Well Meaning But Ineffective - Inquiry

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.

The Lessons of Cancel Culture

Let's talk about cancel culture.  Don't run away just yet.  I'm probably not going to say what you think.  Cancel culture has been around for a very long time.  It isn't going anywhere.  And, like any other part of our culture, there are things we can learn from it.  

Let's start with that first statement.  Cancel culture is not new.  It wasn't created by liberals in the last five years.  It may seem that way because Jim Jordan decided quite recently to make it the center of his ranting in spite of his complete lack of understanding of it.  It may seem new because Twitter hashtags to cancel something or someone didn't exist when we were young and are now pretty common on social media.  It also may seem new because it hasn't always gone by the name cancel culture, which is what I think Representative Jordan does not understand.  We used to call it boycotting, and by that name, it is nothing new and pretty equally used across the political spectrum.  Yes, liberals have attempted to cancel Chick-Fil-A, but do you remember when Franklin Graham encouraged all of his followers to boycott Disney because he heard an interview in which it was implied that there might be a gay character in the live-action version of Beauty and the Beast?  Calls to burn your Nikes and boycott the NFL over Colin Kaepernick don't keep our conservative friends up at night, worried about cancel culture, but when Dr. Suess Enterprises decided on their own to stop publishing 6 of his 60+ works because of their negative portrayals of minorities, they screamed that the left was destroying children's literature.  While these are recent examples, I remember a lot of calls for boycotts from my childhood.  The U.S. led a boycott of the 1980 Olympics in Moscow.  The 80s and early 90s were filled with academic boycotts in protest of South African apartheid.  The word itself comes from Ireland in 1880, but I would imagine the collective practice of people abstaining from doing business based on a belief goes back even farther than that.  Don't let the fact that you hearing more about it in the news make you think it is new.  It is not.  Both sides of the political aisle have wielded it as a weapon for as long as there has been a political aisle.

For all the shouting and many calls for action, very few people have actually been canceled.  Last summer, the cancel Ellen hashtags were many and frequent.  Yet, her talk show was still renewed through 2022, and her Game of Games is still being aired.  If that's a cancellation, it's pretty minor.  During the spring of 2020, people called for Jimmy Fallon's cancelation for about three days.  After the most unnecessary yet heartfelt apology I've ever seen, it was over.  He didn't lose viewers, and he has been renewed for 5 more years as host of The Tonight Show.  Disney, Nike, and the NFL are still going pretty strong.  As best I can tell, the only people who have truly lost their positions of influence are the people who should have, Matt Lauer, Harvey Weinstein, and (as sad as it made me) Bill Cosby.  Just because you see a call for someone's cancellation doesn't mean they are actually "over."

Let's balance our perspective on this issue.  Of course, you should not do business with corporations who support that with which you fundamentally disagree.   If you truly believe Disney is damaging America, you should not pay for things that increase their profits.  I do not donate to or buy products from the Susan G. Komen Foundation because I do not want one red cent of the money I have control over to go to Planned Parenthood.  That is, however, a personal decision based on my own values, not a belief that I can bring them down by getting people to join me.  Your decision about how to spend your money is admirable.  The power trip that causes the organization of boycotts is not.  

There may also be results you don't expect when you boycott something.  Let me illustrate this with a powerful memory I have from childhood.  Picture it, Raleigh, 1988.  I was in the backseat of my parents' car when we drove past the Cardinal Theater.  There were a few dozen people walking around in front of it with signs, calling for boycotts of the movie theater.  It was harder back then.  You couldn't participate in slacktivism, using a hashtag from your couch while wearing your pajamas; you actually had to do some organizing, sign-making, and showing up.  I was confused because I had been to that theater many times; it's where I saw ET.  It turns out that they were protesting because of the movie The Last Temptation of Christ.  I have never seen it (I was twelve when it came out), but I have read about it, and they were right to be horrified.  The things that the movie says about Jesus are reprehensible and no Christian should have ever spent their money watching it, but I was definitely more interested in it as a result of their marching.  I imagine I wasn't the only one, and it grossed a modest eight million dollars.  In a perfect example of the Streisand Effect, they drew more attention to it by trying to get rid of it.  I would likely not carry this memory with me if it were not for the next part of the story.  The movie came and went, as movies do; but this group was not satisfied.  They continued to call for the boycotting of this theater as punishment for having shown it in the first place.  They continued their boycott for almost two years, and they were successful.  In 1990, the theater closed and was replaced by a Blockbuster Video store.  And, that's why this memory is powerful for me.  You know what you could rent at Blockbuster?  The Last Temptation of Christ (and many other movies on the same level or worse) were available.  They got what they wanted, but they didn't really.  That has stuck with me and is the primary reason why I have never participated in an organized boycott.  The movie came and went in about three weeks, but for 13 years, people could walk into that Blockbuster and rent things Cardinal Theater would not have shown.  If you are going to boycott, be careful.  They have unintended consequences. 

While that was a big lesson for twelve-year-old me, there is a bigger lesson that comes from cancel culture.  While the MeToo movement had been around for about a decade, it was 2017 that really brought its power to the front of our minds because it seemed like there was someone being brought down every day.  It started with Harvey Weinstein, but about 200 pretty powerful and celebrated people were accused of sexual misconduct that year.  While a few of those were likely innocent, many were finally being held accountable.  It was sad, hearing every few days that someone whose work you liked may have been a predator.  I remember at one point saying, "God, just leave me with Tom Hanks. I would be devastated if he turned out to be a creep."  And that brings me to the lesson I think we should teach our students.  The lesson of cancel culture isn't that we shouldn't hold people accountable because it makes us sad.  It's that we should never have been idolizing people in the first place.  Everyone is sinful, and while we can admire people, we must also be aware that we don't know everything about them.  Last year, when the allegations about the late evangelist Ravi Zacharias came to light and the investigation revealed monstrous behavior and spiritual manipulation, that lesson finally became complete for me.  People who live their lives in the public eye carefully craft their persona.  That doesn't mean they all lie or that everyone is hiding a truly dark secret, but it does mean that we see what they want to show us (which is true of everyone, not just public people).  Guard your heart by being aware that you don't know everything about them and that you would likely be disappointed if you did.  

The actor or musician or comedian you admire most may be a really great person, but they are a lousy god; so be careful of idolizing them.  That is the most important lesson of cancel culture.