Curios of the week #88

Clippings, endnotes and other ephemera

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The week started with me walking home from the Clarendon Boatshed where we held our board planning meeting. It was a clear night and Lake Wendouree looked even more beautiful than usual. It was a time to pause and contemplate how privileged I am to live in a community like Ballarat.

It has been quiet this week in the Ashman house because my younger daughter has been on camp. So have most of our middle school and so the campus has been pretty quiet too. Layer on the fact that most of Victoria had a public holiday on Tuesday for ‘the race that stops the nation’, the Melbourne Cup—we trade that particular holiday for a long weekend next week—and things have been unusually somnolent.

What else has been happening?

This week’s Curios include behaviour grades, a mixed bag of maths teaching, phonics check scepticism and much more.

Straw man of the week

This week, I found out that back in 2021, Stewart Clelland, an ‘educationally progressive’ teacher from Scotland, wrote a post for Bella Caledonia in which he took aim at cognitive load theory. The post names me as a source and references ‘Ashman, 2021’ but then does not provide a list of references:

According to Clelland:

“…when teaching ‘cognitive load’ must be reduced i.e. ‘by keeping the number of novel items students need to process just within the limits of working memory capacity’(Ashman, 2021). This is done by reducing ‘extraneous sources of load’ – such as irrelevant information – which includes humour, personal search, independent enquiry, colour, debate, choice: the very antithesis of Scottish educational policy. “

Although I’m not sure which 2021 publication of mine Clelland is referencing, I’m certain I never argued that humour, colour and debate must be removed from teaching. I do agree that for novices, choice and independent enquiry are ineffective. I don’t know what Clelland means by ‘personal search.’

Apparently my views get even worse than this:

“…for those that celebrate Cognitive Load Theory, social hierarchies are predetermined ‘natural’ structures, and therefore their continued propagation is ‘morally good’. Those that naturally rise to the top do so due to the highly evolved nature of the supposed architecture in their brains – those that attain are biologically different than those that do not.”

This is absurd. The entire point of paying attention to cognitive load is to improve teaching methods. From these improved methods, students learn more, have more knowledge in long-term memory and are therefore able to do more with that knowledge. This is the opposite of assuming our abilities are somehow fixed by nature. Ineffective teaching methods are the ones more likely to entrench differences caused by natural variation.

Boss of the week

The video below is an address that my Principal, Jen Bourke, gave at our recent graduation event for Year 12 students. It is an 8-minute discussion of culture and its connection to knowledge:

You can find a shareable YouTube version here.

Survey results of the week

In case you missed it, this week, I released the first results from my teacher training survey.

Status of the week

How does the status of the teaching profession today compare with the past?