I don’t suppose that anyone sits down intending to create a cliché.
Whoever first noted that someone was “as cool as a cucumber” must have sat back delighted at their alliteration. Shakespeare may have taken the rest of the day off when he had Polonius suggest that his son “neither a borrower nor a lender be”. The problem is that what seems startlingly fresh at first soon becomes linguistic white noise through overfamiliarity.
I can still remember the first time I came across the phrase “memory is the residue of thought” in Daniel T Willingham’s seminal book Why Don’t Students Like School?. It was so simple, so elegant. Our students don’t necessarily remember what we plan for them to; they remember the things that they think about.
Thinking about thinking
In the years that followed, I’d drop the line into CPD sessions, conference talks, books and articles. And so did many others. And, like so much else, it became part of the background of educational discussion. Something that most teachers would agree is true, but that had lost its power to make us sit up and take notice.
But this simple idea can help us ask ourselves one of the most useful questions when teaching or observing a lesson: who is thinking about what right now?
There have certainly been lessons in which I have been thinking much harder than my students. I’d be working out how to explain a concept, drawing on barely remembered examples as illustrations, making diagrams and modelling answers.
These are all important parts of a lesson, but I had moved a long way from the idea that memory is the residue of thought. It was me who was doing the thinking, not my students. Very little of that lesson had stuck in their memories.
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The same problem occurred in other ways. I remember one lesson I taught on informal settlements (sometimes called shanty towns). I brought my recycling box, full of cardboard, newspaper and bits of plastic, and challenged the students to work in groups to build their own model houses.
Every so often, I would come along and enact a problem faced by the residents in such areas, flooding them with water, disturbing them with landslides or government-backed demolition.
The next lesson, students came in still excited by their previous week’s work. They wanted to know if they could carry on making houses. I was keen to find out what they had learned from it.
They could tell me all about the difficulties of getting glue to stick and how annoying it was to have your work destroyed by someone pouring a bottle of water over it, but they could tell me nothing about informal settlements or the very real challenges that people face when living there.
These two lessons are very different. The first could be described as traditional, with a “sage on the stage”, whereas the second is led more by a “guide on the side”. But in both cases, the problem was the same: I hadn’t considered who was thinking or what they were thinking about.
In my next column, I will explore the practical application of this question in the classroom: just how do we make sure that there is a residue of thought?
Mark Enser is an author and freelance writer
