One of the Most Amusing Errors in Teaching

… is asking students to perform activities that leverage a non-existent knowledge base.

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One of the most amusing errors in teaching is asking students to perform activities that leverage a non-existent knowledge base.

Students can’t have productive discussion if they have no idea what they’re talking about. At best, you’re training them how to bluff a job interview.

How do you build up the knowledge base? Not through discussion.

You know what happens when someone has no idea what they’re talking about, and keeps refining/solidifying their baseless perspective? They turn into a crank.

Instead, the way to build up a knowledge base is direct/explicit instruction.

Now, it’s true that many highly skilled professionals spend a lot of time discussing and solving open-ended problems, and in the process, discovering new knowledge as opposed to obtaining it through direct instruction…

But students are NOT experts!

And they are subject to the expertise reversal effect, a well-replicated phenomenon that instructional techniques that promote the most learning in experts, promote the least learning in beginners, and vice versa.

Kirschner & Hendrick sum it up well in their recent book How Learning Happens. The whole book is well worth a read with numerous insights, scientific references, and practical recommendations for the classroom, but here are some of my favorite quotes on this topic in particular (2024, pp.67-68,76):

• *“As the novice is not a miniature expert, it’s important to realize that what may work very well for an expert (e.g. discovery learning, problem-based learning [in the sense of working in groups to solve an open-ended problem], inquiry learning) usually doesn’t work well or is even harmful and counterproductive for the novice (and vice versa).
  …
  While an expert can be given a problem to be solved after having been taught a certain technique or principle, a novice should be given a more structured approach to using that principle for solving the same problem, for example in the form of a worked example.

  …[I]f you want your students to learn to solve problems, they first need both the declarative and procedural knowledge within the subject area of the problem in question. This is also true if you want to teach them to communicate, discuss, write, or whatever twenty-first century skill people are talking about. You can’t communicate about something, write about something, discuss or argue about something, etc., without first knowing about that something and then also knowing the rules (i.e. the procedures) for doing it.”*

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