The Vatican has the Dicastery of the Doctrine of the Faith. Australian schooling has AERO.

New, not very important but very symptomatic, the Australian Education Research Organisation fits snugly into the elaborate machinery of Labor’s “national approach” to schooling. As an “evidence intermediary,” its task is to make a certain kind of research finding more available to teachers and schools. But its key sponsors hope it will proclaim the doctrine in a system dependent on prescription, surveillance and compliance.

The doctrine is this: schooling is first and foremost about knowledge; teaching is first and foremost about getting prescribed knowledge into young heads; research has established the relative effectiveness (“effect size”) of teaching techniques and “interventions”; learning science has reinforced this evidence by showing how to “harmonise” teaching with the brain’s learning mechanisms; teaching must be based on evidence supplied by this research.

The faith: that in this way the long slide in the performance of Australian schools will at last be arrested and reversed.

AERO’s “gold standard”

In AERO’s view, though, there is no doctrine or faith. “Gold standard” research into effective teaching and findings on the workings of the brain have established scientific facts, clear and definitive.

Of AERO’s two intellectual pillars, effectiveness research is the much larger and stronger. Long-established and buttressed by a vast literature, it has become the lingua franca of education policy (including the policies promoted by the national approach) and has been absorbed by many teachers. But effectiveness research and its uses have also concerned and sometimes enraged many, including, surprisingly enough, John Hattie.

For many years Hattie has been by far the most influential exponent of the effectiveness idea in Australia, and perhaps around the world. But in a series of conversations with Danish philosopher Steen Nepper Larsen (published as The Purpose of Education in 2018) Hattie looks back over a formidable body of effectiveness research and his own work with schools and involvement in national policymaking to find flaws and limitations in the research itself, and gross misinterpretation and misuse of it by policymakers and schools alike.

Education research has (Hattie says) “privileged” quantitative studies over qualitative, and has been “obsessed” with the technical quality of studies at the expense of their importance and value. The focus of so much effectiveness research on basic outcomes (80–90 per cent of it by Hattie’s estimate) has been salutary, but has also obscured much of what schools do and should do.

“I want more,” Hattie says. He emphasises: “I want broader. I want schools and systems to value music, art, history, entrepreneurship, curiosity, creativity, and much more.”

Many ways of skinning the cat

In much the same way, measuring “effect size” was useful but has ended up being the reverse, Hattie argues. It helped teachers and school leaders to accept that there are many ways of skinning the educational cat and to rely less on habit, hunch and assumption. But the “effect sizes” summarised in his celebrated Visible Learning (2009) and many publications following are averages, he points out, and too often the fact, extent and causes of variation are forgotten — along with the importance of context. Effect-size tables have been taken as a kind of installer’s guide — policymakers look at them and say “tick, tick, tick to the top influences and no, no, no to the bottom,” thus missing the point entirely.

The point? To inform and prompt thinking, interpretation, explanation: what is this evidence telling us? What do these numbers mean? What’s going on here, and why? What, for example, should we do with evidence showing that smaller classes have not produced better performance? Just say: no more smaller classes? Or ask why smaller classes aren’t being used more effectively?

A sustained failure of policy

How can we actually do what effectiveness research has made possible? Research can go only so far; it reflects schooling as it is, not how it has to be; the rest is up to government and policy. Properly interrogated, Hattie concludes, the evidence first assembled in Visible Learning (2009) reveals a sustained failure of policy.

Hattie’s criticisms cover much but not all of the ground on which effectiveness research stands. He and others were convinced that education research could do for schooling what medical research had done for medicine. Research of the “gold standard” medical kind would reveal what worked in the classroom (or as Hattie later put it, what worked best). They were also convinced that the teacher was the crucial variable in the schooling equation, which made teachers and teaching “quality” the central objects of policy.

Not medical practitioners, not patients

But teachers are not like medical practitioners and students are not like patients. Teachers try to enlist students in their cause; students might or might not join in. They might do their best to make sense of what the teachers seems to want, or pretend that they’re trying to, or subvert or resist the teacher’s efforts in myriad ways. Much of what students learn is not what is taught but what students think has been taught; often it has not been taught at all, for students learn all kinds of other things in the classroom and everywhere else at school. They learn about themselves, the world, how the world treats them, and how they can and should treat others. Students are, in other words, co-producers of learning, of themselves, and of each other. They learn, and they grow.

What students learn and how they grow, taken in its full extent and complexity, depends partly on what teachers do but mostly on the circumstances in which they and teachers meet. Producing learning and growth is in many ways just like producing anything else. Any form of production combines people, time, space, task, expertise, objectives, rewards and sanctions in a specific way. The central question is not how to make teaching more effective (as effectiveness research assumes) but how to make schools more productive. Which combination of the many factors of production is most productive of what kinds of learning and growth for which students? The failure to ask what the evidence is telling us about what is going on and what could go on is the seed of the policy failure Hattie points to.

A less reliable vessel

“Learning science” is an even less reliable vessel. There is in fact no such thing as “learning science.” The learning sciences (plural) include experimental psychology, social and affective neuroscience, cognitive anthropology, developmental psychology, robotics and AI, and neurology, systems theory and many others. AERO relies on a particular subset of a particular branch of the learning sciences, cognitive load theory, or CLT, which is held in low esteem by many for its failure to take into account “the neurodynamic, attitudinal, social, emotional and cultural factors that often play a major, if often invisible and unsung role in every classroom.”

Learning scientists who do pay attention these “often invisible and unsung” factors reach conclusions very different from AERO’s. Two prominent psychologists for example, concludedafter career-long research that learners thrive when they feel competent and successful, challenged, purposeful, connected to community and culturally safe, working collaboratively on things relevant to their lives. A neuroscientist studying the relationship between young people’s behaviour, circumstances and neural development found that “support, safe spaces, and rich opportunities [to] think deeply about complex issues, to build personally relevant connections, and to find purpose and inspiration in their lives” is crucial to the brain’s development. Indeed, “the networks in the brain that are associated with these beneficial outcomes are deactivated during the kinds of fast-paced and often impersonal activities that are the staple of many classrooms” (emphasis added).

What about other kinds of classroom teaching?

One of the consequences of AERO’s use of CLT and effectiveness research is the assumption that teaching “knowledge” is the only game at school and there is only one way to play it. Of course knowledge is core business in schooling: knowledge of reading, writing, maths and science are “basic”; didactic teaching is for most kids and some purposes the shortest route between a fog and an aha! moment; the precepts of “explicit” teaching may well help to improve didactic teaching; and “effectiveness” research and its “effect sizes” can indeed make teachers and school leaders more aware of options and less reliant on hunch, habit and anecdote.

But what about other kinds of classroom teaching? And other ways of learning? Is AERO’s “teaching model” a one-punch knockout? The sovereign solution to the many things that students, teachers and schools contend with?

Tomorrow: How AERO can (and should) take a long hard look at itself.

This story by Dean Ashenden on AERO was first published in Inside Story. We are republishing with the permission of both Dean Ashenden and of Peter Browne, editor of Inside Story.

Dean Ashenden is a senior honorary fellow in the Melbourne Graduate School of Education, the University of Melbourne. He has worked in and around, over decades, as a teacher, academic, commentator and consultant: He is co-author, with Raewyn Connell, Sandra Kessler and Gary Dowsett, of the 1982 classic Making The Difference: Schools, Families and Social Division. Unbeaching the Whale: Can Australian schooling be reformed? was published last year.