I chose “Secret Life of Learning” for the name of my newsletter because I’m interested in the invisible frictions that get in the way of learning. I like to find things that aren’t working and figure out why. If the machine is smoking, instead of looking the other way, I want to fix it.
In life, I look for what is operating under the surface and driving the behaviors and decisions we see, whether that is unmet needs, hidden motivations, established habits, or systems we blindly follow. The choices we make and the things we do often have very little to do with rational thought and conscious control. What is hidden is usually what matters most and, quite frankly, is the most interesting.
If you are interested in understanding these ideas further and you have not watched this TED Talk, it is worth your time. Dan Ariely’s work on behavioral economics explains why these invisible frictions are so powerful.
The main takeaways:
We believe we are making reasoned decisions, but many of our “choices” are the result of invisible nudges designed to benefit someone else.
When a situation is uncertain or complex, we tend to choose the default option, which is already chosen for us.
In the physical world, we build based on our limitations. In the cognitive world, we believe we’re infallible, and we do not understand our limitations well. This makes us more susceptible to “cognitive illusions” and manipulation in our decisions.
We live in a “designed world.” From the roads we travel to the foods we buy to the way we educate our children, our environments are intentionally designed and built to shape our behavior, often without our awareness. Very often the decisions we believe we’re making are really illusions of choice and control. The designed world of education (its infrastructure) includes the concept of public school, the school year, grade levels, grades, standards, assessment, curricula, and the list goes on. These ideas are an invisible backdrop that influences children’s learning.
For example, take textbooks and other instructional materials. Almost all state departments of education review these to identify what is “high quality,” and educators mostly believe in these determinations. Districts “buy off the list” because there is some sense that their choices will contribute positively to learning. But while the purpose and point of the instructional materials review process might appear to be related to learning (i.e., we want to select the highest quality learning materials), it is actually related to procurement (i.e., we want to select learning materials at competitive prices).
When I was at the Louisiana Department of Education, at one point, I helped manage the process for reviewing instructional materials even as I internally questioned whether we were making any actual determinations of quality. There are so many factors that go into curriculum design, development, and use. Reviewing written content has always seemed like a silly exercise to me.
This doesn’t diminish the need for curricula in schools. It also doesn’t deny the fact that some curricula are better than others. The issue isn’t that curriculum quality doesn’t matter. It’s that we treat the appearance of the review process as evidence of quality and then stop thinking. We assume that because a review process occurs that those curricula are then infallible in their quality: “Pick a highly reviewed curriculum and you’re set!” This gives people excuses. If some kids don’t learn, we can say, “It’s not an issue with the curriculum because we’re using the best.” What is left is often to blame the teachers or the kids.
But now consider this counterevidence: When we examined state data one year, the same math curriculum was used in both the top- and bottom-performing districts. If the quality of the curriculum alone were a differentiator in student learning, then these data are unexplainable. Richard Feynman (yes, the famous physicist and author) wrote about his experience on the State of California’s Curriculum Commission in “Judging Books by Their Covers.” One of the math textbooks he was asked to review was entirely blank with only a cover. Even so, other committee members gave it a decent score.
These systems influence what we believe to be true about learning even as we have access to evidence that tells us a story that doesn’t always match our beliefs.
“Our intuition is really fooling us in a repeatable, predictable, consistent way.”
Dan Ariely
Now take this report from SRI, which reveals that students are still not demonstrating robust comprehension even as teachers are using a high-quality, knowledge-building curriculum for reading comprehension. And why might that be? Teachers are using quality materials. They have training to support them in using those materials. But there are still invisible frictions that counteract the reading comprehension we desire. One of those main frictions is a skills-based mindset which often results from standards-based teaching and assessment.
Standards exist for both philosophical and logistical reasons. I wrote about standards and how and when they work well and don’t in my previous post: “Learning is Not a System.”
Philosophically speaking, when a problem is complicated, if we can break it down into smaller component parts, then we can then tackle those smaller, easier to solve problems. This assumes that the problem is clearly defined and can be broken down into a series of steps. This also assumes that if we fail with one of those smaller parts, then we can pinpoint what went wrong, fix it, and move forward again toward our desired outcome. This approach is what we often think of when we think of teaching and learning. The concept of “backwards design” is to see the end result, break that down into smaller pieces, and then design lessons that help students put those pieces back together to produce the result. If a child doesn’t do well with one of those pieces, then we back up, reteach on that piece, and then try to move forward again.
Logistically speaking, it is difficult to handle uncertainty and complexity at scale. The approaches I might use for teaching one student will be different than those I would use to teach a whole class of students. Now consider writing a curriculum to be used with millions of students. We attempt to reduce uncertainty and simplify complexity by creating easily repeatable processes aligned to very concrete and measurable standards. When something is taught, we can check it off. Aligning instruction to standards provides evidence that teachers are doing the work we’ve asked of them, even when that work doesn’t lead to robust comprehension.
With this backbone of standards, we then develop processes which develop a learning infrastructure which further influences what and how children learn:
States and districts are required by law to engage in procurement processes which require a review of curriculum quality, and they cannot purchase materials unless the materials get a passing score on the review process.
The curriculum review process uses an evaluation rubric that requires curriculum tasks to demonstrate alignment to grade-level standards, not knowledge nor comprehension. To pass the review, curriculum publishers design their curriculum on standards even if that means the learning stops short of deep engagement to build knowledge or comprehension.
Students take a statewide assessment to demonstrate their “mastery of standards.” Teachers are held accountable for how their students perform on those assessments, whether directly for their job performance or indirectly because their school report card and funding depends on improved assessment results.
Each of these design decisions reinforces the need for standards-based learning and contributes to the learning infrastructure that influences teacher behavior. While teachers believe they are helping students build knowledge and supporting robust comprehension by using high-quality curricula, they are actually helping students master standards. When those standards don’t result in robust comprehension, it is often unclear why and what to do instead.
In Chapter 7 of Leveled Reading, Leveled Lives, Tim Shanahan provides an example which illustrates the difference between teaching for standards mastery and teaching for comprehension. He provides this sentence: “When the prairie plants were uprooted the animals that depended on them lost their food source.”
If I’m teaching a standard, I might ask, “What does uprooted mean?” or “What did the author mean by uprooted?” If instead, I’m teaching to grow knowledge and develop comprehension, I might ask, “What caused the animals to lose their food source?”
For the first two questions, the focus is on the standard: Can I determine the meaning of a word (e.g., “uprooted”) using context? In the comprehension-focused question, I’m asking students to use their knowledge and skills to develop understanding. A student would need to figure out the meaning of “uprooted” and its role in the sentence as well as the meaning of the whole sentence to answer the comprehension question.
The difference between these questions is subtle, but the resulting learning is not. The standards-aligned questions stay at a superficial level and check whether students can perform a skill. The comprehension questions go deeper to reveal whether a student is growing knowledge and developing understanding.
To make this shift, teachers have to recognize those invisible frictions. They have to see that the learning machine is smoking and want to fix it. And very often, it’s hard to notice these frictions and even harder to work against them because so much rests on that infrastructure.
Ideally we can bring more common sense back into our comprehension instruction. What if we held standards more loosely and comprehension more tightly? How might that influence how we approach reading a text with students?
Let’s look at, for example, Common Core Reading Literature Standard 6. In grade 4, the standard asks students to compare and contrast the point of view of different stories, focusing on first and third person. Things start to fall apart if the text we’re reading in grade 4 really needs students to think about how the narrator’s point of view affects how a key scene is described. Because that’s a grade 5 standard, should we ignore point of view when reading the text? Or, should we not teach that text because it doesn’t align to the grade-level standard? Or even worse yet, should we force our lesson to align to the grade 4 standard even when focusing on that aspect of point of view does not contribute to understanding the text we’re reading?
If we held the standards more loosely, we can consider the essence of the standard. In this example, that would lead me to look first at the concept of “point of view” and analyze whether and then how different aspects of it contribute to my understanding of the text as a reader. To do this first step, I need to understand deeply the concept of “point of view,” including:
the concept of a “narrator” as being different from the author;
character voices and how those are established;
different types of point of view and their effects on a reader (e.g., What information do we have access to or not as readers? How does first person point of view help us relate to or distance ourselves from the narrator or characters?);
how point of view influences how the setting, characters, and events are described;
an author’s tone and how that contributes to the development of mood;
reliable and unreliable narrators;
irony
Once I’ve determined if and then how point of view contributes to my understanding, I can then develop questions and lessons which will help my students both understand the concept and then how it shows up in the text. That will include questions which require my students to explain their thinking as well as reflect on how they are putting pieces together to make sense of what they’re reading. This will lead my students to make connections among the elements of the text which interact with point of view to develop meaning and their knowledge of the world and themselves. In other words, I will help my students learn how to comprehend the text, not master a standard.
But then how will I know if my students have learned anything if I don’t ask them a question aligned to standard and see if they get it right and then check off that they mastered it? I ask this in jest because when you start to look at what is happening just below the surface of our instruction, it starts to seem kind of nonsensical: Can I know that students are comprehending complex texts by checking off standards? Or, will I know students are comprehending texts because they demonstrate comprehension?
Demonstrating comprehension looks like students forming thoughts and opinions about the text we’re reading and sharing those in speaking or writing. If a text is rich and complex enough (allowing for different interpretations of avenues of thought), students will also likely have differing opinions. They will benefit from working through those ideas with you and their peers, so we will need lots of opportunities for conversations. Students will show they are comprehending texts when they are interested in reading more. They may wonder what will happen next in the text and want to keep reading, or, if they’ve finished that text, they may want to find a new text to read to learn more about the topic or idea or enjoy a new text by the same author.
Designing curriculum to encourage instruction that supports developing comprehension rather than mastery of standards is what we can truly label “knowledge-building curricula.” Unfortunately for us, the educational infrastructure and resulting systems that reinforce standards-based approaches lead us to make decisions in reading comprehension that often run counter to what we believe is good for students. So, while we say we’re using high-quality curriculum with complex texts to grow knowledge, we still end up with superficial learning. Once we see these invisible frictions and we notice the machine is smoking, it is up to us to fix it.