I have spent much of the summer reading books on the science of learning. This week, I finished How We Learn by Stanislas Dehaene, and I recommend it highly. I always post quotes from these books on Facebook and Twitter, but this one had so many good thoughts, I think the most important ones got lost amongst the others. For that reason, I decided I should reflect on some of them more thoroughly here. I may do a few posts as there are parts of this book where I highlighted more lines than not.
First, let me tell you a bit about Stanislas Dehaene. I first heard of him at a Learning and the Brain conference back in 2019, but I didn't get to hear him speak because he suddenly became ill and had to be replaced. I had already downloaded his book Consciousness and the Human Brain, so I knew missing him was a loss (although the replacement speaker Dr. David Rose was awesome, so shout out to the person whose idea it was to sub him in). Dr. Dehanene is a cognitive neuroscientist, specializing in numeracy, but he has also authored books on consciousness generally, learning as a whole, and learning reading specifically.
When I started reading this book, I was intrigued but also a bit intimidated because he uses the first quarter of the book to compare human learning to artificial learning, which was fascinating but also technical and difficult. But once I got to Part 2, I couldn't get enough of this book. Dr. Dehaene's passion for learning how we learn is evident, and he uses stories to illuminate what would otherwise be dry research. He finally arrives at "the four pillars of learning" in the final section. They are: Attention, Active Engagement, Error Feedback, and Consolidation. At this point, I am fully on board and reading without pause.
Then, I hit this sentence, and it made me sit up straighter, grip my highlighter and tear up a bit. “The fundamentally correct view that children must be attentively and actively engaged in their own learning must not be confused with classical constructivism or discovery learning method-which are seductive ideas whose ineffectiveness has, unfortunately, been repeatedly demonstrated.”
If that sentence didn't grab your heart like it did mine, it could be that you are not a science teacher who constantly fights the idea that as long as you have enough labs, kids will love and learn science while knowing that your students have never learned anything from a lab without your very explicit teaching preparation AND reflective follow up. You don't constantly feel guilty about not doing enough labs because it is what other people think you should be doing even though you know it is rarely an efficient or deep way to get to deep scientific concepts. Perhaps, you were a victim of constructivist theory as a student (did you get subjected to inventive spelling, inquiry-based science, or discovery math?) and still don't know how to do the things you were meant to figure out. I was in a class that used Discovering Calculus, and I remember saying, "There's a reason it took from the beginning of time until Isaac Newton to discover calculus; how am I supposed to do it in a semester as a college freshman?
Please don't misunderstand. I believe in the elaborate encoding that comes from hands-on activity and demonstrations of scientific principles, but given the amount of time they take, I choose my lab experiments very carefully. I choose ones that I can carefully and explicitly prepare students for (so it's not inquiry learning because I have told them what they are going to learn), that can be carried out without much technical difficulty, that I can meaningfully follow up on to ensure they have learned what I want them to, and that I can refer back to in multiple chapters (for retrieval and because they address more than one topic). Otherwise, it is just activity for the sake of appearing active. There just aren't that many that rise to the level of all those criteria (and if they don't, they don't deserve the class period it takes to carry them out plus the time it takes to prepare for and reflect on). You are much more likely to be assigned a project in my class than a lab because there is more time for processing and guidance.
Back to Dr. Dehaene. A paragraph or so after the sentence that stopped me in my tracks, he said, “When children are left to themselves, they have great difficulty discovering the abstract rules that govern a domain, and they learn much less, if anything at all. Should we be surprised by this? How could we imagine that children would rediscover, in a few hours and without any guidance, what humanity took centuries to discern?" I took a moment to congratulate my college freshman self and then mulled over the phrase "abstract rules." That is exactly why constructivism doesn't work. They can observe the experiment (which has value), but they have no idea of why the experiment works because the concepts (especially in chemistry) are too abstract. So, in a science class, where our job is to teach why things happen, we are seduced by the idea that they will figure it out if we merely show them what happens. It doesn't teach them to "think scientifically," which is the well-meaning theory behind inquiry-based learning. We are naturally curious, but we are not naturally scientists (which, again, is why it took from the beginning of time until Galileo to think of experimentation in spite of really smart philosophers observing and hypothesizing about the natural world). We need to build on the past and "stand on the shoulders of giants," not hope they will develop scientific thought processes anew.
I don't know how to address this in the teaching of other disciplines, but I know there is a lot of push for student-driven learning in all of them as though they know enough to know what they don't know and how to explore it for themselves. This brings me to the final Dehaene quote of this post. “Perhaps the worst effect of discovery learning is that it leaves students under the illusion that they have mastered a certain topic, without ever giving them the means to access the deeper concepts of a discipline."
- Should we make learning as relevant as possible to students? Yes.
- Should we pique their curiosity? Yes (and I'll write more about that next week).
- Should we work in choices where it makes sense to do so? Yes.
- Should we help them to understand just how much more there is to learn than what there is time to fit into a school day? vYes
- Should we ask them what they want to learn and how they want to learn it and neglect our own professional judgment? No. That is educational malpractice. And all the research says so.
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