RECENT NEWS: MY REVIEW OF "WHY DON'T STUDENTS LIKE SCHOOL?"

WHY DON'T STUDENTS LIKE SCHOOL? A COGNITIVE SCIENTIST ANSWERS QUESTIONS ABOUT HOW THE MIND WORKS AND WHAT IT MEANS FOR THE CLASSROOM. By Daniel Willingham. Jossey-Bass, 2010 (paperback). 258 pages.

The titular question might appear an opening to a rant against our educational system. Rest assured that Daniel Willingham is hardly scribbling out some angry screed. He’s thoughtful, and avoids polemic.

In fact, I hope I’m not oversimplifying when I say his basic answer is that students don’t like school because it’s hard.

If that sounds awfully facile, be aware that Willingham goes on to a knottier problem: What can we do about it?

What Willingham is really writing about is not student anathema, but how our brains work, especially in the areas of understanding and memory, and how that connects to teaching students. A harder concept to translate into a catchy title.

School is hard because "we are not naturally good thinkers." That doesn’t mean we don’t have amazing brains. Evolution has equipped us to take in what’s around us and react accordingly. In typically down-to-earth and insightful language, Willingham uses a striking contrast to clear up the paradox:

"Tasks that you take for granted—for example, walking on a rocky shore where the footing is uncertain—are much more difficult than playing top-level chess. No computer can do it."

Humans do, however, have more difficulty when consciously processing available information to solve problems or create new ideas—thinking. "The mind is not designed for thinking," Willingham writes. Thinking takes time. Thinking requires work. Thinking means not being sure.

So our brains default to not thinking when possible, even when we are performing complex actions—like walking on a rocky shore. Once we know how to chop an onion, drive a car, or read a book, we no longer waste time or effort considering how we are doing those things, or question whether we are doing them correctly.

Willingham repeatedly returns to a major stumbling block on the road to true reasoning and reflection—working memory. This is a short and easy-to-read book with lots of great practical advice for teachers, but its most valuable contribution to my own thinking was really helping me better understand what working memory is, and how its limitations affect learning and cognition.

In a way, working memory is consciousness itself. It is what you are thinking about now. Working memory allows you to blend what’s coming in through your senses with what you already know so that you can answer questions and put together thoughts.

Willingham cites current research that pretty definitively concludes working memory is limited—very limited—and more or less fixed—there is little evidence that you can improve it.

What you can do is cheat it. If the "lack of space in working memory is a fundamental bottleneck of human cognition," the trick is to enfold richer content into the limited number of items that small space can hold.

There are two ways to do this. One is to increase factual knowledge. That’s extremely counter-intuitive—learn more to learn more. Here’s how John Medina put it in his Brain Rules: "It’s like saying that if you carry two heavy backpacks on a hike instead of one, you will accomplish your journey more quickly…."

But it’s true. Willingham uses the same kind of model as Medina, dividing his work into nine "cognitive principles." One is, "Factual knowledge precedes skill." Another is, "We understand new things in the context of things we already know."

When a student can easily access factual knowledge from long-term memory, he can "chunk" information. He has a clear idea of context. The items that he’s manipulating in working memory are broader and deeper. As I’m reading a discussion of eukaryotic cells and life regulation in Antonio Damasio’s "Self Comes to Mind," I’m extremely grateful I just reviewed cell structure with a seventh grade kid with whom I’m working.

Walking on Willingham’s rocky shore is a demonstration of the other way to get around the working memory logjam. Performing automatically means a student doesn’t have to use working memory to think about that performance.

An example Willingham uses is practicing times tables as a yonng man. When he transferred to a new school, his math teacher insisted that Willingham would do better if he memorized the multiplication facts. Coming from a school that placed more emphasis on conceptual understanding than rote memorization, Willingham at first resented the requirement. He soon realized how much automaticity helped.

It’s another counterintuitive principle, its paradoxical nature beautifully summed up by a marvelous quote from the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead: "It is a profoundly erroneous truism…that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them."

Unfortunately, automaticity only comes effortlessly with tasks such as breathing. Willingham’s cognitive principle here is, "Proficiency requires practice." So teachers have to think hard about what their students most need to practice. They should also consider that spacing practice—rather than cramming—is more effective.

It’s clear that Willingham regards working memory as a universal. Indeed, he cites studies connecting working memory to intelligence. This viewpoint is quite different from the outlook of Howard Gardner, and Multiple Intelligence theory. Willingham is somewhat abashed to find himself in this counterpoint position.

Nevertheless, despite feeling "like a bit of a Grinch" in stating it, another one if his cognitive principles is, "Children are more alike than different in terms of learning." He makes a critical qualification, however—that he is not making a claim "that all children are alike, nor that teachers should treat children as interchangeable."

But more important than tailoring content to individuals is teachers really getting to a deep understanding of that content. Activating previous knowledge and making sure that knowledge is there will help advance proficiency and comprehensive mastery.

So will thinking "of to-be-learned material as answers." Begin with a thorough examination of the questions.

No matter where children’s interests lie, no matter what their talents or "intelligences," I do believe that well-rounded general knowledge should be a goal of education (as does Gardner). It makes sense to me that we can also generalize about the ways students might acquire such knowledge.

Gardner’s skepticism about "horizontal faculties," like working memory, might result in teachers using valuable time evaluating different learning styles that would better be spent in effectively presenting content to groups with at least some homogeneity.

Educators, parents and students looking for some good tips on how to do that will find Why Don’t Students Like School? a most worthwhile resource.

Highly recommended.