Seven Myths about Education
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Do you feel like while you trained to teach you learned concepts that sounded great, but did not seem to be effective when you got in the classroom? In her book, Seven Myths About Education, Daisy Chrisodoulou dispels seven myths she was taught when she was training to be a teacher. After much research, Christodoulou wrote this book to demonstrate what modern science tells us we need to change about the education system. While there is truth at the heart of every myth, we often take the myth too far or out of context. Using an easy to read organizational style, Christodoulou presents evidence for the belief behind each myth, what modern practice shows us, and why the myth is wrong.
What Would Socrates Ask?
What myths have you observed about teaching?
How do you decide which facts to teach your students?
What criteria should you use to decide what is and isn’t taught?
Is there a way of teaching a lesson that helps develop analytical skills for more than one discipline?
What if we stopped teaching in subject specific silos?
Do different subjects have overlaps and commonalities that need to be explicitly taught?
How do we make sure the knowledge we teach is not inherently biased or subjective?
Research
When students are given a passage to read, their knowledge of the topic influences their comprehension more than their reading ability.
Concepts
There are seven foundational myths that teachers are taught about education.
Myth: Facts prevent understanding
Myth: Teacher-led instruction is passive
Myth: The twenty-first century fundamentally changes everything
Myth: You can always just look it up
Myth: We should teach transferable skills
Myth: Projects and activities are the best way to learn
Myth: Teaching knowledge is indoctrination
Quotes from the author
“But the aim of fact-learning is not to learn just one fact - it is to learn several hundred, which taken together form a schema that helps you to understand the world.”
“The solution to mindless rote learning is not less teacher instruction; it is different and better teacher instruction.”
“Independent learning suggests a reduced and sometimes even non-existent role for the teacher. If it really were possible to learn independently, why would we need teachers and schools?”
“It is of course true that the skills often defined as being twenty-first century are very important. Problem-solving, creative thinking, critical thinking and relating to people are all incredibly important skills. But there is nothing uniquely twenty-first century about them. It is quite patronizing to suggest that no one before the year 2000 ever needed to think critically, solve problems, communicate, collaborate, create, innovate or read.”
“The aim of education should be for our pupils to be able to solve real-world problems on their own. But we will not achieve that aim if we begin by teaching them as though they can already solve real-world problems on their own.”
Quotes from others
“There is a consensus in cognitive psychology that it takes knowledge to gain knowledge. Those who repudiate a fact-filled curriculum on the grounds that kids can always look things up miss the paradox that de-emphasising factual knowledge actually disables children from looking things up effectively. To stress the process at the expense of factual knowledge actually hinders children from learning to learn. Yes, the Internet has placed a wealth of information at our fingertips. But to be able to use that information - to absorb it, to add to our knowledge - we must already possess a storehouse of knowledge. That is the paradox disclosed by cognitive research.” - Ed Hirsh
“... cognition early in training is fundamentally different from cognition late in training.” - Daniel Willingham, University of Virginia Psychology Professor
Implement tomorrow?
Direct Instruction
1. Break down the knowledge required
2. Sequence the knowledge logically and teach each bit in isolation.
3. Ask students to practice the knowledge
4. When students learn new knowledge, have them practice combining it with what they had learned before.
Gateways to further learning
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Resources
