Revisiting the science of learning.
Where are we now?
There’s a crack, a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in - Leonard Cohen
I hope this post comes as a surprise.
I don’t usually post twice in a month these days, but today marks the two-year anniversary of a news piece released on EducationHQ, where I was interviewed following a post I wrote for The Interruption challenging the science of learning movement as ideologically grounded.
This post continues to be my most read piece and I believe with good reason.
To get some context, you can read the post here 👇
Naturally, this post and my subsequent interview with EducationHQ resulted in some backlash, some of it thoughtful. In response to a number of the critiques of my perspective, I then followed up with a post exploring what I found to be the most common misunderstanding of my argument.
You can read this follow up post here 👇
With permission, I am reposting this article here to bring its attention to my readers in a world where important moments are often lost in the constant pressure to create “content”.
Please share your reflections, thoughts and critique in the comments below, as you consider where we have been over these past two years.
I hope that you find this helpful to prompt some discussions with your peers and circles of influence.
Till next time,
*This article was first published by EducationHQ. Read the original here.*
Science of learning limiting students' education, researcher argues
By Geordie Little.
Deakin University PhD candidate in Educational Philosophy and full-time teacher Tom Mahoney is researching the impact of ideologies on teachers’ practice.
“My research is looking at how the dominant ways of thinking about education are impacting on the way teachers do their job,” Mahoney told EducationHQ.
“But not only just impacting – also, in my opinion, limiting what teachers can actually do with their practice.”
While many in the science of learning movement see themselves as non-ideological, Mahoney said that this is not the case.
“Often, those that like to consider their work as being founded on science like to consider themselves as not ideological, but if we think about ideologies as a perspective on how education ought to look, it's certainly founded on a perspective of what education ought to look like.
“I would argue that the evidence is well meaning and they do have evidence, but that evidence is chosen in relation to a particular perspective of what education should be.”
That perspective, Mahoney said, is one that values efficiency and effectiveness above all else.
“If we think about ideologies as the perspectives, the beliefs, the values that go into how we see education and how it should look, when it comes to the science of learning, I see that as founded in efficiency ideologies specifically.
“That's the ideology that I am more concerned about in relation to this movement, which sees the role of education as a means of basically efficiently and effectively – if we put it harshly and crudely – churning out students with the right information and the right knowledge for society.
“And so that means that the teacher’s role is to effectively and efficiently impart the knowledge that has been prescribed as part of a curriculum, which is assumed to be good and beneficial for society. And once teachers have been able to do that, then they know they've done their job well.”
While Mahoney doesn’t dispute the evidence showing the effectiveness of explicit teaching or other practices associated with the science of learning movement, many of which he uses in his own practice, he said that he wants to see a broadening of perspectives around what education can be.
“I think there's a lot of discourse at the moment that learning is education, but that's not the only way that we can understand education.
“We can understand education as learning content and the curriculum, learning outcomes, those sorts of things, but if that's it, then we might be missing something...
“I'm quite influenced by Gert Biesta, who describes education as something that involves not just the learning of the skills and development that are required as per the curriculum, but also as being a means of socialising our students and looking at the students themselves as people.”
This perspective is often missing in education, Mahoney said.
“I think as teachers, we can get so caught up in making sure that we're showing evidence that students are retaining the information and knowledge and skills that are deemed important – and are important – that we might be missing some important moral questions when it comes to education.
“What kind of students do we want in society? Do we want them to just be knowledgeable of content or do we want them to actually be ethical agents of that knowledge?”
As an example, Mahoney said that he put this philosophy into practice during a VCE psychology lesson on anxiety last year.
“The students knew all the content ... they knew about stigma, they knew what it meant, they could define it, they could respond to questions about it, but as I started sharing about my anxieties of flying in planes, there were a few students who actually started giggling and responding in a way that was really not respecting my experience, and so I stopped sharing the story because it was a bit humiliating to feel that my students were actually responding in this way.”
Mahoney decided it was important to confront the students on their behaviour and make them aware that they were perpetuating stigma in the way that they responded.
“I hadn't had any learning outcomes for this specific thing that I was trying to teach them,” he said.
“I can't even say whether it was effective, I don't even know if it made a difference. But I think it's those moments that actually have the chance to have a real impact in students’ lives.
“It's one thing to learn the knowledge and understand content and to be able to replicate it and be able to repeat it, but I think to embody that knowledge as well and to then engage our students in what to do with that knowledge is really important.”
Well said, Tom.
Just yesterday, as I was having my morning coffee, I thought of a title for a post:”Who taught Einstein?” That is, if the goal of education is for students to learn a specific curriculum, where do new ideas come from? How do we teach students to imagine a world different to the one we know.
I also thought back to my secondary schooling. I had an interest in electronics which lead me to an interest into what was then the new field of semiconductors. I read voraciously about the physics of semiconductors which, ultimately, lead me to an initial understanding of quantum mechanics. Throughout secondary school I knew more about this subject than any of my teachers.