Don’t bother trainee teachers with much theory –half-page summaries should do it - US education thinker tells audience of academics at DfE conference

Trainee teachers do not need to engage much with theory –and indeed could be handed half-page cribsheets on different aspects of their subject, as they get ready for a working lifetime in the classroom.

Such were the thoughts of one of the most prominent American thinkers on education, invited by the Department for Education to speak to English teacher training institutions as they are urged to rethink their curricular under highly controversial current reforms.

However, the thoughts from Professor Daniel Willingham, during a half-hour talk last week that was organised as part of the DfE’s initial teacher education reforms, have brought a decidedly mixed response from sector sources, with one questioner on the day probing for the academic’s evidence base.

Another attendee, a senior figure from a provider which has successfully passed through the first phase of DfE re-accreditation, described the talk as “insulting,” “patronising” and “anti-educational,” stating that it was more relevant to American teacher education than English, while Cambridge University’s education faculty also seemed unimpressed.

I put some points to Professor Willingham. He has provided a response, which is quoted below.

The detail

Professor Willingham was speaking at an event put on by the DfE to kick off the second stage of its teacher education reforms, which have seen initial teacher training (ITT) providers having to apply for re-accreditation to keep operating in the sector from 2024 onwards.

Some 80 of a reported 216 providers were successful in round one of the re-accreditation process, with the remainder having to be successful in round two if they want to continue.

Those who were successful in round one were invited to an online conference on Wednesday last week which was billed by the DfE as taking place to “support providers in their curriculum development”.

As Education Uncovered reported last week, the conference was proving controversial even before it happened.

The conference saw Robin Walker, who as of last week was the schools minister, opening proceedings, with talks also from representatives from Ofsted and the Education Endowment Foundation, before two presentations from academics from the US.

The first of those was Professor Willingham. Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia, his work is appreciated by the DfE: Michael Gove referenced his book Why Don’t Students Like School during his time as Education Secretary and reportedly cited him as an intellectual inspiration.

But the specifics of Professor Willingham’s talk appear to have contributed to controversy around this event, with providers variously having talked about being “patronised”, “insulted” and “depressed” and “talked at” in relation to its proceedings as a whole. The event seems to have been meant to indicate to them approaches they were now being encouraged to take to teacher education.

Most of the day’s talks are now available on Youtube. Professor Willingham’s features a 30-minute presentation, with 15 minutes for questions.

In it, he sets out an argument that approaches to teacher training – the talk featured examples from the United States  – have in the past concentrated too much on a particular way of engaging with education theory.

Speaking specifically on the theme of “What should future teaches learn about psychology?”, he said: “Most initial teacher training does have some information from psychology. But what I want to suggest is that, too often, it includes psychology from the perspective of researchers. And the needs of future teachers are very different from the needs of researchers.”

Researchers, he said, used theories to advance science. “The idea is that there is an arena of competing theories the whole time, and we are always looking for a theory which is going out on a limb generating new predictions, things that haven’t been observed yet and successfully predicts new phenomena, as well as possibly doing an even better job than existing theories of accounting for existing data.”

Teaching practitioners, however, used theories in a different way: “to integrate their empirical observations, co-ordinate them all so that they make sense and are easier to understand”.

And, centrally to this argument it seems, teaching trainee teachers about competing theories could end up leaving them unclear about which theory was evidentially strongest.

Professor Willingham offered up an example of competing theories of intelligence. He said: “If you look at many educational psychology textbooks, the section on intelligence will have competing theories * so you have all three of these theories going simultaneously, and the consequence for teachers is that it looks like we really don’t know that much about intelligence.”

This was misleading, though, in setting up a view that would leave teachers unsure what was known about intelligence – when in reality, one of the theories was much stronger. He said: “In this particular area, there is much less debate [about the varying strengths of the theories], and in fact, many textbooks will point this out, because that is the empirical fact of the matter…

“But in feeling the need for balance , textbook authors will present all three of these [competing theories]. But even more important, even if these were competing theories, the theory is not really what is going to be important or helpful to the teacher. It’s the empirical generalisations, and those are not up for debate.”

Professor Willingham used another example from the American context to elaborate on his point.

Talking to a slide that read “Bandura, Bruner, Dewey, Piaget, Vygotsky, Kohlberg, Bloom,” he said: “These are a list of researchers that teacher candidates in my home state of Virginia are expected to be familiar with. All of these researchers published their final papers decades ago, in some cases many decades ago.

“And if you look at a typical teacher textbook, there will usually be a couple of pages on Piaget, and then there’s a couple of pages after that that explain all the ways in which we now know Piaget didn’t quite get it right, and modifications to the theory, some of which are fairly significant.

“It’s not clear to me why that is beneficial for teachers to know. I can see why if you’re contemplating being a future researcher, some history of the field that you are embarking on is arguably useful. I can’t see it for practitioners, though.”

While researchers focused on contested and debated theories, Professor Willingham put forward an alternative way of engaging with evidence for trainee teachers, in which they were presented with theories that “everybody agrees on”.

He said: “I think that’s exactly what scientists want to communicate with future teachers. We don’t want to say well ‘here’s the stuff we’re arguing about, here’s the edge of the field that we haven’t really worked out yet’. We want to tell them about the stuff that we’re fairly sure is right, and if it’s not exactly right, something really close to this is right.”

Arguably, Professor Willingham’s suggested approach is now being pursued by the DfE, whose reforms seem to advocate an agreed evidence base to be presented to teachers, as curated by the Education Endowment Foundation, though a view in the sector is that this downplays the often contested nature of evidence in education.

Professor Willingham offered perhaps a blunter example of his favoured approach in the question-and-answer section afterwards.

Responses

The first question to him asked if he might be “selling teachers a bit short in saying they only need theories to make evidence memorable”. The questioner added: “I’m tempted to say what’s your evidence for thinking that teachers are just confused by conflicting theories... Because I think it’s fairly inevitable that teachers will encounter conflicts in their reading, even in their CCF [the DfE’s Core Content Framework for ITT] reading list – I’m not sure if you know what I’m referring to there [Professor Willingham nodded his head] but they will encounter these conflicting ideas and isn’t it better to provide teachers with some wherewithal to critically evaluate both theories and epistemic assumptions?”

In response, Professor Willingham put forward the idea that students should be presented with half-page summaries for each aspect of their training – seemingly because there was so much they could cover. Those who wanted to delve more deeply could do so, even going to him directly if they were interested in his field.

He said: “I understand where you’re coming from. There certainly are going to be teachers who enjoy this content and see this as a centrepiece of the way they think about teaching. And they are doubtless going to engage at a deeper level with this content.

“I’m also sensitive to the fact – I of course think everyone should just be thinking about psychology all the time – but I’m trying to be sensitive to the fact that here we are spending half an hour talking about psychology… you could say people need to understand something about economics, they need to understand something about the social sphere in which their children live, they need to understand different cultural backgrounds their students might have, and so on. All of that strikes me as legitimate.

“And so when there are people who spend their whole lives thinking about economic issues, or parenting issues, and so on, I think the best that we can do is offer to teachers, ideally, like here's a half a piece of paper with what I think is really important for you to know, and that’s what everybody should know. And then again, like, some people are going to dig much deeper. And that’s wonderful, send them to me I’d love to talk to them.”

The questioner could be seen smiling at the end.

There appeared to have been no direct answer from Professor Willingham as to the evidence base for implying that, as the questioner put it, “teachers are just confused by conflicting theories”, although arguably Professor Willingham did get into this in his response to me. [See below].

I spoke to another audience member, a senior figure from a university teacher training institution which had made it through stage one of the re-accreditation process. They summarised Professor Willingham’s argument as suggesting “you should limit what you tell teachers, because they only need to know what works, and they don’t need to understand the research processes or the debates in the field, or the evidence base for theories.”

With incredulity, they added that Professor Willingham seemed to be saying: “If you tell teachers all the competing theories it just confuses them, and then they don’t know what to do”.

This source said: “I found it insulting and patronising, on two levels. First, it showed extremely low expectations of teachers. It implied that teachers were unable to process or understand more than one theory and it also implies that teachers were completely unable to appreciate nuance or what they need to know to make situational judgements. I found that really patronising.

“And the other area that I found a bit bizarre, actually, was that this is not how we teach teachers in this country. In the US, they have courses like psychology that they have to take, which are quite disconnected from the practical experiences that they have got.

“I don’t know a single course in England that teaches people to teach in that way. And the irony is: the DfE have got all of our curriculum maps. They’ve all seen our curriculum plans. They know we don’t teach like this. And so it just seems utterly bizarre.

“To give some background, the way that most people learn to teach in America is that they do university courses which are lecture theatre-style, and then they do their practicum in their final year. So they might do three years of being taught stuff before they even make it into a classroom. And they do it in modules, including in psychology, so it’s really disconnected and that to me is what he’s talking about.

“Even then, to suggest that you only teach them the bits that they need to know? It’s actually anti-educational. Because the point about education is that it’s about enabling people to make decisions for themselves: giving people the tools they need, the knowledge, the understanding so they can make their own judgements.

“If you don’t give people alternative viewpoints, that’s indoctrination, that’s not education. That’s basically what he was saying: 'don’t tell people about the complexities, or that there are alternatives, just tell them the big theories they need to know’. But by stripping out the complexities, you are actually disarming teachers: you are not giving them the tools they need to make judgements, because they’ve got one theory, which is fine when that theory works. But the moment that theory stops working, or you encounter a classroom situation for which that theory doesn’t work, you are left with nothing."

Another attendee, from a different provider, said: “The whole thrust of the talk was ‘don’t bother teachers with complexity as their intellectual capacity is too limited. Leave it to big research brains like mine to make it bite-sized for them’. This all plays into a [DfE] narrative that we are training teachers, not educating them, and towards what I think is the favoured end-point: teachers following scripted lessons.”

I also sought a view from the University of Cambridge’s Faculty of Education. Cambridge chose not to apply for re-accreditation in the first round, so could not attend the online conference at the time, but will be applying in the second round. It has since viewed Professor Willingham’s speech.

A faculty spokesperson offered what seemed a scathing response to Professor Willingham’s arguments. They said: “Approaching curriculum planning for teacher education with pre-defined constraints on our expectations of trainee teachers’ engagement with theory and research evidence is a problem. We should have high expectations of trainee teachers in terms of their critical engagement with theoretical ideas and the interplay between those ideas and any empirical generalisations they operate with.

“The notion that an entire evidence base for education practice can be conveniently reduced to ‘predefined generalisations’ at any given time is a falsehood. It is particularly wrong to assume that what we know about children’s learning is ever complete. Any single attempt at reduction will leave teachers with gaps in their knowledge and ossify practice.”

One of the other audience members granted a question at the end of the talk, who I understand works for the initial teacher training arm of the Harris academy chain, which is now involved in the DfE’s Institute of Teaching, was much more positive about Professor Willingham’s talk.

“A lot of us in this country have been following your work for a long time and I think it’s really shaken up British education in terms of the knowledge agenda and what we are seeing in schools, and the way that students learn and curriculum development particularly,” he said.

Professor Willingham did not appear to offer any specific evidence as to what was going on within  teacher education in England, in terms of how theory was presented to them: were competing theories presented neutrally to students, for example, or were they being told which theories were seen as evidentially stronger?

Response from Professor Willingham

So I emailed Professor Willingham, asking him to set out if he had evidence of what was happening in England. I said that the DfE’s reforms seemed to be predicated on the idea that ITT in England needed to change, and the audience would have been interested in his evidence about what was going wrong with provision here.

 He said: “I didn’t build a case that teacher training needs to change because I wasn’t asked to do so…that’s been settled, as I understand, and I was asked to provide some thoughts on how cognition in particular might be taught to teacher candidates. My guess is that the DOE doesn’t have great data on exactly what future teachers are taught, because those data are expensive and difficult to collect…just knowing the materials used is helpful but not decisive unless you know what’s said about them in classes.

“My guess is that the DOE is instead responding to studies of what teachers know rather than what they are taught, eg belief in neuromyths [two papers were referenced here] and lack of knowledge of some straightforward findings in behaviour genetics [another paper referenced].

“Could you teach teacher trainees: ‘here are two theories for which evidence is poor, alongside the theory that best fits the data?’ Sure, but I imagine future teachers would wonder why they’re being asked to learn them.”

 Other talks held last Wednesday, including ones from the Education Endowment Foundation and from the organisation Deans for Impact, based in Texas, were also contentious. I hope to focus on them in future pieces.

*Professor Willingham presented a slide with theories he referenced at this point: Sternberg’s triarchic theory of intelligence; Howard Gardner’s multiple intelligences and a “psychometric view” often associated with John Carroll. The third of these was by far the strongest-substantiated by evidence, he said.