I liked Daniel Willingham as preparation for trying to teach in school. Before that I read John Holt (but I don’t remember which books) a homeschooling guru. He believed children should learn by seeing and doing. He believed in showing children a lot of tools and processes. My favorite John Holt story was about his own learning, not the children around him. He told a story of going on a field trip with a class to see spinning and weaving. There was a demonstration, followed by a discussion of parts of the loom and what they did.

Holt did not understand the loom at all, while the kids were discussing it in ways that showed that they did. It was intensely uncomfortable for him to have such a failure of understanding, particularly as the adult in charge. However, he managed to tell himself what he told the kids. Study everything carefully, and see what your mind will come up with. So he kept looking at all the bits he was being shown calmly. Several hours later as he and the children returned to their home station, Holt said his brain started presenting him with little pictures. It showed him the parts of the loom, along with the name and what the part did. The pictures just floated in in no particular order. After some time of this completely unchosen and unforced process he had a complete understanding of the loom.

He said flatly that if he had been forced to memorize the parts at the moment when he didn’t understand them he would have gotten stuck in that uncomfortable failure and never been able to just let his brain do its work.

“What children need is not new and better curricula but access to more and more of the real world; plenty of time and space to think over their experiences, and to use fantasy and play to make meaning out of them; and advice, road maps, guidebooks, to make it easier for them to get where they want to go (not where we think they ought to go), and to find out what they want to find out.”

John Holt