Just Getting Started
I am just getting started as the new Teaching and Learning Coordinator. Right now, I am reading books and doing research to familiarize myself with latest and greatest in the field. My first book that I choose was a good one recommended by Dr. Kim Christopherson called Why Don’t Students Like School by Daniel T. Willingham. Would anyone like to discuss it with me in the comments section?
Dean,
On page six, I liked the distinction between the lazy ‘thinking’ that we often do, and the ‘thinking outside the box’ that we ought to do (in the classroom at least). I wonder how we can encourage students to ‘think outside the box’.
Willingham says we enjoy thinking outside the box, but that we get bored or frustrated real fast.
Do you think some people have a higher threshold for holding onto a thought-problem? (It seems like ‘smart’ people just don’t give up as easy.)
And if so- is there a way to ‘cultivate’ this passion for learning? I wonder what the steps would coach a student into thinking longer and harder. Can I measure a person’s ‘stick-to-it-ness’? Can I identify some students for coaching, and demonstrate progress based on some kind of intrevention?
Hi Andy,
Getting students to think outside the box is something that must cultivate as teachers. For each student, things are going to be different. But I have a variety of strategies that I like to use. Some students respond well to the Socratic Method. Others respond well to talking things out with me, leading to different thought patterns. Others need more encouragement, and still others need a kick in the pants. The trick is to find what works for each student. Luckily, teaching at a place like Morningside gives me an opportunity to work with students in a small class room size.
Metaphorically speaking, I am trying to get students to take a trip from Sioux City to Omaha. Trips from Sioux City to Moscow are nearly impossible to take students on. The goal is to take them on ever lengthening trips to think outside the box. My biggest problem is with students who have never left, metaphorically, the 51106 zip code. I am afraid that my patience is low for those kind of students. And getting them to spend even more time on the problems than their peers is a difficult challenge for me.
But, to be honest, I have no idea how to measure a student’s stick-to-it-ness. I suppose that all of teaching is to guide students to be better at enduring the problems of thinking at harder and harder levels. If we could identify and measure this, then I am sure that your method of moving students into longer and longer times of just working with source materials would work. We would need someone with a domain knowledge of psychology to help us out with that I think.
Andy,
In chapter 2, Willingham talks about the importance of factual knowledge. This is something that I have to admit that I have not been emphasizing in my classroom. Partly because I believe that if you need to find something, it is a quick WWW search away. But mostly because rote memorization reminds too much of high school, and I want to emphasize that we are beyond high school now. Is there a way to emphasize the importance of facts, as well as do it in a way that suggests that this is no longer high school?
Also, I like to use open book and open note tests and quizzes. Is this something I should discontinue in the future to emphasize to my students the importance of memorizing the facts so that they can recall them later?
Blog community,
I read this book last semester and was very happy to finally read a book based on good cognitive science but written for a general teaching audience. In terms of some of the suggestions the author has (the need for factual knowledge, enjoying out of the box thinking, becoming easily frustrated when that out of box thinking gets too hard) are all supported by research.
In terms of the factual knowledge issue, I agree, Dean, that the drill and kill exercises of high school are aversive and not enjoyed by anyone. I also do not necessarily focus on rote memorization in my courses, however, it is necessary to have a basic grasp of the terms and ideas of a content area before a student can learn something new. I emphasize needing to know the terms so that we can have a common language and to have a basic idea of the major theories in psychology so that when I comment on them they know what I am talking about.
I like to think of memory as a web full of hooks. If you have something in memory that you know (memorized material) to hook a new memory on. If a student does not have a structure to hook a new idea on, they are going to lose it.
The trick here is to figure out how much of that basic material needs to be easily available (memorized) to be accessed in memory and how much time will you as a teacher dedicate to students learning this information. One way to do this without the kill and drill is to explicitly state when two things are related (i.e. “remember when we talked about X – brief review-, concept Y is related in this way”
The other issue of perseverance has often been a topic of interest to educational researchers. One possible variable is the various motivational goal orientations a student might have. For brevity sake (I wrote a dissertation on this) there are two basic types of achievement motivation – mastery (learning for the sake of learning) and performance (learning to achieve some external goal – grade, money, attention, accolades, avoid failing, look smart, don’t look dumb). People with the mastery goal orientation tend to stick to difficult material. The trick is to try to get a mastery orientation into your students.
There is some research that suggests that these goal orientations are not global (they change from situation to situation), but there also does tend to be some general personality characteristics to come extent. One of the things that unfortunately sucks the mastery motivation out of students are the emphasis on grades and simple memorization of material often see in jr and sr high school. We usually start our mastery oriented as kids and through life it gets killed for many folks.
I think that the best that a teacher can do is to emphasize understanding, making errors, working out the problem, and an excitement and love for learning. We will never reach some students, but research has shown that the less competition in classes (in terms of a true curve grading system), less emphasis on grades, more emphasis on the learning process which includes making errors and learning from the errors, and making problems interesting and applicable tend to foster mastery motivation in many students.
In a final comment to Andy, I’m unsure if there is an established measure of “stick-it-to-ness” but it’s probably out there. Because this is a central issue for teachers there has to be research out there on various ways of conceptualizing this idea. I’m not sure of all of them, but the goal orientation literature would be a part of this.