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Why Don't Students Like School: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom (Paperback) by Dan Willingham will knock your socks off. Attention teachers, administrators, tutors, parents... everyone who works with kids or cares about eduction should read this book!

Kids are naturally curious, but when it comes to school it seems like their minds just switch off. Why is it that they can remember the smallest details from their favorite television program, yet miss the most obvious questions on their history test? Cognitive scientist Dan Willingham has focused his acclaimed research on the biological and cognitive basis of learning and has a deep understanding of the daily challenges faced by classroom teachers. This book will help teachers improve their practice by explaining how they and their students think and learn revealing the importance of story, emotion, memory, context, and routine in building knowledge and creating lasting learning experiences.

The reviews speak for themselves. Just like his Ask the Cognitive Scientist column, Dan Willingham's book makes fascinating but complicated research from cognitive science accessible to teachers. It is jam packed with ideas that teachers will find both intellectually rich and useful in their classroom work." said Randi Weingarten, president, American Federation of Teachers.

In this breakthrough book, Willingham has distilled his knowledge of cognitive science into a set of nine principles that are easy to understand and have clear applications for the classroom. Some of examples of his surprising findings are:

• "Learning styles" don't exist. The processes by which different children think and learn are more similar than different.
• Intelligence is malleable. Intelligence contributes to school performance and children do differ, but intelligence can be increased through sustained hard work.
• You cannot develop "thinking skills" in the absence of facts. We encourage students to think critically, not just memorize facts. However thinking skills depend on factual knowledge for their operation.

Why Don't Students Like School is a basic primer for every teacher who wants to know how their brains and their students' brains work and how that knowledge can help them hone their teaching skills.  You can find this book in bulk, as well as literally millions of classroom novel sets on Book-Pal.com!

The Author, Daniel T. Willingham, is professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, where he has taught since 1992. He writes the popular Ask the Cognitive Scientist column for American Educator magazine.