IN DEFENCE OF EDUMYTHS

Over the past decade or so, we have seen a number of takedowns of particular ‘edumyths’ thanks to a rise in awareness of the evidence in education and how learning happens. As teachers, we can all reel off our favourite ‘edumyths’ – VAK and learning styles, ‘brain gym’, the learning pyramid, the right and left brain, to name but a few. On Twitter, there will be much guffawing that this occurred and some will post lesson plans that highlight how a certain ‘edumyth’ was expected to be evidenced in lessons.

I’m not going to go against the science of the ‘edumyths’ as clearly there is evidence that shows they are what they are, myths but what I want to do is explore how they were less damaging than many suggest and in fact, in many respects were quite positive given the state of education at the time.

Before I go on, I’d like to quote George Orwell’s ‘Homage to Catalonia’ and the final passage in his book, which relates to his viewpoint on the Spanish Civil War.  

“And I hope the account I have given is not too misleading.  I believe that on such an issue as this no one is or can be completely truthful.  It is difficult to be certain about anything except what you have seen with your own eyes, and consciously or unconsciously everyone writes as a partisan.  In case I have not said this somewhere earlier in the book I will say it now: beware of my partisanship, my mistakes of fact, and the distortion inevitably caused by my having seen only one corner of events.  And beware of exactly the same things when you read any other book on this period of the Spanish war.”

Clearly I am not writing about the life or death situation of a war but in the heated debates among educators, it can get pretty serious out there and therefore we must remember this fundamental point – your truth is not my truth, within a school/classroom environment and therefore whatever I write now, you may not recognise at all. So here are four reasons why ‘edumyths’ were good for education.

1. Getting the conversation started – before VAK and the introduction of learning styles questionnaires in the classroom, there was not much professional dialogue surrounding what we did in the classroom. In many respects, VAK forced us to stop and think and question whether this was really true. From this, you’d suddenly see teachers discuss pedagogy. It might be a derogative ‘what do you think of this VAK nonsense?’ fashion but all the same, it got people talking and from that perspective it was a huge moment.
2. Mixing things up in the classroom – in order to implement VAK within the classroom, you had to come up with resources that addressed your (supposedly) different visual, auditory and kinaesthetic learners. Many would argue that creating ‘sorting cards’ or doing a ‘Thunk’ was a waste of time but I would argue differently. If we are to stop boredom within the classroom, it is vital that every now and then, we mix up the delivery of our content. According to a recent study*, boredom leads to sadism within the classroom and therefore many teachers who went through the VAK years or created ‘brain gyms’, are likely to have a range of resources and activities that they can dip into, just to shake up the classroom a bit and stop bad behaviour in its tracks.
3. A gateway to the ‘real science’ – in many of the ‘edumyths’, there are links to what are now considered to be the six most effective learning strategies. For example, the learning pyramid explained how much we remember given the method that we use. For example, 10% of what we read, 20% of what we hear and so on, all the way up to the amazing figure of 90% for what we teach. As we know, this has been debunked but this myth would have encouraged teachers to get students to explain concepts to each other. Through this, they would probably end stumbling upon ‘elaboration’ or coming up with their own ‘concrete examples’ that are part of the six effective learning strategies. Mind mapping, that was encouraged for kinesthetic and visual learners, would have been ‘dual coding’ before ‘dual coding’ became a thing.
4. Questioning the next big thing – as ‘edumyths’ were slowly exposed, it made teachers more questioning about the research that was coming their way. As The Who once sang ‘we won’t get fooled again’ and therefore the teaching community has become much more evidence focused and more informed about what makes good research. How big was the sample size? Has it been replicated? Has it been tried in numerous settings? Who has funded the research? These kinds of questions are crucial in making evidence informed education better in the future and ‘edumyths’ was the starting point for this.
5. Metacognition for beginners – before VAK, we never really asked students to think about their own learning. This is now a huge area in schools and although misguided, the VAK questionnaires would have been one of the first times students stopped and thought about how they learn. The seed had been sown. 

As you can see, for me, the ‘edumyths’ acted as a catalyst to the thriving educational environment that we are living in today, where we are evidence focused, happy to discuss pedagogy and ask students to consider their own learning. These important activities were simply not happening when I first started teaching and education is in a much better place because of it and for that, we can give thanks to the ‘edumyths’.

*file:///home/chronos/u-672c8f825b61597ef72ebfd1f3b04b6ff9f88902/MyFiles/Downloads/Boredom%20and%20Sadism%20at%20Schools_v2.pdf