The following is a list of resources that have informed my stance on education since I started taking it seriously. The list is limited to sources that engage with empirical data on education, because if one takes education seriously there is no alternative to measuring what actually works. The sources listed have been useful to me in designing an experimental school and its curriculum from scratch, so they may be more relevant to people working at the policy or administrative level than to front-line educators.
I have included links to the full texts wherever possible, and to collections of key quotes or takeaways for some of the lengthier sources. How to teach:
What to teach:
Education policy:
This is a growing resource; I will revise and add to it periodically. (Last updated: March 2018)
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Step 1: Forget about subjects
The easy way of thinking about curricula is: "These are our school subjects (math, geography, music, etc.); each subject has this number of classes over the course of a school year; now let's fill up that time with interesting things from these fields of knowledge". Hard mode, for many, is then "making these things 'relevant' for students in a next step. Let's not do this. Step 2: Think about skills first Skills-based curricula have been around for a while. Once it gets pointed out to you that education should be about enabling students to do things, rather than filling them with knowledge, using curricula that say "students should know this and this and this" seems kind of awkward. So in accordance with this insight, many of the old curricula were rewritten to focus more on skills. Unfortunately, this did not change anything about the contents. Instead of "these are the three main types of drama", they now read "students can distinguish between the three main types of drama". Instead of "here's why authoritarianism is a problem", they read "I can reason about the problematic effects of authoritarianism". This, I assume, was not what the original proponents of skill-based curricula had in mind. Instead, think about skills first. This goes right to the bottom of what we are trying to achieve with education: What do we want our students to be able to do when they leave school? What are the most important skills they will need to lead happy and successful lives? These go first. (Being able to acquire new skills and to care for one's own mental and physical health should be somewhere near the top of that list, for example.) Then, if there's still room, ask: what other skills might help the students get ahead in the world? What skills did I need? What skills could I have used that would have made my life much better if I'd only learned them at school? What new skills may students need in the future? Then ask others the same question, ideally people who are very different from you. Because you're just one person, and most students will not be like you. Step 3: Think about knowledge too Knowledge is important, but it is strictly subordinate to skills, i.e. what you can do with it. (To forestall any arguments about "procedural knowledge" and such, I am talking about declarative, factual, explicit knowledge here.) You need this sort of knowledge for three things: 1) Some skills require knowledge. Being able to do first aid requires knowing where and how to push if you want to get someone's heart going again. Being able to find mathematical information online requires knowing that WolframAlpha exists and/or that Google Infoboxes will give you good answers to the most common questions if you're marginally competent at phrasing them. 2) Whatever you do with your life, you are likely to encounter new questions that need answering and new problems that need solving. You can do that a lot better if you have what we call a "knowledge framework" that allows you to locate questions and problems in a particular field of knowledge, so you have an easier time finding out if other people have answered that question or solved that problem before. For example, knowing that people have been studying cults and their tricks for a while may be useful when you're getting sucked into one, just as knowing that there's a difference between factual questions that can be settled empirically and ethical questions that depend on your basic assumptions can nip many unnecessary conflicts in the bud. 3) Some concepts are relevant both across many different fields of knowledge and to everyday life. If you know about the concepts of evolution and electrical conduction, for example, you will a) have an easier time grasping why humans and other animals behave in such weird ways once this becomes relevant to you (it will!), and b) be less likely to autodarwinate by getting electrocuted. Step 4: Reduce You've collected a lot by now. Lots of different people are telling you about lots of different things that people absolutely need. It's too much, and you know it is. So go through the collection again and take out everything that does not seem absolutely necessary. Don't discard it; all of this goes into the Honors folder. There will be students who need more, who can do more and think further than the absolute minimum. But don't make it compulsory. You need a minimum standard, what grade-obsessed people call a pass grade. Your trimmed-down curriculum is that pass grade for your school. If you can't teach kids these skills, you fail. If you can teach them a lot more in addition, good on you; but you need to set yourself a failure condition, if only to make sure that you put enough effort into really making this part work. For skills, the obvious questions driving the trimming process should be "is this relevant for most people?" (rather than just for me), "how much will it hurt most students if I cut this?", and "is this something that I can expect most students to pick up from somewhere else or on their own anyway?" For example, finding a place to buy food cheaply is a good skill to have, but probably not something we need to teach. Figuring out how to buy and prepare food that is both cheap and healthy, on the other hand, is not something that we can just "leave to the parents". ("That's the parents' job" is never a good excuse, by the way.) For knowledge, it helps to make the knowledge curriculum really explicit. Do not use questions or broad "know about" statements. "What are loans?" Well, that's a great question and I'm sure we could spend a sememster exploring different takes on it. But your job as a curriculum designer is to figure out what exactly students will need to know about credit so they can do something with it. "Most banks will give you a loan of this size under roughly the following conditions: [list of conditions]", or "this is how you find out if you're eligible for a loan" is concrete and usable information. Phrasing your knowledge items like this also makes your curriculum auditable: people can see if what you've put in there is correct and/or useful, without asking you for explanations first. Most importantly, however, it will keep you from cluttering the curriculum with things that seem "good to know" in some vague way without actually being sure what "knowing about that" would entail. Specifity helps with both parsimony and reflection. ~ ~ ~ At OPENschool, we have completed step 2 and are working on steps 3 and 4 in parallel at the moment. Critical feedback and comments on the first draft of our skills curriculum are very welcome. When I start an experimental school, I want to randomly select students from the applicant pool and ask those not selected to serve as a control group, so that we can see whether our students are doing better or worse than students at other schools. This is obvious to me, but judging by the number of times I have to explain this to other people, it does not seem to be obvious to most.
Generalizing from this anecdotal evidence, I suspect that "wanting to test if what you're doing actually works" does not come naturally to most people. For many, this is easily explained by trust in superiors, institutions and common practices, all of which are reasonable under most circumstances (if everybody in your line of work does things a certain way, your priors should be high that it's a good thing to do, until you encounter good evidence to the contrary). Other than that, the standard explanation would be that we don't see how we're biased: for example, many teachers in alternative schools will tell me success stories that, to their mind, "prove" that their approach works (confirmation bias), or cite statistics of how many of their students go on to have successful lives, without controlling for socioeconomic status or family background (selection effects: even out of those who can afford it, only parents with a particular interest in education will put their kids in alternative schools). This explains, in part, why many people do things that they just assume are working, without bothering to check if they actually do. It does not explain why many people who come up with plans or new ways to do things also do not ask themselves, "how can I see if this new thing will actually work?". This, and a great part of the former cases, is better explained by people mistaking explanations for evidence. If I want to do something, I usually have some idea why I think this will work. I imagine a mechanism, implicitly or explicitly, that leads from my actions to the desired result. Say I want my students to take happiness classes at school (that was a popular thing a while ago). Teaching them about mindfulness and mental hygiene etc. will make my students happier, I figure, so it seems like a good idea. But do I know that it will? The most common way to go wrong there is to wait until someone comes up with an alternative mechanism that "shows" how happiness classes might lead to no improvement, or even make things worse. Say someone comes to me and says, "Look, learning about how other people keep gratitude journals will only make things even worse for the worst-off students, if they feel like they have nothing to be grateful for." then I might feel compelled to "prove", in some way, that my happiness classes don't do that -- though usually that "proof" will be in the form of another counter-explanation. But that's not the point. The point is that I shouldn't be confident that a new thing will work, regardless of how plausible my explanations are for why and how it ought to work. At least, I shouldn't be so confident of my explanations that I don't feel the need to test it. ("But won't I see if the kids are happier afterwards? All the other Happiness teachers I've read about say so!" -- THIS is where the bias and conformity problems come into play; but the first step, the one that usually goes unchallenged, is taking the explanation as evidence. "So what if we're not sure it works; it can't hurt, right?" -- That tends to be the last line of defense, showing insensitivity to tradeoffs and limited resources.) Mistaking explanations for evidence is one of many problems of taking the inside view; but I think it is worth highlighting as its own issue. "A mechanism is not a substitute for measurement" could be another way to put it. There is no alternative to measuring actual outcomes, no matter in how much detail you can imagine the mechanism leading from your actions to the desired result. I've put together a plan for a short lesson, "Beware of explanations", that I've taught to students aged 11-18. It's intended as an introduction and first eye-opener only; learning to override this tendency will obviously take a lot more than this. This is a follow-up exercise (that I've only been able to do with a small part of the classes I taught, unfortunately) that's intended as a weak first attempt at testing, some weeks later, whether the lesson had any lasting effect on students' scepticism of explanations without evidence. Results so far look slightly encouraging, but there's too little data to support any conclusions at this point. It's fashionable these days to focus on teaching skills rather than content; train metacognitive strategies rather than memorize facts; endow students with procedural rather than declarative knowledge ("how to" vs. "what"). Proponents of this strategy have some good arguments in their favor, including:
The defenders of knowledge tend not to deny any of that (except, sometimes, the utility of the internet in light of its information/disinformation ratio). Instead, as I understand it, their argument for continuing to teach content rests on two or three additional convictions:
As usual in this sort of debate, both sides are probably right, and neither side entirely discounts the points made by the other. However, there is a crucial difference that tends to fall by the wayside in discussions of this sort: it is much easier to define which skills you need than it is to define which knowledge you need. In terms of skills, it is easy to agree that it is good if students are able to retrieve, evaluate and connect information, can understand and use at least one language effectively, etc. -- all of which can be broken down into sub-skills whose individual utility can be assessed and falsified. Since the advent of skill-based education, much debate and research has happened in this area, and while not everything is entirely clear cut, it seems at least like an answerable question. With regards to knowledge, however, the standard assumption seems to be that we should just fall back on the traditional content-based curricula that are structured by (mostly academic) subjects and have the weight of history and familiarity in their favor. This makes some sense in light of the "common ground" argument mentioned above, but other than that it is far from obvious that this should be the right path. If we concur that it is good for students to have a core of knowledge on which to build, what should that core contain? It is easy to say that everybody should know their history; but what parts of history does everybody really need to know? Is explicit knowledge about music or any of the other arts universally important? How about knowledge of neurology, or human cognitive biases? (Again, don't forget the adage about "a little knowledge" -- for biases, it can be argued that knowing a little about them may actually do more harm than good, for example.) Never mind that biology and physics can be interesting and fascinating -- the question of what physical and biological knowledge, if any, is essential and should be universally shared is not easily answered. What, then, does make a good foundation on which to build new, personalized edifices of knowledge? What is the irreducible core of facts that any educated person needs to be aware of? Or does it not matter what specific knowledge students gain in school, as long as they gain some of any sort? If so, does that knowledge need to be spread out across multiple fields (which ones?) in order to be any help? I have not yet seen a good answer to any of these questions, even though I have grappled with them (and watched other people debate them) for years. I do have a couple of intuitions, or educated guesses if you like, that I might set out in a future post; but I think we should be able to do better than that. As always, any pointers, links and ideas are very welcome. Most actors I see in movies are really good. I realize that's because I do not watch most of the movies that are being made. Those that do get my attention tend to be big-budget high-end productions that got good reviews from viewers and critics I like. (I don't have much time for movies, so I like to play it safe.) We can have great actors for two reasons. One, it doesn't take very many of them. A few highly talented people -- not just actors, but also directors, camera people, etc. -- can entertain an audience of millions in the age of reproducible data. Two, everybody wants to be a superstar. Sure, there are plenty of excellent drama schools that turn talented people into even better professional actors. But you cannot just put anyone into a drama school, no matter how good it is, and expect them to turn out top-grade actors. The real bottleneck is the amount of talent; and acting probably gets more of this than any other field. There are not many slots for superstars. But the attraction -- and the payoff -- of being a superstar is so big that hordes of talented (and less talented) people are pushing into the field every year with fierce determination, trying to outcompete each other at every turn, and allowing producers to pick and choose from the best of the best. For many struggling actors, this is not a very good deal; for us as consumers, it certainly is. You might ask, at this point, whether the marginal value of slightly better movies is really great enough to justify all of this effort and expenditure. I'm not convinced it is, mostly because I do not really care that much about movies. But I do care a lot about education, and this is why I want the same thing for teachers. The problem with teachers is twofold. First, in most countries teaching does not tend to attract top talent. In some cases this is about prestige, in others about pay and the lack of career options, or a combination of all those. But it gets worse, because even if you are both talented and altruistic, reason suggests you should not go into teaching but apply your talents in another field where you could have a bigger impact. Because that right there is the second problem: In teaching as it is traditionally done, a teacher's talent stays inside the classroom. A great teacher might have a marginal impact on maybe 100-200 students a year, totalling a few thousand over the course of their career -- that's not completely terrible in terms of impact, but not all that impressive either. More importantly, their successes and insights usually do not influence other teachers. In most school systems, there are next to no mechanisms or incentives for teachers to learn from one another, for successful methods to spread and for colleagues to compare the effectiveness of different approaches. Every once in a while, a particularly innovative teacher might merit a portrait in a local newspaper or contribute to a new textbook; but that is about the extent of teacher stardom in most places. All of this is about to change. As the central role of teachers shifts from being a bearer of knowledge towards that of a coach and enabler, it makes more sense than ever to outsource the explaining and input part to outside experts. This opens up new avenues for talented teachers to become highly visible and scale their impact by creating video lectures, interactive online courses, and other teaching materials. At the moment, only a minority of teachers use these materials. But as soon as the early adopter stage gives way to widespread implementation of these teaching materials in schools, we can expect to see a race to the top, as producers and distributors rush to get a share of the market. Eventually, the most engaging and effective materials can be expected to reach an audience of millions, hopefully leading to the sort of professionalization and selection effects that currently give us supremely engaging movies and TV series. This is already happening, but we can help speed it along -- and in doing so, profit from it at the same time. As school administrators, we will want to attract top talent by making our school into a place that allows teachers to become superstars -- e.g. by allowing for and incentivizing the production and sharing of scalable teaching materials, and providing the infrastructure to publish and spread these materials in a way that profits both the teacher and the school. As teachers, we can seek out and use the best of the teaching materials that are currently out there and spread the word to increase their exposure. As technologists, we can help along the development of platforms that allows producers and distributers to profit from their work. And as everybody else, we can curate and use learning materials for our own purposes, because the time when learning started and ended in school is over. I'll end with a quote that looks even further into the future: "If a concerted effort were made, we could develop methods for transferring bodies of understanding — intellectual mastery — far more rapidly, cheaply, and efficiently than we do now. Universities still use medieval (!) techniques (lecturing) to noisily, haphazardly and partially transfer fragments of 21st century disciplines, taking many years and spending hundreds of thousands of dollars per transfer per person. But what if people could spend four months with a specialized AI — something immersive, interactive, all-absorbing and video game-like, and emerge with a comprehensive understanding of physics, or materials science, or evolutionary psychology? To achieve this, technological, scientific, and entertainment innovations in several dozen areas would be integrated: Hollywood post-production techniques, the compulsively attention-capturing properties of emerging game design, nutritional cognitive enhancement, a growing map of our evolved programs (and their organs of understanding), an evolutionary psychological approach to entertainment, neuroscience-midwived brain-computer interfaces, rich virtual environments, and 3D imaging technologies. Eventually, conceptual education will become intense, compelling, searingly memorable, and ten times faster. A Gutenberg revolution in disseminating conceptual mastery would change everything, and — not least — would allow our species to achieve widespread scientific self-understanding. We could awaken from ancient nightmares." (John Tooby's answer to the 2009 Edge question, "What will change everything?") Our ambition is to create a robust blueprint for innovative micro-schools that is easy to adopt and adapt by others. The first incarnation of our school will serve as a testing ground and prototype, but we have been trying to design our concept for scalability from day one. This introduces a number of constraints and requirements. I. Ease of useOur presentation of the school concept needs to be clear and unambiguous, easy to understand without requiring a background in education science or the like, and attractive to as many stakeholders as possible (potential founders, teaching staff, parents, students, experts, members of the community, etc.). Ideally, we will want to present our blueprint in the form of a step-by-step guide (or, eventually, a conversational interface), with deeper layers of detailed (and localized) instructions as well as troubleshooting guides added over time. (As we become a network of schools, this could evolve into a comunally managed wiki or something along those lines.) II. AdaptabilityThe concept needs to be adaptable to different circumstances along multiple dimensions, including:
III. Quality assuranceIf our concept is easy to implement and works in a variety of contexts, that still does not mean the resulting schools will be any good. We need to make sure that the quality of the students' education does not depend on one particular team. This is the hardest part. Outside of licencing and supervision within our franchise model, I see three interlocking ways of raising the probability that schools built according to our concept will not degrade in quality: architecture, incentives/selection effects, and materials.
One key aspect of our school's architecture is the focus on collaboration with experts, businesses and institutions in the community. This means that much of the expertise comes from outside the school itself. While different school administrators might do better or worse at curating this influx of expertise, the number of different expert and community contacts required to fill a school year makes it very unlikely that students do not take anything useful away from it. (Contrast the practice in public schools, where students might well be stuck with a bad teacher -- or more -- for years on end.) Curating, organizing and implementing these collaborations calls for a team of highly flexible and creative individuals with a keen sense for the needs of both students and the community. While selection effects will probably apply, at least in the beginning, attracting people who share our ideals and feel up to the challenge, we will develop tentative guidelines for choosing new team members (e.g. based on this[link: 7 questions]) to be used by administrators. We also encourage creating incentives to reward innovation and professional development, from bonuses to different career options within the network. Finally, the simplest way of ensuring quality is providing well-vetted and easy-to-use teaching materials, from ready-made workshop and course plans to curated online courses, learning games, etc. Interlocking with the previous point, continually creating and improving these materials will not only be part of the job description of our coaches, but will also be rewarded (eventually based on their reception in the network) through a bonus system. Of course, all of this still needs to be war-gamed. What else can possibly go wrong? Where are we creating incentives that run counter to our purpose? ... I'd thought this was self-evident, but apparently it bears repeating:
Education is hard. Education is a hard problem that has not yet been solved.* This is significant, considering how long humans have been working on it. It means that there probably is no quick fix that will solve education, otherwise it would already have been found. This is why I am deeply sceptical of anyone who claims to know how to fix education. Especially if that claim is accompanied by statements like "...and it's actually so simple!", or even "natural". If you think you have a simple solution, you are very likely to be wrong. The science of education, as confused as it may seem, shows one thing very clearly: there are no catch-all solutions. Different approaches are required for different groups of people, different contexts, different topics and skills. This is not the same as saying that all methods are equally valid. On the contrary, it means that if we want to improve education, we have to focus on very specific contexts, purposes, and population groups, one at a time. (This is one of the reasons why we're starting a micro-school for 12-14 year-olds instead of aiming for a larger age group.) We have to look very closely at what works and what does not, while resisting the temptation to generalize each insight and proclaim it as the key to fixing everything. Improving education is hard work. There are no shortcuts. * To add a little more nuance to the this blanket statement, here are two caveats: One, some aspects of knowledge and skill transfer probably have been solved, e.g. by methods such as apprenticeship that have long ago achieved fixation. Two, our circumstances are probably changing faster now than they used to for most of human history, so even methods of education that have worked before may not be appropriate any more. In particular, merely transferring the knowledge and skills of one generation to the next will not suffice, because the next generation will need to be capable of many more and different things than we are. A new report on career guidance in British schools finds that while students feel they have plenty of information about possible careers, they still have difficulties making choices based on that information. "The report suggests that too much information and the wrong sort of information, rather than too little, is the problem when it comes to making decisions about the future. Young people are overwhelmed by the amount of information and the way that it is presented and feel there is no way of making sense of it all. As a result, they switch off from decision-making altogether. This highlights the importance of presenting good careers information, advice, and guidance in a way that young people find useable in order for them to make informed decisions about their future study and career options." (Newsletter of the Institute for Effective Education at the University of York)
Abstract information, then, is not enough to allow students to make informed choices. This implies that the usual practice of explicit, information-based career counseling employed in most schools may be useless or even counterproductive. Consider this quote from the authors' summary of the report: "Overall, the young people we spoke to seemed to have essentially based, or were seeking to base, the decision of their overarching career ambition on whether they had an image of themselves doing the job that they found appealing. This image often came from a variety of sources, including family and friends, personal exposure, and the media." Having an image of oneself doing a certain job is not something that can be imparted through declarative teaching. It requires either observing other people doing the job (and/or hearing them talk about their job), as happens naturally with family members and friends, or actually doing the job (or parts of it) oneself. If we want to broaden students' career prospects, then, we have to get them into close contact with professionals in different careers, ideally in a work context, and make them experience a wide range of different professions 'from the inside', through mini-internships, practice companies, and goal-driven projects. Once they gain a (hopefully realistic) image of what it is actually like to do these jobs, our students will be able to make truly informed choices about their career paths, using the whole spectrum of possible careers as a reference, rather than just the narrow set of jobs their parents and friends happen to do. You can find the full report, entitled "Moments of Choice", here (PDF). One core principle of our school concept is that students are ready to do productive work much earlier than is commonly expected of them. We do not subscribe to the idea that young people need to be "protected" from the world of work and stuck in educational limbo up until the age of 15 (or 25, in many cases), by which time they are supposed to have been filled up with enough theoretical information to be sufficiently "prepared".
On the contrary, we are convinced that direct experience with a variety of different types of work not only helps students find a satisfying career later on, but also increases their motivation for learning, by giving them tangible goals to work towards and sharpening their focus on what they actually need to learn. This is the central assumption underlying the design of our Orientation Phase, which includes in-house entrepreneurial projects, practical workshops led by professionals from various sectors, and mini-internships at local businesses and organizations. A recent report (PDF) from the Education Endowment Foundation seems to confirm many of these assumptions. It is an in-depth review of 96 international high-quality studies of career education interventions, aiming to find out which types of interventions have a positive impact on educational attainment, economic success and social outcomes. One central finding of the report is that "higher levels of supported, authentic exposure to the labour market, in its very different forms, can challenge young people to think afresh about their aspirations and their engagement with education and pathways through it." This sort of reflection, even at an early age, is important because "a range of high quality studies have shown that what young people think about careers (particularly whether they are uncertain or confused/misaligned) influences later academic and employment outcomes. [...] Young people are commonly understood to make use of their episodes of careers education, and especially first-hand experiences of the labour market, to gain improved insights into the operation of the labour market, its breadth and demands. In turn, it is argued, new insights enable more informed decision-making, smoothing the transition into sustained employment." The report identifies a number of "consistent features of effective careers education", including:
Another relevant finding is that students who do part-time work while still in school tend to be more successful economically as adults. With the rapid decline of part-time work by teenagers, the authors note, "the requirement grows on schools, colleges, and employers -- through the realm of careers education -- to help young people gain insights, exposure, and experiences that traditionally they would have accessed through direct, paid experience of the labour market." However, the authors also acknowledge that reliable empirical studies of such interventions are still few and far between. By building on their results and working with researchers to evaluate the impact of our own approach, we hope to contribute to the development of effective career education. |
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August 2017
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