Just about every teacher at some point tries to trick their students into learning something by making it “relevant” to students’ interests. You might be surprised to learn that I don’t think much of this technique. I love cognitive psychology, so you might think, “Well, to get Willingham to pay attention to this math problem, we’ll wrap it up in a cognitive psychology example.” But Willingham is quite capable of being bored by cognitive psychology, as has been proved repeatedly at professional conferences I’ve attended. Trying to make problems “relevant” can also feel forced and artificial, and students see right through the ruse.
So if content isn’t the way to engage students, how about your teaching style? Students often refer to good teachers as those who “make the stuff interesting.” It’s not that the teacher relates the material to students’ interests-rather, the teacher has a way of interacting with students that they find engaging.
When we think of a good teacher, we tend to focus on personality and on the way the teacher presents himself or herself. But that’s only half of good teaching. The jokes, the stories, and the warm manner all generate goodwill and get students to pay attention. But then how do we make sure they think about meaning? That is where the second property of being a good teacher comes in-organizing the ideas in a lesson plan in a coherent way so that students will understand and remember. Cognitive psychology cannot tell us how to be personable and likable to our students, but I can tell you about one set of principles that cognitive psychologists know about to help students think about the meaning of a lesson.
The human mind seems exquisitely tuned to understand and remember stories-so much so that psychologists sometimes refer to stories as “psychologically privileged,” meaning that they are treated differently in memory than other types of material. I’m going to suggest that organizing a lesson plan like a story is an effective way to help students comprehend and remember.
First, stories are easy to comprehend, because the audience knows the structure, which helps to interpret the action. For example, the audience knows that events don’t happen randomly in stories. Second, stories are interesting and engage listeners more readily that other formats, even if the same information is presented. Lastly, stories are easy to remember.
I’m not suggesting that teachers simply tell stories, although there’s nothing wrong with doing so. Rather, I’m suggesting something one step removed from that. Structure your lessons the way stories are structured, using the four Cs: causality, conflict, complications, and character. This doesn’t mean you must do most of the talking. Small group work or projects or any other method may be used. The story structure applies to the way you organize the material that you encourage your students to think about, not to the methods you use to teach the material.
Daniel T. Willingham is a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and the author of Why Students Don’t Like School: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What it Means for the Classroom (Jossey-Bass, 2009) from which this post was adapted.
Can you tell a story about how a teacher might implement this strategy?
Could the “story” be considered “context”?
As a high school English and history teacher, I strongly believe in finding “relevance hooks” – but not as a “trick,” and not in the way you characterize them through your “Willingham likes psychology” example. As you say, that reeks of inauthenticity (what I call “schooliness”). Young and old alike can smell that bad smell a mile off.
But I’d argue there’s a better way to think of “relevance” than faking it through the individualized “tricks” your example suggests (which, in a classroom of 20-30 students, would be impractical to even attempt, btw).
It’s this: aim for real, not fake, relevance. An example: Martin Luther’s Reformation. Boring as hell stuff that happened over 500 years ago, on the face of it, even for the young Catholics and Protestants (and Buddhists, Hindus, and atheists) sitting in the history class.
But it was a terror in its day, causing the earth to shake under the feet of the faithful with its cognitive dissonance upon which they thought their eternal happiness hinged.
I agree that a good storyteller can make it less boring and more memorable, but can’t see how I’ve done much but entertain students and helped them remember stuff to pass a test if all I do is tell the story well (or get them to).
It’s still irrelevant.
I’ve taught the Reformation in a way that made it both a memorable story and a relevant one for students. I’ve paired Martin Luther’s critiques of the Church with Bishop John Shelby Spong’s 1998 (?) essay calling for a “New Reformation.” Spong calls on Christendom to abandon most of its Nicene-based creeds: virgin birth, divinity of Jesus, resurrection, and everything else the scientific revolution has put in question about the ancient faith.
When many students read that, the earth shakes beneath their own feet. Suddenly they experience something of similar magnitude of Luther’s contemporaries – and they have their own cognitive dissonances to try to resolve, their own choices to make.
It’s not a trick, and it’s not pandering to Jimmy’s love of basketball: it’s engaging them intellectually on a question of living importance.
That’s relevance beyond remembering and test-taking, I would argue.
The unfortunate thing, of course, is that a parent demanded I either stop teaching Spong, or be fired. Schools are scared of true critical thinking that way, and find it more convenient if it only tackles safe subjects. Another trick beneath the dignity of students and teachers alike.
I’m with you on story-telling, though. I guess I just don’t think relevance and storytelling are mutually exclusive.
Dan,
I’m not ready to explore the epistemological dimensions of your arguments and I probably can’t read your book until summer, but I think I’m ready to comment on some of the political implications of your great work in this issue of the AFT journal and last week’s blogs. Although your work is very consistent with an aligned k-8th curriculum like Core Knowledge, it is equally impressive in arguing against the top down reform, at least in high school, of curriculum alignment and pacing. (And even if every school in an urban district was Core Knowledge, that wouldn’t justify curriculum pacing because not every class in the district could be expected to move at the same rate through that same curriculum) Your approach actually makes a strong case for teacher autonomy, because every teacher needs to find that sweet spot where the questions aren’t too difficult or too easy.
Treating failure as a natural part of learning is contrary, also, to the “Whatever It Takes” Mantra which never made any sense anyway unless you define learning as test scores and educational reform as teacher bashing. My theory is that inner city kids face so much failure that educators are afraid to add the last straws that break their educational backs so we create bogus credit recovery programs and we don’t enforce disciplinary consequences. Whether its academics or learning how to be a student and behave in a school, failure is essential. We just need to avoid excessive failure and offer immediate help in getting back into the saddle.
I’m glad that you provide justifications for teacher-driven instruction that is often derided as a “sage on the stage.” I’m not about to expend the time required to put my chalkboard routines on Power Point, and I’m still not convinced that that technology is more effective in changing the pace as you describe in the AFT Educator, and the chalkboard remains an excellent medium of providing memory aides and responding to the variations in student preparation. Its certainly a better comedic tool and I still consider humor as the #1 instructional aid.
Regarding your advice to reconsider when to puzzle students, I’m always starting with a joke, even though the students may not catch it until they’ve understood the lesson. So, the punchline of the attention-grabbing joke often needs to be the teacher. The same or another joke can be timed to follow the “aha moment.”
I came from the 70s school of New Social History or “history with the people left out.” But when I switched to public schools I quickly learned the value of stories. (When I first read E.D. Hirsh I rejected him because he sounded like Allan Bloom who sounded like a jerk. But when I read Hirsh in the AFT Educator, I read with an open mind. Now its funny that I tried so hard to parce the differences between Gramsci hegemonic forces and Foucalt’s structuralism and Althussar and all of those other disembodied ideas, so I think I understand where the data-DRIVEN reformers who’ve never been in a classroom are coming from, and besides higher ed gave me plenty of funny stories with teachers a the butt of the joke)
I’m been trying to figure out why it is so much harder to get kids who have the desire to understand Obama to watch video of his answers. Its more than his vocbulary. His logic is “more than two steps long.” So, if you respect the students limited knowledge and memory and their definition of relevance, and you are showing clips of Obama news conference, you start with his counter-punch answer as to why he didn’t immediately criticize AIGs. Teens are always looking for “drama” and the “I like to know what I’m talking about …” line got “ooohs and ahs” and creates an opening. Then, if you want to teach Obama’s first 100 days, you might start with humanizing stories about FDR. (One student who came from a Core Knowledge school knew what the First One Hundred Days was, which was a first.)
Nancy said so much that I agree with, from not wanting to criticize ed schools (I had 8 hours of education classes)to Gladwell to the seating chart issue, but I especially agree with her statement that everyone needs an approach that fits their personality. (Expanding on seating charts, yesterday I had to deal with a fight outside our room and was surprised that the neighboring teacher didn’t respond. It turns out that the great young teacher next door was concentrating on his new seating chart and Power Points. My worry is that he has bought into the Whatever It Takes model, of taking full responsibility for everything. By the 4th quarter when I have disruptive students, I’m putting my effort into lobbying assistant principals for disciplinary consequences not curtailing the freedom of the vast majority of my students. By the way, when half of the fighters ran west and half ran east, my memory told me to take the middle staircase and my memory told me how to approach the situation so that a) nobody gets hurt in an unsupervised fight and b) how to play the game so that 13 parent conference suspensions come out of it every if the cameras and the adults can’t document enough for a fighting suspension. The point is that teaching is a political process, informed by memories of how previous political interactions turned out.)
Speaking of memory as understanding, I continually monitor and adjust my lesson in each of the four or five classes each day. I’m sure your right that its actually my memory that is really the operative mechanism. (And blogging and writing memos can function like a diary). My thinking like a scientist methodology is too primitive to allow myself to think I’ve devise THE answer.
Following up on Tom’s “thinking like a historian” I came from a generation who defined themselves through an essay on The Sound and the Fury where Bengi the Idiot was always peaceful when being driven from right to left around a circular drive, but screamed uncontrollably when he was carried from left to right around the drive. Traditional historians were seen as Bengis who saw a mass of images coming at them and their job was to keep “one damned thing after another” straight. Social historians were like the horse wearing blinders carrying Bengi, that filtered out meaningless facts, and allowed a focus on the important ones. Ideas, then, were paradigms or filters that shut out extraneous, distracting information.
I’ll be trying to be a good consumer of cognitive science, but after I digest your work I’ll be translating it into metaphors and stories that are valuable to me. Rather than reject my previous metaphors, I’ll probably modify them.
Rarely do I disagree with Diane Senechal, but I’m not willing to let my students who read at a 5th grade level just jump into a book written on a 10th grade level without having them study the pictures, graphics, titles, and other hints. Particularly valuable are the photos that tell a story that foreshadows the texts main ideas.
That gets me back to the biggest bone of contention in this series, the drilling. Certain types of practice can be turned into game for young people, but teens just aren’t going to respond to those drills. I can’t help but believe the problem has been made worst by both some progressive educational practices and excessive test prep practices, but the problem, fundamentally, flows from our aleinated post-modern culture. Not enough kids have enough opportunities to watch ants, to be taught how to fix machinery, or to be taught why you wash fruit with cold water and not hot water – thus getting experience in “learning how to learn.”
So, how do we deal with kids who haven’t had that nurturing? That’s one reason why I have to withhold judgement on P21 and hope its a learning process not a turn-key product. Until we can solve the problems created by cancer, incarceration, immigration, drug abuse, etc. we are going to have older teens who don’t have the background knowledge to move at a predictable rate. Rather than trying to teacher-proof education, we need teachers with the confidence and the judgment and the memories of how to offer enough straw of background information in order to create enough bricks of understanding the answers to make learning enjoyable. For the foreseeable future that has to be “an art” informed by cognitive science, not some aligned and paced process governed by assessments of measurable knowledge.
This may be long, but maybe it is a story of how teachers can benefit from your recommendation of stories.
John,
I have many thoughts in response to Dan’s post and your comment, but I will have to limit myself for now. I wanted to comment about the question of having students consult pictures, blurbs, etc. for clues. You responded to that, and I have been thinking some more about it.
We all glance at the book cover to see what the book might be about. We do derive clues from the picture, the blurb, the title, the genre, and more. The argument in favor of “strategies” is that children do not do this automatically if they do not learn it at home. They need to be taught these techniques explicitly.
What happens, then, is that entire lessons are devoted to these “prereading strategies” that otherwise would take a few seconds. Students are told to “turn and talk” to their partner about their predictions based on the cover picture, etc. This seems awfully distracting and it delays the entry into the text (with little reward, I find).
I have seen students dwell far too long on the cover picture, spinning stories off of it that have nothing to do with the book. Even after reading part of the book, they come back to the cover picture and use it to predict what will happen later. It takes a lot of work to get them out of these habits.
Likewise, I think the “prediction” strategy is overdone. We don’t always spend time predicting what will happen next in a story. Some stories are conducive to that; others are not. I am not sure how productive a prediction would be in a story like Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland or Winnie-the-Pooh. Even in mystery stories, too much predicting can take the focus away from the text itself.
But what is really at stake here? I find that a lot of these “strategies” send the message to the children that the text is somehow forbidding and incomprehensible to them and that they need to find out what others have said about the book before entering it themselves. In grad school (Russian literature) I found among lit crit people a similar tendency to avoid the text. Whenever I brought up a work of literature, someone would bring up what so-and-so had said about it. That was more important, apparently, than the text itself. People wanted to be sure that they knew what others had said before forming their own opinions. If you actually read the text, you were guilty of “close textual analysis,” which was considered sort of quaint. I was often told that “close textual analysis” was my forte; sometimes this was not meant as a compliment.
If we teach children to hover around the text and depend on what others have said and drawn about it, that is what they will do. If we teach them to go right into the text, that is what they will do. Now of course they need adequate preparation. John, I wasn’t suggesting that students at a fifth-grade level go right into texts at a tenth-grade level with no help. But are the pictures and blurbs really helpful? Or would preparation instead consist of some cultural and historical context; some vocabulary; and any other orientation that would actually bring insight?
The objection, I imagine, to that sort of orientation is that it comes from the teacher. It might take the form of–gasp–a short lecture. Schools would rather have students “discover” these things for themselves–maybe by going on the internet. But this can go wrong in many ways. They may not be able to understand what they find, or it may be overly simplistic. It might be full of errors and they wouldn’t know it. There is something rather fitting and elegant about having the teacher teach. And as Dan demonstrates so well, if the teacher makes a story of it, it will be interesting.
Diana Senechal
Diana,
You’re right. And you put it very well. I don’t criticize the practice of having students explain the photo to each other, but its easy for that practice to create bad habits. I used those methods in summer programs but quickly abandoned them in school because the likelihood of doing them well was remote.
Clay
All I can say is that I would love to sit in your class.
What I love about your example is that you show your students the relevance of something that they would not, at first sight, think was relevant to them.
John
Wow, so much in this rich entry.
Just a couple of comments. Much of the front end of your entry concerns what the principles of cognitive science that I discuss might mean for education—the classroom, and broader systems. I’ll begin by saying that I agree with your slant on this—teachers must be the interpreters of what these data mean for their classrooms. I believe it ought not to be up to others (least of all cognitive scientists) to conclude “. . .and so we know that teachers ought to do X.”
I’m going to write a blog entry on this over at Britannica relatively soon.
As for practice with teens. . .I think it is essential to remember that practice can be embedded in other skills so it’s not the same thing every time.
Diana
It sounds like you and John are in agreement, and I would be as well, given the significant data on this. Teaching young readers (3rd or 4th grade) strategies like you describe yield a sizable boost to comprehension, but it seems to be a one-time boost. Further practice doesn’t do much.
FWIW, Dan, I wrote a piece called “Why History isn’t Learned, and How Story Helps Change That” that describes my own classroom approach to helping students understand that a) they probably don’t understand the story of history much at all, and b) they can learn that story by – what else – learning to tell it. It’s here: http://beyond-school.org/2008/07/19/gombrich-world-history/
I also don’t believe that relevance and story telling are mutually exclusive. I teach Economics. My students don’t care why demand has an inverse relationship, but when I turn it into a story with them as the main characters, the students start to get it. They will only buy more CDs as the price goes down because they only have so much money, and there are so many other things they want.
Students know when you are not being real with them, so I think it is crucial to make sure that the “story” you tell lines up with the topic you are trying to teach. However, I think that sometimes we need to face the fact that not everything we want students to learn about can be turned into something entertaining. My hope is that when it fits, I can do such a good job using stories to get my students to understand, they will start to comprehend what I am saying even when there isn’t a story involved.
@Clay@ — just my two cents. I can understand why a parent would want you to stop teaching Spong. Spong and Luther aren’t the same — Luther argued that Christianity had deviated from its true roots into religion; while Spong basically says that we have to throw away the roots. In some ways they are the same, but mostly, the difference is huge. Luther saw himself as a reformer — he sincerely wanted to go back to what he perceived to be “original” Christianity. Spong is just an apologist — trying to make Christianity “relevant” in a scientific culture.
Still, good point about telling relevant stories.