After spending a good few weeks of the summer reading edubooks, it was recommended to me that I read Guy Claxton's latest The Future of Teaching: and the myths that hold it back. I, naturally, had heard of Claxton, but hadn't read any of his work (although I had listened to some of the interview James Mannion did with him on his podcast). I found a digital copy online (thank you eLibraries!) and settled down for, what I hoped would be a day or so 'seeing things from the other side'.
If you know me at all, you'll know I'm a fan of explicit teaching having tried the whole discovery/inquiry/enquiry thing at the start of my career and, unfortunately, found it didn't work as well as I wanted it to, before making repeated small changes and ending up where I am. My journey is not one that started with research or blogs or books - those all came later - it is one that I made mostly alone. I, alone, made changes to the way that I taught in order to improve the outcomes of my students (both in terms of what they could understand, and how well they performed on exams). It turned out that those changes I made and the things I was now doing were very aligned with what the people who had been reading were doing.
I made these changes because what I was doing wasn't working. No matter what I did, no matter how effectively I managed behaviour or how well-embeded the projects and inquiry aspects were, it did not work. My students were still coming away having reinforced their misconceptions, being confused about what the correct answers were, and remembering the wrong bits [chromatography crime scenes, anyone?]. Claxton is a huge fan of inquiry learning and, going into The Future of Teaching, I was excited to see what he recommended, how he suggested we implement it. I wanted to see where I had been going wrong. Alas, The Future of Teaching told me little about this. Perhaps this is on me, perhaps I made a mistake expecting a book titled The Future of Teaching might have some suggestions about how to improve teaching, but hey ho.
This review was originally a behemoth of a thread on Twitter, which you can read here. It is obviously a lot more raw and unpolished than this post will be - I was tweeting and reading at the same time - but it is also somewhat more extensive. There are a few bits I cut out here because they felt borderline repetitive.
A couple of points before I continue:
- Quotations given in quotation marks (" ") are direct from the text, quotations given in inverted commas (' ') are from me.
- Further reading and references will be links in the text. They should all open in new windows. I realise that having text littered with brightly coloured, underlined text does somewhat ruin the flow, but the other option was to have it littered with names and dates and this seemed like the lesser of two evils.
Insulting People
Throughout the book, the tone is seemingly deliberately cultivated to insult and irritate those who prefer explicit teaching, whilst simultaneously painting direct instruction as a storybook villain, seeking to harm your children. [NB: I prefer the term explicit teaching to direct instruction as the latter often gets confused with Direct Instruction which is a specific model of instruction and not what people mean when they talk about di.]. Claxton talks about a "Punch and Judy show" (page 7) and how he intends to be above that, and yet frequently uses ridiculous comparisons - comparing a knowledge-rich curriculum to having your feet cut off to fit into a bed (page xxi), suggesting that direct instruction of a knowledge-rich curriculum might have side effects as terrible as thalidomide (twice on page 179), amongst others - all of which do little to convince the reader that he is as neutral about it all, as he insists. He also creates a rather phallic-sounding acronym that he repeatedly uses to describe people who use direct instruction to deliver a knowledge-rich curriculum - DIKR. I'm not really sure you can call pretend to call people knobs and act like you're above it all...
On multiple occasions, Claxton implies that teachers who prefer explicit teaching are stupid, unsatisfactory, or just plain bad at their (our?) jobs - "Some of the DIKR proponents seem to have had short, and in several cases, unsatisfactory teaching experiences of their own" (page xxvi). And yes, he is right that trying to get students to learn things using an inquiry model has been unsatisfactory, but after three years of trying unsuccessfully, I rather think that no matter how effective inquiry teaching might be, it's not worth it. Claxton has a suggestion about this: he says that the reason us DIKR folk can't implement inquiry teaching well is because we lack "finesse" (pages 145 and 155). [I have a thing about implementation. When ever someone suggests something, anything, there are two questions that should be asked - first: 'how easy is it to implement badly?', the second: 'how hard is it to implement well?'. There are lots of schemes and ideas and suggestions out there that could, if implemented well, could be fantastic. But if it's easier to implement badly than it is to implement well, then it's not worth it.]
He also says that it is possible to teach something in a way that completely by-passes the working memory and puts the learning straight into the long term memory, something seemingly at odds with cognitive load theory, but of course this is only if you're "skilled" (page 190) in "real teaching" (page 144). The implication of course being that if you're not skilled then you will to consider cognitive load, and seeing as "DIKRists" consider CLT, they must be unskilled.
There are many opportunities in the book where Claxton comes tantalisingly close to making a good point, and then at the last moment decides to go for an insult instead of a critique. He's right that How Learning Happens references the same people repeatedly, he's right that a lot of the edubooks out there at the moment all reference each other. But he chooses to play the man not the ball instead. He refers to "research" in inverted commas (or to use his preferred term "scare quotes"). He calls Rosenshine "the godfather" (page 13) and refers to those who write about DIKR as a "cabal" (page 17). There's even what feels like a whole chapter where he calls out authors he has a problem with by name.
Challenging the Orthodoxy
There are several points where Claxton reiterates something I've seen a lot of on Twitter, especially recently, this idea that he's 'challenging the orthodoxy'. He states that "it is this Trad alliance that is in the ascendant and the Progs are on the back foot". Ignoring the weird capitalisation of Trad and Prog as if they're football teams, I'm not sure I agree. The ITT review suggests that maybe trainee teachers should be taught some explicit teaching because it's rather effective, and multiple university ITT lecturers and professors are up in arms about this. I'm not really sure you can claim to be "on the back foot" when those providing the at least some of the training given to the majority of people pursuing initial teacher education are massive proponents. He dismisses Christodoulou's use of Ofsted reports praising inquiry/discovery learning saying that they are "selective quotations from a small number of Ofsted reports" (page 40) and arguing that the lessons praised must have contained some knowledge, which brings me to my next point - I don't think Claxton knows what direct instruction is.
Conflating di and a knowledge-rich curriculum
On the contents page, there is a quote. It says "The road to education hell is paved with false dichotomies" (page xiii) and it feels very much like Claxton is taking a merry stroll down that road. He paints a picture of direct instruction and knowledge-rich curricula that simply doesn't exist. Adam Boxer asked him "how many 'DIKR' lessons did [he] observe when researching [his] book?". As of yet, there's been no reply, but the book reads as if that number is zero. Claxton states that the point of progressive education "is to score well on knowledge and reason and imagination and empathy and literacy and and and ..."(emphasis in the original, page 7) and there is absolutely no reason why any of those things cannot or do not come out of "DIKR" lessons. Throughout the book, Claxton's understanding of direction instruction seems limited and, at times confused. He says "[The Trads] advocacy of a knowledge-rich curriculum is in opposition, presumable, to a knowledge-poor or even knowledge-free curriculum in which children spend hours 'discovering' things which they could have been told more accurately in a tenth of the time" (page 31), which for me, seems to conflate direct instruction and a knowledge-rich curriculum - one could discovery learn yourself through a knowledge-rich curriculum, in fact that's what a lot of us tried to do before realising discovery learning doesn't work quite as well as we'd like! he describes a scary world of children forced to memorise "laundry lists of [...] items" (page 51), completely outside of any sequence or curriculum. Which just doesn't happen.
Culture of Error
Claxton briefly talks of "young people com[ing] out of school frightened of 'having a go' for fear of looking stupid". This is, of course, a concern, but is not one related to pedagogy/teaching style, and is certainly one discussed a lot by those of us who use di. This blog by Jo Castelino talks about how she's planning to build a culture of error, one where students are unafraid to make mistakes, in the coming year. Hell, even the term 'culture of error' comes from Teach Like a Champion, a book many of us di-users have been accused treating like our "precious Bible". Claxton does go on to say that there are many things that can affect whether a student likes school or not, which did make me wonder why he'd brought it up in the first place...
Schema-building
I now do a lot of reading. I read books and blogs and papers and Twitter posts. Some of these are obviously better sources of information than others. But one of the things that I see a lot is a discussion around sequencing and around prerequisite knowledge. A teacher who goes by the name Tom Chillimamp set up #ChatSequencing, a "project to bring together a whole bunch of voices from [...] teachers that are interested in [...] sequencing in science". Adam Boxer has written about the importance of prerequisite knowledge when endeavouring to repair gaps caused by distance learning. I've mentioned its importance in three different blog posts. Efrat Furst's piece in which she highlights the importance of activating prior knowledge for understanding is referenced so often that when you search her name the 'related searches' box asks if you want "Efrat Furst Understanding Understanding"! And yet, Claxton says multiple times, that "DIKRists" aren't interested in understanding or prior knowledge - "all communication is based on a guess about what one's listeners or readers know already" (page 108). He also does a weird thing where he says "Of course when challenged, DIKR people say that they are interested in understanding and application of knowledge. But they have little to say about how knowledge becomes understanding"(emphasis in the original, page 34). It's like a pre-emptive dismissal - 'you don't do x!' 'um, yes we do?' 'well, of course you'd say that!'. I imagine Claxton's argument would be that we don't count. I can certainly understand with Chillimamp and myself wouldn't could, but Furst is a cognitive neuroscience researcher and Boxer literally edited a book on explicit and direct instruction. You can hardly say he's not a DIKR.
Claxton says that "only when bald knowledge has been transmuted into a living understanding does it become genuinely useful" which is something we agree on. Except he immediately follows it up with "On the processes by which true understanding comes about [...] the Trads have been rather reticent" which is rather at odds with the beginning of the last paragraph.
Knowledge-Rich
Claxton is very much not a fan of a knowledge-rich curriculum, first rubbishing the name "their advocacy of a knowledge-rich curriculum is in opposition, presumably, to a knowledge-poor or even knowledge-free curriculum [...] I personally have never been in a knowledge-free classroom and I can't imagine what one would look like" (page 31) and then arguing "what [...] knowledge" (pages 31, 32, 35, 38, 51, 193) as if we aren't all having the same arguments over in DIKR Land. And yet, I didn't come away with a feeling of confidence in the alternative. Claxton seemed to argue that one could learn knowledge via projects, whilst simultaneously arguing against learning knowledge.
At one point, he inadvertently makes a point in favour of KR. He says that he hasn't "found that being able to explain what a 'mole' is, and knowing Avogadro's number, has helped [him] get along at all [in life]" (page 46), and yet, for me it has been immensely valuable. We all take different routes in life; it's important that we prepare students for as many as possible.
Cognitive Load Theory, including working memory.
I have a terrible trait of taking everything entirely at face value. I believe the best in people and struggle to 'read between the lines'. And yet, even I am aware that cognitive load theory is a model and not an actual representation of the inside of the brain. Claxton, on the other hand, seems to think CLT insists that there is a physical bottleneck in the brain, that the working memory is a special box and the long-term memory is a different box. "Open up a brain and all you see is a highly integrated [...] web of intrinsically active neural[...] tissue. You don't see separate components soldered to a motherboard" (page 103). No one is out here saying that there are physical brain compartments and special little doorways that information has to pass through.
There is also a seemingly fundamental misunderstanding of 'chunking'. Chunking is a 'technique' used by the brain in order to essentially free up space in the working memory. [Remember that this is a model]. The working memory is limited but is constantly getting rammed full of stuff. In order to process all of this, our brain identifies patterns and treats them as one unit instead of its components. One example would be words. Words are actually just lists of symbols in a particular order. As proficient readers, we don't have to process each letter independently - we can just take the word as a whole and process that instead. That's not so much the case if you're not a proficient reader: I read Hebrew about as well as a 4 year-old. I have to take my time, sound out each word [which is really hard in a language with optional vowels], then associate that word with a meaning, then do the same for the next word. It makes reading hard, it takes a long time, I get overwhelmed much more easily than I do when reading English. Because in English, my brain, my working memory, takes each word as a chunk rather than having to deal with individual letters. Claxton, however, says "Pause for a moment: did you need to do any 'chunking' (or rehearsing) while reading the previous paragraph? I hope not" (page 121). Well, yes, actually. I chunked it into words.
Overall
Quotable Highlights
There were a few points where I found myself pulling a face akin to the one in the image above. These were just some of them.
- "Government departments of education don't show much interest in collecting those stats [on how many teachers feel sorrow in their hearts]" (page 27)
- The suggestion that students should decide what they should learn because what they want to learn and what we say they should learn don't always match up. This is a reasonable suggestion, although not one I would encourage, not least because one of the things that a student suggested they might like to learn was "Shall I 'do drugs' and if so which?" (page 27)
- There was mention of David Didau's "knowledge-focused sword"(page 117) which killed me and I had to stop reading for the night.
[An earlier version of this review stated that none of the reviews were from current teachers. I've been informed this is technically inaccurate as Charlotte Church (yes, that Charlotte Church) started a music school in her back garden last summer.]