Why Don't Students Like School?

A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom

By: Daniel T. Willingham

Narrated by: Paul Costanzo

Length: 6 hrs and 51 mins

Publisher's summary

Kids are naturally curious, but when it comes to school, it seems like their minds are turned off. Why is it that they can remember the smallest details from their favorite television programs, yet miss the most obvious questions on their history test? Cognitive scientist Dan Willingham has focused his acclaimed research on the biological and cognitive basis of learning and has a deep understanding of the daily challenges faced by classroom teachers. This book will help teachers improve their practice by explaining how they and their students think and learn - revealing the importance of story, emotion, memory, context, and routine in building knowledge and creating lasting learning experiences.

In this breakthrough book, Willingham has distilled his knowledge of cognitive science into a set of nine principles that are easy to understand and have clear applications for the classroom. Some examples of his surprising findings are:

• "Learning styles" don't exist. The processes by which different children think and learn are more similar than different.
• Intelligence is malleable. Intelligence contributes to school performance and children do differ, but intelligence can be increased through sustained hard work.
• You cannot develop "thinking skills" in the absence of facts. We encourage students to think critically, not just memorize facts. However, thinking skills depend on factual knowledge for their operation.

Why Don't Students Like School is a basic primer for every teacher who wants to know how their brains and their students' brains work and how that knowledge can help them hone their teaching skills.

Download the accompanying reference guide.

©2009 Daniel T. Willingham (P)2011 Tantor

Critic reviews

"Corporate trainers, marketers and, not least, parents - anyone who cares about how we learn - should find his book valuable reading." ( The Wall Street Journal)

Read this one in print- not well suited to listening

This was a good book with helpful information, but many visuals accompanied the text. It's not possible to see those visuals while listening to the book, so this is one to read rather than listen to.

Love this book, I refer to it often.

What made the experience of listening to Why Don't Students Like School? the most enjoyable?

Chock full of information I can use in my teaching/tutoring.

What was one of the most memorable moments of Why Don't Students Like School??

Chapter 5 about the importance of practice.

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

No, but it is one I love to return to for rereading.

Crammed with useful insights

The book is easy to listen to and well linked up together. The cognitive science approach to learning new information has a lot of scope for further thought and this book is a very helpful accompaniment to starting out.

Clear and grounded in science

I would recommend this book to anyone who appreciates having good science as a background for learning about pedagogy. This book is about principals of how students learn. I enjoyed listening to it and it was definitely a worthy buy that I would highly recommend to like minded colleagues. I came away with some solid practical and theoretical knowledge that I can put into practice in any grade level.

The only reason I gave this book a 4/5 is that it is a tiny bit repetitive. Obviously the author is trying put one of his principals of learning into practice. For the most part that works but in some places it feels like he is not providing new information but just rehashing the old. This only interfered mildly with my enjoyment of the material however.

Thanks!

a must read for all teachers

loved it, so much to think about to help make me a better teacher

Cognitive Sci proving useful in class & work

Author proves his craft by presenting his content in a fascinating and easily digested manner. My oldest is starting kindergarten & this book has given me another framework for evaluation and ideas for how I can help. Of course ideas are applicable at work also.

This is a great general interest and teaching guide

I think this book is well written and highlights some critical points that have not been commonly touched upon, to be recommended to friends.

Informative Stimulating

If you are a teacher seeking to engage students or a parent with a child in school, Why Don’t Students Like School? is a very helpful book. It is widely applicable to students in K-12 or in college. A cognitive scientist, Dan Willingham brings his discipline and its insights to this very needy area. He lays out the fact that before students can be taught to think critically, they must have mastered basic information. Essentially, Willingham posits that the more students commit details to long-term memory, the better able they will be prepared to use their short-term memory and frontal lobe to deal with more pressing problems. Along the way he debunks popular concepts such as the “learning styles” line of thinking (auditory, visual, kinesthetic…) which has little support in the empirical literature. This is not an education bashing book, but the work of an individual genuinely interested in how we best teach students and engage them in thoughtful activity on a day-to-day basis. You may not like the book, but Willingham is persuasive. The reading of Paul Costanzo is excellent.

Spectacular

I finished the book excited at the possibilities to dramatically improve education for students. As a parent, I also have valuable tools to guide my own kids.

The best audio book ever!

I've said that's the best audio book because it's the first one of its kind.