Why Don’t Students Like School? (review)

I’ve been a teacher for six years. I’ve been a student at multiple schools of education, an attendee of numerous staff development workshops, an avid listener of several educational gurus. Here are a few things I know: 

1. We need to teach students to do more than bubble in answer sheets.
2. Memorizing facts is fairly useless. Instead, we need to teach students to be critical thinkers. 

These are a few of the ideas Dan Willingham so politely torpedoes in Why Don’t Students Like School (WDSLS?). Each chapter begins with a simple, common question related to a core educational issue. He begins each answer with a guiding cognitive principle rooted in a body of research, and proceeds to extrapolate how each principle applies to teaching and learning. He concludes each chapter with a series of concrete applications for the classroom. 

As a wanna-be rabble rouser, I have to say I love the counter-intuitive nature of the cognitive principles guiding each chapter. Most of them drop like a bombshell on the landscape of conventional ed. wisdom. And, contrary to the vitriol with which many (including myself) confront sacred cows, Willingham is a most benevolent bomb-dropper. 

I picture the author, mirroring the kindly, sagagious photo on the book jacket, as he pats me on the shoulder, gently enlightening me as follows:

1. The brain is not necessarily made for thinking.
2. Factual knowledge must precede critical thinking.
3. “Proficiency requires practice.” (well, duh. Why do we have such a hard time with that one?)
4. Students are more similar than different when it comes to learning styles. Student learning styles should be secondary to content when making instructional decisions.
5. Students won’t think like experts, and attempting to have them think like experts will do more harm than good.  

There’s plenty more, including some exhortations that won’t ignite as much controversy (intelligence can be enhanced through hard work) but these were the jaw-droppers. Ok, maybe I had suspected a few of these, but I hadn’t heard them expressed quite so succinctly:

trying to teach students skills such as analysis or synthesis in the absence of factual knowledge is impossible. Research from cognitive science has shown that the sorts of skills that teachers want for students–such as the ability to analyze and to think critically–require extensive factual knowledge.

Contrast that with ”expert” advice to “help disadvantaged/falling behind kids to think critically, since we don’t have time to catch them up on all the content they are missing.” Unfortanately, such thinking leads to a lot of wasted time for the kids who need it most. The implications, especially for those who view education as a social equalizer, are huge. The disadvantaged kids need factual knowledge and the time to practice this knowledge more than anyone, and these are the ones we keep trying to impart “skills” already possessed by the “advanced” students. Willingham’s book clarifies the implications of such a view: Students with the “skills” also have a set of background knowledge that enables them to utilize those “skills” effectively. Students without such background knowledge will benefit minimally from instruction aimed at helping them acquire those skills. 

In a sense, this was a disheartening book to read. People can’t think on deeper levels until they have sufficient knowledge, practice, and automaticity. Current educational parameters aren’t exactly conducive to achieving those goals. Willingham’s applications provide a place to start, however, and hopefully his highly readable and applicable book will assist mainstream education to embrace the possibility of factual knowledge/repetitive practice and critical thinking/21st century skills finally taking off the gloves and making nice.

Dollar Bill Smackdown: Public vs. Homeschool

A month or so ago I stumbled upon an outrageously amusing post about homeschooling, authored by a teacher at the blog Teacher, Revised. The post delivered a series of reasons intended to show why homeschooling was a bad idea. Most of the reasons were so outlandish and c0ntrafactual that they could have been mistaken as part of a parody of the anti-homeschool crowd. Most people took the post seriously, however, since last time I read the post it had garnered somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,000 hot-under-the-collar-homeschooler comments. 

At least he didn’t claim homeschoolers were in the dark ages technologically.

Now the point of this post: As I reflected on the asininity of point #8–

Homeschooling is selfish. According to this article in USA Today, students who get homeschooled are increasingly from wealthy and well-educated families. To take these (I’m assuming) high achieving students out of our schools is a disservice to our less fortunate public school kids. Poorer students with less literate parents are more reliant on peer support and motivation, and they  greatly benefit from the focus and commitment of their richer and higher achieving classmates.

–I recalled an article in the Winter edition of Education Next that dealt with the issue of comparing household income levels of public and homeschooling families. The findings were surprising to me, since I did not deny the claim that homeschooling households were probably, in general, a bit more affluent than public school families. Instead, the information from the National Household Education Survey Program noted that home and public school households had almost identical yearly incomes. In fact, homeschooling families were actually lower by several percentage points. For example, 21.7% of homeschooling families made over 75,000 a year, as compared to 25.3% of public school families. The quote from Teacher, Revised (and his source)above fails to inform readers that the percentage of public school families making more than 50,000 a year is also nearly identical.

There was a rub, however, and here it is: 54% of homeschooling families with two parents had only one of those parents in the workforce, compared to 19.7% for public school two-parent families. So if you were to break down income individually, homeschooling parents would indeed make much more; however, the bottom line is that both households experience, on average, the same income when it comes to actual dollars earned. Perhaps this has implications for the accessibility of homeschooling as an option for all families, since more public school families have two parents in the workforce. 

A few parting words for point #8 quoted above: More affluent homeschoolers are homeschooling, and therefore homeschooling is selfish? Such a claim is almost incoherently illogical, and I would get lost trying to pull out each fallacious pus-sac. Suffice to say, this quote actually supports the opposite of the claim, since even with the influx of wealthy homeschoolers, the numbers are STILL roughly equivalent to those of public school families. In other words, before the rush of the rich, homeschoolers were actually much poorer than public schoolers, and the USA Today article says about as much. So I guess everyone is selfish.

Also, by this logic, parents of underperforming students should immediately remove them from the public school before they poison the rest of the poor students with their detrimental intellectual and socioeconomic baggage. Because it’s unfair to have poor kids around bad influences, but then which poor kids to you remove because if you take out all the poor kids you won’t have any poor kids to benefit from the rich smart kids….Otherwise, the underlying assumption is that obligations of fairness only apply to those with money, which is a significant insult to the diversity of talents, abilities, and determination nested among people of all tax brackets.

The Schools We Need and Constructivist Learning

I’ll admit I’m skeptical of the heaving to and fro of “constructivist” learning theory. While reading E.D. Hirsch’s book The Schools We Need, I’ve reconsidered. Perhaps what I’ve been objecting to is what constructivism is used (inaccurately, according to Hirsch) to defend. At any rate, here’s Hirsch:

“(Constructivism) characterizes all meaningful learning no matter how derived….The leap from the general theory of constructivism to advocacy of a particular practice o f discovery learning is overhasty and logically illegitimate….Any learning that involves the meaningful use of language is self-evidently constructed learning–unless one believes in…mental telepathy.” (Hirsch, 1996, p. 134).”

That just gives me the chuckles. Drill and practice, projects, small groups, movies, worksheets, whatever–it’s all leading to constructivist learning. Since all learning is constructivist, it’s tough to use constructivism as a guide to a particular pedagogical practice. Whatever is excluded will be constructivist learning as well. I recommend this book.

Oddly enough or not, I just finished reading something similar on Joanne Jacobs and Bill Evers. Next up on the reading list will be Why Kids Hate School, which seems to be a solid complement and contemporary follow up to The Schools We Need.

Thinking About Facts (08/13/08)

Just when I had all my wonderful “critical thinking” lessons planned out for the year, it turns out kids actually need to have some factual knowledge about which to think critically.

Imagine that.

So now I have to go back and add BORING facts to the things I’m supposed to be teaching. Daniel T. Willingham guy at the University of Virginia says critical thinking isn’t much good on its own. Educational Columnist Jay Matthews quotes Willingham in an article, and Matthews himself points out the following:

“As your most-hated high school teacher often told you (will I be exempt since I teach 8th grade?), you have to buckle down and learn the content of a subject–facts, concepts and trends–before the maxims of critical thinking taught in these feverishly-marketed courses will do you much good.

‘The processes of thinking are intertwined with the content of thought (that is, domain knowledge),’ Willingham says. ‘Thus, if you remind a student to “look at an issue from multiple perspectives” often enough, he will learn that he ought to do so, but if he doesn’t know much about an issue, he can’t think about it from multiple perspectives.’”

I guess this means Roger Ebert actually watches all the movies he reviews.

Sorry boys and girls. This year it looks like I’m going to have to make sure you actually know what happened in the story before we get whimsical with our critical analyses.

Via Joanne Jacobs.