Running head: WILLIAM JAMES STILL TALKS TO TEACHERS

William James Still Talks to Teachers Tylene Neary and Shawna Sjoquist University of Calgary

William James Still Talks to Teachers William James was a prominent figure and helped to establish the practice of psychology in America in the latter half of the 19th century (Berliner, 1993). James published his most famous work, Principles of Psychology in 1890 and was asked shortly after to give a series of lectures to teachers regarding this new psychology and how it related to the classroom. These lectures were refined and expanded over the years and eventually published as a collection under the title, Talks to Teachers on Psychology, in 1899 (Berliner, 1993). What is interesting about the content included in these lectures, delivered to teachers more than a century ago, is that much of it is still relevant today. McKeachie (1999) argues that although research and theory have given us a better understanding of learning and memory much of Jamess wisdom is still valid today. This paper will discuss the areas of interest, attention, habit and memory and will provide connections found between Jamess publication of Talks to Teachers in 1899 and what research and practice tells us today. Interest When William James spoke of interest in his series of lectures back in 1899 he identified interest as an integral component to successful teaching and learning in the classroom. This idea has held true through the years since Jamess declaration and has been reaffirmed in more current times by researchers who have stated that interest has a profound effect on cognitive functioning and that it plays a key role in both motivating and facilitating the learning process (Hidi, 1990; Silvia, 2008). Learning is influenced not only by personal interest in a particular subject matter but also by the amount of interest that is inherent to the object, concept or task itself. James (1899) identified this inherent interest as native interest and stated that in order to make an uninteresting topic of study interesting to students, and so gain their attention and facilitate their learning,

interest has to be acquired by associating the uninteresting object or topic with something that is natively interesting. For example, when teaching students the mechanics of writing, allowing them to write about their favorite cartoon or superhero makes the writing assignment much more interesting. Rather than becoming bored with the mechanics of writing, their interest is held because the assignment is now associated with something they are natively interested in. James (1899) believed that the native interests of children generally fell into the realm of sensation and that novel sights and sounds, particularly of an active or violent nature would attract the interest and attention of students. More modern theories (Silvia, 2008) posit that interest may in fact be an emotion and that novelty certainly plays a role. According to Silvias noveltycomplexity theory, interest can be evoked by the new, unexpected, complex, hard to process, surprising, mysterious or obscure nature of an event (2008, p.58). In regards to classroom teaching, James (1899) instructs teachers to use novelty when introducing new topics to capture the students interest and cites that the child will always attend more to what a teacher does than to what the same teacher says (James, 1899, Chapter 10). Engaging and holding student interest through a variety of sensory-motor techniques and activities that will appeal to the multiple learning styles within a classroom is still extremely relevant today. James (1899) proclaims with gusto that while teaching, you must simply work your pupil into such a state of interest in what you are going to teach him that every other object of attention is banished from his mind; then reveal it to him so impressively that he will remember the occasion to his dying day (James, 1899, Chapter 1). However, as James (1899) and Silvia (2008) both recognize, not all people are interested in the same things so in the teaching of dull curriculum it becomes increasingly difficult for teachers to associate the topic of study with an item of inherent interest that will pertain to all students. James (1899) does suggest, in remediation to this and in

his belief in the benefit of associating prior knowledge with new knowledge, the concept of crosscurricular teaching, where subject matter across the curriculum is related and therefore more meaningful for students. Cross-curricular teaching methods are often used in schools today in an attempt to eliminate isolated skill instruction in favor of providing a more relevant and meaningful curriculum for students ("Curriculum", 2010). Returning to the basic idea that student interest is a hallmark of learning, Hidi (1990) cited several examples from studies conducted between 1973 and 1988 indicating the positive effect of individual interests on cognitive performance. The findings, including an array of positive learning experiences and outcomes from superior performances and test scores on the comprehension of passages and mathematical word problems, to reengagement, motivation and perseverance in subject related activities, indicate that interest is as relevant a factor in learning today as it was at the turn of century when James spoke of its contribution to learning in his talks to teachers. Attention Various theories on attention have arisen in the past half century including selective attention theory, filter theory, attenuation theory and capacity theories (Goel, 2010). If we look at the basic tenets of each of these theories, we discover that James (1899) spoke to most of these same elements of attention in his lectures and publication of Talks to Teachers. The term selective attention and Broadbents filter theory put forth in 1958, both refer to the human limitation of only being able to effectively focus on one stimulus, task or event at a time. Attenuation theory modifies this view slightly in saying that extraneous sights, sounds and events, though outside of our focus, are not banished completely but rather weakened, and that some information from the periphery can be retained and stored for future use (Goel, 2010). In the beginning chapters of

Talks to Teachers, in discussing the stream of consciousness, James (1899) identifies the minds single focus point by relaying that in most of our fields of consciousness there is a core sensation that is very pronounced but also that, the sensations are the centre or focus, the thoughts and feelings the margin, of your actually present conscious field (Chapter 2). James (1899) believed that interest and attention were clearly linked in that any object, topic or task that was interesting would surely excite attention. If we speak of interest in the realm of sensation or as an emotion, then we are in tune with Kahnemans (1973) model of attention that linked overall attention to emotional states such as arousal and alertness (Goel, 2010). In regard to capacity theory, which indicates that working memory is directly associated with the ability to sustain focus, James (1899) shares a similar insight in terms of this connection and the variability amongst individuals: There is unquestionably a great native variety among individuals in the type of their attention. Some of us are naturally scatterbrained, and others follow easily a train of connected thoughts without temptation to swerve aside to other subjects. This seems to depend on a difference between individuals in the type of their field of consciousness. In some persons this is highly focalized and concentrated, and the focal ideas predominate in determining association. In others we must suppose the margin to be brighter, and to be filled with something like meteoric showers of images, which strike into it at random, displacing the focal ideas, and carrying association in their own direction. (Chapter 11) James (1899) understood that attention helped to stabilize learning and prevent forgetting. To make this information practical for teachers, James zeroed in on not only capturing students attention but also working to keep it. He theorized that voluntary attention was very short lived and that teachers would need apply certain teaching strategies to hold students attention, such as incorporating movement into their lessons, stimulating students with effective questioning

techniques, making learning concrete and meaningful and providing novelty in terms of the order and routine of the classroom (James, 1899). Many of these same strategies are encouraged by learning specialists today, including Instructional Intelligence guru Barry Bennett who is a proponent of the use of Blooms Taxonomy for effective questioning as well as incorporating a plethora of co-operative learning strategies that promote active learning and engagement (Bennett & Rolheiser, 2008). Similar to Bennett (2008), James encouraged the use of creative and flexible techniques within a learner-centered classroom in order to improve student attention and stimulate meaningful learning. Association and Habit When William James spoke of habit and association he began his discussion with the representation of education as the organization of acquired habits of conduct and tendencies to behavior (James, 1899, Chapter 3). The idea that education involves a process of developing habits and behaviors that promote learning is a notion that is still widely held in present day. The Government of Albertas Guide to Education identifies that the delivery of education should be designed to help students develop desirable personal characteristics [and] . . . take increasing responsibility for their learning and behavior (2010, p. 16). In 1899, James suggested that an individuals overall life circumstances reflect the collection of habits the individual routinely engages. According to James (1899), the majority of lifes activity, including an individuals morning routine, study behavior and interaction style, are largely habitual. Taken as truth, James proposes that one of the prime responsibilities of the teacher is to instill learners with an abundance of decidedly useful habits that promote successful learning and life experiences (James, 1899, Chapter. 8). The notion of promoting positive learning habits may be found in any of the abundant present day research centering on generative learning strategies. As an example, literature has

emphasized the benefits of teaching learners to perceive tasks, read and attend to textual cues, make sense of what is read and discern an appropriate course of action when comprehension wanes (Zhenhui, Gu, Zhang, & Guangwei, 2007). James (1899) recognition of the habitual nature of human life and learning practices is also present in his understanding of the nervous system and what is now known as automaticity. In his lectures, he declared that our nervous systems have grown to the way in which they have been exercised (James, 1899, Chapter 8). In coordination with James theory, the notion that practice and experience influence cerebral organization is now a widely recognized fact salient in current literature and practiced in current research (Tung-Hsin et al., 2008). As an example, Tung-Hsin et al. (2008) demonstrated that intensive training and practice produced more effective neural connections associated with number encoding and retrieval resulting in the increased mental math abilities found in math experts. Practice and experience then pave the path toward automaticity. In his lectures James identified that the more details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work (James, 1899, Chapter 8). In association with James lectures, current literature recognizes that the automaticity of decoding influences the effectiveness of working memory (Wendling & Mather, 2009). For instance, if a student must sound out every word in a given sentence, as opposed to being able to automatically retrieve the meaning of the word upon sight, the students comprehension of the sentence may become limited as cognitive resources are used up during the process of deciphering the individual words (Pressley, 2000). Learning and Memory What is now known as automaticity is not the only process associated to working memory and recall that William James addressed in his 1899 lectures. James (1899) makes ample reference

to the association of ideas and their role in the learning experience for both students and teachers alike. James discusses what he calls Laws of Association which include his Law of Contiguity and the Law of Similarity and are used to refer to associations made between newly presented information and older pre-existing information (1899, Chapter 9). What William James recognized with what he called the Law of Contiguity and the Law of Similarity relates to processes inherent to explicit and implicit memory (Parker and Dagnall, 2009). Parker and Dagnall (2009) offer that explicit memory tasks are those tasks that require the intentional retrieval of information and implicit memory tasks are those that require the unintentional retrieval of previously learned material. The Laws of Association presented by James reflected present day in literature are also associated with current theories of generative learning. Generative learning theory describes the process by which a learner comprehends new information by integrating and associating it with knowledge that had previously been acquired (Grabowski, 2004). Also aligned with James views, Wittrock (1992) offers that applying generative learning theory to a complex task means that the learner must attend to and generate meaning for the information by forming associations to information already stored within memory. In coordination with current literature, James suggested that teachers should strive to facilitate working associations into the minds of the learner that are generous in number and relate to multiple cues (Engle, 2006; James, 1899). James understood that the cue used to initiate recall is associated in some way with the information produced through the recall process itself (Gray & Brinkley, 2011; James, 1988). James offered that an educated memory depend on an organized system of associations; and its goodness depends on . . . the persistency of the associations and . . . their number (1899, Chapter 13). With this knowledge of memory James (1899) suggests that learning is enhanced when teachers support learners to form robust abundant cues or associations by becoming engaged with

the new information they encounter. Current literature suggests that learning benefits when learners are accountable and responsible for their own learning (Barab, Young & Wang, 1999; Wittrock, 1992). Moreover, todays research regarding metacognition and metacognitive feedback is aligned with James and his suggestions. Current literature has demonstrated that metacognitive feedback can also be used to promote the learning process by challenging learners to assess the appropriateness of the cognitive strategies they use (Narciss, 2008). Conclusion A large portion of the knowledge William James shared through his Talks to Teachers remains in both theory and practice to this day. James identified that successful teaching and learning is substantially influenced by concepts germane to areas of interest, attention, habit and memory. In 1899, James recognized that both interesting information and stimulating presentation of information have profound effects on learning experiences encountered by the individual. James thoughts regarding interest are prominent in research regarding the motivation and facilitation of the learning process, use of multiple learning styles, sensory motor techniques and cross-curricular teaching methods (Hidi, 1990; Curriculum, 2010; Silvia, 2008). The Talks to Teachers lectures highlighted links between interest and attention that still persist in attention theory, filter theory, attenuation theory and capacity theory present day. James (1899) views of education emphasized the presence and necessary development of habits and behaviors valuable for the promotion of learning may be found today in the Government of Albertas 2010 Guide to Education. James identified theories of habitualization that correspond to present day research involving automaticity and generative learning theory and suggest teachers support children in working toward optimizing their use of cognitive reserves and learning strategies (Barab, Young & Wang, 1999; James, 1899; Narciss, 2008; Pressley, 2000; Tung-Hsin et al., 2008; Wendling & Mather, 2009; Wittrock, 1992).

Knowledge of association pertinent to memory formation and learning are mirrored, present day, in theories of implicit and explicit memory and metacognitive research (Narciss, 2008; Parker & Dagnall, 2009). As evidence of past work presents in modern literature it becomes clear that William James, in many respects, still talks to teachers today.

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