Too cool for school

Returning to Halland in time for tomorrow’s workplace meeting (APT) on learning sciences and the cognitive psychologist Daniel T. Willingham’s book “Why don’t students like school?”, I am struck by the basic point that our brain is not designed for thought, that thinking is hard work, and something we often do our best to avoid, especially when it comes at a social cost.

At the same time, humans are naturally curious. We want to see what lies beyond, to better ourselves (if we are to speak Star Trek), and to learn new things. But curiosity is fragile. What we seem to enjoy is not thinking as such, but the small reward that comes from successful thinking. Problems that are too easy are boring; problems that appear impossible are frustrating. Somewhere between the two lies the pleasure of figuring something out.

This also means that good teaching cannot simply consist of making students “active”. To think about something, students need something to think with: factual knowledge, previous examples and procedures stored in long-term memory. Asking students to critically discuss a question for which they lack the necessary background knowledge is no more intellectually demanding than asking them to guess.

Perhaps the better question for teachers is therefore not whether a class is a lecture, seminar or game, but: where is the cognitive work? Who is actually doing the thinking? Willingham notes how easily a lesson can become a long series of teacher explanations, while the students themselves solve very few problems. And perhaps we are sometimes too eager to supply answers before we have created a question that students actually want answered.

Seen this way, the challenge is to design teaching in which students repeatedly encounter problems that are difficult enough to require thought, but sufficiently accessible that they can experience the satisfaction of solving them.