In recent posts we have been looking at Daisy Christodoulou’s book, Seven Myths About Education. In our previous post we looked at the myth that students can always just look up what they don’t know.
Myth 5: We should teach transferable skills
Today we are investigating the myth of transferable skills.
So what are transferable skills? As the name suggests, they are skills that can be transferred to different settings. And like the other myths, there is a certain attraction to this myth. What educator does not want students to develop skills that can be utilised in multiple areas?
Where do we see this myth?
So what does this myth look like? Christodoulou quotes Professor Gary Claxton, “…knowledge is changing so fast that we cannot give young people what they will need to know because we do not know what it will be. Instead we should be helping them develop supple and nimble minds, so that they will be able to learn whatever they need to.” This is a classic example of the myth of transferrable skills.
Today, teachers and educators seem to have bought this myth, Rote learning of facts is out, focus on skills is in. Project-based learning is in, as are theme-based approaches to learning rather than subject-based learning.
Why it’s a Myth
So what’s the problem? The issue is that skills are not as transferrable as we sometimes think. The way you analyse and problem solve in a maths problem differs to the way you would approach historical questions.
Once again, Dan Willingham, Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia has a contribution to make to the debate. He points out that our brain is not like a calculator which can just perform the same function (say analysis) on different sets of data. Rather, “Critical thinking processes are tied to background knowledge.” The implication, he argues is that we need to ensure students acquire background knowledge parallel with practising critical thinking skills.
E.D. Hirsch argues that those who have and use 21st century skills effectively are those who have “domain knowledge in a wide range of domains.” Hirsch refers to a massive body of evidence that shows what we think of as transferrable skills are knowledge based. So, “Knowledge is skill: skill is knowledge.”
A great example of this is in the realm of chess. There is no evidence that chess masters demonstrate more than average competence intellectually. Their talents tend to be chess specific. Thus the acquisition of chess skills is built on recognition memory or stored knowledge.
A second example is in reading. The skill of comprehension in reading is associated with knowledge. So much so, that ‘low’ readers reading a text on baseball were found to comprehend that passage better than ‘good’ readers when those ‘low’ readers had a good knowledge of baseball and the ‘good’ readers did not.
Conclusion
So what we tend to think of as skill in experts is really a function of knowledge that experts have built up into their long-term memory and can retrieve as necessary. This means that if we focus on teaching skills at the exclusion of deep knowledge, we are actually working against the development of transferable skills.