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Myth Number 6 - Projects and activities are the best way to learn
Disliking teacher-directed methods, most education theorists propose instead projects and activities - real-world problems as opposed to "artifical school-based structure".
As we have seen, teacher-directed learning is much more effective than the projects and activities approach, and that is because the projects and activities approach ignores the important difference between experts and novices. "Experts have a huge body of background knowledge and processes stored in long-term memory, and they have spent a huge amount of time practising using that knowledge and those processes....The way they approach and solve problems is fundamentally different to the way novices approach problems." But the projects and activities approach relies on the assumption that young children can tackle problems in the same way that experts can.
"One of the tactics experts use to great effect is to talk to themselves as they solve a problem. It works for experts because of all the hidden background knowledge and processes they have. Recommending that pupils talk to themselves as they solve a problem would not have the effect of turning them into an expert....An interesting analogy here is the famous cargo cult described by the theoretical physicist Richard Feynman:
In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head to headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas - he's the controller - and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land.
"At the root of this problem is a confusion of causation and correlation. The islanders realised that wearing coverings on your ears and gesturing towards the sky correlated with the delivery of cargo. They realised that there was some kind of link between the two events. But they leapt from this point to assume that the former was the sole cause of the latter. They did not see - because they could not - all the other factors and events that went into the delivery of cargo. The soldiers who wore earphones and gestured at the sky were just a small and visible part of a highly complex process that was mostly invisible to the islands. The visible parts of the process were important, of courses. But they were only a small part of the process. By mimicking the visible, the islanders hoped to replicate the whole.
"This seems to me the mistake we have made in encouring expert performance among our pupils. We look at what experts do and encourage pupils to copy that."
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