The means of education are not always what education means (2)

I read this piece of text in an article in the most recent edition of Impact, the journal of the Chartered College of Teaching:

Fortunately, cognitive load theory, schema theory and progression mapping provide a robust framework that can help us to streamline content, activate prior knowledge and manage cognitive load in the classroom. By cutting out unnecessary information, activating prior knowledge through retrieval practice and interleaving concepts, teachers can help students to learn more effectively. 

Now, I am sure that this is true sometimes, and in the minds of the authors, maybe true most of the time. Maybe they think this is stuff that every teacher should know and put into practice. Those wandering around in the world of ‘what works’ in the teaching tend to think that all knowledge gained from ‘evidence-based practice’ is transferable to other humans, because humans are the same, aren’t they?

Fortunately, the subsequent article in the same issue, by Gemma Moss and Rachel France (UCL) helps here, and it is worth a little exploration of their argument to put things into perspective.

Arguing that ‘the supply of evidence is only one half of the EBP [evidence-based practice] story’ and it is what happens to that evidence in practice that leads to mixed results when practitioners in all areas of public service get hold of it – it is that really makes the difference. Thus the link between evidence and professional practice is an area of concern, and this has obliquely led to the rise of randomised control trials – on a clinical model – as a ‘sure way’ of getting the results hoped for through EBP.

However, Moss and France note that this is often not what happens, citing a paper by Lortie-Forgues & Inglis in which effect sizes from RCT-informed interventions were consistent with the null hypothesis, and did ‘not outperform business as usual ((Moss & France 2023: 11). Why this is the case might be due to issues of scale (results not fit for a wider application), measurement being careless, and the failure to distinguish between programs that need strong replication to an original model and those that are more generally applicable. Of course it is easy to blame the practitioners too, and people do, citing the unwillingness of practitioners to change or at least change sufficiently their practices in the light of the intervention. This is real, by the way, and has led, for instance, to restorative practice getting a bad name with Ofsted – simply due to poor application of the model.

What is overlooked, argue Moss and France, is the need for what Aristotle called phronesis, the practical wisdom that comes from ‘intelligent adaptation of evidence to meet local context and circumstances’ (Collins & Coleman, 2021:25 seen here)

This quote, from an article by Sandra Nutley and colleagues, stands as a key reminder as to why EBP has to be ‘brought to life’ with the actors who are using and implementing it:

The phronetic knowledge of those deeply invested in any practice is likely to be of long term significant value, and though this knowledge can have light shone upon it by new understanding from research, cannot be replaced by it, as the circumstances, the locales, the histories and experiences that created that knowledge have a value that cannot easily be brought into conversation with ‘evidence-based research’ if it is conducted beyond the geography of the current practice.

Moss and France see this as incorporating the different ways in which ‘user perspectives can be incorporated into research designs [which] changes the dynamic in the relationships between research and practice, putting them on a more equal basis’ (p.12).

A failure to take account of these user perspectives means that the wrong questions are asked of the research and thus a range of good questions, never asked, go unanswered. A classic example is the longing of governments to ask the single question that they see as the only educational question worth asking: will it fix the attainment gap? Thus research devolves down to the ‘what works’ question, and larger and broader and longer term questions remain unanswered. For a fuller discussion of this problem, see here.

So much for highlighting the problem. The remainder of the small paper by Moss & France deals with some ESRC Education Research Programme projects that they are variously involved in that seek a solution. In each of those summarised, the role, voice and action of the class teacher or early years practitioner is privileged as integral to the research: by giving research partners a greater role in determining the direction of research; by giving voice to the motivations and interests of teachers; by giving children and teachers the opportunity to co-produce new knowledge through dialogue and respect, etc.

All these approaches promise a way of doing educational research that is genuinely educational, rather than relying on the handmaidens of philosophy and sociology to do the educational research for them. To that extent, this critique of Moss and France of EBP, and the approach that has resulted as a consequence of seeking a richer dialogue between techne and phronesis, has to be welcomed.

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In the first post of this mini-series (a part 3 is in my mind already), I explored how the ITaP (Intensive Training and Practice) pilot week was carried out at UEL. It has been interesting subsequently to hear stories from other ITE institutions who have trialled the same thing. What is becoming clear is that ITaP as a concept (it will eventually take up a whole month in a ten-and-a-half month course) is a significant difficulty to be overcome from a range of perspectives: choosing how to teach it, recruiting school partners to host it, evaluating its impact, focusing on the scholarly as much as on the practical (this is vital even if the DfE don’t value it), etc.

It is becoming clear, from the range of interventions and recalibrations made to teaching, and which are outlined in the quote at the top, that we are perhaps living through a period where what we call ‘teaching’ in the English (and other) school system, and what we think of as education more broadly and culturally, have less and less to do with each other. I was interested to see some adverts running currently for Coventry University’s National Institute for Teaching and Education. This instutional title is merely honest. Teaching need not speak to education very much, though what we call education must involve teaching, of course. Gert Biesta, in his most recent book World-Centred Teaching made this point: that there is a manner and mode of teaching that contributes to education, what might be termed ‘teaching that matters educationally’ (Biesta, 2022:9). This is different from teaching as often conceived in schools.

Ultimately, teaching is terrifyingly complex, and has to be thought of complexly and “embodiedly”. As soon as it is simplified into a range of mental techniques, meshed together into some sort of boxed-up ‘practice’ separate from the demands either of body or of place, then the depth and purpose of teaching in a society is diminished, and its usefulness as an agent of affirmation, liberation and the existential placing of the child in the world, has gone. Sometimes, thinking about what we are required to teach in ITE courses in England currently, I think we are not far from that point.