A few days ago, I 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 explain the success of Zig Englemann’s Direct Instruction programme? Although I’m not totally convinced that students receiving Direct Instruction don’t have to think hard, it’s certainly true to say that they’re not expected to struggle.
Think also about rote memorisation. Most people would probably agree that memorising your times tables doesn’t requires thinking hard. Instead it relies on repetition to hammer an idea into long-term memory.
I’m going to suggest that, for the purposes of this post, we try to accept three things (you can always argue the toss later if you don’t like them):
- Learning requires a change in long term memory.
- Thinking takes place in working memory, focussed on the interplay between the environment and what we retrieve from long-term memory.
- By and large, we tend to remember things we think about. (If you can’t remember something you were thinking about then it’s probably true to say you didn’t learn it.)
Now, if these things are true, it perhaps follows that, although we might remember some things we don’t consciously pay attention to, we’re more likely to remember things we think about. It also makes a certain kind of sense that thinking hard might provoke better possibilities for long-term memory changes than ‘thinking a bit’ or ‘not thinking much’.
Rob Coe’s formulation, “Learning happens when people have to think hard” isn’t meant to be a precise description of how learning happens, it’s just an idea for a useful proxy we might look for in our lessons. As he says, “Obviously, this is over-simplistic, vague and not original. But if it helps teachers to ask questions like, ‘Where in this lesson will students have to think hard?’ it may be useful.”
And this is, I think, is the point: learning is vastly complex and we may never understand how it occurs. Some people want to embrace this complexity to the point of obfuscation. We could simply shrug our shoulders and admit defeat, or we could attempt to simplify matters by looking at what we do know and considering how that could help us out in the classroom. Obviously, we don’t really know how, when or why learning happens, but we do have some guides about what might make it more or less likely.
So, here I tentatively offer a list of other possible ‘good proxies’ for learning which may help teachers plan and look for opportunities to increase students’ mastery of curriculum content.
Learning may happen when students:
- concentrate on relevant examples and non-examples
- retrieve what they have been taught in previous lessons
- apply concepts to new examples
- engage in practice drills (which may involve repetition or formulas and procedures)
- answer questions without cues or prompts
This list is by no means exhaustive and I’d be interested to hear what else you think we could usefully add to it.
For me, this cuts to the heart of what schools are about.
I’m going to try to articulate my views about the list, and what I think could be usefully added; this is mainly about me trying to clarify my thinking.
I think it’s easy to fall for bad proxies for learning, hence why ‘thinking hard’ is so useful, it’s a distillation of what it means to learn. The problem with being more specific is that one might fall into a tick-box exercise for ‘good teaching’.
At the moment, the one thing I can think of is for students to attempt exercises that combine 2 or more firmly embedded concepts in a way that they haven’t tried before. For me, this means that students will be learning more about these concepts, at the least they will be learning more about how they relate to each other. I think this is covered by ‘apply concepts to new examples’.
This is something I will think about for a fair while longer. Thanks.
I don’t really know how to word this proxy; Reverse Engineering may be a suitable title or at least a decent metaphor.
When I was studying for my maths GCSE’s back in 19XX, our class textbook had the answers in the back. During study leave, this proved invaluable as I was able to see what the answer to a problem was and then work towards getting that answer, discovering the procedure en route. Crucially, I would test my theory on the next question to validate my procedural theory.
Skip forward XX years and my Year 5’s appear to be following a similar process when using their IXL subscription (other online packages are available). When they get a question wrong, they get shown what the answer should have been and then I have witnessed them intuitively working out the error in their procedure.
Now I appreciate that in the second example, there is a degree of overlap insofar as they are benefiting from immediate feedback, but the premise is similar for both.
In essence, they have to ponder “How did you get from there to there?”, do some thinking, test and evaluate on the next question. Self-discovery; no teacher required.
Now that’s a worry…and a much better title.
The teacher is required, if you want students to have good mental models/conceptual understanding, not just ‘procedures’ (because the bright and enquiring student may infer a procedure that either works for this type of question but doesn’t generalise, or is not the most efficient way to do it, or is plain wrong but by coincidence gives the right answers to t his particular pair of questions).
When they connect something from a lesson with something they did last week…or last month – that has to be good!
Hi David,
Your list of good proxies, used in a planned way by someone with strong subject knowledge, sounds like the beginnings of a reasonable scaffolding for building metacognition (That ongoing question – strong students are often good at it, weak students are often weak at it, but how do we build this capacity in our students?) – so I think you are on the right lines.
Best,
Ian
Surely part of the teacher’s role is to make the learning, and thinking, easier.
If I explain plotting quadratics in such a way that they don’t have to think hard, have I failed? I tend to think not.
That’s an interesting debate. Hattie says that a teacher’s job is to make work difficult so that students struggle and make mistakes. He thinks this is important because if you haven’t made mistakes feedback has no benefit.
There’s also the idea that human beings typically forget about 70% of what they once knew over time. But, we have a strong illusion of knowledge of the 100% condition. This means if you ask children, Do you remember my lesson on plotting quadratics? They’ll say, Yes! But if you then ask them, So, how do you plot quadratics? Many of them will, predictably, have forgotten. When we *know* we know something we stop thinking about it but when we’re aware that we don’t completely understand, then we continue to try to integrate troubling new information into our existing schema.
Arguably, if you teach plotting quadratics in a way that doesn’t require students to think hard you may be in danger of prioritising current performance over more flexible, durable learning.
‘ “Learning happens when people have to think hard” isn’t meant to be a precise description of how learning happens, it’s just an idea for a useful proxy we might look for in our lessons ‘
I don’t think “thinking hard” is simply a useful proxy, I believe there are a number of ways that information might be stored, amended and retrieved in long term memory and for one of them “thinking hard” is likely a necessary but not sufficient condition. In some contexts, learning is unlikely without thinking hard but that does not make it a proxy. I look for thinking hard as I know that often learning will result.
This is sloppy reasoning that leads us to a slippery slope we don’t want to be led down.Only if I reasoned that because a student had thought hard they must necessarily have learned, that there was some sort of correlation would I be using “thinking hard” as a proxy surely.
[…] others, I’ve embraced the idea, but the harder I think about this the less sure I am. In this post I began considering of the limitations of think hard as a good proxy for learning but was still […]
“thinking hard” is surely a better proxy than “busy doing”. But there is a balance to be struck here, right? If the thinking required is too “hard”, does this lead to demotivation, and an unwillingness to engage (especially in Maths)? For me, this is one of the key skills that teachers develop with experience: being able to predict what tasks will require your students to think at the right level of “hardness”.
I explain why thinking HARD might be a bad idea here: https://www.learningspy.co.uk/learning/problems-thinking-hard-proxy-learning/
Dang, teaching is HARD!
Nothing is ever simple! In a Mathematical Thinking workshop with John Mason we were talking about when to intervene to help them in their thinking. Talking to my students about it we all agreed that there would be very different needs within the same class both in how much help is given and how quickly. The it’s OK to be stuck discussions are really important too and I always find myself coming back to the importance of the teacher / student interactions and a classroom where being stuck is just fine and then we sort it out!
Which is why this sort of thing is useful to bear in mind: https://www.learningspy.co.uk/learning/the-feedback-continuum/ – doesn’t just apply to feedback but to any form of support.
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[…] David Didau takes this further and suggests further proxies; that learning happens when children: […]
I feel pretty sure I make the same point in the post. Did you make it to the end?