The last few days, I’ve re-posted a couple of articles I played a minor role in authoring for the Australian Association for Research in Education. These focus on AERO (the Australian Education Research Organisation), the way they push out “evidence” for teachers to follow in Australian education (and the fact that is contested), the lack of independence or peer-review in that process, and a bit of history behind the idea of “Evidence-Based Practice” in education, its roots in medicine, and the fact that despite what you might believe from the popular media, that it has been a contested field in academia since day 1.
It was interesting to see the defenders of AERO speaking up in the comments on our articles, and on their own social media platforms. One of them got very cross, and contributed to an article in another publication (EducationHQ, 2025) accusing us academics of failing to do our jobs, which is apparently to provide “practical advice to teachers”. I’ll come back to that later on, but for now let’s just say while we do do that (I presented at a PL conference for the NSW Department of Education two weeks ago, I’m keynoting a school conference tomorrow, and that’s the 7th I’ve presented at this year), it’s a long way down in my contract, with university teaching and producing cutting edge research being the top two.
Mud-slinging aside, the thing that really gets my goat is that those who criticise those who dare criticise AERO (see the game going on here?) fall into the simplistic ideologically-driven AERO trap of turning everything into dichotomies. In our first article, we pointed to the fact that:
There is significant evidence to support the educational psychology of cognitive load theory. But there are also counter-arguments. Sweller argues that unguided learning “does not work”. But others provide evidence that problem-based and inquiry learning can be effective, and that contextual factors must inform pedagogical choices.
Note here that our argument here isn’t against Cognitive Load Theory, or against the kind of teaching its research findings recommend. And our argument isn’t for other pedagogies that are based on other kinds of research. Our point is to say that when AERO simplifies the research to things it says are “what works”, they imply a functionalist mode of teaching and learning wherein the teacher does a thing to the child, the child receives the thing, and then learning has happened. Pasi Sahlberg, a Finnish Professor of Education at Melbourne University, describes these kinds of top-down, simplified approaches to telling teachers how to teach as the Global Education Reform Movement, or GERM for short.
In their book Cognitive Load Theory (2011), Sweller, Ayres, and Kalyuga explain a series of effects that can improve or impair the natural information processing of knowledge (carefully defined in the first chapter) to be stored in long-term memory. Most of the examples given are directly applicable in traditional classroom settings because they involve instruction (in fact, Cognitive Load Theory is centred around instructional processes, which is why it’s particularly useful for knowing how to teach kids stuff in a super-efficient manner). Understanding the effects, teachers can deliver this instruction and design learning activities that cut the chaff and really help students. That’s a Good Thing.
As we also explained in our first article, “Drawing primarily on Sweller’s cognitive load theory, [AERO’s] explainer proposes that explicit or direct instruction helps to avoid students experiencing cognitive overload”.
Let’s move over into my specialist field, now. Do we music teachers need to teach stuff to young people, and would it be good if we did that as efficiently as possible? Yes, of course! I have “delivered” many a content-heavy class to middle and high school students, especially in courses where a high level of theory is required. I discovered Cognitive Load Theory (CLT) in 2008, integrated it into my teaching immediately (especially to avoid death by PowerPoint!), began teaching it the same year at Western Sydney University, and have been teaching it every year at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music in several of our courses since. It’s incredibly useful at the very minimum as a set of principles to bear in mind as one prepares or reflects on a lesson (before the messy work of interacting with the young people begins).
Sweller (together with Owens, in 2008) has even done a music study! Together, they found that certain kinds of information presentation were more effecting than others when presenting worked examples in music theory.
However, this is where we discover that while incredibly useful, CLT has its limits in music learning. In Owens and Sweller’s paper, the “music learning” is actually “music notation theory learning” (and the experiment designs have some pretty awful music theory errors that shouldn’t have got through peer-review, but that’s another whole issue). This kind of learning is mostly irrelevant to nearly exactly 99% of the students who take music in the state of NSW (i.e., it won’t ever appear on their syllabus), because it’s learning about music (or “verbal knowledge”, as Elliott & Silverman (2015) call it), rather than musical learning, and in a very monocultural mode.
Looking outward, by turning to the Australian Curriculum, we see a similar thing. Year 7 (the population Owens and Sweller drew on) students need do three kinds of music learning: (1) Exploring and responding (listening to music, analysing it, responding to it both verbally/textually and theoretically); (2) Developing and practising skills (including playing and singing); and (3) Creating and making (composing music). Now, it is of course possible to teach notation-based music theory in the first learning context, but let’s bear in mind that notation-based theory is really only central in Western Art Music, Jazz, and a few other music cultures. The Australian Curriculum demands the teaching of “music composed across cultures, times, places and/or other contexts” in a culturally responsive (i.e. to the students in your class) manner. So yep, you can do notation theory worksheets, but it’s really not what the syllabus is about.
Again, this isn’t an attack on CLT nor on Explicit Teaching. It’s just to explain that for some kinds of learning – such as singing, playing, improvising, and composing, doing is actually central to the learning process, rather than giving or recieving instruction. I can sit down and explain how I play a Rachmaninov sonata or a Tom Morello guitar riff to my students, but it’s really not going to help them get there. If we take it to the less virtuosic end, CLT is again very helpful in the common pedagogy of chunking a melody – teacher sings, students copy, then the teacher scaffolds the piecing of sections together – but in these activities most of the physical learning of singing or playing happens when the student is doing it.
Of course, that’s in the science, too. As well as there being mountains of research about this (here’s a good starting point), just like CLT, I’ve loved following my friend Laura Crocco’s PhD work where she looked at how sports scientists have researched motor learning (after all, music learning is physical learning), and then applied it to our field. Right in line with CLT, Crocco & Meyer state that “How we teach (e.g. demonstrating and giving feedback) is just as important as what we teach (e.g., breathing, postural alignment)”. However, they found that (in singing lessons) teachers spent too much time giving instruction and feedback and too little time having the student sing. Applying motor learning research principles to musical training, teachers learn to think about how (and this is no surprise when we think about our own music learning) students learn through their own practice, over time.
This isn’t a dichotomy, and it isn’t simple. But it’s a great way to show that taking one theory, even one as brilliantly researched and documented through empirical research as Sweller’s, simply can’t be expected to translate to every teaching and learning situation in a “one size fits all” manner.
Of course, this argument leaves me wide open to another lot of mud-slinging from the pro-AERO mob. What on earth would a music educator or a music education researcher know about the rest of education?! And even if this is a good point, it surely doesn’t apply to learning in more mainstream and important subjects. Like mathematics, for example.
Well, again, I’m not trying to propose a dichotomy here. I’m extremely pleased that my children, now either finished or soon-finishing in their schooling years, were explicitly taught important information like the number ladder or the correct order to watch the Star Wars films. (Though, now I think about it, the youngest just learned to read by being in competition with the elders! He was reading and doing maths long before he got to school.) One of them (help us all) is in Year 12 now, madly encouraging whole essays to enter her long term memory so she can regurgitate them in her exams in 2 months.
But imagine if, alongside that factual learning, mathematics was also a subject that didn’t just involve memorising facts or worked examples to regurgitate in an exam. Let’s go to Paul Lockhart’s brilliant book, A Mathematician’s Lament (How School Cheats Us Out of Our Most Fascinating and Imaginative Art Form). (N.B Paul is not an academic – he’s a maths teacher.)
THE FIRST THING TO UNDERSTAND IS THAT MATHEMATICS is an art. The difference between math and the other arts, such as music and painting, is that our culture does not recognize it as such […] This is why it is so heartbreaking to see what is being done to mathematics in school. This rich and fascinating adventure of the imagination has been reduced to a sterile set of facts to be memorized and procedures to be followed. […] “The area of a triangle is equal to one-half its base times its height.” Students are asked to memorize this formula and then “apply” it over and over in the “exercises.” Gone is the thrill, the joy, even the pain and frustration of the creative act. There is not even a problem anymore. The question has been asked and answered at the same time—there is nothing left for the student to do.
The man who got cross on Twitter about how denying Cognitive Load Theory’s immutable truth would be like a creationist denying Darwin’s theory of evolution (he might be the same “author and deputy principal at Ballarat Clarendon College in Victoria” who’s the impetus of the EducationHQ article) will be especially triggered if, at this point, I tell you that this idea of education as depositing information into children’s brains is called “the Banking model” (that’s Friere – whoops, I said the name). But Freire wasn’t the first – Dewey had criticised this way of thinking about education over a century ago, and he knew a thing or two about education. And there were others before him, back into the 19th century. Fuller and I published a chapter on this.
Which, again, isn’t to say that there’s a single right way of thinking about education. Or that teaching children doesn’t involve telling/showing them stuff in a way that allows them to store that in their memory and retreive it and use it in different but related situations later on.
You see? I’m pro Explicit Teaching. I’ll give at least 3 lectures on it, and CLT this semester! But I’m also pro student investigation, practice, culturally responsive teaching, inclusiveness, adventure, creativity, inspiration, care, and (here’s the dangerous one:) fun.
How do I arrive at this radical position? Through critical thinking, which I think is the most important skill a good teacher needs, and needs to model. As I’ve shown in my research, developing and showing critical thinking means having a disposition to being well-informed and using credible sources; to use credible sources to challenge one’s own worldview and to avoid only “using literature that agrees with their worldview to become ‘more skilled in ‘rationalizing’ and ‘intellectualizing’ the biases they already have’ (Paul, 1982, p. 3)”; to acknowledge a moral and ethical imperative; and to be self-aware of critical thinking and its application to their own practice. The deputy principal told the website author that “The impression is that we’re so silly that we’ll read something on AERO and we’ll be brainwashed because we don’t have critical faculties. And we need these education academics to filter everything for us … it is quite patronising”. Yet there is little in the commentary that engages with the research put forward (instead there’s a lot of beligerance and straw-manning) in any kind of critical-thinking manner; and isn’t this the same person who was earlier cross at academics for not “providing practical advice to teachers”?
In my view, and that’s as someone working on Evidence-Based Practice research in my own field, AERO’s inception alone is entirely problematic. There is another AARE blog by more independent academics again this week investigating its underpinnings. As we tried to explain in our second article, the “version” of Evidence-Based Practice (EBP) we’ve ended up with in Australian Education is so far from EBP in other scientific fields (we proposed a better way to follow the science), and so ideologically motivated, that none of us should really trust their work. Take a look at the EPPI centre in London for a much better (but not perfect) way of doing this, where methodologies for systematic literature reviews are actually published, and the outputs are peer-reviewed before being sent on to government (let alone teachers). This has still resulted in lots of GERM, but at least it’s work that is coming out of real independent research institutions rather than government departments like AERO, totally lacking in real research methodology.
Those who seemed to get most upset by our (and many other academics’) criticism of AERO seemed to have an awful lot of skin in the game. Principals who are busy implementing PL programs in Explicit Teaching. “Leading Educators” who are also book authors making coin from books on Explicit Teaching (as well as being shouty on Twitter). It seems to me that those adopting the accepted definitions of critical thinking would not be taking to social media to say how stupid and disconnected academics are, but instead having a think about what the patterns of thought here are really telling them. Which, in case you can’t read between those lines, is the same thing that’s been going on for years. This is a complex and academically contested field. Which is OK. In fact, it’s good – it makes defining research questions and planning research projects to find out more of the things we need to know much easier.
And to my Deputy Principal friend and the EducationHQ writer: you’re absolutely right that us academics could be better at explaining to teachers how to turn our research into practice. Some of us are good at that, and others aren’t. But it’s also OK for researchers to just be brilliant researchers and to discover stuff, and to have other people turn that into more easily digestible ideas for teachers to use (or not). And it seems to me that someone who can write books at a level teachers can easily read and use, about really complicated things like the Effects described in Cognitive Load Theory, or practical processes to implement Explicit Teaching, have got a real talent and should celebrate that, rather than denigrating others who do different work and might be brilliant in their own way. I, for one, have ordered your books, and will give careful and open-minded consideration about how practicable your thinking is to my field. Perhaps it will even end up in the book I’m writing – with teachers – on Educative Evidence-Based Practices in Music Education.
