Category: Teaching
Webinar : How Learning Happens
Please join us on Thursday 3 Jun, 16:30 – 18:00 (BST) where Paul and I will be giving a webinar on the first section of our book. Find out more here.
How Learning Happens: How Does Our Brain Work?
Thu 3 Jun 2021 16:30 – 18:00 (BST)
Professor Paul A. Kirschner
Dr. Carl Hendrick
Online webinar – £20
This (90 minute) session aims to give attendees a basic understanding of how the brain learns, drawing on important research from cognitive psychology. As John Sweller noted “without an understanding of human cognitive architecture, instruction is blind”.
In this webinar we will discuss the first section of our book ‘How Learning Happens’ looking at how our brains work and what that means for learning and teaching. We explain why students learn some things almost effortlessly without instruction, while other things are learnt with great difficulty through instruction, how our memory works and how we can make it work better, how we (learn to) solve problems, how and why images and words together can help us learn better, and why children should not be taught as if they were small adults. Among the topic covered are:
- What is cognitive load theory and how can I use it to inform my teaching?
- What do I need to know about short v long term memory?
- How do novices and experts learn differently?
- What is the difference between biologically primary and secondary knowledge?
Paul and Carl will give a 60-minute presentation about how our brain works which will be followed by a 30-minute session where they’ll answer any and all questions that you may have.
Facilitators:
Dr. Carl Hendrick is a teacher of 15 years classroom experience and is co-author of ‘How Learning Happens’ and holds a PhD in education.
Professor Paul Kirschner is emeritus professor of educational psychology, instructional designer and ex-teacher of maths and sciences, and is co-author of ‘How Learning Happens’.
How Learning Happens introduces 28 giants of educational research and their findings on how we learn and what we need to learn effectively, efficiently, and enjoyably. Many of these works have inspired researchers and teachers all around the world and have left a mark on how we teach today.
Just Because They’re Engaged, Doesn’t Mean They’re Learning
I’ve written a new piece for the Chartered College of Teaching journal, Impact with Dr Jim Heal (Deans for Impact)
One of the difficulties with determining what is effective in a classroom is that very often, what looks like it should work does not and vice versa. Take, for example, the notion of engagement. On the surface, this would seem like a necessary condition for learning. However, there is some evidence that it may not be a sufficient one. Graham Nuthall explores this dichotomy in his seminal book The Hidden Lives of Learners (Nuthall, 2007, p. 24):
“Our research shows that students can be busiest and most involved with material they already know. In most of the classrooms we have studied, each student already knows about 40–50% of what the teacher is teaching.”
Nuthall’s work highlights the fact that students are keen to busy themselves doing tasks that give the appearance of learning but which actually might just be disposable activities that do not engender long-lasting and durable learning. In addition, there is the fact that students’ prior knowledge about a particular domain is really the key element in terms of how their learning will progress. As Tricot and Sweller (2014, p. 9) point out, ‘when performing a cognitive task requiring domain specific knowledge, the presence or absence of this knowledge is the best predictor of performance’. Without knowing what students know or don’t know, teachers might not be putting students in a place where they are transforming their understanding of a particular concept, and what might look like learning might in fact just be keeping busy.
Introducing…’How Learning Happens’
Almost two years ago, I was asked by Professor Paul Kirschner to write a book with him. The original title was ‘Standing on the Shoulders of Giants’ and the basic premise was to discuss what we felt were the foundational works in education psychology and present them to educators in a way that would hopefully inform their practice. To be asked by someone of Paul’s stature was a huge honour for me and I really enjoyed reading through almost 100 years of the best evidence on learning and the weekly meetings over Skype talking about the book (and football).
The chapters are divided into six sections. In the first section we describe how our brains work and what that means for learning and teaching. This is followed by sections on the prerequisites for learning, how learning can be supported, teacher activities, and learning in context. When we got near the end of the book we thought it would be good to provide some cautionary tales so in the final section we discuss what can only be described as educational Novichok in a chapter called ‘The Seven Deadly Sins of Education’ which you can download for free here.
It was a fantastic experience to write this book with someone like Paul. His knowledge on this topic is vast and he has a unique ability to make the highly complex accessible and explain even the most difficult psychological processes in a clear and concise way. I learned an awful lot from him over the 18 months we worked together about how learning happens and I hope you learn something from it too.
“So often I’ve been asked to recommend a starting text for educators interested in the workings of the mind―now I have one. The text Kirschner and Hendrick offer alongside each seminal article does a wonderful job of situating the content in the broader scientific context, and in the classroom.”
– Daniel Willingham, Professor of Psychology and Director of Graduate Studies, University of Virginia
“As the volume of research into psychology and education grows, it becomes ever harder for researchers, let alone teachers, to keep up with the latest findings. Moreover, striking results often turn out to be difficult, or impossible to replicate. What teachers need, therefore, is good guidance about research that has stood the test of time, and practical guidance about how these well-established findings might be used to inform teaching practice, and this is why this is such an extraordinary, wonderful and important book. Paul Kirschner and Carl Hendrick have selected the most important research publications in the psychology of education, and, for each publication, they have provided a summary of the research, the main conclusions, and a series of practical suggestions for how the findings might inform teaching practice. I know of no other book that provides such a rigorous, accessible and practical summary of the last fifty years of research in educational psychology, and anyone who wants to understand how research can improve teaching needs to read this book. Highly recommended.”
– Dylan Wiliam, Emeritus Professor of Educational Assessment, University College London
“It’s hard to overstate just how fabulous this book is; a book I’ve wanted to exist for years and now here it is. A judicious and comprehensive selection of seminal research papers presented by two expert communicators, this is absolutely superb – from the mouth-watering list of contents, and through each of the chapters. I meet teachers in schools every week who, on hearing about various findings from research, feel liberated, enlightened with a whole new perspective on the problems they wrestle with in their classrooms. Teachers are busy – often overwhelmed – and all too frequently have not yet found the time or had the opportunity to engage with research that underpins the profession they’ve committed their lives to. This book is going to change that for a lot of people. The format is excellent, presenting the original papers alongside insightful commentary and key practical recommendations; a brilliant idea executed with style! Every school should have this book and every teacher should read it.”
– Tom Sherrington, education consultant; author of The Learning Rainforest and Rosenshine’s Principles in Action
“Teachers are rightly encouraged to base their practice on research – but education research is a huge field and it’s hard to know where to start. This book provides the answer: it’s valuable in its own right as a summary of some key research papers, and it’s also a great starting point for further reading and research.”
– Daisy Christodolou, Director of Education at No More Marking
“With the increasing volume of calls for education to become more evidence based, teachers everywhere have shaken their heads and wondered where on earth they’re supposed to find the time to locate, read and evaluate the ever-increasing acreage of research papers out there. Worry no more. In How Learning Happens: Seminal Works in Educational Psychology and What They Mean in Practice, Kirschner and Hendrick have done the hard work so that you don’t have to. The volume you have in your hands has compiled some of the most important and prominent research papers in the field of education and distilled them into a form that is genuinely useful to anyone chipping away at the chalk face. But, not only is this a resource of unparalleled utility, it’s also a fascinating and world-enlarging read.”
– David Didau, author of Making Kids Cleverer
“Future historians of education will look back on this period as a Renaissance; a time when dogma and orthodoxy were being challenged, and gate keepers, priesthoods and shamans felt the ground shift beneath their feet. The sleep of reason has bred monsters of pedagogy, and they have been fattened and nurtured by the relative ignorance of the teaching profession. Not a general ignorance, but a specific one: ignorance of the evidence bases behind the claims made in education. This Renaissance has been accompanied by an evolution, as teachers and academics reach out to one another and seek sincere, authentic dialogue. But, unless we stand on the shoulders of giants who have gone before us, each generation is doomed to rediscover what their ancestors painstakingly uncovered. For the health of the profession, we need the best of what we know in one place, so that successive generations of educators can carry on from their ancestors, and carry the conversation into the future rather than tread water endlessly.
This book is the perfect resource with which to do so. I can give no higher accolade than to say that every teacher should be familiar with the research it represents, its chapters should be required reading on every teacher induction course, and no teacher should account themselves a professional until they can demonstrate its acquaintance. I wish I had read it in the infancy of my career.”
– Tom Bennett, Founder, researchED
American edition of What Does This Look Like in the Classroom? with new foreword by Dylan Wiliam
Delighted to announce that the American edition of ‘What Does This Look Like in the Classroom?’ has been released this week with a new foreword by Dylan Wiliam which you can read here.
The book is the third volume in @Learn_Sci‘s Dylan Wiliam Center Collection
In 1999, Paul Black and I were working with a group of math and science teachers. We had just completed a major review of the research on the impact of assessment on learning, and we had published our findings in a rather dense 65-page academic journal article.1 However, since we thought our findings would be of interest to practitioners and policy-makers, we also wrote a more accessible summary of our research, and its implications, which was published in Phi Delta Kappan magazine.2
One of the most surprising findings of our review, which we were sharing with the teachers, related to research on feedback. A particularly comprehensive review of feedback in schools, colleges and workplaces by two American psychologists—Avraham Kluger and Angelo DeNisi—had found that while feedback was often helpful in improving achievement, in 38% of the well-designed studies they had found, feedback actually lowered performance.3 In other words, in almost two out of every five cases, the participants in the research studies would have performed better if the feedback had not been given at all.
In trying to makes sense of their findings, Kluger and DeNisi suggested that feedback was less effective when it was focused on the individual (what psychologists call “ego-involving”) and more effective when it was focused on the task in which the students were engaged (“task-involving”). We therefore suggested to the teachers that to make their feedback to students more effective, they should give task-involving rather than ego-involving feedback.
Most of the teachers seemed to find this advice useful, but one teacher, after some thought, asked, “So does this mean I should not say ‘well done’ to a student?” Paul and I looked at each other, and realized that we didn’t know the answer to the question. We knew, from the work of a number of researchers, that in the longer term, praise for effort would be more likely to be successful than praise for ability. However, without knowing more about the relationship between the teacher and the student, about the context of the work, and a whole host of other factors, we could not be sure whether “Well done” would be task-involving or ego-involving feedback.
What is ironic in all this, is that we had failed to take the advice we had given teachers a year earlier in the Phi Delta Kappan article, where we said,
if the substantial rewards promised by the research evidence are to be secured, each teacher must find his or her own ways of incorporating the lessons and ideas set out above into his or her own patterns of classroom work and into the cultural norms and expectations of a particular school community. (p. 146)
The important point here is that the standard model of research dissemination, where researchers discover things, and then tell teachers about their findings, so that teachers can then implement them in their own classrooms, simply cannot work. As Carl Hendrick and Robin MacPherson point out in this book, classrooms are too complex for the results of
research studies to be implemented as a series of instructions to be followed. Rather, the work that teachers do in finding out how to apply insights from research in their own classrooms is a process of creating new knowledge, albeit of a distinct, and local kind. This is why this book is so unusual and important. It is not an instruction manual on how to do “evidence-based teaching” (whatever that might mean). It is, instead, an invitation to every educator to reflect on some of the most important issues in education in general—and teaching in particular—and to think about how educational research might be used as a guide for careful thinking about, and exploration of, practice.
A second unusual—and welcome—feature of this book is the way it was put together. Carl and Robin started by identifying a number of issues that are relevant to every teacher—student discipline and behavior, motivation, grading, classroom practice, reading, inclusion, memory, technology and so on. At this point, most authors would have written advice for teachers on these issues, but of course, the danger with such an approach is that it reflects the concerns of the authors, rather than of the potential reader—what philosopher Karl Popper described as “unwanted answers to unasked questions.”4
Instead, in a novel twist, Carl and Robin decided to ask practicing teachers what were for them the most important questions in each of the areas. Then, again counter to what most writers would have done, they posed the questions to both academic experts and those with expertise in classroom practice. The result is a marvelous combination of insights into teaching that are both authoritative and immediately relevant to classroom practice.
If you have read the previous volumes in the “Dylan Wiliam Center Collection” —Craig Barton’s How I wish I’d taught maths and Tom Sherrington’s The learning rainforest—you will know that our aim has been to bring to North American readers the very best of authoritative writing on education from around the world. While the questions that were posed by the teachers that Carl and Robin worked with may appear to be focused on issues that are of particular concern to teachers in England, the extraordinary range of expertise of those responding to these questions means that the answers are relevant to every American educator. The very best writing on educational research, in an accessible form—solutions you can trust.
References
1 Black, P., & Wiliam, D. (1998). Assessment and classroom learning. Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy and Practice, 5(1), 7-74.
2 Black, P., & Wiliam, D. (1998). Inside the black box: Raising standards through classroom assessment. Phi Delta Kappan, 80(2), 139-148.
3 Kluger, A. N., & DeNisi, A. (1996). The effects of feedback interventions on performance: a historical review, a meta-analysis, and a preliminary feedback intervention theory. Psychological Bulletin, 119(2), 254-284.
4 Popper, K. (1992 p. 41). Unended quest: An intellectual biography. London, UK: Routledge.
How should students revise? A brief guide
One of the biggest lessons from research is that many students don’t really know how to study. Various studies have shown that students rate re-reading and highlighting as the most effective ways of revising when in reality they are often a waste of time giving an illusion of competence in the short term at the expense of long term gains.
Students may spend large amounts of additional time studying despite no gain in later memory for the items, a phenomenon called ‘‘labour-in-vain’’ during learning (Nelson & Leonesio,1988). Recent research with educationally relevant materials has shown that repeatedly reading prose passages produces limited benefits beyond a single reading. (Karpicke, Roediger, Butler, 2009)
In contrast, retrieval practice, spacing and interleaving are some of the most productive ways of revising material but how many students are familiar with this? I think there is often a tendency to focus too much on what teachers are doing and less on what students are doing.
Recently I got the chance to talk to some year 10 students from across our partnership of schools about study skills and I put together a brief guide to help them. The idea was to introduce them to five powerful approaches to studying in a language they can understand with the opportunity to apply them to a period of revision designed by them. All materials are below.
Thanks to the brilliant Olivier Cavigioli for the illustrations and design.
Once you talk students through these key principles, you can get them to plan their revision using a revision planner like this depending on how much time they have left:
Further reading:
Koriat, Bjork ‘Illusions of Competence in Monitoring One’s Knowledge During Study’ 2005
‘Four Quarters Marking’ – A Workload Solution?
In our new book ‘What Does This Look Like in the Classroom?’ we interviewed Dylan Wiliam on how to implement research on assessment in the classroom.
A central problem in the area of assessment in the classroom has been in the way we often confuse marking and feedback. As Dylan Wiliam points out in our discussion, there is an extraordinary amount of energy expended by teachers on marking and often very little to show for it in the way of student benefit. Although feedback is one of the most effective drivers of learning, one of the more surprising findings is that a lot of it actually has a negative effect on student achievement.
A set of marked books is traditionally seen as an effective proxy for good teaching but there is a lot of evidence to say that this might not always be the case. This problem is on a scale that might surprise a lot of people:
Dylan: I once estimated that, if you price teacher’s time appropriately, in England we spend about two and a half billion pounds a year on feedback and it has almost no effect on student achievement.
Certainly students need to know where they make misconceptions or spelling errors and correcting those is important. Doing so also provides a useful diagnostic for teachers to inform what they will teach next, but the written comments at the end of a piece of work are often both the most time-consuming and also the most ineffective. For example, taking the following typical comments on a GCSE English essay:
- Try to phrase your analysis of language using more sophisticated vocabulary and phrasing.
- Try to expand on your points with more complex analysis of Macbeth’s character.
This is a good example of certain assessment practices where the feedback mainly focuses on what was deficient about it, which as Douglas Reeve’s notes, is “more like a post-mortem than a medical.” The other thing is that it doesn’t really tell the student what they need to do to improve. What is more useful to the student here? receiving vague comments like these or actually seeing sophisticated vocabulary, phrasing and analysis in action? It’s very difficult to be excellent if you don’t know what excellent looks like.
Often, teachers give both a grade and comments like those above to students, hoping that they somehow improve by the time their next piece of writing comes around a week later and then berate the student when, lo and behold, they make the same mistakes again. Perhaps part of the problem here is that we have very low expectations of what students are willing to do in response to a piece of work and do not afford them the opportunity to engage in the kind of tasks that might really improve their learning.
To address this problem, Dylan advocates a much more streamlined model of marking that is not only more manageable for teachers, but also allows students to have more ownership over the process:
Dylan: I recommend what I call ‘four quarters marking.’ I think that teachers should mark in detail, 25% of what students do, should skim another 25%, students should then self-assess about 25% with teachers monitoring the quality of that and finally, peer assessment should be the other 25%. It’s a sort of balanced diet of different kinds of marking and assessment.
Dylan Wiliam’s Four Quarters Marking (Oliver Caviglioli)
After producing a piece of work, instead of using abstract skills based success criteria, it is probably more powerful for students to have access to a bank of exemplar essays or worked solutions to see concrete examples of success against which to self-assess their own work. Marking everything in sight and leaving detailed comments is an established cultural norm now but this practice doesn’t appear to be based on good evidence. We know for example that many students will look at a grade and not engage with the feedback but is that feedback always useful anyway?
As we discuss in the book, a common issue we see again and again in using research in the classroom is the ‘Chinese whisper effect’ where by the time evidence works its way down to the level of the classroom, it’s a pale imitation of its original form. This is especially prevalent in the area of marking where convoluted policies such as triple marking are enacted as a means of raising pupil achievement whereas all they are doing is often increasing teacher workload. As Dylan Wiliam reminds us, “feedback should be more work for the recipient than the donor,” but how do you change a culture that has traditionally been the opposite?
Dylan: In terms of what we do about this, I would say first of all, headteachers should lay down clear expectation to parents and say things like, “We are not going to give detailed feedback on more than 25% of what your child does. The reason for that is not because we’re lazy. It’s because there are better uses we could make of that time. We could mark everything your child does, but that would lead to lower quality teaching and then your child will learn less.” Heads have to establish those cultural norms. If a teacher is marking everything your child does, it’s bad teaching. It is using time in a way that does not have the greatest benefit for students.
As a profession, we are too some extent, we are our own worst enemy. Using marking policies that have little impact on student achievement and a negative impact on teacher workload and morale makes little sense. By adopting an approach like four quarters marking, we might go some way to address this issue and at the same time, give students more ownership over their own learning.
‘What Does This Look Like in the Classroom?’ is out later this month.
Ten books every teacher should read
I was asked to write a piece for the Guardian Teacher network on what books teachers should read. You can read it here.
Five Things I Wish I Knew When I Started Teaching
1. Motivation doesn’t always lead to achievement, but achievement often leads to motivation.
While there is a strong correlation between self perception and achievement and we tend to think of it in that order, the actual effect of achievement on self perception is stronger than the other way round (Guay, Marsh and Boivin, 2003.) It may well be the case that using time and resources to improve student academic achievement directly may well be a better agent of psychological change than psychological interventions themselves. Daniel Muijs and David Reynolds (2011) note that:
At the end of the day, the research reviewed shows that the effect of achievement on self-concept is stronger that the effect of self-concept on achievement.
Despite this, a lot of interventions in education seem to have the causal arrow pointed the wrong way round. Motivational posters and talks are often a waste of time and may well give students a deluded notion of what success actually means. In my experience, teaching students how to write an effective introduction to an essay through close instruction, careful scaffolding and then praising their effort in getting there is a far more effective way of improving confidence than showing them a TED talk about how unique they are.
2. Just because they’re engaged doesn’t mean they’re learning anything.
One of the slides from a talk that has stuck with me the most in recent years was this one from Professor Rob Coe which in which he criticised graded lesson observations and highlighted several performance indicators for learning which are actually very misleading:
This again is quite a counterintuitive claim. Why is engagement is such a poor proxy indicator – surely the busier they are, the more they are learning? This paradox is explored by Graham Nuthall in his book ‘The Hidden Lives of Learners,’ (2007) in which he writes:
“Our research shows that students can be busiest and most involved with material they already know. In most of the classrooms we have studied, each student already knows about 40-50% of what the teacher is teaching.” p.24
Nuthall’s work shows that students are far more likely to get stuck into tasks they’re comfortable with and already know how to do as opposed to the more uncomfortable enterprise of grappling with uncertainty and indeterminate tasks.
3. Marking and feedback are not the same thing.
This subtle difference may seem semantic but there is an important distinction to be made. The value in marking a piece of work may counterintuitively be of more benefit to the teacher than the student as David Didau explains:
While there’s no doubt that marking and feedback are connected, they are not the same. In some parts of the world – Japan for instance – teachers do very little marking but that’s not to say students are not getting feedback. From my own experience, I’m pretty sure it’s possible to make marks in students’ books without providing anything in the way of useful feedback and of course lots of thinking (some of it disastrous) has been done to try to prevent this from happening. Ask any group of teachers if their marking load has increased dramatically in past five years and they’ll fall over themselves to let you know just how much impact marking has on their lives, but what impact does it have on students’ outcomes? The answer is, we just don’t know.
4. Feedback should be more work for the recipient than the donor.
Possibly the most damaging misappropriation of research in my career has been the mangling of Assessment For Learning – a quagmire from which we are now only beginning to emerge. Not long after Dylan Wiliam’s seminal 1998 ‘Inside the Black Box’ became adopted at a national level, school leaders and policy makers managed to twist it into a pale imitation of its original form as AFL became about students memorising what level they were working at and teachers marking books at a level that defied sense in order to show ‘evidence’ of learning. But for feedback to be truly meaningful to students, they need to take ownership of it which may well mean not giving levels to a piece of work at all and instead just leaving comments for the student to reflect and act upon. As Dylan Wiliam writes:
Robyn Renee Jackson suggests that one of the most important principles for teachers is “Never work harder than your students” (Jackson, 2009). I regularly ask teachers whether they believe their students spend as long processing feedback as it takes for the teacher to provide it. Few teachers say yes. We spend far too much time giving feedback that’s either completely ignored or given scant attention.
5. (a) The steps needed to achieve a skill may look very different to the final skill itself.
If you want to get good at a certain skill then surely the best way to get good at it is to practice that particular skill right? Well not according to the tenets of deliberate practice which asserts a more indirect approach that breaks a global skill down into its constituent local parts and focuses on specific feedback and incremental improvement rather than a set of assessment criteria/performance descriptors that are “aimed at some vague overall improvement.” (Ericsson) In her book ‘Making Good Progress’, Daisy Christodoulou writes:
Whilst skills such as literacy, numeracy, problem solving and critical thinking are still the end point of education, this does not mean that pupils always need to be practising such skills in their final format. Instead, the role of the teacher and indeed, the various parts of the education system, should be to break down such skills into their component parts, and to teach those instead. This means that lessons may look very different from the final skill they are hoping to instil. For example, a lesson which aims to teach pupils reading may involve pupils learning letter-sound correspondences. A lesson with the ultimate aim of teaching pupils to solve maths problems may involve them memorising their times tables. The idea here is that the best way to develop skills does not always look like the skill itself.
5. (b). There is no such thing as developing a ‘general’ skill.
Of course, critical thinking is an essential part of any student’s mental equipment. However, it cannot be detached from context. Teaching students generic ‘thinking skills’ separate from the rest of the curriculum is often meaningless and ineffective. As Daniel Willingham puts it:
[I]f you remind a student to ‘look at an issue from multiple perspectives’ often enough, he will learn that he ought to do so, but if he doesn’t know much about an issue, he can’t think about it from multiple perspectives … critical thinking (as well as scientific thinking and other domain-based thinking) is not a skill. There is not a set of critical thinking skills that can be acquired and deployed regardless of context.
This detachment of cognitive ideals from contextual knowledge is not confined to the learning of critical thinking. Some schools laud themselves for placing ‘21st-century learning skills’ at the heart of their mission but without anchoring them in domain specific contexts, they are often a waste of time. Anders Ericsson develops this point:
This explains a crucial fact about expert performance in general: there is no such thing as developing a general skill. You don’t train your memory; you train your memory for strings of digits or for collections of words or people’s faces. You don’t train to become an athlete; you train to become a gymnast or sprinter or a marathoner or a swimmer or a basketball player. You don’t train to become a doctor; you train to become a diagnostician or a pathologist or a neurosurgeon.
I’ve written more about this here and this by Dan Willingham is probably the definitive piece on critical thinking.
Education is an end in itself not a preparation for the workplace
It’s a well observed truth that because everyone has had an education, everyone feels well placed to comment on all aspects of education. Often that takes the form of “My experience of education was like this so all education should be more/less like that.” This often finds its most pure expression in the form of mainstream journalists giving answers to questions nobody asked them and giving a state of the union address on education anyway.
In a recent article in the Times, Caitlin Moran decided to offer herself up as education secretary and outlined her vision:
My plan is very straightforward, and rests on two facts: (1) the 21st-century job market requires basically nothing of what is taught in 21st-century schools, and (2) everyone has a smartphone.
First, as anyone with a teenage/young adult child will know, the notion of them going into a full-time, long-term job with a pension at the end of it looks like something we left behind in the 20th century. The old pathway – learn a skill, use it for 40 years, then retire – is over. The jobs of the future require flexibility and self-motivation. Indeed, the jobs of the future increasingly require you to invent your own job. The majority of jobs our children will have – in just a few years’ time – have almost certainly not been invented yet.
Those of you playing TED talk education cliche bingo will probably be already screaming “full house!” but hold your horses folks…
If you work better sleeping until noon, then working until 2am – as most teenagers do – congratulations! You no longer have to deny your own biology! And if, working at 2am, you have no teacher to help you, discovering how to research on your own is, frankly, going to be far more useful than the thing you’re supposed to be learning. Because, (2) my education policy would be to stop bothering kids with anything you can access on a smartphone.
This kind of pseudo-futurist, Waitrose Organic aisle philosophy is often found in self-made individuals who eschewed school to admirably forge a successful career in the communications industry. Fine for those outliers but unconscionable to advocate that for the vast majority of children from less privileged backgrounds for whom good A level results can be life changing.
Apart from the fact there are well documented problems with the assertion that Google can replace human knowledge, claiming that we should just depend on our smartphones for learning is a dangerous idea as Paul Kirschner and Mirjam Neelen note:
All this leads us to conclude that if we don’t have knowledge and only depend on the information in the cloud, what will happen is what William Poundstone articulates in the Guardian: The cloud will make us mega-ignorant: unaware of what we don’t know.
There is also the potentially damaging impact with celebrities claiming that school doesn’t matter. One can’t help stifle a chuckle/grind one’s teeth when we hear auto-satirist Jeremy Clarkson tell A level students to not worry about their results because it all worked out fine for him. Again, fine for those who had great fortune/rare abilities but very dangerous to mandate as a broad system of education.
Behind these risible views however lies a dangerous conceit; namely that the purpose of education is to merely get you a job, and not just any job, but a job that doesn’t exist yet. These phantasmic jobs often focus on alliterative groupings such as “collaboration, creativity and connectivity”, (something we are evolved to do anyway) and are positioned in opposition with the cruelty of 20th century education which apparently was some kind of mass conspiracy designed to create a global village of the damned.
However, far from being the so called “factory model” bastille limiting children’s potential, 20th century schooling is perhaps the high water mark for education. Class sizes were reduced, more students with special needs were included in mainstream education, minimum teachers standards were introduced and more children had access to quality education than at any time in human history. Astonishingly, from 1900 to 2015, rates of global literacy increased from 21 percent to 86 percent.
Behind many of these claims is also a barely concealed contempt for the teaching profession. If Moran’s education policy were to be enacted and we were to “stop bothering kids with anything you can access on a smartphone” then the role of teacher would be defunct. Teachers are the most expensive commodity in the 21st century learning paradigm so it would make sense to replace them with technology, something these evangelists rarely say explicitly. At a time when school funding is being cut to almost unmanageable levels, the emancipatory claims of 21st century learning should be viewed with forensic scepticism.
Of course we should prepare students for an uncertain future, but if we adopt the techno-evangelist disruptive model and view education as merely a utilitarian enterprise for 21st century workplace then we truly will enact a “factory model” of schooling and furthermore, we will diminish the gift of knowledge for its own sake. Students should study Shakespeare not because of what job it might get them but because it’s an anthropological guidebook that tells them how to live.
The Air Traffic Controller Paradox: Why Teaching Generic Skills Doesn’t Work
Being an air traffic controller is hard. Really hard. The job entails having to remember vast amounts of fluid information often within a context of enormous pressure. Essentially the job is about ‘situational awareness’ which involves “the continuous extraction of environmental information, the integration of this information with prior knowledge to form a coherent understanding of the present situation.”[1] The job is sometimes done under extreme duress, where they have to make life or death decisions often with a lack of sleep leading in some cases to long-term fatigue and burnout. So stressful is the job that they are eligible for retirement at age 50 or after 25 years of service.
In the 1960s, a series of interesting experiments was done on air traffic controllers. Researchers wanted to explore if they had a general enhanced ability to “keep track of a number of things at once” [2] and whether that skill could be applied to other situations. After observing their sophisticated abilities in air traffic control, they then gave them a set of generic memory based tasks with shapes and colours. The extraordinary thing was that when tested on these skills outside their own area of expertise the air traffic controllers did no better than anyone else.
These findings challenged contemporary thinking on generic skills. Surely they had developed a set of general cognitive capacities that could be used in other areas or ‘domains’? The evidence suggested the opposite. In order to be good in a specific domain you need to know a lot about that specific domain and moreover, “the more complex the domain, the more important is domain-specific knowledge.”[3] This phenomenon is now well established and has been replicated many times. Other research for example has shown that the ability to remember long strings of digits does not transfer to the ability to remember long strings of letters.[4] Indeed, we all know very ‘clever’ people in their professional lives who seem to often make very stupid decisions in their personal lives:
“A person who is able to reason logically in science may show no such ability in his or her personal life or in any areas outside of his or her areas of science. Knowing that we should only test one variable at a time when conducting a scientific experiment is critical. Outside of hypothesis testing, it may be irrelevant, with other knowledge being pre-eminent.” [5]
Take another example, sport. Within a football team you have many different types of positions or ‘domains’ such as goalkeepers, defenders and attackers. Within those domains you have further categories such as centre backs, full backs, attacking midfielders, holding midfielders and attacking players. Now the ‘general skill’ that all these players have is the ability to play football, however if you put a left back in a striker’s position or put a central midfielder in goal they would be lost.
A footballer’s ability to be effective in a particular position or domain is based on years of experience where they have built up thousands of mental models from playing the game in that particular position so that when they have to perform at a high level they can do so with faster reaction times and their full concentration can go on anticipating the complexities of the game faster than their opponent. Of course there are elements that are consistent with each position such as touch and technical ability but they look very different in each position and are heavily context specific. For example, a central defender heading a ball away to safety is very different to a striker heading a goal and the types of positioning and runs an attacking player needs to make are radically different to those of a defender. In other words, elite footballers are not “good at football” as such, they’re good at being a left back, defensive midfielder or attacker.
Despite the growing body of evidence questioning the efficacy of teaching general skills in recent years, there is still a near constant refrain for them to be prioritised in schools. This usually takes the form of generic “critical thinking skills” often taught in some form for an hour or two a week and decontextualised from any specific subject. This is a problem as Dan Willingham reminds us
Critical thinking (as well as scientific thinking and other domain-based thinking) is not a skill. There is not a set of critical thinking skills that can be acquired and deployed regardless of context.”
Thus, if you remind a student to “look at an issue from multiple perspectives” often enough, he will learn that he ought to do so, but if he doesn’t know much about an issue, he can’t think about it from multiple perspectives. [6]
Another problematic area is the diaphanous world of “21st century learning skills” which some schools have made a central part of their mission. It’s even been suggested that some of these nebulous skills are now as important as literacy and should be afforded the same status. An example of this is brain training games whose proponents claim can help kids become smarter, more alert, and able to learn faster. However recent research has shown that brain training games are really only good for one thing – getting good a brain training games. The claim that they offer students a general set of critical or problem solving skills was recently debunked by a new study reviewing over 130 papers :
We know of no evidence for broad-based improvement in cognition, academic achievement, professional performance, and/or social competencies that derives from decontextualized practice of cognitive skills devoid of domain-specific content.
Instead of teaching generic critical thinking skills, an alternative strategy would be to focus instead on subject specific critical thinking skills that seek to broaden student’s individual subject knowledge and unlock the unique, intricate mysteries of each subject. This goes for other dispositions and faculties taught generically such as Growth Mindset and Grit – students may well have a Growth Mindset in English but not in Maths, and yet the concept is often portrayed to students as a general capacity that can supposedly function in a transversal way across all subjects.(Despite the fact that the jury is still out on whether these can be taught at all.)
In the same way that teaching knowledge devoid of any platform for students to discuss, explore and develop that knowledge makes no sense, the teaching of standalone, decontextualised general skills is a questionable practice at best. It’s enduring appeal is probably in the fact that the concept seems so intuitively right yet when the evidence is appraised we find their justification weak. To those advocates of the ubiquitous critical thinking skills we might risk the question: “but what are they going to think with?” As Dan Willingham reminds us “thought processes are intertwined with what is being thought about.”
More:
The Role of Memory in Air Traffic Control (Gronlund, Dougherty)
Domain-Specific Knowledge and Why Teaching Generic Skills Does not Work (Tricot, Sweller 2014)
Critical Thinking: Why Is It So Hard to Teach? (Willingham)
Do “Brain-Training” Programs Work? (Simons et al 2016)
1 (Dominquez, 1994)
2 (Yntema & Mueser, 1960)
3 (Ericsson & Charness, 1994)
4 (Tricot, Sweller 2014)
5 (Tricot, Sweller 2014)
6 (Willingham 2007)
chronotope 