For some time now, Rob Coe has been suggesting that a good proxy for students learning in lessons is that they “have to think hard”. This seemed eminently sensible and I’ve written about this formulation on a number of occasions, most recently here. I saw Rob speak at a conference on Friday and tweeted the following:
“Learning happens when you have to think hard.” How many minutes do children spend in a day really thinking hard? Asks @ProfCoe
— David Didau (@LearningSpy) November 25, 2016
Rob suggested the answer might be as little as 10 minutes a day and that this might actually be fine. Think hard is, well, hard. It’s exhausting and as Dan Willingham says in Why Don’t Students Like School? we try to avoid it as often as we can and instead rely on what we’ve stored as background knowledge in long-term memory.
Today, the man himself got in touch and said this:
I’d slightly amend..”learning happens when you think hard.” “have to” suggests burden… https://t.co/IHakgY6bOt
— Daniel Willingham (@DTWillingham) November 25, 2016
Now, Dan’s writing has been hugely influential on me personally as well as lots of others, so when he suggests an amendment, it’s worth taking seriously. So I started considering, what might be wrong with thinking hard being burdensome? Dan’s response was that there’s nothing wrong per se with the idea of a burden, but that this might not be an accurate description of the conditions for learning. He went on to speculate that ‘thinking hard’ can be incidental to the activity we’re engaged in. Thinking hard could be prompted in a variety of different ways and that the idea of ‘having to’ do something removed the likelihood that such thinking would be self-directed. Thinking hard, Dan said, could come about while being absorbed in reading, playing Minecraft or baking.
I’m not sure about this. I pointed out that ‘flow’ the state of being completely and effortlessly involved in the performance of an activity certainly leads to absorption, will no doubt involve some kind of thinking, but has been shown not to lead to improvements in skill level. In order to get better at a task we need to be in the cognitive stage (i.e. thinking hard, struggling). As soon as we enter the automatic stage, where thinking hard is no longer necessary, we stop improving. Josh Foer calls this ‘the OK Plateau’: as soon as we get good enough to perform a task without thinking too much about what we’re doing, improvement plateaus. Surely, absorption in a computer game, a book or a recipe is similar to this sort of flow state?
Maybe not. Dan certainly doesn’t seem to think so, but I’m not so sure. Let’s take the baking example. I enjoy cookery in general but tend to avoid baking because it involves so much precision: exact times and precise measurements are essential for optimum results. This requires an awful lot of attention and cross referencing between the mixing bowl and the recipe book. I have to think hard about what I’m doing but I would way I’m absorbed – baking successfully (for me at least) requires deliberate concentration and I’m ever prone to distraction and cognitive overload. I would say that I really “have to” think hard in order to bake anything halfway decent. Cooking a well-practised meal, on the other hand, is effortless. Because I’ve cooked hundreds of Thai curries I can practically make one on autopilot, because I’ve already done the thinking hard required to learn to do so.
I can certainly become absorbed in a book, but if I’m reading about something about which I’m unfamiliar I really “have to” concentrate. I often reread passages in order to make sure I’ve understood what’s being communicated and sometimes I have to break off from reading to really ponder the meaning. If I don’t force myself to think hard and allow my concentration to slip I’ll usually find that the last few pages have become a meaningless blur.
I’m not sure if I’ve fully understood Dan’s objections to the idea that we have to force ourselves to do the kind of effortful thinking required to really learn something, but I’m struggling to come u with an example of thinking hard being incidental to activity I’m engaged in.
You might argue that this discussion boils down to ‘mere semantics’ and that possibly we’re talking past each other. That may be, but in response I’d suggest and semantics – the study of meaning – is the most important thing of all. By thinking hard about meaning we can arrive at new and useful ways of seeing the world.
If learning happens when you ‘think hard’ or ‘struggle’ then it doesn’t seem possible for programs like Engelmann’s Direct Instruction to work.
This would only be a problem if someone were to claim that learning *only* happens when you think hard. Clearly rote memorisation, for instance, is more than capable of resulting in changes to long term memory.
“Thinking hard” has a built-in judgemental ring to it. Is there not a misconception at the heart of this analysis. The premise assumes that thinking that is “not hard” is not as worthwhile as thinking that is “hard”. That somehow unless it is perceived to be essentially difficult (measured by visible signs of struggle!) then useful learning is not taking place. I would contend that it is possible to almost effortlessly “think hard” in the sense of thinking productively and constructively learning. It requires motivation certainly and surroundings & feedback that are positive, pleasurable and reinforce the desire to continue the “thinking path” that you have embarked upon. For many, learning is surely easy, natural and enjoyable. A 6 month old baby is learning constructively at a tremendous pace but in no way would you describe the baby as “thinking hard” about things! Yet skills at that age are being learnt at a fast pace. When it comes to describing thinking as “lazy” or having “not enough effort” then we are making judgement calls on the person which can have a very demotivating effect. The judgement is surely on the environment surrounding that person where motivation and purpose and interest has to be transferred from the person passing these judgements (the person who wishes the other person to follow their own perceived useful “path of thinking”) to the person they require to do the “hard thinking”. This problem is at the heart of good teaching – make learning effortless and natural. The pupil should not be aware that they are learning – just as the 6 month old baby is not aware that he/she is learning.
Another aspect is innate curiosity which is often successfully squashed by our educational systems. It is there for all to see in the 6 month old baby. To nurture this curiosity or reawaken it in an older child would ensure learning takes place effortlessly and naturally.
Anyway – thanks for the stimulating article.
The “built in judgemental ring” is not something I’ve ever felt myself. I see no reason to feel that any other form of thinking is being judged. At no point have I used words like lazy – as I said, thinking hard is tiring and few people can do it for long. Is it lazy for a sprinter not to sprint for more than 100m?
You say, “in no way would you describe the baby as “thinking hard””. I would actually.
But where we really part ways is here:
“This problem is at the heart of good teaching – make learning effortless and natural. The pupil should not be aware that they are learning – just as the 6 month old baby is not aware that he/she is learning.”
This is to see the effortless way we learn biologically primary evolutionary adaptions and then assume that biologically secondary knowledge can be learned similarly. The evidence does not support this view. If you’re interested, I’ve written about his here: https://www.learningspy.co.uk/learning/robots-evolution-schools-shouldnt-teach-innate-skills/
I also profoundly disagree that curiosity is squashed by our education system. It’s just that as we become more knowledgeable about the world we stop being as surprised by it.
Initial thoughts (might be total nonsense): I wonder if this is about choice? When I learn to play a new card game I’m making decisions, or choices, on the spot and I don’t necessarily know if they’re going to work out – I play a hand that I think is going to win but it turns out that I don’t know about the Queen of Hearts being only worth 4 when I have certain other cards, so next time it turns up I’m having to think hard about whether the other cards in my hand will affect it.
This might result in cognitive overload, especially if there are lots of rules. But, and here’s the thing, a game with lots of rules might be harder to win also because there are many ways to win: there are a shed-load of combinations.
But, let’s say I’m learning a new video game. There’s a story line and so whilst I might make mistakes (get blown up, drive off a cliff, be too slow, etc.) there are fewer choices at each point. And so I’ll learn to play it without having to think too hard, because of the lack of choice. Perhaps this is why Direct Instruction in certain subjects is so successful. This is also probably why video games which are critically successful (and which, amazingly, now have professional players) now have multiple potential story-lines and choices, though more casual players will be happy with an arcade-style game because you don’t have to think to be successful.
The cooking analogy is intriguing. Your Thai curry has a few basic ingredients, and cooking is more of an art form than baking, I’d suggest. So the curry will be reasonably successful with a broad range of choice, whereas the baking, because it’s so precise, actually has little choice – you have to follow the recipe or it’ll literally fall flat. The issue, instead of having to think hard, is one of the skill of baking precisely to a recipe with lots of intricacies. It might just be that baking is a very different type of thinking, or simply that you don’t do it enough and if you did, once you mastered the actions of having to juggle with weights and times and temperatures and precise physical skills, like kneading, you might then have to think hard about what other ingredients or times or weights, etc., might do to your cake. As it is, you’re not doing the latter because you’re not in the flow. You can do this with the curry, but you could probably get away with that anyway because the choices are more immediate and less fatal.
Does this make any sense?
My understanding is that Dr. Willingham sought to clarify the description of “having to” think hard in order to learn. The necessity of thinking hard is a given in this discussion, although not for some of the commenters. If I may, it seems that Dr. Willingham is concerned that “having to” do something may imply an external force, coercion, or some such negative connotation, and he concedes that it may be semantics. In this sense, I think David is right to recognize that semantics are important, and if I’m interpreting his use of the phrase “have to” correctly, I agree with him. Conversely, if I’m interpreting Dr. Willingham’s concern with the use of the same phrase as being potentially problematic when others apply a subjective connotation, I see his point too. You’re turning me into a fence-sitter, David, with all your logic and reason!
[…] wrote about a brief online discussion I had with Dan Willingham on the importance of thinking hard. In the comments, Greg Ashman pointed out that thinking hard cannot be the only way in which learning happens, how else, he asks, would we […]
What about when we think hard about something while doing something unrelated/ more automatic. I wonder how much learning takes place beyond the allocated hard thinking time frame.