This week on Where Parents Talk radio on 105.9 The Region, host Lianne Castelino speaks to Daniel T. Willingham, Ph.D., Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia, researcher with a PhD in Cognitive Psychology from Harvard University author of Outsmart Your Brain: Why Learning is Hard and How You can Make it Easy, and father of four, about how to improve learning skills.
DANIEL T. WILLINGHAM, Ph.D.
Professor of Psychology, University of Virginia
Researcher
Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology
Author, Outsmart Your Brain: Why Learning is Hard and How You can Make it Easy
Father of four
“…our expectations of children’s ability to sort of bring something to the table in their own learning is appropriately really close to zero when children are in preschool. In other words, our expectation is 100% that if children learn or don’t learn, it’s because of the teacher, it’s up to the teacher to create environments for children to learn. By the time they’re ready to graduate high school, our expectations are very high about how children should be able to regulate their own learning. We expect them to be able to resist distraction, they should be able to commit things to memory. If they read something that they don’t understand, they should be resourceful in figuring out how they can come to an understanding of it. So we have these very high expectations about their ability to learn and to learn independently. But schools don’t teach them how to do this. And when I say it’s sort of this intersection between human individual ability, and then sort of the systems of how we teach children, that’s the bit about human learning that I’ve been obsessed with.”
