Legend has it that in the olden days, back in the mists of time, teachers lectured at pupils. The curriculum under this reign of torpor was disconnected facts and children generally could not understand the details drummed into their poor heads. This approach is personified in the Dickens character, Thomas Gradgrind.
Gradgrind: Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts.
“[Gradgrind’s children] had been lectured at, from their tenderest years; coursed, like little hares. Almost as soon as they could run alone, they had been made to run to the lecture-room.”
The story goes that this changed when everyone realised that lecturing was no good. Instead children needed to engage in meaningful, authentic and imaginative activities. The curriculum should focus on developing useful skills that would blossom when kids do the right sort of activities to make meaning, like group work and discovery learning.
But, notice something crucial. Many of the new, enlightened generation, still had the same view of knowledge – that it was isolated factoids of info that could fill the bucket of the mind – but these, latter, people thought that was a bad idea whereas the other lot (parodied as Gradgrindian) apparently thought filling the bucket of the mind with factoids was good.
‘Knowing the Kings and Queens of England…are not top priority life skills. Their claim for inclusion in the core curriculum rests on the extent to which they provide engaging and effective ‘exercise machines’ for stretching and strengthening generalizable habits of mind.’
Claxton and Lucas
Arguably, the latter ‘progressive’ movement ideas (which I’ve rather simplified in my description above) dominated educationalists thinking about effective teaching through the 20th century. In England, though, that all changed a decade or so ago. This was because some teachers found out that whilst most educationalists had been doubling down on progressive notions of skill development, through apparently more meaningful authentic activity, other fields of research had been amassing extensive evidence pointing another way. These findings demonstrated, rather convincingly, that forms of direct instruction were generally much more effective than pupil-led pedagogies. Teachers learnt from other fields such as cognitive psychology that knowledge was important after all because it was needed to develop skill. In England, ‘traditionalism’ as an educational movement, gained momentum.
I’d argue that these new insights have led to improvement in teaching in England. The problem is that parts of all these movements made one fatal error and it is one it is very easy to slip into. What?
They focused their energies on changing the teaching activity or pedagogy. The pedagogy became their goal and the means through which they judged if teaching was now effective (whether that was lecture, discovery learning or direct instruction). The focus in each case was on form of teaching over substance taught. In this way they closely resemble each other. And in practice, they all relegate knowledge (whether valued or not) to disembodied ‘stuff’, or ‘the learning’, to be taught through the appropriately sanctioned activity.
It is not a perfect analogy but when I think about this issue I’m repeatedly reminded of the horseshoe model in politics. Wikipedia says:
The horseshoe theory asserts that the far-left and the far-right, rather than being at opposite and opposing ends of a linear continuum of the political spectrum, closely resemble each other, analogous to the way that the opposite ends of a horseshoe are close together.
In the case of the progressive and traditionalist movements there is a tendency within each to put the focus on correct pedagogy whether that be enquiry learning or Rosenshine’s (indeed, very sensible) principles. In so doing the curriculum or ‘what’ question becomes subservient.
In both cases the nature of the activity choice is at the forefront of thinking about quality education. In both cases knowledge is relegated to ‘stuff’ to be learned. It is understandable. Management of quality of education in school is done by non-specialists and activity choices are most amenable to management across subjects.
However, we can only make sense of what we see, hear and read in the world using what we already know. Knowledge is not and cannot be held in the mind as disparate, interchangeable facts. It is an The analogy of a web or schema for how the brain structures knowledge is more helpful.
Gradgrind, with his lectures, was wrong (amongst other reasons) because he presented disparate information to pupils regardless of the fact this was probably meaningless to the pupils concerned. Such lecturing takes no account of what pupils might make of what you say and whether it can be understood or even digested in one go. However, the solution was not, first and foremost, to change the pedagogy choice- which is a symptom of Gradgrind’s disease. Rather, Gradgrind needed to change his perception of what knowledge is and how it is learned. From that realisation could flow appreciation of what might be an appropriate activity choice to ensure pupils can learn what they have the capacity to understand next, given what they already know.
Think about it. If Gradgrind had been required to use discovery learning would his plan for group-work, instead of lecture, mean he suddenly began thinking about whether or how pupils might make sense of new content he introduced? I’m picturing Gradgrind in a school today. A senior leader feeds back on a lesson observation. “Now, er, Tom, don’t you think you could make the lesson more engaging and get in some deep thinking by breaking it up a bit? I’d like to see you get the students to talk in pairs.” Does pedagogical advice of this sort change Gradgrind’s perception of what knowledge is and how it is learned? Would the teacher of today, having switched from group work to regular quizzing, also necessarily appreciate whether what they taught was being understood as they assumed?
Whether lecturing, using inquiry learning or direct instruction it is quite possible for a teacher to continue teaching without appreciating that their endeavour should not revolve around using the right activities.
More than this, Dicken’s discomfort with a Gradgrindian view of knowledge was because that crusty, old lecturer reduced a rich interconnected tapestry of ideas (with the attendant human emotions such ideas can engender) to a rubble of disconnected facts. I do sympathise with the progressive cry for ‘meaning’ even when their pedagogical solutions to a curricular problem were unhelpful.
I’d say that the most effective teachers throughout history have at an instinctive level appreciated that pupils need to build knowledge from what they already know. For them, the knowledge is not inert stuff, but must come to live in the child’s mind. Whatever the trend of the moment, I think effective teachers were the ones aware that the purpose of a lesson is for something to be learned and that pupils had to know enough to make sense of the new material. Successful teachers have never thought about planning as starting with activity selection. And weaker teaching has always resulted when teachers are encouraged to bypass considering first what pupils already know and what that means about what they need to learn next on a pathway to expertise.
Therefore, when pupils don’t learn what we hope, the cause is as likely to be curricular* as pedagogical.
*their grasp of what it is children need to learn to make sense of the next lesson’s content