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Bravo Math News

(3) The Great Stagnation, Part 2: 8 Beliefs & Barriers

Part 1 established education as civilization’s most stagnant sector.

Here in Part 2, I’ll enumerate some myths that prevent major improvements in education.

Let’s start with “Two Truths and a Lie” but with 8 statements.

  1. Teachers should organize their lessons around students’ learning styles.
  2. Continuous feedback supercharges learning.
  3. Learning is all about recognizing innate abilities and talents.
  4. We don’t need to remember facts any more since we can look them up so easily.
  5. “This technology will revolutionize education.”
  6. Learners should master one skill or one concept at a time.
  7. Busting teacher unions will unleash educational progress.
  8. The key to learning is doing. If my students do X easily, it proves they’ve mastered X.

Do you consider each of those to be true or false? Take a minute to write down your answers and a brief explanation.


Ready for the answers?

All of those statements vary from false to terribly misleading.

Let’s take another look, but this time with a tiny sample of citations coming from ~unanimous conclusions of researchers.

  1. “Teachers should organize their lessons around students’ learning styles.” There is literally no evidence for the existence of learning styles. We misattribute to learning styles what is better explained by prior knowledge. Yet overwhelming majorities of people believe in learning styles. This isn’t even debated among psychologists. Whoops!
  2. “Continuous feedback supercharges learning.” Wrong. If you provide feedback continuously or even at a very high frequency, you do not know what the learner is doing or thinking independently and what the learner is doing only because of the feedback. The best outcome is that nobody knows what the learner’s best effort looks like, but the more common outcome is perceiving mastery instead of reliance on external feedback. Continuous feedback is a path to delusion, not a supercharger of learning.
  3. “Learning is all about recognizing innate abilities and talents.” Actually, most evidence shows that most people can reach high levels in most disciplines with the right training. This is yet another damning indictment of our educational system.
  4. “We don’t need to remember facts any more since we can look them up so easily.” Actually, what we can learn next depends almost entirely on our prior knowledge – that is, facts, procedures, and concepts that we remember. Facts like phone number do not need to be memorized because further learning does not depend their memorization. But if an engineer is looking up grade 5 math right before designing a bridge, would you drive over it? Could that engineer just look up “Advanced Dynamics” this afternoon and design a suspension bridge this evening? Of course not. There is no way around it – expertise requires vast amounts of facts, algorithms, and concepts in long-term memory.
  5. “This technology will revolutionize education.” From radios, to Thomas Edison’s motion picture, to computers, to the internet and MOOCs, we’ve seen every generation of information technology promise and fail to transform education. Virtually none make a compelling case for why they’re better than a textbook in terms of the mental effort elicited from students.
  6. “Learners should master one skill or one concept at a time.” Another pillar of educational delusions. A math worksheet entitled “Division Word Problems” cannot tell you if the student is doing division because they recognize the concept of division in the word problem or if they’re just responding to the title of the worksheet. It certainly does NOT give them practice in making such distinctions. The worksheet should have been called “Word Problems – But Only Solve the Problems that Require Division”. Learners need to mix it up! This interleaving might be the most powerful pedagogical technique discovered in decades and it damns the one-concept-at-a-time organization of virtually every textbook you’ve ever used and every course you’ve ever taken.
  7. “Busting teacher unions will unleash educational progress.” LOLz
  8. “The key to learning is doing. If my students do this task easily, it proves they’ve mastered the task.” This is doubly wrong and a gigantic mental trap. How might this thinking go wrong in a physics laboratory? A physics teacher designs an experiment with tether ball so that students will engage with the laws of physics. During the experiment, students are supposed to think about circular motion, the definition of velocity and acceleration, the interaction with gravity, and how you can use those to predict where the ball will go. But they they often actually think “Step 1 says to put the pole here and step 2 says to press that button on the camera and step 3 says to lift the ball this high and step 4 says to record a measurement in cell D13 of the spreadsheet and step 5 says to multiply that number by 9.8…” This latter mental sequence causes no learning because it is devoid of physics yet it is the normative response to many supposedly active learning methods. Second, even if the students were trying to think in terms of scientific principles, were they doing so productively? Or were they entrenching misconceptions? How much will they retain? Will they be able to transfer their learning? None of this is knowable from what students do physically because the proximate cause of learning is what students do mentally.

These beliefs are mainstream and false and they underlie many of the failed attempts to improve education.

But as harmful as they are, they are not the only culprit in the stagnant world of education.

There’s more.

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Educational Politics & Policy

(2) The Great Stagnation, Part 1

Anyone from 1900 would find most of modern life unrecognizable.

“What’s that thing flying in the sky? What is this glowing object showing me moving pictures that talk? Where is that carriage’s horse? Why aren’t children dying from Polio? Why are women and blacks voting? What do you mean ‘open heart surgery’, are you stark raving mad? What are ‘nuclear’ bombs? Where is all this clean water coming from? Why is your outhouse inside the building? What’s ‘space travel’? AND HOW CAN A POT COOK FOOD INSTANTLY?”

But that same time traveler could walk into any school, especially a high school, and say, “Ah, yes, the young ones have one teacher. The students rotate among classes organized by discipline and grade bands. The school grants credits. Sufficient credits will earn a government certificate. Then the smart ones go to university lectures. And I can see a lot of people hate math. This is just the way I remember school!”

And you would largely the same reaction if you were to walk into your your old schools, whether you graduated 10 years ago or 80 years ago.

Education is incredibly stagnant. By and large, we take it for granted that there will be no major innovations in the field.

Why?

Bill Gates spent billions of dollars trying to transform education in the US. How did he assess his efforts?

“There’s no dramatic change.” ~ Bill Gates Photo Credit: Thomas Hawk

Of course, he’s not the only one to try. After countless reforms, elections, “Class Clowns”, presidents, premiers, panels, education ministers and secretaries, commissions, budgets, studies, academic articles, books, school boards, new buildings, charter schools, private schools, independent schools, vouchers, computers, networks, videos, online classes, correspondence classes, programs, philosophies, policies, curricula, standards, tests, textbooks, textbook versions, websites, Web 2.0, MOOCs, tinkering, and fads and trends of every type… the reality is that the vast majority of educational systems work the same way they did 100 years ago.

I bet military trainers would be familiar with combat pedagogy from 5000 years ago.

From grassroots organizations to heads of state and totalitarian dictators, from committed teachers to billionaire CEOs, educational systems are impervious to them all.

With the exception of literacy, there has been no breakthrough in pedagogy in thousands of years.

Why?

Even incremental improvements are hard to sustain.

Have you ever heard a university say: “We eliminated selective admission because, over the past century, our teaching methods have improved by 1%/year. We can now do a great job of educating any high school graduate.” Of course not. How about from selective private schools, any elementary school, any corporate training program, or any organization at all, ever, even yours?

I’m guessing you haven’t.

Why not?

Quality controls have greatly improved manufacturing. Computers are way better and easier to use than they were 20 years ago. Television and movies are better than ever. The cost of air travel and even space travel have decreased dramatically. Nobody wants to go back to the medical practices of 1820 because today’s are unrecognizably better.

But, at the moment, your children’s education is on track to look a lot like your grandparents’ education.

Why is education so hard to improve?

This blog series will begin to answer that question and outline how Bravo Math Inc will, at long last, disrupt these millennia-old norms.

I’ve just described civilization’s worst stagnation.

The next post will discuss some of the causes of that stagnation.

Later on will come Bravo Math’s plans to punch through the status quo and unleash epic change.

And, hopefully some time around 2030, all these posts will be viewed as prophetic.

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Bravo Math News

(1) The Bravo Math Manifesto

Bravo Math does the “impossible” in math education.

We exhibit the following values: Students First, Courage, Truthfulness, and Merit.

Mission “Impossible” 1: Get 5,000 diverse students in Vancouver enjoying math 5 years above grade-level by June 30, 2028.* Cause an earthquake in the stagnant world of education.

When we achieve this mission, students of every background will arrive early to our lessons and ask if they can start right away. They will engage so intensely with math that they wouldn’t notice an ice cream truck crashing through the wall. They will beg to stay after lesson time is over and then ask for homework when we kick them out. They will do our math activities in their spare time, then go beyond that by showing us incredible new math activities, which they find and create themselves. They’ll decorate their bedrooms with math paraphernalia, from eye-catching graphs and geometry to equations and pictures of mathematicians. Math will go from a phobia to a source of joy and excitement.

They will transform from apprehensive remedial math students to inspiring peer tutors who tell their tutees “You can do this, too!” They will ask to bring their friends, which will help us raise an army of grade 5 students who love grade 10 math. The habits and confidence we help them develop will transform their entire lives.

We’ll invite parents, teachers, academics, journalists, and our smartest skeptics to observe our lessons and they’ll be blown away. Parents will give unsolicited feedback about how they cannot believe the change they see in their children. Our work will be widely viewed as the biggest breakthrough in education in ages.

As people rave about Bravo Math, we will receive a flood of demand. To meet that demand, we will build a vibrant and enduring company for which we love to work.

Our compounding successes will galvanize sweeping innovation in educational systems around the world – and, at long last, the vast untapped potential in all of us will finally be in plain sight.

~ ~ ~

Thank you to Jim Collins and Jerry Porhas for the framework used here.