Paul Kirschner:
Editor’s Note: The central premise of The Next 30 Years is that improving educational outcomes for children depends less on new policies and programs and more on getting classroom practice right. That means taking seriously what cognitive science tells us about how people learn—and resisting the comforting myths that dominate education discourse.
Few people have done more to challenge those myths than Paul Kirschner, whose Substack is a must-read for anyone interested in evidence-based teaching. Along with Carl Hendrick and Jim Heal, he is also the co-author of the excellent book Instructional Illusions, which examines many of the misconceptions about teaching and learning that stubbornly persist in schools.
Today’s essay, which first ran on his Substack, is a good example of why Kirschner’s work is so valuable: it takes a close look at familiar but misleading ideas about learning and shows how easily intuition can lead us astray. He takes widely repeated ideas about learning—if students are engaged, they’re learning (right?); students learn best when they discover things for themselves (don’t they?), among others—and asks the simple but often neglected question: Is it actually true? – RP
Instruction is a bit like watching a magician or illusionist: what you see feels clear and convincing, but the surface appearance doesn’t fully explain what’s really going on. In a magic show, the audience naturally focuses on the visible action and misses the hidden mechanisms that produce the effect. Something similar can happen in education.
I’ve just published a book with Carl Hendrick and Jim Heal called Instructional Illusions. It’s not a book about edu-myths in the usual sense. We’re not simply taking a bat to tired old nonsense such as learning styles and calling it a day. The problem is more interesting than that, and also more dangerous. Many of the things we address in the book aren’t absurd. They’re plausible. They contain a grain of truth. That’s precisely why they’re so persistent.