A New Generation of Teaching

As a teacher, imagine you have to teach students an advanced topic like Abstract Vector Spaces so think about what kind of strategy will you choose for teaching ? one where you will read all the corresponding reference books and research papers and solve all types of problems and then make everything simple and fluent for students so that they can get the topic in quick time? or the other method where you will pinpoint the concept in the original complicated language and then motivate students to learn more about it and solve problems themselves even though the initial explanation sounds a little confusing to them? The second answer is correct and we will discuss it scientifically today.

A quick recap of how our mind works, system 1 is a quick, automatic, and error-prone part of our mind, and system 2 is a deliberate, slow accurate part of our mind. Let me elaborate on this with an example, Imagine you are new to driving and you are paying attention to steering, brake, clutch, mirrors, and millions of other things and you are conscious of all the surroundings, well this is nothing but your deliberate part of the mind (system 2) as you are trying to learn this new skill of driving. If you drive for several hundred kilometers then the automatic part of your mind (system 1) takes over the driving from system 2 and now you can easily drive without being completely conscious. So now you might ask what is expertise? Well, it’s easy to define now as it is nothing but transferring any difficult task from system 2 to system 1 with sufficient practice and exposure.

Now what is the role of an educator or teacher here? to transfer that task from system 2 to system 1 we need to provide proper directions and high-quality feedback and once these things are applied slowly system 1 gets the hang of the task. This critical job of providing proper directions and high-quality feedback is the ideal job of the teacher. Once this part is over the learner can just do self-practice and improve his skills and become an expert after hopefully thousands of hours. This sounds easier said than done but there are major hurdles here first being something called a ‘Fundamental error of cognition’ and second being ‘the illusion of understanding’ and the third being ‘strategy with which the instructions/directions are delivered’.

The ‘fundamental error of cognition’ in this context is that what we receive from our senses is raw information that the world is providing us and there is no inherent meaning in that information for example if you look at clouds you will see random cloud formation but if you have a certain expectation in your mind that a certain cloud looks somewhat like a rabbit then your expectation will change the meaning of that received information from the world and you will see a rabbit there. The fun part is once you see the rabbit in clouds you can't unsee it and now the rabbit is always there it’s like it had some sort of imprint on our mind and we can't get it out. Let's go back to a teaching strategy and I will connect the two dots, If a teacher tries to dilute all the information and problems regarding the topic he wants to teach then it is true that the material will be easy to digest but will the students learn anything? (this is ‘strategy with which the instructions/directions delivered’) Research from Dr.Derek Muller suggests that if you provide a very simple to digest and fluent video to students then they will feel happy but their test scores in that topic are unaltered. In simple terms they get an ‘illusion of understanding’ but if you provide a conceptual raw video then they won't be happy to digest the video but their scores will increase. Don’t forget the job of these teachers is to help students to transfer their system 2 workload to system 1 but if you provide easy-to-understand and fluent material to students then they will feel as if they are understanding it but in reality they are not its more like a hack in the whole process of teaching. It is clear now with all psychological toolkits and logical deduction that the students are to be provided real instructions/directions/videos and they should struggle to understand them (they should make some efforts ) and then only they will learn something out of it and obviously there will be high-quality feedback to guide them slowly in the right direction.