On building moats

How progressive education defends its ivory tower

The moat is drying up. Image by AI.

At the beginning of my advocacy journey, I remember hearing a speech by Elena Douglas of Knowledge Society about how progressive education came to dominate. What was even more interesting to me was the way that university academics of this persuasion collectively dug in, attempting to build a moat around their influence, and ultimately their roles.

In times past, if we looked at the structure of university education departments, we might have noticed that a lot of the research which advanced student outcomes wasn’t actually produced by academics in education faculties. The cognitive scientists, reading scientists and even the motivation theorists tended not to call education faculties home.

Whether consciously or not, education faculties needed to plant a flag in a territory, so they claimed constructivism, teacher work and teacher education as their domains. To concede that cognitive science had something to offer would be to concede that it did not originate within their department, weakening the defences.

This is changing, with several Australian universities leading the way in both the reading sciences (La Trobe) and cognitive science (UNSW). But there is still a long way to go, as we saw with the Strong Beginnings report, which mandated, among other things, teaching cognitive science to early career teachers. Responses were diversionary (look over there—a teacher shortage), and of course replete with the usual scare quotes around terms like “brain science.”

Policy academics, influential within their own echo chambers, claimed that teaching didn’t matter anyway—that structural inequality required endless, circular discussion and that any attempt to improve teaching was just another form of neoliberal control. I don’t disagree that structural inequality exists, or that rank order persists between students. But there’s plenty of research to show that within the elements we can control, teaching makes the difference.

It’s been a bit of a strange week for me. I attended the Sydney Morning Herald Schools Summit to talk about teacher recruitment and retention. Most of the day was geared towards reinforcing systemic moves towards explicit teaching. This policy direction has been brewing for some years and culminated, I believe, in the aforementioned Strong Beginnings report.

I was buoyed to see the State Minister for Education, the Secretary of the Department of Education, which serves almost a million students in New South Wales, and several presenters talk about explicit instruction. I felt smug about the advocacy work of the past few years paying off. However, proceedings took a strange turn. Perhaps the message was too strong and too soon for the crowd, with too much discomfort and not enough understanding.

The creator of Quality Teaching Rounds (QTR), Professor Jenny Gore, leaned heavily on the balance fallacy—treating explicit teaching as just one approach among equals, despite strong evidence to the contrary. But this is a false equivalence that reveals a lack of knowledge about the overwhelming evidence on what novice learners need. When a participant questioned the strength of the evidence for QTR, the panel moderator read the tension in the room and was bold enough to ask for a show of hands: who thought explicit teaching was not all it was cracked up to be?

The results were telling. We have a long way to go.

The panel of thought leaders and research leads came out with some corkers: that cognitive science is pseudoscience, there were charges of false dichotomies, and even the suggestion that mandates are another form of colonisation. Own-goals were scored: groans from my part of the room were audible. There was some digging of holes, but perhaps not in the way that moats are supposed to work.

Conflating teaching mandates with structural inequality sounds very academic and intellectual but does nothing to advance the profession, and certainly nothing to advance student outcomes. Dean Ashenden attempts to move the discussion on from the old trope of “Structural inequality! Teachers! Down your tools!” but the circularity of argument remains—articles like this one are drowning in their own moats. OK, I’ve extended the metaphor too far now!

Ashenden critiques effectiveness research (as opposed to what? Ineffectiveness research?) and paints the Australian Education Research Organisation (AERO) as a tool of teacher control. It’s a repackaging of old arguments that claim teaching doesn’t matter in the face of (insert list here). A little like Elon Musk, who blames the measure itself (NAEP) for declining outcomes, Ashenden associates a continuing decline in outcomes with the advent of AERO. As an alternative source of wisdom, I’m not sure where advice like this leaves teachers:

Teachers try to enlist students in their cause; students might or might not join in. They might do their best to make sense of what the teachers seems to want, or pretend that they’re trying to, or subvert or resist the teacher’s efforts in myriad ways. Much of what students learn is not what is taught but what students think has been taught; often it has not been taught at all, for students learn all kinds of other things in the classroom and everywhere else at school. They learn about themselves, the world, how the world treats them, and how they can and should treat others. Students are, in other words, co-producers of learning, of themselves, and of each other. They learn, and they grow.

In contrast to vague and apple-pie statements like this, effectiveness and efficiency are dirty words for critics of evidence-based practice, a luxury belief that I am quite certain doesn’t apply to their own children’s education. Ashenden draws on tired and long-accepted critiques of Hattie’s meta-analysis (including from Hattie himself) to draw a long bow between effect sizes and AERO’s research-translation work.

As far as contribution to the debate goes, all I can glean is, “AERO is bad, m’kay.”

The research base in support of explicit teaching is broad, from program-based studies like Project Follow Through, to large scale standardised assessments like PISA, to correlational studies, to observational research conducted by Rosenshine and Brophy and Good. Ashenden critiques quantitative analysis wholesale, but how much more evidence would be enough? Something about his comments on teaching and learning reminds me of the Princess Bride meme: You keep using that word, “outcomes.” I do not think it means what you think it means.

There are too many calls for a “fundamental rethink,” without anyone offering much substance in terms of what that rethink is. Based on the Summit, I would say it’s too soon to call on whether explicit instruction has failed students. I doubt whether it has penetrated even a fraction of the state’s classrooms. If anything, the Summit revealed a lack of progress on this front. Cries of “Teachers already do this,” were accompanied by the usual, “Don’t tell teachers what to do.” I’m sorry, but you can’t have both.

If progressivism is to survive, it’s going to need something a bit more substantial to argue than teacher autonomy or circular Marxist ramblings. Professional autonomy is exactly that—autonomy within a profession, not laissez faire, and not in the service of teacher preferences alone. Those critics who are still clinging to the moat strategy—digging deeper instead of engaging with evidence—should ask themselves whether they are defending teachers and students or merely defending themselves.

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Come to Sharing Best Practice at Marsden Road in Liverpool on the 22nd of March. Tickets here.