Why Don't Students Like School? Quotes

“Memory is the residue of thought.”
― Daniel T. Willingham, Why Don't Students Like School?: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom

“Teaching, like any complex cognitive skill, must be practiced to be improved.”
― Daniel T. Willingham, Why Don't Students Like School?: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom

“Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is the probable reason why so few people engage in”
― Daniel T. Willingham, Why Don't Students Like School?: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom

“A great deal of research shows that the most successful diets are not diets. Rather, they are lifestyle changes that the person believes he could live with every day for years—for example, switching from regular milk to skim milk, or walking the dog instead of just letting her out in the morning, or drinking black coffee instead of lattes.”
― Daniel T. Willingham, Why Don't Students Like School?: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom

“People are naturally curious, but we are not naturally good thinkers; unless the cognitive conditions are right, we will avoid thinking.”
― Daniel T. Willingham, Why Don't Students Like School?: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom

“Things that create an emotional reaction will be better remembered, but emotion is not necessary for learning.”
― Daniel T. Willingham, Why Don't Students Like School?: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom

“There is no doubt that having students memorize lists of dry facts is not enriching. It is also true (though less often appreciated) that trying to teach students skills such as analysis or synthesis in the absence of factual knowledge is impossible.”
― Daniel T. Willingham, Why Don't Students Like School?: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom

“Effective teachers have both qualities. They are able to connect personally with students, and they organize the material in a way that makes it interesting and easy to understand.”
― Daniel T. Willingham, Why Don't Students Like School?: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom

“Although we like to think that we decide what to pay attention to, our minds have their own wishes and desires when it comes to the focus of attention.”
― Daniel T. Willingham, Why Don't Students Like School?: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom

“makes memory long lasting; and (3) it increases the likelihood that learning will transfer to new situations.”
― Daniel T. Willingham, Why Don't Students Like School?: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom

“People are naturally curious, but we are not naturally good thinkers; unless the cognitive conditions are right, we will avoid thinking. The implication of this principle is that teachers should reconsider how they encourage their students to think, in order to maximize the likelihood that students will get the pleasurable rush that comes from successful thought.”
― Daniel T. Willingham, Why Don't Students Like School?: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom

“Kidd, C., & Hayden, B. Y. (2015). The psychology and neuroscience of curiosity. Neuron, 88(3), 449–460. An overview of contemporary theories of curiosity, focusing on the idea that curiosity evolved to ensure that animals, including humans, learn about their environment. We are maximally curious when we think the environment offers the greatest opportunity to learn.”
― Daniel T. Willingham, Why Don't Students Like School?: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom

“remain alert for what works.When differentiating among students, craft knowledge trumps science.”
― Daniel T. Willingham, Why Don't Students Like School?: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom

“Books expose children to more facts and to a broader vocabulary than virtually any other activity, and persuasive data indicate that people who read for pleasure enjoy cognitive benefits throughout their lifetime”
― Daniel T. Willingham, Why Don't Students Like School?: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom

“When you plan a lesson, you start with the information you want students to know by its end. As a next step, consider what the key question for that lesson might be and how you can frame that question so it will have the right level of difficulty to engage your students and so you will respect your students’ cognitive limitations.”
― Daniel T. Willingham, Why Don't Students Like School?: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom

“mundane”
― Daniel T. Willingham, Why Don't Students Like School?: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom

“As you doubtless noticed, sometimes the words matched the pictures and sometimes they didn’t. It probably felt more difficult to name the pictures when there was a mismatch. That’s because when an experienced reader sees a printed word, it’s quite difficult not to read it. Reading is automatic.Thus the printed word pants conflicts with the word you are trying to retrieve, shirt. The conflict slows your response. A child just learning to read wouldn’t show this interference, because reading is not automatic for him.When faced with the letters p, a, n, t, and s, the child would need to painstakingly (and thus slowly) retrieve the sounds associated with each letter, knit them together, and recognize that the resulting combination of sounds forms the word pants. For the experienced reader, those processes happen in a flash and are a good example of the properties of automatic processes: (1) They happen very quickly. Experienced readers read common words in less than a quarter of a second. (2) They are prompted by a stimulus in the environment, and if that stimulus is present, the process may occur even if you wish it wouldn’t.Thus you know it would be easier not to read the words in Figure 3, but you can’t seem to avoid doing so. (3) You are not aware of the components of the automatic process.That is, the component processes of reading (for example, identifying letters) are never conscious.The word pants ends up in consciousness, but the mental processes necessary to arrive at the conclusion that the word is pants do not.The process is very different for a beginning reader, who is aware of each constituent step (“that’s a p, which makes a ‘puh’ sound . . .”). FIGURE 3: Name each picture, ignoring the text. It’s hard to ignore when the text doesn’t match the picture, because reading is an automatic process.   The example in Figure 3 gives a feel for how an automatic process operates, but it’s an unusual example because the automatic process interferes with what you’re trying to do. Most of the time automatic processes help rather than hinder. They help because they make room in working memory. Processes that formerly occupied working memory now take up very little space, so there is space for other processes. In the case of reading, those “other” processes would include thinking about what the words actually mean. Beginning readers slowly and painstakingly sound out each letter and then combine the sounds into words, so there is no room left in working memory to think about meaning (Figure 4).The same thing can happen even to experienced readers. A high school teacher asked a friend of mine to read a poem out loud. When he had finished reading, she asked what he thought the poem meant. He looked blank for a moment and then admitted he had been so focused on reading without mistakes that he hadn’t really noticed what the poem was about. Like a first grader, his mind had focused on word pronunciation, not on meaning. Predictably, the class laughed, but what happened was understandable, if unfortunate.”
― Daniel T. Willingham, Why Don't Students Like School?: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom

“In the inns of certain Himalayan villages is practiced a refined tea ceremony. The ceremony involves a host and exactly two guests, neither more nor less. When his guests have arrived and seated themselves at his table, the host performs three services for them. These services are listed in the order of the nobility the Himalayans attribute to them: stoking the fire, fanning the flames, and pouring the tea. During the ceremony, any of those present may ask another, “Honored Sir, may I perform this onerous task for you?” However, a person may request of another only the least noble of the tasks which the other is performing. Furthermore, if a person is performing any tasks, then he may not request a task that is nobler than the least noble task he is already performing. Custom requires that by the time the tea ceremony is over, all the tasks will have been transferred from the host to the most senior of the guests. How can this be accomplished?3”
― Daniel T. Willingham, Why Don't Students Like School?: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom

“Sometimes 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.”
― Daniel T. Willingham, Why Don't Students Like School?: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom