Top UK headteacher: Michael Gove is 'pressing the rewind button'

An article from the Guardian that makes me glad my kids have already gone through the UK school system. The pigeon-brained fool in charge of UK education right now, Michael Gove, is doing his level best to set school education in that country back a hundred years, ignorantly or wilfully ignoring every shred of educational research over the past century. He is living proof that an expensive education doesn’t automatically lead to an educated person and might even lead to the reverse: allegedly, he was a somewhat intelligent child, at least before he went to an independent school. Surprising. Thank heavens for people like Tricia Kelleher, the main subject of this article, whose common-sense critique rings true. I particularly like her complementary observations:

“If Michael Gove is saying we should just value what is in Pisa, then we might as well just collapse the curriculum and teach what will come top.”

and

“My worry is we are now going to be driven towards Pisa because Pisa becomes the next altar we worship at. But it is really a cul-de-sac in learning terms.”

Well said.

It makes me wonder about why we allow elected representatives with much less than no knowledge of education to run/ruin our educational systems. There must be some appeal among a significant number of people in the lunatic measures of success that they latch onto but that actually guarantee failure, such as PISA, standardized testing and the deliberate teaching of things that alienate children, along with counter-productivity initiatives that seek efficiency but that liquidize the baby with the bathwater. I’m guessing that these ideas might resonate with and spring from some of those who were brought up under the long-discredited behaviourist regime that blighted the mid-twentieth century and that still refuses to die in some places, even among educators. Few of us are very rational beings and we suffer, amongst many other things, from irrational primacy biases, choice-supportive biases, confirmation biases, irrational escalation and endowment effects that together lead us to believe that what was done to us was the right way to do things, no matter how much the available evidence proves that it was not.  Unfortunately, those who were damaged by behaviourist teaching approaches have been taught one of the best ways not to learn so, notwithstanding a good many who rise above it and/or who learned to learn in other ways, this may be a vicious cycle that is doomed to repeat itself for a while longer. 

Address of the bookmark: http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/dec/19/headteacher-michael-gove-tricia-kelleher-education-reforms

Who's Cheating Whom?

I love Alfie Kohn – his writing is consistently clear, constructive and filled with sound arguments based on bulletproof research that continue to surprise even though the conclusions are completely obvious to anyone who spends a moment thinking about it. In this essay he shows how we, the teachers and our institutions, are the principle cause of cheating, creating elaborate and demotivating gotchas and systems designed to make cheating rewarding and, perhaps, inevitable. As a result, we are cheating students out of the joy learning. We are teaching them not to learn. Full of useful insights and simple but not simplistic solutions.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/cheating.htm

Donald Clark Plan B: When Big Data goes bad: 6 epic fails

Donald once again in brilliant form cracking open a bunch of academic memes that still pervade the education system and have way too much influence on those that fund it. Especially good on challenging the awful data underlying standardization and comparisons like university league tables and PISA scores on which governments and journalists thrive.

 

Address of the bookmark: http://donaldclarkplanb.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/when-big-data-goes-bad-6-epic-fails.html

Being-taught habits vs learning styles

In case the news has not got through to anyone yet, research into learning styles is pointless. The research that proves this is legion but, for instance, see (for just a tiny sample of the copious and damning evidence):

Riener, C., & Willingham, D. (2010). The Myth of Learning Styles. Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning, 42(5), 32-35. doi:doi: 10.1080/00091383.2010.503139

Derribo, M. H., & Howard, K. (2007). Advice about the use of learning styles: A major myth in education. Journal of college reading and learning, 37, 2.

Coffield, F., Moseley, D., Hall, E., & Ecclestone, K. (2004). Learning styles and pedagogy in post-16 learning: A systematic and critical review. 041543).

No one denies that it is possible to classify people in all sorts of ways with regards to things that might affect how they learn, nor that everyone is different, nor that there are some similarities and commonalities between how people prefer to or habitually go about learning. When these elaborately constructed theories claim no more than that people are different in interesting and sometimes identifiably consistent ways, then I have little difficult accepting them in principle, though it’s always worth observing that there are well over 100 of these theories and they cannot all be right. There is typically almost nothing in any of them that could prove them wrong either. This is a hallmark of pseudo-science and should set our critical sensors on full alert. The problem comes when the acolytes of whatever nonsense model is their preferred flavour try to take the next step and tell us that this means we should teach people in particular ways to match their particular learning styles. There is absolutelly no plausible evidence that knowing someone’s learning style, however it is measured, should have any influence whatsoever on how we should teach them, apart from the obvious requirement that we should cater for diversity and provide multiple paths to success. None. This is despite many decades spent trying to prove that it makes a difference. It doesn’t.

It is consequently a continual source of amazement to me when people pipe up in conversations to say that we should consider student learning styles when designing courses and learning activities. Balderdash. There is a weak case to be made that, like astrology (exactly like astrology), such theories serve a useful purpose of encouraging people to reflect on what they do and how they behave. They remind teachers to consider the possibility that there might be more than one way to learn something and so they are more likely to produce useful learning experiences that cater for diverse needs, to try different things and build flexibility into their teaching. Great – I have no objection to that at all, it’s what we should be aiming for. But it would be a lot more efficient to simply remind people of that simple and obvious fact rather than to sink vast sums of money and human resources into perpetuating these foolish myths. And there is a darker side to this. If we tell people that they are (just a random choice) ‘visual’, or  ‘sensing’ or ‘intuitive’ or ‘sequential’ learners then they will inevitably be discouraged from taking different approaches. If we teach them in a way that we think fits a mythical need, we do not teach them in other ways. This is harmful. It is designed to put learners in a filter bubble. The worst of it is that learners then start to believe it themselves and ignore or undervalue other ways of learning.

Being-taught habits

The occasion for this rant came up in a meeting yesterday, where it was revealed that a surprising number of our students describe their learning style (by which they actually mean their learning preference) to be to listen to a video lecture. I’m not sure where to begin with that. I would have been flabbergasted had I not heard similar things before. Even learning style believers would have trouble with that one. One of the main things that is worth noting, however, is that this is actually a description not of a learning preference but of a ‘being-taught habit’. Not as catchy, but that’s what it is.

I have spent much of my teaching career not so much teaching as unteaching: trying to break the appalling habits that our institutional education systems beat into us until we come to believe that the way we are being taught is actually a good way to learn. This is seldom the case – on the whole, educational systems have to achieve a compromise between cost-efficiency and effective teaching –  but, luckily, people are often smart enough to learn despite poor teaching systems. Indeed, sometimes, people learn because of poor teaching systems, inasmuch as (if they are interested and have not had the passion sucked out of them) they have to find alternative ways to learn, and so become more motivated and more experienced in the process of learning itself. Indeed, problem-based and enquiry-based techniques (which are in principle a good idea) sometimes intentionally make use of that kind of dynamic, albeit usually with a design that supports it and offers help and guidance where needed.

If nothing else, one of the primary functions of an educational system should be to enable people to become self-directed, capable lifelong learners. Learning the stuff itself and gaining competence in a subject area or skill in doing something is part of that – we need foundations on which to build. But it is at least as much about learning ways of learning. There are many many ways to learn, and different ways work better for different people learning different things. We need to be able to choose from a good toolkit and use approaches that work for the job in hand, not that match the demands of some pseudo-scientific claptrap.

Rant over.

 

Pedagogy – Scrap exams to create schools of the future – news – TES

A report on the findings of this year’s Equinox Summit. Amongst the more interesting:

the summit’s conclusion was that, in less than 20 years, “knowing facts will have little value”, meaning that schools will have to scrap conventional examinations and grades and replace them with more “qualitative assessment”. This would measure a student’s all-round ability, rather than testing their knowledge in a particular subject.”

A lot of other sound and common-sense ideas are reported on here. All good stuff.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storyCode=6365265

Teaching gestalts

I’m preparing for a presentation and discussion tomorrow with some doctoral students on the orchestration of lifelong learning. Having come up with the topic some time ago on a whim I’m not entirely sure what I’ll be talking about, so this is mostly an attempt to focus my thinking a little and is very much a work in progress.

In brief, the central jumping off point for this discussion is that teachers are not isolated actors but are instead are gestalts formed from

  • numerous technologies, including pedagogies, regulations, processes, techniques and tools,
  • an uncountably large number of individuals and groups and, most notably of all,
  • learners themselves.

For it to work, everything must harmonize or must make the right kinds of dischord to bring about learning. There are various things that shake out of this perpsective, not least of which being that there are many ways to organize this teaching gestalt that do not involve an educational system of the sort we are used to, and that do not involve individuals labelled as teachers. This matters because most of the learning we do throughout our lives does not take place in or result from formal education.

The teaching gestalt

Even and perhaps particularly in a traditional educational system, teachers are not just the ones that stand (metaphorically or actually) in front of classes and explicitly perform an act that we label as teaching. Teachers are also the authors, editors, illustrators, designers and publishers of textbooks, the builders of websites, the writers of articles and so on. Teachers are designers of school systems, timetablers, architects, designers and furniture builders. Teachers are makers of videos, programmers of online environments, system administrators, TV producers, designers of door handles and technicians. And, above all, learners are teachers – of themselves and of one another. In short, teaching is always a distributed role.

Unpicking this a little further, almost all learning transactions involve at least two teachers – the one with knowledge of content, process, etc, and the learner. Learning is always an active process of knowledge construction, linking, and sense-making in which we constantly reflect, reorientate, examine, and adjust our knowledge in the light of new information or new ways of seeing. We always teach ourselves at least as much as we are taught. We are not given knowledge – we make it. Another person may help to guide us, shape the directions we go, correct us when we are confused or wrong, and motivate us to go the extra mile, but we are always a teacher in this process, whether we like it or not.

In an educational context, a vast array of actors add their own contributions to the teaching whole. Some, like authors of textbooks, or creators of curricula, or other students sharing ideas and (mis)conceptions are very obviously playing a teaching role. Others are less obviously so, but they do matter. The people that made decisions about where to place a whiteboard, which tools to enable in an LMS, or what wattage of lightbulb to include in a classroom may make a huge contribution to the success of failure of a particular learning transaction. The designer of the timetable, the legislator who demanded a particular kind of content or a particular kind of behaviour, the setter of normalized tests, the curriculum designer and the person who cleaned the classroom, all play significant and sometimes crucial roles as part of the teaching gestalt. Timetables teach, LMSs teach, hallways teach. In an educational system it is the system that educates, not just the individual teacher. I particularly like the timetable example because it is a great rejoinder to those who rather naively suggest that teachers should put pedagogy first. Sure: but first you must do it only at these times, over this period, for this amount of time, in this physical or virtual place, on this subject. Whatever. Anyway, within this context, the person who is performing the explicit role of a teacher is thus just one of the teaching gestalt but, potentially, quite a special one, sometimes (but not always) second only to the learner in importance. He or she typically acts as a filter, conduit and interpreter that orchestrates this whole, that responds, gives feedback, shows caring. It’s not too surprising that we label this person differently from the rest of the gestalt.

Orchestral manoeuvring

Since we are talking about a process of orchestration, it is natural to think of music at this point, and the analogy works quite well. A teacher may be an orchestrator, adapting to a context in which many constraints and structures have already been determined by others, using the tools, techniques and technologies to play a part in the construction of knowledge that is hopefully the outcome. Some are conductors, trying to elicit harmonious learning through tight control of the process. Like the best conductors, the best teachers of this sort make use of the materials they are working with, fitting the strengths and weaknesses of the players, the acoustics of the venue, the nature of the instruments, to the demands of the piece to be played and the intended audience. Other teachers are more like arrangers, who organize the pieces and leave the playing to someone else. Some are like players in a band, maybe drummers or bassists providing a rhythm to keep learners on track, or perhaps as soloists showing virtuosity and improvisational skills that inspire the learners to new heights. Some are content to play second fiddle, bringing out the best in the soloist but always in the background. And then there are the ones who sit in a recording studio who play all the instruments themselves, sometimes even making the instruments, and arrange everything the way they want it to be arranged. Some play blues, using the same three chords and often simple technique to play an infinite and subtle range of tunes. Some play classically, sticking closely to but always interpreting a score. Some are composers. Some are jazz improvisors, modern or trad. Some go for unusual scales, exotic rhythms and peculiar blends, others prefer the folk traditions that they learned as children. The sounds that musicians make are a function of many things, including most notably the instrument itself as well as the surroundings in which it is played and the reactions of an audience. And, in most cases, there are many instruments to consider. A lot of the process of teaching is about the technologies tools and techniques, incredibly diverse, all of which have to work to a common purpose.

But whatever the tools, genres, blends and roles that teachers play, when it comes down to basics, teachers (that is to say, the players in the teaching gestalt) have to be skilled and creative, whatever and however they try to play. Above all, teaching (emerging from all the many contributors to that role) is a broad set of human practices, not a science, not just a set of techniques. It is, moreover, a creative, active and inventive practice that cannot be emptied of soul and programmed into a machine without losing the vitality and expression that makes it wonderful. This is not to suggest that machines cannot or should not be a big part of the process, however, any more than that an orchestra should try to play without instruments or a venue. Putting aside more blatant technologies like classrooms and LMSs, for better or worse, our educational systems are machines that, depending on your perspective and the aspect you are looking at, either enable or disable our ability to learn. Likewise, Google Search and Wikipedia (my two favourite e-learning technologies) have a very large and conspicuous machine element. And, of course, the creativity and inspiration can be distributed too. A bad teacher can be saved by a good textbook, for instance, and vice versa.

Why bother with teachers anyway?

It is tempting to say that most of the intentional learning we do is self-guided – that we teach ourselves anything from cooking to philosophy. I know it’s tempting, because I’ve been known to say it, and have read many research studies purporting to show this. However, this is nearly always massively wrong. What we actually do, in almost all cases, is to orchestrate teaching done by others. In some cases this is blatant and obvious. If we learn something by reading a Wikipedia article, or a book, or by watching a video, this is very clearly not a case of us teaching ourselves. At least, not totally. We are merely picking our teachers and exercising a bit of control over the pace, time and place that they teach us. We don’t get all the benefits of teaching that way by any means – importantly, we seldom get much in the way of feedback, for example, and any tailoring that happens is up to us. These kinds of things do not show us that they care about us. Such things are co-teachers, part of the teaching gestalt. But it is all a matter of degree: we are always our own teachers to some extent, and there are almost always others involved in teaching us, no matter how informal or formal the setting. Even when we learn by dabbling and experimenting, we are not exactly pure autodidacts. Partly this is because we often have some kind of target to aspire to because we have seen, read, heard or otherwise encountered terminal behaviours of the sort we are aiming for. For many competences, it is because the things we try to learn or learn with are typically designed by humans who have other humans in mind when they design them – this is true of learning that makes use of things like pencils, paints, cookware, computers, cars, musical instruments, exercise machines, calculators and yachts.  Learning in a vacuum is not possible, unless we are learning about the vacuum which might be, incidentally, one of those rare occasions where no other teacher is directly involved in the process.

By way of example, in recent years,  I have been ‘teaching myself’ to play a new instrument at least once a year. I know what these instruments sound like when they are played well, so I can recognize the gaps between what I can do with them and what they can do. Many teachers have taught me. I have seen other people playing them so I have a fair idea how to hold them but, on the whole, they are designed to be held and manipulated so it seldom takes too long to figure that out by trial and error. Their designers have taught me. That said, I challenge anyone to watch someone else play the flute and, based on what you get out of that, to make the flute sound the same. It’s mighty hard. You might get the odd note and you might even figure out how to shape your mouth differently to switch octaves, but simply copying is probably not quite enough. Most instruments have quirks like that and it would not normally be very wise to simply rely on trial and error. The actual process I generally follow usually involves reading a bit about fingerings, tunings, breathing, embouchure and so on, usually with instrument in hand so that I can check what it all means, then a lot of trial and error, lots of YouTube videos and a great deal of practice until I reach a plateau, after which the cycle repeats again as I learn how to do more advanced stuff like overtones, harmonics, complex chords, intonation, picking or bowing styles, etc. I am never going to become a virtuoso this way, sure, but it is loosely structured in a way that leads to a bit more than the outcome of a chopsticks culture (this refers to Alan Kay’s delightful analogy of what happens when you simply put a computer in a classroom and hope for the best). Eventually I need to play with other people who play better or differently, to get a bit of coaching, to find others who will challenge me to go beyond my comfort zone, but I generally wind up being competent to carry a tune reasonably enough before getting to that point. Part of the reason that I can do this kind of thing because I have learned to teach myself and, of course, I am building on a foundation of existing knowledge. I can read music. I’ve grappled with most families of musical instrument at some point. I know the difference between 3/4 and 4/4 time, and a little bit about harmony. And I know a little about how people learn. All of this is because I have had many teachers, very few of whom were intentionally playing that role.

The unsaid

This all leads to what will, in my talk tomorrow, be the jumping off point for the real discussion, and some questions to which I have some answers but mostly not the best ones. What do all the things that go up to make teachers actually do?  What is the value professional teachers add? How can we manage our teachers? How can we replace them? As professional teachers, how can we allow our students to manage us? What aspects of educational systems teach? What alternative ways of organizing and orchestrating learning might we discover, invent or adapt? I’m particularly interested in exploring ways to overcome some of the manifestly awful teaching that our educational systems do to our students like grading, for instance, and what to do when the tunes we want to play are not in harmony with those played by the systems we are working in. But I am also interested in exploring ways that we can enable people to be better orchestrators of their own inner and outer teachers, beyond institutional contexts, beyond xMOOCs, beyond simple tutorials. I’m hoping it will be a fun discussion. How best to characterize what I’m aiming for? A bit of jazz improvisation, perhaps.

 

EdTechnology Ideas – Education Technology Journal

A new open-access educational technology journal. Looks slick, CC licence, a social approach, and I know and respect a couple of the editorial team, so I think it should be reliable and interesting.

Slightly less clear about the need for yet another journal in a crowded market though I guess it’s good to have a thriving ecosystem with plenty of competing species. However, there is a balance between those benefits and the relatively small amount of attention that can be spread around. Now that there are plenty of open-access journals of this nature I see a strong place for metajournals that consolidate writings around particular themes and/or that use curational skills to identify the best of the best. To some extent this occurs in isolated pockets like blogs and curated sites like Pinterest etc, but there is scope for more concerted and formalized efforts in this field.

Address of the bookmark: http://edtechnologyideas.com/

Guesses and Hype Give Way to Data in Study of Education – NYTimes.com

This is a report on the What Works Clearinghouse, a set of ‘evidence-based’ experimental studies of things that affect learning outcomes in US schools, measured in the traditional ‘did they do better on the tests’ manner. It’s a great series of reports.

I have a number of big concerns with this approach, however, quite apart from the simplistic measurements of learning outcomes that ignore what is arguably the most important role of education – it is about changing how you think, not just about knowing stuff or acquiring specific skills. There is not much measurement of that apart from, indirectly, through the acquisition of the metaskill of passing tests, which seems counter-productive to me. What bothers me more though is the naive analogy between education and clinical practice. The problem is an old one that Checkland expressed quite nicely when talking of soft systems:

“Thus, if a reader tells the author ‘I have used your methodology and it works’, the author will have to reply ‘How do you know that better results might not have been obtained by an ad hoc approach?’ If the assertion is: ‘The methodology does not work’ the author may reply, ungraciously but with logic, ‘How do you know the poor results were not due simply to you incompetence in using the methodology?’

Not only can good methodologies be used badly, bad methodologies can be used well. Teaching and learning are creative acts, each transaction unique and unrepeatable. The worst textbook in the world can be saved by the best teacher, the best methodology can be wrecked by an incompetent or uncaring implementation. Viewed by statistical evidence alone, lectures are rubbish, but most of us who have been educated for long enough using such methods can probably identify at least the odd occasion when our learning has been transformed by one. Equally, if we have been subjected to a poorly conducted active learning methodology, we may have been untouched or, worse, put off learning about the subject. It ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it.

Comparing education with medicine is a category mistake. It would be better to compare it with music or painting, for instance. ‘Experimental studies show that children make better art with pencils than with paints’ might be an interesting finding as a statistical oddity, but it would be a crass mistake to therefore no longer allow children to have access to paintbrushes. ‘On average, children playing violins make a horrible noise’ would not be a reason to stop children from learning to play the violin, though it is undoubtedly true. But it is no more ridiculous than telling us that ‘textbook X leads to better outcomes than textbook Y’, that a particular pedagogy is more effective than another, or that the effectiveness of a particular piece of educational software produces no measurable improvement over not using it. Interestingly, the latter point is made in a report from the ‘What Works Clearinghouse’ site at http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/pubs/20094041/pdf/20094041.pdf which, amongst other interesting observations, makes the point that the only thing that does make a statistical difference in the study is teacher/student ratios. Low ratios allow teachers to exhibit artistry, to adapt to learners’ needs, to demonstrate caring for individuals’ learning more easily. This is not about a method that works – it is about enabling multiple methods, adapted to needs. It is about allowing the teacher to be an artist, not an assembly worker implementing a fixed set of techniques.

I am not against experimental studies as long as we are very clear and critical in our interpretation of them and do not over-generalize the results. It would be very useful to know that something really does not ever work for anyone, but I’m not aware of many unequivocal examples of this. Even reward and punishment, that fails in the overwhelming majority of cases, has at least some evidence of success in some cases for some people – very few, but enough to show it is not always wrong.

Even doing nothing which, surely, must be a prime candidate for universal failure, sometimes works very well. I was once in a maths class at school taken by a teacher who, for the last few months of the two-year course, was taken ill. His replacements (for some time we had a different teacher every week, most of whom were not maths teachers and knew nothing of the syllabus) did very little more than sit at the front of the class and keep order while we studied the textbook and chatted amongst ourselves. The average class grade in the national exams sat at the end of it all was considerably higher than had ever been achieved in that school previously – over half of us got A grades where, in the past, twenty percent would have been a good showing. Of course, ‘nothing’ does not begin to describe what actually happened in the class in the absence of a teacher. The textbook itself was a teacher and, more importantly, we were one another’s teachers. Our sick teacher had probably inspired us and the very fact that we were left adrift probably pulled us closer together and made us focus differently than we would have done in the presence of a teacher. Maybe we benefited from the diversity of stand-in teachers. We were probably the kind of group that would benefit from being given more control over our own learning – we were the top set in a school that operated a streaming policy so, had it happened to a different group, the results might have been disastrous. Perhaps we were just a statistically improbably group of math genii (not so for me, certainly, so we might rule that one out!). Maybe the test was easier that year (unlikely as about half a dozen other groups didn’t show such improvement, but perhaps we just happened to have learned the right things for that particular test). I don’t know. And that is the point: the process of learning is hugely complex, multi-faceted, influenced by millions of small and large factors. Again, this is more like art than medicine. The difference between a great painting and a mediocre one is, in many cases, quantitatively small, and often a painting that disobeys the ‘rules’ may be far greater than one that keeps to them. The difference between a competent musician and a maestro is not that great, viewed objectively. In fact, many of my favourite musicians have objectively poor technique, but I would listen to them any day rather than a ‘perfect’ rendition of a midi file played by an unerring computer. The same is true of great teaching although this doesn’t necessarily mean it is necessarily the result of a single great teacher – the role may be distributed among other learners, creators of content, designers of education systems, etc.  I’m fairly sure that, on average, removing a teacher from a classroom at a critical point would not be the best way to ensure high grades in exams, but in this case it appeared to work, for reasons that are unclear but worth investigating. An experimental study might have overlooked us and, even if it did not, would tell us very little about the most important thing here: why it worked. 

We can use experimental studies as a starting point to exploring how and why things fail and how and why they succeed. They are the beginning of a design process, or steps along the way, but they are not the end. It is useful to know that low teacher/student ratios are a strong predictor of success, but only because it encourages us to investigate why that is so. It is even more interesting to investigate why it does not always appear to work. Unlike clinical studies, the answer is seldom reduceable to science and definitely not to statistics, but knowing such things can make us better teachers.

I look forward to the corollary of the What Works Clearinghouse – the Why it Works Clearinghouse.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/03/science/applying-new-rigor-in-studying-education.html?_r=0

LinkedIn launches LinkedIn for Education

This is about connecting people you at colleges or who you went to college with, rather than being a service for academics like academia.edu or others of that ilk, and it’s an incremental change from the existing ways LinkedIn already does pull people who claim the same institutional background together, but an interesting development none the less.

 

Address of the bookmark: http://pro.gigaom.com/blog/linkedin-launches-linkedin-for-education/