Seven Myths About Education – Part 4

We have been working our way through Daisy Christodoulou’s Seven Myths About Education. The previous myth we investigated was that the 21st century fundamentally changes everything. Today we are investigating the fourth myth.

Myth 4: You Can Always Just Look it Up

Who hasn’t heard this one? Someone displays an unusual depth of knowledge and another scornfully says, “If I wanted to know that, I could just google it.” We’ve seen hints of this in the other myths. Procedural knowledge, or knowing how is rated about declarative knowledge or knowing what.

This myth has certainly infected the classroom. Apparently teachers shouldn’t worry about their students learning facts. Given our internet age, knowledge is redundant. Rather we need to focus on teaching research skills.

How is this a myth? What is wrong with this thinking?

the first issue is that it denies what research on memory tells us. Knowledge in our long term memory is extremely important. In fact, the more knowledge we have, the greater range of problems we are able to solve. If we memorise frequently used bits of information, these will not clog-up our short term memory when we are trying to solve complex problems.

A classic case in the classroom is teaching fractions with children who do not know their multiplication tables. First times tables must be in the long term memory, then you can teach fractions. Or what about your doctor? Nobody would want their doctor googling how to do a procedure five minutes before they are due to go into surgery. They are going to need a lot of knowledge stored in their long term memory so they can be effective.

Secondly, ‘looking something up’ actually requires a certain amount of knowledge. First of all, one needs to know what one needs to find out. In addition, knowledge of what makes for a good source could be important. And these are just starting points. As Christodoulou points out, “..research skills are, on closer inspection, the function of large bodies of knowledge.” In fact, often when we describe students has having good research skills, we are actually making more of a comment on their general knowledge. Because of their good general knowledge, they are enabled to interpret research questions and approach the whole process of research in a competent manner.

So yes, we do want to teach good research skills. But it should never be an either-or thing. We want to complement this with providing children with a good body of knowledge.

Seven Myths About Education – Part 3

In an earlier post, we looked at the second myth (teacher-led instruction is passive) Daisy Christodoulou debunks in her book Seven Myths About Education. Today we move on to myth three.

Myth 3: The 21st Century Fundamentally Changes Everything

You’ve probably heard this myth yourself. According to this myth, back in our parents day, we stuffed knowledge into the heads of students. Now, however, this will just render our children irrelevant. Now we need to focus on the acquisition of transferable skills so our children can adapt quickly to the inevitable changes that our modern world will bring into their lives.

Some even go so far as to say that those taught under the old model of knowledge will be doomed to ever-diminishing manual jobs, while skills educated children will ‘whizz around the country problem solving.’

Trends which express this myth

There are some trends in education that spring from this myth. One of these is for a curriculum to be based around skills instead of subjects. An example is the Opening Minds curriculum which is centred around five essential skills rather than subjects. The skills are: citizenship, learning, managing information, relating to people and managing situations. All good skill to be sure. Skills that we certainly want our children to learn.

Another example is the New Zealand curriculum, which although it has subject areas, is fairly sparse in terms of knowledge requirements, focusing instead on skills. In addition, the curriculum emphasises five key competencies: thinking, using language, symbols, and texts, managing self, relating to others and participating and contributing.

Are these skills unique to the 21st century?

The problem with all of this is not that these skills are not important, but that these are skills humans have always needed to be successful. There is nothing uniquely 21st century about them at all! Creativity and problem solving are indeed 21st century skills. But they are not uniquely 21st-century skills. The world has always favoured those who were creative and able to solve problems. Did our forebears require these skills? Of course they did, just as much, if not more so than us.

But the real issue is the way we now propose our children gain these skills. The whole movement pushing the teaching of ’21st century skills’ has become a codeword for removing knowledge from our curricula. But this is perverse, as Christodoulou points out.

…removing knowledge from the curriculum will ensure that pupils do not develop twenty-first century skills.

Implications

Skills are not gained in a vacuum. Knowledge based curricula give our children what they need to develop the skills we all recognise are essential.

Secondly, we should be sceptical of those who argue that we need to toss out old ideas and knowledge. The reverse is true. The newer the idea, the more likely it is to become obsolete! Christodoulou points out that if something has proved itself useful over thousands of years, it is a good bet that it will be useful for the next 100 years. But something that has only been valuable for 5 years? In that case, we cannot be so certain. Therefore the newer an idea, the more sceptical we should be about teaching it in our schools. The older ideas have stood the test of time.

I’ve seen this in my lifetime. In my high school years, we did some learning in ICT. I learned to use programmes that no longer exist.

Seven Myths About Education – Part 2

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.

Seven Myths About Education – Part 1

Recently I have been reviewing my notes on Seven Myths About Education by Daisy Christodoulou, a book I read a few years ago. Christodoulou is an educational thinker in the UK, who attempts to explode some of the common myths in the educational landscape of today. Myth one is “Facts Prevent Understanding”.

Myth 1: Facts Prevent Understanding

For those of you who aren’t involved in education, you probably read something like this and think, “Who on earth would believe that?” For those of us involved in education, we are perhaps more familiar with some of the thinking of educational ‘experts’. Rousseau, for instance, argued that experience alone should be the way scholars should learn. One cynically wonders what lessons his five children whom he deposited at a foundling hospital after their births learnt by their experiences. John Dewey, a hero of education to many, suggested that friction and waste would be the result of a child who is forced into a receptive and absorbing attitude, while the more modern educator and philosopher Paulo Freire argued that the banking deposit concept of education (depositing knowledge in the minds of children) is a misguided system.

So too, many in education today argue that teaching kids facts is a problem. Rather they argue that we need to be teaching understanding and a deeper level of thinking to children. As is often the case, an element of this sounds plausible. We all know that knowledge is not enough. We don’t want our children to be robots who can spit out random facts. Rather, we want them to be able to use their knowledge; to develop higher-order thinking. We would rank highly the ability to analyse and evaluate for instance.

Christodolou points to research that highlights the fundamental importance of knowledge acquisition in education. It seems that research into human thinking demonstrates the importance of long-term memory for cognition. The more information that a child has stored in their long term memory, the more they can overcome the difficulties of cognitive overload in their working memory. Simply put, the more facts a child has possession of, the easier it is for them to work with more complex problems.

A classic case of this is learning the multiplication tables. A child who has not got these ‘down pat’ will struggle to perform division of mixed numbers. Too much of their working memory is being devoted to figuring out the particular times table they need so that there is not enough ‘thinking space’ left to convert the mixed numbers to improper fractions and then change the division sign to a multiplication sign and change the last fraction to its reciprocal. A child with the multiplication tables committed to long term memory is ready to deal with this new complexity.

Creativity, problem-solving and ability to analyse and evaluate are skills that are reliant on large bodies of knowledge securely committed to memory. Dan Willingham, Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia argues that the data from the last 30 years of research leads to the conclusion that thinking well requires knowing facts. He writes,

“The very processes that teachers care about most – critical thinking processes such as reasoning and problem solving – are intimately intertwined with factual knowledge that is stored in long-term memory.”

This research is a timely reminder to educators to keep the main thing the main thing. We need to pass on a solid body of knowledge to our children. This is foundational in the development of critical thinking. Knowledge is the tool our children need to think.