Summary Review of Chapter 3: “Why do students remember everything that’s on television and forget everything I say?”

While driving to see a client this week, I heard a piece on CBC about people forgetting how to read analog clocks because they are surrounded by digital clocks and don’t get a lot of practice with analog. Intrigued, I started to consider my own difficulty remembering which button is which on the remote control. A few minutes later, distracted by traffic, I put the question out of my mind.

But I thought about it again the next day when reading chapter 3 of Willingham’s book about why students don’t like school.

In this chapter, Willingham managed to startle me with the clarity of his definition of memory as “the residue of thought.”

So why is thinking about memory in that way important for teachers? It’s because if we want our students to remember what we teach, we have to construct lessons in such a way as to make them memorable. We have to make them think about what we’re teaching.

We all do that, don’t we, devise creative ways to engage our students?

Willingham provides a great anecdote of a fourth grade teacher who went all out to make sure her young students connected with her lesson about the Underground Railroad. Because biscuits had been a staple food of slaves, the teacher supplied her students with flour and water and all the rest so they could make biscuits themselves.

You know those kids remembered that lesson!

Well, in truth, Willingham says, what those students remembered was not the lesson content – life during the time of the Underground Railroad. No, what they remembered was how to make biscuits – because that’s what they were focussed on. That’s what they were thinking about.

Of course. Of course.

Obviously, there’s more to chapter three than that. Willingham talks about how to construct lessons around narrative structure and he makes a pretty good case that it doesn’t matter what subject we teach. We can use the four Cs of story – causality, conflict, complications and character – to script any lesson.

Interesting stuff. But, frankly, since I swallowed Willingham’s pearl about the difference between memorable and engaging lessons, I’ve been busy revisiting and reconstructing lessons according to what I should have focussed student attention on. So that’s the section of the chapter I remember best.

And, that just makes his point, doesn’t it?

Chapter 3 recommendation: D. L. Schacter’s “The seven sins of memory: How the mind forgets and remembers”

In two weeks: Chapter 4 – Why is it so hard for students to understand abstract ideas?

See you then!

Diane