Tänk om allt du vet om utbildning är fel?

by David Didau, Charlotta Jonasson (Translator)

Hur tror du att dina elever lär sig? Och vad har forskning att säga om hur inlärning sker? Glappet mellan tro och verklighet är avgörande för undervisningens kvalitet och skillnaden kan vara större än vi anar.

I Tänk om allt du vet om utbildning är fel? gör David Didau en bred granskning av olika teser och myter om undervisning och undervisningsmetoders effekter. Här problematiserar han allt från formativ bedömning till prov och kopplingen mellan prestation för stunden och långsiktigt lärande.

Med skärpa och humor lockar författaren till ett sunt kritiskt tänkande kring vår vardagliga klassrumssituation och visar på forskningsbaserade vägar mot en mer effektiv undervisning. Denna utmanande bok grundas i en ödmjukhet inför den ansvarsfulla uppgift vi som lärare och pedagoger bär. Ibland behöver vi stanna upp och reflektera, för tänk om …

Genres: Education, Teaching, Nonfiction

400 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2015

Reviews

[Alison · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve taken a long time over this book but it has been fascinating and very thought provoking. I thoroughly recommend it to anyone working in the education system.

[E.A. · Rating 4 out of 5]

In case the page count scares you off, don't worry, this book is actually pretty easy to read. It's also easy to be inspired by.

The hard thing is to really keep challenging your established ideas on education, to keep from settling into a routine. Reading the book is just the start.

Please, if you're teaching or becoming a teacher, take the time to read this work and think about it and talk about it, and then try to apply it, and then reread it, and think and talk about it some more. If you need someone for that talking, just let me know.

All right, one specific example. Because learning is not visible, we try to make it so with activities and little tests and all, but these only reveal short-term performance, not actual learning which is durable and transferable. The counterintuitive thing, though, is that a lot of teaching strategies that improve performance actually hinder learning. So rather than helping our students learn, we're preventing them from doing so.

[RhysEvans · Rating 5 out of 5]

I finished reading this towards the end of an atypical PGCE year and I found it really refreshing. It's given me a lot of ideas on how to improve my teaching as an NQT and honestly I feel that the time I invested reading this and absorbing the material will probably prove to be more beneficial than the 6 weeks of placement I missed.

I can't believe that it isn't recommended on my uni. reading list, but then again it does challenge a lot of the education trends that were promoted throughout the year such as differentiation and formative assessment. I would recommend this book to any new teacher and I wish I had read it before I started the course for a number of reasons:

1. Resilience. It probably would have given me more resilience when it came to being assessed . As Didau argues, teacher practice is largely dominated by what feels right and trends which are often not based on either robust studies or sound logic. Further all of us are susceptible to a huge range of biases, so it's therefore no surprise that studies have found grading across schools to be totally inconsistent. It leads you to question why institutions bother with lesson grading in the first place. It is also reassuring knowing that in all probability no two teachers would give you the same grade, because everyone has their own individual rubric. Consequently, it's not worth stressing over grades or negative feedback.

2. Validation. There were so many 'thank you' moments in this book, it's ridiculous. Every piece of advice or education trend that I suspected was dubious throughout my PGCE Didau annihilates. For example, the relentless push for AfL. Every. Single. Lesson. I said to myself we're wasting so much time assessing learning, when we could be teaching. Didau draws on very robust research into how we learn to emphasise that learning doesn't happen on a lesson by lesson basis. The mind is not a storage device. One study suggests to learn a complex new concept, we need to approach it at least in 3 different contexts and occasions for the concept to be transferred from working memory to long term memory. That's just one strand of his argument. And all of his arguments always draw on a wide range of research in cognitive science, psychology and education.

3. Reassurance. At times it was kind of funny reading the book and thinking that everything I've been taught is wrong (a little bit of an exaggeration but not too far off). That might sound frustrating, but I find it reassuring to know there are so many experienced teachers out there who have no idea what they're doing. I'm just one among many who have no idea what they're doing. But hopefully now I'll be a little more informed than most and get off to a good start.

4. Optimism. I'm a lot more optimistic going into my NQT year. I have so many ideas that I want to bring into my teaching and now I'm armed with research to justify my practice. As a PGCE or NQT, it's perfect because all the references you need are listed for you to copy into your essays and portfolios. Additionally, I'm not as daunted about my teaching practice failing to live up to many of the impossible expectations of the latest education trends such as AfL or differentiation, because at least now I can hold my corner and say, 'well what evidence do you have that several differentiated worksheets for each class is going to have a positive effect on learning?' Although, I believe I've chosen a school that is research informed so I'm not anticipating a lot of confrontation.

5. Enjoyable. This is by far the wittiest and most enjoyable education book I've read. Succinct. Compassionate. Quizzical. I wasn't sold on all of his arguments and most people won't be I'm sure, but they're definitely robust and cannot be easily dismissed.

[Daniel Winters]

Excellent treatment of research in cognitive psychology and the implications for teaching and learning. Witty, sometimes sharp, but always thought provoking. You may not agree with everything, but you will be challenged to think.

[Filip · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thought provoking and sometimes opinionated, but thoroughly backed by research. A must-read for aspiring teachers or people with a general interest in education!

[Daniel Rothwell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Polemical in the right ways. Check out the barrage of quotations in the preface, introduction to see the vibe of the entire book....

I'm unsteady on how much of this goes against the grain of the language game you need to play as a teacher [in the year of 2025], so probably a bad choice to read it. Lots of 'baby's first introduction to statistics' explanations going on, which should be forced upon maybe every single teacher alive in ITT programmes. I'd be happy if the debates and the required language games in the Institutions of Education occurred in this sort of framework instead of what goes on currently....

[Henrik · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gav mig det som lärarutbildningen saknar.

[Seán Mchugh · Rating 4 out of 5]

In many ways this book is the epitome of exactly what I dislike about any literature that purports to be written for busy stressed teachers to meaningfully engage with and understand. It’s just soooooo long, the sheer physical weight of the book is oppressive, I’m not sure what paperstock they made it from but it certainly makes the anticipation of tackling it particularly daunting.

I feel like this massive tome, can be summed up with my own personal favourite aphorism, FUN OVER FUNCTION, namely that really effective learning only happens when teachers focus on what we know works as opposed to caving in to the pressure to focus on performance whether that be the performance of the teacher or the performance of the students, and of course ignoring this is easier said than done, we all like to be praised, but the sad fact is that what really helps students learn is generally not particularly entertaining or enjoyable, or even rewarding at least not until the student looks back on the process and reflects on the price they paid to understand what they now know.

I find my tried and tested strategy to maintain my sanity and still ensure I have a solid understanding/awareness of essential texts for my own professional development worked well for this book. Namely I read the introduction, and then I skipped the rest and read the conclusion, and honestly felt like that’s pretty much all most teachers really need. If there are any aspects of the conclusion that you find surprising or questionable then of course you have the option to dig deeper by reading the relevant chapter that each concluding point refers explicitly to.

As I spent an inordinate amount of time reading the research and listening to podcasts on all of the topics covered in this book possibly that’s an argument for why I felt I could reasonably skip those sections and save myself a lot of valuable vacation time!

In the author’s defence he does layout his key points at the outset enabling you to possibly make some strategic choices about what you will actually read; identifying certain ideas and ways of thinking which he believes are challenging or troublesome:

Seeing shouldn’t always result in believing (Chapter 1).
We are all victims of cognitive bias (Chapter 2).
Compromise doesn't always result in effective solutions (Chapter 4).
Evidence is not the same as proof (Chapter 5).
Progress is a gradual, non-linear process (Chapters 6 and 7).
Learning is invisible (Chapter 8).
Current performance is not only a poor indication of learning, it actually seems to prevent it (Chapters 8 and 9).
Forgetting aids learning (Chapter 9).
Experts and novices learn dififerently (Chapter 10).
Making learning more difficult can make it more durable (Chapter 11).

For me personally, the highlight of the book was possibly the takedown of high-stakes examinations as a basis for assessing student learning, “External tests can’t be used to measure educational achievement” which for some reason is buried in the appendix, so while I may not have read the majority of this book, I did read most of the appendices!

The other interesting argument Didau proposes is right at the outset of the book which is a focus on “threshold concepts” *If a concept is a way of organising and making sense of what is known in a particular field, a threshold concept organises the knowledge and experience which makes an epiphany or eureka moment possible.”

I work in a school which values what they call “concept based teaching and learning”, yet I find there is a paucity of any support for this approach in any of the literature, so it was with some surprise and delight that I read his arguments for why identifying these concepts and using them to drive teaching and learning is essential.

[Aaron Schumacher · Rating 1 out of 5]

The most salient thing about Didau's What if everything you knew about education was wrong? turns out to be that it has an appendix by Andrew Sabisky which recommends as an "excellent and readable introduction to behavior genetics" an infamous article by eugenicist Arthur Jensen, among other more and less explicitly racist, backward things.

This harmful propaganda was not only published, but also hasn't been corrected since. The book is still for sale. Didau's site still says "Andrew Sabisky has elegantly debunked a series of the most enduring edu-myths about intelligence" in it. While in a later book Didau describes eugenics as "an unpleasant and inherently racist ideology" (page 96) he hasn't disavowed the contents of his earlier book, including when asked directly (1, 2).

Didau's chapters themselves dog-whistle a little more subtly, as when he smirks at political correctness by referencing an obscure incident (page 76) or (in his later book) disparages a feminist paper without considering its contents (page 204).

The book otherwise advocates for explicit instruction and trying to get kids to remember things via, for example, spaced repetition. Didau supports a knowledge-rich curriculum like Hirsch and wants everybody to stop hassling teachers so much. His thinking here reminds me of a meme from Seven Years of Spaced Repetition Software in the Classroom.

Approach with caution.

[Jarda Kubalik · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well.. it took me weeks to get through it - I think it is a few books in one really, sometimes too packed with ideas that get lost in the sea. But it is very compelling, ambitious and especially brave in facing some of the fashions of so called modern education. I gave it full marks but I disagree with lots of its conclusions and views. Primarily, it is assuming the school education is a world in itself and the goal of schooling is to become good at studying. It looks at many HOWs sometimes forgetting the WHYs of the whole picture e.i. the life in the community of people who want to have happy lives now, not remembering facts for a long time. Second, it assumes the student more or less as a passive receiver in the scientifically modified system of increasing the amount of knowledge they should be able to demonstrate to prove the system is right. Third, it is a bit selective in what research is to be trusted (usually the papers supporting the authors views) and what not. This is hard to judge as I obviously did not study all the cited papers. But it is a weakness of almost every book on education systems I read.

[Hugo Duregård · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bästa och mest inspirerande jag läst om och inom pedagogik!

[Mathijs · Rating 3 out of 5]

Learning styles, teach to learn/learn to teach, psychology, education

[Bob Jamieson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a must read for anyone with any serious intentions of educating.


I would like to beat a number of my colleagues over the head with it.

[Ietrio · Rating 1 out of 5]

Yet another guru with another armchair concept. Mandatory schooling? Charged curricula? Stressful exams? That is nothing to Didau. Make it harder! Punish the sinners to get better (dead) angels.