Is skin cancer an unhelpful term? from jonathan rees on Vimeo.

New York Times

I used to think that medical students understood a lot about learning. They had done well to get to med school, so surely they knew how things worked? Gradually, from experience, I began to think otherwise. I have never opposed asking students questions about how they are enjoying things (Do the staff turn up? What is fun? What is bad? etc) but I have been very suspicious that they innately know what it takes to acquire the knowledge that means that you can ‘think like a doctor’ ( which is what med school should be about). Sometimes — and only sometimes — political correctness or plain lazy thinking gets in the way. Much as it does in the clinical arena when commentators misunderstand what information patients bring to a consultation: patients may have their views on wave-particle duality, but I do not attach must weight to them; other views matter more, as do sometimes the views of others.

There is of course a reasonable literature on how good (or bad, in reality) we are at assessing our own competence (for doctors, as well as students). I think some are much better than others, but as I type, I am aware I am entering the ‘All Cretans are liars’ paradox. My reading is that being aware of this issue is not sufficient to alleviate the problem. But the more educational psychology I read the more I find myself falling into a vortex of uncertainty about teaching and learning. I would like to laugh a lot of the experimental findings away. Perhaps, the findings are only true in particular experimental situations (remember these digits, recall them backwards etc); or true only for secondary or primary school levels; or fail to take enough account of motivation, and behavioural issues. Perhaps. But I suspect I and others have been living a fiction.

This most dangerous idea is that much self-assessment and reflection is bogus. That attempts to teach various types of meta skills doomed. And what matters most is knowledge: good doctors know more about patients and the way patents present with their diseases. Paraphrasing George Steiner, facts and memory, are consciousness’ ballast. Introspection doesn’t tell us too much about them, nor is it therefore a reliable guide to action.

In other words, one bank’s executive bonuses equalled a third of the cost of all university teaching, for more than 2 million students in the sector in 2010.

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Eczema in almost 5 minutes from jonathan rees on Vimeo.

 I have argued elsewhere that if you are using the word “textbook” you are probably looking in the rear-view mirror and not thinking clearly about what students need. The word “textbook” drags behind it a collection of obsolete assumptions about how knowledge should be organized and transmitted and learned.

 

 

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I hate the word assessment. Assessment is killing education. Roger Schank.

 

‘Silicon Valley can’t disrupt education because, for the most part, education is not a product category.’

 

 

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I can’t get the phrase ‘think ecology’ out of my mind. Of course, if you have worked in genetics you might think that this is not too surprising: genetics used to be known as experimental evolution. You can’t miss ecology in that. I think it was was some of Ross Anderson’s writings that put the bug in me (pun intended) on how you cannot understand computer security without looking at the ecosystem of users that the code is embedded in. You have to think ecology, and economics is a key part of this ecology. If you think economics, you are of course thinking about scarcity too.

These thoughts gradually seeped through my consciousness after a meeting yesterday, when we were discussing how you select medical students (positions on course at medical school are scarce), and the pros and cons of various selection methods. In broad brush stroke, it seems to me bureaucracies like reliability, but neglect ecology.

Well, we all know the mantra: you cannot have validity without reliability. Absolutely true. In a static world. But we do not live in a static world, but rather in an ecosystem where the agents all modify behaviours in the light of everybody else’s actions. The result is a pressure to create more and more reliable exams, which act so as to distort the learning environment more and more away from what common sense dictates. So, we have an ecosystem with lots of different species, each species representing a type of activity we value. We then select the ones that are most easily reliably assessed and artificially allow these ones to replicate the most. The students see what is going on and act accordingly. We end up with exams that act as parasites that degrade our lovely garden. We want— In George Pickering’s wonderful words— students with ‘lively minds’ to flower, but we continually uproot them to see how they are doing, leaving only the weeds. So, the metaphor of ‘weeding out the weaker students’ has got it all wrong.

Acne in five minutes from jonathan rees on Vimeo.