From Research to Practice

Daniel Willingham addresses 

a small group of PCD faculty.

Every year the PCD faculty has the chance to read a common book and kick-start the year with a discussion about teaching. This year featured an even better opportunity, as the author of the summer read came to speak with the faculty about the implications of his work.

Daniel Willingham's book, Why Don't Students Like School: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What it Means for the Classroom, brings a variety of new psychological research to bear on some of the most pressing questions in education. The book emphasizes the incremental nature of learning, the importance of practice in developing deep understanding, and the idea that intelligence is malleable.

Faculty members clearly took the book to heart. “It confirms the perceptions we acquire through experience,” said English teacher David Cashman. Nowhere was this more true than in the book's call for a consistent, disciplined focus for teachers and learners alike.

It is no surprise, then, that the faculty and administration were so excited to spend a day with Willingham himself. His morning talk focused on students' attentiveness, and perhaps most importantly was filled with what English and Latin teacher Jane Kaufman termed “pragmatic suggestions” for getting students to focus on the material at hand. Willingham noted that, in the short term, paying attention is a decision. Students' brains quickly and subconsciously balance the quality and probability of outcomes with the level of difficulty, when they decide whether or not to pay attention. By changing those outcomes or the difficulty involved, teachers can affect attentiveness.

PCD faculty (from left to right) Dick Tierney,

Jen Aitken, Chris Dodd, and Sharon Hanover

discussing Willingham's research.

In the slightly longer term, Willingham suggested that both inward reflection--that is, taking time away from external distractions such as work or television--and sleep were crucial in building memory. Both are necessary for the brain to transform short-term memory into long term memory, which is a major step in developing deep understanding. Turning off both electronics and work for even thirty minutes a day, as well as getting to sleep earlier, might be two of the best things to do for improving brain function.

After lunch, Willingham worked more closely with some small groups of faculty on a range of topics. In all, the day was one of the most fruitful professional development days in PCD memory, as teachers left prepared and reinvigorated to begin the new school year with a handful of new ideas and tools to make their teaching even better