This week's article summary is The 'How' and 'Why' of Teaching. It’s a longer summary than usual, so I’m sending it out early in case you want to print it and read it over the holiday weekend when you have some spare time.
I like the article for its explanation of the two extremes of education: the more traditional view of students as empty vessels that need to be filled with content knowledge contrasted with the more progressive, child-focused belief that children are innate learners and it’s our (school, teacher, parent) responsibility to engage, inspire, and motivate them to want to continue to learn.
As you’ll see from the article, the traditionalists under the name of ‘cognitive science’ stress the importance of knowledge acquisition as the key to future success, particularly student performance on high-stakes tests. My quibble with these cognitive scientists is they focus exclusively on effective ways to memorize material so it can be stored in long-term memory. For them, learning is a mechanical, one-size-fits-all, rote process where kids receive material from teachers and then commit it to memory. It’s all science and no art, and we teachers know there’s a much art and nuance to great teaching.
We are fortunate that Trinity being elementary-only doesn’t have to deal very often with the above cognitive science arguments that high schools do where content and teacher-centric classrooms rule. When you get to the article’s paragraphs on child-centered teaching, you’ll be in more familiar territory with words and terms like ‘problem solving, internal motivation, process of learning, individuality, student engagement, and play.’
I think It’s important to be familiar with education beliefs different from ours. We can even learn from them. I like reading Daniel Willingham and Daisy Christodoulou (two authors mentioned in the article) and even have some of their books in my office. I do agree with cognitive scientists that content knowledge is important as research consistently shows that background knowledge significantly supports better reading comprehension. Yet it's their pedagogy (the how of teaching) that I take exception with. We at Trinity see the importance of relevance, meaningfulness, and engagement as critical needs for students in and out of the classroom. When the article described how students learn at Michaela Community School I was deeply saddened and engaged. Cognitive science-based teaching is like an old black and white movie, while great teaching is technicolor.
As we reach the quarter mark of the school year, huge thanks to all of you for an exemplary first eight weeks of the school year despite the continued ups and downs and fits and starts of Covid! Have a restful and enjoyable long Fall Weekend!
Joe
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Speaking at a National Education Summit last spring, Education Secretary Gavin Williamson said: ‘We know much more now about what works best: evidence-backed, traditional teacher-led lessons with children seated facing the expert at the front of the class are powerful tools for enabling a structured learning environment where everyone flourishes.’
But hang on a moment. Many parents, educators and psychologists across the country responded to Williamson’s speech with a ‘huh?’
What is this evidence he’s talking about? How does it square with the research showing how important play and motivation is for learning? Where did he get that confidence about the same thing working for everyone, when any teacher knows that each child is different and that teaching a class of children rarely results in them all learning the same thing?
Williamson is referring to a school of thought which has gained traction in recent years, that of education based on ‘cognitive science’.
Advocates such as Daniel Willingham (Why Don’t Students Like School?), Daisy Christodoulou (Seven Myths about Education) and Katharine Birbalsingh (Battle Hymn of the Tiger Teachers) argue that the research illustrates progressive educational techniques don’t work.
By progressive techniques they mean a wide range of methods, including the idea that schools should teach transferable skills (Christodoulou), that teachers should make an effort to make their lessons engaging and interesting to children (Birbalsingh), or that children should be encouraged to think critically and solve problems from early on (Willingham).
From this perspective, progressive techniques are responsible for most of the educational ills of the world, and the whole thing could be put right if we just applied the science. Their approach is simple: An expert teacher instructs, children listen, repeat and learn.
There’s an impressive body of research to back them up. So much so that it’s tough for your average parent or teacher to disagree. The studies are real, the findings are robust. Yet within that narrative there are some leaps of logic which may explain the disconnect between the ‘evidence-backed’ certainty and the day-to-day experience of most children and teachers. The research they cite is from cognitive psychology, and it looks at how humans acquire knowledge and skills.
Cognitive scientists such as Daniel Willingham say that it is now indisputable that ‘thinking well requires knowing facts’. His book explains his model of how the brain works, which, when applied to schools and children results in the expert at the front, children as the audience model of education. This model is essentially an analysis of the process by which people move from being novices to experts. Willingham’s book explains in detail how experts have more information stored in their long-term memories, enabling them to ‘chunk’ their knowledge and therefore use their working memory capacity efficiently and creatively.
The qualitative difference in the thinking between experts and novices is what leads to the claim that in order to ‘think well’, we first require factual knowledge. And when applied to children, this means that the central task of education becomes getting as much knowledge as possible into children by the most efficient means.
Or as Christodoulou puts it, schools should focus on ‘knowledge accumulation’. She says this is essential before children can engage in what she calls ‘sophisticated higher-order responses’. Those sophisticated higher-order responses include critical thinking, hypothesis testing, and problem solving.
Once it’s agreed that knowledge accumulation is the aim, the next step is how to achieve that. Here, another set of research findings come in. This is research into memory, and how information is best committed to memory. If your desired outcome is specific information committed to long term memory, repetition and practice over an extended period of time are what works. Many studies back this up. It doesn’t matter too much whether a person understands what they are meant to be remembering in this model, as it’s the retention of information which is important.
So, the guiding principles are these. Experts think in a more sophisticated way than novices, and the difference between a novice and an expert is the amount of information stored in their long-term memory. Therefore, in order to turn children into people capable of sophisticated thinking we must first make sure they have lots of information stored in their long-term memory, and the sophisticated thinking will follow. Therefore, there is no point in wasting time at school in activities which create opportunities for novice children to use higher order thinking skills… it’s more efficient to spend the time on knowledge acquisition.
Birbalsingh has founded a school, Michaela Community School, which takes these ideas as their founding principles. Teachers at Michaela focus on teaching content, students are expected to focus on retaining the information. There is no variation in teaching methods across the school, and there is no differentiation between pupils. If a child isn’t learning, that is their responsibility, and if they don’t comply precisely with expectations, they are punished. Teachers at Michaela, as they explain in their book, give detentions and demerits for infractions such as slouching at your desk, and there are no exceptions for difficult circumstances. From their perspective, those children who have experienced the most adversity have the highest needs for strict rules and so difficult home situations or a trauma history aren’t reasons for non-compliance. Michaela gets results. Children don’t have much other choice – if they don’t comply, they will quickly find themselves put under intense pressure to do so. Parents are expected to buy into the model too, and so the children are surrounded with the same ethos.
So if standardized test results are the final benchmark of education, all that really matters, then perhaps the Education Secretary is right?
Those of us who work with children might want more out of education, however. We might want to look at what children learn about themselves and their place in the world, and we might want to know how being so strictly controlled at school affects children’s wellbeing and ability to cope when they get into the less structured environment of university or work – one where intrinsic motivation matters.
For this model of learning is all about how to get knowledge and skills into children. The science is procedural and mechanistic. Any difficulties in education are reduced to how can we persuade children to comply with the regime of instruction, practice and repetition. Educational philosophy is completely missing from their approach. The question of why children might learn goes unmentioned, and the question of what they will learn is answered again by ‘the science’.
What’s missing in this Brave New World vision of well-behaved children sitting in rows absorbing knowledge? Well, remember that most of the research we’ve encountered is with adult experts, who have chosen to learn about something because they are highly motivated. Their drive to practice and read and learn comes from within. I’ve seen this process in action with my own children with a rather different pursuit – Minecraft. I did not set out to create Minecraft experts and I suspect that if I had, they would not have been interested. No direct instruction was required for them to acquire expertise: playing Minecraft.
The issue of motivation is a serious one. Children do not typically come to the school because they are fascinated by phonics or fractions. They learn because an adult somewhere has decided that this is what they should be learning. This means that most schools, as with Michaela, have to set up a complicated system of incentives and punishments in order to persuade children to comply with their demands, or they have to try to engage children on their own terms, perhaps by giving them more choices or a chance learn things they are interested in – so called ‘progressive techniques’.
External motivation is less effective for learning than internally driven motivation, and affects the quality of learning. Low quality motivation typically shows itself through behavior, with children being disruptive or refusing. Schools then have to resort to ever more extreme behavioral regimes, and even then, not all children will comply.
Beyond that motivation issue, there are other ways to think about learning. The cognitive model is only one of many. There is an extensive body of research which shows how, from a very early age, children are engaged as active agents in their learning and learn through play. They test hypotheses, problem solve, and come up with creative solutions. Alison Gopnik calls this the ‘child as scientist’ theory of learning, and anyone who has spent time with a young child will have seen it in action. They mix things together, they experiment with floating and sinking, they ask purposeful questions.
It’s hard to square observations of young children learning with the idea that higher order thinking is impossible without extensive background knowledge. They are novices in every way, and yet their observations and experiments are frequently more creative and insightful than the adults around them. On the other hand, their ability to remain seated and listening to an expert is seriously lacking when compared to most adults, and so it seems perverse to insist on a method of learning which plays to children’s weaknesses rather than their strengths.
To Gopnik, and to most developmental psychologists, learning is best understood as an interaction between what a child already knows, and what they experience around them. Direct instruction can actually interfere with this, as the research shows that when children are told what to do with a toy they imitate the adult, whereas without direct instruction they explore freely and in the process discover more about the toy.
The child is not an empty vessel, to be filled with expert knowledge, but an agent who acts upon the world around them. As they explore the world through play, they acquire higher order skills and knowledge – but the knowledge they acquire is not necessarily the same as the next child along.
One child may learn all about the properties of mud and water, whilst another learns about tractors and diggers. It doesn’t really matter, because much of what they are learning is how to learn. This is constructivism. Knowledge is constructed by the child, based on what interests them, what they know already, and what experiences they have available to them.
From this perspective, no two children will learn the same things from their experiences and so standardized curriculums can never guarantee standard results. But from this standpoint, it is not simply knowledge acquisition which an education should focus on, but rather the development of the child as an active learner, a person who sees that their choices matter and that they can have autonomy over their lives. These are the transferable skills.
If your aim is for all children to learn a specific body of knowledge and retain it, and you are confident that you can motivate children to do so, then direct instruction from an expert with lots of repetition (otherwise known as drilling) may well be effective.
If your aim is children who can think critically and creatively, and who are developing their potential as active and diverse human beings, then there is no evidence that drilling them will achieve this.
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