Kohn is hostile to Core Knowledge — and links to Stuart Buck, who attacks Kohn’s argumentation style.

I think Kohn’s critique of praise was necessary at the time to prick the self-esteem bubble. The benefits of homework depend a lot on the quality of the homework. As for teaching self-discipline, schools are a long way from overdoing it.

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Reading wars: Content vs. strategies

January 19, 2009 By

Round 2 of the reading wars pits content knowledge against reading strategies, writes Dan Willingham on Britannica Blog. (Round 1 was phonics vs. whole language.) Both sides have some merit, but he gives the nod to content.

Most of us think about reading in a way that is fundamentally incorrect. We think of it as transferable, meaning that once you acquire the ability to read, you can read anything. That is true for only part of what it takes to read. It’s true for decoding—the ability to translate written symbols into sounds. Once gained, that ability can be applied to any string of characters, including unfamiliar words like operculum, pronounceable non-words like slint, and letter strings like ctpaqw, which you readily identify as non- pronounceable.

But being able to decode letter strings fluently is only half of reading. In order to understand what you’re reading, you need to know something about the subject matter. And that doesn’t just mean that you need to know the vocabulary — you need to have the right knowledge of the world.

. . . Research findings consistently show that students who are identified as “poor readers” suddenly look quite good when they read passages on familiar subjects.

Schools that try to boost test scores by spending tons of time on reading skills are doomed to failure, he writes. Students need to learn about the world — including history, geography and science — to understand what they read.

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