I got Daniel Willingham’s Why Don’t Students Like School? for Christmas nearly a decade ago. I was early in my career and eager to improve but, if I’m honest, struggling to do so.
Unfortunately, Willingham’s book was so far from the perceived wisdom of the time that it didn’t seem to help. My desire to improve floundered as I struggled to finish it.
A while later, for my master’s, I had to present a critique of a research-based text for teachers. I didn’t think a great deal before getting Why Don’t Students Like School? back down from the shelf.
I argued that the book wasn’t about liking school or not. I brazenly used Michael Gove’s endorsement to highlight its shortcomings. I suggested it wanted wholly the wrong kind of teachers and teaching. I utterly failed to respond to anything Daniel Willingham said.
As Why Don’t Students Like School? returns now in its second edition, I’m painfully aware that I was wrong.
No education book in the 21st century comes close to it in terms of impact on teachers and teaching.
Here’s why:
1. Memory is still the residue of thought
For me, there was no Damascene moment of conversion to Willingham’s ideas. I just made the slow realisation that his book was incredibly helpful.
The catalyst for that change was a single sentence: memory is the residue of thought. Those words rang in my ears as I reassessed what students thought about in my lessons.
So many of my tasks didn’t make students think about much. We all have extreme examples, like the time my Year 8s made a Shakespeare board game and thought a lot about cutting and sticking. But the everyday examples are more worrying. In some tasks, students thought only vaguely about content. In others, they could outsource their thinking to someone else.
It’s farcical to admit but it was a revelation - a few years into teaching - to refocus planning on what students would think about.
2. Facts aren’t all bad
At times, Willingham has been mis-sold as some kind of rote-learning enthusiast or a fact-loving Gradgrind. But he actually warns against having students “memorise lists of dry facts”.
Knowledge holds a special place in his arguments because it helps students to overcome the limits of working memory. Almost everything we want students to do well or do independently requires knowledge.
If we want students to read independently, they need background knowledge. If we want them to evaluate, to think critically, to create, they need knowledge of specific domains.
Astonishingly, there was a time when it was argued that teaching factual knowledge stifled creativity and independence. To some, the role of the teacher was to set up a task and then passively watch a class in the hopeful expectation that students would discover the learning for themselves. In this model, students often discovered ways of doing as little as possible.
3. Willingham started the curriculum conversation
Daniel Willingham isn’t the first name we’d put on a list of curriculum thinkers but perhaps he should be. His accessible principles about the importance of memory and practice, alongside the power of stories, can be found ingrained in curriculum policy and practice everywhere.
In redirecting our attention to what students retained from learning, Willingham paved the way for the current discussion about the content of our curricula.
When knowledge is important, you begin to evaluate whether what students are learning is useful, powerful or representative. When stories are privileged by memory, you begin to reconsider which and whose stories you tell.
Why Don’t Students Like School? doesn’t give us the answers to those curricula questions, but it gives us the tools to make the curriculum we have as effective as it can be.
The book so successfully shifted thinking about teaching that its central ideas now feel obvious. It would be a shame to forget the profound impact the first edition had. It’s likely that that impact can be seen in your lessons, your curriculum and the fundamental ways we understand teaching.
