Thread by @SCottinghatt

Teaching is rewarding and challenging.

Here are 4 *counterintuitive concepts* about how we learn🧠
They add to the challenge but once we know them, they can guide our thinking.

You may be able to add to them...🧵

(1) To increase expertise, *don't* do as the experts do.

Why?

Putting pupils in the position where they have to "think like an expert" ignores the process of learning that got experts there.

There's no short-cut to expertise. Pupils need to build rich, well-connected schemas.

To do this, a lot of what pupils need to do looks nothing like 'expert thinking'.

I like Christodoulou's (2019) marathon analogy:

You don't start training for a marathon by running marathons. You eat right/sleep right, do short fast runs & slower longer ones.

These things look nothing like the end goal. You only run marathons once you've done these things.

So what?

To answer an exam q well, pupils need a lot of domain-specific knowledge. They don't learn this knowledge best by attempting exam qs. They do a load of things that look nothing like exam qs: watch modelling, learn small bits of knowledge, practise short answer qs etc.

(2) Pupils' performance may not be a good indicator of learning.

Why?

Learning is a long-term process.

If you've taught something new and pupils are performing well on the task, that doesn't mean it's been learned.

To infer learning, we need to check over the long term.

Also (and what could feel more counterintuitive than this) -

Conditions that impair performance in the short term can improve learning in the long term...
... and conditions that make performance improve quickly often fail to support long-term learning (Bjork & Bjork, 2020).

So what?

At the appropriate time, use techniques that slow performance yet improve learning e.g. retrieval, spacing, interleaving.

These can be tricky to implement well though (Perry et al., 2021), and considering pupils' motivation may be important too (Bjork & Bjork, 2020).

(3) Pupils don't learn what you teach them

Why?

Everyone's prior knowledge is different and you can only understand new information in relation to what you already know.

Therefore...

Pupils learn *their interpretation* of what you teach them.

So what?

Employ the cycle of checking what pupils know, linking new material to what they know and checking what they have understood.

However...

There are some (subject-specific) common misconceptions pupils have.
We could let teachers, through trial and error, discover common misconceptions their pupils are prone to
OR
(Much better) we can share common misconceptions to look out for and practise how to overcome them.

(4) What looks like a generic skill (analysing, inferring, evaluating), is actually underpinned by loads of domain knowledge.

Why?

There's no one 'evaluation' area of the brain that does all the evaluating.

We use our knowledge of a topic to weigh up pros and cons and reach a conclusion.

Try this...

Evaluate which character in 'An Inspector Calls' is most to blame for Eva Smith's death.

Sure, knowing generically what evaluation means helps, but the quality of your answer depends upon the knowledge you have about the play.

The skill cannot be divorced from the content.

So what?

Teaching generic lessons on how to infer/interpret/analyse etc devoid from the specific knowledge we want pupils to practise making inferences etc about, are unlikely to be useful.

Build domain knowledge and get them to practise applying it in these different ways.