9 | Revealing Elephants

Revisited: “You’re Not Teaching Me”

Of all the teachers involved in any learning activity, the most important is the learner, who performs most of the orchestration that leads to individual learning. When we talk of being “learner centric,” we appear to acknowledge this fact explicitly, but too many of us fail to heed what it implies. Too often we worry about adapting our teaching to a learner’s needs, but it is still our teaching, and we are still talking about things that we do to or on behalf of the learner. If we truly take learner centricity on board, learning must be driven by learners, personalized not by teachers but by learners themselves. Teachers in an institutional setting can and should play a big part in that, of course, but they should harden their pedagogies only when that is what learners actually want or need. Good teaching therefore typically involves being aware of how the learner is learning, and how teaching is working, in a conversational process ultimately concerned with supporting a learner until the learner is ready to let go and with being there to help when things get too difficult. In the course that my student was complaining about, I was trying to let go as early as possible. This was for many reasons, not the least of which a belief—which this book reinforces and doubles down on—that one of the most critical and basic needs for learners is to be in control, to feel a sense of autonomy. I was giving the students choices. However, choice alone does not give autonomy, and, at least in the student’s initial perception, perhaps I had gone too far, notwithstanding the apparent effectiveness of the approach.

To give some context, this course adopted a hybrid subjectivist/complexivist approach. There was explicit use of many teachers, though I was the only one directly paid in that capacity. Online technologies, one or two of which I had written with pedagogical intent, helped to aggregate and use the combined discoveries of the students to create a crowd-sourced structure for a knowledge base (Dron, 2002). I seeded it, but it was mainly populated by the students. It was a rich assembly, the organization of which I did not pre-orchestrate. Each resource from the internet had been assembled and orchestrated by someone, however, normally with the intention to impart knowledge. The topics were moderated by me, but they were mostly chosen by the students, and thus the organization was a little haphazard.

Timetabled “lectures” were not exactly lectures; after the introductory session, they were opportunities to discuss things that students had found through their activities and engagements online, to learn from one another, to allow me to intervene in misconceptions or fruitless branches, and to plan future activities (what came to be known, in later years, as flipped classrooms). Instead of PowerPoint slides, wiki pages were projected onto a screen that started as outlines and that we generated collaboratively during classes (though I was the one who chose what to record and how to record it: my role as guide and expert mattered here). These outlines helped to provide focus and grew to include dialogues and student edits that developed over the ensuing week. No grades were given in the course until right at the end, though there were opportunities for discussions of what students were doing. There was no textbook and only broad learning outcomes to provide focus. I did do some didactic teaching, including brief lectures, but only on demand and ad hoc. In brief, the course was extremely soft both for me and for my students.

As the student’s initial complaint reveals, this was not a huge success with everyone. The vague and flexible process left more than a few students feeling rudderless. Without more than a smattering of process-oriented instructions, only a vague fixed body of knowledge and skills to learn, and an open set of intended learning outcomes that might appear to be extremely subjective, it was not unreasonable that a student, who had learned that teaching is about someone else taking strict control of the learning process, might find it unsettling. In fact, in attempting to give them control, I was leaving at least some of them feeling lost and rudderless, because choice is not the same thing as control: if we lack the knowledge to make good choices, then we might as well flip a coin. It probably did not help that soft is hard: some of my mini lectures might have been good, but I am certain that not all met the higher standards that might have been possible had I designed them in advance (though I did have a sizable stock of predesigned notes to use when needed, so I was frequently assembling harder pieces on the fly rather than trying to perform them from scratch).

In the end, though the course had some ups and downs, and some students still felt lost, on average it worked out well. Many students liked the freedom and camaraderie, external moderators were deeply impressed with the quality and depth of their work, and I enjoyed it, though it was terrifying and exhausting at times. But there is no doubt that it caused more anxiety than the average course for all concerned. For me, standing in front of a class of expectant students with an almost blank wiki was a frightening experience because of the enormous uncertainty about whether anything good would happen; it was extremely soft and therefore very difficult. Whenever I do something similar, it takes a leap of confidence for students to feel assured that I know what I am doing, especially since, in all honesty, I have only a rough idea at the best of times.

My course was not an isolated learning technology: as a course in a program within a university, it was part of a larger technology. When we focus on a given set of interactions, it must always be understood in the context in which it occurs. In this case, the break with expectations (accompanied by my failure to help students come to terms with it) led to problems. Just using learner-centric pedagogies that provide learners with choices does not put them in control. We have to empower them to make those choices. Equally, since students did bring prior habits and expectations, and were driven firmly by the need to achieve grades, they were enabled to fill some of the gaps that I left: it was not just me and the students themselves but also (at least) a whole institution that was teaching them.

Although the general method might be reused (and I have done so), this particular set of activities cannot ever be repeated. There were countless pedagogical methods used during that class, only some of which were mine and most of which I probably did not even realize. This kind of process places much onus on the teacher to be extremely responsive, able to change direction, adapt, and (sometimes) massage the process for it to work. It requires the teacher to be unusually aware of how the students are learning and of the effects of each intervention. It takes a lot of time, effort, and energy. With a different teacher (or me on a different day) and different students, in almost every way it would be an entirely different experience, sometimes better, sometimes worse. This soft approach to teaching illustrates the point well that the less tightly we specify the process—the softer our pedagogies—the more we have to do to fill in the gaps. Each time I do something like this, I am surprised by new and unexpected ways that it plays out, and I still fail on a regular basis. It is one of the great pleasures of being a teacher that teaching is a constant process of learning.

My student initially failed to realize that he was being taught because he was expecting me to orchestrate the entire process. This was a failure of my teaching; I should have worked far harder to make the approach much clearer at the start, and, in more recent attempts to do similar things, I have started with activities that allow learners to figure this out, both through explicit discussions and through small, “safe” activities that help them to take ownership of the idea themselves. All of my (online) courses now have a “Unit Zero” that unteaches preconceptions and teaches how learning happens in the course in a variety of ways. As Deslauriers et al. (2019) observe, students who have learned to learn in objectivist ways tend to believe that they are learning more than through subjectivist or complexivist methods even though, when challenged, they tend to reveal the opposite to be true. It is therefore important to shift perceptions of what teaching means before this becomes a problem. Making such things explicit is not always enough—constant reminders are needed, ideally built into the process so that they take ownership of it, for instance through reflective learning diaries—but it certainly helps.

It is always important to be aware of all the teachers in the system, including those who have led students to believe that teaching is something done to learners, not by them, as well as all the institutional processes, norms, assessment regimes, and so on that reinforce such beliefs. They are as much parts of the assembly as the teaching process itself. Teachers can and should let go but only when they have clear and unequivocal evidence that learners are ready to swim and only when they have the time, the energy, and a sufficiently effective process of feedback so that they know when to provide support. I am still learning how to do this. At best, I get better; I seek but never achieve perfection, nor do I expect to achieve it. Teaching is a soft technology.

Revisited: When Good Teachers Do Bad Things

This bit of cognitive dissonance was perhaps the first time that I clearly saw one of the largest elephants in the room that inspired this book. It was at this point that I grasped the simple truth that the most elegantly designed, pedagogically perfect teaching method was trumped almost every time by technique applied by a passionate and caring teacher, with a love of the subject matter and a deep desire to support the success of their students. Just as a great artist can sometimes produce wonderful paintings with poor tools, and even what others might see as poor techniques, so too a great teacher can use the worst pedagogies yet still contribute enormously to the learning of students. In fact, in some cases, the constraints that poor pedagogies impose can provide a creative impetus to overcome them and to excel.

Although my colleague described his teaching process as lecturing, in reality (and despite lacking a formal named model to follow) his approach was closer to direct instruction (Klahr & Nigam, 2004), involving a carefully constructed process to ensure that he was aware of how and when students were learning, with plenty of formal and informal feedback loops, thoughtfully designed challenges, and a clear plan for remedial action. As well as taking great advantage of the softness of the lecture format, he had softened it further by making himself available outside the lecture theatre: this was both a sign of how much he cared for the students and an indicator of his enormous energy and enthusiasm for the subject. It also allowed him to use more methods of teaching than those employed in the classroom itself. His teaching extended far beyond the timetabled events and classroom walls that appeared to bound it, allowing it to be far more personal than it appeared at first.

The fact that good teaching does not necessarily imply good teaching methods—at least not those easily described by simple labels—is explained easily by the co-participation model. Despite apparently poor methods (the harder elements of his pedagogies), my colleague’s success as a teacher was the result of a soft combination of technique, artistry, and compassion. His technique was strong, given the limited tools that he chose to use, and it was backed up by genuine care for his students, along with a highly creative and energetic approach that effectively masked, indeed positively transcended, any underlying methodological “failings” of his teaching methods.

Even his apparently scathing attitude toward students who did not put in the effort or make the grade revealed underpinning concerns about their well-being and success. With a positive attitude and a boundless willingness to help them learn, to become (by his criteria) better learners, the result was that his teaching was what Purkey (1991) describes as “unintentionally inviting.” Conversely, my own teaching, which involved a lot of conscious use of what I had been taught and what my studies suggested should be effective methods, was likely, on average, not as good as his. His combination of harder pedagogies and softer techniques meant that, even if he had the occasional off day, the methods gave sufficient structure for motivated students to succeed. Those without such motivation probably suffered, but his use of rewards and punishments (though problematic in many ways, as we will see in the next chapter) probably kept most of them on track.

Revisited: No Teacher, No Problem

As should be obvious by now, many teachers were involved in this class, including the one who was absent. When he left us, we still had some enthusiasm that he had helped to nurture, not to mention cognitive foundations that he had helped us to build. It was probably also materially relevant that we were a streamed class of students who had already shown relatively high proficiency and interest in the subject. Our learning techniques, at least in math, were likely better developed than those of average students. However, what really mattered were five big teaching presences: a classroom, a timetable, a set of school regulations, a textbook, and one another. Each played a significant role.

It was a nice, sunny, purpose-built classroom, on the ground floor at the end of an isolated wing, quiet because it was not close to other classrooms, and it was spacious enough for us to be able to rearrange desks and talk easily with one another without disrupting anyone else’s lessons. Since the classroom was at the far end of the school, even the act of getting there helped to prepare us for learning. It made it more of a commitment, and hence more salient, the bodily effort likely enhanced our capacity to learn (Skulmowksi & Rey, 2017), and the increased travel time allowed us to ready ourselves.

The timetable was an anchor ensuring that we all turned up at the same time and did not forget about what we were supposed to be doing: timetables are powerful pedagogical tools for drawing attention to the subject at hand and helping learners to prepare to learn. Even though substitute “teachers” rarely if ever did any active teaching, they still kept a register, in accordance with the school regulations, that likely encouraged many of us to continue to turn up, and that marked a ritual beginning to the process.

The textbook provided us with plentiful information and a process for learning, including many exercises, with useful keys at the back of the book to ensure that we knew what was asked and had answers against which to check our efforts.

And, perhaps most importantly of all, we helped one another, talked about the problems, and worked on them together. We asked one another questions, the answers to which benefited both the questioner and the one giving them. Among the many reasons that teaching is among the most effective ways of learning are that it requires teachers to reflect, to organize their knowledge, and to apply it in different contexts, all of which are good pedagogical methods in their own right and form the basis of Pask’s (1976a) “teachback” model. This tended to occur in small clusters determined by the arrangement of desks, combined with the unwritten but surprisingly ubiquitous rule that we almost always sat in the same places for every lesson. My own little cluster consisted of four different people who just happened to gravitate together but, thanks to the classroom layout, stayed that way and formed deeper ties. Our cluster often conferred with the cluster in front of us when we or they ran into contentious or difficult problems. Thus, the group mind of the class evolved as a clustered but interconnected network of problem-solving teams. Complexivist patterns emerged in what had been designed as an objectivist pedagogical process.

The elephant in this room was that, in almost every learning transaction, the “teacher” is not one person but a complex collective distributed among many individuals, their shared artifacts, the processes that guide them, and their environment. In every learning transaction, parts of both the overall assembly and the process of assembly are created by different participants in the transaction. In almost any human context, especially in one of formal education, we are swimming in a sea of teachers.

The math class was so successful largely because rather than despite the absence of a formal teacher. Thanks to the structured hard parts provided by the other technologies of the school, the overall assembly contained all the structures and processes that a teacher might normally provide. The very absence of a formal teacher likely increased the autonomy that we perceived, afforded more flexibility to achieve challenges at a pace that suited us, and the social engagements among us almost certainly had positive effects on our intrinsic motivation, for reasons discussed in detail in the next chapter. As ever it is necessary to look at the entire assembly rather than to focus on one specific aspect of it to understand how it works.

Revisited: An Earth-Moving Learning Experience

The “unsuccessful” presentation was one of the most memorable lectures that I have ever attended, from which I learned more than any other at that conference, even though I remember little if any of the information presented. I did not learn what the presenter hoped that I would learn, but (because I was applying a reflective pedagogy of my own) I got something out of it perhaps even more valuable. There are few technologies or methods of teaching that lead to no learning apart from, arguably, those that cause us to fall asleep. We might not learn what was intended, we might learn falsehoods or bad habits, we might learn to hate a subject, and it is sometimes hard to know whether we learned anything, but few things that we do can be described accurately as negative learning. This is a big elephant in a large and dimly lit room. Simply being human means that we are constantly learning, especially when we find ourselves in a context in which we are expected to learn. We do not learn just facts and skills but also attitudes, beliefs, and ways of thinking. For instance, uninterested teachers do not just poorly teach a topic but also teach that the topic is not interesting, that they don’t care much about their learners, and that this is the usual approach to teaching. This was not the case for this presenter. His enthusiasm was palpable, his passion sincere.

Most of my learning was soft: I do not think that I learned any significant hard facts or methods, but the talk enriched what I already knew, reinforced some connections, added salience to them. It helped me to think more clearly, easily, and creatively about the nature of teaching. I learned about the importance of making the technologies fit the pedagogy. I learned a bit about the value of lighting. I also learned about norms and values in the conference community (e.g., the applause was generous, and I wholeheartedly joined in) and how communities can be brought together by shared adversity. I learned about how situation matters: I deliberately attended an event with the intention of learning that put me in a frame of mind for learning. I learned (eventually, not right away, and of course in combination with many other learning events) about what I am writing about right now.

I am often reminded of this when I attend conferences nowadays. One thing that I observed early in my academic career was that full professors, more often than those lower in the organizational hierarchy, almost always carried notebooks with them, which they filled with notes at every opportunity, especially during conferences and workshops. Naively, I used to think that they were making notes about what the speaker was telling them, much as we still encourage students to do. Now that I am a full professor myself, I know that, apart from the occasional reference or pithy quotation, such notes rarely contain much information from presenters. Mostly, I construct my own responses to their talks, often challenging their views, frequently making connections with other things that interest me, and writing down thoughts that have been inspired (often unintentionally) by some offhand comment. My notes are littered with “special stars” next to ideas sparked by (but not directly drawn from) presentations that I want to follow up later or to incorporate into my own writing. Much of this book was developed this way. Often the most effective learning happens simply when we put ourselves in the way of ideas, good or bad, and give ourselves time to think about them. This is a methodical pedagogical process that improves with experience, a pedagogical technique overlaid on whatever pedagogies provide input to it.

The co-participation model applies to a number of aspects of this scenario. The unintended lessons that the presentation taught me result from the fact that I was the primary orchestrator of the learning experience rather than the ostensible teacher. This is generalizable: what we think we are teaching is seldom the same thing as what people are learning. In fact, at the best of times, it is almost never the only thing that we teach and never the only thing that learners learn.

The “failure” of the presentation itself was unsurprising. If part of your pedagogy depends on people seeing your slides, then (no matter how effective the pedagogy might be when well assembled) it falls at the first hurdle if people cannot see them. The phenomena that projectors make available—in the context of a large room–are necessary parts of the pedagogical assembly without which the pedagogy of visual presentation itself is useless. Pedagogies and other technologies must work together if they are to work at all.

Conversely, many of the other presentations at that conference, in which presenters adapted their approaches to accommodate the changed context, were far more engaging than they might otherwise have been. I think that the main reason for this was that they were forced to think about the technologies, including pedagogies, that they were using rather than following the normal PowerPoint-driven reporting approaches most often seen at academic conferences. One way to interpret this is that the constraints drove their creativity. However, it is just as accurate, and perhaps more useful, to see this as a sudden and unexpected increase in the adjacent possible.

Defaults harden, so, when forcibly stripped away, many other possibilities can be revealed. If anything, such stripping away leads to a loss of constraint. Often the things that constrain us are our own habits and the norms to which we feel that we have to conform. Freed from such expectations, we can explore other, and often more interesting, possibilities. Among the new possibilities are that the roles of others—each contributing pedagogy and knowledge—become much more prominent. The social aspect also had value in improving the sessions of the conference later in the day: the fact that presenters picked up ideas and approaches from those that went before is a great illustration of the value of social learning and of the many teachers who contribute to our learning. They were learning ways to teach as well as what was intentionally being taught.

Revisited: Boats That Teach

There are many elephants in this cramped little cabin. None of the former owners or designers of my boat had any intention of teaching me or anyone else, but I learned, and continue to learn, a great deal from them. This comes down to a number of mutually reinforcing factors.

• Pedagogy is embedded in many of the technologies that we use: we learn from others simply by using technologies with purposes that unfold as we use them.
• We learn from the differences between technologies: by seeing how one set of technologies solves problems compared with another, we better understand the problems and the solutions to them.
• Technologies embody learning. They do not just enable it but also do it for us, hardening processes that otherwise we would need to enact ourselves.
• The technologies that we create provide scaffolds and connections that enable and support learning, not just for individuals but also for whole communities. They are not just objects or methods that we construct but also inseparable parts of our learning process and our inherently distributed cognition.

Like houses (Brand, 1997), boats learn, and as they learn so do we. During the writing of this book, my boat has learned to be a fair environment for writing, having grown a folding shelf at a height and position useful for typing and a means to channel wifi to my computer. I have also adapted and developed methods of working in this tight space, including rituals at the start and end of a working session for preparing the space for work.

This participative feature of our constructed environment is particularly significant in the context of internet learning, in which billions of technologies, and people with varying levels of skill, help us to learn and perform the tasks that we wish to perform. Assuming that no great collapse occurs in the technologies and infrastructure of the internet, it is now a significant part of the environment in which we live and learn. To learn without recourse to the ubiquitous tools available to us through the internet—including all the people and systems such as Wikipedia, Reddit, StackExchange, email, and so on—makes no more sense than to learn without the aid of longer-established technologies such as writing, reading, arithmetic, or, for that matter, language. That said, it is worth remembering that old technologies seldom if ever completely die, and it remains useful (at least optionally) to retain the old skills that newer technologies can sometimes make apparently obsolete. There is a good case to be made that at least some of us (and all of us in a culture for which such skills are required) should remember, for instance, how to recite a poem or perform mental arithmetic.

Apart from anything else, without knowing some things, it would be impossible to make sense of others. We need foundations upon which to build, we need tools to examine critically our discoveries, we need methods of effective learning, and there are connections to be made between almost everything. Knowledge is constructed, forms, or emerges only in the context of other knowledge, and the greater our existing knowledge and skills the richer our new knowledge. There is great value in all things, to some people, some of the time, and in some of these things (writing, speaking, etc.) for virtually all people most of the time. However, to require that we learn things simply because they are parts of a curriculum makes little sense and, without due care and reflection, can stand in the way of achieving literacy in things normally of greater importance to most of us.

Distributed teaching occurs simply through interacting with the world, especially the built environment. Every one of our creations can explain things to us, help us to see things differently, connect ideas, mediate dialogue, and more. We never learn alone: we are in constant communication with the makers of all that surrounds us. It is part of our knowledge, part of our means of creating knowledge. We cannot exist in modern cultures without both teaching and being taught by the physical and virtual contexts that we share. As Mitra’s (2012) Hole in the Wall project showed, such learning might not always be effective without at least some support, or at least without intention and goal directedness, and it might not be sufficient for those who lack the pedagogical skills (e.g., children) to orchestrate the phenomena effectively. Providing such support remains a useful role for designated teachers. As Bruner (1966, p. 44) put it, “learning something with the aid of an instructor should, if instruction is effective, be less dangerous or risky or painful than learning on one’s own.” However, none of one’s learning actually occurs on one’s own. The key to success is to find the right instructors at the time and place that one needs to learn.