INSET days – 7 reasons to scrap them

Parents get pretty annoyed every time an ‘INSET’ day comes along. What other organisation simply closes shop and refuses to deal with all of its customers or clients five days a year? Imagine phoning up the school and saying, ‘Listen, my work is having a training evening next week, could you look after my kid for me, until I get home?’

Here’s seven reasons to scrap them:

1. Organisations don’t throw customers out of the door for an entire day of training
2. Extra cost/load on parents in terms of childcare is significant
3. Kids lose about a week of schooling a year
4. No convincing research evidence that INSET days have any beneficial effects
5. Some are not training and used as catch-ups for work
6. Many are hotchpotches of faddish, non-empirical training
7. Many are ill-planned, dull and irrelevant

Other organisations don’t throw customers out of the door for an entire day to do training

Imagine banks, hospitals, shops, police forces, fire services – almost every other service, closing down for five days a year with a simple notice saying ‘staff training’. It’s unimaginable.

The extra cost/load on parents in terms of childcare is significant

People don’t find it easy to cope with teacher training days. Additional childcare, often at a cost that huts people on low pay, is the cost to the community.

Kids lose about a week of schooling a year

Schools have 5 INSET days a year, resulting in a significant amount of lost teaching. Imagine the fuss if parents suggested that we should be allowed to take our kids out of school, for five separate days, of our choosing.

No research evidence that INSET days have any beneficial effects

Prof Dylan Wiliam, from the Institute of Education thinks that INSET days are largely a waste of time as there’s no real evaluation of their effect and no conving research showing they work.

Some are not training and used as catch-ups for work

INSET days are not supposed to be work catch-up days, but are often treated as such. This is clear from teacher forums.

Many are hotchpotches of faddish, non-empirical training

INSET days are used to introduce theories from outside ‘mom and pop’ training companies that are often out of date, untested and nothing short of snakeoil. Brain Gym, Mozart Effect, L/R brain theories, Gardner’s MI, Learning Styles….the list is huge.

Many are ill-planned, dull and irrelevant

“We have to go to stupid, boring, meetings that last all day and often are a total waste of my time” (from teacher’s forum). This sort of reaction is not unusual from teachers.

And why not simply latch these days on to the start or end of holidays? Why pop them into the middle of terms? The problem here is that the timetabling is at the discretion of the school. What’s not generally known is that, the regulations state that attendance outside the regular required hours at INSET days is not obligatory. In other words, they needn’t attend at all!

Who knows? It seems to be a pretty scrappy affair but evidence from teacher’s forums is pretty disturbing. Here’s the first post on the subject from the TES and there’s lots like these in teacher forums:

“I am just looking to get a feel for what other schools do with support staff on inset days. Until recently we were left to our own devices which was great as we were able to catch up on work but under a "Whole Staff" ethos we are "invited" to attend training. The problem is that we do not find the training offered to be relevant to our job roles and, at times, is completely incomprehensible to us! We are also informed that failure to attend our allocated training session is a disciplinary issue which does wonders for the morale. We would be happy to attend targetting training but curriculum INSET is a nonsense for us and we'd rather be clearing the decks!”

Gardner's 'Multiple Intelligences' seductive nonsense?

In Gardner’s 2003 paper in the American Educational Research Association, Multiple Intelligences after Twenty Years, he states,

“I have come to realize that once one releases an idea – “meme” – into the world, one cannot completely control its behaviour – anymore than one can control those products of our genes we call children.”

Absolutely. One of the problems with Gardner’s ‘Multiple Intelligences’ was its seductiveness. A teacher could simply say, everyone’s smart, we’re all just smart in different ways. There’s a truth in this, in terms of a narrowly academic curriculum, but when adopted as ‘science’ in schools, Multiple Intelligences can be a dumbing-down, destructive force. In general people confuse the critique of single IQ scores as a measure of intelligence, with Gardner’s theory, as if he were the final world on the matter. He is not.

Not neuroscience

First, teachers who quote and use the theory are unlikely to have fully understood its status and further development by Gardener himself. Few will have understood that it is not supported in the world of neuroscience, despite the perception by educators that it arose from there. Gardner’s first book, Frames of the Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences (2003) laid out the first version of the theory, followed 16 years later by a reformulation in Intelligence Reframed (1999), then again in Multiple Intelligences after Twenty Years (2003). Few have followed its development after 1983 or the critiques and Gardner’s subsequent distancing of the theory from brain science.

Lynn Waterhouse laid out the lack of scientific evidence for the theory in Multiple Intelligences, the Mozart Effect, and Emotional Intelligence: A Critical Review in Educational Psychologist, a paper to which Gardner felt duty bound to respond. In fact, in response to the absence of neurological evidence for his separate 'intelligence' components, Gardner had to redefine his intelligences as “composites of fine-grained neurological subprocesses but not those subprocesses themselves”(Gardner and Moran, 2006). In fact, many areas of learning such as reason, emotion, action, music, language and so on are characterised by their overlapping, dispersed and complex patterns of activity in the brain, as shown in brain scans. Islands of functional specificity are extremely rare. In short, Gardener suffers from conceptual invention and simplicity. Brain science simply does not support the theory.

Gardener himself admits that the science has yet to come, but teachers assume it’s already there and that the theory arose from the science. Big mistake. Pickering and Howard-Jones found that teachers associate multiple intelligences with neuroscience, but as Howard-Jones states in his recent BECTA report, “In terms of the science, however, it seems an unhelpful simplification as no clearly defined set of capabilities arises from either the biological or psychological research”.

Training's the problem

The problem seems to be the culture of in-service training ( a fact confirmed in the Howard-Jones survey), as the most quoted source for such myths. It would seem that a rather lazy culture of oddball suppliers and ‘psychology for dummies’ INSET days has led to this sad state of affairs. There's an army of small teams of trainers peddling this snake-oil. They cull populist, fashionable theories, string them together in PowerPoint presentations, and the ever-popular 'workshops' and so the meme is virally spread, not only through the minds of teachers, but to our children who suffer from the misconceptions of their teachers. We all agree that teachers don't have a lot of spare time, so why waste it on this rubbish? Their time would surely be better spent on real brain science, where real increases in the productivity of learning are possible, not tomorrow but now.

Gardner, H. (1983) Frames of the Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences. (New York, Basic Books).

Gardner, H. (1999) Intelligence Reframed. (New York, Basic Books).

Gardner, H. (2003) "Multiple Intelligences after Twenty Years." American Educational Research Association.

Gardner, H., and Moran, S. (2006) The Science of Multiple Intelligences Theory: A Response to Lynn Waterhouse, Educational Psychologist, 41.4, 227-32.

Pickering, S.J., and Howard-Jones, P. (2007) Educators' Views on the Role of Neuroscience in Education: Findings from a Study of UK and International Perspectives, Mind, Brain and Education, 1.3, 109-13.

Waterhouse L. (2006) Multiple Intelligences, the Mozart Effect, and Emotional Intelligence: A Critical Review, Educational Psychologist, 41.4, 207-25.

BBC Bitesize - stupid, lazy GCSE questions

English GCSE Revision

To Kill A Mockingbird

How were black people were treated in 1930s America?

a) Treated like everyone else

b) Treated extremely badly

c) Treated for dry rot and rising damp

What halfwit came up with this question and its dumb-assed third option? In what way is this really testing 15 year old GCSE students? It simply reduces the questions to a 50:50 chance of getting them right.

Here's another...

Why are we told about Jem's broken arm at the start of the novel when the attack does not occur until the end?

a) To make us feel sorry for Jem.

b) To create suspense.

c) So that we know what happens if we don't have time to read the book.

There's loads of these. Standards and BBC - an oxymoron?

Piaget – why teach this stuff?

Asked my niece, who’s doing teacher training (B Ed), what she’s getting in psychology and the first name that comes up is ‘Piaget’. My heart sinks as there’s almost nothing left of his theories that is remotely useful to a new teacher. His four-stage theory of child development has been so completely wiped out by subsequent studies, that there’s nothing left. It’s merely an exercise in the history of science. What’s shocking is the way he’s still revered and taught in such courses. It’s like teaching Lamarck, not Darwin.

Famous four-stages demolished

His famous four stage developmental model (Sensorimotor, Pre-operational, Concrete and Formal) has been fairly well trashed.

First, the Sensimotor Stage with the infamous ‘hide a toy under a cloth and the child thinks it’s no longer there’ study, which turned out to be an exercise in distraction, and when repeated by Bower and Wishart in the absence of an adult, with a teddy, most children had no difficulty in understanding that the toy is still under the cloth. In general, Piaget simply focussed too much on motor actions when the real development is perceptual. Kagan also attributes object permanence to a simple increase in memory capacity.

Second, the Pre-operational Stage study, where a child fails to recognise a doll’s point of view from photographs of three mountains, was shown to be too complex for the children to understand. A simpler experiment by Hughes, using dolls of two policeman, showed that many children can understand non-egocentric perspectives.

Third, the Concrete Operation Stage was demolished by Rose and Blank, when it was found that Piaget had been verbally correcting the children towards his wanted conclusions, invalidating the data. The ‘naughty teddy’ experiment also wiped out his famous three rows of sweets trial supposedly showing that kids couldn’t get constancy in number. Overall he ignored hereditary, educational and cultural effects, thereby standardising theory, when, in fact, there are large differences in the speed and nature of development due to these and other factors

Fourthly, the Formal Operative Stage focused to much on formal logic, ignoring many other mature cognitive skills. It’s as if we were all little mathematicians, not ‘little scientists’. In fact kids develop, not in a predictable, linear fashion, but in fits and starts, and in many different ways.

All in all, the four stages were pretty much demolished and subsequent research has shown that development takes place much earlier than he had posited, is more of a continuum, with more variation in ages and more plasticity than was previously thought.

Poor scientist

How did he get it so wrong? Well, like Freud, he was no scientist. First, he used his own three children (or others from wealthy, professional families) and not objective or multiple observers to eliminate observational bias. Secondly, he often repeated a statement if the child’s answer did not conform to his experimental expectation.. Thirdly, the data and analysis lacked rigour, making most of his supposed studies next to useless. So, he led children towards the answers he wanted, didn’t isolate the tested variables, used his own children, and was extremely vague on his concepts.

I wasn’t kidding when I compared him to Lamark, as his theories are mostly wrong and he offers nothing but descriptions of development without any real underlying explanations. This was his biggest weakness, failing to understand the mechanisms behind development. For him, kids just ‘do thing’ stripped of motivation, language development, memory development and so on.

The good news is that his mistakes led to more rigorous studies that really did unravel child development, although one wonders why he is taught at all. The bad news is that the hole was filled by an even less rigorous and more flawed theorist, Lev Vygotsky. Don’t get me started on him!

What's worrying is the fact that teachers are coming out with a fixed view of child development based on 'ages and stages' that are quite wrong. This leads to amateurish teaching methods and a lack of understanding of when and how to teach numeracy and literacy. The 'whole-language' teaching fiasco in primary schools was the perfect storm of this amateurish approach.

The sad fact is that education and training is still soaked in this dated theory, as they suffer badly from 'groupthink'. The community literally thinks that theories are sound if a) they've been around for a long time (sorry, but in science, especially psychology, the opposite is true) b) everyone does it (that's precisely the problem).

Future is free

Reading Chris Anderson’s book FREE – The Future of a Radical Price, makes one think that these powerful principles could be applied in education and training.

Phase 1 – Free knowledge

In fact, it already has. In 1991 the encyclopedia industry was worth an astonishing $1.2 billion, Britannica being the market leader with sales of $650 million. In 1993, Encarta was launched for $99 and in the same year Britannica laid off its door-to-door sales force. Within 3 years Britannica had dropped to $300 million and the overall encyclopedia market had shrunk to $600 million, of which Encarta had $100 million. So a cheaper price not only revolutionised this market, it decimated the market. Along came Wikipedia and the market shrunk again, with Encarta canned completely in 2009. The end result is a market where the cost to the learner is ZERO. However, the availability of free encyclopedic knowledge base, that is bigger, better, broader, in more languages than ever before won the day.

The really interesting economic point is that the real money that would have been spent on expensive sets of rarely read Encyclopedias, can be spent elsewhere. It’s redistributed. We as customers get to keep our money a well as getting a better product.

Phase 2 – Free teacher created content

Now that lectures are being recorded, and distributed, often for free through YouTube EDU, iTunes U, Open Learn, MIT Courseware and others, anyone can have access to this level of instruction. See previous post. The advantages are obvious. In fact these recorded lectures, are in the end better than their live originals in all sorts of ways supported by the psychology of learning.

Google and its many services has also given us access to a wealth of resources, especially in searchable print. Project Gutenberg and others have given us hundreds of thousands of free books. You pretty much get an answer to any question you pose.

Phase 4 – Free formative teaching

This is the tricky one, but formative feedback is improving greatly in online content, especially in simulations and games. There’s plenty of evidence to show that many learning tasks can be completed without teacher intervention. It’s simply a matter of designing top class content.

Live teaching is not a necessary condition for learning. In fact it can be a condition for stopping learners from learning. If e can take some magical motivational dust from games and other media and apply it to learning, we’ll make great gains.

Phase 4 – Free accreditation

At some time in the future, the technology will be able to provide free assessment. Let’s face it, current types of assessment in education and training are often fairly crude. It’s no great stretch of the imagination for it to be largely automated.

The first problem is unique identification. Iris scanning, fingerprints, digital photographs and other cheap techniques will make this very cheap.

As for delivery, the online delivery of assessments, which avoid leaks, can be varied from person to person and really does provide high quality assessment, is already possible.

This frees people up to take the assessment when they’re ready, and not just when it’s convenient for the organisation. It’s about attainment not attendance.

I’m free

I, for one, am already a ‘free learner’. I don’t go on courses, don’t use teachers, yet learn daily online (and offline). I know from the many other people I encounter online that we all read, click on links, use reference material, do academic research, email, blog, Facebook, Tweet to improve our knowledge and skills. The future is free.

Web makes you smarter - UCLA study

Last year I had a few drinks and dinner with Steven Johnson, and he was delighted to hear that Flynn, whose data he had used in Everything Bad is Good for You had come round to his hypothesis, that new media was making people smarter. Johnson used f Flynn’s IQ data from the US military that showed a 0.31-0.39 points per annum rise over 46 years. New media doesn’t dumb down, but smartens up, he concluded.

New study from UCLA

A new study has looked specifically at the impact of web use in older subjects. A fMRI-based study from UCLA has just been presented by Teena Moody in Chicago at the Society for Neuroscience, which took scans from 24 normal 55-78 year olds. It showed significant increases in brain activity patterns and increased function after just seven one hour sessions on the web over seven days. The control was the group who did no web activity.

Enhanced cognition

“The first scan of participants with little Internet experience showed brain activity in the regions controlling language, reading, memory and visual abilities. The second brain scan of these participants, conducted after the home practice searches, demonstrated activation of these same regions, but there was also activity in the middle frontal gyrus and inferior frontal gyrus – areas of the brain known to be important in working memory and decision-making.

“The results suggest that searching online may be a simple form of brain exercise that might be employed to enhance cognition in older adults.” says Moody.

What’s fascinating about brain scanning research, is the possibility of identifying optimal learning techniques. For example, what type of internet activity leads to highest levels of desirable cognitive activity and improvement?

Universities - recorded lectures better than live

Universities, in their current guise, have become closed, inward-looking, traditional, elitist institutions. Shut for much of the year, empty buildings, three lectures a week, poor teaching – the current financial squeeze will hopefully force us to re-examine the model.

Imagine a world in which some universities simply opened their doors to learners, even offering courses for free. There are signs that such a paradigm shift may be happening on the web. Suddenly a huge amount of good content is available on the web, for free, as some of the biggest brands on the web act as conduits for higher education content, with hefty foundation grants paying the bill.

YouTube EDU

Simple enough, video lectures with ratings and details of number of downloads, from over 320 Universities such as; Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon, Stanford,, and so on. Cambridge, Coventry, Edinburgh, Leeds, Nottingham, OU, The top lecture has received 10.5 million views! But even physics lectures are beating the 350,000 mark. Compare this with the once a year, lecture from a typical living academic – let’s say 100 students once a year for 15 years (and that’s really pushing it). You’re effectively extending the life of a good physics lecturer by thousand of years!

YouTube lectures can be public or private, structured as playlists embed on your site or show on a mobile phone. YouTube Insight gives you loads of useful stats on; views, referrals, gender, age, geography.

iTunes U

Like YouTube EDU, iTunes U is all free content, currently at 200,00 audio and video items, from major Universities. You can download all the tracks on a specific topic or just one. You can also subscribe to receive new stuff automatically. Top downloads – Intensive English, Introduction to Mac OS, Building a Business, beginners’ French etc. One distinct advantage is that you can play audio or video on your iPod, iTouch, iPhone, MP3 player, Mac or PC. iTunes U Reports give you lots of stuff on downloads, unique users and so on.

Open Learn

Open Learn is the OUs Moodle based system is much more sophisticated on support for learners with its learning tools, knowledge maps, shared activities and activity reports. All you need do is register with a personal profile. The content and forums are then available for group discussions, you can do the self-assessment, where you answer questions, then compare your answers with model answers. You can rate and review units, create a learning journal and use Learning Space to organise your study. Pretty impressive.

MITOPENCOURSEWARE

That guy Walter Lewin, physics lecturer, is at the top of the downloaded courses with his Physics 1 Classical Mechanics lecture with its subtitles/transcript, lecture notes, assignments/solutions and exams/solutions. More of him later.

MITOpenCourseware has an annual running cost of $3.6 million (10% lower than last year) they’re constantly lowering their cost base. Over 1900 courses, some translated, at both undergraduate and graduate level, this is an astonishingly rich resource of free lecture notes, videos and exams from MITs actual courses. There’s translations in Chinese, Thai and Persian. Zipped downloads and lots of user controls coming

The stats are astounding 40 million visits by 31 million people from almost every country in the world. The majority view this stuff for personal learning 62%. Overall the breakdown is 49% self-learners, 32% students, 16% educators.

University of the People

The ‘free’University , yes ‘free’. Just started this year but puts forward a model that may be ideal for the developing world (see my previous post).

WikiBooks

A growing resource of ‘Open books for an open world’ are available with the usual wiki functionality of discussion, source and history for each book. There’s also print-ready and PDF books available.

Project Gutenberg

At 2.5 million downloads per month, Project Gutenberg is starting to motor. What’s interesting is the eclectic nature of the downloads. The top ten contains fiction such as Alice in Wonderland, Pride and Prejudice, but also a science book, the Kama Sutra and a book on the history of Furniture. They also have their famous ‘Distributed Proofreading’ system, where volunteers proofread e-books, a page a day.

Wikipedia

The greatest single, searchable store of knowledge on the planet and growing still. It’s a miracle of the web, and I’d personally give Jimmy Wales the Nobel Prize for knowledge dissemination. Who doesn’t use this thing? It’s wonderful beyond belief. Who cares if a few errors are noted, they’re soon fixed. It quite simply the greatest knowledge sharing show on earth.

Open Education

OER (Open Education Resources) is a rapidly growing movement with the not-for-profit OER Foundation launched last month on the back of a $200,000 grant from the Hewlett Foundation and support from the Learning4Content project.

The Cape Town Open Education Declaration is up and running, a sort of manifesto for future development. The Opencast Community site has a wealth of information on podcasting in Higher Education. The Matterhorn project is of real interest with $1.3 million from the Mellon and Hewlitt Foundations to develop software that will schedule, capture, encode and deliver audio and video content to the likes of YouTube EDU and iTunes U. Should be ready by summer 2010. WkiEducator is one of many communities operating in the field, where you can join, and create free content. They promise to ‘turn the digital divide into digital dividends’.

Funding

So how is all of this funded? Well, there’s a number of sources; foundations, most notably, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, institutions themselves, free contributions, donations and payment. The foundation money (mostly from private sector benefactors) tends to seed the initiative, which then gains momentum either in a University or community. The real progress comes when you get a slingshot effect from altruistic contributors (as in Wikipedia).

Recorded lectures – better learning?

Are Youtube video lectures better than the real thing? I think the evidence is in the video themselves. In the cutaways to the audience you see some students attention wander and always towards another student. You don’t have that distraction in your own company. Lewin understands and explains at the start of his lecture series, that lectures complement other forms of study. He is NOT lecturing the book. It’s about demonstrating physics, selling physics, exciting people about physics. It’s about motivation, as well as understanding.

What I love about Walter Lewin is his style – he walks around, he shouts, he gesticulates, he demonstrates, he stands up on his desk, gets students up, he quips – he’s a livewire. He does the very opposite of playing that ‘I’m an academic and have to be serious, grave and dull’ routine.

Case study 1: University of Texas - Austin

Major findings included:

• Attendance was not significantly affected by webcasts, even given the limited degree to which some students repeatedly substituted webcasts for attending class.
• Students perceived webasts to be a helpful tool for learning, but the impact of webcasts on their performance in terms of grades and test scores is not clear.
• Students used webcasts for learning benefits (e.g., reviewing course content) and psychological benefits (e.g., anxiety reduction, course satisfaction).
• A majority of students watched webcasts at least once, typically 1-7 times, before exams or 1-3 times a month, at night from home through high-speed connections.
• Most students watched the entire lecture and typically they both listened to the lecture and watched videos and slides.
• Female students and students who cared about their course grades perceived webcasts as more beneficial than did male students or those who did not care about their grades respectively. Also, those with certain difficulties non-native speakers of English, students with a learning disability, and students with difficulty in understanding the professor’s speech) did not report benefits from webcasts, contrary to our expectations.
• Students rated most current and future webcast interface features as important, in particular stop/rewind (current feature), scan (current feature), manipulating the slides or video window (current feature), and better quality or full screen animation/video (future feature).
• Students and instructors were generally satisfied with webcasts’ quality and did not experience many technical problems. Many problems they did report can be resolved through training of instructors, students, and camera operators.
• Both students and instructors in general indicated that webcasts were good supplemental learning resources but not a substitute for attending class.

Case Study 2: University of Michigan - Flint http://tiny.cc/9q0fI

The results presented here now further extend the benefits of the cyber classroom by demonstrating a significant improvement in student outcomes as assessed by final grades with a nearly half grade improvement in mean grades, a 56% drop in failing grades, and a 36% increase in grades B+ and above.

Case study 3: ICTP Trieste

Another comes from ICTP in Trieste, who have been using recorded lectures for some time. Assessed learning improves, students watch 2 hours per night after live daytime lectures and even watch lectures from other courses they’re not taking.