Curios of the week #98

Clippings, endnotes and other ephemera

Image via AI

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This week has been the final week of the term break for me. Back from the beach, I have divided my time between relaxing and preparing for the term ahead. This has seen me spend more time with my daughters. My eldest daughter and I have been on a few trips so she can gain practice driving and my youngest daughter has shown an interest in guitars, so I have loaned her my old electric and a crackly Marshall valve amp.

I have spent some time with my better half and our dog, a cavoodle named Alfie. It is the girls’ job to walk him but we have substituted for them a few times. Walking is good for the back and good for the soul.

This week’s Curios include a fightback, a former minister, an ontological framework and much more.

Insights of the week

To my shame, all I really knew about Betsy DeVos, Donald Trump’s previous U.S. secretary of education, is that she attracted the vitriol of America’s education establishment. So, it was with interest that I read Rick Hess’s interview with the philanthropist and school choice advocate. I was particularly struck by a couple of insights.

I had just read a piece by Nick Cater in the Australian edition of The Spectator about politicians and their addiction to ‘announcables’. This is when a political figure turns up in some regional area to announce that the government is going to spend so many millions of dollars on an arts centre, bypass or upgraded a fish pond. That sort of thing. And it is a key problem with democracy and its short term limits. Nobody involved in the announcement is going to be around in ten years to be held to account for how effective that expenditure has been and so the focus is on announcing the spending and not on ensuring the money is spent effectively.

DeVos had noted a similar phenomenon in education:

“The biggest assumption is that the programs are working. They’re not, and when being honest, most people acknowledge as much. I recall our first internal budget meeting in 2017, where the career staff pointed out that the only federal program that had empirical research showing its success was the charter school program. Similarly, I had numerous discussions with teachers and administrators about how poorly Title II—the funding for teacher professional development—functions. The list of examples goes on. This was one of many reasons we ultimately proposed block granting the funds to the states—in most programs, the money is thinly spread with too many restrictions for it to really be productive.”

DeVos also made a point that reminded me of Michael Gove and his team when he was U.K. education minister from 2010 to 2014. They were a team who were unusual in their haste, aware that their window of opportunity was limited. DeVos wishes she had hit the ground with similar urgency:

“It may be a bit cliché, but the time does go fast. When you start, four years seems like a long time; the truth is it goes by incredibly quickly. I wished I’d pushed harder and faster from the jump, appreciating this phenomenon fully.

Doing anything in Washington is hard and slow. There were policies we advanced that had broad, bipartisan support, like expanding career and technical education options, and even those were painfully slow to move forward. Some of that legislation is still stalled in Congress today. In that sense, every minute counts.”

If you find yourself in government, get on with it.

Video of the week

Pritesh Raichura has released a video on Twitter/X of him teaching. You will need to have X to watch it—click on the screenshot below—because I don’t know if it is available elsewhere.

Interestingly, some Americans on Twitter/X assumed this is a private school. It is not. Raichura’s school is a government school in Acton, an area of inner city London with a large number of social housing projects.

What I like about the video is that it is a great example of what advocates mean by explicit teaching. If you have a colleague or friend who defines explicit teaching as a teacher standing at the front and lecturing or something that can be done within the context of inquiry learning, this video demonstrates the kind of approach I mean when I use the term.

I have usually explained the difference between explicit teaching and inquiry learning in terms of the amount of guidance—explicit teaching is fully guided, with concepts fully explained and procedures fully demonstrated before students apply those concepts and procedures, whereas inquiry learning necessarily misses something out. However, I think there is also a qualitative aspect about what the guidance is. Advocates of inquiry learning may claim they give loads of guidance but, in my experience, it often consists of guidance-through-questioning or, more pejoratively, guess-what’s-in-my-head. There is nothing wrong with a teacher explaining what is in their head to their students.

Ontological framework of the week

The evidence for explicit teaching is largely empirical. It comes from large-scale correlational studies, such as the process-product studies of the 1950s-70s, as well as from smaller true experiments. But is that all there is? Maybe we should stroke our metaphorical beards, smile pityingly at empiricists and their lack of nuance, tell ourselves how terribly clever we are and insist other ‘ontologies’ are available.