🧠 Why Don’t Students Like School? by Daniel Willingham is one of the most influential books for teachers on cognitive science. It explores how students’ minds work and how to use this knowledge to be a better teacher. TOP 5 TAKEAWAYS! 1/ 🧠 Working memory has limited space, and thinking becomes increasingly difficult as it gets crowded. ‘Unless the cognitive conditions are right, we avoid thinking.’ Promote challenging cognitive work by reviewing each lesson in terms of what students will THINK about. 2/ 📚 ‘Background knowledge from our long-term memory helps us to make sense of new information.’ Knowledge is best learned when it is conceptual and facts are interrelated. Guide students to learn the unifying ideas of each discipline—the most common concepts. 3/ 💭 Students remember what they THINK about—‘memory is the residue of thought.’ Effective teachers connect personally with students and organise material to make it interesting and easy to understand. E.g. through storytelling... Stories have a familiar and memorable structure! 4/ 🧱 ‘Understanding is disguised remembering,’ because every new idea is built on existing ones. Develop deep knowledge by working with the same idea in different ways. Support learning with multiple examples and guide students to categorise, compare and contrast ideas. 5/ 🏋️ ‘It is virtually impossible to become proficient at a mental task without extended practice.’ Practice helps make mental processes automatic, reducing the demand on working memory capacity. Prioritise giving students ample practice with the knowledge and skills they need to master. 🙌 Thanks for reading! Support my work by tapping REPOST and grab a FREE high-quality copy here: static1.squarespace.com/stat…

Interesting pattern in the most-read ⚗️DistillED editions recently… 🛡️ Making Participation Safe newsletter.jamieleeclark.com… 🧠 Retrieval Practice newsletter.jamieleeclark.com… 🗣️ Think–Pair–Share newsletter.jamieleeclark.com… 👣 Circulation & Actionable Feedback newsletter.jamieleeclark.com… 🔔 Signal for Attention newsletter.jamieleeclark.com… Each post tackles a similar core challenge: Helping students think, participate, and pay attention.