Teaching and its Predicaments

By World War II teaching already was America's most investigated profession, the object of many studies, much criticism, and repeated proposals for reform. The postwar explosion of higher education, the consequent growth of the social sciences, and increasing efforts at school reform fueled a huge growth in research on education, and more investigations and reform proposals followed. Investigators scrutinized teachers' education, the conditions of their work, the unions they joined, the salaries they earned, how and why they made decisions, and many related subjects.

As I worked on this project, I read many of these studies, but I gradually saw that even in this accelerating blizzard of research there was little about the work of teaching itself. Researchers probed the occupation from dozens of angles and produced boxcar loads of studies, but only a few asked the rudimentary questions: What sort of an endeavor is teaching? What kinds of problems must teachers solve, and how do they solve them? And what would it take to solve them in ways that promote ambitious teaching and learning?

Cohen, David K (2011). Teaching and its Predicaments, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA

The Triumph of Efficiency over Effectiveness

Teaching and learning — especially in the US — takes place behind the doors of millions of self-contained classrooms, and this drives reformers crazy. Historians of education have long documented how often past efforts at school reform bounced off the classroom door, thus buffering the process of teaching and learning within from outside influence.

This local autonomy, which makes education annoyingly inefficient in the eye of policymakers, is essential in the effort to make education effective. Teaching is not a delivery system for academic content but a fiendishly complex form of professional practice that seeks to induce students to learn in the absence of any efficient mechanism for insuring that they will do so. Students only learn when and what they choose to learn. The classroom art is in luring them into making the choice the teacher is aiming for. And this means that teachers need to have the flexibility to adapt their teaching approaches to the peculiarities of the group of students they find before them and also to the differences in individual students in the class. The variables that shape this process are legion: school subject, age, sex, class, ethnicity, community, home life, health, hunger, time of day, day of year, weather, and state of mind — to name just a few. The accountability movement disrupts this teaching and learning process by forcing teachers and students to focus entirely on learning particular subject matter at a particular level measured by the high-stakes test. It deliberately ties the teacher’s hands, compelling the same pedagogy for every classroom — and that pedagogy is teaching to the test.

Teaching to the test is an efficiency mechanism masquerading as effectiveness. One problem is that it runs smack into Goodhart’s Law: Once a measure becomes a target, it is no longer a valid measure. Initially a student’s test score may capture something about the amount of specific subject matter that student has accumulated. But once teachers, schools, school systems, and whole countries make raising test scores the object of schooling, the scores become ends in themselves. Everyone learns quickly how to game the system in order to raise scores with a minimum of real learning.

Another problem with the accountability approach is that it radically narrows the aims of education. Instead of seeing education as an effort to gain a broad array of skills and forms of knowledge, to explore interests, experience personal growth, become a good citizen and a productive worker, it focuses learning on a tiny subset of school subjects that bear only a marginal relationship to these broader goals.

And perhaps most depressing of all, accountability systems are the most efficient tool ever devised to destroy a student’s interest in learning. It makes school the world's deadliest job — where the best strategy is to phone it in, in order to keep school from grinding you down into a grain of sand in the desert of test prep. In education, as in many other things, efficiency is the death of effectiveness.

Excerpted from https://davidlabaree.com/2024/07/25/the-triumph-of-efficiency-over-effectiveness-in-both-public-health-and-public-schooling/

Should Teachers Know the Basic Science of How Children Learn?

This quotation is from an article published by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) in the summer of 2019, part of a series called "Ask the Cognitive Scientist." The scientist is Daniel T. Willingham, a cognitive scientist dedicated to passing on and explaining the results of cognitive research to school teachers.

(Willingham's website is a treasure trove of useful science. In particular, click on his articles.)

Scientific knowledge can influence educational practice in more than one way. Sometimes the applications are overt, as when scientific descriptions of how children learn offer new ideas for instructional methods. For example, researchers have described the learning benefits of spacing out practice¹ and some educators have sought to incorporate that finding into their classrooms.

Science can also influence education through the use of scientific methods to evaluate the effectiveness of different educational practices. Scientists have a lot of experience designing experiments and can offer useful techniques to help decide whether, for example, two reading programs differ in how much they motivate children to read independently.

*   *   *

An educator’s practice is, of course, influenced by her beliefs about what children are like. Teachers try to tune their practice to what they believe to be children’s nature, in the perfectly reasonable belief that teaching will be more successful if it accounts for the way children learn. These beliefs influence not only planning but also teachers’ in-the-moment reactions and responses when something unexpected happens in the classroom. Furthermore, beliefs influence our receptiveness to new ideas.² When a vendor offers a new product, for example, or an administrator suggests a new classroom practice, teachers evaluate it in light of their beliefs about children.

Scientific findings provide one (but obviously not the only) source of information contributing to educators’ beliefs about the nature of children. . . . Here I want to make a different point: some statements concerning children’s learning are perfectly sound scientifically but should not influence educational decisions. That includes some statements that seem like they ought to have a direct bearing on classrooms.

1. N. Cepeda et al., “Distributed Practice in Verbal Recall Tasks: A Review and Quantitative Synthesis,” Psychological Bulletin 132, no. 3 (2006): 354–380.
2. R. Nickerson, “Confirmation Bias: A Ubiquitous Phenomenon in Many Guises,” Review of General Psychology 2, no. 2 (1998): 175–220.

The article goes on to address the sometimes confusing intersection of cognitive science and teaching, the difference between empirical generalizations and theoretical statements in science, and why teachers should focus on empirical generalizations for application to their teaching.

If you would like examples of empirical generalizations, there is a table of articles by Willingham focusing on specific generalizations - click here.

In addition to the article, there is also a huge AFT sidebar packed with useful information and a lot of links to other resources. Here's a blog post of mine about one of those resources.

The Learning Scientists

Here's a recommendation: in an earlier posting, (Should Teachers Know the Basic Science of How Children Learn?), I mentioned the American Federation of Teachers, who publish the "Ask the Cognitive Scientist" series.

Among the multitude of other resources available on their site is a website called The Learning Scientists.org. The AFT describes it as "a website written by four cognitive psychologists interested in education." The Learning Scientists describe themselves as "Making scientific research on learning more accessible to students, teachers, and other educators." Yes, there are four main writers, but quite a collection of collaborators and scientists as well.

This is a very up-to-date, diverse, accessible site worth visiting and exploring if you are a teacher interested in cognitive science.

Which you should be. Honest. Give it a look.