Daniel T. Willingham

And so then we learned how to hunt an antelope because we were listening to the story.

And so Daniel Willingham says that stories are cognitively privileged in part for this reason, because the people who survived were the people who listened to the story and understood how to hunt an antelope.

And the people who weren't listening, they were in trouble.

So it became evolutionary beneficial to us to be very attentive to stories.

And how you pay attention determines how much you will later recall.

Or, using the words of cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham, memory is the residue of thought.

Think deeper and you'll remember more.

And if you want to go deeper into this topic, I've written a guide, The 7 Keys to Effective Notetaking, which you can grab for free by following the link in the description

Why couldn't you, why couldn't by the action of making the finger puppets, why couldn't you be imagining the beef between the Montagues and the cats?

So there is a great piece of advice from one of my favourite writers in education, a cognitive scientist called Professor Daniel Willingham.

Who's that? I don't know him.

Yeah, Professor Daniel Willingham.

He's a cognitive scientist at the University of Virginia.

He's written a fantastic book called Why Don't Students Like School? And what he tries to do in that book is to boil it down, all of cognitive science into nine chapters with what are the most useful things that...

That is actually, I think, as it should be.

I also think that there is a less political way you can look at this.

So we know this isn't true for a few reasons.

And mainly because as the cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham has written, you may think your brain's made for thinking, but it's actually made for preventing you from having to think whenever possible.

Because thinking is energetically costly.

Right.

Miles said families could exit the program and the district would pull children who do not make sufficient progress.

Daniel Willingham, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Virginia, said he had serious concerns about Alpha's methods.

Compressing academics into two hours per day suggests a lack of breadth and depth, he said.

Quote, they think the way you toughen kids up is to get them to clean a bathroom, and the way you get them to learn is to power through it as quickly as possible, Professor Willingham said, adding, these are naive theories of psychology.

And then on teaching methods, it was just not practical, but it was not scientific either.

And I think I was one of the first people to notice Dan Willingham's videos about learning styles and realised that what we were being told about children blew in the face of psychology.

How do you think that gap emerged or emerges? How is it possible for things to be commonplace in schools attended by millions of children and yet not understood in the corridors of power or the corridors of academia or wherever it is? I

think partly those in positions of power often never went to ordinary comprehensives themselves.

Interactive partner talk.

And what's important about even the hashtag, I'm sure everyone listening knows Daniel Willingham, right? Right.

And understanding that memory is the residue of thought.

the hashtag becomes a retrieval cue.

There's more to it, but that's a necessary component.

So I try not to use the word rote learning at all, and my inspiration for this was Daniel Willingham, and instead think about rote knowledge.

This is how he talks about it instead, a distinction between rote and inflexible knowledge.

So if we think of a fact as something that is connecting concepts together, relating concepts, so we had two is the smallest prime number as an example.

Yes.

There are some amazing books by Dr. Willingham.

Mm-hmm.

By Dr. John Hattie.

I am not going to learn to swim by someone say, "Okay, you put your right arm over your left, o- over your head, and then you put your left arm, and then you kick your feet, flutter kick." Um, but what we have to do is match the modality to the skill.

So in order to learn to ride a bike, whether you're a visual learner or not, you have to physically get on a bike and do that kinesthetic motion.

Um, I think in Daniel Willingham's book, he said, "Dismantling the idea of multiple intelligences-

Yes