My raw notes are posted earlier on this blog, but they don't do much for me unless I mush it all together in my head to summarize and synthesize. With that in mind, the next few posts will be my own reflections of some sessions. This is almost entirely from the presentation of Dr. Jim Heal.
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Like any issue, EduTwitter is polarized over the two extremes of classrooms being either teacher-led or student-centered. Proponents of the research on direct instruction come out strongly in favor of teacher expertise. More progressive teachers are all about students making meaning for themselves. In reality, both of these camps are reflecting only a caricature of their ideology. If you listen to the "teacher-led" people, the image you have in your mind is of a teacher lecturing non-stop for 45-90 minutes with no interaction whatsoever from students as they silently create a transcript of the lecture. Outside of a college lecture hall, this isn't happening much in reality. Listen to the student-centered crowd, and the image you have in your mind is a teacher setting some materials in the center of the room and saying, "1, 2, 3 Learn" without any input from the teacher for a few weeks. I feel like even the most ardent proponent of the Montessori method hasn't gone quite this far. The truth is that good instruction is both teacher-led and student-centered. I don't mean, lecture one day and free play the next. The truth is best represented in this quote from Jim Heal:
"Students are the center of learning as the primary beneficiaries of it, but that doesn't mean they should be responsible for all of the learning that needs to happen."
He offers a resolution to the paradox through teachers designing learning experiences that activate the prior knowledge of the student while being taught the new knowledge by the teacher.
If we look at Daniel Willingham's model of what is happening in our minds while we learn, we see that there is a reciprocal relationship between encoding and retrieval as we put things in and retrieve things from our working memory. Anything not involved with this "merry dance" (Jim Heal is quite British) is forgotten. This is why remember we the stories we tell and forget what we ate yesterday. We are retrieving one and not retrieving the other.
What had not occurred to me before this session is that we don't have to be talking about the same information in those arrows. We can be encoding one thing while retrieving something else - and if that something else is relevant to the new information, the encoding will be stronger, like velcro hooks (new knowledge) being attached to the loops (prior relevant knowledge).
There's good news and bad news here. The good news is the brain very naturally retrieves prior knowledge that it deems to be in the same category as the new knowledge. It has to. Your brain is like a categorizing machine. The bad news is that the brain doesn't always do this correctly. It may activate irrelevant prior knowledge, so we should be careful about trying to connect new learning to something from pop-culture just to make it interesting (then they are thinking about the singer instead of the point you were making). It can activate relevant prior knowledge that the learner doesn't realize is connected, so we should help them make those connections. Most dangerously, it can activate prior knowledge that is only partially relevant, leading us to encode some very wrong conclusions.
There is another piece of good news, though. We have some control over which prior knowledge they retrieve. We do it by cues and questions. The higher quality the cue, the better thinking we get from our students. Say, for example, that you want to teach about spiders after your students have already learned about insects. You can put up a picture of a spider and ask, "How many legs does a spider have?" While valid, it only retrieves one piece of relevant knowledge - the number 8. If, instead, you point to the picture and say, "In what ways is a spider different from an insect?" you will get a variety of answers. You may want to do this with several spider pictures to create a schema because spiders can be different from each other.
Creating a schema is both a natural and a complex task. When a child sees a new kind of dog, they are naturally tagging it with a number of categories (things with fur, things with four legs, things that pant, things I'm afraid of for some). But it's easy to go wrong because things that are very different can have some things in common. There are some ways in which a plane is like a bird, but they don't really belong in the same schema when you see a photo of a chickadee. This is why teacher-led instruction matters so much. Left on their own, students may encode the information incorrectly, so it is important to design the learning experience well. You might give the a set of cards with words and pictures and ask them to categorize, but it will then be important to have a full class discussion on those categories. A student might be able to defend why they put something into a certain category or you may have the chance to address misconceptions. This can only be done if the teacher has carefully crafted the experience, not just said, "Google images of this." They need the schema to be explicit, and that cannot happen accurately without a teacher-led process.
So should classrooms be teacher-led or student-centered? The answer is yes. Researcher Sam Sims published this on November 17, 2022 - "Researchers found little support for the arguments made by either side and concluded that 'the debate has largely been an unhelpful distraction for the field.'" Don't figure out what side you are on. Figure out what goal you have for a lesson and decide what works for those students for that lesson in that context. You can use art and science to craft the right experience for your lesson.
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