Teaching Inquiry

One of my favorite books of the past 10 years is David Epstein’s Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. Among many fascinating topics addressed in the book, I want to focus on the distinctions Epstein makes between kind and wicked learning environments and, more specifically, how people learn (or fail to learn) from experience in these different settings.

Drawing from work by the late psychologist Robin Hogarth, Epstein explains that in kind learning environments, people can access direct and immediate feedback on how they are doing at a given task. Working on one’s tennis serve is a good example of kind learning, because one can see how frequently attempted serves are landing in play and, based on these observations, tweak one’s technique. Similarly, if someone utilizes the Quadratic Formula to solve an algebraic equation, they can plug their answer into the equation and, if the answer is incorrect, review their work to see where things went wrong. In kind environments, learning from experience is a straightforward process of trying, gathering feedback, reviewing, and trying again.

Wicked learning environments, by contrast, are characterized by far more tenuous and uncertain links between performance and outcome. Feedback might be infrequent or misleading. As Epstein discusses in Range, people in wicked learning environments often do not improve with experience, because they don’t obtain clear and consistent signals about how well they are doing over time. But in assuming that their experience translates to effectiveness, they can be “fooled” by their ostensible expertise.

U.S. presidential election polling is a good example of a wicked learning environment. Because these elections happen every four years, pollsters obtain limited feedback on their models, and feedback from one election cycle may not be entirely relevant for future cycles; demographics, world events, and cultural trends can shift significantly in four years. Despite these wicked features, pollsters can demonstrate hubristic and, as we have seen in recent cycles, misguided certainty about the accuracy of their models.

Epstein recently returned to the subject of wicked learning environments, citing evidence that many experienced mental health therapists do not produce better outcomes than newer therapists; in some cases, they may produce slightly worse outcomes as they gain more experience. While this research is not definitive, it suggests that therapy is an inherently wicked learning environment, especially since many therapists don’t track client outcomes over time or belong to institutions prioritizing this longitudinal feedback.

This example got me thinking about teaching, which is an analogously wicked learning environment. It is, after all, extremely difficult to measure what and how much students are learning; we rely on proxies of learning in the form of quizzes, tests, papers, discussion posts, etc., but these proxies are very much not the same as learning itself. Unfortunately, it is all too tempting—for individual teachers and for whole institutions—to assume a one-to-one correspondence between the proxies we require students to perform and what students are actually learning.

This phenomenon illustrates another common feature of wicked learning environments: The tendency of experts to rely on tools they are most familiar with to address complex and dynamic problems even when other, potentially more useful, tools are available. The old metaphor of the person who, possessing only a hammer, views every problem as a nail, encapsulates this unwillingness to explore other options.

Consider how the latest gains or losses in standardized tests like the NAEP (popularly known as the “nation’s report card”) are taken as prima facie evidence of overall learning gains or losses among American students. Any time scores drop, jeremiads ensue about how the kids, teachers, and schools are not all right; these moral panics about learning loss have periodically fueled multibillion dollar initiatives like George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind and Barack Obama’s Race to the Top, none of which produced lasting gains in those same test scores.

Given the inherent challenges posed by wicked learning environments, how might those of us in formal education be better equipped to learn from experience? Once again borrowing from Robin Hogarth, Epstein advocates making wicked learning environments “kinder.”

For Epstein, this means adopting a scientific mindset based in cycles of “experimentation, feedback, and reflection.” In other words, test ideas, gather and analyze results, and in doing so, refine one’s approach over time. This process can be enhanced through collaboration, as in surgical teams who “set aside regular time for group reflection after surgery” and who “improved more rapidly than teams that simply repeated a procedure.”

On one level, I find this approach very appealing. As discussed in Teaching Inquiry’s Opening Statement. I believe that teaching can and should be understood, practiced, and valued as fundamentally intellectual work. I support opportunities for faculty to pursue collaborative cycles of experimentation, analysis, and reflection about their teaching practices.

Toward that end, I encourage faculty to view their classrooms as pedagogical laboratories in which part of their job is to try different approaches and to gather data on their effectiveness. If an idea doesn’t go as planned, that is not so much a failure as an outcome from which one can learn, reflect, and adjust. And like the surgeons referenced above, I believe this process is best pursued in community, with teachers brainstorming ideas, sharing and reflecting on their experiences in real time, and visiting each other’s classes. Participating in interdisciplinary communities of practice can be generative and rejuvenating, and it can help us avoid complacency by exposing us to diverse teaching styles and methods.

On another level, however, I am skeptical this approach would make the inherently wicked components of teaching kinder, or if that should even be the goal. Because teaching will never be like the kind learning environments mentioned above, and that is in many ways a good thing. The process of learning higher-order cognitive skills is complex, messy, and at times chaotic, and allowing for this complexity and chaos can also spark creativity and innovation.

The danger of making wicked learning environments kinder is that we risk creating new norms, standards, and metrics to accompany those standards. Online education is especially vulnerable to this problem, as in cases where the people running the system seem committed to algorithmizing teaching and learning, and thus abolishing the wickedness of the learning environment. It should go without saying that education will never be one or two algorithms away from being “solved.”

So, even as I propose mainstreaming faculty communities of practice around the intellectual work of teaching—with appropriate institutional resources in the form of course releases and stipends, I recognize the tensions this proposal creates. Perhaps the goal, then, should be to strive for a balance of wicked and kind, of human chaos and institutional order.

One way to support this goal, I suggest, is to keep the communities of practice highly diverse—disciplinarily, culturally, perhaps even institutionally. Having people collaborate across the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences, as well as professional fields like law and business, and even across community colleges, liberal arts colleges, and research universities, can help ensure that people regularly engage different teaching approaches and, hopefully, stay committed both to updating the tools they are most familiar with and exploring new tools.

At the very least, I believe all teachers should be aware of, and guard against, the very human tendency to become complacent with the teaching methods we know best and to assume these are the only, let alone best, ways to teach whatever content or skills we seek to teach. I also believe that the more we work with teachers who use different approaches, the more equipped to navigate this tendency we will be.