Learning Despite Schooling
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
Every parent wants their child to thrive, but when it comes to the arena of education they don’t know how. Most end up leaving intellectual development to the experts—the professional educators. For those who are wary of mainstream education the alternatives are expensive either in monetary terms (private schools) or time commitment (home schooling). Home schooling in particular anticipates the parent actually becoming a teacher—a prospect many can’t envision.
This season I want to catalyze a vision of parental involvement that is much less life altering than home schooling and that does not simply leave learning in the hands of the professionals. I’m definitely not opposed to home schooling, but I recognize it is not an option for many. If you’re a home schooler, this season will help you hone your craft. If your child attends a school led by professionals, this season will enable you to be involved in a transformative role as a coach and not just a traffic manager who ensures homework is completed on schedule.
What follows is an approximate transcript of the podcast episode “Learning Despite Schooling.”
Intro:
Welcome to a new season of Deep and Durable Learning!
I groped in a fog of confusion through elementary and middle school. I was a C student with a sprinkling of B- grades. My teachers told my parents I could do better. My question was how? Definitely not perfect, I did my homework on time under the watchful eye of my parents. I tried to focus in class and I was not a discipline problem.
I emerged from this unmotivating fog in high school and rapidly learned to thrive. I’d like to help your children (and maybe even you) fall in love with learning. This podcast season is all about helping your children thrive—perhaps in spite of the educational system.
Podcast:
I’m Mike Gray. I have a PhD in microbiology, and I’m recently retired from teaching undergraduates for nearly 45 years. Before that I taught high school science for three years. I’ve been passionately in love with learning since about 9th grade, but as you heard, it hasn’t always been so. The relationship was pretty rocky for a long time.
For about three decades I’ve given some serious consideration to how we learn with the goal of informing my own teaching. I’ve sought to create a learning environment that cooperates with my student’s brains. If you’ve listened to previous seasons of this podcast, you’ve heard the fruit of that. This season I’m going to address the reality that most students don’t like school for what are often very good reasons. Your own children may be experiencing this “failure to thrive.” I want to give you some tools to turn things around.
Daniel Willingham is a cognitive psychologist who teaches at the University of VA. His writing is extraordinarily accessible and practical. Willingham wrote the book Why Don’t Students Like School? which came out in a second edition in 2021. I’m going to interact this season with Willingham’s 10 principles of learning which form the backbone of his argument of why most students don’t like school. I don’t always agree with Willingham, but this is an important book (and no I don’t get any kickback for saying so).
Willingham observes that teachers generally loved school as students. That’s not what most students would say. Teachers are outliers. Their viewpoint is skewed in favor of the status quo. They like the system as it was and, largely, as it is. They view the problem as an issue of student motivation, so they focus on making work relevant and perhaps entertaining and even fun.
Motivation is certainly lacking in many students and schools are extraordinarily successful at eradicating the joy of learning in most of the remainder. By junior high there is a very small minority who love learning and a somewhat larger group who put up with school for the credential it provides or to please parents.
Since children are born with insatiable curiosity and a passion for learning, something has gone terribly wrong. The lack of motivation in school age children is only a symptom of a much deeper problem—a lack of respect for the way the brain learns.
Here’s the way Willingham states his first principle:
People are naturally curious, but we are not naturally good thinkers; unless cognitive conditions are right, we will avoid thinking. (p. 1)
Before addressing this head-on, let me digress to talk about labeling this as a principle. I think this is a big idea, but not a principle in the sense I develop in my book, Unforgettable: Enabling Deep and Durable Learning. I attempt there to recover the historical power of the foundational nature of a principle. Principles are propositions which are broadly applicable but principles are much more. Principles attempt to explain, and they predict where a certain line of practice will lead.
Principles are primary!
The assertion that people are naturally curious is absolutely correct, although it might be clearer to say children are naturally curious. Curiosity seems to have atrophied in some adults.
Curiosity in children leads to concept formation which is a game of pattern recognition. As physical objects are encountered, the child puts them in categories such as houses, grocery stores, etc. or dogs, cats, rabbits and so on. Seeking pattern is built into the way the brain functions. It is unquestionably a type of thinking and we are good at it, so it does not follow when Willingham says, “we are not naturally good thinkers.” We excel at pattern recognition, and we learn whatever we come to understand even as adults in terms of these patterns built up over time. These inter-related patterns are our conceptual frameworks.
Now it is possible to have a misconception—to put something into the wrong mental box or to perceive a pattern which is not there. Take for instance the conflation of masculinity with toxicity or the rise of conspiratorial thinking. Good thinking regularly inspects and debugs our web of concepts and connections. This quality control is what we are not good at. We are not wired to suspect that we harbor misconceptions. Rather, we bend the evidence of our experience to fit our frameworks. We are wired for confirmation bias.
The power tool for pruning conceptual frameworks is the question. It is notable that most education systems treat questions as perfunctory. Questions in the classroom aim at fact retrieval rather than potentially challenging one’s concepts. Asking the right questions would bog down the machinery of our industrial approach to educating. We simply don’t have time for questions of that sort.
That, I submit, is the root of the motivation problem. Questions can be deeply motivating such that students truly want to know the answer. No, they don’t want to be given the answer as a verbal assertion from an expert—a fact to be memorized. They want the give and take of inspecting their conceptual categories and tugging on the way concepts are linked to each other in their mental frameworks. They want to understand and own the conclusion so that they can build future understanding and action on it. Simply adding another fact to the library is dispiriting.
So, let’s have another go at Willingham’s assertion. Perhaps reformulating it as something like:
Children are born curious, and their curiosity is satisfied through building conceptual frameworks. Because these mental frameworks are personal, they may be flawed. Flaws in thinking are revealed by asking the right question—something we are not good at.
There are a couple of principles here.
Curiosity is satisfied through building conceptual frameworks.
Conceptual frameworks are remodeled through questions.
We naturally excel at the first principle. The second one is where education can serve as a corrective to our private frameworks. Notice that both 1 and 2 are propositions with broad application. More importantly, however, they both invoke a mechanism that explains. In the first curiosity is satisfied by the mechanism of building conceptual framework. That is what curiosity is intended to catalyze. In the second principle the mechanism of conceptual remodeling is by means of questions. Both predict. Curiosity is satisfied, not by fact accumulation, but by building concept categories and connections. Similarly, unexamined conceptual frameworks will contain misconceptions unless questions surface those errors.
The standard educational approach your child is probably embedded in views learning as fact collecting.
To the contrary, learning is concept formation and connection. Accumulating facts is not what the brain is built to do, and it is certainly light years away from learning as constructing a web of interrelated ideas. Ideas—that’s what concepts are.
To be effective, education needs to respect and utilize the reality that the brain is thinking in terms of concepts—patterns personally perceived over time. Education needs to aid and abet this organic reality and then improve it and debug it by asking questions that are seriously entertained and used to debug perceived patterns so that they conform with the evidence.
John Dewey is supposed to have said “Nobody thinks until he has a problem.” (This is not actually a quote, but a summary of other, less memorable things Dewey wrote.)
Common examples might be a math problem that we cannot solve or a reading comprehension quiz that shows we missed an important element of a story. Put yourself back in that situation. Did it provoke thinking? Not usually. It provoked you. It irritated you or perhaps made you angry even. The math problem was too hard, or it was not like the examples used to teach you. The importance of the missing element in the story is debatable, but the teacher holds the power, and you must knuckle under. So, you search for the missing fact. In the math problem, you look more closely at the examples you were given to see if one of them is more parallel to your situation than you suspected and you can plug in your variables and solve it. This isn’t really about thinking. It is certainly not about understanding and learning worthy of building on in the future.
Being stymied on these performance tasks might indicate a deeper problem—a flaw in our conceptual frameworks. If we go back to principle number two, we see that the tool to uncovering misconceptions is questioning. The need to answer questions can be the “problem” that motivates an examination of flawed thinking. Most students will not be able to articulate the right questions on their own (although this is the eventual goal) so
you need to step in here and ask the questions your child needs.
These will probably be how or why questions. “Why are you dividing by that number instead of subtracting it?” “How did the villain in the story get into the situation that allowed the authorities to catch him?” “Who do you think is the hero and why?”
Answering these questions should be helpful in the short-term but will probably not be motivating to your child. Willingham observes curriculum tends
to view schoolwork as a series of answers. We want students to know Boyle’s law or three causes of World War I . . . I think that we, as teachers, are so eager to get to the answers that we do not devote sufficient time to developing the question. . . . [and] it’s the question that piques people’s interest. Being told an answer doesn’t do anything for you. (p. 19)
We can apply the first principle here. Catalyzing curiosity occurs when we need to develop concepts to answer a question that we care about. That’s where motivation for learning comes from.
Answering this compelling question provokes thinking.
Being asked to care about answering a question that is trivial and already understood is not motivating, but neither is trying to answer a question that I’m not yet equipped to answer. Here’s where you as a parent can step in with your child. You can customize the question so that it is in their Goldilocks zone. Optimal learning requires a question that is just beyond your child’s current understanding. Too easy and there’s no motivation. Too difficult and it’s demoralizing. Start with a larger question and then simplify it as needed by asking the simpler questions that add up to the answer to the larger question.
Let’s take Boyle’s law as an example. The answer orientation requires students to memorize a definition like this “the pressure and volume of a gas are inversely related when the temperature is held constant.” This is opaque to most children.
Image by Rupert Kittinger-Sereinig from Pixabay
In contrast, here’s a question for a young child: “Why does bubble wrap pop when you push hard on the bubbles?” Every child knows the compulsion of popping bubbles in bubble wrap. You’re just asking a “why” to uncover the mechanism. To help them answer the why, use additional questions to develop their concepts of pressure and volume. Notice I said their concepts, not memorized definitions of pressure and volume. Keep going with questions until they can use these concepts to answer the question. In addition, the nature of an inverse relationship needs to be developed. Restrain yourself from answering the questions for your child
You might want to ask questions using additional examples such as spraying paint from a can or blowing up a balloon or using a bicycle pump.
So how does this kind of interaction with your kids prepare them for school? When the answers kids are accountable for at school hang on logical pegs within a framework of ideas in their brains, they will succeed at school, and they will be equipped to apply these concepts to a variety of situations propelled by real curiosity. They’ll be on their way to deep and durable learning!
Outro:
In today’s podcast Willingham and I ended with the same advice.
In learning questions are king.
Questions can be compelling, motivating a search for a satisfying answer. Questions are also clarifiers which we can use to probe, debug, and grow our child’s conceptual frameworks.
On the next episode I will contend with Willingham’s second principle about the priority of factual knowledge in learning. Given what he said in his first principle, I don’t think he’s being consistent. Given our natural wiring as pattern seekers, I think his emphasis on facts is a red herring.
See you in two weeks with more perspective that will help your child thrive in any educational environment!
Here’s a video interview with Daniel Willingham discussing the key points in Why Don’t Students Like School?