In an earlier post we looked at Daisy Christodoulou’s book Seven Myths About Education. The first myth we looked at was Facts Prevent Understanding. Here we learned that facts are foundational to the acquisition of skill and critical thinking processes.
Myth 2: Teacher Led Instruction Is Passive
Essentially, this myth argues that direct teaching is ineffective because the student becomes a passive vessel. Instead, we need to allow children to direct their own learning. They need to learn independently to become independent learners.
Once again some big names in the past have been associated with this myth. Rousseau felt that formal teaching of reading (of the alphabet and sounds) was inappropriate and that a stimulating environment would enable children to discover reading for themselves. John Dewey felt that a child’s inclinations should determine the education process, and he is echoed in those who speak of student agency and child-centred pedagogy. Freire, a Brazilian educationalist, was opposed to drill and memorisation and spoke of co-construction of knowledge through discussion and dialogue, where the teacher was not a figure of authority but a student as well.
So what do we know about learning? Evidence does not support the idea that teacher-directed education is passive and unhelpful. Firstly we know that there are some things that are not learned naturally. Nobody learns their alphabet naturally. Nobody learns our number system naturally. Nobody learns about gravity from their own contemplation and study. The breakthroughs in civilization were breakthroughs because they were concepts that for thousands of years were not learned naturally or independently. Why would we expect each child to have to relearn these unnatural developments when it took thousands of years to get to them in the first place? We need teachers to pass on this knowledge, and we do this effectively through teacher instruction.
The second piece of evidence that Christodoulou refers to is the human working memory. Apparently the limitations of our working memory explain why humans took so long to discover some of the laws of nature. In learning, our working memories can only hold so much information and are prone to overload when there is minimal guidance.
The final piece of evidence against this myth is the evidence we have in favour of the effectiveness of direct teacher instruction. Christodoulou cites John Hattie in his Visible Learning which highlights direct teaching as the third most powerful teacher factor. She cites a major American study which showed the direct instruction method outperformed other methods in terms of academic performance and the self esteem of the students.
Once again, it’s funny how educational experts need convincing of what most laypeople instinctively understand: an expert teacher who can keep students spellbound and motivated is what our children need.