I first saw Roger Schank talk in Denver, Colorado, over 25
years ago and have barely disagreed with a word he’s said since. Schank is a
critic of the current educational system, pointing to 19th century
curriculum, teaching by telling, lectures, memorisation and
standardised tests, as structures and techniques that distort learning. I’ve
seen him ask audiences of academics to tell him the quadratic equation, taught
to most children – they can’t. I’ve seen him ask audiences about the safety
briefing on a 737, something they’ve seen dozens of times – they can’t.
With characteristic boldness, Schank often starts with the
statement, “There are only two things
wrong with education: 1) What we teach; 2) How we teach it.” So let’s look
at his work through these two lenses.
1. What
we teach
Schank’s research took him back to the 1892 curriculum in
the US, where he found that the current subjects were fossilised into a
curriculum designed for testing and to filter students for university. The very
idea of a fixed curriculum seems odd to Schank, as it fixes knowledge and we
mostly forget the stuff we’re asked to remember.
His bête noire is ‘maths’. Our obsession with maths and
standardised tests impoverishes education. In fact the two are linked. Maths is
popular because it is easy to test. Driven by PISA tests, which he debunks by
showing that their supposed relevance is bogus, the world has become addicted
to tests not performance. Algebra, in particular, he sees as a hangover from a
fossilised curriculum.
Similarly with the sciences; physics, chemistry and biology,
STEM subjects, he thinks, are overrated. Sure we need to learn how to write
well in English but that comes through regular practice, not occasional essays.
As for languages, Roger has lived abroad and as he speaks French, he finds the
French taught in school laughable, as it rarely results in any real success and
is not the language spoken in France. The classroom, he claims is not the place
to learn a language, especially in a country where there’s no real opportunity
for immersion or practice.
In short, school he thinks, has turned into a funnelling
process for Universities. This is a big mistake. His solution is to have lots
of curricula and allow people to follow their curiosity and interests, as this
is what drives real, meaningful and useful learning, as opposed to memorisation
and hoop jumping. Organise school, not around subjects, but cognitive processes
that match what we do in the real world.
Higher
education?
The idea that everyone should go to college he thinks
absurd. It’s fine for some but not all. With impeccable, academic credentials,
and a background in cognitive science, computer science and education, he
explodes the view that Higher Education has of itself, as the pinnacle of
teaching competence and achievement. Professors like research and mostly see
teaching and undergraduates as something to be avoided. In any case, he thinks,
they’re often very poor teachers, relying on stale lecture series that teach
what they research.
To cut to the quick, Schank things Higher Education is a
con. You pay through the nose for not very much more than a three or four year
vacation and a good social life. The courses are poor and the system designed
to select researchers.
2. How
we teach it
Schank has a strongly libertarian view in that he wants to
abandon lectures, memorisation and tests. Start to learn by doing and practice,
not theory. Stop lecturing and delivering dollops of theory. Stop building and
sitting in classrooms. We need to teach cognitive processes and acquire skills
through the application of these processes, not fearing failure.
What most people fail to realise about Schank is that his
recommendations are based on a lifetime academic interest and contributions to
cognitive science and a deep understanding of these processes.
Script theory
Based on an examination of language and memory, Schank
explored the idea of personalised scripts in learning. This personalised,
episodic model of memory led to a theory of instruction that exposed learners
to model scripts by allowing them to experience the process of building their
own scripts. We need scripts for handling meetings, dealing with customers,
selling to others and so on. Knowledge is not a set of facts, it’s a set of
experiences. This is not taught by telling, it is taught by doing, ‘there
really is no learning without doing’. Interestingly, recent memory research
confirms this view.
Learning by doing
He rejects the idea that we have to fill people up with
knowledge they’ll never use. Too much education and training tries, and fails,
to do this. We need to identify why someone wants to learn then teach it. In
this sense he puts motivation and skills before factual knowledge. One can pull
in knowledge when required.
Meaningful stories (scripts) lie at the heart of his
instructional method. These contextualise learning and link to previous schema.
A fierce critic of lectures and classroom education and training, he has
developed simulation methods for exposing learners to script building
environments, where they can learn by repeated exposure to failure and
ultimately success. Expectation failure is when things turn out to be different
from what you expected. This is when you learn. Breaking with traditional
linguists and theorists of learning, he sees learning as a difficult and messy
process, where failure is the primary driver. We match incoming problems to
past experiences. Case-based reasoning is therefore instructive, where we learn
by doing what we want to do. We also learn by making mistakes and reflecting on
what those mistakes were and what we can do about them. Learning by doing,
works. Learning by telling, doesn't.
In e-learning this means using case-based instruction,
emotional impact, video, role-playing, storytelling. Learners are put into
situations that seem realistic to them, to solve problems, and possibly fail,
and have someone help them out. Design is hard, reworking the thing into a
case-based scenario; something that seems like a goal someone has, then to
helping them accomplish it - that's learning.
Story-Centred Curricula
He prefers to deliver learning from mentored experience, not
from direct instruction presented out of context. Fictional situations are set
up in which students must play a role. They need to produce documents,
software, plans, presentations and such within a story describing the
situation. Deliverables produced by the student are evaluated by team members
and by mentors. The virtual experiential curricula are story centred.
Story-Centred Curricula are carefully designed apprenticeship-style learning
experiences in which the student encounters a planned sequence of real-world
situations constructed to motivate the development and application of knowledge
and skills in an integrated fashion.
Cognitive processes
In
his latest book Teaching Minds: How Cognitive Science Can Save Our Schools
he focuses on cognitive processes as the basis for learning interventions.
Conscious Processes
1. Prediction: determining
what will happen next
2. Modeling: figuring out how
things work
3. Experimentation: coming to
conclusions after trying things out
4. Values: deciding between things you care about
Analytic Processes
1. Diagnosis: determining what
happened from the evidence
2. Planning: determining a
course of action
3. Causation: understanding
why something happened
4. Judgment: deciding between choices
Social Processes
1. Influence: figuring out how
to get someone else to do something that you want them to do
2. Teamwork: getting along
with others when working towards a common goal
3. Negotiation: trading with
others and completing successful deals
4. Description: communicating one’s thoughts and what has just happened
to others
These are the skills one needs to master. By allowing users
to fail in controlled environments, he saw that instruction is not about
telling, it’s about real or fictionally constructed experience, involvement and
practice, including the experience of failure.
Online education
In fact most current
online education he sees as just a change in venue, not a change in method. He
argues for much more problem solving, simulation and learning by doing. He is
also critical of MOOCs largely “just lectures on line interrupted by quizzes and
discussion groups” and he has little
time for Coursera and Udacity, which he sees as replicating poor college
courses.
Conclusion
Schank has turned most instructional methods on their head
by rejecting the subject-led, academic approach for a more meaningful,
experiential, learn by doing method. Using sound principles in cognitive
science, he uses case-based scenarios and stories are used to create contexts
in which learners succeed, and just as importantly fail. As time passes, Schank
seems to become more and more relevant. He’s seen as a heretic but most of the
actors in education know in themselves that he’s exposing some deep truths.
Bibliography
Schank, R.C. (1975). Conceptual
Information Processing. New York: Elsevier.
Schank, R.C.
(1982a). Dynamic Memory: A Theory of Reminding and Learning in Computers and
People. Cambridge University Press.
Schank, R.C.
(1982b). Reading and Understanding. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Schank, R.C.
(1986). Explanation Patterns: Understanding Mechanically and Creatively.
Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Schank, R.C.
(1991). Tell Me a Story: A New Look at Real and Artificial Intelligence.
New York: Simon & Schuster.
Schank, R.C.
& Abelson, R. (1977). Scripts, Plans, Goals, and Understanding.
Hillsdale, NJ: Earlbaum Assoc.
Schank, R.C. & Cleary. C.
(1995). Engines for education. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum Assoc.
Schank, R.C (2005). Lessons in
e-Learning. Pfeiffer.
Schank, R.C (2011). Teaching Minds: How Cognitive Science Can Save Our
Schools
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