Wayne Cosshall's Writings
Education
Just How Stupid is Career Planning?
If you are like me, you were taught the importance of career planning. What we were taught was wrong. Let’s examine why. I remember sessions in school when we looked at career possibilities and discussed, for those of us who were heading towards what in those days was considered a career, how to craft a successful career. Now in my day only 5% of school leavers went to university, so it was a different world than now. But more recently we sat through sessions at my daughter’s high school that emphasised an early decision on what she wanted to do, so that subjects could be carefully chosen with a view to what was required for university entry for that field. The advice in my day, and my daughter’s, was so wrong for many different reasons. In this article we will look at a few of those and seek a much better alternative. You Have To Be In It To Know It Ask most high school students what an accountant does all day and you’ll get suggestions about doing math, adding up lots of columns of numbers and maybe spending a lot of time in spreadsheets. Most teachers will think the same and will probably say that you should be good at math for a career as an accountant. And of course they would be wrong. A recent conversation with my accountant is why I have chosen this example. His answer is that to be a good accountant you have to like people and be really good at communication. While I picked one profession as an example, this is true for most professions where the actual practice of the profession is very different to what people expect to be the case. Sadly school career advisors and university study rarely, if ever, provide a proper introduction to actual life in that career. What this means is that even, say, a high school accounting teacher, if they have never actually worked as an accountant, won’t even be in a position to provide correct advice. Over a great many years I have seen the sad consequences of this over and over again. I have seen so many students doing the wrong course and even more people disillusioned and burned out in their careers. It is impossible to properly shape your career if you do not have true clarity about what the career is about, what is involved and what is possible, even if unlikely. Today, Careers Often Have Quite A Short Life Careers have always come and gone. But as the pace of change in the world accelerates, so the lifespan of many careers shorten. The real problem with this is that our thinking about careers is stuck in the days when a career lasted a lifetime. That thinking determines the systems and practices that we put in place around careers. For example, it perhaps makes sense to spend three or four years doing an undergraduate degree, and some large amount of money as well, if it qualifies you for a career that will stretch from your early 20’s until you eventually retire. If you get 40 years out of a 4 year degree then that is a 10% overhead. But if the career only lasts 10 years, is it still worth it? Perhaps this is one factor that is encouraging the shift to shorter courses. But ultimately that’s not the complete answer. As the pace of change increases, then logically the career longevity will get shorter, requiring ever shorter courses to qualify for them. This will eventually hit limits of practicality. As careers get shorter, then the qualification period must also get shorter proportionally, but this gets impractical beyond a certain point. We Are Focused On The Wrong Thing And now we get to the real issue, all along we have been focused on the wrong thing. We have tied the concept of a career to a particular and narrow definition around a job. Frankly we started to lose the plot as soon as we started to focus on work. This has been the ruination of the concept of the career, just as it has become the ruination of the university as a place of noble learning. Instead it has made the university somewhere you go to get the piece of paper that enables you to do a particular job. Pure and total stupidity, and such destruction of what was once an amazing institution. What’s wrong with work, you say? Well nothing really, but for what we are talking about here, this is an issue. Work implies payment and if you spend too long stuck in this way of thinking then you will tend to only do or value activities that provide a reward. This is not only limiting, but also skews things to only being about yourself and what benefits you get. A term that seems to have disappeared from the common language is avocation. Now an avocation is usually defined as a secondary occupation, apart from one’s main one, and is something that one does purely for the enjoyment of it. And this is getting much closer to the right way of thinking, but we are not quite there yet. Many people use the term ‘purpose’. They talk about your life’s purpose. Even better than the term itself, it is often broken down into four ingredients: Passion Mastery or Talent Values Mission Now we are close. The problem I have with the term ‘purpose’ is that it implied that our purpose is something we have a choice over. And I don’t think that is the case. Your Calling or Trajectory I prefer the terms calling or trajectory. Your Life’s Calling has a nice ring to it, but might be a little too spiritual or have a religious overtone for some. I think in terms of my Life’s Trajectory. Trajectory has the right combination of being something that is just there, rather than something you picked. It suggests momentum. It also suggests that there are activities that are aligned with and so contribute positively to the trajectory of your life, and yet others that act against it. So now let’s take the four purpose ingredients from above and modify them slightly. The trajectory of your life is made up of: Your passions, and especially the common, deeper passions that link them together Your talents The values and beliefs you have and, more important than the ones you have at any given time, the common thread of values and beliefs that you have over time The missions you set out on I’ll have much more to say about these in followup articles, so you might like to follow me or subscribe. Few of us are born with clarity of our life’s trajectory. Rather it emerges over time, and you do need to go looking for it. And you will refine and develop it over time. Using Your Trajectory Once you do have some idea of your life’s trajectory you have a wonderful tool for decision making. If you are considering a job, for example, then you can ask yourself whether getting the job will be aligned with and contribute to your trajectory, or act against it (Jade McAndrew-Barlow explores this in Things You Must Consider Before Accepting a Job Offer ). Let’s continue this discussion later. Be sure to Follow or Subscribe so you don’t miss anything.
The Benefits of Having Diverse Friends and How to Learn from Them
I am blessed with having friends of all sorts, from so many countries, religions, ethnicities, experience and professions. There are values in such diversity that you may not expect. Photo by Duy Pham on Unsplash
The Privileging of Text Literacy in Education Must Stop and a Media-Agnostic Approach Embraced
 Since the development of writing we have gradually privileged text literacy above other forms of communication. Even oratory, one of the pillars of Greek civilisation, has been subsumed in the march of text literacy above all else. In education we put so much emphasis on text literacy that children who have difficulty with text are […]
Removing the Disability Label from Dyslexia, Asperger’s, Autism, ADHD and Other Cognitive Diversities
A child being unable to learn to read at the ‘normal’ rate is only an issue in a literate society. For the vast majority of human existence an inability to learn to read was not an issue at all. In fact if you go back, say 10,000 years, an ability to read would be abnormal. […]
Education
Just How Stupid is Career Planning?
If you are like me, you were taught the importance of career planning. What we were taught was wrong. Let’s examine why. I remember sessions in school when we looked at career possibilities and discussed, for those of us who were heading towards what in those days was considered a career, how to craft a successful career. Now in my day only 5% of school leavers went to university, so it was a different world than now. But more recently we sat through sessions at my daughter’s high school that emphasised an early decision on what she wanted to do, so that subjects could be carefully chosen with a view to what was required for university entry for that field. The advice in my day, and my daughter’s, was so wrong for many different reasons. In this article we will look at a few of those and seek a much better alternative. You Have To Be In It To Know It Ask most high school students what an accountant does all day and you’ll get suggestions about doing math, adding up lots of columns of numbers and maybe spending a lot of time in spreadsheets. Most teachers will think the same and will probably say that you should be good at math for a career as an accountant. And of course they would be wrong. A recent conversation with my accountant is why I have chosen this example. His answer is that to be a good accountant you have to like people and be really good at communication. While I picked one profession as an example, this is true for most professions where the actual practice of the profession is very different to what people expect to be the case. Sadly school career advisors and university study rarely, if ever, provide a proper introduction to actual life in that career. What this means is that even, say, a high school accounting teacher, if they have never actually worked as an accountant, won’t even be in a position to provide correct advice. Over a great many years I have seen the sad consequences of this over and over again. I have seen so many students doing the wrong course and even more people disillusioned and burned out in their careers. It is impossible to properly shape your career if you do not have true clarity about what the career is about, what is involved and what is possible, even if unlikely. Today, Careers Often Have Quite A Short Life Careers have always come and gone. But as the pace of change in the world accelerates, so the lifespan of many careers shorten. The real problem with this is that our thinking about careers is stuck in the days when a career lasted a lifetime. That thinking determines the systems and practices that we put in place around careers. For example, it perhaps makes sense to spend three or four years doing an undergraduate degree, and some large amount of money as well, if it qualifies you for a career that will stretch from your early 20’s until you eventually retire. If you get 40 years out of a 4 year degree then that is a 10% overhead. But if the career only lasts 10 years, is it still worth it? Perhaps this is one factor that is encouraging the shift to shorter courses. But ultimately that’s not the complete answer. As the pace of change increases, then logically the career longevity will get shorter, requiring ever shorter courses to qualify for them. This will eventually hit limits of practicality. As careers get shorter, then the qualification period must also get shorter proportionally, but this gets impractical beyond a certain point. We Are Focused On The Wrong Thing And now we get to the real issue, all along we have been focused on the wrong thing. We have tied the concept of a career to a particular and narrow definition around a job. Frankly we started to lose the plot as soon as we started to focus on work. This has been the ruination of the concept of the career, just as it has become the ruination of the university as a place of noble learning. Instead it has made the university somewhere you go to get the piece of paper that enables you to do a particular job. Pure and total stupidity, and such destruction of what was once an amazing institution. What’s wrong with work, you say? Well nothing really, but for what we are talking about here, this is an issue. Work implies payment and if you spend too long stuck in this way of thinking then you will tend to only do or value activities that provide a reward. This is not only limiting, but also skews things to only being about yourself and what benefits you get. A term that seems to have disappeared from the common language is avocation. Now an avocation is usually defined as a secondary occupation, apart from one’s main one, and is something that one does purely for the enjoyment of it. And this is getting much closer to the right way of thinking, but we are not quite there yet. Many people use the term ‘purpose’. They talk about your life’s purpose. Even better than the term itself, it is often broken down into four ingredients: Passion Mastery or Talent Values Mission Now we are close. The problem I have with the term ‘purpose’ is that it implied that our purpose is something we have a choice over. And I don’t think that is the case. Your Calling or Trajectory I prefer the terms calling or trajectory. Your Life’s Calling has a nice ring to it, but might be a little too spiritual or have a religious overtone for some. I think in terms of my Life’s Trajectory. Trajectory has the right combination of being something that is just there, rather than something you picked. It suggests momentum. It also suggests that there are activities that are aligned with and so contribute positively to the trajectory of your life, and yet others that act against it. So now let’s take the four purpose ingredients from above and modify them slightly. The trajectory of your life is made up of: Your passions, and especially the common, deeper passions that link them together Your talents The values and beliefs you have and, more important than the ones you have at any given time, the common thread of values and beliefs that you have over time The missions you set out on I’ll have much more to say about these in followup articles, so you might like to follow me or subscribe. Few of us are born with clarity of our life’s trajectory. Rather it emerges over time, and you do need to go looking for it. And you will refine and develop it over time. Using Your Trajectory Once you do have some idea of your life’s trajectory you have a wonderful tool for decision making. If you are considering a job, for example, then you can ask yourself whether getting the job will be aligned with and contribute to your trajectory, or act against it (Jade McAndrew-Barlow explores this in Things You Must Consider Before Accepting a Job Offer ). Let’s continue this discussion later. Be sure to Follow or Subscribe so you don’t miss anything.
The Benefits of Having Diverse Friends and How to Learn from Them
I am blessed with having friends of all sorts, from so many countries, religions, ethnicities, experience and professions. There are values in such diversity that you may not expect. Photo by Duy Pham on Unsplash
The Privileging of Text Literacy in Education Must Stop and a Media-Agnostic Approach Embraced
 Since the development of writing we have gradually privileged text literacy above other forms of communication. Even oratory, one of the pillars of Greek civilisation, has been subsumed in the march of text literacy above all else. In education we put so much emphasis on text literacy that children who have difficulty with text are […]
Removing the Disability Label from Dyslexia, Asperger’s, Autism, ADHD and Other Cognitive Diversities
A child being unable to learn to read at the ‘normal’ rate is only an issue in a literate society. For the vast majority of human existence an inability to learn to read was not an issue at all. In fact if you go back, say 10,000 years, an ability to read would be abnormal. […]
University
The Learning Manifesto
Five Core Principles for Effective Learning I started teaching in 1979, when, as a third year undergraduate student, I was given a 1st year class to teach. Since then I’ve taught thousands of students, designed courses from short courses to Masters degrees and bailed out courses that were in trouble. Over 43 years I have had enormous fun and learned so much from my students. I’ve also learned a lot about teaching. Introduction In this article I am going to discuss the key guiding principles that I have come to hold sacred in teaching. It has taken a lifetime of teaching, huge amounts of reading, observation, experiments on groups of students (but no use of electrodes applied to sensitive body parts) and lots of discussions with colleagues and students alike. In follow-on articles I’ll cover how to effectively embrace these principles, examine ways in which education screws them up currently and we’ll dive into the particular issues of embracing these principles in different learning environments, from the face-to-face to the online learning world. Five Principles Since this is a Manifesto, we must have some guiding principles. Of a vast number of ideas that are important in effective education, I have distilled these down to the five core principles outlined here. I will introduce these five principles in sufficient detail to provide understanding. Then later articles will expand on this presentation, going into much more detail about how they work in practice. So let’s begin. Unique Learners This is the first principle. Every individual truly is unique. Yes, when one looks superficially at people we see similarities and the illusion that people are the same. But when you dig deeper, the individual traits emerge. From a learning perspective, we can get even more specific. Genetics, upbringing and environment will all affect an individual’s learning. While it is unpopular to say so, genetics definitely plays a significant role in intelligence in the broadest sense. Most of the badly named learning disorders, like dyslexia, autism, Asperger’s and such are clearly genetic in origin. They are badly named because I would argue that rather than conditions, they simply represent the diversity in brain structure and function that occur naturally. Upbringing further impacts on this neurodiversity, by determining how well we make use of what genetics has presented us with, determines how dedicated, confident, willing to make mistakes and learn from them, we are and how open or closed minded we are willing to be. Upbringing feeds into the character traits which have a major effect on our approach to as well as attitudes to learning. Upbringing also influences the early learning we do and thus the foundation on which our later learning is built. Environment in the broadest sense also feeds into how we approach learning. Environmental factors can be influential in whether existing genetic characteristics are expressed or not. So while I do not accept the claims that vaccines cause autism, I am open to the possibility (note I say possibility only) that some ingredient in some vaccines or an immune response in some people to a vaccine may cause existing genes for autism to express themselves whereas they may have remained dormant otherwise. But environmental factors stretch well beyond this. Childhood traumas can impact neuroplasticity, causing changes in the brain that may not be helpful. This explains why I have seen things like dyslexia suddenly get much worse in an individual. Also the broader Gen-X, Gen-Y type of discussion is really a reflection of environment. If one grew up in an age of print, of radio, or of television or now of pervasive computers there will be major differences in attitudes, preferences and things like attention span. One could argue that widespread consumption of television programming has made people more interested in passive activities, rather than the active construction of one’s own entertainment that might have been required in previous ages. Combine genetics, upbringing and environment and we get massive variation between people. Then you have to add in existing knowledge and life experience. Students never come to learning as an empty vessel, despite the jokes most teachers make about their students at some time or another. Humans are preprogrammed to learn and so from birth (or before) we are learning about the world. At any age learners have some existing knowledge base to work with. Our existing knowledge is both an asset and a liability for learning, as some prior knowledge is enabling and some is quite disabling. The currently popular cohort concept in learning is, at best, a possible reflection of some common environmental characteristics in a group of students. But my experience is that cohorts are so massively diverse that I am not convinced it is an overly useful concept. Learner Preferences Learning styles is a hugely controversial topic in education, and so I have chosen to discuss it as learner preferences. The concept of learning styles is that individuals learn in different ways. So people get labelled as visual learners or some other style. Much of the controversy about learning styles I believe stems from a tendency to over emphasise things. When you label someone as a visual learner or a practical learner there is an implication that they can only learn in this way. My experience tells me this is never the case. Experience has shown me that learners do have preferences in the way they learn, and that catering to these preferences provides a more effective learning experience for that person. I’ve also seen people have different preferences for learning method in different domains of knowledge acquisition. The lesson from learner preferences is twofold: diversity of approach and learner control. Given that learners will have different preferred ways of approaching a topic, it is wise to provide a diversity of learning experiences and methods, and then to allow the learner to decide for themselves how to learn. We’ll have more to say about learner control later, so we will focus on learning experience diversity here. Since we usually can’t determine in advance which single learning approach will work for a given group of learners, it makes sense to provide choice. Now it is important to understand that you do not need to duplicate a particular piece of learning in every possible learning style. Rather what is needed is choice between at least two, and preferably ones which are quite far apart in approach. Cognitive Load Cognitive load is an extremely powerful and yet tricky concept in education design. It refers, naturally enough, to the degree of difficulty in a particular piece of learning, either due to the inherent nature of the subject or to the way it is being presented or worked through. The powerful nature of cognitive load is that it forces the learning designer to consider the impact of their choices on the learner. This learner-centred viewpoint is critical, and yet is often ignored by people who are too ‘topic centred’. Topic centred learning is too often encountered in university teaching, where the academic is, to be honest, an amateur in teaching (usually with no formal training in teaching) and too time poor to be able to remedy the situation. The effective use of cognitive load entails asking questions like: Have I made this as simple to understand as possible? How much additional information must the learner keep in front of themselves for this to make sense? Is this too large a chunk of information to absorb? Have I focused on only core matters or do I have unnecessary ‘fluff’? What’s tricky about cognitive load is that learners differ greatly on what cognitive load they can deal with and even what cognitive load causes optimal learning. People differ in the size of their ‘working memory’, how much discomfort they can deal with and with the amount of cognitive load associated with different types of activity, for example. A highly introverted learner might experience a high cognitive load in a collaborative learning activity whilst an extreme extrovert may experience a low load, for example. Minimising the cognitive load in any given piece of learning is useful. By doing so we have the learning fit within the cognitive load limits of the largest group of learners. We also reduce the fatigue such learning with incur and maximise the speed with which is can occur. Play with the Comfort Zone You will hopefully already be familiar with the comfort zone concept. The comfort zone is the area of knowledge we already have, techniques, mental models and ways of thinking that we have achieved sufficient familiarity with, experiences we have absorbed and so on. You are not learning when you are within your comfort zone. Learning only happens when you are outside of it. The further a learner is from their comfort zone the greater the potential learning, until you push them too far. The too far is the ‘OMG (Oh my God), I can’t deal with this’ response, that causes the learner to rush back inside their comfort zone and put up barriers to what they were trying to learn (or you were pushing on them). The challenge is that not only do we all differ in how far we can operate from our comfort zone effectively, but that this distance can also vary from day to day, hour to hour and also from topic to topic. This variability, even for a given person, creates a great challenge for the educator. The key to overcoming it lies in the other four core principles. Learner Control Much is made in education circles of the difference between adult learners and, one can only presume, non-adult learners. One of the supposed big differences is that adult learners have to be in control of their learning. This implies that child learners do not have to be in control. And this is rubbish. Effective learning only happens when the learner is in control, no matter how old the learner is. Adults may feel more empowered to demand this, but it doesn’t mean that children feel any less strongly about it. Believing this is not the case is one of the big things that are wrong with primary and secondary education of children. It says a lot about how with disempower, disenfranchise, attempt to control and generally treat children as a possession. But we’ll get into that elsewhere and another time. Since learning, when and if it actually occurs, happens inside the head of the learner, it is only the learner who can control this process. To think otherwise is delusion. Failure to provide this control manifests in various ways, from learning that doesn’t ‘take’, that evaporates like dew on a hot day, to acts of rebellion or plain disengagement. What Do We Do With This? In the next article, we will make a start on unpacking this. This article was also published to Medium.com
Higher Education Is in Trouble, And Should Be – Higher Education is Broken, Let’s Disrupt it and Build a Better Model of Adult Education Series, Part 1
This series of articles examines the deep and profound structural issues in post-secondary and adult education, examines the disruptive forces at work and works towards a new model of adult education that can truly work for all. Here is part one. Even before Covid-19, higher education was dead in the water, it just didn’t generally […]
Why Do We Torture All High School Students with Maths That Many Will Never Use?
Education administrators and governments seem to be totally detached from any understanding of the real world when it comes to designing curriculum. Nor do they seem to care how making students study something they are ill suited and unmotivated for will destroy self-confidence and create negative internal dialogue. It also wastes time that could be […]
Rising Student Numbers Have Harmed Universities -Higher Education is Broken Series, Part 2
Governments across the world have, to varying degrees, exercised control over universities. In the English-speaking world in particular, alternating waves of Reaganite or Thatcherite economics, the so called economic rationalism, have been juxtaposed with more left-wing social opportunity and equality policies. All of these have impacted universities in various unexpected ways. This series of articles […]
University
The Learning Manifesto
Five Core Principles for Effective Learning I started teaching in 1979, when, as a third year undergraduate student, I was given a 1st year class to teach. Since then I’ve taught thousands of students, designed courses from short courses to Masters degrees and bailed out courses that were in trouble. Over 43 years I have had enormous fun and learned so much from my students. I’ve also learned a lot about teaching. Introduction In this article I am going to discuss the key guiding principles that I have come to hold sacred in teaching. It has taken a lifetime of teaching, huge amounts of reading, observation, experiments on groups of students (but no use of electrodes applied to sensitive body parts) and lots of discussions with colleagues and students alike. In follow-on articles I’ll cover how to effectively embrace these principles, examine ways in which education screws them up currently and we’ll dive into the particular issues of embracing these principles in different learning environments, from the face-to-face to the online learning world. Five Principles Since this is a Manifesto, we must have some guiding principles. Of a vast number of ideas that are important in effective education, I have distilled these down to the five core principles outlined here. I will introduce these five principles in sufficient detail to provide understanding. Then later articles will expand on this presentation, going into much more detail about how they work in practice. So let’s begin. Unique Learners This is the first principle. Every individual truly is unique. Yes, when one looks superficially at people we see similarities and the illusion that people are the same. But when you dig deeper, the individual traits emerge. From a learning perspective, we can get even more specific. Genetics, upbringing and environment will all affect an individual’s learning. While it is unpopular to say so, genetics definitely plays a significant role in intelligence in the broadest sense. Most of the badly named learning disorders, like dyslexia, autism, Asperger’s and such are clearly genetic in origin. They are badly named because I would argue that rather than conditions, they simply represent the diversity in brain structure and function that occur naturally. Upbringing further impacts on this neurodiversity, by determining how well we make use of what genetics has presented us with, determines how dedicated, confident, willing to make mistakes and learn from them, we are and how open or closed minded we are willing to be. Upbringing feeds into the character traits which have a major effect on our approach to as well as attitudes to learning. Upbringing also influences the early learning we do and thus the foundation on which our later learning is built. Environment in the broadest sense also feeds into how we approach learning. Environmental factors can be influential in whether existing genetic characteristics are expressed or not. So while I do not accept the claims that vaccines cause autism, I am open to the possibility (note I say possibility only) that some ingredient in some vaccines or an immune response in some people to a vaccine may cause existing genes for autism to express themselves whereas they may have remained dormant otherwise. But environmental factors stretch well beyond this. Childhood traumas can impact neuroplasticity, causing changes in the brain that may not be helpful. This explains why I have seen things like dyslexia suddenly get much worse in an individual. Also the broader Gen-X, Gen-Y type of discussion is really a reflection of environment. If one grew up in an age of print, of radio, or of television or now of pervasive computers there will be major differences in attitudes, preferences and things like attention span. One could argue that widespread consumption of television programming has made people more interested in passive activities, rather than the active construction of one’s own entertainment that might have been required in previous ages. Combine genetics, upbringing and environment and we get massive variation between people. Then you have to add in existing knowledge and life experience. Students never come to learning as an empty vessel, despite the jokes most teachers make about their students at some time or another. Humans are preprogrammed to learn and so from birth (or before) we are learning about the world. At any age learners have some existing knowledge base to work with. Our existing knowledge is both an asset and a liability for learning, as some prior knowledge is enabling and some is quite disabling. The currently popular cohort concept in learning is, at best, a possible reflection of some common environmental characteristics in a group of students. But my experience is that cohorts are so massively diverse that I am not convinced it is an overly useful concept. Learner Preferences Learning styles is a hugely controversial topic in education, and so I have chosen to discuss it as learner preferences. The concept of learning styles is that individuals learn in different ways. So people get labelled as visual learners or some other style. Much of the controversy about learning styles I believe stems from a tendency to over emphasise things. When you label someone as a visual learner or a practical learner there is an implication that they can only learn in this way. My experience tells me this is never the case. Experience has shown me that learners do have preferences in the way they learn, and that catering to these preferences provides a more effective learning experience for that person. I’ve also seen people have different preferences for learning method in different domains of knowledge acquisition. The lesson from learner preferences is twofold: diversity of approach and learner control. Given that learners will have different preferred ways of approaching a topic, it is wise to provide a diversity of learning experiences and methods, and then to allow the learner to decide for themselves how to learn. We’ll have more to say about learner control later, so we will focus on learning experience diversity here. Since we usually can’t determine in advance which single learning approach will work for a given group of learners, it makes sense to provide choice. Now it is important to understand that you do not need to duplicate a particular piece of learning in every possible learning style. Rather what is needed is choice between at least two, and preferably ones which are quite far apart in approach. Cognitive Load Cognitive load is an extremely powerful and yet tricky concept in education design. It refers, naturally enough, to the degree of difficulty in a particular piece of learning, either due to the inherent nature of the subject or to the way it is being presented or worked through. The powerful nature of cognitive load is that it forces the learning designer to consider the impact of their choices on the learner. This learner-centred viewpoint is critical, and yet is often ignored by people who are too ‘topic centred’. Topic centred learning is too often encountered in university teaching, where the academic is, to be honest, an amateur in teaching (usually with no formal training in teaching) and too time poor to be able to remedy the situation. The effective use of cognitive load entails asking questions like: Have I made this as simple to understand as possible? How much additional information must the learner keep in front of themselves for this to make sense? Is this too large a chunk of information to absorb? Have I focused on only core matters or do I have unnecessary ‘fluff’? What’s tricky about cognitive load is that learners differ greatly on what cognitive load they can deal with and even what cognitive load causes optimal learning. People differ in the size of their ‘working memory’, how much discomfort they can deal with and with the amount of cognitive load associated with different types of activity, for example. A highly introverted learner might experience a high cognitive load in a collaborative learning activity whilst an extreme extrovert may experience a low load, for example. Minimising the cognitive load in any given piece of learning is useful. By doing so we have the learning fit within the cognitive load limits of the largest group of learners. We also reduce the fatigue such learning with incur and maximise the speed with which is can occur. Play with the Comfort Zone You will hopefully already be familiar with the comfort zone concept. The comfort zone is the area of knowledge we already have, techniques, mental models and ways of thinking that we have achieved sufficient familiarity with, experiences we have absorbed and so on. You are not learning when you are within your comfort zone. Learning only happens when you are outside of it. The further a learner is from their comfort zone the greater the potential learning, until you push them too far. The too far is the ‘OMG (Oh my God), I can’t deal with this’ response, that causes the learner to rush back inside their comfort zone and put up barriers to what they were trying to learn (or you were pushing on them). The challenge is that not only do we all differ in how far we can operate from our comfort zone effectively, but that this distance can also vary from day to day, hour to hour and also from topic to topic. This variability, even for a given person, creates a great challenge for the educator. The key to overcoming it lies in the other four core principles. Learner Control Much is made in education circles of the difference between adult learners and, one can only presume, non-adult learners. One of the supposed big differences is that adult learners have to be in control of their learning. This implies that child learners do not have to be in control. And this is rubbish. Effective learning only happens when the learner is in control, no matter how old the learner is. Adults may feel more empowered to demand this, but it doesn’t mean that children feel any less strongly about it. Believing this is not the case is one of the big things that are wrong with primary and secondary education of children. It says a lot about how with disempower, disenfranchise, attempt to control and generally treat children as a possession. But we’ll get into that elsewhere and another time. Since learning, when and if it actually occurs, happens inside the head of the learner, it is only the learner who can control this process. To think otherwise is delusion. Failure to provide this control manifests in various ways, from learning that doesn’t ‘take’, that evaporates like dew on a hot day, to acts of rebellion or plain disengagement. What Do We Do With This? In the next article, we will make a start on unpacking this. This article was also published to Medium.com
Higher Education Is in Trouble, And Should Be – Higher Education is Broken, Let’s Disrupt it and Build a Better Model of Adult Education Series, Part 1
This series of articles examines the deep and profound structural issues in post-secondary and adult education, examines the disruptive forces at work and works towards a new model of adult education that can truly work for all. Here is part one. Even before Covid-19, higher education was dead in the water, it just didn’t generally […]
Why Do We Torture All High School Students with Maths That Many Will Never Use?
Education administrators and governments seem to be totally detached from any understanding of the real world when it comes to designing curriculum. Nor do they seem to care how making students study something they are ill suited and unmotivated for will destroy self-confidence and create negative internal dialogue. It also wastes time that could be […]
Rising Student Numbers Have Harmed Universities -Higher Education is Broken Series, Part 2
Governments across the world have, to varying degrees, exercised control over universities. In the English-speaking world in particular, alternating waves of Reaganite or Thatcherite economics, the so called economic rationalism, have been juxtaposed with more left-wing social opportunity and equality policies. All of these have impacted universities in various unexpected ways. This series of articles […]