I was met with blank stares. “Start work,” I repeated, and pencils began to scratch.

I allowed time before announcing I was coming around to check work and call on students to read out answers. What did I find? My students had copied from the board perfectly, including the spaces left for their own thoughts.

These were still blank, ready for my answers to be given so they could copy them in. Students had complied with my instructions up to the point of having to think.

They were given time to eat a piece of fruit before the lesson. We discussed the day and removed distractions. The class was calm.

Despite all these efforts to lay the groundwork for learning, the best I could extract was copying.

This is a common dilemma for teachers. It seems the choice is either a peaceful classroom where the work is easy or to push for creative, complex and problem-solving cognition but at the cost of a high level of friction.

Simply meeting basic needs does not give us students ready to engage their minds in challenging thinking. Brains that resist thinking do not just engage because they are ready to.

We are told to adjust for each student’s level, and while it is absolutely essential that the work we set is achievable, we can err towards over-simplifying just so students will complete it.

How does one overcome the brain’s natural laziness and wind it up into top gear? What can we do as teachers to motivate brains beyond merely functioning, and encourage higher-level thought?

A surprising fact

Human beings do not like to do difficult things. This applies not only physically, but to our brains as well. Cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham explains this in his insightful book, Why Don’t Students Like School?

He says, rather ironically, our brains don’t like thinking. Thinking uses energy and our brains, like our bodies, want to conserve this. It’s not that our brains are ever idle, they have many duties, such as keeping our bodies functioning properly, and complex thinking is like adding a weight vest to an athlete already running up a hill.

This is not to say we should avoid challenging our brains, however. Our bodies resist exercise too and we need that. It’s just that there’s a level of inertia which must be overcome for our brains to be used to their capacity.

For effective learning to take place, we must provide the right amount of stress, or what Professors of Psychology E. L. Bjork and R. A. Bjork call, ‘desirable difficulty’.

As teachers, we need to guide our students into achievable mental exertion just out of their comfort zone.

Your students may not resist revision questions because the answers came easily.

Yet ask them to concentrate and apply a new concept and their brains resist and default to tasks requiring less computing, such as looking out the window, talking to a friend or flicking rubber dust at the student in front of them.

A teacher’s natural instinct

Often, a teacher’s instinct is to create motivation by saying something along the lines of, “You must complete this before you go to lunch”.

This works for many children, and wakes their brains into action with the thought of a consequence worse than the task in front of them.

One issue with this is that it encourages completion of work to a minimum standard, not higher-order thinking or the best the student can produce.

Again, the brain’s default is to do as little work as possible, and all we’ve done is raise the bar slightly from no thinking, to a comfort-zone level of thought.

This can become the standard teachers settle with, because to push further creates an unstable environment, where we find ourselves pushing the limits of volatile students likely to react unpredictably.

The importance of higher-level reasoning

This creates a dilemma however, and exposes an unintended flaw in our education system. Is accepting compliance and minimal creative thought from students preparing them for the future?

Our rapidly changing world poses many complex questions - technological, ethical and practical - which require high-level reasoning.

Failure to train the next generation in complex reasoning is to restrict them to the role of unthinking consumers, at the mercy of large corporations seeking to control society for their own purposes.

We must train our students to shape the future or they will be shaped by a future outside their control. It is therefore essential that we do more than play lip-service to higher-order thinking and find ways to engage students’ minds daily.

Preparing students for the future

Teachers are familiar with Bloom’s Taxonomy, which places creative thought at the pinnacle of thinking skills, followed by evaluation, analysis and application.

Higher-order thinking involves taking what has been taught and moving beyond recalling facts to applying them to new situations.

It is using facts that have been learnt to solve problems not encountered before. It is the ‘Part C’ of an assessment item.

Unfortunately, it has been my experience that we don’t prepare our students well for ‘Part C’.

We teach the facts and see what happens with the problem-solving component. We almost treat it as something our ‘gifted’ students will get and let it filter out our A students from the rest.

I’ll admit, I tried teaching problem-solving in my early, naive days and soon worked out it was more trouble than it was worth. When it didn’t seem to be prioritised by the school, I let that aspect of the curriculum slip.

A solution

For a better solution, let’s consider why adults, out of their own free will, choose to challenge their brains.

Adults play chess, learn languages on an app, engage in strategy games, read academic journals and even watch quiz shows on television to relax.

Adults do so because they’ve found that testing their brains is stimulating and fun. So as teachers, we should ask ourselves what will make learning fun for our students?

Interactive, hands-on and activity-based learning are a reward in of themselves and have been shown to increase self-confidence, motivation and develop higher-order thinking.

Much like physical exercise, the most difficult part is starting. Once we’ve begun, exercise and learning are energising.

Games and fun can provide the pay-off to motivate the brain to think hard. Making learning fun makes pushing for better answers rewarding.

While simply getting the facts across results in students unwilling to think for themselves, fun is a gateway to higher-order thinking.

References

Anwer, F. (2019). Activity-based teaching, student motivation, and academic achievement. Journal of Education and Educational Development, 6(1), 154–170.

Bjork, E. L., & Bjork, R. A. (2011). Making things hard on yourself, but in a good way. Psychology and the Real World. https://bjorklab.psych.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2016/04/EBjork_RBjork_2011.pdf

Krathwohl, D. R. (2002). A revision of Bloom's taxonomy: An overview. Theory into Practice, 41(4), 212–218. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15430421tip4104_2

Willingham, D. T. (2009). Why don't students like school? A cognitive scientist answers questions about how the mind works and what it means for your classroom. Jossey-Bass.