TOT #002. Teaching ‘The Scientific Method’ + more Twitter Takeaways

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Show Notes

Teaching ‘the scientific method’

Superb post from @mfordhamhistory, on how we can teach students the discipline through a curriculum of case studies: https://t.co/Akgpv6D3NT

— Harry Fletcher-Wood (@HFletcherWood) January 10, 2017

Original post by Michael Fordham

‘1. Disciplines are characterised as much by their internal differences as their similarities.

2. There is no Platonic ideal of each discipline

3. Generalised models of disciplines rarely reflect what happens on the ground

All of these points lead me to great scepticism about curriculum theories in history, science or other disciplines that work by distilling the ‘essence’ from those disciplines, and teaching those. I am not all convinced that we can teach children ‘the scientific method’ in a general sense before they have learnt a number of cases of scientific research in practice.

History teachers have produced numerous examples of this over the last few years. Steve Mastin, for example, designed a scheme of work in which he taught his pupils how one historian (Eamon Duffy) had worked with a particular body of source material to answer questions about the impact of the reformation in England. Rachel Foster has a similarly well-cited example where she designed a scheme of work around the way two different historians (Goldhagen and Browning) had interpreted the same source material (a report from a police battalion involved in the Holocaust) in quite different ways. In examples such as these, children are taught about a specific example of where historians have undertaken research. Over time, as pupils learn more and more cases of disciplinary practice, we can then teach them the similarities and differences between different approaches: we thus end with abstract ideas, rather than beginning with them.

This means that I would suggest the following as an alternative way of teaching disciplinary practice to school children. Rather than distil some general, abstract ideas about ‘how the discipline works’, we would be better off specifying a range of specific cases of disciplinary practice for children to learn, from which we can as teachers tease out the similarities and differences in approach that characterise our respective disciplines.’

Is Growth Mindset a Hoax?

This is an example of the kind of education journalism that we need more of https://t.co/Ljmk3fyo6x via @tomchivers

— Greg Ashman (@greg_ashman) January 14, 2017

Original article by Tom Chivers, about hype of Growth mindset, being able to do everything from help struggling students to bring peace to the middle east.

‘Scott Alexander, the pseudonymous psychiatrist behind the blog Slate Star Codex, described Dweck’s findings as “really weird”, saying “either something is really wrong here, or [the growth mindset intervention] produces the strongest effects in all of psychology”.

He asks: “Is growth mindset the one concept in psychology which throws up gigantic effect sizes … Or did Carol Dweck really, honest-to-goodness, make a pact with the Devil in which she offered her eternal soul in exchange for spectacular study results?”

Strongest evidence from Timothy Bates’ research…

‘Bates told BuzzFeed News that he has been trying to replicate Dweck’s findings in that key mindset study for several years. “We’re running a third study in China now,” he said. “With 200 12-year-olds. And the results are just null.

“People with a growth mindset don’t cope any better with failure. If we give them the mindset intervention, it doesn’t make them behave better. Kids with the growth mindset aren’t getting better grades, either before or after our intervention study.”

Dweck told BuzzFeed News that attempts to replicate can fail because the sci