Curios of the week #58

Clippings, endnotes and other ephemera

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This week, I have been in the UK. First, I visited my family and then I traveled to London to conduct interviews. It’s been an experience. On Sunday afternoon, the principal and I caught the tube up to Camden Town. It was in full hustle with thronging streets, so we took some time away from the crowds to sip a cool lemonade in The Hawley Arms, a piece of London’s rock history. As we sat and contemplated the view next to two immaculately dressed older gentlemen, the music grew louder and louder. It’s exactly what a pub in Camden Town should be.

It’s always good to get back to blighty.

This week’s Curios include ‘oracy’, romanticism, healthcare for transgender youth and much more.

That’s-the-problem-with-so-much-education-research-right-there of the week

“Math Homework Can End Up Doing More Harm Than Good, Study Shows,” screams a Science Alert headline. But does the study show this? Well, that would depend on its quality.

What evidence would you expect to be behind such a claim? A randomised trial in which students were allocated to a homework and a non-homework condition? Come off it — this is education research! Why not simply interview eight families in Canada?

If we track back through to the original study by Lisa O’Keefe of the University of South Australia and colleagues, published last year, this is exactly what they did.

“In this article, we examine how eight families, who were both working and middle class (defined in terms of skills, education, and income), experienced mathematics homework…

…Each family participated in three interviews which included discussion about, and sharing of, homework artefacts. Across the interviews with each family, all mothers and one father attended all interviews, another father attended the first family interview, and another joined for the first 10 minutes of his family’s second interview.”

Homework is a key issue that deserves to be properly investigated. My own view is that homework should always be independent practice of content addressed in the lesson rather than project work or work that students will need help with, such as from parents or tutors. Homework exists, as far as I am concerned, to facilitate more spaced practice.

However, that view is based on extrapolation from what I think I know about cognitive science. It would be good to research this issue robustly. Interviewing eight families is not the kind of research that can answer this question.

Oracy of the week

While I have been in the UK, I have been hearing many stories of schools pivoting towards so-called ‘oracy’ at the expense of other, perhaps more significant, elements of the curriculum. ‘Oracy’ is a highfalutin word for students expressing themselves through talk rather than, say, writing.

When I visited Michaela Community School last year, I was impressed with this aspect of their approach. During class, students constantly turned and talked to each other about content, rehearsing what they would say to the teacher or write down. During their ‘family lunch,’ they offered considered words of appreciation for each other and their teachers.

However, this does not seem to be the kind of oracy that is the latest fashion in England. Instead, the primary history curriculum is being sidelined for extended, student-led projects that lead to a verbal presentation.

When I tweeted this, I was inundated with people explaining to me that oracy does not have to be at the expense of a knowledge-rich curriculum. I am aware of this, but I was commenting on what I had discovered about how it seems to be being pursued.

Many objected to my term, ‘oracy fad.’

I am afraid this really is a classic education fad that deserves such a description. One teacher who had been given responsibility for primary school humanities explained to me how her headteacher had said she was no longer interested in these aspects of the curriculum because the government in the UK was about to change and the new government wanted schools to be doing oracy (cue sounds of a record scratching as the stylus is unceremoniously removed). And that was that.

It is true that the Labour opposition in the UK is on track to win the next, as yet unannounced, election and it is true that their leader, Sir Keir Starmer, has been making uninformed and naive comments about the supposed power of ‘oracy,’ as I wrote about last year for The Spectator.

So, how do you know whether you are caught up in a fad or if, like Michaela, you are asking students to speak in a way that enhances their learning of a knowledge-rich curriculum. Here are some signs that you are implementing ‘fad oracy’:

1. Oracy is being traded off against curriculum content e.g. ‘We need to shorten this unit on The Romans so we can do some oracy’.

2. Oracy is being treated as some sort of ‘skill’ that is largely independent of content, often with the justification that this is going to somehow help students when they enter the jobs market.

3. Following on from 2, truth is irrelevant. Similar to the worst kinds of persuasive writing instruction, it doesn’t matter whether the things students say are based in fact. It just matters how they say it. For example, a hyperbolic but scientifically illiterate rant about climate change is judged to be wonderful because it has a powerful impact and is on the right side of history.

4. Following on from 3, you are developing a cottage industry around creating rubrics and scoring/grading oracy skills that rewards form over substance. This consumes hours of work.

5. Because substance is unimportant, you ask students to make speeches about trivial things such as pets, hobbies and school uniform because without having to deal with challenging content, everyone can score 11/10 on the stupid rubric.

Anything else?

Substack of the week

Andrew Old takes on Alfie Kohn and his attack on cognitive load theory.

Can we reject an idea for being too simple?

I have also written about Kohn’s attack but Andrew focuses on the idea that cognitive load theory must be wrong because it is too simple. It’s worth a read.

Disincentive of the week

There is an interesting phenomenon in comparative education — the field of research where we compare the education systems of different countries and states. We tend to equate what is measured and reported with reality. However, if, for example, one country scrupulously records every suspension and expulsion, including demographic data, and another does not and perhaps deals with these issues more informally, we cannot necessarily conclude from its reportedly higher suspension and expulsion rate, that the first country is actually suspending and excluding more students. There is a gap between the data and the reality it is intended to represent.