Читать книгу Why Don't Students Like School? - Daniel T. Willingham - Страница 23

How can you make the problem interesting? A common strategy is to try to make the material “relevant” to students. This strategy sometimes works well, but it's hard to use for some material, and your struggle to make it relevant to students is usually obvious. Another difficulty is that a teacher's class may include two football fans, a doll collector, a NASCAR enthusiast, a horseback riding competitor – you get the idea. Mentioning a popular singer in the course of a history lesson may give the class a giggle, but it won't do much more than that. I have emphasized that our curiosity is provoked when we perceive a problem that we believe we can solve. What is the question that will engage students and make them want to know the answer?

One way to view schoolwork is as a series of answers. We want students to know Boyle's law, or three causes of World War I, or why Poe's raven kept saying, “Nevermore.” Sometimes I think that we, as teachers, are so eager to get to the answers that we do not devote sufficient time to developing the question. That probably happens because the question is obvious to us. But of course it's not obvious to students, and as the information in this chapter indicates, it's the question that piques people's interest. Being told an answer doesn't do anything for you. You may have noted that I could have organized this book around principles of cognitive psychology. Instead I organized it around questions that I thought teachers would find interesting.

When you plan a lesson, you start with the information you want students to know by its end. As a next step, consider what the key question for that lesson might be and how you can frame that question so it will have the right level of difficulty to engage your students and so you will respect your students' cognitive limitations.