Education guaranteed

The claims are many and bold, but some evidence-based education is anything but. Tom Bennett looks at how teachers can ward off the snake oil merchants...

How many of you have heard about, used, or been asked to use ‘learning styles’? I bet quite a few. What about Thinking Hats, Bloom’s Taxonomy, or SOLO? Perhaps you’ve been directed to get kids using iPads, or flipping the classroom, or differentiating for VAK. If you’re very unlucky you’ll have endured NLP, or Brain Gym. All of these practices have something in common – there is little or no evidence to suggest they actually have a discernible impact in the classroom. I’m serious. Even if you swear by these strategies there are a dozen other reasons why they might have an effect, or at least appear to do so. I can assure you the science that claims to inform them all just isn’t there.

When I started in the Narnia of classrooms, I soon realised that things were very different from the adverts. Fortunately, my thorough teacher training had equipped me for all of the challenges that lay ahead – right? Wrong.

A lot of what I’d learned at university was extremely useful, and my institution was a very good one. But I constantly came across research that was impossibly cryptic, remote and theoretical, with little relevance to the rooms I walked into and the children that I met. As the years progressed and I pursued my own interests and research – in the classroom and in my library – I started to wake up to the realisation that there was often a dislocation between research and practice. Dusty tomes in the library were dusty for a reason: much educational research was irrelevant, remote and unusable by anyone actually in the business of teaching children.

As I woke up to this, a weight lifted from my shoulders. I was no longer at fault for being unable to make some of these theories work. I wasn’t completely rubbish. Then another weight descended: I now had to work out for myself what would make me a better teacher. And that’s exactly what I’ve tried to do over the years – work it out for myself. I’ve done it in the most artisan way I can possibly muster: I’ve tried things out; I’ve asked to be observed; I’ve observed others; I’ve discussed both processes with other people; I’ve kept my own journals of what works and what does not. It doesn’t make me the perfect teacher, but I fancy I get by, and I can triangulate this with my results, the feedback from my kids, from observations, and from the feeling I get when I teach. That’ll do for me.

The horror of it is I had to learn this myself. Actually, I think all teachers have to learn it by themselves; there’s only so much you can learn from a book. I had to unlearn much of the educational dogma I had learned from textbooks and lecturers. I had to find my own way. I had to be lost in order to find myself. If I’d known that, I would have packed sandwiches. As it was, I struggled for years thinking I was completely terrible. Cheers, education. You’d think, given how long we’ve been teaching children, we’d have it all down by now, wouldn’t you? Obviously not. As George Orwell once said: ‘Some ideas are so stupid only an intellectual would believe them.’ I think that’s where we are in education right now. There’s a lot of terrific, well made research. But there’s a huge amount of pseudo research, or cargo cult science, that dresses itself up in the clothes of the natural sciences and proudly boasts that it has rediscovered America. That would be fine, but the trouble is that sometimes, research like that, fuelled by partisan values and interests, creeps through into the mainstream, catches a wave of popular interest, surfs it, and then bleeds into the classroom. That’s when teachers get dragged into the dogma, and the kids suffer.

Where it all started

The big boom for educational research came in the late 1960s. Up until that point, educational debate had been dominated by ideological concerns rather than pedagogical ones. It was still assumed, even by ministers, that schools and their educational establishment knew best; that the best people to discern the methods of instruction were teachers themselves. Most headmasters had been teachers, and they could at least lay claim to a level of professional authenticity.

But with Harold Wilson’s Secret Garden speech, the doors were blasted open and tanks started to roll across the lawns. Ideology still dominated the debate, but now governments started to openly declare their rights over not just who was educated, but how. On the one hand this is hardly surprising – no sector can expect to receive significant proportions of the GNP and not expect some form of direction, and eventually, inspection. On the other hand, this status quo started to create a process by which non-educators could start to influence educators. The rise of social science had begun. The result is that education currently exists in an intellectual vacuum, where the normal rules of what constitutes evidence no longer exist; where a belief about how children should learn can become translated into a policy about how children do learn. And that’s a disaster. It already has been a disaster, and an expensive one. It’s what pushed me to write a book about it, and now organise a conference – researchED 2013.

Some of the recent bad research is on the way out; some of it is still achingly hip. Some of it is so axiomatic to the modern pedagogue that it’s surprising to even hear it questioned. One of my aims is to give educators – but especially teachers – the ammunition to fight back against these dogmas; to have the confidence and the ordnance to be able to stand up to those who insist they are keepers of the sacred scrolls. I want teachers to be able to tell good research from bad. In other words, I want teachers to be professionals, safe from the scourge of the edugonks who think they know better than anyone. Otherwise, if we’re unable to immunise ourselves against bad science, it undermines the profession and, ultimately, the learning of children. That’s the real tragedy.

WHO ARE YOU AGAIN?

AMAZINGLY, MANY OF THE EDUCATIONAL RENTAGOBS WHO END UP TELLING TEACHERS HOW TO DO THEIR JOBS HAVE EITHER:

• Never set foot in a classroom as a teacher
• Haven’t taught for decades, or
• Have only taught in a slender demographic or extreme or unusual circumstances, such as a fee paying primary school with 20 children and so on.

Here’s a Pepsi challenge for you: the next time you hear someone on telly pontificating about education, treat yourself to a quick Google of their educational chops. If they’re talking about reform in the state education sector, I am betting you a slice of key lime pie that they were the product of a private sector education. Not always. Just usually. Which, of course, doesn’t exclude them from having an opinion – it’s just no more valid than anyone else’s.