Teacher training’s war on science

When I trained as a teacher, seven years ago, these are some of the things I was taught: it’s better for pupils to discover a fact than to be told it. Children learn best working on authentic, real-world projects. Schools and traditional subject boundaries are silos which stifle the natural creativity we all have within us. And this last fact especially: there is no point teaching a body of knowledge, because within a few years it will be outdated and useless. Don’t teach the what, teach the how. ‘Drill and kill’ and ‘chalk and talk’ will lead to passive and unhappy pupils.

This, to a large degree, is still what most teachers are taught. So it’s unfortunate that these ideas are deeply flawed. There’s solid evidence that mostly, the exact opposite is true. Discovery learning is hugely inefficient and ineffective. Authentic projects overload working memory and confuse pupils. Skills are domain-specific and depend on a well-organised body of knowledge securely committed to long-term memory. Deliberate practice — what might be called ‘drill’ — is necessary for mastery. Here’s the real truth: direct teacher instruction is good for pupils’ academic achievement and their self-esteem.

Over the past 50 or so years, scientists have discovered more about how the brain learns than ever before. Their findings have profound implications for education, but too few of these are known or taught within English education.

One of the interesting things about the prevailing myths of teacher training is that they are not new. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was pushing them in the 18th century. Since then, despite a consistent lack of success, they’ve persisted, under different names and with different justifications.

For example, one popular buzzword at the moment is ‘21st-century skills’, which sounds about as cutting-edge and modern as it gets.