Tag Archive for 'Dan Willingham'

Dan Willingham’s Hall of Shame

Published by Robert Pondiscio on November 11, 2009 in Education News. 8 Comments

Dan Willingham has debuted a new feature over the the Washington Post’s Answer Sheet blog aimed at debunking scientific claims made on behalf  of educational products.  The first case on the docket is a computer program called eyeQ, which purports to improve reading speed by teaching kids to use both hemispheres of the brain during reading.  A recent article about eyeQ in a Salt Lake City newspaper quotes company officials saying the product offers “strength conditioning for the eyes and the brain.  Willingham found nothing in research literature about eyeQ, and takes a dim view of the science on which the company bases its claims. 

The website makes much of the fact that only the left hemisphere of the brain is active when you are reading. It neglects to mention that the left and right hemispheres are both active in inexperienced readers. The coup de grace for me is the website’s claim that the left hemisphere is associated with scientific ability and logic, whereas the right brain is associated with intuition and artistic ability. This cartoon characterization of the brain was discredited 30 years ago.

eyeQ, which is currently in use in 750 schools, claims to be based on a “revolutionary information process” developed in Japan by Dr. Akihiro Kawamura, who has “conducted extensive research and has authored 72 books related to brain function, reading and learning technology,” according to the company’s website.   Heard of him?  No?  Well, Google him then. Still nothing?

The books do not show up in a web search, says the company’s president, “because they are in Japanese.”

How Can We Get Students to Think Like Experts?

Published by Dan Willingham on March 26, 2009 in Education Practice, Research and Reports and Teaching. 22 Comments

“How can we expect to train the next generation of scientists if we are not training them to do what scientists actually do?”  This sounds sensible, even insightful,  but students are not cognitively capable of doing what scientists (or historians, writers, mathematicians, etc.) do.   It’s not just that students know less than experts.  As I’ll describe, what experts know is organized differently in their memory.

Even the greatest scientists do not think like experts when they start out. They think like novices. It’s not possible to think like a scientist or a historian without a great deal of training. Does this mean we shouldn’t ask students to write a poem or conduct a scientific experiment?  Of course not. (Some great examples and ideas for history can be found at the National History Education Clearninghouse). But we should understand the difference between the thought processes of experts and novices. 

Accomplished mathematicians, scientists, and historians have worked in their field for years, and the knowledge and experience they have accumulated enables them to think in ways that are not open to the rest of us. Thus, trying to get your students to think like them is not a realistic goal. “Well, sure,” you might be thinking. ” I never really expected that my students are going to win the Nobel Prize! I just want them to understand some science.” That’s a worthy goal, but it is very different than the goal of students thinking like experts.

Real scientists are experts. They have worked at science for forty hours (or more) each week for years. Those years of practice make a qualitative–not quantitative–difference in the way they think compared to how even a well-informed amateur thinks.  It will surely not surprise you to learn that experts have lots of background knowledge in their area of expertise. But the expert mind has another edge over the rest of us. The information in long-term memory is organized differently than the information in working memory.  We can generalize by saying that experts think abstractly.  When confronted with a classroom management problem, for example, novice teachers typically jump right into trying to solve the problem, but experts first seek to define the problem, gathering more information if necessary. Thus expert teachers have knowledge of different types of classroom management problem. Not surprisingly, expert teachers more often solve these problems in ways that address root causes and not just the behavioral incident. For example, an expert is more likely than a novice to make a permanent change in seating assignments.

Seeing things abstractly enables experts to home in on important details among a flood of information, to produce solutions that are always sensible and consistent (even if they are not always right), and to show some transfer of their knowledge to related fields. In addition, many of the routine tasks that experts perform have become automatic through practice.

Sounds great. How can we teach students to do that? Unfortunately, the answer to this question is not exactly cheering. The only path to expertise, as far as anyone knows, is practice.  One other interesting factor:  Great scientists are almost always workaholics. They have incredible persistence, and their threshold for mental exhaustion is very high. 

So if we can’t get students to think like experts what’s a reasonable goal?  Drawing a distinction between knowledge understanding and knowledge creation may help. Experts create. For example, scientists create and test theories of natural phenomena, historians create narrative interpretations of historical events, and mathematicians create proofs and descriptions of complex patterns. Experts not only understand their field, they also add new knowledge to it.  A more modest and realistic goal for students is knowledge comprehension. Student may not be able to develop their own scientific theory, but they can develop a deep understanding of existing theory.  A student may not be able to write a new narrative of historical fact, but she can follow and understand a narrative that someone else has written.

Tomorrow: How can I help slow learners?

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. 

Protect Teachers? Or Protect the Profession?

Published by Robert Pondiscio on March 18, 2009 in Education Leadership, Teaching and accountability. 14 Comments

On Brittanica Blog, Dan Willingham takes a look at teachers’ wish for greater respect and the role of unions in winning it.  He observes that unions perform two important functions that are fundamentally at odds with each other: they protect the rights of individual teachers in personnel matters, and they undertake public relations and other activities in an effort to promote the profession.

On the one hand, if your mission is to protect the members of the profession from unfair termination, you will insist on a rigorous process by which their incompetence must be demonstrated. On the other hand it must be admitted that in any profession employing several million people some are incompetent, and if your job is to protect the reputation and integrity of the profession, you should want those people to leave.

Since the process of determining who is or isn’t a good teacher is far from foolproof, mistakes will be made, Dan notes. So the question becomes what kind of mistake do you prefer: firing someone who is actually a good teacher?  Or failing to fire an incompetent teacher?  If you’re cautious about not allowing good teachers to be fired, you’ll inevitably allow more poor teachers to remain.  If protecting the reputation of the profession is your main concern some good teachers will end up being drummed out of the corps unfairly. 

“If your diagnostic is imperfect, you’re going to make errors,” Willingham writes.  “All you can do is choose the proportion of error types.”  He argues that teachers unions have handled this tradeoff badly, harming the reputation of teaching as a profession. 

While Dan’s post is at Brittanica Blog, the debate over it is at Eduwonk.  Teachers’ unions “are in a purgatory of their own creation,” opines Andy Rotherham. ”They don’t want to use data to evaluate teachers and they don’t want to use managerial discretion.   I guess that leaves the Magic 8-Ball?”  After much back and forth about the union’s preferred role Willingham makes an observation that seems unassailable: “The President is talking about getting rid of poor teachers,” he writes. ”It appears likely that something is going to be done, so you may as well try to take control of the situation so it’s something you are doing, rather than something that is done to you.” 

Lead, follow, or get out of the way, in other words. 

N.B. Dan has a brilliant new book out called Why Students Don’t Like School, which if I had a magic wand would appear on the desk of every teacher in America. Absent that, I’m thrilled to report that Professor Willingham will be taking over the Core Knowledge Blog all of next week to talk about some of the insights from his work and his new book while I take a week off from blogging.  Don’t miss it.

21st Century Skills: A Guide for Clear Thinkers

Published by Robert Pondiscio on March 2, 2009 in Curriculum, Education Theory and Teacher Training. 17 Comments

In politics, “issue framing” means presenting an issue in a way that is most likely to get others to agree.  A classic example of this is in the debate over abortion.  No one is for or against it; they support the “right to life” or the “right to choose.”  Reject a cleverly framed issue and you risk finding yourself on political, moral or ethical thin ice.  This is why those who are opposed to military actions must turn cartwheels to “support the troops.”  It’s essential that you praise the men and women in uniform if you wish to criticize what they are being ordered to do. 

21st Century skills is a masterpiece of issue framing.  Who can possibly argue against students being able to innovate, think critically and solve problems?  The beauty of a well-framed argument is that it keeps its opponent forever on defense.  A classic piece of political wisdom is ”if you’re explaining, you’re losing” and critics of 21st Century Skills have to spend a lot of time explaining why something that sounds so attractive and desirable doesn’t make a lot of sense, or simply won’t work. 

That brings us to the peerless Dan Willingham, who patiently and clearly unpacks several of the problems with the 21st Century skills movement.  Dan stole the show at last week’s Common Core panel discussion in Washington, and his piece today on Britannica Blog lays out in a single reading three flawed assumptions made by The Partnership for 21st Century Skills:

1. Knowledge and Skills are separate.
2. Teachers don’t have cognitive limits.
3. Experience is equivalent to practice.

Pay careful attention to point #2, for it’s enormously important, and with the exception of Willingham, it has gone completely undiscussed. As currently conceived, 21st century skills enthusiasts expect teachers to do a job that is literally beyond the cognitive abilities of almost all of us.  Not just beyond the limits of most teachers but beyond the limits of most human beings.

Everyone’s cognitive system has limits. We can’t remember everything that happens to us. We can’t pay attention to five things at the same time. This is important in the classroom because the methods that P21 encourages teachers to use (as the ones most likely to develop 21st-century skills) are incredibly demanding—so demanding that almost no one can use them effectively without a great deal of preparation and training. The demanding methods include project-based learning, small-group learning, and others in which students have some voice in the direction of the lesson plan. These methods are difficult because it’s so hard to plan for them; you can’t know what’s going to happen in the classroom until you get there.

Willingham points out that teachers already believe the teaching methods promoted by P21 are the best ones.  “Yet classroom observation studies show that very few teachers use them, almost certainly because they are so difficult to use.”  He went into even more detail on this point at his Common Core presentation. 

If you’re uncomfortable with the giddy promotion of 21st century skills, here’s the start of your “support the troops” position.  the 21st Century Skills movement is conscripting you in an unwinnable war.  They want you to do a job that is beyond your –  or anyone’s — cognitive capability.  It will be easy (and facile) to say as Ken Kay did at the Common Core event last week that just because something is hard doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.  Diane Ravitch recently pointed out that we’re already gullible about the myth of the miracle teacher.  Now P21 wants to up the ante. 

If we’re serious about closing the achievement gap and raising the level of performance of American education, we can’t be serious about asking teachers to walk on water and labeling them failures when they drown.  Any credible reform has to be reasonable and achievable.  21st Century Skills, as currently conceived, fails dismally on both fronts.   If we’re serious about equipping children with these important skills, we need to be equally serious and clear-eyed about what it will take, about what works and what doesn’t. 

Right now P21’s take on education is a clear case of Garbage In, Garbage Out.  And when it fails, as it inevitably must, guess who will be blamed?

Panel Discussion on “21st Century Skills”

Published by Robert Pondiscio on February 20, 2009 in Education News. 0 Comments

Lots of blogging lately about the 21st Century skills movement.  Now, E.D. Hirsch, Diane Ravitch, Dan Willingham and Ken Kay, the President of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills will have at it at a panel discussion in Washington, DC on Tuesday, Feb. 24, titled “What is the Proper Role of Skills in the Curriculum? A critique of the idea of 21st century skills.”  Details on the program, which is hosted by Common Core and moderated by its co-chair, Antonia Cortese are here.  If you’d like to attend send an email to info@commoncore.org.

21st Century Skills and the Tree Octopus Problem

Published by Robert Pondiscio on February 5, 2009 in No category. 27 Comments

The 21st century skills movement has a problem.  It’s a problem that can’t be solved by all of the innovation, creativity and information literacy lessons under the sun, yet it can be deftly handled by a little bit of science knowledge.  Call it the tree octopus problem.

The Partnership for 21st  Century Skills describes its mission as to serve as a catalyst to position 21st century skills at the center of US K-12 education.  Based on “hundreds of hours of research, development and feedback from educators and business leaders across the nation,” it has developed “skills maps” for educators to help teach the supposedly new skills of demonstrating originality and inventiveness in work and developing, implementing and communicating new ideas to others.  To its credit, the Partnership does not dismiss traditional curricular content, but rather ”advocates for the integration of 21st Century Skills into K-12 education so that students can advance their learning in core academic subjects.” 

So what does a 21st Century ELA lesson actually look like in the classroom?  Here’s an example of a 4th grade “information literacy” activity taken directly from the 21st Century Skills Map.

Outcome: Evaluate information critically and competently.

Example: Students are given a teacher-generated list of websites that are a mixture of legitimate and hoax sites.  Students apply a website evaluation framework such as RADCAB (www.radcab.com) to write an explanation for deciding whether each site is credible or not.

“RADCAB,” if you’re not familiar with it, is a trademarked “critical thinking assessment tool for online information” that teaches kids to evaluate the information on a website.  RADCAB is an acronym for Relevance, Appropriateness, Detail, Currency, Authority and Bias.  OK, RADCAB, say hello to my little friend, the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus, an endangered species and Internet cause célèbre.

RADCAB features a rubric that helps students evaluate online information.  Level 3 of 4 (the “Research Pro” level, and presumably a reasonable goal for all learners) includes things like “I create ’slam-dunk’ keywords from my research questions and use them to find relevant information” and “I leave information sources quickly that are too hard for me or offend my core values.”  Nothing very helpful in determining if the Tree Octopus is for real or not. The rubric also tells us we are research pros if we “look for copyright information or ‘last updated’ information” in the source.  Very well: The tree octopus site was created in 1998 and updated within the last two months, so it must be a current source of tree octopus information.  We are also research pros if we ”look for the authority behind the information on a website because I know if affects the accuracy of the information found there.”  Merely looking for the authority tells us nothing about its value, but let’s dig deeper.  The authority behind the site is the “Kelvinic University branch of the Wild Haggis Conservation Society.” Sounds credible. It is, after all, a university, and one only has to go the extra mile to be a Level 4, or “Totally Rad Researcher.”  The Tree Octopus site even carries an endorsement from Greenpeas.org, and I’ve heard of them (haven’t I?) and links to the scientific-sounding ”Cephalopod News.” 

It’s possible to spend countless hours looking at the various RADCAB categories without getting the joke.  Unless, of course, you actually know something about cephalopods — such as the fact that they are marine invertebrates that would have a tough time surviving or even maintaining their shape out of the water — then the hoax is transparent. 

Here’s where we come smack up against the limits of information literacy skills in the absence of content knowledge.  Researchers at the University of Connecticut’s Neag School of Education asked 25 seventh-graders from middle schools across the state to review the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus site, the results were unsurprising:

  • All 25 students fell for the Internet hoax;
  • All but one of the 25 rated the site as “very credible;”
  • Most struggled when asked to produce proof – or even clues – that the web site was false, even after the UConn researchers told them it was; and
  • Some of the students still insisted vehemently that the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus really exists.

If you were on the research team you might fairly conclude that science knowledge was lacking in the 7th graders in the study.  (One dead giveaway on the site is the reference to the Tree Octopus’s natural predators, the bald eagle and the sasquatch.)  But the team at the University of Connecticut saw things differently.  Their verdict: “Classroom instruction in online reading and other ‘new literacies’ is ‘woefully lacking.’” 

(Cue the sounds of palms smacking on foreheads)

It’s one thing to talk about how 21st century skills can “advance learning in core academic subjects.” It’s quite another to put it into practice.  To a hammer, everything is a nail, and to 21st century skills enthusiasts, it’s all about technology tools, information literacy, innovation and collaboration. All the rest is ”facts you can find online in a maximum of 20 seconds.” So the question for the Partership for 21st Century Skills is this: are you prepared to argue just as strenuously for content standards and a broad, rich curriculum as for innovation, critical thinking and problem solving standards?  Because ultimately 21st Century skills without content knowledge is a non-starter and probably a step backward.  Dan Willingham proved to be not just a great cognitive scientist, but a good history student recently when he noted a familiar pattern in education:

Pendulum swings between an emphasis on process (analysis, critical thinking, cooperative learning) which fosters concern that students lack knowledge and generates a back-to-basics movement that emphasizes content, which fosters concern that student are merely parroting facts with no idea of how to use their knowledge, and so on.  In calmer moments, everyone agrees that students must have both content knowledge and practice in using it, but one or the other tends to get lost as the emphasis sweeps to the other extreme.

Wise words.  Maybe if we start listening, history will stop repeating itself.

Alfie Kohn Smackdown

Published by Robert Pondiscio on February 2, 2009 in Core Knowledge School, Education Theory and Research and Reports. 6 Comments

Dan Willingham does a takedown of all-purpose education pundit Alfie Kohn over at Britannica Blog.  Dan cheekily titles his piece “Alfie Kohn is Bad For You and Dangerous for Your Children” to lampoon Kohn’s stock-in-trade of broad-brush oversimplification.  He details how Kohn ”consistently makes factual errors, oversimplifies the literature that he seeks to explain, and commits logical fallacies.”

Kohn specializes in attacking conventional wisdom in education.  He takes a common practice that people think is helpful and then shows it’s not helpful, and in fact is destructive. Most people think that homework helps kids learn, praise shows appreciation and makes them more likely to do desirable things, and self-discipline helps them achieve their goals.  Kohn argues that each of these conclusions is wrong or over-simplified. Homework may bring small benefits to some students, but it incurs greater costs and overall is likely not worth assigning.  Praise doesn’t help academic achievement, it controls children, it reduces motivation, and makes them less able to make decisions. Self-discipline is oversold as an educational panacea, and in some contexts may actually be undesirable.

Kohn raises interesting questions and is a useful provocateur, Willingham concludes, but he “cannot be trusted as an accurate summary of the research literature….He will lead you to something interesting and useful, but if you want to use it, you will have to do the work yourself.”  

Along with Stuart Buck’s recent blog piece, seconded by Jay Greene, it seems the spotlight is burning a bit more brightly on Kohn of late. He has richly earned the dressing down.  I’ve gotten out of the business of responding to Kohn’s deliberate and persistent mischaracterization of the Core Knowledge curriculum as ”rote memorization” and a “bunch o’ facts.”  (The offer still stands, Mr. Kohn: Let me know when you want to visit a Core Knowledge school.)    Clearly, Kohn has no incentive to let a bunch o’ facts get in the way of what is a lucrative business of books, articles and lecture fees– reportedly 200 speaking engagements a year at $5K a pop.   Indeed, it’s tempting to view Alfie Kohn, Inc. as the intellectual equivalent of professional wrestling.  He needs a heavy to go after to keep that income stream running strong.

Update:  Eduwonk questions Dan’s sanity and masochistic tendencies in taking on Alfie Kohn.  Dan’s response in the comments section discusses the real price of shrugging your shoulders and rolling your eyes.

Teaching Content is Teaching Reading

Published by Robert Pondiscio on January 9, 2009 in Core Knowledge, Education Practice and Research and Reports. 8 Comments

A little over a year ago, I saw Dan Willingham give a talk at the Education Trust conference in Washington, DC titled “Teaching Content is Teaching Reading.” He demonstrated convincingly why background knowledge is essential to reading comprehension–and why broad, content-rich education is the best way to ensure kids can understand what they read.  Having been force-fed the idea that all kids needed is the ability to decode, vocabulary and “reading strategies” in order to comprehend, I thought – I still do — the phrase “teaching content is teaching reading” ought to be on the lips of every elementary educator in America.  

Dan has made an intriguing video on the main ideas of his presentation and posted it on YouTube. It’s terrific. 

<a href="http://youtube.com/watch?v=RiP-ijdxqEc">http://youtube.com/watch?v=RiP-ijdxqEc</a>

Great work, Dr. Willingham.  If you know an elementary school teacher, forward the link to Dan’s video.

Stopping a Bad Idea In Its Tracks

Published by Robert Pondiscio on December 5, 2008 in Research and Reports. 0 Comments

“A lie can get half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes,” said Mark Twain.

Dan Willingham does the education world a good service, stopping a bad teaching idea in its tracks.  If you saw yesterday’s ASCD Smart Brief newsletter, which goes out to hundreds of thousands of educators, you may have read the lead item, “Students can benefit from tackling hardest material first.” It concluded that, “while most teachers progress from easier topics to more advanced ones, that may not always be the best approach, according to a new study.”  A man bites dog story if ever there was one. 

There’s just one problem: That conclusion is not supported by the study, which was done by Greg Ashby, an internationally recognized expert in how people learn new categories.  On Britannica Blog Willingham calls BS on this half-baked idea:

Ashby is interested in differences between two types of categories: those for which one learns an explicit rule (e.g. tricycles have three wheels, bicycles have two) and those categories that one learns almost intuitively, and for which one cannot articulate the rule by which one makes a judgment (e.g., the difference between paintings by Klee and paintings by Kandinsky).  Ashby doesn’t use these sorts of categories, however. He uses more figures more amendable to experimental control such as those shown in the figure. The finding in the article is that for the intuitive categorization (like Klee/Kandinsky), subjects learn better if they get the more difficult-to-categorize stimuli first, and the easy stimuli later. For the explicit category (like the bicycle/tricycle) the order doesn’t matter.

Ashby didn’t make any claims about education, notes Willingham, who contacted him for “to be sure that I wasn’t missing something.” Ashby’s reply:

“I believe it is much too premature to apply our results to classroom instruction. First, the work needs to be generalized to natural objects and real-world information of the type encountered in classrooms. Second, we found a benefit for initial training on difficult items only for a certain specialized kind of learning that is probably rare in classroom instruction. The goal of most classroom instruction is to convey explicit knowledge to students, and our research found no benefit to training initially on difficult items when the knowledge to be gained is explicit.”

It’s not hard to imagine how this broad, unsustainable idea — tackle the hard stuff first — could be misapplied.  For example, as a justification to continue to have kids attempt Algebra before mastering basic math.  Kudos to Willingham.

Test Curriculum, Not Standards

Published by Robert Pondiscio on November 18, 2008 in Assessment and Testing, Curriculum and accountability. 0 Comments

One of President-elect Barack Obama’s education ideas is to “improve the assessments used to track student progress.” But improving the tests may be tougher than he appreciates ”and the problem may be rooted in the state standards themselves,” says UVA cognitive scientist Dan Willingham.  ”Most people underestimate how hard it is to write good test items that are based on state standards.”  Writing at Britannica Blog, Willingham notes:

If you want to assess what students know and can do, it is only reasonable to list your expectations. Make the expectations too broad and they do not help students, teachers, and parents understand what is expected. Make them too narrow and you invite teachers to teach the list of expectations at the expense of everything else.

“I don’t see how these problems can be avoided unless you make the expectations more comprehensive,” concludes Willingham.  “That is, instead of writing a list of standards, specify the expectations for contents and skills in more detail—in short, base tests on a curriculum.  A curriculum would differ from a list of standards because it would include both the broad conceptual ideas and the specific content, and it would describe how the abstract concepts relate to the specific content.”

E.D. Hirsch, Jr. sounded a similar call early this year in a cover story in the American Educator, which argued that reading tests should contain passages about specific topics taught not just in literature, but in all other subjects taught in that grade.  It makes all the sense in the world, for the reasons Dan Willingham describes.