In a post on the knowledge theory of learning called "Spherical Children in a Vacuum", I made this quick characterisation of Direct Instruction/Knowledge based teaching:
You break down the knowledge into carefully chosen chunks. You make sure that each chunk is carefully defined. You use regular low stakes recall to make sure that memorisation is happening over time. You make sure explanations take account of all possible misconceptions, with words and images carefully chosen to be clear rather than decorative or distracting. You deliberately contrast and discriminate between important concepts so they are not confused. You meticulously order the content of the curriculum so nothing is extraneous or redundant, and everything is consolidated and built upon. You make sure pupils can recite the best definition of a concept and can quote verbatim the best evidence.
And I suggested that it is fundamentally flawed. How can it be flawed? Are all the things on this list not A Good Thing? They certainly seem sensible or even important. But what if there is a mistaken assumption in the very first step. "You break down the knowledge." How can this be wrong? What other approach is there?
I am going to draw first on my experience of language learners. These could be hypothetical situations to make a point, but they are also true personal stories.
Imagine you are tasked with teaching the bosses of a small high tech business in a converted old school building in a village in Switzerland who speak no English how to read documents from the British Ministry of Defence on the specification of some diving equipment that doesn't make bubbles because it recycles and remixes the exhaled gases. (They initially wanted me to translate the classified documents but didn't realise that I couldn't do this without being allowed to read them.) How would you set about teaching them English? Maybe you would start with grammar. You could chop up the knowledge in a logical way. They could start with the present tense of regular verbs. Then some irregular verbs. Then some other tenses introduced one by one until they built up the overall picture of the language. Ensuring mastery at every step through a "novice" stage in which knowledge is introduced, consolidated and built on. And eventually they would reach the "expert" level where they could read the secret documents.
Now imagine you are living with a large family in Mexico who speak no English. An English friend comes out to stay. They have a C in O Level French and they teach themselves colours, numbers, days of the week in Spanish on the aeroplane. What would their language learning experience be?
The family could have fun explicitly teaching them. Names of foods, how to give opinions, aspects of daily routine and interaction, some rhymes, songs and sayings. But with no thought of how the conceptualisation of the language is building up. No careful breaking down of the overall grammar system. Instead, a direct response to the individual learner and the situation they find themselves in.
And in interactions outside the house. Immersive exposure to Spanish in social, transactional and professional situations. How much of this input is Comprehensible Input that the human brain can learn from? Almost all of it. Because Comprehension isn't a function of the words and the grammar. It's a function of the interaction. You can tell by what the situation is, what the interaction is, what people are showing you, tone of voice, other people's response, the reaction you get when you act on what you think is being said. We need to bear this in mind when we swap to talking about the classroom. One thing we know the human brain can do is acquire languages. Especially when the language is being used to communicate, not as a chopped up thing to be learned. But the debate about whether that is relevant to the classroom situation continues...
Just to satisfy your curiosity, my Swiss employers never did learn enough English to read those documents for themselves. My friend stayed on in Mexico after I returned to England, and within 6 months had Spanish fluent enough to deliver post-graduate science presentations.
What could I have done with those Swiss engineers? Get hold of some similar (non classified) documents and read through with them, showing them how their technical understanding of the content equipped them to extract meaning. Diagrams, technical terms, cognates, figures, and what made sense given their knowledge of the subject. Despite their lack of English, their engagement with the meaning of the texts would have allowed them to recognise important information. And to start to engage with learning the English they needed.
My first point in all this is to illustrate the difference between learning that starts with chopping up the knowledge, and learning that starts with what the learner will immediately grasp hold of. Are you teaching grammar step by step so one day the learner will have the full picture and be able to communicate? Or are you teaching the learner what they need to communicate, and leaving the overall grammatical picture to emerge once they have enough language for patterns to appear?
My second point is that we can't answer that by chosing one of the approaches. It would seem sensible to attempt something that combines the two. And my biggest point is that this overlapping combination doesn't emerge from thinking about what should work. We have to start from the classroom and what we find actually does work.
And here we find things get messy. Learning is not neat and tidy or uniform. And it is not purely cognitive. Whole dimensions of relevance, meaning, importance, enjoyment make a real difference. We saw in this post that using language to say things that have meaning for them (rather than just to practise the language) has an impact on learning. We saw in this post how pupils remember chien and chat even though they never need them in lessons again, but mess up j'ai and je even though they see them every lesson. And pupils who can tell you the difference between travailler and travaillé get it wrong as soon as they are focused on genuinely telling you what job they would like to do.
What does this tell us? If you take a chopping up the knowledge approach, you could say this means we should double down on drilling the difference between travailler and travaillé and make sure you avoid letting pupils express themselves until they are ready. This is an approach based on determining what you think should stick and not moving on until it has.
If you take an approach based on what the learner knows and can do, you observe what sticks and what doesn't, what is salient, relevant, useful. You observe how the learner's body of language grows, and you build a syllabus that deliberately focuses on how the learner's snowball of French is growing, not on making sure your knowledge is delivered in an even covering. As we know when we look out of the window the day after the snowfall, the snowball outlasts the even covering.
You don't need to agree with me, but I hope I have gone some way to making the distinction clear. And I am sure we all agree that it's what happens in the classroom that matters, not on paper.
Does this apply only to language learning?
What about say science? The version of the knowledge approach we see in some schools would start by making sure pupils know definitions and rules. They learn them and then see them in action and then apply them to exam questions. For example making sure that pupils know that an object remains at rest or in uniform motion at constant speed and in a straight line unless acted upon by a force. You can teach pupils this. Make sure they understand it, can repeat it. And then see if they can apply it to what happens when a person A takes their foot off a skateboard B while standing on a slope of gradient y.
What would the opposite approach be? And here the "we never ask pupils questions they haven't been told the answer to" or the "discovery learning doesn't work" people would be horrified. But how about asking pupils what is going on when you push a smallish lump of rock and when you push a marble. Do things keep moving when you stop pushing them? You need to find out if pupils think that things stop moving when you stop pushing them and there must be something strange going on with the marble, maybe to do with its rotating motion. And that maybe different rules govern different things of different weights. The rules seem complicated and to apply differently to different objects. Then, you can show them that there's actually a different way of seeing things that suddenly simplifies everything and covers everything. Things stay still until something moves them. Things stay moving until something stops them. This simple rule explains the rock and the marble.
Isn't this an example of how chopping up the knowledge, giving clear definitions and making sure pupils "know" it and can repeat it, is a partial and defective approach? The question needs to be how we can make something relevant, important and revelatory to pupils, by engaging with their actual thinking, not what they ought to know.
All the steps after the first statement (in bold) are still desirable.
You break down the knowledge into carefully chosen chunks. You make sure that each chunk is carefully defined. You use regular low stakes recall to make sure that memorisation is happening over time. You make sure explanations take account of all possible misconceptions, with words and images carefully chosen to be clear rather than decorative or distracting. You deliberately contrast and discriminate between important concepts so they are not confused. You meticulously order the content of the curriculum so nothing is extraneous or redundant, and everything is consolidated and built upon. You make sure pupils can recite the best definition of a concept and can quote verbatim the best evidence.
But the first step, with its assumption that the aim of teaching is to break knowledge into chunks and then reconstruct it in the learner's brain, is bogus. Learning is much messier and much more active. Learning isn't flatpack assembly. Learners engage much more creatively with learning. They assign importance, use or ignore features, transform, link, make associations and extrapolations, imagine implications, create, question, contort and pervert the knowledge they are given.
Assuming it's all about the knowledge leads to attempts to quash pupils' agency and individuality. When we know learning works best when pupils think, find and give meaning, and take ownership.
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