Why Don’t Students Like School?

By Daniel T. Willingham

Daniel Willingham is a cognitive scientist who is writing this book mainly for teachers. He uses nine principles to break down some myths about how we learn that are fairly commonly held. A brief paraphrasing of his principles are as follows:

1. Humans are not good at thinking
   
2. Factual knowledge must precede skill
   
3. Memory is the residue of thought (one of my favorites)
   
4. We understand new things by their analogy to things we concretely know
   
5. Practice is important
   
6. Thinking is different if you are new to a subject than if you are an expert
   
7. Children are more alike than different in terms of how they think and learn (or there are not "Learning Styles" the way most people understand this term)
   
8. Intelligence can be changed
   
9. Teaching must be practiced to be improved
   

I will go through my understanding of his book by each principle and relate it to what we see in students with visual processing problems. It will be impossible to fully understand the reasoning behind his principles without getting the book and working through some of the problems and stories he uses to illustrate the science behind the principles. I hope that some readers get his book and benefit from it.