The Future of Teaching: And the Myths That Hold It Back

by Guy Claxton

It's time for the educational slugfest to stop. 'Traditional' and 'progressive' education are both caricatures, and bashing cartoon images of each other is unprofitable and unedifying. The search for a new model of education - one that is genuinely empowering for all young people - is serious and necessary. Some good progress has already been made, but teachers and school leaders are being held back by specious beliefs, false oppositions and the limited thinking of orthodoxy.

Drawing on recent experience in England, North America and Australasia, but applicable round the world, The Future of Teaching clears away this logjam of bad science and slack thinking and frees up the stream of much-needed innovation. This timely book aims to banish arguments based on false claims about the brain and poor understanding of cognitive science, reclaim the nuanced middle ground of teaching that develops both rigorous knowledge and 'character', and lay the foundations for a 21st-century education worthy of the name.

Genres: Education, Nonfiction, Teaching

260 pages, ebook

Published April 28, 2021

About the author

Guy Claxton is Emeritus Professor of the Learning Sciences at the University of Winchester. His many publications include Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind: Why Intelligence Increases When You Think Less. He lives in the UK.

Reviews

[Stuart Macalpine · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brilliant summary of where we are in the struggle between traditional and progressive pedaogogy- the book knowledgeable explores and deconstructs the dichotomy. It provides an excellent grounding for someone wanting to understand the changes and challenges they are hearing about in education.

[Seán Mchugh · Rating 3 out of 5]

When it was interesting, it was worth reading, but if most of the teachers that are anything like the ones I know, most found the majority to be very, very tedious.

Here are the few examples, worth a read:

The Future of Teaching

It’s time for the educational slugfest to stop. 'Traditional' and 'progressive’ education are both caricatures, and bashing cartoon images of each other is
unprofitable and unedifying. The search for a new model of education - one that is genuinely empowering for all young people - is serious and necessary. Some good progress has already been made, but teachers and school leaders are being held back by specious beliefs, false oppositions and the limited thinking of orthodoxy.

Foreword
Dylan Wiliam

XVII
As Guy said, “arguments about the relative merits of traditional and progressive teaching methods largely miss the point. If you look into your heart, know your own attitudes, sentiments, beliefs and priorities accurately and honestly, then the methods you use will, quite naturally, be right, authentic and effective“ (Claxton, 1978 p 24, emphasis in original).

XVII
Many teachers believe that the main purpose of education is to help students pass exams and get good jobs, although the vast majority of teachers would agree that this is not the only purpose of education. Perhaps mindful of my own early teaching experiences, in my own work I have spent little time discussing the goals of education and have instead focused on helping teachers do what they want and need to do, given the generally conflicting, and often irreconcilable, demands that are made on them. But, as Guy makes clear in this compelling and powerful new book, supporting teachers to teach more effectively within an impoverished view of the overall purpose of education has real dangers, now more than ever.

As Seymdur Papert pointed out over 20 years ago,

the model that says “learn while you’re at school, while you’re young the skills that you will apply during your lifetime” is no longer tenable. The skills that you can learn when you’re at school will not be applicable. They will be obsolete by the time you get into the workplace and need them, except for one skill. The one really competitive skill is the skill of being able to learn. (Papert, 1998)

In an era when schools could reasonably expect to teach children most of what they needed for their adult lives, then an overwhelming focus on getting students the best possible grades might be defensible. However, it is now clear that students cannot possibly learn all they need to know by the age of 16 or 18 for the simple reason that much of what they will need has not been discovered or invented yet. No matter how much we teach our students, if we extinguish the passion for learning that all young children bring to school, we will have failed them.

XIX
Indeed, While teacher-led approaches may Well be appropriate where the goal is to ensure that students develop certain important, well-defined skills such as grammatical writing, accurate mathematical calculation, or scientific reasoning, claiming that all teaching should be of this kind is way too sweeping. To be sure, those advocating a ‘traditional’ approach to teaching do have much empirical evidence on their side, but that is largely, I believe, because researchers have focused on the most easily researched questions. It is much easier to decide whether one teaching approach is better than another if the goal is getting students to balance chemical equations than it is if the goal is to debate efiectively the science and ethics of genetically modified foods. Those who argue for the superiority of direct instruction no matter what it is that you want your students to learn remind me of the drunk looking for his keys underneath the streetlamp, not because that is where he dropped the keys, but because that is where the light is. How you teach has to be subordinate to what you want students to learn.

As the many scientific studies that Guy cites in this book make clear, we get certainty about the best way to teach only by reducing education to a parody of what it might be. As Guy has made consistently clear for over 40 years, teaching is a complex, multifaceted endeavour. An education that effectively prepares young people for life in the 21st century has to be about more than what a government says should be in the national curriculum.

Prologue

There is a much misguided searching for what works these days.

There is a small but vocal group busy lobbying for the idea that the only thing that ‘works’ is something called direct instruction in a knowledge-rich curriculum: what I will call the DIKR for short.

Results plus
One limitation of this DIKR thinking is the preoccupation with exam performance as the measurement of success. There is little consideration of other outcomes of education such as what I would call the development of epistemic character, and while some DIKR adherents do speak of character, it tends to be reduced to traits such as stoicism, diligence and compliance — not to the learning attitudes and aptitudes that might equip young people to respond well to the challenges of life. In fact, in terms of coping with uncertainty, these outcomes all seem to be left alarmingly to chance.

XXV
Cognitive science
Unfortunately, much of the cognitive scientific research that is induced by the neotraditionalists is actually out of date, highly selected to suit a particular case, and grossly language over-generalised.

The animus

8
In traditional schools, writing is usually the main way in which students give evidence of their knowledge and understanding, and the main style of writing is expository and argumentative: you explain, you reason, you critique. Some traditional schools value speech, but it tends to be only in the context of formal, and rather adversarial, ‘debating’. In more progressive schools, other methods of displaying your thinking are more common. The development of ‘exploratory talk’ between students is seen as important, and they are often able to display their progress in a variety of more creative ways: through mini-TED talks, videos, artistic products and so on. In general, Progs value collaborative learning, encouraging learners to explore ideas in discussion, while Trads see learning as mainly a solo activity, involving solitary reading, thinking and writing.

12
It is abundantly clear that Willingham’s central message is one of balance, and he could not sum up the twin insights of cognitive science more clearly:

It is certainly true that facts without the skills to use them are of little value. It is equally true that one cannot deploy thinking skills effectively without factual knowledge.

13
It must be reassuring to those of us who struggle to keep up with the welter of publications these days to know that little of major significance has happened in the educational, cognitive and learning sciences in the last 30 years, and none at all in the last ten.
…
Suffice it to say here that, although the DIKR people profess to respect research, the evidence they present is in fact highly contested, cherry-picked to support their case, and often out of date.

29
Values

Summary
How you should teach depends on what you are teaching for; what you consider the most desirable residues of those 12 long years to be. Some knowledge, practical literacies and useful certificates can be part of that package of valued outcomes (though we must remember that those norm- referenced certificates are competitive and have market value only because hundreds of thousands of children have to fail to get them). But no one thinks that they are sufficient. So what are these other outcomes that allow the inevitable losers at the exam game to be winners at education? Presumably they have to be broader attitudes and attributes that will enable people to flourish, whatever their path or station in life turns out to be. Progressives and traditionalists tend to disagree about what those traits should be — but nobody denies that school should be about more than subjects and results. And Trads seem to be less inclined to engage in the difficult, delicate conversation about what those outcomes ought to be, if they are to equip all young people to rise to the considerable, and in some ways unprecedented, challenges of life in the mid- to late 21st-century.

34
Knowledge
Only when bald knowledge has been transmuted into a living
understanding does it become genuinely useful. Only then are you capable of paraphrasing it, discussing it, critiquing it, adapting and applying it, transferring it to new situations, combining it with other ideas, using it as an analogy and so on. On the processes by which true understanding comes about - and the ways these processes can be harnessed and strengthened by teachers - the Trads have been rather reticent.

39
What knowledge do kids need?
In all of these examples, sophisticated ways of thinking, many derived from the disciplines that lie behind the traditional subjects of the curriculum, will be useful or necessary. But that does not mean that those subjects have to be taught separately, all the time. The fact that thinking in history is in some important ways different from thinking in maths is not a strong argument for preserving the sanctity of the subjects. Perhaps some people cling to the subjects of the classical curriculum for a different reason. Once you break their magic spell and start to think about what’s is really useful for young people, growing up in the 21st century, to know, the discussion quickly becomes diificult — intricate and contested — and the thorny issue of values become unavoidable. But I, along with David Perkins and many others, think it is not good enough to retreat into a knee-jerk defence of the same old subject matter taught in the same old way and examined by the same old kinds of tests. Children deserve, and urgently need, a more thoughtful response from us than that.

40
Kristen Buras, in her detailed review of Hirsch’s book The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them in the Harvard Education Review, summarises a wealth of research that documents what is actual going on in classrooms. She concludes that, certainly in the USA, “schools overall remain traditional institutions that offer teacher-centered, whole-class, text-book focused instruction”. While acknowledging that progressive ideas have had some impact on schools, such changes “have not significantly transformed curricular content or pedagogical practice overall“.

46
Michael Young agrees: he says, “Power in this broad sense is . . . the capacity to achieve something of value.” But it is not clear that power in the abstract sense of the previous paragraph automatically delivers, for all young people across the world in the 21st century, such tangible benefits. Or does Knowledge Is Power simply mean that remembering the right stuff at school gets you good examination grades, and these act as entrance tickets to ‘better’ universities and ‘better’ (white- collar and higher salaried) jobs? In which case it isn’t the knowledge itself that is powerful; it is the display of a certain kind of knowledgeability — a kind of set-piece performance — that is at stake.

52
Arguments such as Michael Young’s that try to pass off the traditional curriculum as the most "powerful knowledge’, that today’s young people need (in particular those from poor aged or disadvantaged backgrounds) just won’t wash. And knowledge per se — facts committed to memory — is of little practical use beyond the artificial confines of the examination hall or the quiz show. Knowledge needs to be understood, and that means connected to personal histories and current concerns, if it is to ‘empower’ anyone to get things done that matter to them. People- even professors — do not live in Platonic Worlds of rarefied abstractions and learned debates; we live in messy worlds of breakdowns, deadlines and feelings, and education, if it is to be a useful preparation for life, carmot run away from that and hide in parts of speech and trigonometry.

58
Thinking
Some explicit, declarative knowledge is useful in skill development, but it is knowledge that can be immediately applied, or which helps you see how you could develop your expertise, not knowledge per se. You don’t get good at taking penalty kicks, playing the violin, talking in public — or thinking critically and logically — just by having your head filled with lots of information.

59
Cognitive apprenticeship
If all the teachers in a school were using congruent but complementary teaching approaches, suited to their own subjects, we could see school itself as providing a more general kind of epistemic apprenticeship in which the learning and thinking skills of each subject were gradually adding up to more than the sum of their parts. We could see school as an all-round mental training in which cognitively more adept people (teachers) design activities (learning hard stuff) and model ways of engaging with it (thinking out loud) so that beginning thinkers (students) become progressively better at thinking and learning. From this perspective, the content of the curriculum has a dual role. It is — or ought to be — right (as I argued in the previous chapter), and it also serves as an appropriately graded series of exercises for developing ever more powerful ways of thinking and learning (students’ epistemic mentality).

90
Learning (and learning to learn)
Conventional education however relies on, and rewards, a very particular kind of learning — the acquisition and display of conceptual tools and frameworks that have little to do with students’ everyday lives and concerns — which may well not excite natural curiosity. There are reasons why some of this focus on intellectual knowledge is desirable, but where this focus becomes all-consuming, it squeezes out many other valuable kinds of learning and encourages those who are good at these different kinds of learning, but not at school learning, to consider themselves and their intellects to be second rate. Analysing, arguing and writing about matters remote from people’s lived experience are valuable and sophisticated accomplishments, but they are not the whole hog, and lives can be well lived without high levels of such skills — and countless lives have been.

119
Memory
The truth, almost certainly, is that intelligence arises from a complicated mixture of knowledge and skills and techniques and beliefs, mindsets and habits of mind and the ability to stay calm in the midst of uncertainty and frustration and a willingness to think hard and an ecology of smart tools and smart people and a bit of genetic good fortune and a dozen other things.
…
It really doesn’t help anyone, least of all the students, to minimise the notion of intelligence to fit a small prior agenda and then try to pass this off this shrunken version as the whole thing. And in general we might concur with Jeff Howard’s judgement that common "beliefs about human intelligence and educability are limiting and counterproductive; they represent a major constraint on the development of our young, and an entirely inappropriate basis for 21st century pedagogy”.’

122
It is perfectly possible for people to know (in a superficial sense) lots of things that they don’t really understand. Most of the time, in most subjects, in a well-designed lesson, these mechanical models and constraints simply don’t apply. They belong to another world, and a pretty arcane one it is too. What matters in school is understanding, application and transfer, and for those to happen, you need plenty of thinking, linking and discussing; merely knowing doesn’t cut it.

And the best way to make sure it is retrievable is through frequent tests and repetitions?
That is good teaching only for formulae, procedures, definitions and so on which have to be retained accurately and verbatim. For everything else — like learning how to use a chisel skilfully, how to feel your way into the meaning of a poem, or how to apply Ohm’s Law to a real electrical problem — brute methods of testing and repetition are neither adequate nor necessary.

142
Summary
Scientific research cannot tell teachers what to do. You cannot deduce an ought from an is. Research says that you want these outcomes, then this might be a plausible or effective way of going about it. As Daniel Willingham himself says, “Even when there’s something that scientists know with confidence that teachers should know, the classroom application is still tricky. It certainly doesn’t mean that scientists can tell teachers, ‘Well, that means you ought to be doing this.’

160
Reality - getting out more
Perpetuating the unfortunate confusion between ‘memorising’ as verbatim retention, and ‘memory’ as the hypothetical ‘store’ we’re all our accumulated knowledge and skills are supposed to be warehoused.

194
The future of teaching
And that is why the myths and half-truths that I have dissected in this book are so pernicious: they hamper and misguide the conversations and innovations that need to happen — that are happening in many schools around the world, but not nearly enough — if schools are to fulfil their potential and do their duty as nurseries of the next generation. We cannot afford to be held back by oversimplified and dogmatic views. Educational improvement should not be just about racking up the test scores and getting more poor kids to Oxford; our ambition should be far greater than that alone. It is about rearing millions of youngsters who naturally think critically, creatively and collectively about the world in which they find themselves, find or devise work that is fulfilling and responsible, and strive to make the world a better and a safer place for their children — our grandchildren — to inhabit.

[Trevor · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book that, particularly if you are a teacher, you need to read. The author begins by saying that he very much dislikes the false dichotomy between traditional and progressive education. That each has their place, and to be solely one or the other – if that was even possible – is a parody of what it means to teach and learn. However, there has been a major swing towards traditional ideas that are often, as in Australia and the UK, being mandated for teachers to teach in their classrooms. This is done by governments and other bodies, often composed of people who have never actually taught in a classroom. The danger here is longstanding. Since everyone has spent time in a classroom, everyone imagines that they are experts in what it means to be a teacher. This is odd, because I think it is unlikely that anyone would think they are an expert football player just by watching people play the game, but having watched teachers teach for a decade or so, people assume they know what it means to teach.

There is a movement that has gained strength across the world over the last decade or so called the science of learning. This makes some remarkably strong claims. One is that the main questions of teaching and learning are settled science. That is, that cognitive science has proven a number of things to be true beyond question. One is that direct instruction is the most effective way to teach anything. Another, that learners have limited capacity and that that capacity is always in danger of being overwhelmed. This is called cognitive load theory and it is meant to have been proven by a range of experiments that prove that it is all too easy to overwhelm students and thereby stop them learning. This means that they believe that the best way to teach anyone anything is to break it down into easily digestible chunks and to test each chunk has been learned before you proceed to teaching the next chunk – so that the chunks build like a series of Lego blocks one upon the other. This is also seen as a repudiation of what had long been seen as standard education theory – known as constructivism. Constructivism asserts that people learn best when they are not seen as blank slates, but rather that they learn when new knowledge takes into account their previous knowledge and seeks to build upon this. Constructivism is derided by those who support the science of learning as leaving people to figure it out for themselves. That is, the supporters of the science of learning claim that the student-centred approaches of constructivism leave too little room for the teacher – and so we need to shift back to teacher centred ways of teaching. The central error that they see of constructivism is that students – especially children – simply do not have enough knowledge to learn unassisted, and therefore need to be give facts, and lots of them, before they can begin learning on their own.

The author says that constructivism is closer to settled science than the ideas those proposed in direct instruction. In fact, he goes so far as to compare it to the theory of evolution as a ‘theory’. That we need to construct new knowledge on the foundation of what we already know seems hardly controversial to me – but it is certainly controversial to those who promote the science of learning. He also says that there simply isn’t a single science of learning – but rather that multiple sciences play a role in helping us to understand how learning takes place, and that these often present difficult to reconcile understandings of that process. And the reason is rather simple – humans are complicated things and how they learn is also complicated. The other problem that the science of learning faces is that isn’t one thing. Too often, what the science of learning focuses upon is ways to teach things that can, at least seemingly in principle, be broken down into discrete parts. So, they focus on mathematics or phonics. But can what you can do in a mathematics class really apply in the same way to how we go about learning art, or history, or literature?

Since the author is a cognitive scientist, much of this book challenges the supposed cognitive science that is promoted as the ‘settled’ part of the settled science of learning. As I said, since there isn’t a single science of learning, to say what makes for effective learning on a scientific basis is going to struggle anyway – but you might think that at least what it has to say about cognitive science might be on a firmer foundation. He points out that this isn’t the case. Rather, most of those promoting these ideas rely on experiments that were conducted a long time ago – often over 30 years ago – and that cognitive science has moved on a lot since then. These experiments also had a narrow focus on what it meant to learn. Often this involved giving people strings of numbers to memorise or lists of nonsense syllables. Humans are remarkably bad at remembering such things. This is something, if you are old enough, that you would have noticed when you tried to remember someone’s telephone number. This is where much of the stuff that is said about cognitive load theory comes in. The idea is that we have two different buckets in our memory. A very small bucket, which is short term memory, and a near infinite bucket that is long term memory. The problem is that to get into long term memory, new information needs to pass through the very narrow neck of short term memory – which is very easily overwhelmed. This is why we need to chunk new information and then to ensure that it has made the transition into long term memory.

But this is only true of information that we cannot relate to what we already know. These memory tests show incredibly limitations if the information trying to be remembered makes no sense, but as soon as it becomes meaningful, it becomes much easier to remember. Years ago, I read lots of books on improving my memory – I’ve a terrible memory for names, for example. And I thought it would be worthwhile if I could learn lots of facts. And so, I learned various methods of being able to do just that. One of them was to memorise a list of rhyming words related to the numbers up to ten. One/bun, two/shoe, three/tree, four/door. The idea being that this would give me a scaffold, and if I needed to remember a list of things in order, I could create a picture in my head for each of the things I needed to remember connected to the nouns in the memorised list. If I needed to get milk, bread, shoe polish and potatoes from the shops, I could picture a bun floating in a pool of milk, a shoe with slices of bread coming out of it, a tree covered in shoe polish and so on. And this actually worked really well when I ever used it – the problem was it quickly became obvious to me that in real life, I very rarely needed to remember lists of things in order. This is a great party trick, but not a particularly useful life skill. Learning long series of disconnected data isn’t really learning. Learning is joined up and the meaning is a key part of what makes learning fun and interesting and effective. Saying that pulling information together is something for later, misses this key point.

That isn’t to say that we should allow children to learn on their own. I’m not sure any teachers have ever really done this, the progressive teacher that is torn down by those promoting direct instruction has probably never existed. The point isn’t to say that direct instruction is never appropriate – but more that it works, if at all, only for limited situations, and then, not always as well as people who promote it think it does. The author gives lots of examples where students are given direct instruction and other ways of learning and compares the outcomes. In some of these examples the children are first explained the problem they need to solve and work alone, and then in pairs, and then as a whole class to come up with strategies that they think might work. The teacher never leaves any of the children floundering. But they also don’t just provide the solution. The point is to get the children thinking for themselves – the struggle is an essential element of the learning process. And this is the opposite of direct instruction in many ways. Rather than the teacher providing the step-by-step process that leads to the solution, the children have to tackle it on their own. The teacher might suggest certain paths towards that solution, but only as a way to encourage them to think deeper about how to get to that solution. The direct instruction part comes at the end of the process, rather than at the beginning. That is, once the class comes together having struggled with the problem. When tested again later, those who had been encouraged to struggle with the problem proved better able to retain ‘what works’ than those who had been feed the answer piecemeal. It seems obvious to me that this should be the case.

The point of a lot of the science of learning it to make learning teacher proof. If you just follow these simple steps, everyone will learn. The problem is that this is something that is impossible to achieve. This is the reason why we need to have real teachers in classrooms. Teaching is complex. What worked today might not work tomorrow. You need a professional teacher in the classroom to try ever new strategies to see what works. There is no single, already settled means to ensure learning will occur. Learning is always situated and always relational. Knowing your students and what they are ready to learn is the most important attribute of a good teacher.

I’ve barely scratched the surface on this book. It should be compulsory reading, particularly for those who are so keen to mandate how teaching and learning will occur in our classrooms. Too many people are prepared to say that various forms of rote learning have been proven to be the best means of teaching everything and to claim that his has the imprimatur of the best available science. As this book make clear, this isn’t even true of the science that it relies upon the most. We need to move beyond the metaphor that the human brain is just a wet version of a computer. Learning is inherently a social activity and so we need to move beyond considering it just about forcing chunks of data into little brains.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enjoyed the book but felt Guy was a bit reductive and simplistic in his treatment of the DIKR position. Having read most of those he ‘tears down’, I felt he was a little unfair on their position and believe this book would have been better with less of an antagonistic, WWF feel…though maybe that’s a better way to get sales?

I do feel that there are some great ideas in.the book but not sure this does anything particularly groundbreaking or new in terms of discussing the future of teaching. Parts felt like it could be settling the prog/trad debate, while others pour gasoline on it 🤣

Worth a read for teachers and leaders to have a decent overview of the current discourse in education but I don’t think it settles beyond clarifying that you need a mix of direct instruction and discovery learning.

[Karen Brockway · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found this really inspiring and interesting, although I admit that part of the reason for this is Guy Claxton articulates views I already hold in a more eloquent way, offering excellent critiques of research (thus showing confirmation bias that Claxton criticises within!)

I've come away full of ideas for beginning teaching with my new year 7s next year and a more thorough knowledge of the research surrounding CLT. Highly recommended for any teacher.

[Debs Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

I appreciated Claxton’s attempts to navigate a middle road in the polarization of “traditional” vs “progressive” teaching. I think he does a masterful job of showing most good teaching is a blend of approaches, that teaching is a craft (I truly believe this), and that teachers _must_ be lifelong learners if they want to continually improve in their craft. Again, this is a core philosophy for me.