So, I have a book out. It's been a long time coming. Since I started teaching, I knew there was something suspicious about what I was being told worked in classrooms, and what actually happened. It started in teacher training, as well-meaning lecturers and reading lists advocated apparently cast-iron guarantees that this method of educating children, or that way of directing behaviour, would be efficient. It continued on DfE sponsored training programs where I was taught how to use NLP, Brain Gym, Learning Styles and soft persuasion techniques akin to hypnosis.
Then I began teaching, guided by mentors who assured me that
other contemporary orthodoxies were the way to win hearts and minds. It took me
years to realise that thing I could smell was a bunch of rats wearing lab
coats. And why should any new teacher question what they are told? Establishment
orthodoxies carried the authority of scripture. And often it was justified with
a common phrase- ‘the research shows this.’
I remember reading Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science, and being
amused and horrified by the cavalier ways in which science could be hijacked by
hustlers. His harrowing of Brain Gym led
me to wonder what else, like Descartes, I needed to question. What I discovered
led me to write Teacher Proof.
First of all I discovered that a lot of what was considered
to be absolute dogma by many teachers, was built on quicksand. Learning Styles, for example, were almost
universally accepted by every teacher who trained me. It was a Damascan epiphany
to find out that there was hardly a scrap of evidence to substantiate it, that
the serious academic community had
washed its hands of it long ago. But it lingered on, a zombie theory,
staggering from classroom to classroom, mauling lesson plans.
Once I had peeled one strip of paper from the wall, I could
do nothing else but keep pulling, and see how much came off. Much, much more,
it turned out. First of all, I entered the world of pseudo-education, where
optimistic internet sites boasted of Olympian gains to made by the adoption of
this pill (often Omega 3), that smell (sometimes Lavender, sometimes not) or
even this sound (the Mozart Effect, for instance). These, at least, seemed to
be obvious pigs in pokes. Other companies sold hats- literally, thinking hats-
of various colours, or exercises that promised to boost brain power. But they
asked customers to gamble a lot more than a stamp, as Charles Atlas innocently proposed.
Unfortunately, it was often just as bad when I progressed to
the realms of alleged propriety; I found that a lot of what was practically
contemporary catechism, was merely cant. Group work, three-part lessons,
thinking skills, multiple intelligences, hierarchies of thinking like Bloom’s,
all- at least to my poor eyes- appeared to rely on opinion and rhetoric as much
as data. Delving deeper, I found that this was an affliction that affected the
social sciences as badly as the natural sciences- perhaps worse, as natural
sciences are at least readily amenable to verification. But any social science-
from economics to sociology- is subject to inherent methodological restrictions
that makes any claims to predictive or explanatory powers intrinsically difficult.
Which isn’t to say that social science isn’t’ a powerful and
urgent device with which to accrue an understanding of the human condition. But
merely to require that its claims be interpreted appropriately. It is a very
different proposition to claim, for example, that water boils at 100 degrees
Celsius at sea level, than it is to say that children learn best in groups. The
first can be at least disputed immediately, or not, by testing. The latter requires
a plethora of causal factors to be adjusted and
accounted for. And to confound matters further, humans are notoriously
hard to fit on a microscope slide. Nor are we always the most reliable of
subjects.
Sometimes this was the faulty of those writing the research;
sometimes the research was, as Richard Feynman describes, Cargo Cult Science;
sometimes the writers appeared to have no idea what the scientific method was,
believing it to be some kind of fancy dress with which one clothed a piece of
journalism; sometimes allegedly sober pieces of research were simply
misinterpreted by a willing media; sometimes it was the teachers themselves
that had misappropriated the findings; sometimes it was the policy makers who
were hungry for a magic bullet and had already made their minds up about what
they were buying.
Whatever the reasons, it was clear: the educational research
we were asked to assimilate in schools was often more like magic beans than
magic bullets. That’s unhealthy. There are armies of earnest, dedicated
professionals working in educational research who are horrified by some of the
fantastical or flimsy claims made by the hustlers and their PRs. If educators
want to get past this unhealthy system
of intellectual bondage, we need to become more informed about what the
research actually says, and what good research actually means; about how hard
it is to say anything for certain in education, and when claims can be ignored,
and when they should be listened to.
So I wrote Teacher Proof. It’s aimed primarily at people who
work in schools, but it’s also for anyone involved in education, research and
policy. I am, unashamedly, a teacher. I admit I have entered a world- of
educational research- in which I am only a guest. I am aware that in my travels
I may be more of a tourist than a native. But I have tried to write as honestly
and as plainly as I can, about matters that affect me deeply- the education of
children. If I have made any errors- and I’m sure that I have- I welcome
correction, and discussion. I can’t shake the feeling that teachers would do
well to make research more of their business, get involved, participate in
studies, and perhaps even conduct some of their own, with guidance. I’d also
like to think that researchers would be well advised to ensure their theories
are tested objectively, with an eye to disproving them, in classrooms with
meaningful sample sizes. There is a great deal of good that the two communities
can do together.
Perhaps then teachers can look forward to hearing the latest
research, and run towards it; and researchers can see classrooms not as awkward
inconveniences between data sampling and publication. There’s an awful lot of
good research out there, but it gets drowned out by the bad.
Good ideas, like decent whisky, need time to settle and
mature. I suspect that we need to develop more of a critical faculty to sift
the ideal from the merely idealistic. Maybe then we’ll be immune to novelty and
fashion in pedagogy. Or, as I call it, Teacher Proof.
Buy Teacher Proof HERE
