This feels like an unfinished sort of thing to publish as a “post,” but come with me as I experiment with showing my work.1 It may not be great, but there will be pretty pictures of flowers that Kateri took when we visited the Cloisters this spring.
A Twitter mutual and Direct Instruction enthusiast recently pointed me to this fascinating LessWrong post, which echoes many of my own gradually solidifying conclusions about the relationship between teaching and learning2 and provoked me to try and capture those conclusions in one place. Each of these points could, of course, be discussed at length, and I hope to do that, with specific attention to the homeschool setting, gradually over time.
The student’s motivation is (almost) the whole ballgame.
Learning requires some effort from the learner. A teacher can do their best to make that effort as pleasant and efficient as possible, to provide a little extrinsic motivation, but the teacher cannot do the work of learning for the student. An unmotivated student will not put in the effort and so will not learn.
The most ambitious instruction, the instruction we really care most about, teaches things to do, not stuff to know.
It is almost impossible to learn to do something without watching someone else do it.
The most important part of learning to do something is trying to do it many, many times.
A “knowledge-rich” curriculum is necessary for learning…
…BUT the actual number of things all students really need to remember for the long haul is truthfully pretty small.
Repetition, which, sure, you can try to space to maximize efficiency if you want, is the best way to learn those things.
A lot of teaching is training attention -
In terms of stamina, but also, maybe more importantly:
What to attend to; what is important and what isn’t.
Some subset of things need to become an automated response to certain stimulus, and there is no way around drilling those things.
To bring us back to the beginning of this list, here is where motivational deficits cause some of the biggest problems for learning.
These are all things I’m pretty confident hold true at the broadest possible level. I would add more details for specific domains and disciplines. And I would have a different list for the thing we call “education” more broadly. What about you? What do you know to be true about teaching and learning?
How about a few other interesting education links?
Dan Meyer is my favorite guy writing about AI and education, and this, on truly personalized education, is worth reading, as usual.
I loved this about reading War and Peace aloud so much. Some of our best family read aloud and audiobook experiences have been big books, with David Copperfield topping the list, and I suspect the Principal would definitely be up for tackling War and Peace before our oldest flies the nest. The advice is so commonplace, and yet it simply remains true that shared read alouds are probably the best thing you can do for your family culture.
The discourse moved on long ago, but I want to register that this Scott Alexander post makes me sad.3 I think our current compulsory attendance laws are bad, but “schools” are too many different things to be bad or good. Meanwhile, Americans seem to be withdrawing more explicitly than ever from the public goods of education, and that is definitely bad.
I get that a lot of smart kids were bored in and even damaged by schools, but I was a smart kid who got a lot out of the schools I went to, and I’m very, very wary of one idea that seems to be behind some anti-school sentiment, which is that without schools, smart kids will know how to educate themselves. That idea hasn’t worked out great in higher education, to say the least.
The educational reform we really need is curricular; we are way overdue for a deep rethinking and streamlining of our extremely bloated curriculum, which is driven by college entrance requirements and thus affects college-bound homeschoolers almost as much as kids in brick-and-mortar schools. Less, more efficient school would be better for all kids, “gifted” or not. But it’s hard to get people to agree on a relatively tiny set of universal essentials and easy to pretend that a different way of arranging or delivering what we’re already trying to teach would make a meaningful difference.
On that last point, an old article by the late Grant Wiggins: “The Futility of Trying to Teach Everything Of Importance.”
Which, to be frank, feels like the sort of thing an external processor would come up with. I am very much not an external processor, but I’m also very much a busy mother of six who is in a stage where finding the time to quietly internally process my thoughts into what feels to me like an adequately polished form is just not happening.
Keep in mind that, as Ivan Illich said, “[one] major illusion on which the school system rests is that most learning is the result of teaching.”
It also suggests the spaced-repetition craze is coming to an end. Spaced-repetition was definitely over-hyped for the usual reasons (makes us all feel like we are doing something - and something that can be fairly easily measured and lends itself to shiny tech tools at that), but let’s all take care not to wind up with a wet, critically injured baby.