Curios of the week #51

Clippings, endnotes and other ephemera

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This week has been notable for having two warm days. The ten year average for February in Ballarat is 2.5 days over 35C and, so far, we have had two. The second of these days occurred this week and happened to be the same day of a visit by Amanda Spielman, until recently the head of Ofsted, the schools inspectorate in England. Amanda is going to find it very difficult to believe the may Australians who will tell her Ballarat is cold.

We had a good chat, I introduced Amanda to some key personnel, we toured the school during lesson time and we showed her the way we organise our knowledge-rich curriculum. I hope she got something out of it. We did — it is always worth bouncing ideas off a knowledgeable other.

This week’s Curios include an admission, a false choice, an American college figuring out something that the medieval Chinese already knew and much more.

Stunning, era-defining educational journalism of the week

Sarah Duggan of Education HQ decided to run a piece on Peter Liljedahl’s Building Thinking Classrooms approach to teaching mathematics. Wisely, Duggan decided to interview me on this issue and unlike most Education HQ pieces, they decided o publish it without a paywall.

You can read the piece here.

A quote from me from the article:

“When you’ve got novices, you actually need to teach them things, not just let them get on with trying to solve problems – you actually have to teach them some strategies they can use to solve the problem… And that’s, in essence, why these approaches fall down because they just overwhelm students.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

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Declaration of apathy of the week

Dan Meyer first broke through into the education big time with his 2010 TEDx talk, Math class needs a makeover, in which he argued that maths teachers need to be less helpful and remove most of the scaffolding we tend to put around the problems we set students:

This obviously placed him in the problem-based learning camp — those who are romantically convinced by the need for teaching methods at odds with cognitive science. Over the years, I have challenged him about this.

He has now declared his complete lack of interest in this debate in a recent post on his Substack that came to my attention this week.

Meyer’s thesis is that the debate about inquiry-based learning versus direct instruction only serves a small group of academics who are wedded to one side or the other. Maths teachers, on the other hand, do not and should not care about it. Instead, teachers are eclectic magpies who seek to do what works for them.

“I realize I am maybe that guy right now, declaring that the thing you care a lot about is maybe not worth all that care. I am. I am saying that the intellectual ground many of you are spending your life naming, studying, and protecting is actually not all that arable, and that if you’re willing to look, it’s actually adjacent to some beautiful vistas, fertile soil, and interesting neighbors. No one is making you self-limit and thought-terminate in this way. Especially if you are not on the tenure track, if you are not right now seeking an endowed chair in the building closest to the center of campus, there is very little incentive for you to do this to yourself.”

This is an interesting ad hominem argument — that those of us who care about this issue are only in it for our own self-aggrandisement. It also does not gel with the writers of a paper Meyer obliquely references via an article by Jill Barshay. One of those writers is me, a Deputy Principal in an Australian school, and two of them are retired professors with no career ahead of them.

I do not agree that this is a matter of no consequence, divorced from the reality of the work of teachers. I am frequently contacted by teachers who are being coerced into using problem-based maths teaching methods they do not believe in and that they know will lead to worse outcomes for young people — such as Building Thinking Classrooms. Unfortunately, while denying the grounds for a debate, proponents of problem-based learning tend to hold a lot of institutional power which they use without compunction to promote their views. It matters.

Substack newsletter of the week

The inimitable, indefatigable and lucidly loquacious Tom Bennett has started a Substack newsletter. This flew under my radar for quite some time. A shy and retiring sort, Bennett has a tendency to hide his light under a bushel and so I shall remove that bushel and reveal the intellectual light beneath.

Naturally, all Bennett’s pieces are worth reading but I have selected his latest on the parallels between declines in church and school attendance and how neither suits a simplistic explanation.

The thing I don't like has caused a bad thing

Admission of the week

The current conflict in the Middle East, wherever you stand, has brought a certain clarity. Where once there was gaslight, we now gaze at the world through a pimple magnifying white fluorescent strip light.