GoKawiilBeing the guy who wrote a book called Ultralearning, I get asked a lot of questions about what I think schools should be doing better. Having never taught in a classroom or worked for even a single day in education, it’s a question I’m totally unqualified to answer. It’s a bit like asking a guy to reform an entire health care system because he’s good at lifting weights.
But being totally unqualified has never stopped me before, so I’ll try to explain the answer I typically give to this question, which is that I’m skeptical of dramatic proposals to make school considerably more effective or efficient for the average student.
To be clear, that’s not because no improvement is possible. We do know some about things that work that are inconsistently applied: phonics should be taught, cognitive load should be managed, skills should be fully taught and practice should be fun and ample.
But these answers aren’t the kind that satisfy the people who ask me these questions. Instead, having had many of these conversations, I feel like the person asking already “knows” what my response should be:
Isn’t it obvious that school sucks? That we should be teaching critical thinking and problem-solving skills instead of useless facts and theories? That school should be more like real life, with real-world projects and experiments and collaboration? That there should be less of that stuffy work of sitting at a desk and memorizing things?
If you had asked me this question years ago, I probably would have agreed with you. It took reading a lot of research to convince me that this intuitively appealing idea is actually bad. Below, I’d like to explain why.
First, the Evidence
Before I get into the explanation of why these kinds of seemingly-good strategies don’t work, I should begin by pointing out that these ideas are not new. They have been tried, and they have been found wanting.
Entire books have been written pointing out the flaws in many of these strategies. I won’t be able to do the full debate justice here, but, if you’re interested, you can check out Daniel Willingham’s Why Don’t Students Like School? Greg Ashman’s The Power of Explicit Teaching and Direct Instruction or, if you want to learn more about the actual debate between proponents of both sides, try Constructivist Instruction: Success or Failure.
To briefly recap some of the evidence:
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