On the General Capabilities

Is it time for them to go?

I asked AI to make my article into a metaphor. It’s getting pretty good!

When I first started writing a few years ago, it felt like the push for evidence-based practice in Australian schools would only ever amount to yelling at strangers on the internet. I remember talking to a science of reading advocate who said there really needs to be two kinds of people pushing the movement along, what I think of as the “cotton cycle” and the “gentle hand-wash.”

If you’ve been reading for a while—and certainly if you’ve met me in person—you’ll know I’m more of a cotton gal. Due to the efforts of the various agitators in the community, massive progress has been made. From the yelling of individuals, we have slowly developed communities of thousands, from Think Forward Educators to researchED to Sharing Best Practice.

We’re still pretty disparate and Australia is a big, dispersed place. But policy has also come leaps and bounds. A couple of years ago, Strong Beginnings took a broom to initial teacher education, to much impotent rage. Phonics is now mandated in Victoria. In my work, I talk to many school leaders, and it seems that every new teaching framework features explicit teaching. I would venture to say that progressivism is the new “traditional teaching.”

I was compelled to reflect on the progress we have made mainly because there is such a long way to go. It’s not time to pop the champagne yet—self-regulated learning is an area that needs more attention. No, not that kind of attention. It’s already heavily featured as a General Capability in the Australian Curriculum. It’s also a darling of Hattie’s meta-analysis. But it suffers major definitional problems.

There’s a magic thinking quality to some of the documentation. For example, in History and the Social Sciences:

Inquiry-based learning assists students to develop their capacity for self-management. It gives them a role in directing their own learning and in planning and carrying out investigations, providing them with opportunities to express and reflect on their questions, opinions, beliefs and values appropriately.

Or this one on critical thinking which vastly overestimates the potential for students to transfer their thinking skills:

This element involves students reflecting on, adjusting and explaining their thinking and identifying the thinking behind choices, strategies and actions taken.

Students think about thinking (metacognition), reflect on actions and processes, and transfer knowledge into new contexts to create alternatives or open up possibilities. They apply knowledge gained in one context to clarify another.

There really isn’t anything on self-regulated learning strategies. As they are, the Capabilities are a series of apple-pie statements about being disciplined, setting goals, empathy, critical and creative thinking and so on. There is some very general subject-specific guidance, but they’re not a curriculum—more ornamental than anything.

We should be sceptical of anything that purports transferable, general or generic skills. Critical and creative thinking fall firmly into this category. I’m working my way through this fantastic e-book on “Developing Curriculum for Deep Thinking,” (no, not the Michael Fullan product), which cites Gick & Holyoak’s experiment (1980) where they tested analogical problem-solving using Duncker’s Radiation Problem, in other words testing for transferable problem-solving skills.

Participants had to destroy a theoretical tumour with radiation. A high-intensity ray would destroy the tumour but also harm surrounding healthy tissue. A low-intensity ray wouldn’t damage healthy tissue but also wouldn’t destroy the tumour. The correct solution was to send multiple weak rays from different angles, so they converge on the tumour with full strength while keeping surrounding tissue safe. One group got an unrelated army attack analogy with a similar solution (splitting forces), but only about 30% transferred the idea to the radiation scenario unless explicitly told it was relevant.

Transfer doesn’t work so well unless we have deep subject expertise. For an easy read, or if you’re trying to inform or persuade a colleague, I love this Dan Willingham paper that talks about critical thinking and deep vs surface knowledge. The ability to transfer problem-solving skills depends on such a deep subject knowledge that you can look beyond the surface details of problems to uncover the structural features. Of course, practice at problem-solving helps students to recognise patterns, but only after they have built up sufficient expertise.

Recent moves towards a broad uptake of the science of learning go some way to shifting teachers and policy-makers to prioritise knowledge-building before jumping to inquiry, critical thinking and problem-solving. And by knowledge, I mean declarative, procedural and conditional, which reframes skills as just another type of domain knowledge. But self-regulated learning is still so fluffy and abstract that it needs a facelift too.

The General Capabilities are not well-supported by research and hardly constitute teaching guidance. By contrast, the English syllabus in New South Wales has always made a nod to metacognition, but the newest version makes the domain knowledge explicit. Metacognition in English is now more about planning, structuring and editing, and gives detailed outcomes which act as teacher guidance. I’m yet to see if other yet-to-be-released syllabi live up to this excellent example.

If we really must have something general in the curriculum, I propose that self-regulated learning skills related to study be reframed as knowledge about memory, and general but domain-relevant frameworks and principles for remembering. It’s not enough for teachers to be armed with the research about how memory works. Students need it too. Briefly explaining research to students, for example the research by Ebbinghaus (now over 100 years old), Dunlosky, and the Bjorks, empowers them and makes instruction more credible and less like folk wisdom.

Providing conditional knowledge about which strategies are best for which subjects also ensures that strategies are not generic, but best suited to broad domains. For example, elaborative interrogation might lend itself better to the humanities while flashcards might be more suited to memorising formulas. Of course, the principles of self-testing and desirable difficulties like spacing and interleaving are broadly useful to know, but no study method works in the absence of domain knowledge.

If the General Capabilities disappeared tomorrow, would anyone miss them? If a tree falls in the forest, et cetera. They feel like the skinny jeans of Australian education. Perhaps they can be replaced with “Generally Useful Things for Teachers and Students to Know,” in the next iteration.

---

For a useful reference list on SRL check out the Smart Study report.