I bought Daisy Christodoulou’s Seven Myths About Education after listening to her speak at the 2018 Festival of Education at Wellington College last June. I was interested in her passionate presentation of how some of the most popular notions in education are in fact not supported by concrete evidence; in fact, Christodoulou’s claim is that “there is now a substantial amount of knowledge about what happens when learning takes place… yet very little of this research evidence makes its way into classrooms”. School practitioners (and teachers in training) are disconnected from cognitive psychologists and their work, and there is a new movement in education to bridge that gap (the organization ResearchEd is a clear step in this direction).
The Seven Myths that Christodoulou rejects on the basis of evidence are (as summarised in her introduction):
- facts prevent understanding
- teacher-led instruction is passive
- the twenty-first centrury fundamentally changes everything
- you can always just look it up
- we should teach transferable skills
- projects and activity are the best way to learn
- teaching knowledge in indoctrination
Christodoulou suggests that these (erroneous) beliefs about education are rooted in even more erroneous principles: those that reject the value of content knowledge for learning. She makes the very persuasive claim that the best we can do for our students is focus on helping them acquire more (and more fine-tuned) #1 content knowledge. “Knowing (a lot of) facts” allows the learner to develop increasingly complex and increasingly coherent schema that helps his/her process of making sense of the world. This is, without a doubt in my mind, the most useful outcome of education. Cognitive science has produced a simple model of how the mind works for learning, and the key role that memory has in this process. Simply put, in order to “acquire” knowledge, it must become part of our long-term memory, and it must be stored in a way that is coherent and allows us to retrieve it. Christodoulou paraphrases from Daniel Willingham that there can be no learning until there is a change in long-term memory. And that process requires developing understanding (which could very well begin with #2 teacher-led instruction), and opportunities to practise using that knowledge in different ways. For learning to happen students must engage with knowledge and think about it for extended periods. Students need to keep coming back to that knowledge for it to make a permanent imprint in their brain—or that content will not be learnt. The added benefit of this level of “learning” is that when knowledge is housed in long-term memory (that is, when we do not need to #4 “look it up”), then our working memory is free to do more with that knowledge: that is when we can solve problems that require more creative uses of information, or #5 transfer of skills. Only by building a greater basis of knowledge (information, facts, content) will the student have enough to work from and to work with in order to involve their minds in solving more complex problems. Knowing more becomes the gateway to learning more, and unfortunately approaching new content with #6 enquiry-based projects can derail a student’s pursuit of knowledge, or in fact support the acquisition of incorrect knowledge as permanent. If we want all our students to succeed, and we understand that sometimes we need to help them bridge a gap in their background understanding or prior knowledge, the best we can do is help them acquire more background knowledge, which they can then capitalise into making connections with new knowledge, comparing/contrasting, building on previous knowledge, refining their understanding of the world. The students from the most deprived backgrounds are those who have the most to gain from a content-rich education, so it is a more democratising and #7 anti-elitist effort than any other.
I do agree with her claims and her suggestions, if not with her methods. Louder than her message was her indignation—the British system of education is broken, and Christodoulou feels she must fix it. She is (perhaps rightfully so) outraged, and this is manifest in her text. Yet I found it difficult to agree with her methods because the “evidence” she used did not resonate with me. Although the Ofsted reports she quoted were appalling, can I really draw a conclusion from reading 3-5 lines of the report? Christodoulou writes, “Pupils from educated families will bring a great deal of knowledge to the classroom. Pupils from uneducated and immigrant families will bring less knowledge.” Is that really the case, or is it that “uneducated and immigrant families” have knowledge that is different, or perhaps less valued than “educated families”? I did not agree with the way she summarised the message of Paulo Freire, (the Brazilian educator and philosopher who wrote the influential Pedagogy of the Oppressed) … could she have misinterpreted other texts in the same way? Do classroom teachers actually teach skills in an absolute vacuum, devoid of any connection to the content they want students to master? Does anyone have the time to isolate skills from content that way? She dismisses a number of summaries from Ofsted inspectors, but she doesn’t provide a counter study to allow for a comparison between some of these “good” versus “bad” practices she deplores. No clear data is provided to support the claims that more “traditional” pedagogical styles are more successful with our students.
Despite all these reservations, the data on how memory works and why it is essential to engage students in learning content was persuasive and very effectively supported. It has certainly made an impact in my daily teaching practice.
Source: Christodoulou, Daisy. Seven Myths About Education. Routledge, 2014.
