Most Complex Job

Hey

Welcome to September, and to another year of evidence snacks. I’m planning to broaden my focus over the coming months, to tackle some of the wider issues facing schools and what we might do about them. If that’s not your bag, you can easily unsubscribe at the bottom of the email, no offence taken (you already have enough emails). Otherwise, strap in…

Big idea 🍉

Teaching is one of the most fiendishly complex jobs ever invented. But most people don't see it like that, including many of us in education (more on that shortly).

That’s a pretty big claim, so… let's compare teaching to something that everyone recognises as complex: brain surgery. Brain surgeons have to restructure people's brains. They only operate on one person at a time, they can see what they are working on, and they have sophisticated tools and a skilled team on hand.

Teachers, by contrast, have the same end goal: restructuring minds. However, we have to do it on ten, twenty, even thirty people at once (some who don't even want to be there), with our eyes basically closed (because learning is invisible), using only words and images as our tools.

No shade on the medical profession, but teaching is orders of magnitude harder than brain surgery. OG agrees:

Why don't we see teaching this way? Well, it's partly because we've all spent thousands of hours, as students, watching teachers in action, AND... the better the teacher is, the easier they make it look. This 'paradox of expertise' means that, as a society, we end up with a misconceived perspective of the true complexity of the role.

I say all this not to boast on behalf of the profession, but rather because complexity can easily become a serious enemy of impact, especially if we underestimate its extent.

The best teachers and schools understand this. They go to grain paints to recognise and radically reduce the risks of complexity. In upcoming snacks, we'll explore ways to achieve this. But until then, strut a bit taller in the knowledge that you’re doing one of the most complex collective tasks ever invented.

🎓 For more, check out this paper on expert teaching.

Summary

• Teaching is an incredibly complex job, but its complexity is often underestimated, especially by those in the profession.

• One reason is the ‘paradox of expertise’: the better a teacher is, the easier they make it look.

• Underestimating this complexity can stop us from recognising and reducing the risks it creates.

Little updates 🥕

• Discussion paper on PD challenges → explores ‘false economies’ in PD & advocates for mechanism-rich processes that are responsive to context.

• Paper on metacomprehension → suggests summaries alone may not improve self-evaluation, however comparisons with expert models can.

• Study of executive function & social behaviour → links stronger executive function with prosocial behaviour but finds little evidence of two-way effects.

• Research on early literacy programmes → suggests that light-touch, adaptive tutoring can produce modest & sustained improvements in reading.

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