Marginalia
The Mind Is Not Designed for Thinking
By thinking I mean solving problems, reasoning, reading something complex, or doing any mental work that requires some effort.
People Are Naturally Curious, But Curiosity Is Fragile
When I say “problem solving” in this book, I mean any cognitive work that succeeds; it might be understanding a difficult passage of prose, planning a garden, or sizing up an investment opportunity.
How Thinking Works
Thinking occurs when you combine information (from the environment and long-term memory) in new ways.
That combining happens in working memory
Respect Students’ Cognitive Limits
So scan each lesson plan with an eye toward the cognitive work that students will be doing. How often does such work occur? Is it intermixed with cognitive breaks? Is it real cognitive work that can lead to the feeling of discovery and not just retrieval from memory?
Background Knowledge Is Necessary for Cognitive Skills
First, you should know that much of the time when we see someone apparently engaged in logical thinking, he or she is actually engaged in memory retrieval.
it appears that much of the difference among the world’s best chess players is not their ability to reason about the game or to plan the best move; rather, it is their memory for game positions. Here’s a key finding that led to that conclusion.
Factual Knowledge Improves Your Memory
This final effect of background knowledge – that having factual knowledge in long-term memory makes it easier to acquire still more factual knowledge – is worth contemplating for a moment. It means that the amount of information you retain depends on what you already have.
When You Require Critical Thinking, Be Sure Students Have Enough Relevant Knowledge to Succeed
Our goal is not simply to have students know a lot of stuff – it’s to have them know stuff in service of being able to think effectively.
The Importance of Memory
Memory is the residue of thought.
What Good Teachers Have in Common
Does the professor seem like a nice person, and is the class well organized? (Figure 3.8.) Although they don’t realize they are doing so, students treat each of the 30 items as rephrasings of one of these two questions. What matters is cognition and connection.
Putting Story Structure to Work
Structure your lessons the way stories are structured, using the four Cs: causality, conflict, complications, and character.
Use Discovery Learning with Care
An important downside, however, is that what students will think about is less predictable. If students are left to explore ideas on their own, they may well explore mental paths that are not profitable. If memory is the residue of thought, then students will remember incorrect “discoveries” as much as they will remember the correct ones.
How Can We Get Students to Think Like Experts?
The only path to expertise, as far as anyone knows, is practice
Don’t Expect Novices to Learn by Doing What Experts Do
Replace the mantra “practice makes perfect” with “practice makes progress.”
Notions of “Ability” Shouldn’t Undercut Hard Work and Modest Achievement
I would advise teachers to treat students differently on the basis of the teacher’s experience with each student and to remain alert for what works. When differentiating among students, craft knowledge trumps science.
Don’t Take Study Skills for Granted
I didn’t see the Big Boss very often, and I was pretty intimidated by him. I remember well the first time I did something stupid (I’ve forgotten what) and it was brought to his attention. I mumbled some apology. He looked at me for a long moment and said, “Kid, the only people who don’t make mistakes are the ones who never do anything.” It was tremendously freeing – not because I avoided judgment for the incident, but it was the first time I really understood that you have to learn to accept failure if you’re ever going to get things done. Basketball great Michael Jordan put it this way: “I’ve missed more than nine thousand shots in my career. I’ve lost almost three hundred games. Twenty-six times I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”
Less Technical
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.
This Changes Everything, 1.0: Your Brain on Tech
Comfort with tech comes from your context, not your generation.
Adoption of Tech Products
Here’s a list of questions I ask myself about new teaching tools.
1. Is there good reason to be an early adopter? By “early” I mean before there are published data or at least fairly detailed impres-sions from other educators I trust. Does it make sense to wait until someone else has tried it out?
2. How confident am I that I can guess the impact on my students? If I’m looking at published data, were the students and school context similar to mine? Think about the distinction drawn in this chapter: I’ll be more successful in guessing how useful a tool will be if it serves a single narrow purpose (e.g., a visualizer) than something broad (e.g., an iPad).
3. When new technology replaces old, something is sacrificed. I want to be sure I’m clear on what that is and that I’m comfortable with it. An example of this principle involves old technologies: using an overhead projector instead of a blackboard. An overhead projector allowed teachers to prepare transparencies in advance (and so they could be carefully designed and neatly executed), and they could be used with a photocopy machine so a figure from a book could be reproduced and projected to the class. But there’s one easily overlooked feature of a blackboard: a teacher can start at the left side and add content, moving right, so as the lesson advances, it’s easy for the teacher to refer back to an earlier part of the lesson; even if the teacher doesn’t, students can. That’s lost with transparencies. How much does it matter?
4. Make a plan for evaluation. When I visit districts contemplating a major tech initiative (or in the midst of one), I’m often surprised by the vagueness of the objective. The motivation often seems a feeling that using technology makes schools up to date, which is obviously good. I recommend being more specific and having clear answers to these questions: (i) What are we hoping to change? (ii) How will we know whether or not it has changed? (iii) By when is it supposed to change? (iv) What are we going to do if it changes, and what are we going to do if it doesn’t? (I say much more about this approach in my book When Can You Trust the Experts? )
Educate Parents
If this hypothesis – that what looks like a decreased span of attention is really a quickening of the conclusion “I’m bored” – then the twenty-first century skill that may be in the greatest demand may be the ability to deploy patient, alert vigilance.
Notes
As psychologist David Daniel put it, “People think smartphones and tablets provide instant gratification for kids. It’s really instant gratification for parents.”
The next thing the parent knows their child is 11 and spends hours on screens each day, doing stuff her parents don’t think is terrible, but that they wish added up to more like 30 minutes.
Conclusion
Reading is a mental act that literally changes the thought processes of the reader. Thus every piece of prose or poetry is a proposal: “Let me take you on a mental journey. Follow and trust me. The path may sometimes be rocky or steep, but I promise a rewarding adventure.” The reader may accept your invitation but the decision-making process does not stop there. At every step your audience may conclude that the way is too difficult or that the scenery is dull and end the mental trip. Thus the writer must keep in the forefront of her mind whether the reader is being adequately rewarded for her time and effort. As the ratio of effort to reward increases, so does the likelihood that the writer will find herself alone on the path.
I think this metaphor applies also to teaching. A teacher tries to guide the thoughts of the student down a particular pathway, or perhaps to explore a broader swath of new terrain. It may be novel country even for the teacher, and their journeys occur side by side.
Always the teacher encourages the student to continue, not to lose heart when he encounters obstacles, to use the experience of previous journeys to smooth the way, and to appreciate the beauty and awe that the scenery might afford. As the author must convince
the reader not to drop the book, so too must the teacher persuade the student not to discontinue the journey. Teaching is an act of persuasion.*“Most of writing is anticipating how your reader will react.”
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