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ISBN 9781119715665 (paperback)
ISBN 9781119715795 (epdf)
ISBN 9781119715801 (epub)
Cover image: School Desk: © CSA-Archive/Getty Images Student: © A-Digit/Getty Images
Cover design: Wiley
SECOND EDITION
For Trisha
Acknowledgments to the First Edition
Esmond Harmsworth, my literary agent, has been an asset every step of the way, starting with the initial concept. Lesley Iura, Amy Reed, and the whole team at Jossey-Bass showed great expertise and professionalism during the editing and production processes. Anne Carlyle Lindsay was an exceptional help with the artwork in the book. Special thanks go to two anonymous reviewers who went far above and beyond the call of duty in providing extensive and helpful comments on the entire manuscript. Finally, I thank my many friends and colleagues who have generously shared thoughts and ideas and taught me so much about students and education, especially Judy Deloach, Jason Downer, Bridget Hamre, Lisa Hansel, Vikram Jaswal, Angel Lillard, Andy Mashburn, Susan Mintz, Bob Pianta, Trisha Thompson-Willingham, and Ruth Wattenberg.
Acknowledgments to the Second Edition
My thanks to the team at Wiley for their care in the editing and production process. Esmond Harmsworth, my literary agent, has been an asset every step of the way, and I thank Greg Culley for bringing his expertise to the artwork. This book owes much to teachers and researchers who have generously shared their expertise since the publication of the first edition.
The Author
Daniel T. Willingham earned his B.A. degree in psychology from Duke University in 1983 and his Ph.D. degree in cognitive psychology from Harvard University in 1990. He is currently professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, where he has taught since 1992. He is the author of several books, and his writing on education has appeared in 17 languages. In 2017 President Obama appointed him to the National Board for Education Sciences. His website is http://www.danielwillingham.com.
Introduction
Arguably the greatest mysteries in the universe lie in the three-pound mass of cells, approximately the consistency of oatmeal, that reside in the skull of each of us. It has even been suggested that the brain is so complex that our species is smart enough to fathom everything except what makes us so smart; that is, the brain is so cunningly designed for intelligence that it is too stupid to understand itself. We now know that is not true. The mind is at last yielding its secrets to persistent scientific investigation. We have learned more about how the mind works in the last 25 years than we did in the previous twenty-five hundred.
It would seem that greater knowledge of the mind would yield important benefits to education – after all, education is based on change in the minds of students, so surely understanding the student's cognitive equipment would make teaching easier or more effective. Yet the teachers I know don't believe they've seen much benefit from what psychologists call “the cognitive revolution.” We all read stories in the newspaper about research breakthroughs in learning or problem solving, but it is not clear how each latest advance is supposed to change what a teacher does on Monday morning.
The gap between research and practice is understandable. When cognitive scientists study the mind, they intentionally isolate mental processes (for example, learning or attention) in the laboratory in order to make them easier to study. But mental processes are not isolated in the classroom. They all operate simultaneously, and they often interact in difficult-to-predict ways. To provide an obvious example, laboratory studies show that repetition helps learning, but any teacher knows that you can't take that finding and pop it into a classroom by, for example, having students repeat long-division problems until they've mastered the process. Repetition is good for learning but terrible for motivation. With too much repetition, motivation plummets, students stop paying attention, and no learning takes place. The classroom application would not duplicate the laboratory result.
Why Don't Students Like School? began as a list of nine principles that are so fundamental to the mind's operation that they do not change as circumstances change. They are as true in the classroom as they are in the laboratory* and therefore can reliably be applied to classroom situations. Many of these principles likely won't surprise you: factual knowledge is important, practice is necessary, and so on.
What may surprise you are the implications for teaching that follow. You'll learn why it's more useful to view the human species as bad at thinking rather than as cognitively gifted. You'll discover that authors routinely write only a fraction of what they mean, which I'll argue implies very little for reading instruction but a great deal for the factual knowledge your students must gain. You'll explore why you remember the plot of Star Wars without even trying, and you'll learn how to harness that ease of learning for your classroom. You'll follow the brilliant mind of television doctor Gregory House as he solves a case, and you'll discover why you should not try to get your students to think like real scientists. You'll see how people like American politician Julian Castro and actress Scarlett Johansson have helped psychologists analyze the obvious truth that kids inherit their intelligence from their parents – only to find that it's not true after all, and you'll understand why it is so important that you communicate that fact to your students.
Why Don't Students Like School? ranges over a variety of subjects in pursuit of two goals that are straightforward
