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How science should inform teaching
Dan Willingham has a new video out on whether teaching is an art or a science, and here’s a blog that discusses his video. You’re welcome to watch the video, but to me the most interesting aspect of Dr. Willingham’s talk is his introduction of the concept of “boundary conditions” in teaching. Here’s an excerpt.
“I think what we know about how kids learn, and develop, interact and so on, can suggest boundary conditions. I mean by that things that, if you ignore them, will likely lead to trouble. For example, if you think that someone will acquire a skill without practice, that’s probably not going to work. Providing practice for skills is a boundary condition. Another example, most kids benefit a lot from explicit instruction in letter-sound correspondences when they are learning to read, so providing that instruction is another boundary condition. Notice this doesn’t tell you how to implement practice, or how to implement teaching letter-sound correspondences—it just says that those things have to happen. I call these ‘must have’ principles.”
It sure would be great to have a list of all the boundary conditions!
I like Dan Willingham, but this (as with other arguments of his) is too ‘middle of the road’ to be helpful. He is knowledgeable and he articulates good points, but just as he skirts the “is teaching an Art?” question, he also skirts/misses another very important concept on the “is teaching a Science” side.
“Could John Stuart Mill Have Saved our Schools?” is a cumbersome title for a book, but the material it elucidates is unbelievable. The authors (who else) Englemann and Carnine illustrate how using a logic-based method such as Mill’s “theory of induction” one can create a scientific method to guide instruction design towards a razor sharp efficiency.
Willingham states that medicine uses science-based conclusions in the form of vaccines to treat bodies because the assumption is that bodies are all alike. He then states that such scientific methodology can not be relied on in the case of learning, because students’ brains aren’t all alike. He cites background, motivation and even developmental theory as off-handed examples of why brains and learning should be considered in an individualized way. Well, developmental theory is just wrong, (Engelmann disproved it back in the sixties by demolishing Piaget’s concept regarding the conservation of liquid amounts.) and a well-designed instructional method can make the other examples into non-issues on account of the main point that Willingham misses: brains function logically.
This is not to say that all brains are equal in their efficiency, but that they all will try to make logical conclusions based on the input fed to it. Even damaged brains or addled ones still try to function logically, just in a less efficient way. So, if one creates an logical presentation of a new concept that yields only one conclusion, the brain will follow it. All that remains is the behaviourist question of how many repetitions of this logical pattern are needed in order to ingrain the concept in the learner’s mind- which is also an empirical question.
Thus, instruction design and learning theory should be steered away from the “Art” side and more towards the scientific. Please read Theory of Instruction, or the above cited book by Engelmann if you need more clarification, or proof of the science behind the method.
PS.As to art being decidedly ‘not-scientific’, I also disagree vehemently, but that discussion is for a different blog.