Engagement, Active Learning & Other Bullshit in Education

First, some definitions:

Engage: occupy or attract (someone's interest or attention).

Active Learning: learning that happens when students engage with the learning process.

Fluff: superficial, trivial, useless, or unimportant information.

Liar: someone who intentionally deceives others by misrepresenting or hiding the truth.

Bullshitter: the liar cares about the truth and attempts to hide it; the bullshitter doesn't care if what they say is true or false, but cares only whether the listener is persuaded.

Engagement

'Engagement' is to Education what 'Artificial Intelligence' is to 'Technology'. Everyone has heard of it. Everyone discusses it. Everyone sells it. Almost no one understands it.

What should a teacher do? Make the classroom more engaging.

What should lesson plans be? Engaging.

What should children be? Engaged.

When do children learn? When they are engaged.

What do parents want? Engaged children.

When will a demo sell? If children are engaged.

The word 'engagement', like AI in Tech, has become overused to the point where it does not convey any information at all. And, like AI, engagement is a beautiful concept when it is truly understood. Let's explore it a bit more.

Why is Engagement important?

Neuroscientists have consistently found that learning happens when students form and strengthen connections in their brains. The point to note here is this - 'students form the connections', teachers can't do it on behalf of the students. So, technically speaking, teaching is just helping students learn i.e., form connections in their brains. Unlike a computer, teachers can't connect a USB cable and transfer the content directly into the brain of the students.

There is a fixed path through which learning happens. Students have to first pay attention to what they want to learn, then temporarily store it in their short-term memory, and finally transfer it to their long-term storage over time. Therefore, we can safely assume that learning starts with students paying attention to what they want to learn. And since engagement just means 'paying attention', it has penetrated so effectively into teaching and learning vocabulary, and rightly so.

The use of engagement in the learning process is further jargonized into 'Active Learning', i.e., learning that happens when children are engaged. But, can learning to be passive? If learning means making and strengthening connections in the brain, and all connection formation requires attention, then technically, all learning is active. It is impossible for any connections to form when students are not paying attention.

So, engagement is important for learning. But it is just one part of the puzzle. The effectiveness of classrooms can't be predicted on the basis of engagement alone, it depends on the alignment between engagement and learning goals.

What are the Goals of Learning?

How do we know what children already know? And if they are learning more? The best way to know would be to actually see and measure the connections in the brains, physically in some way - may be by sticking electrodes in the brain or by imaging techniques like fMRI. Alas, teachers can't do it in real time and, at the moment, neither can't neuroscientists. So what is the alternative?

Educators use Learning Outcomes, Learning Goals, or Learning Objectives. These are simple statements that define what students should be able to do after they have learned a concept or an idea. Here are some examples.

The principle behind using learning goals is this - since we can't measure learning directly, we observe and measure the actions of students and then infer(guess) their learning from these actions. The observations of these actions may be in the day-to-day classroom or during assessments.

In principle, learning goals are just a different tool to understand and gauge a student's learning (like electrodes, fMRI, a weighing scale, or a psychiatric assessment). They are a human-understandable way to model connections that students have formed in their brains.

So, teachers first break down a course into some bigger goals to define the destination or learning. Then they break down these big goals into smaller goals so that they can consistently measure the direction in which the learning is happening. The classrooms are then designed in such a way that the goals are achieved and the assessments are designed in such a way that you can measure student actions to validate the achievement of the learning goals.

Now we know three truths:

• Learning happens when connections form in the brain and these connections start forming when the students are engaged.

• Learning goals are our hack to model learning.

• Assessments are our way to measure if the learning goals were achieved.

But most of us simplify these truths into three heuristics.

• Engagement tells us 'how students learn'

• Learning goals tell us 'what students need to learn’

• Assessments tell us 'what students have learned'

Most teachers I have interviewed know these heuristics. Most lesson planners aka. curriculum designers I know, also know these heuristics.

And yet they consistently confront the following situation - the learning goals were created, the classroom was engaging and yet students failed in the assessment.

All Engagement is NOT Equal

A principle should be obvious by this point - if students engage with X, they can learn X. It is simple, so so simple. Yet we ignore this principle all the time. Here are a few examples:

1. If you are teaching a poem and while doing so jump around the classroom and keep the students engaged, the engagement leads to the following learning - our teacher is funny, she can jump really high, etc.

2. Let's say you are teaching children about Isaac Newton and as an activity to keep students engaged, ask students to paint an apple and then later relate it to the fact that 'an apple fell on Newton's head and he discovered gravity'. In this case, students learn to paint an apple, because they are engaged in painting, not Newton and gravity.

3. Let's say you ask students to play a game of 'Never have I Ever' at the beginning of the class to keep them engaged, and then start teaching them 'Nouns'. In this case, too, children learn how to play the game, not Nouns.

4. The same goes for other fluff like irrelevant videos, making them run around the class, making them play games, and other engagement-inducing mumbo-jumbo that is NOT aligned with the actual learning goals.

All this mumbo-jumbo is useless when it comes to learning. The aim of the activity is NOT to simply keep the students engaged, but to keep them engaged in alignment with the learning goals. I will henceforth call such learning activities that don't directly align with the learning goals as 'Fluffy Activities'. Fluffy Activities might help you keep students busy, and parents happy, or even sell a few courses but one thing they will not do is help children learn.

I repeat, engagement only helps in learning when engagement is aligned with the learning goals, everything else is just fluff.

Bullshit in Education

So, is everyone lying about engagement? No, they are not, some of them are innocently naïve, but most of them are just bullshitting.

Lying requires one to be deceptive, to intentionally withhold the truth. Bullshitting is different - it is NOT caring about the truth. 'A liar cares about the truth and attempts to hide it; the bullshitter doesn't care if what they say is true or false, but cares only whether the listener is persuaded.' A bullshitter makes up facts according to their convenience without caring about the truth.

Most people don't care about what the truth about learning is, they care about what is in demand and what makes the child/parent happy. They say and do whatever it takes to persuade the child, or the parent, or their boss, or their principal, of the fact that the learning is happening.

Parents want activities - add more activities to the classroom. Parents want assessments - add more tests. The sales team wants videos, games, and fun, give it to them. The principal says, do project-based learning - so do it. A motivational speaker says, make the classroom student-centric, so do it. Do whatever it takes to persuade others that students are learning or will learn, that's bullshit!

So, if you are adding fluffy activities to the classroom without doing your research about learning, you are a bullshitter! If you are adding fluffy activities to the classroom to persuade the parents that their children will learn, you are also a bullshitter! And, if you know the principles of learning and are still doing it, you are a liar!

Avoiding Bullshit & Surprises

To the ones who are discovering these ideas for the first time - you shouldn't be surprised when students fail in an assessment after an engaging classroom. Engagement does not guarantee learning. Even, if engagement aligned to learning goals just starts the process of learning, it does not guarantee it. There is a lot more to it, so it is better to learn more about learning, instead of bullshitting about it.

To the ones who want to avoid bullshit, just make sure that you enquire more about the truth when someone is giving you complicated jargon. Another thing is not being satisfied with the sentence 'according to research', ask more. And if you are still curious, there is a whole course on bullshit by the University of Washington.

Best of luck!