Dan Willingham resonates with me and my line of thinking. It has something to do with the way that he can frame cognitive psychobabble in layperson speak that clearly explains teaching, learning, memory, and the human mind. Plus, Willingham is a cognitive psychologist at the University of Virginia, and his Wahoo-roots make him alright in my book.
In his book Why Don’t Students Like School? Willingham writes that teachers who help students think about the real meaning behind an activity use storytelling as an organizing principle. This is true for teacher types (the comedic teacher, the showman teacher, the nurturing teacher) and content areas (math, science, social studies, reading/language arts, etc…). According to Willingham, a lesson that uses storytelling as an organizing principle contains four C’s:
- Causality: Events are causally related to each other.
- Conflict: The inherent struggle for the protagonist to reach a goal(s).
- Complications: Sub-problems that arise within the conflict as the protagonist struggles to reach a goal (s).
- Character: A strong cast of characters, whether real “organisms,” places, or ideas, are essential (p. 52).
Dan Meyer’s recent WCYDWT post begins to unpack these principles in an effort to explain why his “don’t tell” philosophy works in mathematics education and student learning. Using storytelling and film as a vehicle for explanation, Meyer’s analogy and examples seem to align with what Willingham believes are the cognitive strengths of a storytelling platform for lessons and instruction. Three such congruences are both individuals’ belief in setting up the story/learning experience, the “uninterestingness” of strictly focusing on an answer in mathematics, and the importance of a clear question (but not a wordy one).
Consider the following quotes from Willingham (I replace Willingham’s words with Meyer’s examples in the italicized words):
A couple of things are worth noticing. A good deal of time- often ten or fifteen minutes of a class- is spent setting up the goal [when using a storytelling approach], or to put it another way, persuading students that it’s important to know how to [answer a question]. The material covered during this setup is only peripherally related to the lesson. Watching The Italian Job isn’t related to decimals and measurement. It’s all about elucidating the central conflict of the story.
Spending a lot of time clarifying the conflict follows a formula for storytelling from, of all places, Hollywood. The central conflict in a Hollywood film starts about twenty minutes into the the standard one-hundred-minute movie. The screenwriter uses that twenty minutes to acquaint you with the characters and their situation so that when the main conflict arises, you’re already involved and you care what happens to the characters. A film may start with an action sequence [ala James Bond films], but that sequence is seldom related to what will be the main story line of the movie. It’s kind of like playing Gimme Friction Baby and creating a class leaderboard as a mechanism for learning about angles and tangent lines. In this respect, game play is symbolic of the setup for the conflict or question.
When it comes to teaching, I think of it this way: The material I want students to learn is actually the answer to a question. On its own, the answer is almost never interesting [by itself and in isolation]. And the question is very important (p. 57-58).
The final paragraph seems to be a falling down point for teachers, including me. I struggled to come up with the proper question for the cereal box challenge which I did not include in the original post: What is the most cost-effective design for cereal boxes? While Meyer may struggle to come up with the formative assessments, I struggle to come up with the right question to ask.
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