Waves are repeating and periodic disturbance that travels through a medium from one location to another location.
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One of many moments…
Recently, I was engaged in a discussion with a colleague about one of our school policies. The policy in question made reference to ‘differentiation’. I do not remember exactly how the conversation went, but it started like this:
Colleague: I suppose we’ll have to take that out.
Me: Why?
Colleague: Because… aren’t we meant to call it responsive teaching or something now?
Me: I don’t think they are the same thing. But I agree that differentiation has fallen from grace.
There followed a discussion about what we understand by the term differentiation, why the term had become unpopular in certain circles, and whether responsive teaching would be a useful replacement/addition to the policy.
In the end, we agreed to leave the term in, but define it carefully and set clearer parameters on its use.
Another moment…
I attended an NPQ conference last week. About half way through the day, the currently popular multi-store model of memory was explained to the conference delegates. As per the script, the model was introduced with the obligatory ‘it’s only a model’ disclaimer. However, the speaker quickly relapsed into talking about this metaphorical construct as if it explained learning fully and unambiguously. I felt frustration rising; not at the speaker (who was doing the best job he could), nor with the NPQ provider (who had to assume no prior knowledge if they were to avoid leaving some of the assembled audience behind). So, who or what was I frustrated with?
So many moments where I feel a wave wash over me.
Every breaking wave
In The Next Big Thing in School Improvement, we employed the wave metaphor to describe the educational fads, movements and policy surges that periodically wash up on the educational shore. The metaphor worked in so far as these periodic disturbances build, gain momentum, then eventually break when they encounter the friction of the complex reality of the education system.
In writing about educational waves, we took aim at past movements like the data wave. Waves that have since broken are an easier target than those we are still riding. Firstly, we can see them for what they were, with the benefit of hindsight. Secondly, whilst our past selves may have been caught up in the wave, our present selves have no skin in the game.
We then ventured to critique the curriculum wave which, at the time of writing, was still building momentum. We were equivocal in our analysis, as one should be when employing foresight rather than hindsight.
But the wave we did not address – at least not directly – was the cognitive science movement. I have a vague recollection (everything is quite vague in my memory from those lockdown days) of debating taking this on in the book, but I do not remember the reasons we did not. I have my suspicions why we decided not too, however.
One difficulty in critiquing the cognitive science movement in education is that the ‘movement’ gets conflated with the ‘discipline’ of cognitive science. In my mind, the two are quite separate. Cognitive science is not a fad, and neither is its application to education. However, it has become the object of a movement and it is legitimate to question and dissect this movement. This is not the same as questioning the scientific method. It is wrong to interpret a critique of the cognitive science in education movement as a critique of cognitive science itself.
CogSci in education as a social movement
Cognitive Science the discipline (let’s call this CS-dis) is not a social movement, but the way it has been deployed by advocates in education in the UK and elsewhere in the last decade or so surely is. (Let’s call this CS-edsoc).
A social movement is a loosely organised effort by a large group of people to achieve a particular goal, either social or political (Scott & Marshall, 2009). The goal of this movement is to make the schooling system more evidence-informed, with cognitive science being the preferred source of evidence. It is worth noting that there are other choices of discipline, including but not limited to psychology more broadly, neuroscience, sociology, or political science. The choice of cognitive science is not value-free. The discipline seeks to shed light on the workings of the individual human mind, an interesting choice as schooling rarely involves educating individual humans.
The sociologist Charles Tilly stated that social movements typically include WUNC displays, that is concerted public representations of worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitments. CS-edsoc indeed has a large coalition of advocates whose call for ‘what works’ is backed by their commitment to attend conferences, write blogs, even change the course of their careers out of a sense of belonging to the group. At times, I have counted myself among them.
Why do people join the CS-edsoc movement and advocate so strongly for it?
The appeal to be more evidence-informed is backed by a compelling moral argument which has been termed the ‘disadvantage gap’. This term was at first coined to specifically refer to the inequality in educational outcomes due to economic inequalities in the population. However, it is now employed to refer to ‘gaps’ which open up between various privileged and underprivileged groups, whether defined socially, economically or cognitively.
The disadvantage gap is a form of injustice frame, a moral appeal which motivates agents to join rather than free-ride on a social movement. Injustice framing also enables diagnosis of the problem and selection of desirable solutions.
Injustice framing helps us understand my colleague’s questioning of whether the term differentiation should be allowed to stand in official policy. Differentiation, when taken to mean the provision of more ‘accessible’ curricular or learning activities to students who are presumed to be disadvantaged in their learning, has been reframed as part of the problem of low expectations. The more palatable adaptive teaching pedagogy accepts that learners have different prior knowledge but does not accept that they should not access the same rich knowledge as everyone else. We can appeal to cognitive science to explain why teachers must establish the state of each student’s schema so that new information can be assimilated and given meaning, and we can appeal to injustice to motivate our efforts, but I do not believe that my colleague was appealing to either when she stopped to question the inclusion of the term differentiation in the policy. What caused her to pause was an awareness of the social norms brought about by the CS-edsoc movement; something in her peripheral vision that caused disquiet. Language and concepts once deemed relevant and significant were now rendered morally questionable.
It is the strength of the social movement, not of cognitive science itself, that resulted in a slightly awkward explanation of the multi-store model of memory by someone who probably hadn’t heard of it until a few years ago at the conference I attended. I’m not saying that it is a bad thing that memory was being discussed, just that we should be honest about why it was being discussed.
There are reasons for joining a movement other than moral imperative, however. Social movements distribute rewards. The CS-edsoc movement has enabled access to government advisory boards, consultancy work, senior trust positions, and additional earnings as a new wave of qualifications required experts to deliver. But the rewards are not only financial: status is also on offer. It is no coincidence that this particular movement gathered momentum in parallel to the growth of edu-Twitter. The rewards have been social too, with a strong sense of belonging and new social networks emerging. There is no shame in wanting to be part of something successful.
Social games
What got me started on this was a blog post by Christian Moore-Anderson this morning in which he compares the ‘evidence-based educational movement’ to a game – a game with a rule set which prohibits certain things being done and said. It will be irritating to some because it questions whether the rules of the game are as objective as proponents of the cognitive science in education movement would claim.
Again, there is a danger of conflating CS-dis and CS-edsoc: the discipline with the movement. The social movement must have a shorthand because not everyone has the time to become a cognitive science expert. For the same reason, it must have its own slogans. For a movement to take hold, barriers to entry must be low.
For those on the periphery of the movement, like my aforementioned colleague, there is a game to be played. Rules provide a sense of what is permissible. These rules serve a purpose as they allow the movement to survive and prosper in the far reaches of the education system. The social movement does not evolve in the same way as the discipline. The latter applies the scientific method, the former propagates through memes, sound bites, and touchstones.
Surging waves
There was one thing we got wrong in our application of a wave metaphor and that is that all waves must inevitably break. It turns out they don’t.
Surging waves may not break at all. A surging wave swells over a long period. It moves slowly. A crest barely exists, and when it reaches the shore, as all waves must eventually, it may dissipate rather than break.
The cognitive science movement in education has all the signs of a surging wave. It has built gradually since around 2012, has maintained momentum at a grass roots level, benefits from passionate advocates, has embedded itself in institutional structures, and draws its energy from a discipline which continues to generate new insights.
And yet the warning signs are there.
Firstly, the reward distribution function has been achieved – the early adopters have found their niche in the new educational landscape. Secondly, dissenting voices are emerging who say the things that aren’t meant to be said. Thirdly, there is factionalism within the in-group as members go down different rabbit holes and distinguish themselves by highlighting how they differ from mainstream thinking. Fourth, the evidence has been operationalised by bureaucratic institutions, thereby making the whole movement decidedly unsexy. Fifth, the platform that brought everyone together, formerly known as Twitter, has been made dysfunctional.
Perhaps the bitterest blow is yet to come as governmental advocacy is withdrawn by a new Labour government.
Whether the wave breaks or dissipates, all is not lost, for it is the cognitive science movement that will wash up against the shore, not the discipline itself. Other waves are gaining momentum as we speak. Our collective role is to ensure that they don’t wash away the desire to be more informed, to engage in robust discourse, or to steer the debate.
References
Scott, J. & Marshall, G (2009), Social Movements, A Dictionary of Sociology, Oxford University Press.
Tilly, C. (1999), From Interactions to Outcomes in Social Movements, How social movements matter 10, 253-270
Matthew Evans 