Teachers often talk about the vital nature of their work and the fact that for the young people we teach there are no second chances. I’ve heard teaching compared to air traffic control and the risks in the classroom compared to the risk involved in miscalculating the landing of a plane. These kinds of comparison are made to alert us to the importance of what we do, more clearly they’re over dramatic and, in a very real way, untrue. I don’t want to make out that what we do is unimportant but if we teach algebra badly no one dies. But what if it were true? What if education really was life or death? What might we do differently?
In their important new book, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning, Brown, Roediger and McDaniel point out that almost everything teachers and students believe about learning is untrue and based on unsubstantiated theories, folklore and intuition. We do what we’ve always done. We do what everyone else does. We do what sounds right. And we do it based on very little in the way of empirical evidence. But what if we had a gun to our heads? What if we were staking our lives and the lives of our students on the efficacy of choices we make? Would that change our approach or shake our faith? Would we be willing to bet our lives that the strategies and techniques we advocated and practised were the best ones?
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The Echo Chamber 