Regular readers will be aware that I have been writing on my annoyance with the new and growing cult of “explicit teaching”. Sure, it is a much needed correction to the old and seemingly, hopefully, declining cult of inquiry game-playing. But a cult is still a cult, and the spiritual and authoritative leaders of this new cult seem unwilling take any responsibility for, or even acknowledge the existence of, the perverting of good teaching principles into mandated madness.
An interesting warning note on this madness recently came from inside the house. Haili Hughes is an Associate Professor of Education at La Trobe, a very recent English import. A couple weeks ago, Hughes was featured in a free kick article in EducationHQ, based upon her substack post:
The de-intellectualisation of teaching: expert warns mandates have become dangerous
Dr Haili Hughes, an Associate Professor at La Trobe University, says in too many schools she’s seen teachers who are forced to sacrifice their professional curiosity and who are denied the chance to engage in the intellectual and relational work of teaching because they must rattle through a set of prescribed techniques for every lesson.
Of course, Hughes may be just another inquiry clown, but she at least claims otherwise:
“Can I be absolutely crystal clear: my position is heavily ‘science of learning’,” Hughes clarifies.
“I’m all about teachers being equipped with the knowledge of the science of learning, of how students’ learn, being given support to practice and perfect a range of techniques – but then for me, it’s up to the agency of the teacher of deploying those techniques at the right time for the right reasons.” …
The techniques themselves are not the problem, she says, but rather the lack of judgement that’s demanded about when and how to deploy them.
“(This is) done badly when you split a lesson into distinct phases – and we’ve been through this in England – whereby the first 10 minutes is a retrieval task that’s mandated.
“We then don’t really do anything with the data that we receive from that retrieval task because the next part is an ‘I do’ model. The second part is a ‘we do’ and then ‘you do’.”
This amounts to a ‘lethal mutation’ of Rosenshine’s Principles of Instruction, Hughes adds.
Of course that Hughes’ opinions are here in synch with mine does not make her correct. And, certainly, that Hughes is an associate professor of education does not make her correct. I am not going to start appealing to authority simply because, for once, an authority’s views agree with mine. The interesting thing is not that Hughes is correct, although of course she is, but that she appears to be willing to be noisy from a platform that may be difficult to ignore.*
I think the N-E-T gang have questions to answer. I don’t think they will because it is in the nature of a cult for the priests to sermonise rather than to debate, but the questions are there and it is pleasing to be, for once, not the only person asking out loud.
There are many things that puzzle me about the N-E-T business, not least of which is that what is being practised in the name of “explicit teaching”, at least on occasion, bears little resemblance to the practices upon which Rosenshine and co based their work.** In sum, however, there seem to me two very big questions of the N-E-T gang:***
1. What, precisely, are the N-E-T gang advocating and/or attempting to mandate?
Big Ben Carroll loves to pronounce on explicit teaching:
Schools use evidence-based teaching practices aligned with the Victorian Curriculum: Mathematics 2.0 and the VTLM 2.0.
This includes:
• explicit teaching of key concepts and skills
• structured learning sequences
• regular practice and review.
Big Ben has a whole position statement devoted to sermonising on this stuff, but what is the sum of his sermonising? Is it any more than the good vibes of Rosenshine, to which few sane people object? Or, does it require the use of BB’s crappy lesson plans, or similar, to which most sane people object? I am genuinely unclear what BB and the other rather thuggish thought leaders are advocating and, in some instances, seemingly demanding. If it is no more than the good vibes, how has it come about that some schools are now mandating very bad vibes practice?
2. What are the N-E-T gang offering the smart and very smart kids?
I cannot see they are offering anything. I cannot see that they even care that they are not offering anything, that they give a stuff about the smart and very smart kids, or that they even recognise what might benefit such kids. If I am wrong, if they are offering something, what is it?
At the moment, the N-E-T gang seems to have the worthy vision, and important practical effect, of trying to ensure mathematics students not starve after a long period of intellectual famine. That is far from nothing but it is also not nearly close to everything. I do not see that the N-E-T sermonising has exhibited one iota of grander vision, that the sermonisers can even imagine offering students more than bare sustenance.
*) These education articles seldom appear out of nowhere, and one wonders what inspired EducationHQ to give the free kick to Hughes here.
**) Better, questions for the N-E-T gang, rather than of them. But, given I don’t expect much in the way of answers, we’ll keep it as “of”.
***) Hence the “Neo”.
I think I may finally get what you are saying Marty – that the current method of promoting ‘explicit instruction’ or what everyone just used to call teaching is too prescriptive and furthermore is promoting some dreadful practices like death by Powerpoint – is that it? And this may prove counterproductive?
That is half of it.
The other half is that this prescription is a disaster for teaching any deeper mathematics, and that the N-E-T priests do not give a flying fuck about teaching any deeper mathematics, if they even know what deeper mathematics is, of which there is zero evidence.
Thanks for your post, JJ.
I would be interested to know why you think it took a while for you to see what Marty is saying.
I’ll admit that puzzled me as well. I’ve been nothing if not blunt.
Hi Marty – I’ve been thinking about it myself. I read each post in turn, but they seemed to be attacking particular views and people, and it all got jumbled in my head. I could see that you had explained how Rosenshine was not particularly backed by evidence, but I couldn’t see why Greg Ashman was terribly wrong.
In my own mind, Greg Ashman seems to be pretty sound. I bought and read his book ‘The truth about teaching’ and it seemed to be pretty sound. When he makes comments, they are generally pretty intelligent. And my understanding is that his school has a very particular way of teaching, but he acknowledges it’s not for everyone. And I’m certain not for me – I can’t stand anyone telling me how to teach, I will only listen to people whose competence and training I personally know.
In my own mind, I’m trying to put together a theory of teaching – I don’t mean in a high-falutin way, but just how could we find out how to become excellent teachers? One definite conclusion is that teaching should be an apprenticeship, rather than just lots and lots of academic study. It is interesting that the number of teaching placement days remains unchanged, even though they doubled the length of the course!
My personal theory is that the science of maths is essentially a reaction to the current insane practices that are taught in many primary schools and even high schools and definitely in faculties of education at universities. Lack of times tables, nonsensical strategies, inquiry learning etc etc.
I am currently testing out some of the suggestions that have risen from the movement that Greg Ashman is involved with. I plan to tweak my style to incorporate things like mini whiteboards and see how they go. I’ve also found Craig Barton to be a source of fantastic ideas – his current series on AI in education is utterly excellent. He has got many perspectives, ranging from those who reject AI to those who fully embrace it. So I see value in that movement.
While I can see that you have demolished the evidentiary basis for Rosenshines principles, I do think they are useful as you seem to. Rules of thumb, like Rosenshines 80% are often very useful. I don’t really care if it has an RCT or other evidentiary basis or not.
What I do have a beef about is that many proponents of the science of learning do not really understand science. This is true of the basics of science, given that teaching is an incredibly complex activity, and the availability of randomised control trials to be useful is rather limited indeed. And then add on all the issues including the replication crisis, incentives to publish, let alone the incredible weakness in many education faculties and you can see that the whole thing is very mixed up indeed.
I find it particularly vexing, that the science of learning people do not seem to understand that in a very complex environment, what has been done for a very long time and is the result of hundreds of thousands of little experiments by teachers over the centuries is probably the best guide we have. Nassim Nicholas taleb makes this point in his book anti-fragility, and I found that enlightening.
The ‘science of learning’ people also seem to miss the point that teaching is fundamentally about relationships, (after of course appropriate boundaries have been established through behaviour management), and that inspiring learners is a key part of the role. They seem to confuse the sum of parts (various evidentiary strategies) with the whole of teaching (very much person-based).
Tony Gardiner did not set out a manifesto, perhaps because he recognised that teaching is inherently complex and actually specifying what actually works is very difficult. He said we should make change slowly – he was such a wise man!
But we also live in a world where we do have to to educate people when what seems to be common current practice is silly, so we don’t have the luxury of the old starting point we did.
There is a fair bit of research into changing practice and I agree mandating poor quality Powerpoints may well be counter-productive.
It would perhaps be useful to set out some things that might actually help the current situation. My own thought is that a few visits by VCE high school maths teachers to primary schools to explain what happens when kids don’t have times tables etc might help, but beyond that I don’t know. That is of course politics, way out of my field.
Sorry – this is rather rambly but I’ve just jotted down my thoughts.
I guess I’m looking for positive ways forward.
Yes, I think Ashman is pretty sound, while signifying much less than he, and others, imagine.
I think I’ve been pretty clear all along, about my concerns with Ashman and Ashmanism. But I’ll read carefully what you’ve written and will consider if it’s worth responding with more than the suggestion to reread my posts.
Hi JJ. I don’t think I have anything to add to clarify my previous posts. I have another post coming, which will hopefully help.
I understand that my bitching about Ashman might be considered a distraction from the common enemy. But at the the moment I regard the sciency guys as at least as great a threat as the inquiry guys.
If you have a look at the comments on Facebook – the mandating of the Ochre powerpoints is a total disaster. Kids are bored and start to misbehave. Teachers understandably hate them. For the few Ochre slides I’ve seen, they’ve been less than inspiring.
This mandating is nasty, and not one of these gurus will say one word about it.
They can’t, because to open a crack would risk widening it. And right now they’re promoting a package tour which doesn’t allow side trips.
Of course they can’t. That is why my questions were of the N-E-T gang, not for the N-E-T gang.
My understanding of Marty’s current interest in Ashmanism is as follows. In a few English-speaking countries (including England and some Australian states), there has been a backlash against the previous education academic-driven inquiry fad. This has led governments (usually of the centre-right persuasion) to mandate that teachers use evidence-based teaching practices. This is not necessarily bad, but it can be problematic, since politicians typically don’t know much about science one way or another. They can mandate inquiry when education academics tell them this is how schools should work, and then turn around and mandate explicit teaching when scores drop and there’s a backlash against inquiry, but the devil is in the details in how this is actually being implemented in schools. And the way the turn to explicit teaching has been implemented in many places takes the form of pre-planned lessons delivered by means of compulsory PowerPoint slides. Marty, as an old curmudgeon, thinks PowerPoint slides are the worst thing ever to happen to education and would resist any attempt to introduce them (and in fairness, even though I have used slides — LaTeX, not PowerPoint — in courses I’ve taught, I would never ever use them as the only material support for a mathematics course, since for learning to occur students need to take notes on paper, work through problems, and so on). So the way the science of teaching is being mandated in schools might in fact not lead to truly effective teaching.
Another issue with compulsory pre-planned lessons is that they might deprofessionalize teachers, by stripping them of their autonomy and their professional ability to lead classes the way they intend to. Teacher autonomy (at least at the primary and secondary levels) is a touchy subject, since it’s a hobbyhorse of education academics, who sometimes deploy it to mean the autonomy to ignore the science of learning and use less effective teaching methods like inquiry for ideological reasons (although they would probably reframe it as disagreements about the purpose of schools, rather than ideology). For this reason Ashmanism isn’t very strong on teacher autonomy. Ashman’s school famously doesn’t ask new teachers to develop teaching material until a few years after they’ve been hired, preferring to let them concentrate on learning the material and how to teach it effectively. Their teaching materials go through an iterative educational design process, being used by several teachers, until they are as good as they can possibly get. Ashman thinks of teachers as more like skilled artisans, who’ve learned the ways of the trade by experience and contact with their mentors, than as university-educated professionals. And while there are differences in what different potters or glass blowers can make, they all use the same basic techniques, don’t they? Marty, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to think that you can reliably script a lesson down to the granular level that some of the explicit teaching proponents think you can, and while not being a proponent of inquiry, also, as a mathematician, has sympathy for the idea that mathematics is about solving mathematical problems and going above the notions that are explicitly taught and practiced. And while Ashman has in the past railed against mathematics teachers who don’t seem to like mathematics, and against cheapening mathematics down to a tool that you use to model traffic problems or to file your taxes, Marty doesn’t think Ashman (who, to be fair, isn’t a mathematician: he has a bachelor’s degree in physics) is really aware that there can be anything to mathematics beyond what can be explicitly taught and reinforced through repeated practice. Marty, on the other hand, thinks a good mathematics teacher needs professional autonomy to apply their mathematical knowledge (which should be quite high) to their teaching task.
As for me, while I do usually enjoy Ashman’s blog posts, I find that he selectively deploys the request for “evidence” in a way to position his own personal teaching style as the correct one. In education, very few practices truly have a large evidence basis behind them, and I’m sure many things Ashman does in his classes, while they probably work for him and maybe for the other teachers at his school as well, don’t have a lot of scientific evidence (in the form of randomized controlled studies) proving their effectiveness. But Ashman would never point that out, while he may point out that something another teacher does that he disapproves of has no evidence behind it. For example, I’ve noticed that Ashman doesn’t like Philosophy for Children, which he probably thinks is tantamount to inquiry bullshit. So he often points out that there is very little evidence behind it, therefore, why would anyone do it? I don’t have any strong opinions about Philosophy for Children, but not everything needs to have a large evidence base behind it, especially when we’re talking about optional enrichment programs.
Thanks, Marc. I think that is even-handed and fair. I’ll respond in some detail later.
Just to add a little supposition …
Evidence-wise I’m guessing Ashman would be likely to quote Clarendon scores, which are very high. I suspect it’s very effective at getting high scores. I’m not taking a position on whether this aligns with good mathematics teaching, but getting reasonable scores (even with the nonsensical curriculum) would appear to be a necessary, (but not necessarily sufficient) condition for quality mathematics teaching.
Also – a friend’s daughter taught at Clarendon – apparently there is very much a “Clarendon way”. And Clarendon is raved about amongst particularly recently arrived migrants incredibly keen for their kids to get high scores and do the ‘right’ courses etc. Clarendon wasn’t for my friend’s daughter and definitely not for me. They sent their kids elsewhere. But it definitely works for some. Don’t think it’s replicable across the system more generally though.
How are the Specialist Maths scores at Ashman’s school?
Thanks again, Marc. Lots to respond to.
Your first paragraph I think has got it strongly right, but I’ll add/emphasise a few points. First, it is not simply that I think the government types are thinking of explicit teaching in much too mechanical a manner; as noted in this post, I am also genuinely puzzled about exactly what the government types are advocating, and possibly mandating. I honestly don’t know what it means for a school to be complying (for better or worse). Secondly, although the buck stops with the government types, I don’t think that remotely gets Ashman and his fellow priests off the hook. They are ceaselessly banging their big boring drum, and are constantly in the news on “mathematics education”; it is their stuff that is being perverted and they have a very prominent platform to call out the perversion, and they simply decline to do so. They’re too busy winning to consider criticising some of the madness coming from their own winning team. Thirdly, I am intrinsically very sceptical of the “science of learning” stuff. It seems to me the main purpose of this stuff is to prove the bleeding obvious. But also, the science of learning guys consciously or unconsciously devalue any aspect of teaching that is not susceptible to their bleeding obvious experiments. The art of teaching and the craft of teaching are hugely important, and I do not see that the science guys can capture the subtlety of the art and the craft, or that they exhibit any interest in capturing it.
Your second paragraph is two halves, the first half of which I semi-demi-agree, and the second half I think is correct but buries the lede. To begin, there is no question that the programmatic approach to lesson planning and “resources” is an attack on the professionalism of teachers, and it hamstrings teachers; teachers may be able to do less wrong but they can also do less good. Yes, this is mostly artisan stuff, what I’m calling craft, and for that you’re looking for a clear and functional resource and plan, rather than great art, and AARE types waxing lyrical about creativity entirely miss the point. But, there is still art in the delivery, and PowerPoint still makes for bad craft.
But, more fundamentally, I find this entire fussing over “resources” and “plans” to be absurd and hugely distracting. I don’t think *anyone* should be preparing this stuff, that it is needed at all. Primary schools are more complicated, because, stupidly, the kids don’t have textbooks. But secondary schools do have textbooks; presumably even Ashman’s kids have textbooks. And, sure, they’re crappy textbooks, with typically crappy examples that are crappily presented. But, for the majority of the bread and butter topics to be introduced, the examples or very similar will suffice. So, the “resource” is gonna be Chapter 5A, and then the “plan” is to present the relevant examples or similar to those in Chapter 5A, modulo the I-do-we-do-you-do thing. What’s the big fat hairy deal of having to have some elaborate plan laid out? I simply do not buy it. I see schools knock themselves silly with slides and videos and work plans and five hundred other documents that, as far as I can tell, add at most one iota to the quality of the teaching and the learning, and not a fraction of which anybody pays any attention to whatsoever. Just use the goddam textbook, or one fixed resource, and modify, very little, as needed. Anything else is nuts.
The second part of your second paragraph is fundamental, and I think requires more emphasis. Yes, absolutely, I do not believe that Ashman is much aware of, or at least much appreciates, mathematics that exists beyond what Ashmanism can deliver. And you suggest for us “to be fair”, since Ashman is a physics guy? Screw that. If Ashman is the go-to guy for mathematics education then he should know mathematics and he should appreciate mathematics. As for what is lost through such mathematical ignorance? I wasn’t making the point that you made, that a teacher with more nous will be very limited by prescriptive Ashmanism, although it is an excellent point. I was primarily concerned with the LCD-ing of lesson content, rather than the preclusion of a more mathematical presentation of the given content.
Quickly on your final paragraph, I agree with both the kind and less kind words for Ashman’s writing. I genuinely like his posts, in and of themselves. My concern is that the pedagogy thing swamps the entire discussion, and there is never ever ever any proper discussion of content. But, also, I agree that Ashman is not really the dispassionate evidence guy that he likes to appear to be. He plays games with references and rhetoric and selection, just as all these guys do.
Thanks Marty. About Ashman’s background, what I meant is that it is a fair criticism to say that he might not know that much about mathematics, since his background is in physics, not in mathematics. I’m actually impressed that he does often seem to realize that there is more to math, and even to math teaching, than what his very formalized explicit teaching method would suggest. I’ve alluded to his posts Mathematics teachers who don’t like mathematics (https://fillingthepail.substack.com/p/mathematics-teachers-who-dont-like), which is about how mathematics teachers should have a real appreciation for the subject, and Mundanisation (https://fillingthepail.substack.com/p/mundanisation), about the tendency in education to reduce the beauty of knowledge (and especially of mathematics) to mundane life applications. I would expect someone who came to teaching from physics to have a very utilitarian view of mathematics, to think of it as a servant to the sciences, so I find these posts refreshing. But it is still fair to say that his understanding of the scope of mathematics might have its limits.
If one’s understanding of mathematics is limited then one’s understanding of mathematics education is limited.
A philosophical community of inquiry approach can yield amazing results with children…. IF brilliantly ‘taught’ by outstanding teachers.
Of course, there’s the rub.
Thanks, Susan.
Of course the rub is a hell of a rub. One would hope that there is always a place for and proper appreciation of “outstanding teachers”, although this is unlikely to come from the N-E-T gang. But, even if so, one requires a system that can utilise and function well with “not outstanding teachers”.
Even given that, however, I do not understand “philosophical community” and I am skeptical of the meaning of “inquiry approach”. Does one philosophise the teaching of the multiplication tables?