Daniel T. Willingham > Quotes

“Memory is the residue of thought.”
― Daniel T. Willingham, Why Don't Students Like School?: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom

“Teaching, like any complex cognitive skill, must be practiced to be improved.”
― Daniel T. Willingham, Why Don't Students Like School?: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom

“A great deal of research shows that the most successful diets are not diets. Rather, they are lifestyle changes that the person believes he could live with every day for years—for example, switching from regular milk to skim milk, or walking the dog instead of just letting her out in the morning, or drinking black coffee instead of lattes.”
― Daniel T. Willingham, Why Don't Students Like School?: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom

“Critical Thinking: Why Is It So Hard to Teach?
By Daniel T. Willingham
SUMMER 2007 AMERICAN FEDERATION OF TEACHERS pp. 8-1

Can critical thinking actually be taught? Decades of cognitive research point to a disappointing answer: not really. People who have sought to teach critical thinking have assumed that it is a skill, like riding a bicycle, and that, like other skills, once you learn it, you can apply it in any situation. Research from cognitive science shows that thinking is not that sort of skill. The processes of thinking are intertwined with the content of thought (that is, domain knowledge). Thus, if you remind a student to “look at an issue from multiple perspectives” often enough, he will learn that he ought to do so, but if he doesn’t know much about an issue, he can’t think about it from multiple perspectives. You can teach students maxims about how they ought to think, but without background knowledge and practice, they probably will not be able to implement the advice they memorize.”
― Daniel T. Willingham

“People are naturally curious, but we are not naturally good thinkers; unless the cognitive conditions are right, we will avoid thinking.”
― Daniel T. Willingham, Why Don't Students Like School?: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom

“Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is the probable reason why so few people engage in”
― Daniel T. Willingham, Why Don't Students Like School?: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom

“makes memory long lasting; and (3) it increases the likelihood that learning will transfer to new situations.”
― Daniel T. Willingham, Why Don't Students Like School?: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom

“Effective teachers have both qualities. They are able to connect personally with students, and they organize the material in a way that makes it interesting and easy to understand.”
― Daniel T. Willingham, Why Don't Students Like School?: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom

“Critical Thinking: Why Is It So Hard to Teach?
By Daniel T. Willingham
SUMMER 2007 AMERICAN FEDERATION OF TEACHERS pp. 8-19

Critical reasoning, decision making, and problem solving—which, for brevity’s sake, I will refer to as critical thinking—have three key features: effectiveness, novelty, and self-direction. Critical thinking is effective in that it avoids common pitfalls, such as seeing only one side of an issue, discounting new evidence that disconfirms your ideas, reasoning from passion rather than logic, failing to support statements with evidence, and so on. Critical thinking is novel in that you don’t simply remember a solution or a situation that is similar enough to guide you. For example, solving a complex but familiar physics problem by applying a multi-step algorithm isn’t critical thinking because you are really drawing on memory to solve the problem. But devising a new algorithm is critical thinking. Critical thinking is self-directed in that the thinker must be calling the shots: We wouldn’t give a student much credit for critical thinking if the teacher were prompting each step he took.”
― Daniel T. Willingham

“There is no doubt that having students memorize lists of dry facts is not enriching. It is also true (though less often appreciated) that trying to teach students skills such as analysis or synthesis in the absence of factual knowledge is impossible.”
― Daniel T. Willingham, Why Don't Students Like School?: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom

“Although we like to think that we decide what to pay attention to, our minds have their own wishes and desires when it comes to the focus of attention.”
― Daniel T. Willingham, Why Don't Students Like School?: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom

“Things that create an emotional reaction will be better remembered, but emotion is not necessary for learning.”
― Daniel T. Willingham, Why Don't Students Like School?: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom

“The consequence of long-term experience with digital technologies is not an inability to sustain attention. It’s impatience with boredom.”
― Daniel T. Willingham, Raising Kids Who Read: What Parents and Teachers Can Do

“جرّب هذا في بعض الأحيان: اسأل أحد الأصدقاء: «لماذا تصدّق ما تصدّقه؟ ما الأدلّة التي تُقنعك بأنّ أحد الأشخاص على صواب أو أن أحد المنتجات جيد حقا؟» نادرا ما يثير هذا السؤال إجابة متأنية ومدروسة، بل يثير عادة الصمت ويجعل الصديق يضيّق عينيه متشكِّكًا. يعتقد معظم الأشخاص أن معتقداتهم تتشكّل بواسطة المنطق والعقل، ومن المحتمل أن يجد صديقك قدرًا من الإهانة في السؤال.

إلا أنّ معتقداتنا تغذّيها أمورٌ أكثر من المنطق والحقائق؛ فمن الصحيح أننا نقتنع بالأدلّة الدامغة المجمعة في صور حججٍ تتّفق مع مبادئ المنطق، إلا أن هذا تنطبق صحته فقط على الرسائل التي نتفحصها، ونحن لا نمتلك وقتا للتدقيق في كل الإعلانات التي نسمعها ومنشورات المدونات التي نقرؤها. إنّ المعلومات تنهال علينا بصفة مستمرة تقريبا. فكّر فحسب في التواجد الدائم للشاشات في كل مكان؛ عند بوابات المطار، في المطاعم، في قاعات الانتظار، في مكتب البريد، حتى في مصاعد الفنادق. إذا كان المكان يحتوي على جمهورٍ بشريّ مضطر للمشاهدة، فمن المحتمل أن توجد شاشة، وتحديثات سريعة للأخبار من أفغانستان، أو تغطية لإحدى بطولات الجولف، أو إعلان لدواء كلاريتين، كثير من هذه المعلومات غير حيادي، والمقصود منه إقناعك بأمر ما. وعلى الرغم من ذلك، فإننا لا نمتلك الوقت أو الطاقة الذهنية للتفكير مليًّا في كل رسالة تأتي في طريقنا.”
― Daniel T. Willingham, When Can You Trust the Experts?: How to Tell Good Science from Bad in Education

“remain alert for what works.When differentiating among students, craft knowledge trumps science.”
― Daniel T. Willingham, Why Don't Students Like School?: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom

“Outsmarting your brain means doing the mental exercise that feels harder but is going to bring the most benefit in the long run.”
― Daniel T. Willingham, Outsmart Your Brain: Why Learning is Hard and How You Can Make It Easy

“As you doubtless noticed, sometimes the words matched the pictures and sometimes they didn’t. It probably felt more difficult to name the pictures when there was a mismatch. That’s because when an experienced reader sees a printed word, it’s quite difficult not to read it. Reading is automatic.Thus the printed word pants conflicts with the word you are trying to retrieve, shirt. The conflict slows your response. A child just learning to read wouldn’t show this interference, because reading is not automatic for him.When faced with the letters p, a, n, t, and s, the child would need to painstakingly (and thus slowly) retrieve the sounds associated with each letter, knit them together, and recognize that the resulting combination of sounds forms the word pants. For the experienced reader, those processes happen in a flash and are a good example of the properties of automatic processes: (1) They happen very quickly. Experienced readers read common words in less than a quarter of a second. (2) They are prompted by a stimulus in the environment, and if that stimulus is present, the process may occur even if you wish it wouldn’t.Thus you know it would be easier not to read the words in Figure 3, but you can’t seem to avoid doing so. (3) You are not aware of the components of the automatic process.That is, the component processes of reading (for example, identifying letters) are never conscious.The word pants ends up in consciousness, but the mental processes necessary to arrive at the conclusion that the word is pants do not.The process is very different for a beginning reader, who is aware of each constituent step (“that’s a p, which makes a ‘puh’ sound . . .”). FIGURE 3: Name each picture, ignoring the text. It’s hard to ignore when the text doesn’t match the picture, because reading is an automatic process.   The example in Figure 3 gives a feel for how an automatic process operates, but it’s an unusual example because the automatic process interferes with what you’re trying to do. Most of the time automatic processes help rather than hinder. They help because they make room in working memory. Processes that formerly occupied working memory now take up very little space, so there is space for other processes. In the case of reading, those “other” processes would include thinking about what the words actually mean. Beginning readers slowly and painstakingly sound out each letter and then combine the sounds into words, so there is no room left in working memory to think about meaning (Figure 4).The same thing can happen even to experienced readers. A high school teacher asked a friend of mine to read a poem out loud. When he had finished reading, she asked what he thought the poem meant. He looked blank for a moment and then admitted he had been so focused on reading without mistakes that he hadn’t really noticed what the poem was about. Like a first grader, his mind had focused on word pronunciation, not on meaning. Predictably, the class laughed, but what happened was understandable, if unfortunate.”
― Daniel T. Willingham, Why Don't Students Like School?: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom

“mundane”
― Daniel T. Willingham, Why Don't Students Like School?: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom

“People are naturally curious, but we are not naturally good thinkers; unless the cognitive conditions are right, we will avoid thinking. The implication of this principle is that teachers should reconsider how they encourage their students to think, in order to maximize the likelihood that students will get the pleasurable rush that comes from successful thought.”
― Daniel T. Willingham, Why Don't Students Like School?: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom

“Sometimes I think that we, as teachers, are so eager to get to the answers that we do not devote sufficient time to developing the question.”
― Daniel T. Willingham, Why Don't Students Like School?: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom

“wanting to learn has no direct impact on learning. You often remember things you didn’t try to learn.”
― Daniel T. Willingham, Outsmart Your Brain: Why Learning is Hard and How You Can Make It Easy

“تظهر الاستقصاءات أن العلماء محل ثقةٍ أكثرَ من غيرهم من الأشخاص في أي مهنة أخرى، فالناس يعتقدون أن الأبحاث العلمية هي أكثر أنواع الأدلة موثوقيةً. لماذا؟ لماذا هذه الثقة الضمنية في العلم؟ بدأت هذه القصة في أوروبا في القرن السادس عشر، في زمانٍ ومكانٍ كانت فيهما ملاحظة العالَم -حجر الأساس في العلم- تُعتبر «أقلَّ» أنواع الأدلة إقناعًا. كانت المرجعيّةُ هي أكثرَ أنواع الأدلة إقناعًا؛ فإذا قال الكتاب المقدس (او المفكّرون القدماء لا سيّما أرسطو) امرًا ما، فلا بدّ أن يكون صحيحا. شهدَتِ السنواتُ المائة التالية تحوُّلا كاملا عن هذا التوجه، وأصبحت الملاحظةُ -لا سيّما الملاحظة المحكومة مثل الموجودة في التجارب- تحظى بأعلى مراتب التقدير. كان التغيُّر في تقدير الأدلة راجعا في الأساس إلى النجاح الهائل لهذه الطريقة في تفسير العالَم وتحسين ظروف البشر. لقد جاء العلم ليُؤَثّر في كل جانب تقريبا من جوانب شؤون البشر -ويحسّنه عادةً- وهذا يعني أن المظهر البسيط المتمثّل في الأدلة العلمية يمثّل عاملَ إقناعٍ مهمًّا. هذا النوع من الأدلة قوي للغاية، حتى إنه في مجالات أخرى (مثل الطب والهندسة) لدينا مؤسسات قوية تراقب وتتحكم في استخدامه، فمن غير القانوني أن تقول إن أحد الأدوية اختُبر علميًّا في حين أنه ليس كذلك. اما التعليم فليس لديه مثل هذه القيود؛ فأيّ شخصٍ يستطيع أن يقول إن احد الحلول التعليمية «مُستنِد إلى أبحاث»، ولهذا السبب يكرّر موظّفو المبيعات هذه الجملةَ مثل الببغوات؛ وهذا هو السبب الذي يجعل الطريقَ المختصر لتقييم الأبحاث مطلوبًا.”
― Daniel T. Willingham, When Can You Trust the Experts?: How to Tell Good Science from Bad in Education

“Curiosity prompts people to explore new ideas and problems, but when we do, we quickly evaluate how much mental work it will take to solve the problem. If it's too much or too little, we stop working on the problem if we can.”
― Daniel T. Willingham

“Books expose children to more facts and to a broader vocabulary than virtually any other activity, and persuasive data indicate that people who read for pleasure enjoy cognitive benefits throughout their lifetime”
― Daniel T. Willingham, Why Don't Students Like School?: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom

“When you plan a lesson, you start with the information you want students to know by its end. As a next step, consider what the key question for that lesson might be and how you can frame that question so it will have the right level of difficulty to engage your students and so you will respect your students’ cognitive limitations.”
― Daniel T. Willingham, Why Don't Students Like School?: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom

“The very processes that teachers care about most--critical thinking processes such as reasoning and problem solving--are intimately intertwined with factual knowledge that is stored in long-term memory (not just found in the environment).”
― Daniel T. Willingham

“In summary, your brain evolved to understand typical speech. In a normal conversation you don’t plan fifty minutes of remarks in advance; you say things as they occur to you, and because you’re planning only a sentence or two at a time, you’re unlikely to say something that can be understood only if your listener connects what you’re saying now to what you said twenty minutes ago. But lectures are planned and organized hierarchically. Therefore, it’s not just possible that an idea connects to something mentioned twenty minutes ago, it’s likely, and if a student misses that connection, she will miss a layer of meaning.”
― Daniel T. Willingham, Outsmart Your Brain: Why Learning is Hard and How You Can Make It Easy

“In the inns of certain Himalayan villages is practiced a refined tea ceremony. The ceremony involves a host and exactly two guests, neither more nor less. When his guests have arrived and seated themselves at his table, the host performs three services for them. These services are listed in the order of the nobility the Himalayans attribute to them: stoking the fire, fanning the flames, and pouring the tea. During the ceremony, any of those present may ask another, “Honored Sir, may I perform this onerous task for you?” However, a person may request of another only the least noble of the tasks which the other is performing. Furthermore, if a person is performing any tasks, then he may not request a task that is nobler than the least noble task he is already performing. Custom requires that by the time the tea ceremony is over, all the tasks will have been transferred from the host to the most senior of the guests. How can this be accomplished?3”
― Daniel T. Willingham, Why Don't Students Like School?: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom

“«تتبُّع الزعم» (...) إن المقصود بها الانتباه إلى مؤهلات ودوافع الشخص الذي يحاول إقناعنا. إننا نقتنع إلى أقصى درجة بالأشخاص الذي يتمتعون بالمعرفة وعدم التّحيُّز؛ لكن لسوء الحظ، من الصعب الحكم على الشخص بأنه يتمتّع بالمعرفة حول موضوع ما، إذا لم نكن نحن نمتلك بعض الخِبرة؛ ولذلك فإننا نميل إلى الاعتماد على الشهادات؛ فنحن نصدّق الأطباء عندما يتحدثون عن الطب، والكهربائيين عندما يتحدثون عن صندوق الصمامات الكهربائية. بطبيعة الحال، يمكن أن تكون الشهادات مزوَّرةً، لكنني سأقول إنه في حالة كونها أصليّةً، فالشهادات ليست دليلا موثوقا فيه على المصداقية في مجال التعليم. في الحقيقة، إن هذه العلامة المميزة الأكثر شيوعا في الاستخدام للمصداقية هي «أقلّ» العلامات نفعا.”
― Daniel T. Willingham, When Can You Trust the Experts?: How to Tell Good Science from Bad in Education

“Kidd, C., & Hayden, B. Y. (2015). The psychology and neuroscience of curiosity. Neuron, 88(3), 449–460. An overview of contemporary theories of curiosity, focusing on the idea that curiosity evolved to ensure that animals, including humans, learn about their environment. We are maximally curious when we think the environment offers the greatest opportunity to learn.”
― Daniel T. Willingham, Why Don't Students Like School?: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom