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What if everything you knew about education was wrong?
David Didau
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What if everything you knew about education was wrong?
David Didau
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About This Book
If you feel a bit cross at the presumption of some oik daring to suggest everything you know about education might be wrong, please take it with a pinch of salt. What if everything you knew about education was wrong? is just a title. Of course, you probably think a great many things that aren't wrong. The aim of the book is to help you 'murder your darlings'. David Didau will question your most deeply held assumptions about teaching and learning, expose them to the fiery eye of reason and see if they can still walk in a straight line after the experience. It seems reasonable to suggest that only if a theory or approach can withstand the fiercest scrutiny should it be encouraged in classrooms. David makes no apologies for this; why wouldn't you be sceptical of what you're told and what you think you know? As educated professionals, we ought to strive to assemble a more accurate, informed or at least considered understanding of the world around us. Here, David shares with you some tools to help you question your assumptions and assist you in picking through what you believe. He will stew findings from the shiny white laboratories of cognitive psychology, stir in a generous dash of classroom research and serve up a side order of experience and observation. Whether you spit it out or lap it up matters not. If you come out the other end having vigorously and violently disagreed with him, you'll at least have had to think hard about what you believe. The book draws on research from the field of cognitive science to expertly analyse some of the unexamined meta-beliefs in education. In Part 1; 'Why we're wrong', David dismantles what we think we know; examining cognitive traps and biases, assumptions, gut feelings and the problem of evidence. Part 2 delves deeper - 'Through the threshold' - looking at progress, liminality and threshold concepts, the science of learning, and the difference between novices and experts. In Part 3, David asks us the question 'What could we do differently?' and offers some considered insights into spacing and interleaving, the testing effect, the generation effect, reducing feedback and why difficult is desirable. While Part 4 challenges us to consider 'What else might we be getting wrong?'; cogitating formative assessment, lesson observation, grit and growth, differentiation, praise, motivation and creativity.
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Topic
EducationSubtopic
Education GeneralPart 1
Why weâre wrong
Chapter 1
Donât trust your gut
Man prefers to believe what he prefers to be true.
Francis Bacon
Nobody wants to be wrong â it feels terrible. In order to protect ourselves from acknowledging our mistakes, we have developed a sophisticated array of techniques that prevent us from having to accept such an awful reality. In this way we maintain our feeling of being right. This isnât me being smug by the way. Obviously, Iâm as susceptible to self-deception as anyone else; as they say, denial ainât just a river in Egypt.
There are two very good reasons for most of the mistakes we make. Firstly, we donât make decisions based on what we know. Our decisions are based on what feels right. Weâre influenced by the times and places in which we live, the information most readily available and which weâve heard most recently, peer pressure and social norms, and the carrots and sticks of those in authority. We base our decisions both on our selfish perceptions of current needs and wants and on more benevolent desires to positively affect change. And all of this is distilled by the judgements we make of the current situation. But our values and our sense of whatâs right and wrong can lead us into making some very dubious decisions.
Secondly, weâre deplorable at admitting we donât know. Because of the way weâre judged, itâs far less risky to be wrong than it is to admit ignorance. If weâre confident enough, people assume we must know what weâre talking about. Most of us would prefer a clear answer, even if it turns out to be wrong, than an admission that someone is unsure. Because no one likes a ditherer, certainty has become a proxy for competence. Added to this, very often we donât know that we donât know.
Feeling uncertain is uncomfortable, so when weâre asked a hard question we very often substitute that question for an easier one. If weâre asked, âWill this yearâs exam classes achieve their target grades?â, how could we know? Itâs impossible to answer this question honestly. But no one wants to hear, âI donât know,â so we switch it for an easier question like, âHow do I feel about these students?â This is much easier to answer â we make our prediction without ever realising weâre not actually answering the question we were asked.
Despite it being relatively easy to spot other people making mistakes, itâs devilishly difficult to set them straight. Early in my career as an English teacher, I noticed that children would arrive in secondary school with a clear and set belief that a comma is placed where you take a breath. This is obviously untrue: what if you suffered with asthma? So how has this become an accepted fact? Well, mainly because many teachers believe it to be true. This piece of homespun wisdom has been passed down from teacher to student as sure and certain knowledge, probably for centuries. If you do enough digging, it turns out punctuation marks were originally notation for actors on how to read scripts. Itâs still fairly useful advice that you might take a breath where you see a comma, but itâs a staggeringly unhelpful rule on how to use them.*
Iâve spent many years howling this tiny nugget of truth at the moon, but it remains utterly predictable that every year children arrive at secondary school with no idea how to use commas. Teaching correct comma use depends on a good deal of basic grammatical knowledge. Itâs a lot easier to teach a proxy which is sort of true. Although the âtake a breathâ rule allows students to mimic how writing should work, it prevents a proper understanding of the process. And so the misunderstanding remains. As is often observed, a lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth has had time to find its boots, let alone tug them on.
This kind of âwrongnessâ is easy to see. Itâs much more difficult when what we believe validates who we are. Many of our beliefs define us; a challenge to our beliefs is a challenge to our sense of self. No surprise then that we resist such challenges. Here are some things which defined me and which I used to believe were certain:
- Good lessons involve children learning in groups with minimal intervention from the teacher.
- Teachers should minimise the time they spend talking in class and particularly avoid whole class teaching.
- Children should be active; passivity is a sure sign theyâre not learning.
- Children should make rapid and sustained progress every lesson.
- Lessons should be fun, relevant to childrenâs experiences and differentiated so that no one is forced to struggle with a difficult concept.
- Children are naturally good and any misbehaviour on their part must be my fault.
- Teaching children facts is a fascistic attempt to impose middle class values and beliefs.
These are all things I was either explicitly taught as part of my training to be a teacher or that I picked up tacitly as being self-evidently true. Maybe you believe some or all of these things to be true too. Itâs not so much that I think these statements are definitively wrong, more that the processes by which I came to believe them were deeply flawed. In education (as in many other areas Iâm sure), it would appear to be standard practice to present ideological positions as facts. Like many teachers, I had no idea how deeply certain ideas are contested as I was only offered one side of the debate.
Iâll unpick how and why I now think these ideas are wrong in Chapter 3, but before that I need to soften you up a bit. If the rest of the book is going to work, I need you to accept the possibility that you might sometimes be wrong, even if we quibble about the specifics of exactly what you might be wrong about. You see, weâre all wrong, all the time, about almost everything. Look around: everyone youâve ever met is regularly wrong. To err is human.
In our culture, everyone is a critic. We delight in other peopleâs errors, yet are reluctant to acknowledge our own. Perhaps your friends or family members have benefitted from you pointing out their mistakes? Funny how they fail to appreciate your efforts, isnât it? No matter how obvious it is to you that theyâre absolutely and spectacularly wrong, they just donât seem able to see it. And thatâs true of us all. We can almost never see when we ourselves are wrong. Wittgenstein got it dead right when he pointed out: âIf there were a verb meaning âto believe falselyâ, it would not have any significant first person, present indicative.â1 That is to say, saying âI believe falselyâ is a logical impossibility â if we believe it, how could we think of it as false? Once we know a thing to be false we no longer believe it.â This makes it hard to recognise when we are lying to ourselves or even acknowledge weâre wrong after the fact. Even when confronted with irrefutable evidence, we can still doubt what is staring us in the face and find ways of keeping our beliefs intact.
Part of the problem is perceptual. Weâre prone to blind spots; there are things we, quite literally, cannot see. We all have a physiological blind spot: due to the way the optic nerve connects to our eyes, there are no rods or cones to detect light where it joins the back of the eye, which means there is an area of our vision â about six degrees of visual angle â that is not perceived. You might think we would notice a great patch of nothingness in our field of vision but we donât. We infer whatâs in the blind spot based on surrounding detail and information from our other eye, and our brain fills in the blank. So, whatever the scene, whether a static landscape or rush hour traffic, our brain copies details from the surrounding images and pastes in what it thinks should be there. For the most part our brains get it right, but occasionally they paste in a bit of empty motorway when whatâs actually there is a motorbike.
Maybe youâre unconvinced? Fortunately thereâs a very simple blind spot test:
Figure 1.1. The blind spot test
Close your right eye and focus your left eye on the cross. Hold the page about 25 cm in front of you and gradually bring it closer. At some point the left-hand spot will disappear. If you do this with your right eye focused on the cross, at some point the right-hand spot will disappear.
So, how can we trust when our perception is accurate and when itâs not? Worryingly, we canât. But the problem goes further. French philosopher Henri Bergson observed, âThe eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.â Quite literally, what we are able to perceive is restricted to what our brain thinks is there.
Further, Belgian psychologist Albert Michotte demonstrated that we âseeâ causality where it doesnât exist. We know from our experience of the world that if we kick a ball, the ball will move. Our foot making contact is the cause. We then extrapolate from this to infer causal connections where there are none. Michotte designed a series of illustrations to demonstrate this phenomenon. If one object speeds across a screen, appears to make contact with a second object and that object then moves, it looks like the first objectâs momentum is the cause of the second objectâs movement. But itâs just an illusion â the âillusion of causalityâ. He showed that with a delay of a second, we no longer see this cause and effect. If a large circle moves quickly across the screen preceded by a small circle, it looks like the large circle is chasing the small circle.⥠We attribute causality depending on speed, timing, direction and many other factors. All we physically see is movement, but thereâs more to perception than meets the eye. Consider how we infer causes to complex events: if we see a teacher teach two lessons we consider inadequate, we infer that theyâre an inadequate teacher.
This leads us to naive realism â the belief that our senses provide us with an objective and reliable awareness of the world. We tend to believe that we see objects as they really are, when in fact what we see is just our own internal representation of the world. And why wouldnât we? If an interactive whiteboard falls on our head, itâll hurt! But while we may agree that the world is made of matter, which can be perceived, matter exists independently of our observations: the whiteboard will still be smashed on the floor even if no one was there to see it fall. Mostly this doesnât signify; what we see tends to be similar enough to what others see as to make no difference. But sometimes the perceptual differences are such that we do not agree on the meaning and therefore on the action to be taken.
The existence of optical illusions proves not only that our senses can be mistaken, but more importantly they also demonstrate how the unconscious processes we use to construct an internal reality from raw sense data can go awry.
Figure 1.2. Checker shadow illusion
Source: http://web.mit.edu/persci/people/adelson/checkershadow_illusion.html.
Source: http://web.mit.edu/persci/people/adelson/checkershadow_illusion.html.
In Edward H. Adelsonâs checker shadow illusion (Figure 1.2), the squares labelled A and B are the exact same shades of grey. No really. The shadow cast by the cylinder makes B as dark as A, but becaus...