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Is Teaching Golf Like Teaching Algebra?
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson

My work in this field starts with a simple logical argument:

A: Learning happens in the brain and the mind.

B: Therefore, teachers might benefit from knowing more about the brain and the mind.

C: Therefore, we should hang out with people who study brains (neuroscientists) and who study minds (psychologists). We can learn from them, and they can learn from us.

So far, so good.

That seemingly simple logic, however, gets complicated quickly.

First — as I argue frequently — we benefit MUCH MORE from studying psychology than neuroscience.

Second — again, a refrain here on the blog — we need always to remember context and nuance.

For example:

Teaching 1st graders might require different skills and techniques than teaching 8th graders, or college students.

Sometimes neurotypical students benefit from different teaching strategies than non-neurotypical students.

Cultural differences shape classroom expectations, and might thus require or forbid various teaching strategies.

In other words, my simple idea — “improve my teaching by learning brainy stuff!!” — quickly requires all sorts of subtleties.

In fact, I’ve just stumbled across a new one. Let me try to explain.

To The Classroom, and Beyond

As an English teacher, I live in a wordy world.

We study poems and write essays and read Zora Neale Hurston and revel in grammar. (Well, I revel. My students graciously put up with me.)

As the Prince of Denmark once said: “Words, words, words.”

To teach these English-y topics, I’ve got lots of strategies:

Retrieval practice: “What’s the difference between a direct object and a predicate nominative…Sylvia?”

Managing alertness: “Alistair and Yazmeen, please write your answers on the board.”

Working memory load reduction: “What’s our acronym for the 4 key verbs?”

Research suggests all this wordiness will help my students learn.

HOWEVER, not everything that students learn boils down to words.

Yes, SOME knowledge is “declarative“: I can say it out loud.

Yet OTHER knowledge is “procedural“: something I do, not something I can say.

Imagine, then, that I’m teaching someone how to play golf. As they practice, should I use those same teaching strategies? Will my players benefit from translating their physical activity into words?

For instance:

Retrieval practice: “Describe the best stance for a putt…Sylvia.”

Working memory load reduction: “What’s our acronym for the ideal golf swing?”

Will words, words, words help golfers?

Plot Twist

Just this last week I’ve started finding research raising intriguing doubts.

The research suggests:

Some kinds of knowledge aren’t really verbal: say, for example, a golf swing.

Asking students to put not-verbal knowledge into words as they learn actually gets in the way of learning.

In other words, if I ask a golfer to describe her swing while learning, I’m asking her to cram procedural knowledge into declarative form.

Little boy blowing golf ball into hole.

That translation — put “not words” into “words” — makes learning harder.

I’ve been using golf as an example because the studies I’ve found focus on golf skills.

In this study, novice golfers learned less when asked to describe their golf strokes.

In this study, expert golfers improved less under similar circumstances.

But off the top of my head, I can think of all sorts of school topics that might (MIGHT!!) fit this category:

Pottery and painting and dancing

Handwriting

Manipulating microscopes or pipettes or other science-y tools

Shop

If the golf research applies to these procedural skills, then many of my word-based teaching strategies need a substantial rethink.

Not So Fast

In this highly speculative post, I should rush to include several cautions:

First: I haven’t yet found any research applying this idea to the school subjects I’ve mentioned. I’m extrapolating — always a perilous thing to do. (Most of the research, in fact, focuses on facial recognition.)

Second: this line of reasoning might lure some folks into “learning-styles” flavored teaching theories. Beware that siren song!

Third: I might be overstating the changes that flow from this possible conclusion. For example, my pottery students should still do retrieval practice — but they should respond to questions by showing me rather than telling me the answers.

As you can tell, I’m still working out these ideas in my head. If you have insights — or research suggestions — I hope you’ll share them with me.


By the way: this research topic is called the “verbal overshadowing effect.” That is: when I translate procedural knowledge into declarative terms, the mistranslation into words  (“verbal”) overshadows the actual content knowledge — which is at its root procedural.


Flegal, K. E., & Anderson, M. C. (2008). Overthinking skilled motor performance: Or why those who teach can’t do. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review15, 927-932.

Chauvel, G., Maquestiaux, F., Ruthruff, E., Didierjean, A., & Hartley, A. A. (2013). Novice motor performance: Better not to verbalize. Psychonomic bulletin & review20, 177-183.

“You Can Find Research that Proves Anything”
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson

Sometimes teachers hear about research that SUPPORTS our current beliefs and teaching practice.

Honestly, that experience feels great. “Look,” says my interval voice, “I’ve been doing it right all along.”

And sometimes, we hear about research that CONTRADICTS our beliefs and practice.

Honestly, that’s a punch to the gut. “Wait,” says that voice, “I’ve been wrong all this time?”

This discomfort often prompts us to use a handy rejoinder: “well, you can find research that proves anything…”

The not so subtle implication: “yes, this research says that — but this research doesn’t really matter because even absurd positions can find research backing…”

So, what should we do when a colleague rejects our research-based advice with this claim? Or, what should we do when we find ourselves saying it?

Step #0: Let’s Check

In the first place, I’m honestly not so sure that we can find reseach that says anything.

Let’s take a common piece of teaching advice: “teachers should shake hands with their students as they enter the classroom.”

Can we find research supporting, or contradicting, this claim? If “we can find research that says anything,” we certainly should be able to.

Child wearing a bow tie and a happy expression standing in front of a chalkboard with a bar graph showing steady increases

Well, so far I haven’t found any research examining this question.

As I’ve written before, Dr. Clay Cook found that “positive greetings” at the door produced specific benefits for specific students.

But his research doesn’t remotely suggest that all teachers should “shake-in” at all times. (For one thing: “positive greetings” don’t have to be handshakes.)

I just asked Elicit.org this handshake-at-the-door question. The closest answer I found is a study showing that female professors get higher ratings on the first day of class when they shake in, whereas male professors get lower ratings.

But again: that study neither confirms nor contradicts the larger claim about daily handshakes.

It seems that we can’t always “find research that proves anything.”

Step #1: Start Reading

But let’s agree that we can find research supporting lots of strange conclusions — or, at least, conclusions I disagree with. What should we do when that happens?

Imagine that a friend tells me: “chewing gum increases learning.”

When I ask him if he’s found research supporting that position, he grins broadly and says: “check this out.”

So, let’s check it out!

A cursory glance suggests that — yes — my friend has found research supporting his position, but it’s not terribly persuasive research.

It includes exactly 16 participants.

It’s published in a journal that focuses on engineering (not, say, memory, or learning).

Its method of measuring attention is … well … HIGHLY unscientific.

In other words, my friend found research supporting this claim; however, I didn’t need to look very hard to find reasons to doubt it.

That is: it doesn’t really matter if I can find research that “proves anything.” What matters is if I can find GOOD research supporting a particular claim.

Step #2: Get Curious

But, is GOOD research enough? If I find one well-done study, should I accept that chewing gum does promote memory?

When I got started in this field, I noticed that the scholars I admired most shared a surprising intellectual habit:

They shift to curiosity.

That is:

Person 1 says: “research shows that chewing gum improves learning!

Person 2 says: “nope; research shows that chewing gum has no effect at all on learning.”

At this point, person 1 might say: “well, you can find research that shows anything. You’re obviously wrong. My research is correct.”

Or, person 1 might say: “wow, I’m curious that we have seen research that arrives at contradictory conclusions! Let’s explore…”

Over the years, I’ve come to rely on two sources when I feel curious and want to explore.

Scite.ai asks how often a particular study has been cited overall; how many times its findings have been confirmed; and how many times its findings have been contradicted.

Connectedpapers.com looks at the most frequently cited papers related to the topic, and creates a cool spiderweb diagram to show their connections.

Using these websites, person 1 and person 2 can plug in their studies, and see how many OTHER studies arrive at their conclusions.

That is: rather that rely on just ONE study, we can look at a WHOLE GROUP of studies to reach our conclusion.

When I use these tools to explore the chewing gum claim, as I’ve written before, I arrive at several conclusions:

First: researchers have done a surprising amount of work on this topic. (It seems like SUCH a niche-y question that I’m surprised folks have investigated it substantively.)

Second: even the quality research in this field (i.e., more than 16 participants) arrives at contradictory results.

This overview, noting that we can find clear evidence of both benefits and detriments, concludes that “the robustness of reported effects of gum chewing on cognition has to be questioned.”

So, at this point I don’t think we can claim we have a decisive, research-informed answer to this question.

In other words: the question is not “can we find research that proves anything?”; or even “can we find GOOD research that points in a clear direction?”; but “can we find SEVERAL studies all pointing in a clear direction — and more studies pointing this way than that way?”

Only if the answer to that last question is “yes” should we teachers start changing our practice because “research says so.”

TL;DR

Can we really find research that supports any claim about education?

First: no.

Second: we don’t want research, we want good research.

Third: we don’t just want good research, we want several good studies pointing roughly toward the same conclusion.

Until we have met these criteria, we can’t really say that a particular claim merits our attention and respect.


Cook, C. R., Fiat, A., Larson, M., Daikos, C., Slemrod, T., Holland, E. A., … & Renshaw, T. (2018). Positive greetings at the door: Evaluation of a low-cost, high-yield proactive classroom management strategy. Journal of Positive Behavior Interventions20(3), 149-159.

Wilson, J., Stadler, J., Schwartz, B., & Goff, D. (2009). Touching your students: The impact of a handshake on the first day of class. Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 108-117.

Zero to Birth by William Harris
Erik Jahner, PhD
Erik Jahner, PhD

No two human brains are the same – but, the developmental process that leads to the adult brain is also remarkably similar between individuals and between species. It’s an impressive feat considering the number and variation in the potential connections of the brain. How do neurons decide who they are and then migrate to settle in their final destinations? Once their final domain has been established, how do the roads of axons build themselves and snake through distant causeways in the body and brain to create highways for later perfectly synchronized information flow?  And once a complex highly organized highway of axons is established, what leads to the predictable and systematic deconstruction or preservation of some roadways over others? While experience plays a big role it is surprising how much has been selected by evolution and is dependent upon molecular machinery built from our genome.  In his ambitious project to bring some light to these issues William Harris gives an amazing overview of the process in his book Zero to Birth: How the Human Brain Is Built.

If the questions above interest you, and you want to get a well-organized and accessible understanding of how your brain became its current marvel, this is an amazing introduction. This is not an easy field to conceptualize with much of it is outside what is visible – hidden in the womb, and in molecular biology. This is where Harris shines: the often-difficult conceptual images are introduced through his masterful use of language to paint pictures in your mind that are manageable and memorable from orange rinds to, tanks treads, and zombie cells. You will be surprised at how accessible genetics and molecular biology can be.

The book is also a wonderful witness to the research process and history of developmental neuroscience. We see the human side of the researcher, including how the social aspects of research resulted in times with the dismissal of ideas due to gender, research early death, and even suicide; but the survival of the brilliance of the research in this text is a testament to the eventual success of the scientific process. Through this book you will be taken into the conceptual puzzles that stumped researchers and how they sought answers through careful experimentation but also careful observation of serendipitous methodological mistakes. You will see over and over how students built the field by questioning their teachers and those that came before them. All of this is done through exemplary storytelling as Harris builds questions from results.

This is a scientific book not a guide to teaching practice or a life better lived, but it will leave you with a life better appreciated. The examination of development will give your discussions of the role of evolution, genetics, and experience in brain development nuance which will have implications for how to frame social dilemmas, mental health, and teaching practice. Harris will help you appreciate where you came from both evolutionarily and developmentally. The microscopic world that builds a human will leave you with a sense of wonder and humility.

To understand the human, Harris loads the text with examples from a vast array of organisms that were necessary to understand ourselves. What our brain shares with even the smallest multicellular and some single-cell organisms is really some curiosity candy that your mind will savor. From the paramecium to fruit flies and owls, we share anatomical and molecular processes that display an astounding variety and preservation of form and function.

While the majority of the book takes us from a single cell to the first moments, we open our eyes after birth, the last chapter brings it all together to appreciate how the molecular and cellular adventures of the previous pages build the foundation of our lives. I really found this book to be quite the page-turner with complex concepts boiled down to the crucial information in bite-size morsels. It is not only a book that answers questions, it helps you conceptualize the inquiry – it builds the awesome world of neurodevelopment by expanding your curiosity. This book left me with a sense of awe as it will do the same for you.

Read This Post with Your Right Brain First…
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson

My Twitter feed is suddenly awash with one of those “how does your brain?” work tests. (I should say, “tests.”)

If you look at the picture and see an angel, you’re right-brained.

If you see a helicopter, you’re left-brained.

This “test” has several important flaws.

Flaw #1: it’s not a helicopter or an angel — it’s obviously a dog.

Flaw #2: left-brain/right-brain is one of those zombie myths that just keeps coming back, no matter how many times we kill it.

Of all the myths in this field, this one puzzles me the most. Let me try to unpack my confusion.

Not True: The Brain

At the most basic level, this brain myth suffers from the flaw that it lacks any meaningful basis in neurobiological truth. In the world of theories about the brain, that’s a big flaw.

We can’t in any meaningful way find people who “use more of the right brain,” or “rely on left-brain thinking.”

If you’d like a detailed explanation of the wrongness here, I recommend Urban Myths about Learning and Education by de Bruyckere, Kirschner, and Hulshof.

If you’d rather click a link, check out this study. In the mild language of research, it concludes:

Our data are not consistent with a whole-brain phenotype of greater “left-brained” or greater “right-brained” network strength across individuals.

Translation: “people and brains just don’t operate that way. No seriously. They just don’t.”

Yes, yes: a few mental functions typically take place more on one side than another.

A conceptual image of a brain, falsely suggesting that the left hemisphere is computational and the right hemisphere is artistic

Back in grad school, we learned that 95% of right-handed people rely more on the left side of the brain for some reading functions. But 95% =/= 100%. And [checks notes] left-handed people do exist.

In any case, this finding doesn’t support the LB/RB claim — which is that some people rely more on these synapses, and others rely on those synapses.

Honestly: at the basic level of “how we use our brains,” we’re all “whole brained.” *

Not True: The Mind

Okay, so maybe the LB/RB claim isn’t exactly about “the brain” and more about “the mind.”

That is: some folks are more analytical (“left-brained”) and others are more creative (“right-brained”).

This version of the myth doesn’t use the word “brain” literally. (“Who knows precisely where those mental functions happen in the brain? We were just joshing, kind of poetically.”)

It simply argues that people think differently — and we can tidily divide them into two groups.

In other words, this version simply repeats the “learning styles” argument. These theories say we can divide students into distinct groups (visual/auditory/kinesthetic; or,  creative/analytical; or, happy/grumpy/sleepy) and then teach them differently.

Of course, the LB/RB version of “learning styles” is no truer than the other versions; they all lack solid evidence to support them.

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator sort of claims to measure this distinction (“thinking vs. feeling”). But here again, we just don’t have good evidence supporting this test. **

So, whether we’re talking about neuroscience or psychology, LB/RB ain’t true.

Beyond “True”

One of my favorite quotations is attributed to George Box:

All models are false; some models are useful.

In other words: psychologists can offer a good model for how — say — working memory works. That model is “useful” because it helps us teach better.

However, that model is a model. The staggering complexities of working memory itself defy reduction into a model.

So, maybe LB/RB isn’t true, but is useful?

Honestly, I just don’t see how it could be useful.

If the model were true (it’s not) and I could divide my students into left and right brained groups (I can’t), what would I then do differently?

Just maybe I could devise a “creative” lesson plan for one group and an “analytical” lesson plan for the other. (I’m not sure how, but I’m trying to make this work.)

Yet: doing so would be an enormous waste of time.

Neither group would learn any more than they would with the same lesson plan. And all that time I dumped into my dual planning can’t be used to create an effective lesson plan.

That sound you hear is George Box weeping.

TL;DR

Left-brain/right-brain claims are NEITHER true NOR useful.

Do not take teaching advice from people who make them.


* Yes, it’s true, some people have only one hemisphere. But that’s really rare, and not at all what the LB/RB myth rests upon.

** Some time ago, I tried quite earnestly to find evidence supporting the MBTI. To do so, I emailed the company that produces it asking for published research. They did not send me any research; they did, however, sign me up for their emails.


Nielsen, J. A., Zielinski, B. A., Ferguson, M. A., Lainhart, J. E., & Anderson, J. S. (2013). An evaluation of the left-brain vs. right-brain hypothesis with resting state functional connectivity magnetic resonance imaging. PloS one8(8), e71275.

Pashler, H., McDaniel, M., Rohrer, D., & Bjork, R. (2008). Learning styles: Concepts and evidence. Psychological science in the public interest9(3), 105-119.

You Should Not (or Should) Let Your Students Take Pictures of Slides
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson

Back in October, I wrote a blog post about a surprise: it turns out that students REMEMBER STUFF BETTER when they take photos of lecture slides.

For several reasons — including common sense — I would have predicted the opposite. In fact, so did the researchers (led by Dr. Annie Ditta) who arrived at this conclusion.

But when Team Ditta ran their study and crunched their numbers, they found that slide photos improved students’ recall.

Woman holding up mobile phono to take photo of speaker and slides

Having written that pro-photo blog post, I was genuinely alarmed to see a tweet from Prof. Dan Willingham — one of the greats in this field. He describes taking photos as “a terrible way to take notes.”

And Dr. Willingham should know. He’s just written a book focusing on study strategies — including note-taking.

What’s going on here? Have I given you terrible advice?

It turns out: Professor Willingham’s advice derives from this study, published in 2021 by Wong and Lim.

My blog post came from the Ditta study, published in 2022.

How do we explain — and choose between — studies that ask the same question and arrive at entirely different answers?

Untangling the Knot

Step 1: don’t panic.

It might seem that contradictory results explode the field of psychology. If THIS study shows “yes” and THAT study shows “no,” then the whole enterprise looks foolish and broken.

But here’s the thing:

Psychology is complicated.

Teaching and learning are complicated.

PEOPLE are complicated.

When psychology researchers study people who are teaching and learning, they’re studying FANTASTICALLY complicated topics.

For that reason, psychology researchers regularly produce contradictory results. That’s just how they roll.

And for that reason, no one study answers a question for good. To quote Dr. Willingham once again: “One study is just one study, folks.”

We should look not for one study to answer a question definitively, but for clusters of studies to point in a consistent direction.

If 10 studies show YES, and 2 studies show NO, and 2 more show CONFUSION — well then, “yes” strikes me as a plausible conclusion. (At least for now.)

Start Here

How can we know if most researchers have arrived at Wong’s 2021 conclusion (“photos = bad”) or at Ditta’s 2022 conclusion (“photos = good”)?

Step 2: Get curious.

Replace advocacy (“I know for sure that photos are good/bad!”) with curiosity (“I wonder what I’ll find? This should be fun…”)

For my curiosity projects, I rely on three websites: scite.ai, connectedpapers.com, and elicit.org. *

They all have different approaches and yield different kinds of results. And, they all help answer the question: “do we yet have a cluster of studies that mostly point to the same conclusion?”

So, what did I find when I asked those resources about the Wong (“photes = bad”) study?

When I looked on connectedpapers.com … it identified exactly ZERO other studies that asked questions about taking photos of lecture slides.

When I asked elicit.org a question on the topic … it came up with nothing.

Scite.ai did identify one other study responding to Wong. Sure enough, it’s the Ditta study: “photos = good.”

So, unless I’m missing something, we just don’t have much research on this topic. We can’t know where a “cluster of studies” might point because we don’t have anything remotely like a cluster.

Getting Specific

We’ve got at least one more research avenue to pursue:

Step 3: explore the boundaries.

Let’s imagine for a minute that Wong did her study with 3rd graders, and found that photos = bad; and (still imagining), Ditta did her study with college students, and found that photos = good.

In that case, we could reasonably imagine that they got different results because they studied participants in different grades.

Or (more imagining) maybe Wong studied photos of slides during a music class, and Ditta studied photos during an art history class.

Here again we could make a reasonable guess: slide photos will help in some disciplines (art!) but not others (music).

Researchers call these “boundary conditions”: as in, “this finding applies to people within these boundaries, but not outside them.

Potential examples: a conclusion applies to …

… math class but not history class, or

… a Montessori school but not a military academy, or

… for dyslexic students, but not for neurotypical readers, or

… in Icelandic culture, but not Brazilian culture.

You get the idea.

When we look at Wong’s and Ditta’s studies, however, we find they’re very similar. Adults watch short-ish videos, and do (or don’t) take photos or notes.

The studies differ slightly — Wong looks at mind wandering as an important variable, for instance — but not enough to draw strong conclusions.

At this point, neither our online resources nor our exploration of boundary conditions gives us any reason to prefer one study to the other.

End at the Beginning

No matter how the journey goes up to this point, we always end with …

Step 4: Look to your experience, and your colleagues.

In other words: we teachers should be curious (step 2) and informed (step 3). And, we always ultimately rely on our own judgement.

In this case — in my view — we simply don’t have a good research consensus to push us strongly one way or another. So, relying on my experience, here’s the policy I would follow with my 10th grade English students:

You may take pictures of photos or complex diagrams — anything that would be hard to put into words.

However, if you can put the material into words, I’m going to ask you to do so.

Why?

Because the more time you spend processing the information, the likelier it is you will understand and remember it.

This policy would, of course, have nuances and exceptions. (E.g.: dysgraphic students shouldn’t have to write as much.)

I want to emphasize, however, that your policy needn’t resemble my policy.

If you teach different kinds of students, or teach in a photo-friendly discipline (art history!), or if your experience tells you something else…you should follow your own wisdom.

TL;DR

Should students take photos of slides as a way to remember the material?

At present, we have so little research on the topic that it really can’t answer that question — ESPECIALLY because the studies contradict one another.

Instead, we should rely on our research-informed judgement.


* As I’ve written elsewhere, I would not use ChatGPT for this kind of inquiry. In my first forays into that world, the website simply MADE UP citations. Ugh.


Ditta, A. S., Soares, J. S., & Storm, B. C. (2022). What happens to memory for lecture content when students take photos of the lecture slides?. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition.

Wong, S. S. H., & Lim, S. W. H. (2021). Take notes, not photos: Mind-wandering mediates the impact of note-taking strategies on video-recorded lecture learning performance. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied.

Beware the Experts: The Danger of Popular Science Writing
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson

Here’s a little expert advice on nutrition:

Michael Phelps — the most decorated Olympic athelete in any sport ever — obviously had to take EXCELLENT care of his body. He thought A LOT about fitness and nutrition.

While he was training for the Olympics, he ate roughly 10,000 calories a day.

So: if I want to attain peak fitness, I too should eat 10,000 calories a day.

If it’s good enough for Olympic medals winners, it’s good enough for me.

Wait a minute. [insert sound of record scratch]

That’s terrible advice.

10,000 calories per day might have been a good idea for Phelps. However — physically speaking — he and I have very little in common.

During his Olympic career, Phelps was in his teens and 20s.  I’m 57.

He was in peak human physical condition. I am — well — in very average physical condition.

He (I assume) undertook ferociously vigorous physical exercise — and burned calories — most of the day. I spend much of my day sitting here writing blog posts.

Basing my nutritional plan on Phelps’s example just makes no sense.

Simply put: stories of extreme human performance fascinate us. Alas, they rarely produce useful models for everyday life — or for teaching.

Danger, Will Robinson

That last paragraph, sadly, creates real problems for popular science writers.

In my experience, their formula goes something like this:

“Here’s a fascinating story abouts something EXTRAORDINARY that happened.

Now that I’ve got your attention, notice this AMAZING X FACTOR in my story.

Here’s some wonky research roughly related to Amazing X.

You should enact Amazing X in your life, too.”

Whether the extraordinary story focuses on burning planes or impossible inventions or heroic feats, those stories — we’re asked to believe — all have something to tell us about improving our lives.

Underwater picture of a young boy swimming directly toward the camera

But if it’s true, as I wrote above, that “stories of extreme human performance rarely produce useful models for teaching,” then the narrative structure above invites — heck, demands — our skepticism.

Amazing X might benefit extraordinary folks in outlier conditions. But, by definition, few of us teach in outlier conditions. Amazing X just won’t help us much. It might, in fact, be a very bad idea in our classrooms. (10,000 calories, anyone?)

Don’t Start Here

You have, perhaps, heard the story of the Mann Gulch Fire. (If not, you should check it out. It’s an AMAZING story.)

In brief:

Back in 1949, a group of trained “smoke jumpers” battled a wildfire that was burning toward the Missouri river. The fire abruptly turned towards them, and they realized they were trapped … and likely doomed.

In an instant, the group’s leader — “Wag” Dodge — came up with an astonishing solution. He set his own fire, and then stepped into its”shadow”: the area that his fire had burned clear. The wildfire burned around him — but not over the area that his fire had scorched.

Sadly, none of his men followed him into the shadow. Two other men outran the fire; most died.

This story appears in more than one book I know. The message: we want our students to think the way Dodge thought. We want them to be creative thinkers, who can come up with novel solutions to important problems.

I agree with those goals. I want my students to be able to think for themselves, and think past the knowledge that I have.

However: Dodge’s example tells us exactly nothing about helping students develop that capacity.

Dodge was a highly experienced firejumper. And he was in immediate danger of his life.

Our students are not highly experienced in the topic we’re teaching them. (If they were, we wouldn’t need to be teaching them.) And — except in very rare circumstances — they don’t face immediate peril.

Dodge’s thought process, in other words, has almost nothing to do with our students’ thinking. Until they know as much as Dodge knew, and have roughly as much experience as he had, we should have no expectation that they can “think the way he thought.”

We shouldn’t use his example to inform our work — even if it’s a great story.

Familiar Problems

Another example, from another popular science book:

Dr. K reads X-rays for a living. He found that he got bored and tired as the day progressed. He worried — reasonably enough — that he was getting sloppy as the day progressed.

So, he installed a “walking desk” in his office. He walked at a moderate pace as he read the X-rays, and felt much more alert and perceptive.

Dr. K wondered: does this technique benefit others?

He ran a study, and — sure enough!! — found that Doctors Who Walked spotted suspicious masses more often that Doctors Who Sat.

Clearly, walking is good for thinking. Therefore, teachers should have students walk as they learn.

Please insert a second [record scratch] here.

Once again: a great story about experts doesn’t meaningfully apply to the work we do in schools.

Doctors who read X-rays are highly trained experts. They’ve been in school for roughly two decades.

And: reading X-rays is a perception task.

If walking helps highly trained experts stay alert enough to perceive patterns better, we can ask if walking helps students learn better.

But both the people involved (experts vs. novices) and the cognitive task (perceiving established patterns vs. learning new patterns) are meaningfully different.

We really need research looking at this question directly before we make strong recommendations.

Based on my the research I know — and my experience as a classroom teacher:

Yes: exercise is good for the body, and good for the brain.

Yes: physical activity before learning provides lots of benefits. (Link)

No: physical activity during learning hasn’t been studied much. (Link)

And: based on my classroom experience, walking my students around outside while trying to discuss Macbeth with them seems like a deeply bad idea.*

Dr. K’s treadmill might help him and his colleagues; I don’t think it does much of anything for teachers and students.

TL;DR

When reading popular science books that include teaching advice, be aware:

The stories about extraordinary people doing extraordinary things fascinate and compel us.

However:

Before we make changes to our teaching practice, we should see research that looks at students like ours studying a topic like ours.

If we don’t, we’ll end up doing the teaching equivalent of eating 10,000 caleries a day.


* Yes, of course, if students are studying something that is in fact outside, it makes sense to go outside and look at it.

For instance: when I taught Where The Crawdads Sing — a book that relies heavily on the symbolism of marshes and swamps — I took my class out to see the marshes on school property.

I’m not saying: never take students for a walk. I am saying: do so with a very specific pedagogical purpose in mind.