Actually it wound me up a fair bit reading this because it's just so exasperating. I go to so many hundreds of lessons and it is just always the case that the issues teachers wrestle with are getting a whole class of students engaged in thinking, making connections, forming sound schema, retrieving knowledge, practising using it etc. There's so much mileage for improving practices in this area, all informed by cognitive science - and if wanting children to learn more and feel more successful ends up seeming like dogma to someone - I just want to say 'suck it up'. That's the work. That's the job. It's great that you've taken the time to write such a comprehensive response.
Re: "There's so much mileage for improving practices in this area, all informed by cognitive science"
Do you really mean "cognitive science" or do you mean "psychology"? because it might be worthwhile to be more specific about which science we're talking about.
Also, is it possible that there are limitations to how much controlled experiments in a laboratory can inform what should happen in a crowded and chaotic classroom full of special and unique students?
If you got into teaching because of a love for instructional design and creativity, perhaps the “art and craft” of teaching, (or sort of on accident, like me - with my past experiences as a student and some developmental and adolescent psychology from teacher prep to help me guess how learning happens), the shift it takes to reimagine and redesign instruction to incorporate SOL - and then apply it in ways that respond to learners by using the judgment that is required - can seems soul crushing. However, the success of students who don’t find success without adaptation towards the principles of SOL does light the soul. That kind of teaching, to me, is electric. The challenge is helping teachers both integrate the SOL and then develop the judgement it takes to make the right decisions for their students.
Really agree with you here. I think one of the most unhelpful things is the way scientific evidence ends up bundled together with particular political stances, or particular approaches to curriculum content.
“Her complaint about “student-centred” practices being marginalised betrays a deep irony. The science of learning is student-centred, and just not in the sentimental sense. It attends to the learner’s cognitive architecture, not the teacher’s preferred aesthetic.”
Do you have recommendations for students who want to have a graduate course on this topic?
This one is beautifully written. I really enjoyed reading this one. One comment: as the rise of critical pedagogy is being espoused, I think it’s getting harder to talk about the general principles that seems to work for a better effective learning. How do you personally deal with it?
Before you plunge into looking for a graduate course on applying research to the classroom, you might want to spend at least five to seven years teaching real students.
Have you ever heard the saying "the best laid schemes of mice and men..."?
The truth is that what someone's research says "tends to work better" may just not work for your students in your particular circumstances. In which case, you should hope to have the autonomy and resources to try something else that might.
Totally sympathetic to this case given the similar knowledge gaps myself and colleagues experienced, essentially teaching for a decade without a viable model of learning. SOL is integral to good teaching, full stop. However, I also get the conflation with the neoliberal agenda, which is an unfortunate cultural coincidence of increasing knowledge about cognitive architecture and effective practice emerging at the same time the policy agenda leaned hard into increasing teacher accountability. As a result, it is associated with other things such as standardised testing as part of an ideological toolkit. There is a lot more work for us as a profession to do to claim 'what works' as our own by framing it in terms of our own professional mastery, equity, more engaged/competent learners and remove it from its political associations.
Insightful take, @Kristy, on Hendrick's 7th point in this article. The "conflation [of the science of learning] with the neoliberal agenda" is real, and as Henrick points out, harmful. It reminds me of episode of 3 of Emily Hanford's Sold a Story podcast. Literacy work that was based on evidence was rejected by some liberals because George W. Bush supported it, and if Bush supported it, it must be bad. Carl's post, and your comment on it, are helpful reminders to consider evidence before we rush to condemn something based on our political persuasions. Not so easy in polarizing times, but essential. Thank you, @Kristy for pointing this out. Education is so political, but not everything that is political has to be politicized.
But somewhere in amidst your comments on “idiosyncratic approaches” and “aviation, law, medicine” there needs to be an acknowledgment of the performative nature of some professions.
I suspect the dividing line is around the manner in which your professional activity needs to play to an audience.
Aviation? No. Sure, there’s a hundred people sitting there - but they really don’t need to engage with the process. Sit down. Buckle up. Headphones in.
Medicine? Not really. There’s no performance here. No audience. Just you and your pain. Here’s the diagnosis. Here’s the plan. Keep taking the tablets.
Law? That’s more complicated. Is there an audience for changes to the law? 20 mph speed limits, anyone?
More explicitly we could consider barristers. They certainly have an audience. They need to sway the jury. Expect a performance.
Education? I think we all know that lecturing, teaching and tutoring all require an audience that is paying attention.
The educational experience for teenagers sees them move from classroom to classroom, from subject to subject, often for four or five hours a day, five days a week, for weeks on end.
So I think we need to acknowledge that ‘playing to the audience’ is a key part of what teachers must do.
And if that means a certain amount of idiosyncrasy layered on a bed of science of learning then that’s probably for the good.
You wrote: "For example, between 2013 and 2019, Mississippi, once near the bottom of national rankings, saw dramatic gains in reading and math scores, outpacing nearly every other U.S. state despite high poverty rates. These improvements were not the result of vague pedagogical pluralism but a deliberate, statewide adoption of evidence-based reading instruction grounded in cognitive science: systematic phonics, phonemic awareness, and explicit teacher training."
I don't doubt that improved teacher training helped improve student reading outcomes, but it seems that Mississippi's "miracle" improvements for fourth grade reading are more likely due to their move to hold students back in the third grade when they were flagged as struggling readers. The gains are still there but are significantly diminished in the eighth grade.
Explicit and Direct Instruction moves can be effective teaching tools that can make up some part of education; they can be good parts of teachers' toolboxes. The way this 'Science of Learning' thing seems to be going is that a bunch of legislators and clueless administrators are going to oversimplify it and try to apply scripted lessons to teachers like a blunt instrument. This is going to drive even more good teachers from the profession and ultimately make schooling even more miserable for all involved than NCLB and Common Core and all of their bedfellows already have.
Thank you for bringing Dr. Rachael Jefferson's article to my attention. I largely agree with her.
@Peter, because I loved your article about teaching as craft, I respect your opinions so I read the article Hendrick references. But I have to agree with Hendricks on this, that Dr. Jefferson's concerns are weak. Except for this one:
“'I feel like teachers are positioned more as technicians as opposed to professionals, and in that sense they’re able to deliver content and therefore they’re not supported by the state mandates and scripted lessons and so on as being knowledgeable professionals who make ongoing nuanced decisions about pedagogy,' she argues."
And that supports what you say above: "a bunch of legislators and clueless administrators are going to oversimplify it and try to apply scripted lessons to teachers like a blunt instrument. This is going to drive even more good teachers from the profession and ultimately making schooling even more miserable for all involved than NCLB and Common Core and all of their bedfellows already have."
I agree with that whole-heartedly. There is an unfortunate trend in education to jump on the newest "thing," but either only at a surface level, or worse--going all in but in a distorted version of the original. That's what happened with Common Core. It was all about skills, not content. There was a tiny footnote about content that no one read. And now there's a growing movement back towards content/knowledge. I worry, because I support it, but it's coming at a time when we are distracted by AI and politics, and because I don't want people to screw that up either.
Hendrick's point #3 addresses the concern Jefferson raises. But what superintendents, administrators, and other do with "the science of learning" remains to be seen.
Thanks for engaging! I suspect we agree more than disagree--or at least both have learning for kids and positive outcomes for them at heart. I DO believe in phonics, breaking down learning, modeling, checking for understanding, and the efficacy of explicit, direct instruction, especially early in education and early in the introduction of new ideas; I'm skeptical of anything that presents itself as a panacea, am deeply skeptical of 'the Mississippi miracle' (I've worked in a school that 'miraculously' improved its scores--there was a lot of funny business, a lot of cost (not monetary), and a lot of counterproductive stuff that came along with it), am worried about the ways things like this can be 'overprescribed,' and am always dubious of heavily top-down initiatives that reduce teacher autonomy. That all said, I'm also a high school junior and senior teacher, and should admit that I'm perhaps out of my area and age group of specialty when we talk about the 'science of learning' and k-4 aged kids. As someone who's seen instructional strategies that work for one age group/ discipline be assigned to others by top-down bureaucrats with deleterious effect, though, I thought I would speak up.
Agree with all of this. I'm also a secondary teacher--history--who has had well-meaning educators insist hat what works for teaching math works for history, and what works for 4th grade works for 8th. What works in math class and 4th grade MIGHT work for 8th grade history--I have learned much, especially lately, from those who teach different subjects and ages than I do-- but those things also might not work. And nothing solves everything.
It's easy to teach basketball shooting outside of technique drills. I agree that there are a lot of good principles that come out of cognitive science, but the problem is it creates an artifical structure around which we've simply assumed things about learning that are patently false.
A constructivist approach known as Teaching Games for Understanding has done it for decades, in its most game-based forms; and now a growing number of basketball coaches out the nonlinear pedagogy/constraints-led approach, who are more explicitly proponents of embodied cognition, are doing it too.
I have some direct experience with this approach through both striking and grappling martial arts. I know the assumption you need technique drills to learn and become skilled at physical activities is false, and it's within the power of any coach to test and invaldate this notion immediately, provided they have some idea of how to teach skills without traditional technical drills.
Your point about athletic training is interesting to me. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about sports and how learning/development happens for young athletes. I have watched my sons learn to play ice hockey - which is a really complex sport as it turns out, particularly from the embodied cognition perspective. The first step was to learn to skate - which is complex in itself, and then once they weren’t so wobbly, the drills started. And then game play. Things really took off for both my kids when they did some power skating lessons, developed their edge work, etc. They worked with a coach one-on-one, lots of modeling on the specific skills, etc. Development didn’t necessarily happen as fast with the skills and drills clinics. I have heard the phrase “Hockey IQ” used by coaches which I’m told means a sort of speedy ability to read and react - and that ability would seem to be embodied cognition that, when applied in fast-moving game play, shows up and grows though experiencing a variety of situations through which they developed that read-and-react judgment that is both mental and physical at once. Fascinating to me, this kind of learning. I’ve seen pieces of various instrumental approaches over the past 5 years. Learning to play hockey also helped one of my sons overcome some sensory processing delays - which makes sense, too, doesn’t it? He also started doing better academically after he started playing - for a number of reasons, no doubt.
Perceptual-motor skill (your ability to read and make decisions in an emergent way) is an underappreciated aspect of motor control and learning. The technique drilling model barely addresses this dimension at all, because it wants to put almost contextless knowledge into you before you can even play the game, and the "perceptual load," if you will, does not match the perceptual variables you actually have to manage in the game. So you only get practice on managing those variables on game day or in practice skirmishes.
Isn't it interesting how those athletes had to learn how to balance on skates *before* they could do technical drills?
Yes - absolutely. Before they even understood the main objectives of play, they had to get good on the skates. Coaches talk a lot about ice time, too - a sort of general measure of what it takes to improve is how much “ice time” one gets beyond team practice. Which reminds of what I have shared with one of the new teachers I am working with. He came to the profession with a JD, but no other preparation for teaching. He likes sports, so we’ve talked a lot about learning to teach as preparing/planning, but also getting those games in - those game-play reps. You can work out in the gym - and that fitness matters, and you can watch others play, but you have to get into a game to really learn the “sport.” That’s where that emergent read-and-respond decision making practice has to happen. Crude analogy, perhaps, but it works for us. Anyway, thanks for this!
You're welcome! Thank you for sharing about your son and the coaches you know. Pleasantly surprised by the engagement here -- I should comment more often lol.
Sweller et al, (2019). Cognitive Architecture and Instructional Design: 20 Years Later also made mention of Embodied Cognition. "it is clear that motor information may constitute an additional modality that can also occupy WM’s limited resources. As it seems difficult to firmly reconcile the cognitive effects of human movement with the working memory model adopted by cognitive load theory, it can be argued that human movement may constitute an additional modality that should be considered within existing WM models." This contradicts Carl's claim "it has not demonstrated a generalisable theory of instruction."
Wow, thanks for brining that paper to my attention. I'm working my way through an Ed.D. and I'm looking for ways to make sense of both cognitivist and ecological research.
yes there are lot of other papers too, but make sure you get a copy of Sweller et al, they conclude- "In the 1998 article, no mention was made whatsoever of evolutionary psychology, working memory resource depletion or embodied cognition, yet, these ideas turned out to be crucial for the further development of the theory. So, let us not try to predict the future but create it by continuing to do good research."
thanks Josh, I don't think Carl has represented the research on Embodied Cognition accurately. I'm interested in Teaching Games for Understanding, I will look it up.
Amazing analysis, especially this, which overlaps with my area of interest, the science of reading:
The science of learning is student-centred, and just not in the sentimental sense. It attends to the learner’s cognitive architecture, not the teacher’s preferred aesthetic. . . The ultimate tragedy of positions which privilege ideological purity over empirical evidence is that they potentially perpetuate educational inequity. Students from disadvantaged backgrounds, who often lack the cultural capital to navigate discovery-based approaches, benefit most dramatically from explicit, systematic instruction. To reject this evidence in favour of pedagogical romanticism is to abandon those who need us most. As Doug Carnine noted, “The greatest victims of these fads are the very students who are most at risk.”
Back in 2000, reading researcher Keith Stanovich wrote:
Ironically, the primary casualties of the Reading Wars are disadvantaged children who are not immersed in a literate environment and who are not taught the alphabetic code—precisely the children that progressive forces most want to aid. As Adams’s (1990) book makes clear, research has shown that a very efficient way to generate large social class differences in reading achievement is to implement an extreme whole language curriculum that shortchanges the explicit teaching of spelling-sound relationships.
Your assertion of "probabilistic insights" lacks scientific rigor. Without consistent, calibrated, or reliable measurement methods, such claims fall outside the bounds of empirical science.
Furthermore, your sweeping statement that "different disciplines often converge on similar instructional implications" contradicts the evidence from leading researchers in the field. Even prominent Cognitive Load Theory (CLT) theorists acknowledge fundamental inconsistencies in their own domain. Zhang and Sweller (2024) explicitly grapple with conflicting findings, noting that "the inconsistency in these findings is stark." This pattern of contradictory evidence extends throughout the literature, as demonstrated in the work of Gorbunova, van Merrienboer, and Costley (2023), and Kalyuga and Singh (2015).
If the foundational theorists within a single discipline struggle to reconcile conflicting evidence, claims of cross-disciplinary convergence appear premature at best.
Thanks for your thoughtful and detailed piece Carl. It’s clear we need more grounded, good-faith dialogue like this in education. I share your commitment to moving past surface-level debates and toward deeper understanding of how students learn.
While I don’t see the debate as favouring one approach over another, I’ve been reflecting on how we can move beyond the binary framing of explicit vs. inquiry-based instruction. In particular, I’m interested in how we can foster school cultures rich in teacher agency, where educators are seen as professionals with access to a wide repertoire of pedagogical tools, and the confidence to draw on different approaches in response to their students, context, and purpose.
Actually it wound me up a fair bit reading this because it's just so exasperating. I go to so many hundreds of lessons and it is just always the case that the issues teachers wrestle with are getting a whole class of students engaged in thinking, making connections, forming sound schema, retrieving knowledge, practising using it etc. There's so much mileage for improving practices in this area, all informed by cognitive science - and if wanting children to learn more and feel more successful ends up seeming like dogma to someone - I just want to say 'suck it up'. That's the work. That's the job. It's great that you've taken the time to write such a comprehensive response.
Re: "There's so much mileage for improving practices in this area, all informed by cognitive science"
Do you really mean "cognitive science" or do you mean "psychology"? because it might be worthwhile to be more specific about which science we're talking about.
Also, is it possible that there are limitations to how much controlled experiments in a laboratory can inform what should happen in a crowded and chaotic classroom full of special and unique students?
If you got into teaching because of a love for instructional design and creativity, perhaps the “art and craft” of teaching, (or sort of on accident, like me - with my past experiences as a student and some developmental and adolescent psychology from teacher prep to help me guess how learning happens), the shift it takes to reimagine and redesign instruction to incorporate SOL - and then apply it in ways that respond to learners by using the judgment that is required - can seems soul crushing. However, the success of students who don’t find success without adaptation towards the principles of SOL does light the soul. That kind of teaching, to me, is electric. The challenge is helping teachers both integrate the SOL and then develop the judgement it takes to make the right decisions for their students.
Really agree with you here. I think one of the most unhelpful things is the way scientific evidence ends up bundled together with particular political stances, or particular approaches to curriculum content.
“Her complaint about “student-centred” practices being marginalised betrays a deep irony. The science of learning is student-centred, and just not in the sentimental sense. It attends to the learner’s cognitive architecture, not the teacher’s preferred aesthetic.”
Do you have recommendations for students who want to have a graduate course on this topic?
This one is beautifully written. I really enjoyed reading this one. One comment: as the rise of critical pedagogy is being espoused, I think it’s getting harder to talk about the general principles that seems to work for a better effective learning. How do you personally deal with it?
Before you plunge into looking for a graduate course on applying research to the classroom, you might want to spend at least five to seven years teaching real students.
Have you ever heard the saying "the best laid schemes of mice and men..."?
The truth is that what someone's research says "tends to work better" may just not work for your students in your particular circumstances. In which case, you should hope to have the autonomy and resources to try something else that might.
Brilliant Carl.
Totally sympathetic to this case given the similar knowledge gaps myself and colleagues experienced, essentially teaching for a decade without a viable model of learning. SOL is integral to good teaching, full stop. However, I also get the conflation with the neoliberal agenda, which is an unfortunate cultural coincidence of increasing knowledge about cognitive architecture and effective practice emerging at the same time the policy agenda leaned hard into increasing teacher accountability. As a result, it is associated with other things such as standardised testing as part of an ideological toolkit. There is a lot more work for us as a profession to do to claim 'what works' as our own by framing it in terms of our own professional mastery, equity, more engaged/competent learners and remove it from its political associations.
Insightful take, @Kristy, on Hendrick's 7th point in this article. The "conflation [of the science of learning] with the neoliberal agenda" is real, and as Henrick points out, harmful. It reminds me of episode of 3 of Emily Hanford's Sold a Story podcast. Literacy work that was based on evidence was rejected by some liberals because George W. Bush supported it, and if Bush supported it, it must be bad. Carl's post, and your comment on it, are helpful reminders to consider evidence before we rush to condemn something based on our political persuasions. Not so easy in polarizing times, but essential. Thank you, @Kristy for pointing this out. Education is so political, but not everything that is political has to be politicized.
Hard agree with all of this. Understanding the science of learning has transformed my practice for the better.
I’m pretty comfortable with most of this.
But somewhere in amidst your comments on “idiosyncratic approaches” and “aviation, law, medicine” there needs to be an acknowledgment of the performative nature of some professions.
I suspect the dividing line is around the manner in which your professional activity needs to play to an audience.
Aviation? No. Sure, there’s a hundred people sitting there - but they really don’t need to engage with the process. Sit down. Buckle up. Headphones in.
Medicine? Not really. There’s no performance here. No audience. Just you and your pain. Here’s the diagnosis. Here’s the plan. Keep taking the tablets.
Law? That’s more complicated. Is there an audience for changes to the law? 20 mph speed limits, anyone?
More explicitly we could consider barristers. They certainly have an audience. They need to sway the jury. Expect a performance.
Education? I think we all know that lecturing, teaching and tutoring all require an audience that is paying attention.
The educational experience for teenagers sees them move from classroom to classroom, from subject to subject, often for four or five hours a day, five days a week, for weeks on end.
So I think we need to acknowledge that ‘playing to the audience’ is a key part of what teachers must do.
And if that means a certain amount of idiosyncrasy layered on a bed of science of learning then that’s probably for the good.
You wrote: "For example, between 2013 and 2019, Mississippi, once near the bottom of national rankings, saw dramatic gains in reading and math scores, outpacing nearly every other U.S. state despite high poverty rates. These improvements were not the result of vague pedagogical pluralism but a deliberate, statewide adoption of evidence-based reading instruction grounded in cognitive science: systematic phonics, phonemic awareness, and explicit teacher training."
I don't doubt that improved teacher training helped improve student reading outcomes, but it seems that Mississippi's "miracle" improvements for fourth grade reading are more likely due to their move to hold students back in the third grade when they were flagged as struggling readers. The gains are still there but are significantly diminished in the eighth grade.
Explicit and Direct Instruction moves can be effective teaching tools that can make up some part of education; they can be good parts of teachers' toolboxes. The way this 'Science of Learning' thing seems to be going is that a bunch of legislators and clueless administrators are going to oversimplify it and try to apply scripted lessons to teachers like a blunt instrument. This is going to drive even more good teachers from the profession and ultimately make schooling even more miserable for all involved than NCLB and Common Core and all of their bedfellows already have.
Thank you for bringing Dr. Rachael Jefferson's article to my attention. I largely agree with her.
https://educationhq.com/news/teacher-educator-laments-soul-destroying-explicit-instruction-movement-194633/
@Peter, because I loved your article about teaching as craft, I respect your opinions so I read the article Hendrick references. But I have to agree with Hendricks on this, that Dr. Jefferson's concerns are weak. Except for this one:
“'I feel like teachers are positioned more as technicians as opposed to professionals, and in that sense they’re able to deliver content and therefore they’re not supported by the state mandates and scripted lessons and so on as being knowledgeable professionals who make ongoing nuanced decisions about pedagogy,' she argues."
And that supports what you say above: "a bunch of legislators and clueless administrators are going to oversimplify it and try to apply scripted lessons to teachers like a blunt instrument. This is going to drive even more good teachers from the profession and ultimately making schooling even more miserable for all involved than NCLB and Common Core and all of their bedfellows already have."
I agree with that whole-heartedly. There is an unfortunate trend in education to jump on the newest "thing," but either only at a surface level, or worse--going all in but in a distorted version of the original. That's what happened with Common Core. It was all about skills, not content. There was a tiny footnote about content that no one read. And now there's a growing movement back towards content/knowledge. I worry, because I support it, but it's coming at a time when we are distracted by AI and politics, and because I don't want people to screw that up either.
Hendrick's point #3 addresses the concern Jefferson raises. But what superintendents, administrators, and other do with "the science of learning" remains to be seen.
Hi Lauren,
Thanks for engaging! I suspect we agree more than disagree--or at least both have learning for kids and positive outcomes for them at heart. I DO believe in phonics, breaking down learning, modeling, checking for understanding, and the efficacy of explicit, direct instruction, especially early in education and early in the introduction of new ideas; I'm skeptical of anything that presents itself as a panacea, am deeply skeptical of 'the Mississippi miracle' (I've worked in a school that 'miraculously' improved its scores--there was a lot of funny business, a lot of cost (not monetary), and a lot of counterproductive stuff that came along with it), am worried about the ways things like this can be 'overprescribed,' and am always dubious of heavily top-down initiatives that reduce teacher autonomy. That all said, I'm also a high school junior and senior teacher, and should admit that I'm perhaps out of my area and age group of specialty when we talk about the 'science of learning' and k-4 aged kids. As someone who's seen instructional strategies that work for one age group/ discipline be assigned to others by top-down bureaucrats with deleterious effect, though, I thought I would speak up.
Peter
Agree with all of this. I'm also a secondary teacher--history--who has had well-meaning educators insist hat what works for teaching math works for history, and what works for 4th grade works for 8th. What works in math class and 4th grade MIGHT work for 8th grade history--I have learned much, especially lately, from those who teach different subjects and ages than I do-- but those things also might not work. And nothing solves everything.
Whose design? Whose yardstick?
Who should get to make the decisions about what is working?
It's easy to teach basketball shooting outside of technique drills. I agree that there are a lot of good principles that come out of cognitive science, but the problem is it creates an artifical structure around which we've simply assumed things about learning that are patently false.
A constructivist approach known as Teaching Games for Understanding has done it for decades, in its most game-based forms; and now a growing number of basketball coaches out the nonlinear pedagogy/constraints-led approach, who are more explicitly proponents of embodied cognition, are doing it too.
I have some direct experience with this approach through both striking and grappling martial arts. I know the assumption you need technique drills to learn and become skilled at physical activities is false, and it's within the power of any coach to test and invaldate this notion immediately, provided they have some idea of how to teach skills without traditional technical drills.
Your point about athletic training is interesting to me. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about sports and how learning/development happens for young athletes. I have watched my sons learn to play ice hockey - which is a really complex sport as it turns out, particularly from the embodied cognition perspective. The first step was to learn to skate - which is complex in itself, and then once they weren’t so wobbly, the drills started. And then game play. Things really took off for both my kids when they did some power skating lessons, developed their edge work, etc. They worked with a coach one-on-one, lots of modeling on the specific skills, etc. Development didn’t necessarily happen as fast with the skills and drills clinics. I have heard the phrase “Hockey IQ” used by coaches which I’m told means a sort of speedy ability to read and react - and that ability would seem to be embodied cognition that, when applied in fast-moving game play, shows up and grows though experiencing a variety of situations through which they developed that read-and-react judgment that is both mental and physical at once. Fascinating to me, this kind of learning. I’ve seen pieces of various instrumental approaches over the past 5 years. Learning to play hockey also helped one of my sons overcome some sensory processing delays - which makes sense, too, doesn’t it? He also started doing better academically after he started playing - for a number of reasons, no doubt.
Perceptual-motor skill (your ability to read and make decisions in an emergent way) is an underappreciated aspect of motor control and learning. The technique drilling model barely addresses this dimension at all, because it wants to put almost contextless knowledge into you before you can even play the game, and the "perceptual load," if you will, does not match the perceptual variables you actually have to manage in the game. So you only get practice on managing those variables on game day or in practice skirmishes.
Isn't it interesting how those athletes had to learn how to balance on skates *before* they could do technical drills?
Yes - absolutely. Before they even understood the main objectives of play, they had to get good on the skates. Coaches talk a lot about ice time, too - a sort of general measure of what it takes to improve is how much “ice time” one gets beyond team practice. Which reminds of what I have shared with one of the new teachers I am working with. He came to the profession with a JD, but no other preparation for teaching. He likes sports, so we’ve talked a lot about learning to teach as preparing/planning, but also getting those games in - those game-play reps. You can work out in the gym - and that fitness matters, and you can watch others play, but you have to get into a game to really learn the “sport.” That’s where that emergent read-and-respond decision making practice has to happen. Crude analogy, perhaps, but it works for us. Anyway, thanks for this!
You're welcome! Thank you for sharing about your son and the coaches you know. Pleasantly surprised by the engagement here -- I should comment more often lol.
Sweller et al, (2019). Cognitive Architecture and Instructional Design: 20 Years Later also made mention of Embodied Cognition. "it is clear that motor information may constitute an additional modality that can also occupy WM’s limited resources. As it seems difficult to firmly reconcile the cognitive effects of human movement with the working memory model adopted by cognitive load theory, it can be argued that human movement may constitute an additional modality that should be considered within existing WM models." This contradicts Carl's claim "it has not demonstrated a generalisable theory of instruction."
Wow, thanks for brining that paper to my attention. I'm working my way through an Ed.D. and I'm looking for ways to make sense of both cognitivist and ecological research.
yes there are lot of other papers too, but make sure you get a copy of Sweller et al, they conclude- "In the 1998 article, no mention was made whatsoever of evolutionary psychology, working memory resource depletion or embodied cognition, yet, these ideas turned out to be crucial for the further development of the theory. So, let us not try to predict the future but create it by continuing to do good research."
thanks Josh, I don't think Carl has represented the research on Embodied Cognition accurately. I'm interested in Teaching Games for Understanding, I will look it up.
Amazing analysis, especially this, which overlaps with my area of interest, the science of reading:
The science of learning is student-centred, and just not in the sentimental sense. It attends to the learner’s cognitive architecture, not the teacher’s preferred aesthetic. . . The ultimate tragedy of positions which privilege ideological purity over empirical evidence is that they potentially perpetuate educational inequity. Students from disadvantaged backgrounds, who often lack the cultural capital to navigate discovery-based approaches, benefit most dramatically from explicit, systematic instruction. To reject this evidence in favour of pedagogical romanticism is to abandon those who need us most. As Doug Carnine noted, “The greatest victims of these fads are the very students who are most at risk.”
Back in 2000, reading researcher Keith Stanovich wrote:
Ironically, the primary casualties of the Reading Wars are disadvantaged children who are not immersed in a literate environment and who are not taught the alphabetic code—precisely the children that progressive forces most want to aid. As Adams’s (1990) book makes clear, research has shown that a very efficient way to generate large social class differences in reading achievement is to implement an extreme whole language curriculum that shortchanges the explicit teaching of spelling-sound relationships.
Your assertion of "probabilistic insights" lacks scientific rigor. Without consistent, calibrated, or reliable measurement methods, such claims fall outside the bounds of empirical science.
Furthermore, your sweeping statement that "different disciplines often converge on similar instructional implications" contradicts the evidence from leading researchers in the field. Even prominent Cognitive Load Theory (CLT) theorists acknowledge fundamental inconsistencies in their own domain. Zhang and Sweller (2024) explicitly grapple with conflicting findings, noting that "the inconsistency in these findings is stark." This pattern of contradictory evidence extends throughout the literature, as demonstrated in the work of Gorbunova, van Merrienboer, and Costley (2023), and Kalyuga and Singh (2015).
If the foundational theorists within a single discipline struggle to reconcile conflicting evidence, claims of cross-disciplinary convergence appear premature at best.
Bravo, Carl! Thanks for sharing such an important reflection. I wrote one myself not too long ago. https://learningcosmos.substack.com/p/my-science-of-learning-manifesto
Hope somebody finds it useful
Thanks for your thoughtful and detailed piece Carl. It’s clear we need more grounded, good-faith dialogue like this in education. I share your commitment to moving past surface-level debates and toward deeper understanding of how students learn.
While I don’t see the debate as favouring one approach over another, I’ve been reflecting on how we can move beyond the binary framing of explicit vs. inquiry-based instruction. In particular, I’m interested in how we can foster school cultures rich in teacher agency, where educators are seen as professionals with access to a wide repertoire of pedagogical tools, and the confidence to draw on different approaches in response to their students, context, and purpose.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/renewing-how-students-learn-moving-beyond-explicit-vs-pinar-fhea-dgcac/?trackingId=vrJWY5YKRS%2BnJPbXQ%2Fzqeg%3D%3D
Oh wow. There are so many lines here that I love. A great piece of writing. Thanks.