Introducing 'Instructional Illusions'

Why what appears to work in education often doesn't and what actually does

"The world is an illusion, but it is an illusion which we must take seriously." - Aldous Huxley

Dear reader, I wanted to let you know about a new book I have just completed with Paul Kirschner and Jim Heal.

If there was one thing I wanted educators to take away from 'How Learning Happens' and 'How Teaching Happens', it's that the process of learning is highly counterintuitive and that the practices that produce the most visible engagement and immediate results are often the least effective for developing durable, transferable knowledge. This was something I fell prey to in my early years as a teacher where ‘engagement’ was the dominant metric of learning. The ‘engagement illusion’ is the first chapter in this book and serves as an anchor point for exploring the many ways our intuitions about learning can mislead us.

It seemed to me that much of what happens in teaching and designing effective learning environments is paradoxical in nature; often you need to do the opposite of what you think you would need to do in order to get a desired outcome. For example, if you want students to retain information for longer, you should make the initial learning process slightly harder, not easier; if you want to build students' confidence and motivation, focus first on helping them achieve success rather than trying to motivate them directly; if you want to develop independent thinkers, begin with structured, explicit instruction rather than unguided discovery.

Each chapter takes a different illusion, whether it's the myth of multitasking, the lure of edutainment, or the confusion between performance and learning, and examines why it endures, what the evidence says, and how we might do better.

These counterintuitive principles run through the ten illusions we explore in the book. The performance illusion shows how conditions that produce fluent performance in the short term often fail to create durable learning. The transfer illusion reveals how the conditions that optimize immediate learning in controlled environments often differ from those that enable knowledge application across diverse contexts. The expertise illusion demonstrates how the very knowledge that makes someone an expert can make them less effective at teaching novices. Here is the full chapter list:

1. The Engagement Illusion
2. The Expertise Illusion
3. The Student-Centred Illusion
4. The Transfer Illusion
5. The Easy-Wins Illusion
6. The Motivation Illusion
7. The Discovery Illusion
8. The Uniqueness Illusion
9. The Performance Illusion
10. The Innovation Illusion

I believe that understanding these illusions is not just liberating, but empowering for educators. It helps explain why well-intentioned teaching practices sometimes fail to produce the outcomes we expect, and it suggests alternatives that align with how learning actually works rather than how we intuitively think it should work.

Understanding how learning happens does not mean educators will automatically improve student outcomes but it will mean they will make better decisions. And these decisions are based on the best bets we have about learning rather than hunches, intuition or folk psychology.

As we note in the book's introduction, education is "both primed for and rife with illusory factors that lead us to misinterpret, oversimplify, or distort." By trying to unmask these distortions, we hope to equip educators with the clarity to see beyond the many illusions inherent in how learning happens and how we can design effective instruction.

Two hugely influential figures in my own thinking on these topics are Dylan Wiliam and Robert/Elizabeth Bjork and I’m honoured to say that they have both written forewards to the book.

Lastly, this book is dedicated to our dear friend and co-author Piet Van Der Ploeg, as well as to my father and Jim’s father, all of whom we lost during its creation.

We hope you find it useful or at least, interesting.

Available 29th August. Pre-order here