A comparison that helps no one

Dear Michael

I really enjoyed reading your “A comparison that helps no one”, which Penny shared with me. I read it twice. The line that stayed with me is that explicit instruction isn’t the opposite of inquiry, but one of the things that makes meaningful inquiry possible. This resonates exactly with what Dewey was complaining about back in 1938, when he wrote, “MANKIND likes to think in terms of extreme opposites. It is given to formulating its beliefs in terms of Either-Ors, between which it recognizes no intermediate possibilities.”¹

The either-or debate leaves out that learning is never purely cognitive. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang and Antonio Damasio argue that emotion and cognition are not separate systems: we think about what we care about, and what we feel shapes what we attend to, remember and carry into new situations.² Inference, the move from what is given to what is not yet stated, depends on that engagement. A child who infers is taking a risk, and whether they take it depends on whether the room has taught them their thinking is welcome. Boaler’s work in mathematics, drawing on Dweck’s research on mindset, makes the same point from another angle: students’ beliefs about who can do mathematics shape whether they persist through the struggle that conceptual understanding requires.^{3, 4} If we only measure what is retrieved, we miss the conditions that decide whether a student is willing to reason at all.

The cacophony surrounding direct instruction and the science of learning as being the only guarantee of learning is narrow and misleading. Education is broader than this, and it deals not only with academic milestones determined by retrieval results and understanding gauges; it also deals with student identity, capacity, and possibility. When we neglect one, we subtly alter the course of potential development. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote about the purpose of education: “Intelligence plus character—that is the goal of true education.”⁵ While a philosophy of education statement can be relegated to something abstract and reduced to a few short lines in a CV that no one will ever pay much attention to, it remains central to how pedagogy is lived out by each educator daily. What we believe informs our daily interactions with students, shaping their identity through what they infer over a year-long experience of our lived-out beliefs and what they come to know from us about who they are and what we believe them to be through our teaching.

I’d enjoy continuing the conversation.

Warm regards
Kelvin