“He’s thrown a kettle over a pub, what have you done?”

Whilst cj reminds me that “cash is king” I’m trying to remember that all this impassioned “learning theory celebrity death match” academic thinking about minimally guided instruction is played out for real in the context of that DUT we call school/s – kindergarten school, primary school, secondary school and tertiary school

And that made me realise that different edu_bloggers responses to Clark, Kirschner and Sweller’s minimally guided instruction must in part reflect the school context they are thinking in…

Even the deliciously provocative Clark, Kirschner et al pull back from totally trashing pedagogies of inquiry – acknowledging all is not lost in pedagogies of minimal guidance

“The advantage of guidance begins to recede when learners have sufficiently high prior knowledge to provide “internal guidance”.

If minimal guidance works for experts, then ed_bloggers working with students who have considerable prior knowledge might be very content with the learning outcomes of their students.  

I wondered if an argument for minimally guided instruction from an edublogger working in kindergarten would be the same as an argument for minimally guided instruction from an edu_blogger working in tertiary, … since all contexts for thinking are institutions for learning, and all contexts will have students with enough prior knowledge to provide “internal guidance” perhaps this is not a significant distinction 

After reading up to p51 of cj’s DUT Book of the Month – Jo Weizenbaum’s  Computer Power and Human Reason –.  I have a new question for understanding the technology of school that might help-  “What do teachers attribute to school?”

Some of us claim that

• School is an agent of/for change, others that
• School is a technology for introducing the young of the bewildered herd to “worthwhile activities” (Key competencies living a good life in a well functioning society)
• Clark, Kirschner et al’s definition of learning suggests that they would see school as a technology for producing changes in long term memory (aka learning)
• And many of the schools I work with describe themselves as communities for learning (aka learning communities), [Users of an edu_jargon that tries to get leverage from the good thing status of the word community - seem oblivious to the reality that the relationships between individuals that create “communities” are helplessly compromised and contradicted by the hierarchical power structures experienced between individuals when employed in a government funded and controlled institutions.  Institutions are not Communities] 

My disquiet comes from a suspicion that school is none of the above –

I attribute to school the technology for keeping “the same old same old”.  I suspect school is a clever way of preventing change –

No amount of making schools bigger by closing and combining small schools, opening up online courses at tertiary, integrating information communication technology, no amount of initiative that does the same old same old more efficiently, changes this. Increasing the efficiency/reliability of a technology like school - does not increase its validity – rather it exposes the fragility and flaws in the whole endeavour of school.

And plagiarising Weizenbaum’s argument for computer technology  -

Instructing more people about stuff more efficiently, increasing opportunities for institutionalised learning, simply cannot be represented as innovation.  Increasing efficiencies does not equate to school as an agent of change regardless of any accompanying self approbation trumpeting of “we are a learning community for the 21st learner”.

So perhaps a mental model to better understand the pedagogy of minimal guidance in Clark Kirschner Sweller’s argument is one where schools are represented as agents for limitation and control, teachers attribute schools with pedagogies that compromise change

I wonder what would happen if the failure of petroleum based initiative or something similar meant schools in their current guise  could no longer exist, for whilst we continue to have schools I suspect real change and innovation in learning will never happen.

If schools were abandoned we would have to seek new ways of learning from the community around us, and Pratchett’s “occasionally found useful” approach to minimally guided and direct instructional learning might be a useful half way position before we reach full independence from “school” as a mediator of learning.

“The teachers were useful there.  Bands of them wandered through the mountain, along with the tinkers, portable blacksmiths, miracle medicine men, cloth pedlars, fortune tellers and all the other travellers who sold things people didn’t need every day but occasionally found useful.” Pratchett The Wee Free Men

When students are asked to solve authentic problems in information rich settings, Clark, Kirschner et al argue that minimally guided instructional approaches are based upon two assumptions

1. Constructing own solutions is most effective learning experience
2. Knowledge can best be acquired through experience based on the procedures of the discipline 

Regardless of the memory arguments (which I think can be, and are addressed by alert educators (ailsa, bill and Jedd’s argument), and I think can’t be and aren’t by the rest of us in the long tail) both of these assumptions would sit more comfortably within a diverse community construct like the inhabitants of Pratchett’s The Chalk than they do in the controlled group of institutionally sorted individuals available to learn with in an institution.

Perhaps part of the reason minimally guided instructional approaches (aka constructivist/ inquiry/ problem based) learning are vulnerable to questions like “He’s thrown a kettle over a pub, what have you done?” - part of the reason minimally guided instruction falls short of expectation in kindergarten, primary, secondary and tertiary schools is more because with minimal guidance/ inquiry we are trying to introduce a different way of “doing school” –

Perhaps with minimally directed inquiry we are trying to implement a pedagogy for learning that confronts and compromises what already exists, we are introducing change into a fiercely defensive technology, AND most significantly we are using success criteria based on maintaining the same old same old.