A recent visit to the St. Andrew’s Episcopal School Center for Transformative Teaching and Learning (CTTL) in Potomac, MD, opened my eyes and forced me to confront my preconceived notion about the efficacy of “brain science” in guiding teaching practice. Director of the CTTL Glenn Whitman and his Research Head Ian Kelleher are leaders in the “neuroteach” movement deeply committed to applying sound, research-based principles from cognitive psychology and neuroscience in the real life classroom. Their new book, Neuroteach: Brain Science and the Future of Education, also attempts to sort out the ‘wheat’ from the ‘chaff’ in this burgeoning field.
Since my faculty of education days, the critical pedagogical concept of “crap-detection” introduced in Charles Weingarten and Neil Postman’s 1969 classic Teaching as a Subversive Activity has loomed ever larger in my thinking about education. The whole notion actually originated with the great novelist Ernest Hemingway who when asked if there were one quality needed, above all others, to be a good writer, replied, “Yes, a built-in, shock-proof, crap detector.” For at least two decades, listening to various and sundry travelling education consultants promoting “brain-based learning” has tended to set-off my own internal crap-detector.
That perception was further cemented by reading Daniel T. Willingham’s 2012 book, When Can You Trust the Experts: How to Tell Good Science from Bad in Education. The field of teaching and learning , he warned us, is “awash in conflicting goals, research ‘wars’, and profiteers” and we need to be vigilant in critically evaluating new pedagogical ideas and less persuaded by “bad evidence” drawn particularly from neuroscience. He provided us with a helpful shortcut to help in assessing the latest panacea: “strip it and flip it, trace it, analyze it, and make your own decision about whether to adopt it.” In short, become an informed consumer of initiatives floating on unproven theories or based upon dubious research evidence.
Whitman and Kelleher’s book Neuroteach and the CTTL both venture into contested terrain in the larger debate over the value of neuroscience in informing and guiding classroom teaching. Like many such cutting-edge ventures, the CTTL is housed in an impresssive state-of-the-art learning centre and comes beautifully packaged in booklets exhorting teachers to “think differently and deeply” about their practice. Upon closer examination, however, there is more to this initiative than meets the eye.
Whitman and Kelleher are plainly aware of the wall of skepticism aroused by pseudoscience and expressed in hushed tones in today’s high school staff rooms. British education gadfly David Didau (@LearningSpy) put it best: “While cognitive psychology is playing an increasingly important role in how teachers understand their craft and how students can best learn, neuroscience has, for the most part, remained the realm of quacks and snake-oil salesmen.” In such a field, Whitman and Kelleher are a breath of fresh air – playing an important role in bridging the gap between sound research and classroom practice. They also use “crap-detection” in helping us to understand “the complexities of the science of learning.”
The CTTL is school-based and focused specifically on improving teaching practice by applying the best research in cognitive psychology and neuroscience. Some readers of Neuroteach may be put-off by the optimistic, aspirational tone and tendency to appropriate “transformational” rhetoric. It’s a bit of a stretch to imagine teachers caught up in the euphoria as they “begin to rewire each other’s brain, to develop neural pathways and connections informed by mind, brain and education science.” Not everyone possesses an “ambitious brain” and will be easily convinced to either stop teaching as they were once taught or to abandon teaching to their own “learning strengths.” ( p. 7). Some outstanding teachers, we all know, do both.
Whitman and Kelleher, to their credit, do deliver more than the usual messianic educational progressivism. Educators familiar with Tom Bennett’s ground-breaking work with researchED will heartily approve of certain sections of this book. It’s encouraging to see British teacher-researcher Carl Hendrick’s classroom wisdom brought to a North American audience. The doctor who still uses leeches to treat his patients and, when questioned on it, replies “it works for me” is, as Carl reminds us, simply not good enough these days. Research-informed teachers will also be pleased to see Professor Robert Coe, head of Britain’s College of Teaching, cited for his penetrating observation: “The problem with what’s obvious is that it is often wrong.” This applies not only to the traditional “leeches” but to supposed 21st century psuedoscientific curatives.
The proposed CTTL teacher research agenda is a welcome contribution to the field of teacher growth and development. Focusing on two different strands makes good sense: 1) mastering MBE (mind-brain-education) science and 2) curriculum understanding ( p. 153). The primary objective, according to Whitman and Kelleher, is to marry curriculum understanding and teaching strategies informed by MBE science to achieve pedagogical content knowledge.
The CTTL approach aligns well with Rob Coe’s recent Sutton Trust research review identifying six “research-backed components of “great teaching,” all cast within the context of assessing “teacher quality.” Coe’s top two factors match the two strands underlying the CTTL program philosophy: 1) content knowledge; and 2) quality of instruction, both of which show “strong evidence of impact on student outcomes.” In essence, “knowing your stuff” still matters and applying the lessons of MBE science can make you even better as a teacher.
Cutting through the accretion of “crap” in cognitive psychology and neuroscience is not easy. What can be done to develop in new teachers and everyday classroom teachers what Postman termed a “built-in crap detector”? Is it possible to transform teacher development into something approaching immersion in research-informed practice? How can we separate initiatives like the CTTL from the commercial and trendy purveyors of pseudoscience?
Yes,okay but what about the refusal of the establishment to honour research?
I read the article this am in Atlantic Monthly(Mark Seidenberg) on Reading process and how it`s ignored,it works the other way too.
I think the key to developing a crap detector is opening one’s mind to the concept that there might be a third way to teach students. Unfortunately, currently it seems like debates about Reading focus on the sciences vs the social sciences but always within the context that phonics or whole language are the only ways to teach reading. Similar situations exist with teaching of Math.
The science also undermines the role that socioeconomics play in educating our children. Perhaps schools need to take a third (or even fourth) approach to teaching students in order to address economic differences.
I hope you read the article…It`s important,very important to not operate on opinion.
There are 5 pillars to teaching reading properly,it certainly is not phonics or whole language..I hate that too.
I am very interested to learn more about the proposed CTTL teacher research agenda, and it’s focus on the twin components of content knowledge and quality of instruction; both are essential aspects of good teaching. I have been dismayed to meet teachers struggling to teach Science at Intermediate Grade levels, for example, with little understanding of the concepts, relationships, and inquiry skills that they are expected to teach according to the Ontario curriculum. Without that understanding, they struggle to use high quality instruction effectively.
As I understand it, high quality instruction necessitates teachers providing clear, accurate explanations, giving feedback to correct errors and misunderstandings, and using alternate approaches and explanations as needed. Teachers cannot do this well if they lack deep content knowledge. To my mind, the expression ” quality of instruction” is irreducibly bound to quality of content knowledge when considering teaching efficacy. Having good content knowledge and a strong understanding of and ability to use a range of instructional approaches/strategies, empowers a teacher to consider the learning targets and select the best methods for teaching different clusters of targets.
Instead of engaging in fruitless, meaningless generalized discussions around the value of using direct instruction over inquiry-based instruction, a teacher with sound content and instructional knowledge would want to discuss specific instances involving different learning targets, and reasons why he or she might choose to use one approach more than another to get the best result in each case. If the CTTL provides opportunities for teachers to have those kinds of fruitful discussions, I think it is an exciting venture. Seldom do those kinds of conversations happen in schools, and perhaps not often enough in existing teacher education programs either.
I disagree strongly with those who say that we make teaching more complicated than it needs to be. I hold the opposite to be true; as teachers, we need to acknowledge the complexities and challenges of teaching and seek all the help we can to constantly grow and improve our practices. One way we can do that is by having more, not less research-based dialogue about those challenges with our colleagues and others in educational fields. Also, contrary to what some people claim, most teachers will not “figure it out eventually” on their own. They will figure some things out, of course, but that does not neccessarily mean they deepen their content knowledge or develop a wider range of effective instructional skills.
Like Paul, I too shied away from earlier “brain-based teaching” publications. I thought most of them were simply ways to make a buck in the lucrative market for how to teach books. The CTTL initiative looks more promising.
Thanks for your comment on our book You are spot on when you said “a teacher with sound content and instructional knowledge would want to discuss specific instances involving different learning targets, and reasons why he or she might choose to use one approach more than another to get the best result in each case.” This sounds like a professional way to conduct a profession, and an enjoyable way to be a teacher. One of the goals of our book was to lay out the research on what approaches could help learning and what approaches we should perhaps steer away from. Content knowledge, instructional knowledge, plus professional judgment always work together.
Crap Detection & Continuing Reading Wars
I see the book by Seidenberg mentioned in the Atlantic article has this long title: Language at the Speed of Sight: How We Read, Why So Many Can’t, and What Can Be Done About It. How typical!
How many books on education have been written about how to fix it? Remember the 1955 book, — Why Johnny Can’t Read, and what you can do about it by Rudolf Flesch? So many of these learned books promise that there is a solution and we can be part of that solution. Have you tried?
I pre-ordered the yet-to-be-released book (Jan, 2017) and look forward to the how-tos. Maybe the secret will be revealed, but I’m not holding my breath.
Today I submitted the following comment to the Globe and Mail on the Margaret Wente Saturday post-mortem of the Trump election on this very subject of reading and literacy.
*** Watch English Classes As A Possible Battleground
Wente notes that one Trump voter says that immigrants should pay back taxes and learn English. Well, that is definitely an important point — the English part.
However much we may agree, we should also become aware that some of the most insidious undermining of a population could happen via the teaching of reading and literacy. Look up “Reading Wars” and you’ll get some inkling of the battles and polarized divisions. The entire political continuum has been involved — from right-wing to left-wing — from kindergarten to adult education.
Both the methods used plus the reading materials have been blamed for producing socialists or capitalists. This scuffling has gone on for over a half century. Not always evident to the general public, it’s hard to know the current status. Many people in the field of education will tell you there is no longer a problem and that a mix of tools are being used to good effect. That may be true, however, we still remain alarmed at the high illiteracy figures that abound, especially within prison populations.
While English for all is a good policy we should be aware that problems might arise due to the politics of reading. A recent report to the World Bank, which is promoting world literacy. has this caution: “The reading ‘wars’ are alive and well in many low-income countries, often miring ministries of education and teaching centers in seemingly endless debates between the ‘whole-language’ and ‘phonics-based’ approaches.” Being aware of pitfalls should help make the language teaching more true to the results intended and English should not become yet another divisive issue in America.
There may also be some helpful perspective in Jonathan Haidt’s “The Righteous Mind” where one of his observations is that we tend to react to decision making with our intuition first—and then we go looking for the research and rationality to back it up. He is speaking mainly of our sense of morality but I suspect that his thesis holds up in other dimensions of our life as well.
True, Stephen read Dan Kahneman’s thinking Fast and Slow. Dan was a Nobel laureate in economics
Teachers have all the tools to find out about cutting edge research on their own. Yet it seems everyone looks to outside organizations to hopefully disseminate research to them. While teachers strive to foster critical thinking skills, there is little evidence that they apply critical thinking skills to their teaching. How else could so many bogus ideas get implemented so quickly? It’s as if teachers can only digest research if they are spoon fed, and it’s on a PD day. It doesn’t speak well of their teaching training at all..
Teachers are often fed stuff from speakers hired by school districts or provincial govts.
Sometimes they latch on to ideas like “magic bullets” because
– they are BUSY – finding “research is easy but critiquing it is not
– they have a real classroom issue they want to address
As for teacher training
– too short
– often does not connect with schools or school cultures or the realities of classroom life
I beg to differ. The staff of teacher education institutions have failed to develop teachers’ critical thinking skills – crap detection. They have failed to present cutting edge research. The latest research, such as that in neuroscience, should be ‘integrated’ across the curriculum. ( I can’t count the number of times I heard that phrase as a teacher.) it doesn’t matter at all who hires the speakers. All the more reason for teacher training to graduate teachers with strong critical thinking skills. I respectfully suggest that the buck stops at your office door.
If that is true Christina why did every teacher on the planet buy into”is he an auditory learner or a visual learner?
That crap was sold every successfully to 90% of teachers I met on my journey..
Also,why did the important and critical stage of handwriting for neurodevelopment get thrown out if teachers are good crap detectors?
What about the success of Brain Gym?
Whole language as a buy in-at a conference I attended in 2000 in Chicago when the NICHD DIRECTOR OF RESEARCH SAID”We made a mistake-20 years of whole language”where were the teachers on crap detection?
Joanne,
Teachers bought into the auditory/visual learning crap because they are sheep. Uninformed sheep. They are the farthest thing from the term we teachers were flogged with, “risk-taking, independent thinking, life long learners”. They are not encouraged to think independently at teachers colleges. They are taught to swallow the latest unproven fad, and ministry curriculum without question. And for sure, the unions don’t encourage independent thinking.
The director of OISE should apologize for his institution’s heralding of David Booth and his wacko whole language readers, leaving the renowned reading researcher, Keith Stanovich totally in the shadows. The damage is still with us. That would demonstrate the fallibility of staff and signal to teachers in training to be diligent crap detectors.
A few problems here with the above post.
-As Kahneman, Willingham and others in the field have noted, thinking is hard and most of us avoid it. This is as it has always been. Return to the opening of Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities.
-We can do better but it takes work. See the Heath brothers and Dan Pink for ideas on making REAL change.
-As far as I know David Booth has never opposed phonics or other directed and structured approaches to reading. He does say that if students are interested in reading and see the meaning in the content they read they are ore likely to do it. I first saw research in this in the mid 1980s when students were reluctant readers improved when they got to read books in the subjects they were interested in.
-Universities, rightly or wrongly, rigorously defend academic freedom and this do not usually have an “official” position on an issue. The advantage of this is independence of thought. We do not want a North Korean system. The disadvantage is that some silly, untested, and /or dis[proven ideas also circulate. See Dickens again.
-Name-calling without evidence is counter productive, unless you are running for American president and even then the story is far from over.
You have captured well the spirit of critical awareness and openness that my commentary and the researchED movement exemplifies. It’s a contest of ideas shaped by sound evidence and best practice. Research-informed teaching practice is not bound by certainties, but flexible and adaptable enough to respond to new evidence. That’s what I learned from Dylan Wiliam at researchED Washington.
Now I understand what you mean although as individuals the not being a sheep should start by 30:)
One kid who worked at my clinic in Toronto while doing her training refused to attend her grad…so she became a critical thinker early.
What is she now?
Politically correct.!
That`s the biggest infection out there.
There appears to be a potential conflict of interest in teacher education. How do we teach our newest teachers to identify the crap and develop detectors when their instructors are also the leaders in research? Reminds me of my undergrad years when many of my textbooks were written by the professors teaching the course.
There is also the question of who is ultimately responsible for education. When a school district or province promotes one particular teaching practice, are the classroom teachers responsible for questioning it or following it? One only needs to look at Common Core.
Unfortunately you have a point.
Also,what about consumer protection?
If sugar causes harm,we are being told,there are even documentaries..laws like the mayor of NYC reducing drink size as an attempt to reduce consumption.
Unfortunately,in my field,we meet the victims of non researched pedagogy sold through publishers whose goods are manufactured frequently by editorial teams..it`s many many times just plain old marketing.They don`t even have to field test.
Contradiction Between Knowing & Doing In Education
Much is known about what works and what doesn’t in education. The biggest problem — at least in relation to the goal of at least equipping students with the basic skills of reading and math — is the huge gap between certain populations exhibiting or not exhibiting those skills. Consistently, poor and minority students are left behind. And, they disproportionately are the clienteles of the criminal justice systems.
No need to look for neuroscientific magic bullets in reading and math. There is considerable research and evidence to correct those lags now.
Our popular BC radio broadcaster and economist, Michael Campbell, pointed out these contradictions this weekend in face of the US election results:
• 2,3 million Americans are behind bars, 40% are black, while they are only 13% in the general population.
• That inner city schools are a disaster is a failure of the establishment elites to drop politics and work on behalf of these forgotten and dispossessed.
While Campbell rages about education contradictions here and in the US he is completely stumped as to why there is no uprising against the education elite. Over the last year of his broadcasts he correctly foresaw both Brexit and the Trump election as reactions against political establishments. What will it take for a shakeup and correction in the education establishment?
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Tunya you nailed it. Thousands and thousands of families of all social classes completely ignored by educational bureaucracies. Well, uprisings are happening as we see and educational bureaucracies must be forced politely and peacefully to pay attention to the harm that they have caused ordinary citizens. Your last question. Who knows?
Here`s what was on Edsurge this am-they keep peddling the crux of the problem as the solution.
10 YEARS OF EDUCATION RESEARCH has shown we are failing to use technology effectively with underserved students, who are mostly subjected to “drill-and-practice or remediation” activities, writes Molly B. Zielezinski. But there’s hope—the Stanford researcher completed a 500-paper lit review with professors Linda-Darling Hammond and Shelley Goldman to identify five actionable tips to provide equitable digital learning opportunities to low-income students.
LDH-one of the wolves in sheep`s clothing!
And what about a few others-we know who they are!
I recently had the honour of being telephoned by someone who is attending an adult high school-he was labeled ADHD and Dyslexic in elementary school-couldn`t write his own name-
He learned to become literate with my programme-age 20-passed his literacy test with 81%-
Multiply the kids who get labeled because the school isn`t forced to teach by millions.
Find them in welfare,unemployed,mental health institutions and jail.
Find their families,broken emotionally or financially or both from the problem.
We need to figure out how to make these people accountable rather than stick data under a carpet or manipulate it.
The teachers care-big time-the administration is deceptive and manipulative!
Reblogged this on The Echo Chamber.