Deep Learning and its New Pedagogies: Does ‘Going Deep’ Mean Doing Away with Knowledge?

“All that glitters is not gold” is one of the better known English proverbs. It means that not everything that looks glittery and precious turns out to be.  That pearl of wisdom is also a tiny piece of true knowledge, found in Aesop’s Fables, Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and William Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, and it readily comes to mind when confronted with Michael Fullan and Maria Langworthy‘s recent conceptual invention, New Pedagogies of Deep Learning.

Since the launch of its first installment, A Rich Seam, with Sir Michael Barber at Pearson Learning in London, UK, back in January 2014, Fullan and Langworthy have been preaching the new gospel of Deep Learning at education conferences around the English-speaking world. “New teaching partnerships between teachers and students are the essential foundations of effective new pedagogies,” they claim, and are “beginning to emerge as digital access opens the door to broader and more varied sources of content knowledge.”  These new pedagogies are capable of not only motivating “bored students” and “alienated teachers,” but “blowing the lid off” learning in the 21st century classroom.

The New Pedagogues funded by Pearson International, the world’s largest “learning corporation,” exude great faith in the power of learning technology. Fresh from Microsoft and its global research team, Langworthy sees “exciting things” happening in schools world-wide when teachers set aside  knowledge “content delivery” and engage students using “collaboration” facilitated by the latest technology. While Fullan’s latest research partner holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from Boston University, she introduces herself  with the phrase “I am a learner” (rather than a teacher), and claims that A Rich Seam is “trying to put some substance and conceptual rigour” around the theory.

Fullan and Langworthy’s grand theory is heavy on imaginative thinking and incredibly light on content. Tapping into the “rich seam” of the new pedagogies involves “deep collaboration” to “learn from and with your students.”  Deep Learning seeks to develop what are termed Fullan’s Six Cs: character education, citizenship, collaboration, communication, creativity, and critical thinking, so, one is left to assume, the fundamentals of reading, writing and mental computation are just as passe as teaching content knowledge in the classroom.

The New Pedagogues, much like John Dewey and the old-school Progressives, tend to see factual knowledge in opposition to the kinds of abilities and thinking they seek to develop in students. While teaching isolated facts is clearly unhelpful, they go far beyond that in assuming that teaching facts is somehow opposed to teaching meaning and essential context. Indeed, as Daisy Christodoulou shows in Seven Myths about Education (2014), mastery of bodies of factual knowledge actually allow creativity, problem-solving and analysis to happen.

Exciting discoveries can happen spontaneously, but thinking well requires knowing facts.  That’s the considered view of one of America’s leading cognitive scientists, Daniel T. Willingham. Based upon cognitive science research over the past 30 years, knowing things actually facilitates deeper thinking and learning.  In Why Don’t Students Like School? (2009), Willingham put it succinctly: “The very processes that teachers care most about –critical thinking processes such as reasoning and problem solving –are intimately intertwined with factual knowledge that is stored in long-term memory (not just found in the environment).” So intertwined are they that one London English teacher, Joe Kirby, likens the development of knowledge and skills to a “double helix.”

Distinguishing between “deep” and “”surface” approaches to study is certainly not new and can be traced back to original empirical research in the 1970s.  A 2013 literature review of “deep and surface learning” by J.S. Atherton clarified the differences and provided a useful comparison chart.  Although learners may be classified as “deep” or “surface,” they are not necessarily attributes of individuals and are often found in combination with one another. They do correlate fairly closely with motivation, since “deep” tends to be associated with intrinsic motivation and “surface” with extrinsic. What is abundantly clear, however, is that knowing something is absolutely critical to “deep learning” and reflected in its first three characteristics: finding significance, relating previous knowledge to new knowledge, and relating knowledge from different courses. 

Michael Fullan’s The New Pedgaogies of Deep Learning may well turn out to be yet another 21st century learning illusion. He’s now riding high on global rocket fuel provided by Sir Michael Barber and Pearson International. It is well advanced in Fullan’s educational ‘sandbox’, the Ontario school system, where he commands seemly unlimited research dollars and seems to appear on every “educational leadership” conference program. After four decades of “new initiatives” now long-forgotten, it’s incredible to read his rousing January 2014 call for “new pedagogies” capable of unleashing “rich futures” where “students and teachers” are “always learning” and it makes the whole “system” go round.

What’s really driving Michael Fullan’s latest project funded by Pearson Learning? Is it possible to truly learn deeply without a sound foundation in factual knowledge and subject content?  How much of the New Pedagogies rests upon “21st century learning” conceptual thinking and false assumptions about the place of knowledge in student learning? 

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Back to School Euphoria: What’s New about the “New Pedagogies of Deep Learning”?

Grade 1 teacher Tammy Doyle is positively euphoric about the return of school.  After 25 years in the elementary classroom, the Ottawa Catholic School Board teacher featured in a recent Canadian Press story no longer considers herself a “teacher” of children. She now calls herself a “learning partner.”

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Play learning is making a comeback in the Digital Age. “We want to stop having education delivered and make (the children) creators of their education,” Doyle says of the efforts to “build a more collaborative classroom” with the help of technology. “I think it’s incredible if we can empower our kids for tomorrow– not looking back to yesterday or even today…That’s the definition of empowerment and innovation and it begins with that simple shifting mindset. ”

What has come over Tammy and some of her elementary school confreres?  It’s called “New Pedagogies for Deep Learning” or NPDL for short, the latest innovation concocted by Dr. Michael Fullan, Canada’s globally-renowned school change theorist.  The Three R’s (reading, writing, and arithmetic) are passe to Fullan and his new disciples because Deep Learning seeks to develop what are termed Fullan’s Six Cs: character education, citizenship, collaboration, communication, creativity, and critical thinking. 

The Ottawa Catholic Board is one of 15 school districts in Ontario and Manitoba working to implement  and “disseminate” these ideas in practice. It’s all being done in advance of developing instruments to assess and support the new outcomes.  Creating “digital ecosystems” in the classroom is, all of a sudden, more important than teaching effectiveness, mastering the fundamentals, and improving student math outcomes.

The latest iteration of 21st Century Digital Learning has just sprung out of a project, spearheaded by Sir Michael Barber and Pearson Education, involving some 100 school districts in 10 countries as part of a global push to reshape education for the Digital Age. While Barber has conceded that, so far, educational technology’s impact on “learner outcomes” has been “disappointing,” the technological revolution, in his words, “does not allow us to abandon our ambition to use technology in classrooms.” That’s why he commissioned Fullan, his Chief Research Officer Maria Langworthy and other “leading education thinkers” to reinvent teaching pedagogy to deploy technology in ways that will “transform learner outcomes.”

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In his Foreward to to the January 2014 White Paper, A Rich Seam, Sir Michael Barber lauds Fullan and Langworthy for conceiving of the “new pedagogy” based upon “a learning partnership” between and among students and teachers. In one memorable passage, he also concedes that “much of what Fullan and Langworthy describe is not new at all,” but building upon the so-called “Progressive” tradition going back through to Piaget, Vygotsky and other key theorists.”

If so, why do it all again? For two reasons: First, the “new pedagogy” was emerging — he claimed– “not in laboratories or universities, but at the frontline, in classrooms” across the globe in response to “the crisis of boredom and frustration among students and career disillusionment among teachers.”  And secondly, educators had little choice, fully immersed in digital ubiquity and struggling to stay Alive in the Swamp, but to integrate technology into their classroom practice.

All of this demonstrates that what British teacher Tom Bennett termed the “Cult of Shift Happens” has now surfaced in Canada (Ontario), the United States (California), the United Kingdom, and four other countries. in a new guise. The familiar Shift Happens mindset, sparked by Barber in his 2000 OECD Rotterdam Address, and immortalized in Colorado teacher Karl Fisch’s viral futuristic Did You Know? YouTube video, is back in a peculiar fusion of old, unproven, pseudo-scientific innovations, borrowing heavily from Project-Based Learning, Cooperative Learning, and Change Leadership, now from the Middle (LftM) rather than the Top or Bottom of school systems.

Some current advocates of NPDL like Richard Messina, Principal of the OISE’s Institute of Child Study Laboratory School, favour Inquiry-Based Learning, a pedagogical model with proven benefits for academically-able students. Such innovative approaches work better in “hot house” elementary education environments than in what Barber describes as the “ordinary schools.”  In Messina’s Toronto private school, it’s easy to imagine Grade 4 students creating their own science experiments, generating their own curriculum, and utilizing technology programs such as Knowledge Forum to assist with research. So far, it hasn’t worked notably well in mainstream classrooms.

“New Pedagogy” zealots such as Tammy Doyle and her Director of Education Denise Andre sound born again in espousing the latest educational fad springing from the still fertile mind of  Michael Fullan and his coterie.  While Doyle sees “a bit of chaos” as up to 80 six-year-olds wander in and out of their four Grade 1 classrooms, she’s all revved-up about their excitement.  “It’s unlike education that we have ever had and experienced,” she says, because “the kids are going home excited and talking about it.” Then comes the ever-popular 21st Century Learning mantra: “We’re preparing kids for jobs we don’t know are going to exist in the future.”

What’s so new about integrating technology into the learning process?  How many of the “new pedagogies” accept the critical need for explicit instruction, particularly in certain cumulative subjects?  Is the Deeper Learning movement really a venture aimed at undercutting and eventually eliminating provincial core subject assessments?  How wise is it to implement Michael Fullan’s Six Cs when we have no reliable, research-based way of assessing such competencies? 

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