Good Teaching Now Supported by Good Science: Revisiting John Holt

After 25 years of hearing about and reading the evolving research, more and more educators have become attracted to neuroscience. At conferences and workshops, teachers and administrators pay rapt attention to lecture after lecture listening for the answer to one overwhelming question: How can we improve student learning?

Given the constant frustrations of the job—the failure to reach students who seem to stand on the far side of an ever-widening chasm between books and TikTok, the persistent pressure to improve test scores, the arrows of debilitating criticism aimed at teachers, the fear and self-doubt that haunt teachers—it’s an understandable question. And god knows, new research is helping us understand how learning actually happens, suggesting implications that challenge many of the traditional assumptions and practices embedded in our schools.

But last night, I was reminded of the many teachers whose experiences in their own classrooms have led them to these same insights that are now supported by fMRI and neuroscientists. I was going through my bookshelves and found an old Dell paperback (95 cents), John Holt’s 1964 book How Children Fail. Holt was a teacher, and he drew his inferences and conclusions from the behavior of the students with whom he worked. As I sat and reread pieces of his book, I was struck by the similarities between his insights and the implications of today’s research, especially these:

• Research confirms the importance of attention and developing students’ metacognitive skills. Holt: “Most of us have very imperfect control over our attention. … Part of being a good student is learning to be aware of that state of one’s own mind and the degree of one’s own understanding.”
• Research explores the effect of structural and environmental factors that support student performance and skill-building. Holt: “Would [my students] have discovered [the answer] if I had not paved the way with leading questions?  Hard to tell.”
• Research explains how grades (“scores”) came to replace learning. Holt: “We wanted [students] to figure out how to balance the beam, and introduced scoring as a matter of motivation. But they outsmarted us, and figured out ways to get a good score that had nothing to do with whether the beam balanced or not.”
• Research reveals the vital role that regression (still confused with failure) plays in building increasingly complex skills and conceptual understanding. Holt: “… perhaps we should see that failure is honorable and constructive rather than humiliating.”  “A baby does not react to failure as an adult does, or even a five-year-old, because she has not yet been made to feel that failure is shame.”
• Research studies the effect of fear on thinking and learning. Holt: “What I now see for the first time is the mechanism by which fear destroys intelligence, the way it affects a child’s whole way of looking at, thinking about, and dealing with life. So we have two problems, not one: to stop children from being afraid and then to break them of the bad thinking habits into which their fears have driven them. … What is most surprising of all is how much fear there is in school.”
• Research reveals the need to link new learning to the variable real-world understandings brought to the classroom by different learners. Holt: “Between what he was studying for chemistry and the real world, the world of his senses and common sense, there was no connection.”
• Research explores issues of homework and rigor. Holt: “I have noticed many times that when the workload of the class is light, kids are willing to do some thinking, to take the time to figure things out; when the workload is heavy the ‘I-don’t-get-it’ begins to sound, the thinking stops, they expect us to show them everything. Thus one ironical consequence of the drive for the so-called higher standards in schools is that the children are too busy to think.”
• Research reveals the danger of coverage and testing as opposed to constructing conceptual understanding. Holt: “We do not consider that a child may be unable to learn because he does not grasp the fundamental nature of the symbols he is working with. … [These children] would not be in the spot they were in if, all along the line, their teachers had been concerned to build slowly and solidly, instead of trying to make it look as if the children knew all the material that was supposed to be covered.”
• Research establishes the connection between emotion and learning, the importance of studying genuine questions and subjects that matter to the learner. Holt: “[What I was teaching] did not meet any felt intellectual need. … The only answer that really sticks in a child’s mind is the answer to a question that he asked or might ask of himself.”
• Research stresses the need to understand what skills and understanding the learner brings to the classroom. Holt: “The reason this poor child has learned hardly anything in six years of school is that no one ever began where she was.”
• And research reveals the great hoax of schools. Holt: “Even [young children] learn that what most teachers want and reward are not knowledge and understanding but the appearance of them.”

Why do I cite these observations from the past? To remind us that good teachers know or have felt many of the things that neuroscientists are confirming. Let me be clear here: I know perfectly well that a majority of educators remain wedded to the flawed assumptions about learning that form the rock on which schools rest. I am not talking about them. I am talking about educators who are eager to unite science and practice—the junction where classroom experience and scientific insights resonate with each other. However, when teachers and researchers come together, too often, I think, teachers sit mutely absorbing the lectures of the neuroscientists as though the teachers have nothing to contribute, and many of the neuroscientists project this attitude, as well.  Lecture needs to give way to discussion because there is a great deal teachers and scientists can learn from each other as we rethink schools.

Perhaps together, we will finally be strong and courageous enough to act on the insights that teachers like John Holt wrote so passionately about 50 years ago—not to mention Maria Montessori and John Dewey 50 years before that. Perhaps we won’t have to wait another half century to answer the question about how to improve student learning. Perhaps we will finally fundamentally change our designs for schooling.