The subtitle of this book is The case for an ed tech revolution. Presumably, the revolutionary idea contained in its pages is the one stated explicitly towards the end:

“The more effective approaches seek out what is valuable about teacher expertise and try to copy or even improve on it. The less effective approaches assume it is irrelevant or can be ignored.”

Christodoulou takes aim at those who think nobody needs to learn facts, because we can look things up on Google. Her argument is, in essence, how can we evaluate what we find there if we don’t have any underlying framework by which to judge it?

Fair enough, though it might have also been worth mentioning that it’s pretty hard with Google to find anything useful from pre-internet days, or at least not in comparison to the amount of stuff that exists online. You have to use other kinds of source material and research methods, which would be another reason to not tell kids they need only Google.

Other targets are Sugata Mitra’s Hole in the Wall experiments, flipped learning, rubrics and project-based learning.

I agree with much of what the author says, especially the importance of teacher expertise. Acknowledging the skills of a teacher means knowing that attempting to address the crisis in recruiting teachers of Computing by using so-called facilitators is not going to work. (If you don’t buy that, read Teachers? We don’t need no teachers!)

Now, you might think that from all the articles I’ve written along similar lines I would be welcoming this book with open arms. However, I do have a few misgivings.

First, although Christodoulou mentions adaptive learning technology, and assessment using comparative judgements, nothing in the book strikes me as cutting edge as far as technology is concerned. (Adaptive technology has no doubt come a long way since experimentation in the late 1990s, but it’s not a new idea. As for comparative judgement, I was experimenting with a similar approach in 1978, though without the benefit of technology to make it scaleable.) I understand that the aim of the book was to look at how people learn, the importance of teacher expertise, and argue for education technology that makes the best use of what we know about both, but I do think it would have been interesting to consider the potential benefits of more recent technologies and approaches.

Secondly, much of the research drawn upon lies in the field of neuroscience, and I have to say that I remain sceptical about its efficacy. That is in no small part because we keep discovering that the things we thought we knew about the workings of the brain turned out to be working assumptions. I’m afraid I can’t give you any examples, except to say that some of the psychology books I studied when I was younger are now regarded as almost akin to fiction. Ditto the biology books I used to find out how the brain works. So I can’t help thinking: will studies carried out in a few years’ time disprove, or at least call into doubt, a lot of the current revelations in that field?

I’m not even sure some of it means very much either. What, for example, does “overloading working memory” mean in practice, unless you somehow know what the working memory capacity of every pupil in your classroom is? Most teachers most of the time would, I contend, use their expertise and experience as teachers, and a good dollop of common sense. (A good article about this from a philosophical viewpoint is Mel Thompson’s Neurodeterminism As An Antidote To Common Sense? I Doubt It!)

Thirdly, as I said earlier, Christodoulou takes aim at project-based learning. She seems to have two objections. One, that if we’re not careful, pupils can end up learning the technology rather than the concepts they are supposed to be learning from doing the project. I agree with this objection, but it’s nothing new, and doesn’t even have anything to do with technology per se. I’ve seen several examples of where kids had to “do a project” which involved finding books and drawing pictures and putting it all together in a portfolio of some sort. But ask them what they had learnt and you would be met with a blank stare. They were doing the work rather than doing the learning.

In my opinion, that comes down to poor teaching and poor classroom management. I realise that this view is liable to make me deeply unpopular, but if, for example, kids are using PowerPoint to create a presentation for their project, and it consists of every effect under the sun, isn’t that because the teacher didn’t make it clear that that would elicit no marks, or even negative marks, that the only thing that mattered was the information they found or the solution they came up with?

At one point in the book the author argues that kids and teachers aren’t solely to blame for being distracted by technology, because the technology has been designed to make you keep you engaged with it. But when all is said and done, the teacher in the room is, supposedly, the person in charge. By way of analogy, if I run someone over because I was using my car’s hands-free mobile phone technology, I don’t think I’d get very far in a court of law if I argued that it was the car manufacturer’s fault for making it so easy to use. (Much more interesting to me was the finding that being in the same room as someone using technology can be distracting even if you’re not doing so yourself. I wasn’t aware of that. but it does make sense.)

Two, according to Christodoulou, complex projects are too complex and therefore can overload working memory. Again, doesn’t that come down to the teacher, and their approach? Work can be scaffolded. You can use something like an Ausubel advance organiser to introduce the topic or project. You can provide templates for pupils to use to help them plan their work.

So who might benefit from the book? I think two kinds of teacher. One is the technofile who thinks the answer to learning resides purely in technology. The other is perhaps the colleague who wishes to dip their toe in the technology water, but is not really sure what constitutes good education technology. For that person the book will as a caution against forgetting the roles of the learner’s brain and the teacher’s expertise.

If I were still a head of department in a school I would buy a copy or two to lend to interested colleagues, especially NQTs, despite my criticisms. There’s a lot of food for thought here, and I have to say that it’s good to read well-researched arguments against approaches like the Hole in the Wall experiment and so on. I think one of the big problems is that a lot of people who have created amazingly powerful technology think they can use their technological expertise to address the challenges faced by educators. This book makes a pretty good attempt to put such people back in their box!

One last thing, to the publishers: if you bring out a second edition, please include an index.