Daniel Willingham

To the classroom: episode 3

March 6, 2023

Today’s guest is Daniel Willingham, author of the new book OUTSMART YOUR BRAIN. I’m so excited for you to hear us talk about how we as teachers can help students become successful, independent learners through supporting their focus, planning and goal setting, purposefully taking notes from listening or reading; and how to help them best tackle and comprehend complex texts. Later, I’m joined by my colleagues Elisha Li, Gina Dignon, Lainie Powell, and Macie Kerbs for a conversation about what we can bring to the classroom.

Jennifer Serravallo :

Dr. Willingham, welcome.

Daniel Willingham:

Thanks so much. Happy to be here.

Jennifer Serravallo :

I love your book. I read the whole thing and I've already recommended it to tutors in my town who work with high schoolers. I made my daughter read the procrastination chapter, <laugh> a Middle Schooler, about to go off to high school. It's just such a perfect book for this time and I think there's so many kids and teachers that are going to benefit from reading it. So thank you for writing it.

Daniel Willingham:

Oh, thank you so much.

Jennifer Serravallo :

So essentially it's about how to become a successful independent learner. And the majority, I think, of your audience is college students, high school students a little bit. Also, you have tips for instructors, and I'm thinking too from the perspective of an elementary middle school teacher, what responsibility do you feel like we have elementary, middle school teachers in supporting students with some of the tips or strategies that you have in your book to build independent learning so that they're more prepared for the independence that's expected later on in school?

Daniel Willingham:

Yeah, absolutely. I think that that's a great question because it seems self-evident that it would not be a great situation if it, you went from zero to 60, so to speak, in terms of responsibilities. And so you want to be sort of back planning. I was actually just thinking this morning, it would be an interesting experiment to have a pre-K or K teacher sit in a grade 12 classroom and just jot down notes of what wouldn't work in my class. Things like being able to sustain attention on teacher talk for as long as these students are being asked to. Being able to commit things to memory and so on. And then just ask yourself, during these students' education, were they taught how to do this? Have they ever been taught any strategies for regulating their attention and listening to teacher talk and so on?

 We might even think about looking even earlier for sort of scaffolded steps that are aimed at something a little bit down the road. So people are very aware of this with reading instruction that we very early on, we show children, this is how if before children are able to read, we're teaching them some aspects of how sort of metacognitive aspects, of how one engages with books.

 So you can imagine students getting some practice with that. When it comes to focus, making children aware of the effects their environment has on their focus. So sort of pointing out to them, it's like, yeah, when I noticed that when you sit next to Jen, you're, you seem to have a much harder time listening when we're doing read alouds. Tell me what's going on with that and why get them to reflect on the fact that attention is not just a matter of this sort of internal trying to pay attention. You're also very much affected by your environment and you can choose environments that will help you focus more effectively. So big picture, I think if we look for opportunities, we're going to see them when they come and sort of think about what the building blocks are for these more demanding tasks that students are going to have to do starting in middle and high school.

Jennifer Serravallo :

And I think what's so important and powerful about the book is that sometimes the things that we're asking kids to do later on are just expected of them, but what you're really doing in the book is you're teaching them how to do it. You're teaching them the actual steps they need. And so I think about this as an elementary/middle school educator and say, we can be explicit and teach kids how to choose a good spot, block out distractions, maintain focus, notice when your mind is wandering, all these things that you talk about for older students. I think some of them work really well in the elementary, middle school classroom as well.

Daniel Willingham:

I absolutely think they do. And again, I think the guide should be look at what the expectations are of your students and then determine if they're not meeting those expectations. Is it because no one's ever taught them how to do these things? And this is not to deny that this is challenging work. I mean, teaching students anything anytime is always challenging. But this is I think especially challenging. Exactly. Because there's not a curriculum in place that you can turn to for advice.

Jennifer Serravallo :

Yeah, it's not really in a lot of curricular, larger curricular products because it's not really in standards. And yet, if we don't do this, then how are you going to do any of the other things that are required in the standards if you can't block out distraction and focus?

Daniel Willingham:

It implicitly it is in standards, right? It's not going to be tested on it, but you can't meet standards without these cognitive skills in place.

Jennifer Serravallo :

Absolutely. So speaking of one of these cognitive skills your book is organized, for those who haven't had a chance to read it yet. It's organized into chapters that are categories like taking notes, preparing for a task, staying focused, and within each goal you offer these tips that they can work on. And later in the book you talk about the importance of goal setting, planning, goal monitoring, and making sure you really have a purpose for your learning. And I'd love to start with talking about that because I think it's really foundational to everything in the book in a way. What is your reading of the research around this area say about the importance of goal setting, planning, and goal monitoring?

Daniel Willingham:

Yeah, for short-term goals, there's lots of empirical work for something like goal setting. In reading, we know that you actually read content differently if you have different goals in mind. If you're thinking, I'm reading this for pleasure or I'm reading this not to really understand the whole thing, I'm kind of on the hunt for a particular fact because I'm doing a research paper. It won't surprise anyone that you end up with a different understanding of the text depending on what the goal is.

 And then for the longer term goals, there's very little empirical work and it's sort of understandable why that is. That would be very challenging research to do.

Daniel Willingham:

But I do think that it's a big issue for a lot of the students that I encounter in higher education. They just never think about what their educational goals are.

Jennifer Serravallo :

I also love that you have an entire chapter devoted to staying focused, which I think feels harder now than ever for a lot of adults that I even talk to.

 I'm just wondering what tips you have from your study of the science to help get our minds into that engaged state while we're reading or while we're studying.

Daniel Willingham:

So let me start by offering some general strategies, some of which will be familiar and a couple of which might not.

One is I show this little model in which is I say the little model, but it's really a quite nice model from Jim Gross at Stanford and Angela Duckworth at University of Pennsylvania of the process by which distraction happens. And one of the things that I have found useful is the students readily understand this very simple model.

It helps students sort of think through what is the process of distraction and why it's so much easier to be in a place that just simply doesn't have the distractions compared to being in a place that has distractions, but I'm going to overcome them mentally.

But when it comes to distraction, one of the most important things to communicate to students is not to choose to be distracted because very high proportions of students report that they do other things while they're doing for homework and other sorts of more serious pursuits, they'll have music on, they'll have video content on, they'll be texting friends and so on. And trying to multitask is one of those things where your brain deceives you. I mean, there's a reason the book is titled Outsmart Your Brain because your brain sends you a lot of signals that are a little bit confusing about what's going on. And one of them is things are going just fine if I have this video content on because I'm really just ignoring it. It's kind of background noise. And what laboratory studies show is nobody can do this. I have never seen a study that shows people perform just as well at reading or doing math problems or whatever it is while video content is playing in the background.

So those are pretty typical advice. But let me mention one or two things that you don't see quite as often. One skill that I think is important to develop is judgment about when you should as I put in the book, either regroup, just move on, sometimes distraction, it comes because you're just not making much headway on whatever it is you're working on. And so regrouping means taking a step back and saying, why is it I'm having so much difficulty making any progress on this, so I'll do this frequently when I'm writing. I'll think why I've been trying for a half an hour to come up with any idea for the introduction of this. Why is this so hard for me? And sometimes I really get an insight and I think of a different way to approach the task. Other times I don't. And what I do then is I say I need to work on something else for a little while and come back to this fresh because, so again, the big message here is distraction is sometimes a signal to you this particular thing you're working on is just not going very well and you need to get yourself out of this.

Jennifer Serravallo :

I am thinking again with my elementary teacher hat on, I taught New York City, my class size was 32, 33 kids. It was constant movement in the classroom. Wiggles, chairs, screeching things were going off over the loud speaker. People were coming into in and out of my classroom interrupting during the flow of the lesson or during independent work. And so I'm thinking about the elementary teachers who are listening and I'm wondering if you have any advice within a classroom setting. How do kids set themselves up to be as focused as they can to be as successful as they can to engage with their work and get into that zone when they're working in a classroom setting? Classroom setting, so there are a couple of things that occur to me. One is the most obvious is to the extent that it's possible, classroom norms are ones that will minimize distraction.

Mind wandering can happen and having a to-do list really helps. So if I'm working on writing something and the thing I'm writing is more than a paragraph or two and it's a little bit complicated, I will break it down. It's like I'll have a thing, I'm going to brainstorm first and then I'm going to think about whether all the sources that I need to include or really include and so forth. And that way when I finish one little bit, I know exact, I know where to go next, I just look up my list and see what I'm supposed to do next. And I find that helps me stay on task.

Jennifer Serravallo :

Yeah, I'm thinking about this mind wandering. We've been talking a lot about external distractions, the noise in the classroom, the physical space, the things you see, the things you hear, but our own minds naturally wander, especially if we're thinking about, I think with writing it's a creative process, so a lot of times you have to let your mind go places to kind of decide what is it that I want to say or how do I want to say it? So our minds are naturally wandering, sometimes in a productive way, sometimes in an unproductive way. And you have some tips for helping besides the to-do list. Anything else you want to share to help with that kind of wrangling your mind back to the task at hand?

Daniel Willingham:

Yeah, I, so to sharpen the to-do list also, I mean what that's really about is whether or not the goal is well defined.

I think the clarity of the goal really contributes to that because not knowing where you're going is when your mind is likely to drift away. There are two other bits of standard advice for which there's a lot of empirical evidence. One is taking breaks does help with mind wandering as we would expect when you come back from a break. There is sort of a mental sharpness and a ability to stay on task that is renewed. I'll also mention there's been a lot of research on whether there is an optimal ratio. How long do you work before you take a break and then once you take a break, how long should the break be? There's no consistent evidence that there's a ratio or a set figure for either one of those that that's better than another. There's also been a lot of work on exactly what you should do during the break that's also inconsistent. My take in the book is what I say is a break should feel like a break,

So if you're coming back from a break after three or five minutes and you feel like that didn't feel like a break, then you know, need to try doing something else during your break, what people most often do is go on their phone and that's kind of vexed. In cognitive terms I would say that's probably not a great thing to do because you're doing something that's kind of similar to what you were doing. It's very outwardly focused. So something that is more like taking a walk, especially if you can walk outside that's more inwardly focused. There are separate attention systems for outward focus work and inwardly focused work and they toggle one or another is on, but they still affect one another. So giving yourself a break from outwardly directed attention is probably a good idea.

The other thing that I'll mention as standard advice for which there's lots and lots of evidence is meditation does help in maintaining focus. So that's something else that you could think about

Jennifer Serravallo :

A regular meditation practice so that you just become less...

Daniel Willingham:

A regular meditation practice. And by the way, it's probably 10 years ago now that various schools started experimenting with having kids do mindful meditation in classrooms. And candidly, when I first heard about that I thought that was ridiculous. I thought that's for the parents, that's not, that's the kids aren't going to benefit from that and I was spectacularly wrong. Not only do you know children's engage in children engage in this practice very successfully but also there's lots of evidence that they benefit from it.

Jennifer Serravallo :

Thank you. Thank you. Let's switch gears now. I'd love to talk with you about note taking and writing about reading.

Some kids fill their notebooks with so many notes, it's got to be an interruption to getting into the flow of their reading while other kids tend to just read without doing a lot of stopping and jotting. But the idea of pausing to write something and having writing be really purposeful, there's a reason why I'm stopping to write what does my future me need this for I think was really helpful. What do you think is the balance that kids should strike between brevity when they're stopping and jotting so it's not interrupting the flow of reading too much and clarity so you can actually go back and understand and benefit from what you've written down?

Daniel Willingham:

It's a great question and I think it's a great opportunity to have a conversation with your class starting with "why would you want to do this? Why would you want to take notes while you're reading?" And there's surveys of middle schoolers, many of whom I'm guessing probably never had that conversation with their teacher.

And they're basically two reasons which I'll clarify…taking note, helps cement things in memory. So the process of taking notes helps. You will remember them better by virtue of writing them down. And then also it's a reference for later that if you don't remember everything perfectly, you're, you can go back and look at your notes and it jogs your memory. So middle schoolers are aware of this. And so I think the answer to your question is, well, it depends on what it is you're reading and what you're hoping to get out of it and you would adjust your note taking strategy depending.

So I think it's why I suggest this idea of talking with students is this should be a flexible strategy and we want to get them to start thinking early on about why am I doing this and what's the best way to do it here rather than thinking there's a right way to do this and you just always apply that one right way.

Jennifer Serravallo :

That's good advice. How about notetaking systems, formats, graphic organizers, what does research say and what's your advice about that?

Daniel Willingham:

So research is not super helpful. So what research would say is note taking systems are very helpful, but the way, if you look at the way the studies were done, they don't really answer the question we want answered. The way these studies are typically done is someone comes up with a notetaking system. So then we've got Willingham's Magical Notetaking System and then I compare Willingham's Magical Notetaking System to no instruction at all. And what we find is if you are taught my system, you end up taking better notes and sometimes even you do better on quizzes or something like that. The problem is if you've never had any instruction, it could be that it's nothing very magical about Willingham's system, it's just getting people to think about taking notes and what those should look like in the process. That's accounting for all the effect.

 People are, as we all know, both as students and as teachers, people are in mental overload pretty much constantly when they're taking notes, trying to juggle whether it's reading or listening new content that is complicated and you're trying to learn and understand it at the same time you're making decisions about what to take notes on, how to phrase all that. And this is one of the reasons most people feel like my notes almost always end up being incomplete. So adding onto that now I want you to think about, you're going to take a note, where's it going to go and how am I structuring this and all that? I don't think it's worth it.

Jennifer Serravallo :

Interesting. You have a whole chapter on the importance of organizing notes to go back to synthesize the information. So you've taken these notes and you're revisiting them and to find connections between the ideas when you were first taking the notes, I wonder if any of these ideas work well for the third through eighth grade range who are organizing...

Daniel Willingham:

As soon as kids are taking notes? I think these ideas absolutely work and probably yeah, you would want to simplify it. I mean, again, the thing I would want children to understand, even at this very early grade, whether you were taking notes from teacher talk or whether it was an activity that you did or whether it was something you read, that thing, that information source was organized, it was planned. And so you should be able to see that organization in your notes. That's a really important part of it. The author thought about the paragraphs aren't random, so the author was thinking about that. And so you want to be, that's part of it. And so you want to be sure that that's in your notes. I shouldn't say that's part of it, but that's also the part that's probably the most difficult for you to get. So it requires special attention to be sure that you've gotten it. So however it's framed, I think that's a vital lesson that a lot of college students don't know, but it's not beyond the understanding of a child who's in third grade.

Jennifer Serravallo :

The research around clueing kids in to text structure, which I think would work as well for lecture structure. Like you said, the author or the speaker has an intended organization to how they're presenting the information. And if kids are aware this is a cause and effect structure, this is a narrative structure, this is a boxes and bullet structure that helps them to comprehend it better. So it makes sense to me that teaching them some kind of note-taking system that sets them up to listen for the important information aligns to the way that the text is organized might support them.

Daniel Willingham:

Just to reiterate, the reason I recommend doing this after the notes are taken is it's too much to do as the organization is emerging to you in real time.

Jennifer Serravallo :

So you have a whole chapter on reading complex texts such as textbooks. You make the point that one of the reasons they are more challenging to read is that they're written with a hierarchical organization rather than a narrative organization or sequential organization. And you tell your readers that kids approaching these texts need a different approach. What's the main difference in the ways readers should approach narrative versus expository texts?

Daniel Willingham:

It depends. It depends a little bit on what your goals are.

Daniel Willingham:

Let me start this way thinking let me divide reading comprehension into sort of bare comprehension where you understand most of the intended meaning versus working with a text where you're doing some sort of textual analysis. The latter of these can be quite complex, obviously when we're talking about narrative, but when we're talking about just understanding what happened, if it's a narrative, understanding the plot and who was and what happened that's quite different. And this is what children come into pre-K already understanding. The vast majority of them understand a narrative structure. And so that's a huge advantage as they get to the point where their decoding is fluent enough that they can really comprehend as they're reading or if they're, it's a read aloud and they're listening. So that's a big advantage to comprehension that suddenly disappears when some of the texts they're asked to read is no longer has that narrative structure. The other thing about narratives is a lot of them are fairly linear, especially ones in the earlier grades. They're not going to be flashbacks, I mean not just temporarily linear but also causally linear A causes B, which causes C and so on. And so the demands of working memory are greatly reduced.

None of that is true in a hierarchical structure where if you have a textbook where there's a chapter about plants and then the first section is about leaves and then the second..., and so forth this is going to be hierarchically organized. And the thing about a hierarchical structure is as you get down to some of the details, you're being expected to understand how, what I'm reading now relates to content that I read several paragraphs ago. And we know from research on, not just on children in elementary, but through high school and into college, a lot of students do not do this coordination of meaning across paragraphs or is sometimes even across frequently across sentences.

So there it's a very clever experimental method. The way they do this, they give kids paragraphs, some of which are just sort of normal paragraphs taken from textbook type materials that they would encounter and then some of which are the same types of paragraphs, but they put an error in the paragraph. So sometimes they'll misspell a word, sometimes they'll scramble words. So the syntax in a sentence doesn't make any sense. And sometimes they'll change one word in a sentence to completely reverse its meaning. They'll like include a "not." And now sentence six in the paragraph directly conflicts something that was stated in sentence two in the paragraph.

What you find is, college students in particular, they never miss a misspelled word. They never miss a sentence that has messed up syntax, but they frequently miss where sentence six directly conflicts with sentence two. So this is something we know that a lot of students are not very good at.

So back to your initial question, this is when we talk about helping children understand how to approach a textbook at, because textbooks are hierarchically organized, they place a greater demand on this willingness and ability to coordinate meaning and think about how this paragraph relates to other things that I've read earlier.

Jennifer Serravallo :

And I think too, just seeing younger children too, approaching these kinds of texts, they have to have flexibility when they get there. Lots of times they'll come with a preconceived notion of that, what that topic's about or what they already know. And if something like you're talking about within paragraph contradictions, but sometimes they'll approach a text and what the text says contradicts their background knowledge, knowledge and they tend to sometimes read the text to try to make it fit what they thought they already knew when really they have to be flexible. Yeah, there's a lot of challenges there.

Daniel Willingham:

Adults do the same thing.

Jennifer Serravallo :

Oh, it's true,

Daniel Willingham:

Where no, yeah, this is actually relevant to exactly a course that I'm teaching at the University of Virginia right now. We're taught, it's a course in high level cognition and one, we're all constantly faced with this. We're getting new information. And the question is, to what extent do you update what you already know? Sometimes what you see supports what you already know. Other times it doesn't. And so you have to make judgements and knowing exactly how what that judgment should look like can be complicated.

Jennifer Serravallo :

It's fascinating cause it's key to learning, right? That's what learning is going to. It's taking in new information. Revising what you thought before. Yeah,

Daniel Willingham:

A hundred percent.

Jennifer Serravallo :

Thank you so much for your time today for this conversation. I have so many ideas about things that I can support younger children with so that I'm not going to say they won't need your book when they're older. Cause hopefully they still read it too, but they'll not kidding when I say I'm getting this book for many people I know it's a really great contribution. Thank you so much. You

Daniel Willingham:

Thak you so much. It's a pleasure chatting with you.

Jennifer Serravallo :

Likewise. Take care. Take care. Bye.

Jennifer Serravallo:

All right, I've got a big group with me today. I've got Macie Kerbs, Lainie Powell, Elisha Li, and Gina Dignon for a conversation about how to take these ideas to the classroom. Who wants to get us started?

Macie Kerbs:

I was kind of thinking about how you started your Getting Started chapter in the Reading Strategies 2.0 and you have this beautiful chart that outlines the different types of strategies on page two, and it talks about how there's cognitive strategies, metacognitive strategies, and the management strategies.

Jennifer Serravallo:

A lot of them are in that management strategy category, at least the first part portion of our conversation when we were talking about blocking out external distractions or anything having to do with other peers around you and how to manage your environment.

Elisha Li:

I just made me think too, when he was talking about the idea of classroom environment, what are the little things teachers can do that could have a large impact in terms of environment? And I remember very early on in my career I learned to, maybe I learned this from you, Jen, that we, it's a really good practice that before students get come to the lesson for a rug, to the rug or to the meeting area, that they set up their materials at their seats before the lesson starts to get ready for the independent work after the lesson. And it seems like such a small shift, but I find in classrooms, I mean when I started doing it, it was such a difference because this idea that the kids don't, when you move from the lesson to the independent work, the kids are not thinking, oh no, what book am I going to get? Oh, I left it in my backpack. Oh, it's lost in my desk. You do all of that before the period starts.

Jennifer Serravallo:

That part when he was talking about how our mind tends to wander when we're transitioning between things, you think about how many transitions kids have to have in a day, especially in a self-contained elementary classroom. And those supports really is what that is. It's a support to help them transition smoothly and quickly. And to be reminded, as soon as I go back to my seat, I know what I am supposed to be focused on. It gives them that help to not allow their mind to wander.

Macie Kerbs:

Also having that goal when you go back. So turn and talk to your partner about what you are going to be doing as a writer today or turn and talk about to your partner about your goal during reading time today. So just getting their intention set before the transition might be a good habit to get them into so that their mind is less likely to wander as much.

Jennifer Serravallo:

Yeah, like you said, there's a lot of support for these ideas. Short-term goals. What am I trying to accomplish today? What's my focus for today's work? Absolutely.

Lainie Powell:

I was thinking last night in anticipation of today I was asking my kids, how do you focus during reading or writing time? What are some things, if you could design the perfect classroom for you and you gave your teacher a list of tips on day one, what would it include? And my daughter said, I have to have flexible seating and it has to be flexible. One day it might be a wobbly chair, one day it might be a bean bag. So it's not even the idea that every day she gets a wobbly chair, but she's making choices about what kind of seating is going to be best for me today. My third grader said noise canceling headphones have made such a difference for him that he goes under a desk or somewhere in the room with headphones on and that is where he does his best work.

And so I think to your point, it's about having goals jointly mapped out goals with kids and then those how-to parts in place. And that looks different across, we could all have a goal of engagement, but those how-tos are going to look very different for different children. So being nimble in what independent practice looks like as teachers I think is really important.

Jennifer Serravallo:

Yeah. I want to pick up on something you said too, Lainie, about the idea of the individual nature of these.

I think if you're having long stretches of independent time, you want to allow for kids to decide for themselves. I'm noticing my mind's really wandering a lot here or to be aware of their own distraction or mind wandering and say, I have a strategy to help me with that. I'm going to take a break. And for some kids it might be a physical break for other kids, it might be a meditation break. For other kids, it might be, I need to sketch for a minute. Even what the break looks like could be individualized to allow kids to independently reengage with their work. So this idea of individual variety within a large class and how do we set kids up to self-monitor and then self-regulate I think can be really powerful to set them up for their future success as independent learners.

Macie Kerbs:

So if we're teaching kids how to be flexible with their learning environment and some of these strategies in their mind, we can still teach the content and go through some of these curricular resources, but provide the choice and opportunities to grow those self-regulation skills in a different way.

Elisha Li:

It kind of reminded me of that, the strategy in the Reading Strategies Book 2.0 in the engagement chapter, take a break. I don't think we use, he used the word reflection, but that I feel like is an underlying practice of developing self-regulation and attention and giving space for reflection and just asking how did that go? Or what felt good, what worked, what didn't? And I just feel like those are such powerful questions. You can ask students at the end of try a new routine when you tried a new lesson, just asking them how'd it go? I found that to be so powerful and insightful, the kids always have something to say and I always learn from them.

Gina Dignon:

And you're making me just think more and more about how important that the routine and structure of regularly meeting and talking with kids is really important not to lose because we have to scaffold them into that kind of thinking.

And I was just thinking too, when you were mentioning the engagement chapter, the 2.11 "Plan Goal Focused Stopping Places" seemed to overlap with what he was saying around note taking it's plant, think about your goal set, stopping places with sticky notes, pause and practice a strategy. It's kind of like that scaffold to set kids up for purposeful note taking in a small way.

But when he mentioned why would you want to take notes while you're reading, some kids don't see the point in it and they really don't want to do that. And it actually offers them a way to stay focused.

But if kids can see the connections between, oh, if I jot it's going to help me remember this, and if I have a goal to focus my jotting, that's even better. And then if I get to talk with somebody that's even better.

Macie Kerbs:

Well, you just made me think, I'm wondering if it's this idea of agency versus compliance. So when students are doing notetaking, are we asking them to do it for the teacher? Are we having them fill out a worksheet or a graphic organizer that's pre-printed? So I wonder if they might feel like it's a waste of time because they're just truly being compliant and doing school, going through the motions. But what he was talking about and some of these ideas you were pulling through The Reading Strategies Book is about putting that ownership into the kids' hands so that they have agency over their learning.

Jennifer Serravallo:

And just to focus on purpose, why am I doing this? To constantly be asking yourself as a teacher, have I made it clear to kids why this is helpful or what purpose there is behind this particular practice? It makes me think about the research around when we look at the research around strategy instruction, an important layer to making sure strategies are successful or helpful is a conditional knowledge. When do I apply this strategy? Why do I apply this strategy? It can't just be because my teacher taught it to me, so I have to now go do it. It can't just be because it's being graded or my teacher said to write three post-it notes. There has to be a purpose and the condition in which that particular strategy is most effective. So it's a good reminder of that, I think.

Gina Dignon:

And do you think what he said about note taking applies to teacher note taking? When, so I'm only asking because I did this thing with a group of teachers where we just practiced listening. We borrowed your suggestion at the beginning of the conversation chapter about making the T chart. And one side you listen for comprehension what kids are doing comprehension wise well, and then on the other side what are they doing conversationally? And it was just so fascinating to compare notes. I kind of left it open-ended and I wrote down sort of what I heard and then we compared. It was just interesting setting up purpose for note taking, even with teachers taking notes on with students.

Macie Kerbs:

I love that you brought up teacher note taking in connection. I hadn't even thought about that. And now my mind is like, oh my gosh, how can I rethink note taking when working with students and modeling this for teachers especially, because that's sometimes the hardest part about conferring is making sure we're taking notes that will actually transform our teaching for the next conference. So I just love that you brought that up.

Jennifer Serravallo:

Which is maybe why listening through the lens of a student's goal when note taking, right? If I am sitting down next to a student and I know this is this child who's working on a goal of understanding characters better, so as I listen to what she says, I'm going to be filtering it through the lens of "Which things that she's saying are about character?" And then I can choose to either, depending on the kind of note taker I am, record verbatim some key things that she says. So I can go back, look it over, organize it, see the connections between and then make a decision. Or I can be listening and on the spot evaluating the quality of her response to the character and jot down some takeaways. What did I notice or strengths and what kind of tips. I think bringing this research into professional learning with teachers and having them think about noting is a great idea, Gina. I love it. Lainie, what were you thinking?

Lainie Powell:

So switching to kids, taking notes around complex texts. I think it would be really interesting. I was actually looking at, I tend to go to the main idea chapter, but I was looking at the text features chapter as a way, I mean, there were so many in here that appealed to me as I was listening to him. Let's see oh, 10.12, 10.13, 14, and 15. All as ways to help get into that really dense text and do that harder work that he called. "coordinating meaning across paragraphs" is really hard. So I think using some strategies and comparing notes, even as a small group, could be really helpful for kids to see different ways that I can interact with, gain meaning from, and record my learning in these texts. Lots of lots to take away, lots of work to do,

Jennifer Serravallo:

Lots to take away. I look forward to having more conversations about that interview as well as his book together as a team. Thanks so much for joining me today, everybody.

Lainie Powell:

Thanks everyone. Thank you.

Jennifer Serravallo:

Bye-Bye.

About this episode's guest:

Dan Willingham received his PhD from Harvard University in cognitive psychology and is now a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia. He is the author of several books, including The Reading Mind: A Cognitive Approach to How the Mind Reads and Raising Kids Who Read. A fellow of the American Psychological Association and the Association for Psychological Science, you can follow him on Twitter @DTWillingham.

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Maryanne Wolf