Do Your Kids Know How to Learn?

Daniel Willingham is a cognitive scientist, by which I mean, he is an academic researcher who extracts information from psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, philosophy, computer science, and anthropology in an effort to understand the mind and apply the findings to education.¹

In his book, Outsmart Your Brain, Willingham says something revolutionary: he says that most children are asked to learn without ever being taught study skills, without ever being taught how to organize themselves for studying, without ever having been taught to prioritize what to study, and without ever having been taught what to do when they procrastinate about studying.

And we all know this is true because we were once those children.

Unless your kids go to a very unusual school, this will be true for them as well.

When I went to school, I remember being told that I just wasn't "trying hard enough". But Willingham says that wanting to learn has no direct impact on learning.

He says that we often remember things we didn't intend to learn and we often do not remember things we did want to learn.

He also says that repetition doesn't guarantee learning.

From junior high onward, Willingham says that school is made up mostly of three basic tasks: listening, reading and taking tests — and these are the three areas of learning he covers in his book.

He talks about so many important things. For example, he describes how to extract the important information from a lecture, a lab or a demonstration. And he goes into detail about how to take notes, and how to organize materials.

Interestingly, he also talks about the dangers of having a computer open in the classroom — even if the student is taking notes on it — and I think we all know what he means: it is tempting to look at other things and do other things while the laptop is open! Willingham suggests that students who are allowed to have laptops open in class put the laptop in airplane mode so they do not do other activities during class.

Willingham even gives advice for instructors about how to present material so that it will be clearer and more easily learned. And he gives even more of this advice in another of his books, Why Students Don't Like School.

His books are heavily referenced, he has clearly studied the existing literature on learning, and his own background in cognitive science is extensive.

You may want to read these books. You may want to donate a couple of Willingham's books to the principal of your child's school and ask if they can incorporate some of what he has to say into in-service training for teachers. Furthermore, you may want to ask the principal of your child's school to institute some new curriculum for the students on how to study and learn effectively, or even suggest that a course be offered in this subject – especially in seventh, eighth, or ninth grade when learning becomes more complex. I say this because teaching kids how to learn is not a job parents should feel they have to take entirely by themselves.

It would be hard to impart Willingham's ideas to your children. Children often resist parents' efforts to help them learn. But if done at school, as part of the curriculum, it seems to me that many of Willingham's ideas could be extremely helpful!

Teachers receive a lot of information about pedagogy. They go to college to learn how to teach, they go to conferences to learn more and they are often provided with materials during seminars at the schools where they teach. But kids, as Willingham says, are rarely taught how to learn.

It is about time that we helped kids learn how to learn, that we helped teachers teach kids how to learn, and that we helped teachers teach in a way that makes it easier for kids to learn.