Teacher Proof

Why research in education doesn't always mean what it claims, and what you can do about it

Tom Bennett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135040277
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

'Tom Bennett is the voice of the modern teacher.' - Stephen Drew, Senior Vice-Principal, Passmores Academy, UK, featured on Channel 4's Educating Essex

Do the findings from educational science ever really improve the day-to-day practice of classroom teachers?

Education is awash with theories about how pupils best learn and teachers best teach, most often propped up with the inevitable research that 'proves' the case in point. But what can teachers do to find the proof within the pudding, and how can this actually help them on wet Wednesday afternoon?.

Drawing from a wide range of recent and popular education theories and strategies, Tom Bennett highlights how much of what we think we know in schools hasn't been 'proven' in any meaningful sense at all. He inspires teachers to decide for themselves what good and bad education really is, empowering them as professionals and raising their confidence in the classroom and the staffroom alike. Readers are encouraged to question and reflect on issues such as:

• the most common ideas in modern education and where these ideas were born
• the crisis in research right now
• how research is commissioned and used by the people who make policy in the UK and beyond
• the provenance of education research: who instigates it, who writes it, and how to spot when a claim is based on evidence and when it isn't
• the different way that data can be analysed
• what happens to the research conclusions once they escape the laboratory.

Controversial, erudite and yet unremittingly entertaining, Tom includes practical suggestions for the classroom throughout. This book will be an ally to every teacher who's been handed an instruction on a platter and been told, 'the research proves it.'

Part I How do we know anything?

DOI: 10.4324/9780203782293-2

A brief – I promise – exploration of what it means to say you know something; of how difficult it is in general; and how specifically difficult it is to say we know something in education.

Chapter 1 Quid est veritas?

DOI: 10.4324/9780203782293-3

How do we know anything at all?

How do you know anything at all? I bet you know a lot of things. You know what your name is; probably the day, and that right now you’re reading this sentence. Weirdly enough, the very fact that you’re reading it means that I know you’re reading it too, and the odd sensation you get as you realise that this is true, even though I’m writing this in early 2012 in my study, makes you feel uneasy. Don’t kill me for my sorcery. So we know a lot of things. But how do you know that you know? Is there any chance – any chance at all – that you’re wrong? Of course there is. Unless you are possessed of spectacular perspicacity, you might have occasionally mistaken the day when on holiday, or the date, when asked. I even – and I am far from proud of this fact – forgot my age for about six months, and had to be reminded by my mother. At least I had the rare sensation of feeling a year younger, instantly. And also an idiot.

How do I know anything?

This question (how we know anything, not my age) is not being asked for the first time in these pages. It is one of the great Grails of philosophy, since the day philosophy was first getting planning permission. Although you can trace this debate back to Plato and before, it’s useful to start with René Descartes¹, a French mathematician and philosopher in the seventeenth century, who rebooted the whole subject in his lifetime. In his Meditations,² he wrote one of several masterpieces when he considered: how do we know anything, and is there anything we could know beyond doubt?

1 Whom, as I never tire of pointing out, was told by a doctor never to rise early or he would die. He then went to work for the Queen of Sweden, who made him get up early to tutor her, and he died. 2 Which was placed on the Vatican list of prohibited books, the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, and if that doesn’t make you want to read it, then there is no hope for you.

His starting point was, appropriately enough, his own mind. He noticed that there were many things that he used to believe with utter conviction when he was younger, that he now regarded as being false: both matters of fact and statements of opinion. This is true of all of us. Not only is your opinion about your favourite song probably a little different now to ten years ago, but there are issues even of the natural world towards which you will have very different attitudes. Exhibit A: Santa Claus.

This prompted him to wonder about his present beliefs: were there any of what he believed now that might be overturned in the future? And was there any way to future-proof what he knew? Was there a way to find out knowledge that was incontrovertibly, irrefutably true? We call this the search for Foundational Knowledge. And he was thorough about it. He went about demolishing the creaky old tenement of his beliefs to see if there were solid foundations anywhere he could build upon. To do this he used what is famously referred to as his Evil Demon argument.

Suppose a malicious devil was making him believe he was a French Philosopher with a spectacular nose – it doesn’t matter if it’s true or not, could it be true? Yes. Could he prove it wasn’t true? No. So he was left knowing nothing. He could now doubt everything he thought he knew. What was he left with?

Cogito, sum

He asked the question: is there anything – even by this point of scepticism – that I can still believe to be true? Because if he could, he would have a belief that was pretty robust – a foundational belief. And he believed he did. Even if he was the helpless victim of the evil demon, who was making him believe that he was a pug-ugly polymath who didn’t get out of bed until ‘after the best part of the day’,³ at least there was something incontrovertibly true: he was thinking. And if he was thinking, there must be at least one thing that existed: himself. Perhaps not even his body – he may be a disembodied spirit, for example – but there was some essence of Descartes⁴ that was doing all of the doubting. This was the basis of his famous (and famously misquoted) Cogito ergo sum: I think, therefore I am. His actual phrasing was closer to the subheading, above.⁵

3 Copyright: My mum. 4 Available at all good perfumers. 5 That’s showbiz!

Already we can see how high the bar can be before we will accept something to be true. This is a common and recurring theme in philosophy: how do we know that we know? The aim of this (epistemology) is to get as far as clear thinking can take us, however far that may be, right up to the very outer limits of what it is possible to say. Fuzzy, it isn’t. Descartes used this reasoning to form the basis of a whole lot more philosophical proofs, most of which are far more contestable. But the majority of philosophers agree that his basic groundwork, as laid out in the Meditations, is hard (although not impossible) to disagree with.

How do we find anything out?

Returning to our Cartesian discussion, there has been an accompanying, and equally relevant, discussion about this question: how do we actually acquire knowledge? How do we learn anything? This discussion has centred round a centuries-old debate between two camps: the rationalists on one hand, represented by the devilish thinkers of the Continent, and the empiricists, represented by the plucky Brits, showing that the fault lines so splendidly displayed and demonstrated in our differing approaches to what ‘food’ means and queuing, are also engaged in ideological war on the abstract realms.

Briefly put, empiricists believe that the most valuable, the most reliable source of information about the world is from the evidence of the senses (empiricism comes from the Greek empeiros, meaning the senses), and we can find the common sense application of this idea in the term ‘common sense’. It’s as plain as the nose on your face; I saw it with my own eyes. I have felt your presence, etc.⁶ If we can perceive it, we can reasonably say we know it to be true.

6 I’ll grant you that using The Force to know something hasn’t yet been accepted in many scientific circles as absolutely beyond reproach as a method.

Contrast this with the rationalists, who as their name suggests, prefer to rely on knowledge gained through use of reason mainly, and point to the notorious unreliability of the senses as a source of anything fundamentally true.

Rationalism

At first it seems a hard claim to make: how can you say you know something just by thinking about it? Well, rationalists such as Descartes thought there were plenty of things that could be known more clearly by reason, for example that I exist (the Cogito) for one. But there were many others: in mathematics the rules of maths were demonstrably known without referring to the senses. One and one must equal two, because that is that the definition of those terms, and it would be impossible for the two numbers to come to anything else. Similarly, other truths are known without doubt using reason: ‘all bachelors are men’ is a truth known without recourse to experience. If someone wheels a bachelor into the room, you know without looking up their kilt⁷ that they are male, because that’s what the concept ‘bachelor’ necessarily entails.

7 This isn’t a hen party, unless I’ve miscalculated.

So far, so uncontroversial, except it is; everything said so far has been contested, because that’s what philosophers do when the other kids are learning to swim and make friends. What else can reason alone help us with? Well, enlightenment scientists (or natural philosophers as they were called in those days, the term scientist not having been created until the nineteenth century) believed and observed that the world around them was reducible to numbers; that everything could be described in terms of mass, velocity, position etc. And that these variables, manipulated by the rapidly emerging disciplines of physics, chemistry and various others, could produce results of terrific accuracy. Want to know how much thrust a rocket needs to reach Moon orbit? Well, you could lick a finger, stick it in the wind and hazard a guess – and watch as billions of tax dollars float down to Earth in a pall of smoke and shards, or you could do the maths. Rough estimates work well – in fact they can work really well – with everyday, human-sized dilemmas – how hard do I need to throw to get this paper ball in the basket? How fast do I need to run to catch the bus? How much pressure should I use on these keys? But when it comes to things that are complex, or large, or very small, our human frame of reference becomes swamped quickly. Mathematics can describe and unpack the world for us in a very precise way, which means that rationalism becomes one of our principal tools to evolve as a scientific species.

There was one main problem with rationalism, according to the empiricists. Without experience, it was blind.

Empiricism: in the realm of the senses

Over in Blighty, a triumvirate straight out of a seventies gag: an Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman were having other thoughts on the matter. They were the trinity of empiricism: David Hume, George Berkeley, and John Locke. Locke came up with the term tabula rasa to describe the human mind. It was, he said, a blank slate, empty of all ideas, except for those that experience provided. In other words, we knew nothing until we had experienced it through our senses. These experiences were then stored in our minds as memories, reflections and so on, and formed the basis of our every piece of mental furniture. If you hadn’t experienced the colour red, for example, you would be unable to imagine it.

It sounds reasonable. But what about all those things we could imagine but had never seen: a mermaid, say, or a golden mountain? Easy, says Hume, stepping in: such things were merely the reorganisation of what we had experienced, but photoshopped, cut ‘n’ pasted into new forms. So if you’ve seen a fish, and you’ve seen a woman, and you’ve seen a pair of clams, voilà! The Little Mermaid. It was a simple and neat explanation of how ideas were formed, and how we could be said to know anything.

But hang on, hang on, you might be saying. What about things that we do seem to ‘know’ automatically at birth: knowing to breathe, knowing to recoil from pain and so on. Ah, said David Hume, that’s the difference between knowing how to, and knowing that. The former is instinct, like a bird knows to flap its wings, or a faun knows how to stagger upright. That isn’t what we mean by knowing that knowledge, or propositional knowledge as it’s called. You may as well say that a rain drop ‘knows’ to fall when it drops.

So: an empiricist would claim that to know something means to be able to make a proposition out of it (a claim that something is true, like ‘water puts out fires’) and that it must be justified, true and believed. And that justification comes from our senses, which make photocopies of the world, relayed to our brains, which then mop up all that data and become more and more sophisticated. So far, so good. We have a theory of knowledge, and we have a system of obtaining knowledge. This is going to become very relevant for our understanding of science, and later, educational science, and so are the problems.

Problems?

There are always problems.

One of the main problems with the empirical method, which relies on observation, is that observations can often be wrong; misinterpreted, mistaken, misled. But, as Descartes pointed out, at least we could usually check when we were wrong, couldn’t we? And that would allow us to form some kind of reliable, testable picture of the world. Ah, testable; that’s the word that starts to bring us closer to the topic of science, which is where this is all leading. Because that was one of the great inventions of humanity, and something that brought us closer to a state of mastery over our environment rather than the reactive servitude endured by most organisms since the primordial soup and sandwich of evolution and competition.

Science: humanity, the great tool-using animal has, if not uniquely, then to a unique extent, discerned the machinations of nature and divined methods to obtain advantage over the other beasts. We’re not the fastest, or the strongest, or the longest lived; we don’t have fins, or fangs, or luminous antennae to attract prey. We can’t detach our mandibles, or change sex, or hibernate, or endure most extreme spectrum habitats. But we are rather good at puzzling out clever ways to cope with it all. And that’s based on a system called induction.

The Inductive Method

You will – if you’ve heard of Sherlock Holmes – be familiar with the principle of deduction. I think if I asked most people what it meant, they would say, ‘Er … working things out. Like Sherlock Holmes and that.’ Which is barely right. Because induction and deduction are much misunderstood, and it’s worth exploring what they mean briefly here before we start trying to work out what we mean by a scientific method, and more importantly, when something isn’t scientific. Like most educational research. See? I’m getting there.

Deduction

Deductive and inductive refer to the way you construct a logical argument. Let me give you an example of a deductive argument:

• Premise one (P1): All men are mortal;
• Premise two (P2): Socrates is a man;
• Conclusion: Therefore, Socrates is mortal.

In plain speech, it’s this: ‘All men are mortal, and Socrates is a man, therefore, Socrates is mortal.’ We lay it out like that to make sure we’re as clear as possible about what we’re saying. Now how do we know that Socrates is mortal? Because if we accept the premises that all men are mortal and he’s a man, then he must be mortal too. You can swap the words Socrates, man and mortal with other terms that fit, such as ‘Every rainy day I need an umbrella; it is a rainy day, so I need an umbrella.’ And so on. The fun you can have with logic.

There’s nothing in the conclusion that hasn’t already been said in the premises. In effect, all I’ve done is shift the terms around a bit. And that’s the point: deductive arguments are great, because they have the benefit of certainty. If your premises are true, and your argument is valid, then the conclusion must be true as well. Hallelujah! If you want to attack a deductive argument, you either have to prove that one or more of the premises are untrue, or you show that the conclusion doesn’t follow from the premises, in which case it wasn’t a valid deductive argument in the first place.

Induction

Inductive arguments look similar, but are very different in DNA. Here’s an example to begin with:

• P1: That man’s shoe is plastered with dung.
• P2: There is a pile of steaming horse sherbet not two steps behind him.
• C: The man has blazed a trail through the nearby equine stew.

Now this seems reasonable; it...