Relishing My Cognitive Dissonance – I Recommend Some

I’ve been feeling a bit chagrin these past few weeks.  Despite the effort that I have put in to becoming a knowledgeable educator, guided by theory and best-practice rather than intuition alone, I have recently been faced with new knowledge that doesn’t gel with the delicate schema that I’ve built up that is represents the totality of my knowledge about teaching and learning.  And all of a sudden, this cognitive dissonance that I feel leaves me wondering what do I really know about teaching and learning.

Here’s what happened:

I was planning a professional development about lecturing (I know that lecturing may seem like a red-headed step-child, but I’m still a fan…really I am).  My goal was to use research to support certain strategies for lecture that would make it more effective as a teaching strategy, especially when it comes to moving beyond mere recall and understanding of information.  Anyway, one of the things I was looking into was research on learning styles.  Unbeknownst to me there has been talk about learning styles being bunk for years (Here, here, here, here, here, and many more, and this one’s nice because it links to some nice research).  So I pick up the book The Science of learning (2006) hoping for some help, and I find a section called “Myth 5: Instruction Should Consider Learning Styles.”   “WHAT?” was my immediate reaction, “You are kidding me!”

So then I pick up Efficiency in Learning co-authored by my new favorite author, Ruth Colvin Clark, just to see what they say, and on page 248, she calls learning styles an “unproductive instructional mythology.”

Here’s the thing, for years, and I mean for years, I have heard that educators should consider learning styles/modalities as they construct learning experiences.  It has come up in professional development, conferences, readings, etc.  I’ve referred to learning styles when I have presented, because I had assumed it was a research-established notion.  So now I’m starting to wonder where have I been.  Am I an idiot?  (I know that I am in general, but am I educationally idiotic too)  How did I not know about this earlier?  These books, articles, and discussions aren’t new.

Plus, a recent overview of the research surrounding learning styles stated,

“our search of the learning-styles literature has revealed only a few fragmentary and unconvincing pieces of evidence that meet this standard [of rigorous research], and we therefore conclude that the literature fails to provide adequate support for applying learning-style assessments in school settings.  Moreover, several studies that used appropriate research designs found evidence that contradicted the learning-styles hypothesis”

So suddenly, as I mentioned above, I feel like an idiot, and I am experiencing some pretty major discomfort.  But the reason I’m feeling discomfort isn’t so much about learning styles being something I need to pluck from my web of understanding.  I can do that without a major reorganization of my thinking.  In practice I never really used learning style theory.  I didn’t do inventories or try to direct individuals to resources using a particular modality.  Ultimately, I’d always just seen it as additional justification for differentiating instruction and providing multiple types of contacts with material.

My real problem was this:

• I have developed an extensive web of understanding about teaching and learning based on training, research, and experience that I trust to be accurate.
• One element of that web that I  have been taught about since I first got my teaching credential needs plucked from that web because it lacks justification
• So what other items that need removed, modified, etc.?  Is this an isolated incident?

That is the true dissonance I feel.  If there is fairly good evidence that learning styles are a myth, why has it continued to be so pervasive?  What other landmines are in my schema that are waiting to explode?  What “folk” understanding of education are wrapped up tightly in my network of ideas that could be hampering my efforts to educate effectively?  More importantly, what are we as an entire community of educators accepting as gospel truth in education that has no solid grounding?  I feel anxiety…core-shaking anxiety…blech!

In order to resolve this dissonance for myself, I have begun sifting through books and research articles that suggest best practices and research-based strategies, but only accepting those practices where I see the evidence.  Until I can identify the real grounding for my understandings, I think I will continue to feel adrift.  But I am thankful that I have some tried and true sources that make me feel a bit less woozy right now.  But since my real concern is about our larger community of educators, I offer a plea that we examine our guiding  principles and do a double-check to make sure that we aren’t following fads and intuition as we structure our instruction or guide others in their own practice.  Despite the wooziness and anxiety, I actually feel stronger as an educator now that I have been a bit disrupted.

So here are my recommendations if you are experiencing similar cognitive dissonance:

• any book by Ruth Colvin Clark because of her adherence to the practice of Evidence Based Teaching.  I mentioned how much I love her book Efficiency in Learning in an earlier post.
• The Department of Education has a guide for identifying and implementing educational practice on research.  It’s more about evaluating research, but I find it helpful.
• I also recommend The Science of Learning by Robert T. Hays and almost anything by Robert Marzano because he too uses research as a guide for practice.
• I know my list should be more extensive, but that’s all I’ve got for now.

I am hungry for other trusted authors and resources where I can sink my teeth into some dense research but at the same time enjoy a course of pedagogy that compliments it.  Any suggestions are appreciated!

Thanks,

Heidi

Efficiency in Learning

I’m a skeptic.  It drives my husband crazy (and he’s a philosopher, so that’s hard to do).  He’ll start a conversation about something like the Buddhist concept of no self and I’ll ask so many questions that he’ll barely be able to get to the point.  I make him justify each step.  So that’s obviously something I need to work on, but my real point is that even when it comes to educational theory and new ideas, I’m not easily convinced.  That’s why I love the book Efficiency in Learning:  Evidence-Based Guidelines to Manage Cognitive Load.

As I continue to educate myself about the craft of teaching and learning, I hear lot’s of theories, frameworks, and ideas, and probably because there isn’t much time for speakers, professors, consultants, etc. to provide the evidence that justifies their suggestions.  They’ll just say something like, “it’s research-based.”  Now I think we have all been numbed by that phrase because we hear it every day.  In fact, if I it’s not coming from a super reliable source like the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, where rigorous research is the standard, I’ll just tune it out.  For example:

I’m not saying that the above claim hasn’t been categorically proven by science, but unless I hear more, I’m not going to give it much thought.

Now I think the reason we’ve become skeptical is because the next day we hear that the very thing we thought research had shown to be a powerful solution to some problem clearly doesn’t, or worse, does the exact opposite, just take the current FDA squabble over cheese.   While you’re at it watch the Medieval Barber sketch from SNL.  Although this is a parody, we all know that medicine has advanced significantly because of hard science, but I’m guessing there are a few things in medicine that are common practice but aren’t based on incontrovertible evidence.

I experience some of the same skepticism when it comes to teaching and learning.  I remember working with schools where teachers were expected to chart everything.  Their teaching performance was judged by how many charts they had up around the room when an administrator came into the room.  While I am certain that there was a study done where charting showed increases in student learning, it is certainly not a panacea for the problems of education, and it is at least possible that that solution to a problem worked best for those students in the study and the teaching style of the teachers and may not be effective for everyone.  Who knows?

Teaching is an art form.  I don’t think that recommendations for practice should be specific to charting or having students create movies.  Any specific practice can be done well or be done poorly.  One thing that makes the difference between great teaching and mediocre teaching is how well that practice is situated in real, proven educational theory.  That’s where the book Efficiency in Learning comes in.

This book does what I wish every book that provided guidelines for practice did, it provides specific, compelling samples of research to justify the recommendations it makes.  Here’s one of the examples from early in the book.  *spoiler alert*

In order to demonstrate how having the right prior knowledge, or schema, activated can help enhance learning the book provides an example from the research of Chase and Simon (1973).  In the study two different groups were asked to memorize the location of pieces on a chess board where a particular game was stopped midway in.  One group was composed of novice chess players and the other group was composed of master chess players.  As you would expect, the novice chess players were able to remember only about 5 pieces from the board while the master chess players were able to remember significantly more, over 15 pieces, on just one viewing of the board.

In the second phase of the experiment the same two groups viewed a chess board, but rather than being a board stopped mid game, the pieces were placed randomly on the board.  What would you expect to happen this time?  What I expected was that both groups would perform similarly and remember only about 5 pieces, but this is not what happened.  Instead the master chess players did significantly worse, remembering less than 3 pieces on average from the board and the novice players gave an almost identical performance to their performance with a chess board mid-game.

When I read the description and interpretation of this study in this book, it made the idea of schema building and prior knowledge come alive for me in a way that it never had before in all the times I had heard experts refer to the need to build on prior knowledge and schema building.  Why did the researchers see these results?  Well, because the master chess players had a significant schema related to chess – a lot of prior knowledge.  When they viewed a chess board mid-game, they were likely able to recognize the series of events that lead to that outcome, and that helped them to remember more of the pieces, significantly more.   When the same masters were asked to remember the pieces on a board with random arrangement, they were using an inappropriate set of prior knowledge as a guide for understanding the events they witnessed.  Because they tried to make the circumstances fit their knowledge, they performed much worse.  So one element of effective teaching is recognizing that if students are going to be successful, finding an appropriate set of already held beliefs and ideas will help students integrate new knowledge more successfully into their schema.  On the other hand, students who relate an inappropriate set of ideas to this knew knowledge will be less able to understand.  Wow!  I love good research because now I have a much richer understanding of why a tenet I had heard a million times is significant.  It’s not just a fad.

Anyway, that’s just one example of many from this book of compelling evidence for teaching and learning practice.  The book so many more gems related to creating efficient learning experiences by minimizing the cognitive load placed on students while maximizing learner performance.  I highly recommend this book!  If you have read a book that is anyway similar to this one, please let me know.  I’m hungry for more books on teaching and learning that are this well done.