Teaching Machines: What Does Training Pigeons have to do with Ed Tech Innovation?

 

Education technology researcher Audrey Watters has a peculiar fascination with pigeons and their behaviour. The common domestic birds appear regularly in her popular education technology review Blog, Hack Education, and one adorns the flyleaf of her searing and insightful new book, Teaching Machines: The History of Personalized Learning. That affectation is inspired by none other than the infamous Harvard psychology professor B.F. Skinner, his “teaching machine,” and lab experiments with pigeons.

            Skinner and his experiments with pigeons, some of which he trained to play ping-pong, provide Watters with an ingenious way of conveying the hidden dangers associated with early teaching machines and their contemporary successors, personal computers. While at Harvard in the 1950s, Skinner was a leading proponent of behaviorism, a school of psychological thought now in disfavour. The foundation for early forms of education technology, such as Skinner’s mechanical teaching device, she points out, was to give students – just like his pigeons—positive reinforcement so that students, again like pigeons, would learn new skills.  

            Watters provides a very thorough, impeccably researched look at Skinner and his role in the launch of ‘Didak 101’ to teach spelling and his repeated, mostly futile, attempts to promote the widespread adoption of early teaching machines. She is particularly effective in demonstrating how the media shapes people’s perceptions of such inventions and raises public awareness of the psychological theories underpinning the latest ‘tech toys.’ Adopting a broader societal approach, the author analyzes the machines in the context of education reform, particularly the global impact of Sputnik in the 1950s, the explosion of the textbook industry, and the advent of every-student assessment.

            Skinner claimed that his teaching machines allowed students to learn at their own pace, a cardinal principle of today’s “personalized learning.” Yet Watters’ research and writing demonstrates its unintended effects. By their design and operation, such devices (much like contemporary ed tech) not only limit what students learn but lead to the standardization of the teaching and learning process. More profoundly, while behaviorism (i.e., animal behaviour training and operant conditioning) is considered passe, it continues to inform and influence a new generation of education technology.

            Watters’ much-anticipated and long-in-the- making book fills a gaping hole in our understanding of the origin and implementation of education technology. Her earlier writings, including the four-part “Monsters of Education Technology” series and regular barbed online commentaries earned her a reputation as “ed-tech’s Cassandra.” This major piece of work will establish her as the foremost public intellectual and independent scholar in the field.

Reviewer Peter Greene hit the nail on the head in his recent Forbes Magazine assessment.  It’s an amazing accomplishment when a single, compact and readable book manages to “connect the dots” as well as “bridge the gaps between history, technology and education.” The book also provides plenty of evidence in support of the recent work of American education technology critic Justin Reich, exemplified in his 2020 book, Failure to Disrupt, excoriating ed-tech hype and demonstrating why more recent technological marvels will not transform education.

            The founder of Khan Academy, Salman Kahn, author of the 2012 best-seller The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined, provides a convenient foil for Watters because he demonstrates a deeply flawed grasp of the evolution of teaching and learning.  Like many others, including the late Sir Ken Robinson, he perpetuates the ingrained mythology that the American and Canadian education system remained “static” or unchanged from the late 1890s onward for over a hundred years. While the invention of the Internet had an impact, the ed-tech and classroom apps of today are more of a continuation of inventions and trends going back as far as the 1920s, to the days of Sidney Pressey and the earliest teaching machine pioneers.

            The prevailing assumptions and fallacies perpetuated by education technology evangelists and high-tech corporate business executives come in for some telling and deadly accurate analysis. Most know little or nothing about history and base their decisions on often faulty perceptions. Whether they fully understand the context or not, they simply proceed to build ed tech products, promulgate policies, and predict the future based upon such “futuristic” visions. They do use history “willy-nilly,” as American education historian David Tyack wisely observed. Watters’ book will go a long way to setting the record straight.

            Teaching machines matter in education and that’s why Watters’ book is such a welcome addition to a field well-stocked with titles extolling the virtues of ed-tech and heralding the imminent arrival of ‘the next big thing.’  Technological innovations from the early teaching machines to now are interwoven into the evolution of modern school systems as well as classroom teaching and learning practices. That’s where the book excels – in helping us to understand the technocratic culture that dominates K-12 education.

            Teaching machines, as Watters amply demonstrates, are not just ‘flashes in the pan’ but harbingers of successive changes in the ‘warp and woof’ of systems and classroom culture. “Their ongoing influence,” she contends, is embedded in the contemporary push for both “personalized technologies and behavioral engineering” in the schools. The real legacy of a succession of machines lies precisely, in her words, in “the technocratic culture that they helped engender in education.” 

Why is the history of teaching machines littered with failed experiments?  What motivated B.F. Skinner and the early inventors of teaching machines?  Why did his early teaching machine take the educational world of the 1950s by storm?  Whatever happened to the curricular mutation known as “programmed learning” popular in the 1970s?  Will machines and apps programmed to provide “personalized learning” ever displace humans in the classroom?  

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Pearson’s 2025 Plan to Transform Teaching : What’s the Education International Critique Missing?

The new world of Artificial Intelligence is upon us and teaching may never be the same.  That’s the upshot of a new report by Sam Sellar and Anna Hogan for Education International focusing on Pearson’s Plan for 2025 and its implications for teachers everywhere.  The two researchers see dangers ahead with the introduction of AI into the teaching domain and warn of the further expansion of private interests, while embracing the need for technology-enhanced learning and implicitly accepting 21st century student-centred teaching pedagogies. 

The world’s largest learning corporation, Pearson International, is pursuing a visionary plan to advance the “next generation ” of teaching and learning by developing cutting-edge digital learning platforms, including Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIEd).  It is now piloting new AI technologies that will, in time, enable “virtual tutors’ to provide “personalized learning” to students, much like Siri or Alexa. The Pearson Plan for 2025 calls for this technology to be integrated into a single platform — Pearson Realize — that has been integrated into Google Classroom. The ultimate goal is to forge direct and lifelong relationships with Pearson product educational users to whom it will provide virtual schooling, professional certifications, assessments, and other services.

Pearson’s Plan for 2025 does raise alarm bells for teachers. The corporate strategy is premised upon causing “educational disruptions” with respect to 1) the teaching profession, 2) the delivery of curriculum and assessment, and 3) the function of schools, particularly those in the public sector.  Such changes are unsettling for Sellar and Hogan, but they still laud the potential benefits of technology enhancements and their “combination with new kinds of teacher professionalism’

The underlying philosophy was expressed in a December 2014 Pearson policy paper prepared by Peter Hill and Michael Barber with a grandiose title, “Preparing for a Renaissance in Assessment.”  While Pearson marketing is decidedly teacher-friendly, the Hill and Barber paper belies that image, making a strong case for improving “teacher quality” as a pre-condition for “transforming teaching”  and achieving better student outcomes.  Here is how they described the desired transformation:

from a largely under-qualified and trained, heavily unionised, bureaucratically controlled semi-profession into a true profession with a distinctive knowledge base, a framework for teaching, well defined common terms for describing and analysing teaching at a level of specificity and strict control by the profession itself, on entry into the profession (Hill and Barber, 2014, 20). 

Teaching, according to Hill and Barber, is also bedeviled by classroom practitioners who guard their autonomy.  The problem was that teaching was an “imprecise and idiosyncratic process  that is too dependent on the personal intuition and competence of individual teachers” (Hill and Barber, 38). That implied that most teachers cannot be trusted, despite their university education, professional registration, teaching certification, continuous professional learning, and professional standards of practice.

Teachers, it seems, were “the problem” in the eyes of Pearson education experts Hill and Barber.   Transforming teaching for 21st century learning, it followed, required the “overthrowing” and “repudiating” of the “classroom teacher as the imparter of knowledge” and replacing them with “increasing reliance on sophisticated tutor/online instruction.’ ( Hill and Barber, 23). Computerized “personalized learning,” in their view, was the answer and the way of the future.

The Pearson Plan for 2025 does not, as the Education International researchers repeatedly point out, call for “replacing teachers.” They do recognize that the introduction of new technologies does carry certain risks such as the “routinisation of teaching tasks,” but also seem to accept the benefits of the new technologies for developing complementary skills. What is flagged is the dangers posed by the routinisation of teaching by Pearson and its subsidiaries in “low fee” private schools in sub-Saharan Africa, India, and parts of South-East Asia.

The Education International critique, oddly enough, gives the philosophy, program and assessment dimension of 21st century learning a free pass.  “Many have called for the reform of schooling,” they note, ” to modernize this nineteenth century institution, particularly in regards to the provision of homogeneous curriculum, age-based learning, and traditional models of teacher-led instruction.” Such changes are fine with them unless they lead to the automation of teaching and the replacement of teachers with robots or virtual tutors.

Much of the rest of the Sellar and Hogan critique of Pearson 2025 is predictable and essentially well-founded.  Technology-enhanced teaching and learning is part of the emerging “infrastructure of modernity” and, as such, needs to be confronted and tamed.  While there is a place for Global Education Industry(GEI) giants like Pearson and Google, we do need to guard against potential problems and encroachments that further erode teaching as a profession. Their critique would have been considerably strengthened by citing the critical research of Ben Williamson, author of Big Data in Education, and a leading expert on the OECD’s plan to introduce “stealth assessment.”

Technology-driven education can lead to greater social inequalities, creeping privatization, displacement of teachers, spread of routinized teaching models, the illicit corporate collection of data, and the  degradation of teaching into a personalized experience focused almost entirely on individual knowledge and skills.

International education researchers such as Sellar and Hogan still seem mesmerized by the allure of the “21st century learning” panacea, the new pedagogy of deep learning, and technological enhancements in the class room. There is still no real recognition that the purveyors of learning technology actually stand in the way of “future-proofing” the next generation.

What’s the real agenda of Pearson International’s global education plan for 2025?  Where do classroom teachers fit in the “next generation” of teaching and learning?  To what extent will teachers be displaced by robots in the friendly guise of “virtual tutors”?  Should teachers put their faith in Pearson Education experts who are out to reduce the influence of “idiosyncratic” classroom practitioners and particularly those who favour explicit instruction and a “knowledge-rich curriculum”? 

 

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Future-Proof Learning: What if… 21st Century Skills Don’t Exist?

Equipping the rising generation of students with what are termed “21^st century skills” is all the rage. Since the fall of 2010, British Columbia’s Ministry of Education, like many other education authorities, has been virtually obsessed with advancing a B.C. Education Plan championing the latest iteration of a global education transformation movement – technology-based personalized learning.

 

The whole concept of 21^st century skills, promoted by the World Economic Forum and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), rests upon widely-circulated global theories about our fast changing, technology-driven, unpredictable future. Leading proponents of the new dogma contend that it is now essential to ensure that our youth are “equipped with the right type of skills to successfully navigate through an ever-changing, technology-rich work environment’ and ready to “continuously maintain their skills, upskill and/or reskill throughout their working lives.”

Much of the 21st century learning mantra went unchallenged and escaped critical scrutiny until quite recently. Today many of the education researchers challenging the 21^st century learning orthodoxy are charter members of researchED, a British grassroots teacher research organization, founded by teacher Tom Bennett five years ago.

A growing number of outstanding education researchers, including Daniel T. Willingham, Dylan Wiliam, and Paul A. Kirschner, have been drawn to researchED because of its commitment to scrutinize prevailing theories, expose education myths, and encourage more evidence-informed curriculum policy and teaching practice. That is precisely why I took the lead in bringing researchED to Canada in November 2017.

British Columbia teachers have given the futuristic B.C. Education Plan a cool reception and are, by every indication, ripe for teacher-led research and curriculum changes that pass the evidence-based litmus test.

A 2017 BCTF survey of teachers gave the B.C. Education Plan mixed reviews and has already raised serious concerns about the province’s latest iteration of a “21^st century skills” curriculum. Teachers’ concerns over “personalized learning” and “competency-based assessment” focus on the “multiple challenges of implementation” without adequate resource support and technology, but much of the strongest criticism was motivated by “confusion” over its purposes, concern over the lack of supporting research, and fears that it would lead to “a less rigorous academic curriculum.”

Such criticisms are well-founded and consistent with new academic research widely discussed in researchED circles and now finding its way into peer-reviewed education research journals. Professor Paul A. Kirschner and his Open University of the Netherlands team are in the forefront in the movement to interrogate the claims and construct an alternative approach to preparing our children for future success.

Research-informed educators are now asking whether the so-called 21^st century skills actually exist. If these skills do exist, to what extent are they new or just repackaged from previous generations of attempted reform.  Why, they ask, have the number of identified skills ballooned from four in 2009 (Partnership for 21^st Century Skills) to 16 in 2016 (World Economic Forum).

What students need – and most teachers actually want – is what Kirschner has termed “future-proof education.” Based upon recent cognitive science research, he and others are urging teachers to take action themselves to ensure that evidence-informed practice wins the day.

The best way forward may well be deceptively simple: set aside the “21^st century skills” paradigm in favour of “the acquisition of knowledge, skills, and attitudes necessary to continue to learn in a stable and enduring way in a rapidly changing world.”

Kirschner and his research team propose a new “future-proof” basis for preparing students for success and fulfillment: 

1. Cognitive and metacognitive skills are critical. Five of the identified GCM clusters emphasize such skills and suggest emphasizing a progression from concrete cognitive skills to more generic personality competencies.
2. Authentic learning situations should be a high priority and the driving force for teaching, training, and learning. Such tasks help learners to integrate knowledge, skills, and attitudes, stimulate them to develop coordinate skills, and facilitate transfer of what is learned to new problem situations.
3. Redesigning schools and professionalizing teachers in 21st century learning strategies are not likely to make much of a difference. Shift the focus to cognitive and metacognitive skills, linking learning with authentic, real-life situations and matching teaching methods with educational contexts and goals.

Rushing head-long into 21st century skills makes little sense to Kirschner and fellow researchers because the most effective and durable initiatives are those that are planned and staged over a longer span of as much as 15 years. He proposes a three-stage approach: 1) laying the building blocks (i.e., concrete cognitive knowledge and skills);  2) develop higher-order thinking and working skills; and 3) tackle Bigger Problems that require metacognitive competencies and skills. Much of the underlying research is neatly summarized in David Didau’s 2017 Taxonomy demonstrating the connection between long term memory and working memory in teaching and learning.

All of this is just a small taste of my upcoming researchED Vancouver 2019 presentation on the B.C. Education Plan.  It will not only analyze the B.C. version of 21st Century Learning, but attempt to point the province’s education system in the right direction.

Where did the “21^st century skills” movement actually originate?  Where’s the evidence-based research to support 21st century skills projects such as the B’C. Education Plan? How much of the Plan is driven by the imperatives of technology-based personalized learning and its purveyors? Can you successfully prepare students for careers and jobs that don’t exist? Would we be better advised to abandon “21st century skills” in favour of “future-proof learning”? 

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