May 10, 2021

Teaching our Teachers to Teach feat. Daniel Willingham

53 minutes

The ethics of teaching are in the news daily as the pandemic continues to upend everything we know about education. Looking forward, how can we better prepare and build teachers looking to join this complex and ever-evolving field?

Joining us today is Dan Willingham. He is a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, and also the author of numerous books, including The Reading Mind, Why Don't Students Like School?, and When Can You Trust The Experts?, and the forthcoming Outsmart Your Brain.

Trained in cognitive psychology, his research now focuses on the intersection of cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and K–12 education.

Hear his theory on the practice of creating teachers, federal regulation of teaching practices, the “reading wars”.

Episode Quotes:

Decoding and visual perception as a means of teaching kids to read:

"When you see an elephant, you don't say, well, I see a trunk and I see some feet and there's a tail. Let me kind of piece together. In these parts, you just see an elephant. And similarly, a really good reader just sees the word dog. They don't sound it out. This is the way good readers do it. And so we want kids to be taught the good way to do it straight away."

On gaming as a teaching mechanism, and using more direct pathways to teaching certain topics:

"The Soviet Union for years taught everybody Chess because they thought it was going to make everybody smart. And we don't have their data because the Soviet union never released it. But we do have data from US School systems, Chess doesn't make you smart, chess makes you good at Chess. And so that transfer problem is a big problem in gaming. If you want to teach kids Math, They actually really need to do Math."

On his book When Can You Trust the Experts:

"So, if I have a lot of trouble figuring out who's an expert, then I easily fall prey to people who claim to be an expert. I think the reason is that once you get out of a content area that you know anything about, you have to fall back, not on expertise, you can't really evaluate the expertise. So, you fall back on marks of expertise, sort of earmarks of expertise. And I think those are fairly easy to fake, especially in professions where there's no licensing going on."

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