Doug Lemov: Interview with Daisy Christodoulou

Posted: December 19th, 2013 | Author: Michael Goldstein | | No Comments »

Doug’s interview is up on his blog. Daisy Christodoulou wrote a new book called Seven Myths About Education.

Doug:

You also talk about how simplistic and isolated facts are presented as a proxy for knowledge and then dismissed. It’s a recurring trope to pull a single obscure fact—the date of the battle of Waterloo, say—and point out that it is useless to know such a thing when that isn’t really “knowing.” This becomes an argument to dismiss the importance of a broad-based knowledge of facts.

I loved your response which was to point out that this is a way of reducing the idea to absurdity. That the power is in in fact in systematic knowledge.

You write:

“Of course pulling one fact out like this does seem rather odd, But the aim of fact-learning is not to learn just one fact — it is to learn several hundred which, taken together form a schema that helps you understand the world. Just learning the date of the battle of Waterloo will be of limited use. But learning the dates of 150 historical events from 3000BC to the present and learning a couple of facts about why each event was important will be of immense use because it will form the … basis of [a broad and widely applicable] historical understanding.”

Can you talk a bit more about that?

Daisy:

My current favourite analogy for this is brushing your teeth. Suppose you are trying to persuade a child to brush their teeth, and they say, ‘well, I brushed my teeth once this month but my teeth are still in bad shape’. You wouldn’t say ‘oh dear, the tooth brushing strategy has failed, better try another one!’ You’d tell them that they need to brush their teeth twice a day! Of course, you can skip brushing your teeth now and again and still have healthy teeth, just as you can be vague on a couple of dates and still have good historical knowledge.

Essentially this problem comes down to a misunderstanding of the relationship between knowledge and skills. The best way to think of skill is as a web of knowledge. Knowledge causes skill.

I think in many ways, we are sometimes like the child who doesn’t want to brush their teeth. We want a short cut. We want to be told, if you use this magic toothpaste, you will only have to brush your teeth once a month! Or even just once a year! And that’s the dream of skills-based instruction – if you teach these magic how-to lessons, you don’t have to worry about the slow accumulation of knowledge. There is no magic how-to lesson. Not only that, but actually, the slow accumulation of knowledge is really enjoyable. It’s wonderful to learn new knowledge. It is time-consuming, but it is a great way to consume time!

Doug:

You give another example: “Just learning 4*4 is useless but knowing all of the 12 times tables and learning them all so securely that we can hardly not think of the answer when the problem is presented is the basis of mathematical understanding.”

It also strikes me that we actually tend to be more comfortable with the idea that math requires automaticity to free the mind up for deep insight than the idea that history does, say. A lot more people get that argument than get the idea that knowing history “cold” allows for deeper insight. You’re saying that unless it’s in our long term memory, accessing it takes up finite processing capacity and drives out other analytical thought. Deep insight comes suddenly and fast. To be able to say “Aha! He sounds just like Napoleon at Waterloo,” you have to think of the similarities automatically, without deciding to do so. Is that the idea?

Daisy:

Yes, if you have lots of historical knowledge, then you can make analogies like that a lot more quickly. You can see this if you read any great work of historical scholarship. I just finished reading Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers, a history of the causes of the First World War. Clark’s analysis of a complex historical problem derives from his mastery of the facts. You can’t separate the analysis from the facts. The two are bound up with each other.

And having historical knowledge down cold also means you have a grasp of chronology, which is vital for understanding one of the most important historical concepts of all: causation.

I frequently came across pupils who had no idea of when really big world inventions such as gunpowder, the printing press and the railway had happened. If you don’t know that, then you can’t really understand how they might have caused certain changes, and why certain things maybe couldn’t take place until they had been invented. So you know, you are discussing the Battle of Hastings, and looking at how King Harold marched his troops down from Stamford Bridge to Hastings, and why that was such a big deal, and someone says why didn’t they get the train?

I think the best way to give pupils this historical framework – the grammar of history, if you like – is through a narrative like Ernst Gombrich’s A Little History of the World or Susan Wise Bauer’s books. I think if you supplemented a narrative like that with the key dates I talked about above, you would have a really good one year introduction to the grammar of history.

I think you are right that people have a harder time accepting this for history, and indeed for grammar/language than they do for maths. I don’t know why that is. Perhaps it’s because with maths, because it’s quite abstract, people are happier to accept the idea that the facts are the building block. Whereas with history, and also with language and literature, narrative and story are so important, and people worry that focusing on facts will kill the joy of the narrative.

Doug:

I think the biggest epiphany in the book, for me, came when I read your “chicken-and-egg” passage: “This kind of activity [independent work where students work on their own to apply understanding and problem solve] is meaningful if you already have knowledge … But if they have always been taught via this method, it is unlikely [students] will have extensive knowledge of the topic.

Pupils will be caught in a chicken-and-egg scenario: unable to work independently because they do not have necessary background knowledge, but unable to gain that background knowledge because they spend all of their time working independently.” I read this while I was rewriting TLAC and it made me think especially about Ratio.

Can I ask you to provide further thoughts on how you’d strike the balance between knowledge assimilation and relatively independent application of knowledge in rigorous and relatively autonomous tasks?

Read the whole thing here.

Buy Daisy’s book here.