I watched a documentary about disruptive kids. If you know anything about documentaries, you can probably guess that we either (a) follow the kids as they learn not be disruptive or (b) they're not really disruptive and there's something else going on.
This was the second kind. What is the 'something else'? Cognitive Load Theory.
The picture above illustrates a one of the main points below. Probably the main point. What is it? Answers in the comments if you think you know. Only those who get the answer exactly right will receive a chirpy point - and it's about us, the teachers, not the learner.
Background story:
Researchers want to know why some kids are disruptive. They do an experiment. We get to watch.
At the end of a class, the teacher and pupils tidy up the room of all the materials. It is at this point some kids are disruptive. In general, the kids are not disruptive when they're occupied and in learning flow.
The Four Experiments Experiment one:
The teacher says something like, "Well done. Put away the pens." The result is that everybody does what they're asked and there are no disruptive kids.
Experiment two:
The teacher says something like, "Well done. Put away the pens and then return your books to the cupboard." The results are positive and there are still no disruptive kids.
When we get to Experiment four, something different happens:
The teacher says something like, "Well done. Put away the pens, return your books to the cupboard, put the waste paper in the bins and line up for lunch." The results are startling.
Most of the class immediately set to the task. But some of the kids are frozen to the spot. After a few moments, these kids get restless and start to distract some of the 'good' kids. A few moments more and half the class is diligently carrying out the task while the other half are being 'disruptive'.
I wish I could find this documentary to show you. What you're missing here is the 'disruptive' kids' expressions when the teacher gives them four tasks to carry out. I never ever get tired of six-year-olds giving it the 'WTF?' facial gesture.
What is Cognitive Load Theory and how does it help us understand the kids?
Okay, here's Cognitive Load Theory based on Ruth Clark's (with Frank Nguyen and John Sweller) in her book Efficiency in Learning (link to PDF sample of first chapter). It's my summary, but you can go and read Ruth Clark's chapter if I don't make sense. It's only 15 pages long.
Working memory has a limited capacity
Beyond a certain 'cognitive load', performance will suffer
There are three types of cognitive load; intrinsic, germane and extraneous
Intrinsic = load caused by content
Germane = relevant load caused by a learning activity
Extraneous = irrelevant load caused by a learning activity
Cognitive load is cumulative, not parallel.
We can explain the kids' disruptive behaviour in terms of Cognitive Load Theory:
The teacher gives simple tasks. The intrinsic load of the content itself is low in all four experiments.
In the first three experiments, the kids have to remember one to three instructions. The germane load (ie the instructions for the activity) is also low. Low intrinsic load and low germane load means the task isn't taxing.
In the fourth experiment, the germane load is higher because there are four tasks to remember. Even though the intrinsic load of the task themselves is low, the instructions are too much. Performance suffers.
Not only that, but some of the disruptive kids start to distract the other kids, who are near to maxing out their attentional capacity. This extraneous load is too much for some. Performance suffers.
Cognitive Load Theory explains why your brain sometimes says, "WTF?"
And that's Cognitive Load Theory.
Three problems:
Learning Styles is mostly a load of cobblers, but they are actionable. So people like them (even me, in moderation). Cognitive Load Theory is much harder to make use of. The theory itself is unpersuasive and far less effective than stories like the one above. I have some stories about the Marines and the Rule of Three, but what about you? Can you think of any teachable stories?
Cognitive Load Theory might be suspect. @usablelearning pointed me to this piece which urges that we treat the theory with caution. (But not the above story. See?)
Cognitive Load Theory - even if the theory was sound - is a recipe for North Korean re-educational-camp-style learning experiences. I'll be talking about that in the Soul of a Stick. And, there are alternative ways to maximise attention. Which I'll be talking about it Soul of a Carrot.
If you've made it down this far, chances are you'll be interested in this post which explores a similar theme:
In his case, he's a partner in Y-Combinator, a finishing school for hackers developing web-based applications. In exchange for their guidance, and seed funding ('rarely more than $20,000'), Y-Combinator take a '2-10%' stake in founders' companies. They claim 'the money is by far the smaller component'. He also writes wonderful essays, some of which are designed to help start-ups.
The biggest difference between Paul Graham and a conventional teacher is that he's got skin in the game.
I'm in the unusual position of being able to test the essays I write about startups. I hope the ones on other topics are right, but I have no way to test them. The ones on startups get tested by about 70 people every 6 months.
So I sent all the founders an email asking what surprised them about starting a startup. This amounts to asking what I got wrong, because if I'd explained things well enough, nothing should have surprised them.
(I wish more learning professionals would do this rather than give out Happy Sheets. Why do I hate Happy Sheets? The clue is in the name.)
He received over 100 responses detailing the surprises the founders encountered. And one reporting that 'everything was actually fairly predictable'. This is a fairly meagre success rate for the essays. He goes on to list 19 surprises he encountered again and again in the emails.
He also attempts to discover a Super-Pattern:
One's first thought when looking at them all is to ask if there's a super-pattern, a pattern to the patterns.
I saw it immediately, and so did a YC founder I read the list to. These are supposed to be the surprises, the things I didn't tell people. What do they all have in common? They're all things I tell people. If I wrote a new essay with the same outline as this that wasn't summarizing the founders' responses, everyone would say I'd run out of ideas and was just repeating myself.
What is going on here?
When I look at the responses, the common theme is that starting a startup was like I said, but way more so. People just don't seem to get how different it is till they do it. Why? The key to that mystery is to ask, how different from what?
Anybody who's helping people to learn at work (or if you're working in a school or university, helping improve students' meta-learning) should think about this. When we ask this question - different from what? - we tend to think in terms of skills or knowledge-gaps. Teaching skills or knowledge gaps is child's play.
Paul Graham identifies his founders' 'different from what?' as being 'different from a job':
Everyone's model of work is a job. It's completely pervasive. Even if you've never had a job, your parents probably did, along with practically every other adult you've met.
This isn't so much a skills gap as a 'model' gap. It's a Story Gap. Most everything that you teach will have an element of Story Gap. (If you think what you're teaching doesn't have a Story Gap element to it, let me know in the comments and I'll see if I agree.) Here's Paul Graham's conclusion:
You probably can't overcome anything so pervasive as the model of work you grew up with. So the best solution is to be consciously aware of that. As you go into a startup, you'll be thinking "everyone says it's really extreme." Your next thought will probably be "but I can't believe it will be that bad." If you want to avoid being surprised, the next thought after that should be: "and the reason I can't believe it will be that bad is that my model of work is a job."
Image: idea nicked off Marty Neumeier. If you're reading this far you might like Up the Injunction, which is all about the competition that trainers face from real life. And zombies.
I have a friend called Dan. He's a smart guy. Been to college and everything.
Dan went to university in Wales. You'll need to know some things about Wales if you want to understand this story.
Some facts about Wales and going to university in Wales
Welsh is a linguistic (and political) success story. 7.5% of languages are in danger of extinction and Welsh was on a short list of endangered languages in Europe. But no more. Now about a fifth of people in Wales are fluent in Welsh.
One way they've done this is to make Welsh a compulsory option in many public places. Road signs, for example, should always be in Welsh and English (though, this sometimes causes problems). University is a public place so it's natural that Welsh is a feature of life there. When I was in Wales as a fresher, I had to sit through the Vice-Chancellor's welcome speech - an exercise in tedium if ever there was - twice. Once in Welsh (the only way I could tell it was over was when all the Welsh speakers gratefully shuffled out) and once in English (the only way I could tell it was over was when I was woke up with stale breath to a desultory round of applause).
Still, a couple hours of boring speechifying is a small price to pay for saving a language. Why do I think saving a language is so important? More on that later.
Dan's conundrum
Dan was reminiscing the other day about life in Wales. He regrets not taking the time to learn any Welsh. Not that he's completely ignorant, of course. For example, his name, he tells me, means either 'fire' or 'exit'. He's knows this because all the bars he hung around in have this sign everywhere, saying: Allanfa dân
Although this might seem like a totally dumb thing to say, it does betray a certain wisdom. He has shown awareness of the possibility of Welsh having different word order, for example. No, wait - it is a totally dumb thing to say.
Dan was in Wales for three years. He could have asked. Or visited this website. Or even worked it out for himself (have a closer look at the picture and work it out, it's elementary, Watson).
But he didn't. I asked why.
I didn't want to find out that my name meant 'exit'. I kind of liked the idea of my name meaning 'fire'.
(Incidentally, if you're a Welsh speaker, you're probably having thoughts about 'Dan' being different to 'dân' with it's to bach, or little roof, over the 'a'. Leave it. That thought is going nowhere. We're talking about Dan here.)
There is something called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (or something similar). And it basically says that the language you speak influences the way that you think (or, words to that effect). So, for every language that dies out, we not only lose a few pretty-sounding words and some amusing grammatical idiosyncracies - we lose a whole way of thinking. Or that's what I understood after I read about it in a science fiction book.
Is the Sapir-Whorf thing any more than a hypothesis? Is it a fully-formed thesis? I have absolutely no idea. And I don't even care. The idea is so startlingly beautiful and has such a motivational affordance that, like Dan, I would be disappointed if it weren't true.
(Like Dan, I could have visited this site any time I wanted to.)
Another argument for fun?
If you're helping people to learn, there will always be cases where not knowing is more fun than knowing. It's also important to realise that some people are more logical, more rigorous, more skeptical because it's more fun. Anger is fun.
Helping people to learn is all about simplicity. But it's easy for a love of simplicity to become the fetish of minimalism. Minimalism is aesthetically pleasing but bad for learners. Simplicity should focus on chemistry not being catchy.
The best apple crumble in the world?
I've been making apple crumble for thirty years now. It's the first dish I ever cooked on my own as a ten-year-old in Home Economics class. I still make them and, last week, I made my best one yet. How is it possible to be making, thirty years on, tastier versions of a dish which contains only four ingredients (apples, sugar, flour and butter - plus spice, if you're feeling adventurous*)?
Simple as possible. . .
Here's how school taught me to cook apple crumble:
Take equal parts flour, sugar and butter
Rub this into crumbs
Put crumbs on top of sliced apples in a dish
Place the dish in an oven and cook till it's golden
Thirty years on and I still remember the recipe. It's a model of simplicity. But it's only good for children.
. . .but no simpler
When I made my first apple crumble, I felt like I was being my mum, which was fun. Make-believe is fun. The barely game of pretending is fun for adults too but we're usually past the stage of pretending to be mummies and daddies. We want to pretend to be Heston Blumenthal or Ferran Adrià.
Pretending games for grown-ups
The simple recipe only allows you to copy the crumble. An adult would want to make it their own, to make it better. We want new super-powers . This means teachers and trainers of grown-ups channeling Kathy Sierra. Or Amy Hoy. Perhaps even making yourself obsolete (with a hint of Microwave Learning Objectives).
As everybody says, simple is good. But brevity can come at the expense of more than meaning. It can kill any sense of fun and play - or, learning, as we like to call it when we're at work.
Design Thinking
So where should we look for answers to our simple vs simplistic problem in the Greatest Toolshop in the World?
Design Thinking seems to be an umbrella term for a whole load of related approaches to problem-solving and innovation (I've included some links at the foot of this post). A particularly useful one for unReal Trainers is Systematic Inventive Thinking.
The basic idea of SIT is that you break down any product or service into its component parts and then monkey around with them to see what you come up with.
Making a better apple crumble
At first glance, there are only a few ingredients to an apple crumble. But, in SIT, we're not thinking of ingredients but components. Here's a possible list of components for an apple crumble:
fruit
sweetener
fat
flour
flavour enhancers (eg spice, salt)
dish
cooking utensils
temperature
colour
time
work
presentation
other ingredients
I could go on but you get the picture. (Can you think of any more? I can think of at least five. . .)
Playing around with any of these could potentially result in a better (or far far worse) crumble. In my case, after experimenting with oatmeal and walnuts, I learned that doing the following would result in the lightest, tastiest crumble imaginable (NB there's a clue to a couple of the missing components in the list above here):
Mix the flour, oatmeal and butter together first. Add in the sugar later.
Place the 'crumble' mix in the freezer for a half hour before topping the fruit and putting into the oven
(Now, ahem, 'my' secret's out. Did you spot two more components in 'my' crumble innovation?)
Simple doesn't necessarily mean short
There's a danger of confusing brevity with simplicity. For blank-slates and children a focus on brevity makes sense.
But for every bit of 'new information' we're giving as 'input' in workplace learning, there's a hinterland of habits we're trying to improve. It's not so much that our old dogs can't learn new tricks. but that they have to unlearn old ones too.
I don't think there's anything that you can't get better at. Because there isn't anything that can't be broken down and done differently. Simplicity in the form of minimalism hides this fact. There are two pictures of houses above - which one is the simplest?
Anything can be broken down and done differently Which means it can be done better. Watch and see:
Another definition, or rather a list of attributes
Why Design Thinking won't save you - sense as always from Peter Merholz (Adaptive Path) who points out that you can and should be adopting viewpoints and ideas from everywhere (just like, erm, designers)
(There aren't any unbiased or non-proprietary links to SIT on the net, so I haven't included any here. Do a web search and you might have more luck than me. I heard about it through a podcast which I've now lost. I'll post if I can find something decent.)
*Spice had dangerously exotic connotations in our house...
Note: It would be more accurate in the above to say, "I still remember 'a' recipe," not "the". There's an important difference between what they taught me and what they said and did.
Marketing and poor journalism are not the enemies of science and reason.
Blame Einstein Baby Einstein is offering a refund for its DVDs writes Daniel Willingham asking his usual question:*
"How can science reporting and education be improved so that consumers will not be susceptible to subtle marketing campaigns that play on misunderstandings of scientific findings?"
It's a question I've asked before too. (In fact, it's been a bit of a theme.)
Of course, it's completely the wrong question.
Blame Teletubbies
Baby Einstein didn't do what it was supposed to do (it didn't, erm, turn your baby into Einstein. . .) but some TV programmes are even worse; according to Literacy Today in 2004.
". . .watching Teletubbies was negatively related to both vocabulary size and expressive language use. . .
Teletubbies features poor language models (primarily vocalisations and single-word utterances). Those children who did view the programme tended to produce more vocalisations and fewer single and multiple word utterances than those who did not view, suggesting that children will model or imitate what they see onscreen."
Blame the pressure to publish
You would be forgiven for reading the article and coming away with the impression that Teletubbies is bad for children. You would also be forgiven for reading the article and deciding that it's entirely empty of meaningful content. (My summary: we tried an experiment which didn't work the way we expected, so we analysed the heck out of our data until it yielded something we could publish.)
Blame Game
There's little substantial difference between this and the Tinky Winky controversy in which the eponymous Teletubby was 'accused' (sic) of being a gay role model by Jerry Falwell and investigated by the Polish Ombudsman for Children. (Incidentally,it's not just Tinky Winky. Apparently all the Teletubbies are fomenting the rejection of the Christian paradigm.)
Blame Politicians
Some of the objections to Teletubbies were more insidious. Steven Byers, then Minister for School Standards said they exemplified the dumbing down of culture.
Blame your colleagues
A colleague of mine recommended the Baby Einstein DVDs to me. A teacher, she gave me lots of good reasons why I should stick my children in front of the idiot-box to watch them. But I resisted (and now I get to say, "I told you so). Why did I resist?
Blame the parents
I'm a snob. I don't let my children watch TV. Even if Daniel Willingham himself had imploringly thrust the DVDs into my hands I would probably have found a way to do something else. I don't have any real evidence that TV is a negative influence (other than that, like everything, it's harmful in excessive amounts). My opinion of TV is based on aesthetics.
All of the humbug about Teletubbies came after the opinion was formed.
Hang the blamers
There's a common image of people with an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other. The reality's more like this: a lynch mob rampaging through your mind, razing reason with whatever weapon they can get their hands on. Sometimes the nearest weapon to hand is science, sometimes aesthetics. They're both potentially just as flawed.
Blame my exquisite sense of taste
I would never use Comic Sans, even though many people say learners find it the easiest to read of all the available fonts. Some feel the same way about 'informal learning', 'learning 2.0', 'unLearning' - you name it. People are making decisions and posting blogs based on aesthetic principles.
Your workplace learning strategy is being decided based on whether it's (a) funky or (b) reputable. You have no chance at all of persuading the reputables to get funky.
Only ourselves to blame
Daniel Willingham wonders how to make consumers less susceptible to subtle marketing campaigns. He really should be asking how to make people more susceptible.
Credits: @techerding for the post on coaching (which I mostly agree with) and, especially, @usablelearning for this post on cognitive bias which includes an essential reminder of why the lynch mob is so important (see the bit about Damasio).
*You could say I'm a fan of the 'usual question'. Not just this one, but anybody who has one. If you haven't got one, I would seriously think about getting one if I were you.
Just in case you were wondering, this is what Steven Byers, Minister for School Standards and nemesis of dumbing down, grew up on:
Learning Styles don't exist. Everybody knows this except people who don't. Their non-existence is mostly harmless. And occasionally tragic.
Learning Styles: meme or virus?
The idea that everybody has a 'Learning Style' is enchanting. It's feels right because it's so explanatory. In all the time that I've been teaching people to use Learning Styles and spreading the Learning Styles virus, nobody has ever questioned them.
This is not down to passive, happy-to-be-spoonfed learners.The idea of cognitive load seems to have struck many people I've worked with as an affront to their creativity and their chosen specialist subject, for example.
This puts us practitioners in a bind. Some people who seem like they're pretty qualified say there are Learning Styles. And then somebody who's a scientist says there aren't. Howard Rheingold's crap detection guidelines don't necessarily work here. It's PhD vs PhD. Obviously, some of the Learning Styles camp are peddling their wares. But not all of them. Some of them seem, well, okay.
Skepticism and sabotage
Here's a post/comment thread on Stephen Downes' blog where he has a lot to say on the subject of Learning Styles - or, more accurately, he criticises Daniel Willingham's 'facile treatment' of the subject on YouTube (and, elsewhere, Making up Facts). Like, Howard Rheingold, Stephen knows a thing or two about crap detection. Here are his own Principles for Evaluating Websites, for example, written in 2005. It's obviously something he's been thinking about a fair bit.*
But even if Stephen Downes is right and Daniel Willingham lying and facile (this is a very big 'if') then, surely, the dozens of Learning Styles Inventories can't all be right. But neither can they all be wrong? A practitioner who ignores all new ideas until they're 'scientifically proven' runs the risk of sabotaging innovation. Who are we to turn to?
"Next time you see a learning styles questionnaire, burn it [we] produced two reports for the now defunct Learning and Skills Development Agency, which got cold feet and refused to launch them. It was afraid, as one of the government's "delivery partners", to back research it had itself funded, in case it upset the DfES.
Our reports reviewed, systematically, 13 models of learning styles and concluded that this area of research is theoretically incoherent and conceptually confused. I listed in the reports 30 dichotomies, such as "activists" versus "reflectors", "globalists" versus "analysts", and "left brainers" versus "right brainers". We should stop using these terms. There's no scientific justification for them.
We do students a serious disservice by implying they have only one learning style, rather than a flexible repertoire from which to choose, depending on the context."
*Gulp* That sounds fairly authoratitive. A 16-month study of 13 Learning Styles Inventories (whittled down from literally dozens more) carried out by four researchers with authority.
Here's links to the report from Frank Coffield. You should read it.
Rather than show you extracts and summaries, I've taken some screenshots and added explanatory notes. Hopefully, you'll get a flavour of the report. (And want to read more.)
The first table shows the various flavours of Learning Styles.
Main takeaway: there are loads of them.
The second table shows how the Learning Styles measure up to a test of four 'minimal criteria'
Main takeaway: only one system meets all four. Some don't meet any. (
The final table shows the 'effect size of different intervention'
Main takeaway: even if Learning Styles were valid, we'd be much better of focusing on other things.
How did we end up in this situation?
To get a sense of the motives of people who are for learning styles see this review of the review [pdf] written by somebody who has produced their own Learning Styles Inventory. Here, in a footnote:
"Personally, I found that being relegated to the category of “derivative” somewhat undermined the review."
Yes, this person has decided that their own inventory being dismissed has somehow compromised the review. Incidentally, this person's job title is Head of Dyslexia, Literacy and Learning Styles.
If you'd like to check out their Learning Styles Interactive Diagnostic Screening, the PDF is here. One things for sure, people like Learning Styles even when they are 'derivative'. This Head of Learning Styles has plenty of testimonials. Why?
"Ahhh...now the lights are coming on. I think the rub here is on the word "style," which seems to be way too ambiguous for us to find the commonality of thought. My personal definition of learning "styles" is not as hard-lined as the "auditory, visual or kinesthetic" camp, and because of that I completely missed this idea in all the earlier posts. My own "theory" is that learning styles are more closely associated with personality "styles" than they are with a specific sensory method of data capturing. Does that help at all? Make things worse?"
The phrase Learning Styles is just too hard to resist because it's so very useful. It seems like we all have our own 'personal definition' and our own 'theory'.
Analysis kills humour (among other things)
The reason that a deaf stunt man is funny (apart from the slapstick potential) is that stunt men work in a special context. They're used to being asked to do things which, for the rest of us, would be unthinkable. A normal person mishearing an instruction as 'ride your bike into the dock' would fall flat as a facile, faux-surreal joke.
Like Chip Cobb, we've misheard the instructions and rushed off to do our own thing. Because we work in a special context.
Preaching and zealotry
In my own spreading of the myth that is Learning Styles, I've also been guilty of using my own 'personal definition'. In my case, Learning Styles meant VAK (never VAKt, oh no...). And VAK meant making sure learners were stimulated with visual aids, interesting conversation and physical activity. Nothing more. (An idea not dissimilar to what Baroness Greenfield is talking about in a piece quoted below.)
I certainly didn't practice any of the zealotry outlined in the Coffield report (seriously, read it and see). Like Eric Wilbanks, I basically made up my own version of the term. So did Francesca Elton. So have countless others. There is, of course, danger in co-opting scientific explanation. But it's feels right because it's so explanatory. And they give us a shared lexicon. Even Frank Coffield says:
"Learning-style instruments vary markedly in quality and some (eg Allinson and Hayes's CSI or Entwistle's Assist) could be used to start a dialogue with students about their learning, assessment and the purposes of education."
Surely, this is harmless? Why are all the bloggers and commentators so worked up about it?
Fable-ous but sometimes tragic
Learning Styles are too good to be true. But too truthy to be ignored. Learnining Styles have a teachable narrative. Learning Styles are Fable-ous. At least, my version of them is.
But when they're institutionalised it's a tragedy. Learning Styles don't exist but that doesn't stop them being a part of many practitioners' training, which is fine, and the way their performance is assessed, which is decidedly not.
Stunt Men and Women
I think most Learning Professionals have a fairly good idea what they're doing when it comes to Learning Styles. It's a bit of a car crash, but it's mostly okay.
Here's Super Dave Osbourne demonstrating a possible approach to Learning Styles.
Post Script - I know, this is a long post
Here's some more on Learning Styles. All of the below influenced the above, some more than others.
Debates, opinions and/or crap
Here's some more stuff on Learning styles. The posts are all good. Sometimes the comment threads are even better. All of the links below sparked debate.
. Donald Clark always has a lot to say. Here, he says that Learning Styles are flaky and they've been proved wrong. Here, apparently, Peter Honey (of Honey and Mumford fame) wasn't happy with Donald's presentation on the Coffield Report. This isn't surprising when you consider the fact that he makes a pretty good living out of their which will "make you a better learner". Finally, here's a subtle-as-anything post on Amazing Learning Style Research.
"Humans have evolved to build a picture of the world through our senses working in unison, exploiting the immense interconnectivity that exists in the brain. It is when the senses are activated together - the sound of a voice in synchronisation with the movement of a person's lips - that brain cells fire more strongly than when stimuli are received apart."
"The myth of learning styles is based on three faulty premises: learning styles are intrinsic, learning styles can be assessed, learning styles can be matched to instructional styles. Snyder points out that all three premises are untrue."
In the comments of Clive Shepherd's blog (already mentioned above) Robert Bacal asks:
"Does the learning styles construct have value in a) explaining events parsimoniously, and b) improving learning and instruction?"
"You can’t really provide different activities for learners with different styles, for practical reasons, and it turns out you may not want to anyway.
The research on this is rather copious, and I’d guess that the majority of trainers have never looked at a single journal article on this topic, much less reviewed the field properly. It turns out there is some research to suggest that people learn better if you use a style that involves a mismatch with the preferred style. Generally speaking if you spend a year or two reading the body of learning styles research, you’d probably a) discover the findings are all contradictory, and b) realize that the reason for all the contradictory findings is that learning styles and matching simply are not very important for instructional success."
Finally, here's the two clips from Daniel Willingham:
