What Willingham's theory claims

1. Daniel Willingham is a cognitive scientist who argues that learning is built on knowledge you already hold in memory.
2. His starting point is that memory is the residue of thought, so you remember whatever you spend time thinking about.
3. Teaching should therefore be planned around what you already know and what a task makes you think about, not around a supposed preferred learning style such as visual or kinaesthetic, for which he says the evidence does not hold up.

Factual knowledge precedes skill

1. Willingham argues you cannot think critically about a subject until you know a good deal about it.
2. Skills such as analysing, comparing and problem solving are not free-floating abilities; they always operate on facts held in long-term memory.
3. Because you can only hold a small amount in mind at once, insecure facts eat up that space while you hunt for them, leaving nothing spare for the harder thinking.
4. Once the facts are secure you retrieve them without effort, and that freed-up capacity is what the skill runs on.

The importance of practice and effort

1. Practice is what turns knowledge and skills from effortful into automatic.
2. Something automatic costs you almost no mental effort, which is precisely what frees you to think about the difficult part.
3. Willingham argues practice needs to be spread out and kept up over time rather than crammed, because it is repetition across weeks that makes knowledge durable.
4. Effort matters because the learning comes from the thinking you do during practice, not from the minutes you sit there.
5. Copying notes out neatly makes you think about handwriting, so handwriting is what improves.

Strategies to support cognitive development

1. Build background knowledge deliberately before expecting analysis or evaluation.
2. Set tasks that force thought about meaning rather than about surface features such as colouring or layout.
3. Use spaced practice and regular retrieval, such as low-stakes quizzing, so knowledge becomes secure rather than merely familiar.

Strategies to support physical development

1. Demonstrate the movement and describe it, so you have a clear model to think about while you attempt it.
2. Break the movement into parts, practise each part, then put them back together.
3. Give immediate and specific feedback, so practice corrects the error rather than drilling it in.
4. Repeat it over weeks until the movement is automatic, which is what leaves you free to think about tactics instead of technique.

Strategies to support social development

1. Adults model the behaviour they want, such as listening without interrupting or settling a disagreement calmly.
2. Explain the reason behind the expectation, because a rule you understand transfers to a new situation and a rule you have only memorised does not.
3. Build in structured chances to practise, such as group tasks, shared responsibilities and turn-taking games.

Strengths and weaknesses of the theory

1. A strength is that it rests on cognitive science evidence about memory and practice, so its claims can be tested rather than just asserted.
2. A further strength is how usable it is, because a teacher can act on it directly by sequencing knowledge and spacing practice.
3. A weakness is that a heavy focus on facts can crowd out creativity and independent enquiry, which are harder to build through drilling.
4. It also plays down individual differences, treating learners as more alike than teachers often find them to be.

Turning this into marks

1. If a question asks for strategies, name the type of development it wants and give strategies that actually fit it, because a cognitive strategy offered for physical development earns nothing.
2. For a strategy to score, say what the teacher does and why it works, since the reason is usually where the second mark sits.
3. The mark most often lost is the judgement, so pair the evidence base against the crowding-out criticism and then say which you find more convincing.