This article was updated in October 2023.
Daniel T. Willingham is not your typical TikTok star. This mild-mannered University of Virginia psychology professor doesn’t share recipes, exercise tips, or make funny animal videos. Instead, he clearly and concisely provides evidence-based advice for students and educators on how they can work smarter, not harder.
This approach has resonated with viewers.
A video advising university students. about how not to be left behind at your job has garnered more than 2.5 million views so far, while other videos about his tiktok channel It regularly gets tens of thousands of views.
Willingham, a leader in learning research, offers the same concise, clear advice for educators and students in his new book, Outsmart Your Brain: Why Learning is Hard and How You Can Make It Easy.
Here are four tips from the book.
That changed after Willingham was asked to give a lecture on learning to 500 teachers. He realized that educators were eager to know what scientists had discovered about how human beings think and learn, and helping to provide this information to teachers became the center of his career. Today, Willingham is a professor in the psychology department at the University of Virginia and a leading voice in learning research.
Outsmart Your Brain: Why Learning is Hard and How You Can Make It Easy shares science-backed learning strategies that students and teachers can use in their studies and classes. In fact, each chapter concludes with a “For Instructors” section with specific tips for educators.
1. Smarter learning is not always pleasant
One barrier to more effective learning in humans is that the best learning strategies do not always seem intuitive. An example of this can be seen in pretests, which can be useful to students even if they have not previously been exposed to the material.
“If someone hands you a deck of flash cards and you try to answer the questions even though you’ve never seen the material before, it seems absolutely stupid because you’re just guessing, but you actually get a little boost in your understanding. learn when you do that,” Willingham says.
This is just one of many examples, and instructors should remind students that good cognitive practices can seem like a waste of time even when they may be working, Willingham says.
2. Listening to lectures should not be passive
Students tend to treat direct instruction as if they were watching a movie or a live presentation; however, listening to a lecture should be more active than that.
“Listening like you listen when you’re in a movie is not going to be enough,” Willingham says. “You need to be much more active, you need to think, you need to rebuild the organization of the conference if you really want to understand everything you are supposed to understand.”
Teachers can help students do this by making sure the key points of the lecture are clear and reminding them to make connections between various subtopics. For example, Willingham begins her lecture with a slide that describes the various topics she will discuss. Each time she moves to a new part of the lecture, she returns to the original slide to show students where they are and help them make necessary connections between the material.
3. Don’t plan by task
Many students organize their study time by assignment, which may not be the most effective approach. “The problem with task-based planning is that there is a planning fallacy, where everyone, not just students but everyone, underestimates how long it will take to complete tasks,” Willingham says. “Then you think, ‘Oh, I have a chemistry problem due on Friday. But it’s only Tuesday. I have nothing else to do on Friday. So there’s no problem. I’ll do it Thursday night.’”
However, when Thursday night rolls around, if the task takes longer than expected, you may be late or unable to complete it. On the other hand, if you plan by time, you will have created a schedule that will keep you ahead of various tasks. Willingham short tiktok video Sharing this tip has received over 1 million views.
4. Create good study habits
Linked to time planning is the idea of developing study habits. Humans are creatures of habit, so developing effective study habits can help your students stick with class material.
Although he advises scheduling study sessions by time and by task, Willingham says the timing of these study sessions should be based on specific triggers throughout the day rather than rocky starts. So instead of saying you’re going to study from 7 a.m. to 8 a.m. each morning, he recommends planning to study an hour after breakfast. Students should also plan for challenges and distractions that arise and how they will handle them.
While many students might think in terms of streaks, Willingham says streaks will always be broken, so it’s important to remember that the key is to study most days, not every day. “The key to a habit is that it eliminates the decision of whether you’re going to work or not,” Willingham says. “If you’re in the habit of brushing your teeth every night, you don’t decide, ‘Oh yeah, that’s a really good idea.’ You find yourself in the bathroom with your toothbrush in your mouth. And that’s because it has become so common that you don’t even think about it. “That’s the place you want to get to.”
