The Scarecrows of Education

Earlier this month I blogged in response to the keynote of Katherine Birbalsingh made while at the recent ResearchEd conference in Auckland challenging her claim that the only effective way to teach is through employing a primarily teacher-led approach to learning. I received the following response from Ms Birbalsingh.

I reflected on the response, as a good Jed'aii must and despite not actually addressing my argument that skills and content need to work in concert, I do concede that in saying in my original post that Ms Birbalsingh advocates for content over skills, I was incorrect as we both agree that both are required as I suggested, although we disagree on the timing on when to teach them. This was further reinforced by my reading of her book the Battlehymn for the Tiger Teacher which in many parts actually illustrative of what a majority of teachers in New Zealand would actually see as good practice including the teaching of skills explicitly, exactly what I was advocating!

What did concern me was the majority of responses including Ms Birbalsingh's did not actually address the evidence I provided or support her other assertion she made that if New Zealand continues on the path of inquiry and discovery learning we will fall off the edge of a cliff.

Instead, she created a strawman of this second point. Creating the image of learning groups of 75 with teachers roaming as facilitators as a fair illustration of education in New Zealand. So in ignoring my strawman, she created her own.

As Graham Greene writes of the protagonist in The Quiet American:

 “He was impregnably armored by his good intentions and his ignorance.” 

Regarding the relationship between skills and content with respect to the teaching approaches advocated by Ms Birbalsingh, I fell into this trap, along with those who responded to my post who focused on the first part of my conjecture and ignored the need to also balance between student and teacher-led approaches. Though I admit, I did focus on the skills/content part of my argument rather than this second part of my critique of Birbalsingh's keynote.

So if New Zealand continues on the path of inquiry and discovery learning will we fall off the edge of a cliff?

The problem is that if you are to challenge the concepts of inquiry learning, problem-solving and group learning and endorse the more teacher-led approach outlined by Ms Birbalsingh you need to be aware of each of the points you attack or defend. Using random quotes from Hattie’s work Visible Learning and cherry picking from the effect-size to serve your intention is disingenuous. 

Having now read Ms Birbalsingh's book and E.D Hirsh's The Schools We Need and The Making of Americans, the former which inspired to her to write her book, most advocates of the traditional teaching methods as outlined by Ms Birbalsingh, show a lack of reading of Hirsch’s work and bring straw-man arguments to engage in the debate. I would like to analyze the evidence further as I find that more and more educators slowly fall back into accepting educational experts they most relate to and discard little by little the qualities that make us critical thinkers. 

To do this, I followed the advice I have in the previous post: Firstly, I read widely. Secondly, I learnt more viewpoints, to be literate in terms of learning theories and pedagogy, and I analyzed a lot of research – including those that created cognitive conflict and disproved some of the beliefs I held (that is where the first blog post was very beneficial in terms of feedback). Thirdly, I examined my own philosophy of education to see where my biases lie.

Let us then start with Hattie which was used as evidence for more teacher-led approaches in Birbalsingh's book and by those commenting on my original post. One response via facebook I received was the following:

Just a cursory glance of Hattie’s work shows several principles that are actually in conflict with a “traditional” education from the construction of knowledge to differentiation (p. 119). The entire book is in favour of focusing our effort and attention to how learning rather than teaching occurs.

From the above chart, it can be clearly seen that many of the techniques defined as "progressive" rank higher than direct instruction including Paigetan programmes, problem-solving and co-operative learning. This suggests that effective teaching and learning requires a multifaceted approach incorporating both "traditional" and "progressive" pedagogy.

Much of Birbalsingh's approach is based on US educator E.D. Hirsch who portrays the present educational theory as one which attempts to give students intellectual tools such as "critical thinking skills,” but which denigrates teaching any actual content, labelling it "mere rote learning.” Hirsch states that it is this which has failed to develop knowledgeable, literate students. Hirsch's most recent book The Making of Americans questions why after decades of educational reform and efforts at innovation, do our schools continue to disappoint is informative yet contradictory. A simple example is his muddled consideration of teaching methodology, sees him favouring:

“(…) learners construct and reconstruct knowledge and ideas. It is not the knowledge or idea, but the learner’s construction of this knowledge and ideas that are critical.” (p.22)

This is the basis of constructivism, a “progressive” learning theory! But then favouring methodology where:

“whole class lectures” based on “a curriculum set in advance.” (p.45).

Yet then stating that:

“the least effective methods seem to not involve peers” (p.94). 

So with Hirsh's rather confused view of the most effective learning theory to use can we use Hattie as evidence for a more teacher-led classroom and didactic teaching methods, where does Hattie see the importance of collaborative learning? Hattie is quite clear.

“Cooperative learning is certainly a powerful intervention. It exceeds its alternatives: cooperative learning vs. individualistic learning (d=0.59), cooperative vs. competitive learning (d=0.54)

“(…) an art of teaching is seeing the commonality in diversity, in having peers work together, especially when they bring different talents, errors, interests, and dispositions to the situation.”

Another important piece of evidence used by those advocating a more traditional teaching approach is the decline in New Zealand's PISA results in recent years. Ignoring the point of whether this is the best way to measure student success, the OECD report on PISA 2015 also found that collaborative learning environments triggered better results in terms of academic achievement (see p. 28)

However, in the section Drill and Didactic Teaching Work Best in Battle Hymn defends the use of drill and didactic teaching as it is fun. In my experience, students like chanting in rhythm and this helps to make learning more memorable, leading to an automatic recall. So this idea seems to make sense. If you want to remember facts. It is unclear though how the approach offered shows the application of knowledge. As a science teacher, how do those children go from knowing some scientific facts to thinking in scientific ways – how do they see, as Feynman said that “science is the culture of doubt”

The chapter then goes on to challenge discovery-based learning using the example of solving a Rubik's cube. If students are taught the algorithm to solve a Rubik’s cube, they can do it in seconds, rather than struggling with it for hours through discovering the algorithm for themselves. The book seems to miss the point here – that working something out for yourself can be deeply satisfying rather than just being told. Hattie is then introduced as evidence that discovery-based learning has limited impact, but fails to mention that he is equally dismissive of the initiate-response-evaluate (IRE) approach outlined as the alternative. 

The IRE approach outlined has been discounted by Hattie due to this lack of adjunct questions. Even if a higher order question is posed, only one student gets to answer before the teacher evaluates the answer and ends any form of discussion. Such as style of questioning does not provide their students with the maximum possibilities of expanding their thinking ability and knowledge of the content.

Hattie cites research that shows that teachers may ask many questions but "the majority of questions are about ’the facts, just give me the facts". He exemplifies how the use of questioning improves learning by stating:

“The effect size of adjunct questions was 0.40 which shows that there can be important gains.”

Another idea challenged in this chapter is the idea that teachers should talk less. The flip side of this, of course, is that when teachers talk more, children talk less and the importance of the role of speaking and articulacy are well researched and documented by scientists such as Resnick as well as academics such as Alexander and Mercer. None of this research is mentioned.  So what does Hattie have to say on this?

“When highly effective and other teachers were compared (Hardman, Smit, and Wall, 2004) the former had the more general class talk and less directive talk.”

However, one must be careful as general class talk is not necessarily a sign of effective teaching and learning. The busyness of active student-led classrooms can involve students being engaged in hands-on but mind-off activities.

Finally, strawmen are given as proof of the foolishness of progressive thinking, like baking biscuits in order to understand native American Indian culture. This is not progressive. It’s just a bad idea. 

Many traditional educators also claim that a curriculum that is well-structured, content heavy and enables progression will result in excellent learning an example being Cambridge International Examinations used in many NZ high decile schools. Hattie discusses different curricula and makes the following remark:

“One difference across different curricula can be in order or progressions: some objectives fall before or after others. There is too little evidence as to what is the best order and even, in some domains, whether there is indeed an order.” (p.63)

In conclusion, he states:

“…the debates about desirable curricula in a democratic society are often presumed to be answered by these test-outcome-based questions (n.n. testing and standards) rather than based on a debate about what is worth preserving in our society, and what is worth knowing in order to live the desired good life.” (p. 63)

So again the purpose of education needs to be considered. What defines the success of an education system? Although, I challenge the data outlined in Visible Learning. If you are going to use it to back up your arguments make sure you do not misquote and misrepresent the data to further a certain take on education. Direct instruction is a powerful tool, but we should not discount other teaching methods to enhance the learning of our students. Hattie is very clear on this important final point saying:

“To make teaching and learning visible requires an accomplished teacher as evaluator and activator, who knows a range of learning strategies to build on students’ surface knowledge, deep knowledge, and conceptual understanding.” (p.21)

Another point raised by Birbalsingh was how can we expect children, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds, to be creative or succeed in their chosen area if we don’t equip them with the knowledge and content first?

This is a straw-man in this educational debate. By exaggerating, misrepresenting, or just completely fabricating someone’s argument, it’s much easier to present your own position as being reasonable, but this kind of dishonesty serves to undermine honest rational debate. This is exactly what her twitter response was.

To the same extent, those advocating a more progressive approach view traditional teaching as “indoctrination” and equate it with rote learning and/or learning disconnected facts and having read Birbalsingh's book this is quite clearly not the case.

I, for one, having worked in a “progressive” system (NCEA) knowledge is not minimized but emphasized in each stage of a spiralling and extremely demanding curriculum. As Hattie noted, curricula do not very much in term of objectives but rather in the challenges they pose. Constructivism, like any other learning theory, works provided that certain criteria are met.

As I mentioned in my last blog post, direct instruction works. However, one has to ask though for those who desire a return to a more traditional approach, why is it that only ineffective "progressive" models of teaching are used as examples and ones that are effective like International Baccalaureate are never mentioned? Does direct instruction work? Of course, it does. Does that mean other instruction theories don’t? Not at all. Think of national education systems. Estonia and Singapore can’t be more apart in terms of values, of teaching philosophies and methods. Yet both have top results on PISA.

The idea of comparing the superiority of one teaching approach over another is, to me, the laziest intellectual stance. Dichotomies are mostly theoretical – in real life, as it is the case in education, there are too many grey areas to surrender to a simplistic black-or-white definition.

From what I have seen from more traditional teacher-led tweeting teachers, what is considered “progressive” teaching is a myriad of busy lessons, low-demanding cognitive tasks, and an over-focus on forced collaboration all of the time. As such, I DO empathize with these teachers’ reactions towards this type of“progressive” teaching. However, this is not even progressive teaching – it is pure pedagogical illiteracy that transferred into a methodology.

So as with my previous post, I conclude that you should read a lot. If you tweet or blog, so we can think critically: research all sides of an issue, all research available and all the evidence. I try to be balanced, "traditional" teaching techniques can be effective, as are approaches advocated by "progressives" depending on what the desired outcomes are.  I  read “traditional” authors e.g. Kirschner and Hirsch and conflicting research or critiques of them from different academics and vice versa. So read a lot from many different sources and viewpoints and this creates an environment to allow our learners to succeed.

References:

Smith, F., Hardman, F., Wall, K., & Mroz, M. (2004). Interactive whole class teaching in the National Literacy and Numeracy Strategies. British educational research journal, 30(3), 395-411.