Curios of the week #179

This week was a short one. We closed on Thursday for a boarders’ weekend, enabling our boarding students to go home and visit their families. As a result, I had five days of meetings and packed into four and was glad when Thursday afternoon came.

I taught my Year 7 science class about the Earth’s magnetic field. This is highly confusing because the Magnetic North Pole is a magnetic south pole and so on. We also discussed auroras, which are a cool topic.

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This week’s Curios include a pivot in cognitive load theory, some mathematics teaching misconceptions, an authoritarian police state and much more.

Regular readers will be aware that a survey about the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers closed yesterday and that the Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE) have been running a campaign attempting to influence submissions.

As part of that campaign, the AARE has published a series of blog posts. The latest, by Kelly Ilich of Curtin University, is ostensibly a sceptical piece about artificial intelligence and the need for the Standards to reflect AI developments in some way. There is some sense in these suggestions.

Unfortunately, it is not long before the usual preoccupations of so many education academics come through. The section in the standards titled ‘know the content and how to teach it’ should apparently be rewritten to encourage ineffective methods for teaching academic knowledge:

“Students do not learn only by receiving explanations or interacting with text on a screen. They learn through movement, experimentation, conversation, observation, making and participation in shared physical and social environments.

The OECD identifies teacher-guided and experiential learning as foundations of active learning for human flourishing. Teachers create the conditions in which students investigate, encounter uncertainty, revise their thinking and connect abstract ideas to lived experience. The Castlereagh Statement similarly affirms the importance of embodied experiences, human educators and community.”

The OECD really should know better by now, given that its own evidence keeps proving it wrong.

Yes, there is a role for experiential learning in schools, but that is either for developing ‘biologically primary’ knowledge—see more on this below—rather than the typical content of the school curriculum, or, depending on what you mean by experiential learning, for developing further expertise in individuals who already have lots of relevant knowledge. Unless this is made clear, experiential learning should stay out of the Standards.

When Will They Learn? Episode #14 called ‘Scandal Du Jour’ is out now. Caiti and I discuss those Standards for Australian teachers, a cool article by Daisy Christodoulou on so-called transferable skills and give our own takes on the scandal du jour that is still unfolding at Cambridge University, even if the main protagonist has now resigned.

The episode is available on all major podcast platforms and you can read the show notes over at the When Will They Learn? Substack.

There have been mutterings from right-wing and, especially, American accounts on Twitter/X that all is not right in Britain. It is hard to take these too seriously because I have visited the place while others have been voicing these concerns and nothing seems particularly amiss. But despite my scepticism, some events still cause me to sit up and take notice.