Why Don’t Students Like School?

The 10 chapters explore several fascinating principles. The book begins by looking at the difficulty of deep thinking.  Willingham points out that our brains are much better at making complicated calculations related to our basic functions like seeing or moving than making abstract comparisons to synthesize new knowledge. For our natural curiosity to be triggered, we need problems that are in a Goldilocks position of not being too easy or too complicated. He goes on to explore how we need to know many facts before we are able to develop skill in any given field, how memory works, how we transfer knowledge from one example to another, how important practice is for developing skills, how cognitive processes differ for beginners and experts, how similar peoples’ cognitive processes are despite their personality differences, how intelligence is not fixed but can be developed with practice, how technology interacts with our cognition, and finally how teaching is another cognitive skill like any other.

The book was a pleasure to read, and I found myself eagerly turning pages to find out more. Much of the content felt like information I was already aware of but had not connected in the same way or expressed so clearly in my own mind. More exceptionally, several pedagogical long-held beliefs are reevaluated. For example, Willingham suggests that Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences is often misunderstood, and that applying a musical or kinesthetic element to learning will not do much to help transfer knowledge that is not itself musical or kinesthetic in nature. He also points out that Bloom’s taxonomy is a hierarchy that requires building on previous levels, and that no one will be able to synthesize knowledge automatically without a lot of rote practice at the lower levels.

I highly recommend this book to other teachers for its ease of reading and the applicability of its precepts to our daily routines. I found myself frequently bringing up ideas presented in the book to colleagues in meetings and in casual conversations. The open-ended questions at the end of each chapter could provide excellent starting points for workshop activities in the future. The book left me eager to go pick up another title from our Professional Development Book Club shelves in the library!

SUIS Qingpu

21 September 2023

Matt Saunders is in his second year of teaching Grade 2 ELA at SUIS Qingpu. He was born in Columbus, Ohio, USA, and grew up in Tolland, Connecticut. In 2002, he received a Master of Arts degree in Teaching with a K-12 licensure in Classics and ESL from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.