Curios of the week #67

Clippings, endnotes and other ephemera

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The cockatoos have been busy this week, swarming trees and making a jolly racket as they fly past. Compiling this week’s Curios has been like dealing with a tree full of cockatoos, with more happening than usual. I have therefore been selective and mentioned a few points only in passing.

On Wednesday, I took the train down to Melbourne to speak to a parliamentary inquiry into Victoria’s state education system. You can read my submission on the inquiry website — apologies for all the typos. This will also hold the transcript of my evidence once that has been produced.

One of the points I argue in my submission is the need for structured literacy in early primary — an approach that includes systematic phonics teaching — and for Victoria to align its phonics checks with other Australian states and with England. The very next day, Robyn Grace reported in The Age that the Victorian government was finally going to embrace structured phonics teaching over the current free-for-all that leads to a lot of ‘balanced’ literacy. However, they will keep the current online literacy assessment, committing only to review it. We shall see how this develops.

We have had a few visitors to Clarendon this term and I recently sat down with one of them, Ollie Lovell, to record an episode of his podcast. If you would like to visit us but cannot, this episode gives a feel for what we are all about.

This week’s Curios include a traditionalist, a latter day revolutionary, some manifestos and much more.

Non-causal claim of the week

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The always amusing blog of the Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE) has delivered the goods once again. This week saw Dr Nicole Brunker, a senior lecturer in the School of Education and Social Work at The University of Sydney, take to the blog to complain about ‘evidence-based practice’ in education and promote the alternative of ‘evidence informed practice’ instead.

This basic premise is not a bad one. When I wrote my book for new teachers, I subtitled it an ‘evidence-informed guide.’ To me, ‘evidence-based’ implies the specific program a teacher is using has been trialed and there is strong correlational or experimental evidence to suggest it is effective. We are rarely in this position in education. Instead, we mostly have to apply what we know from the evidence to make a series of best guesses. To me, that is better described as being ‘evidence-informed’.

However, Brunker and I would diverge starkly on what evidence we would use to inform ourselves.

Near the start of the post, Brunker asserts that, ‘Teaching is a non-causal practice.’ Taken literally, this means that teaching does not cause anything. Given the purpose of teaching is to cause students to learn things, this is a startling claim that, if true, renders the entire enterprise futile. Yet I don’t think Brunker quite means this. Instead, she is attempting to point out how terribly complicated it all is. Some children may not learn the thing we want them to learn and may need a different approach or more support.

However, this highlights just how bizarre an understanding of evidence and the scientific method many education academics hold. Following this logic would render smoking ‘non-causal’ because it doesn’t cause lung cancer in everyone who smokes. Yet if you go around claiming smoking does not cause lung cancer, people will look at you sideways, ask if you’re feeling OK and perhaps query whether you are being funded by the tobacco industry.

For good measure, Brunker takes a pop at Kirschner, Sweller and Clark’s classic 2006 paper about the effectiveness of different teaching methods, dubbing it a huge ‘strawman’. She links to one of the responses to this paper, but not to the original authors’ reply to these responses. The entire section is instructive.

Some responses to Kirschner et al. take issue with the authors characterising inquiry learning and its variants as involving ‘minimal’ guidance. No, they claim, such methods include absolutely loads of guidance, thus immediately conceding the point that teacher guidance is critically important, presumably because it causes learning. If that’s the case, the original authors’ replied, why not use a fully guided approach? What is the advantage of missing out some guidance? There is no evidence to suggest it helps anyone and good reason to believe it most disadvantages the most vulnerable. Enthusiasts can read more about the arguments here.

In sociology, an imaginary is the set of rules, symbols, institutions, values and so on through which members of a specific group view their social world. It is a useful idea. We can picture those who inhabit the rarefied atmosphere of educational academia somehow talking themselves into an absurdity such as that teaching is non-causal. We can also picture this milieu as responsible for the headline, ‘Escape Oppression Now: Disrupt the Dominance of Evidence-Based Practice,’ which is humorously overblown but would be considered gravely persuasive on the fifth floor of the education faculty.

Traditionalist of the week

Andrew Old has been blogging about education longer than me and always has worthwhile things to say. Often these are relatively parochial concerns when viewed from an Australian perspective because they will involve specifics of the English education system, so I particularly enjoy it when he takes on wider themes as he did this week.

In a new post, Andrew tackles the very real philosophical differences between educational traditionalism and educational progressivism. There are two similar claims that are often made about this distinction — that it does not exist or that everyone uses a mixture of both. Old explains why these arguments are flawed and why the latter view requires us to render down deep philosophical differences into sets of teaching methods.

Good news of the week

Actually, the best news of the week is probably the turn taken by Victoria on early literacy teaching. However, this news comes a close second.