Understanding How the Mind Works
It’s like coming home. This course, in these early stages, feels like returning to all the stuff I’ve had living under my roof – all these familiar furnishings, memorable photos, recognizable routines. As I read Daniel Willingham’s book Why Don’t Students Like School, it’s bringing me back to the basics of my understanding. This book feels like familiar surroundings.
I’ve started to BIN my readings for the upcoming course, 6411 Cognition and Learning, and making notes from the book that grounds this course. I’m building new connections, linking to current contexts of my work as an educator, and rethinking what this information means for my doctoral work.
The Willingham text outlines nine principles about how the mind works that are ‘understood to be true’. These include:
- “People are naturally curious, but we are not naturally good thinkers; unless the cognitive conditions are right, we will avoid thinking.” (p. 3)
- “Factual knowledge must precede skill.” (p. 25)
- “Memory is the residue of thought.” (p. 54)
- “We understand new things in the context of things we already know, and most of what we know is concrete.” (p. 88)
- “It is virtually impossible to become proficient at a mental task without extended practice.” (p. 108)
- “Cognition early in training is fundamentally different from cognition late in training.” (p. 127)
- “Children are more alike than different in terms of how they think and learn.” (p. 148)
- “Children do differ in intelligence, but intelligence can be changed through sustained hard work.” (p. 170)
- “Teaching, like any complex cognitive skill, must be practices to be improved.” (p. 189)
Each of these statements will become the focus of the coming weeks in the course. As a starting point, I’m examining each one, as outlined in the book, and expanding on the two which will be the focus for my particular assignments. This will also lead toward the essay assignment for this course.
One specific connection I’m making, at this preliminary stage, is finding a definition of ‘cognition’ and ‘learning’. I’ve done an activity in one of my courses to examine student understanding of the term ‘learning’ and what it is, or isn’t, and how it can be ‘seen’ or ‘known’ to have occurred. How do we know we have learned something? How can a teacher verify that something has been learned by a student?
For these reasons, and explicitly number 2, 3, and 4, are present and active in these early stages of this course. Thinking about thinking, remembering what I remember, and engaging new thinking based on familiar ideas, these are all exciting me for this upcoming course.
