Chapter 1 — Why don't children like school?

Thinking and fragile curiosity

The slightly provocative starting point is that people are not naturally inclined to think. Thinking is slow, effortful and uncertain compared with relying on things we already know from memory.

Yet we are also naturally curious. The important point is that curiosity is fragile.

We tend to enjoy thinking when:

• there is a problem or question that interests us;
• we have enough background knowledge to understand the problem;
• the problem provides some challenge;
• but we can also see a realistic route towards solving it.

If something is too easy, there is little satisfaction in solving it. If it is too difficult, particularly because we lack the necessary background knowledge, we are likely to disengage. The sweet spot is where pupils have to think but can experience themselves making progress.

That helps explain why background knowledge matters. If I ask a pupil a fascinating question but they lack the knowledge needed to think about it, the question itself cannot sustain their curiosity.

Questions and curiosity

One particularly useful idea was the distinction between creating curiosity and sustaining it.

A teacher could begin with something striking—for example, burning paper inside a bottle and using the resulting pressure change to pull a boiled egg through the neck of the bottle.

“How on earth did that happen?”

But the demonstration itself does not guarantee learning.

The challenge is to structure the information, explanations and subsequent questions so that pupils can gradually work towards an answer. Otherwise, the initial curiosity can disappear very quickly.

Planning backwards from the thinking

Another idea I want to remember is to begin by asking:

Then construct questions or problems that require pupils to think about that material.

The questions need to sit at an appropriate level of difficulty. That may mean thinking about how pupils with different levels of prior knowledge can access the same underlying idea without making the thinking either trivial or impossible.

Pace and attention

The appropriate structure of a lesson may also depend on the class.

If pupils struggle to sustain independent attention for long periods, there may be value in having shorter periods of independent work followed by moments where attention returns to the teacher.

Those pauses can:

• refocus attention;
• check understanding;
• correct misconceptions;
• provide the next piece of information;
• then send pupils back into thinking again.

That feels more useful than simply deciding that a particular activity should last twenty minutes because that was what I planned.

Keep a teaching diary

Willingham also recommends keeping a very brief record of lessons.

It does not need to become an enormous reflective exercise. Something as simple as:

could gradually build a useful record of which explanations, questions and activities actually caused pupils to think.

A useful distinction

One point I want to keep clear is the difference between overloading working memory and asking pupils to retrieve something they already know.

The stronger warning in this chapter is about placing too many demands on working memory, or asking pupils to think about problems for which they do not yet possess the necessary knowledge.

That distinction matters because retrieval from long-term memory can actually reduce demands on working memory: the more securely something is known, the more mental capacity is available for thinking about the new problem.

My main takeaway

Don't just ask, “Is this activity interesting?” Ask, “What will pupils be thinking about, and have I given them enough knowledge and the right level of challenge to succeed at that thinking?”

That seems particularly relevant to my recent reflections about attention. A pupil appearing disengaged does not necessarily need something more exciting; sometimes the route into the thinking may be unclear, too demanding or insufficiently challenging.