Several people have very kindly written about why they like my new book, What if everything you know about education is wrong? but refreshingly, Jane Manzone (@HeyMissSmith) has reached entirely different conclusions. To be fair, I suggested that Jane review the book for Schools Week because I thought she’d have a very different take from most of the other people who’d read and helped me shape my ideas.
I knew she’d take issue with much of it but honestly I didn’t really expect quite such withering scorn. After all, no one, not even Sir Ken, spends months of their life chiseling away at something in the belief that what they’re writing is crap. I know why can’t please everyone, but it hurts when someone dismisses your work as ‘absurd’, ‘guff’ and ‘lacking in substance’. Is this a fair criticism or just spite? Does it lack substance? Is it all blindingly obvious stuff that everyone already knows?
My instinct is to shrug off the criticism and to point to some of the other responses to the book. I want to dismiss Jane as exactly the sort of person I’d want to disagree with. I want to level the charge that the book she’s reviewed bears little resemblance to the one I wrote and snippily suggest that she superficially skimmed everything after the first three chapters. I want to cry out, “Why don’t you get it?” and expose all the inaccuracies, fallacies and contradictions, but what if I’m wrong? What if she isn’t ignorant, stupid or evil? Having written a book about confronting bias and questioning certainty, I at least have to pause for thought.
Is it just that, as Jane says, “it’s not my kind of book”? Or is she right that everyone already knew everything I’ve written about and it’s all been said before? That certainly doesn’t seem to be true judging by my interactions with the many teachers I regularly speak to about these ideas, but maybe there’s some sort of emperor’s new clothes thing going on? Maybe everyone else is just really polite? Most frustratingly, Jane doesn’t even seem to disagree. Her main complaint seems to be that everything I’ve written is either patronisingly self-evident, or lumpenly derivative.
Anyway, here are her words, unedited and presented without further comment. Make up your own mind.
Most weirdly, she gave it 2 stars!
Nick Rose (@turnfordblog) has posted a reply to Jane’s review:
I entirely disagree with this review of ‘What if everything you knew about education was wrong?’. The reviewer unfairly dismisses as ‘old news’ a well-written and detailed analysis of the really important debates raging at the heart of teaching and school leadership currently.
The ‘Wrong Book’ is a timely disruption to dominant and often simplistic approaches to evaluating and improving, teachers and schools. The example of Mr Garvery in chapter one, might describe countless teachers operating within an accountability regime which does not always appreciate the nuance of statistics or the limitations that apply to the validity of assessing teacher performance. The belief in the ‘infallibility’ of data (ignoring the complexities of analysis) pervades school culture at the moment, and I think the book introduces a non-specialist reader to some vital areas of doubt.
The other form of ‘infallibility’ which the book expertly undermines is over-reliance on reflection as the basis of professional judgement. The book introduces a non-specialist reader to a range of cognitive biases which identify the many ways in which experience alone can be misleading. Our profession has a tendency to hold up ‘best practice’ which may be nothing of the sort. It also suffers from decisions in schools being driven by sunk costs or group think. The way that teachers and schools are evaluated is also subject to these biases, not least the ‘halo and horns’ effect produced by attainment data. The reviewer dismisses all this because she already knows these things to be falsehoods, but it seems bizarre to ignore that these biases strongly influence the accountability culture operating in schools.
The author applies these cognitive biases to eight widespread but misguided ideas which circulate in education. The reviewer unfairly dismisses this part of the book as some ‘re-hash’ of ‘Seven Myths’. It’s not clear whether she considers these self-evident nonsense and the author is wasting time attacking things no one believes, or they are important truths which the author is ineffectually attacking. She also ignores the timely and important discussion about the use and limitations of evidence and research within education.
The ‘wrong book’ for me details a very personal journey from a position of false certainty about how we assess and observe teaching and learning through to a refreshing lack of certainty about how much we really know. The second (and by far the longer) half of the book explores a comprehensive range of educational topics in light of this doubt. These are indeed ‘salient’: linear progress, ‘outstanding’ teachers, schools killing creativity, use of lesson observations, formative assessment, motivation and children’s attributions, differentiation and praise. The reviewer seems to be under the impression that everyone working in education already knows everything in the book. I disagree! There are really important arguments here which most teachers and school leaders appear frighteningly unaware! I see the ‘Wrong Book’ as genuine opportunity to raise professional awareness of these highly topical debates and issues in education.
Jan concludes her review with, “My verdict? Don’t bother. Watch some Chomsky on YouTube instead.” So here he is:
I see where she’s coming from.
A lot of your conclusions are common sense and would not startle the average man in the street. However, the problem is that common sense has not been common practice in education for the last twenty years.
She conceives your representation of progressive ideas (‘guide at the side’, rapid progress etc) as ‘straw men arguments’ but for straw men they have been remarkably pervasive in teacher training, CPD and most, importantly, in the practice of Ofsted.
I think the thing is that a lot of experienced teachers have instinctively known that a lot of this stuff has been wrong for a hell of a long time, but have been forced to tow the line.
But how many stars did she give?
Do they allow 0?
“I want to read new ideas, or at least feel like I am reading a book by a person who has ideas. If I read a book about education I want it to take everything the author believes and distils it into something beautiful and useful; a book to remind me how exciting, how important, how vast my job is.”
I prefer reality and science, which remind me how small I am, not how important I wish I was. Different strokes . . . : )
I’ve read enough of your writing to recognise it as yours without being told (as I found out in an ITT training session). Nevertheless, when I splurged my final bursary payment on summer reading today, this wasn’t in my basket; not because I don’t expect it to be good, but because I don’t think it’s what I want right now.
As someone making the transition from PGCE to NQT, I’m not sure I *have* entrenched opinions (and to the extent that I do, it feels like I’ve read at least something you have to say on the subject on here!). Instead, right now, I’m still looking for ideas to play with and develop. (In particular, I’m thinking a lot about planning for learning over the long term now I’m a “proper teacher”, instead of thinking about a lesson as a thing I’m going to be observed teaching). I didn’t buy the much-vaunted “7 myths” book for much the same reason. Perhaps you’ll get my cash in a year or two…
It seems that this review was written by someone who 1)shares a lot of your opinions and 2) feels like you’re stating the obvious, at great length, as a result. Of course, this seems unfair as a criticism as the book- it just feels that she, as I, was looking for a different book.
That’s fine. There are lots of teaching tips books out there and I wish you well with them.
I’m intrigued by your hint that an ITT provider plagiarised my stuff. Have I got that right?
The text of a blogpost of yours was given to us as “an article from online” by a school mentor. Not passed off as their own by a uni- someone somewhere clearly just copied and pasted into Word for handing out copies without attribution.
Manzone seems to be labouring under the common misapprehension that those who do not consciously hold a belief are not being influenced by it. It is the unstated beliefs that are often the most powerful, a point which Hirsch and Christodoulou make very well. These deeply held assumptions are what we need to examine and unpick.
In any case, I’ve been inspired by this negative review to go and buy the book. I’ll let you know my thoughts once I’ve actually read it.
I fear you’ll be disappointed – that review bears very little resemblance to anything in the book. Jane has mainly reviewed 3 chapters of a 25 chapter book.
I am a trainee teacher who is constantly being told to challenge the established thinking – I’m only onto chapter 4 at the moment but it has definitely given me some food for thought. Nothing wrong with a conflicting opinion…
Nothing wrong with conflicting opinions, but not really a fan of polemic and points-scoring.
I feel your book has come precisely at the right time. Anyone who forces you to rethink what you’re doing and why you’re doing it should be championed in my book. It is teachers who are resistant to change in the transitory landscape of education who are a threat to the success of the young people entrusted to us. Shamefully I have used the ‘pyramid’ and to stand corrected on something I took as fact is incredibly humbling and refreshing. My colleague and I have been reading it at the same time and so much of what you write rings true with barriers we too have faced/are facing. Don’t stop doing what you’re doing because the teaching profession needs this kind of evaluative text with a strong psychological base.
What do I think? I think that it’s not what reviewing is all about. I reviewed hundreds of books in the TES and elsewhere (including, occasionally, the late lamented ‘New Society’ and the even more lamented ‘Listener’) for forty years. If I’d ever been sent a book I really hated, which I interestingly never was, probably because the books editors thought about who should review what, I’d have declined to review it. That’s because a totally negative review inevitably comes across as a self-indulgent point-scoring exercise. It’s what snooty academics do to each other’s work. As an author myself I’ve always had too much respect for the effort that’s involved in turning out tens of thousands of thought-out words. For the same reason I’ve always assumed that even if I disagreed with a book, I was duty bound both to give good reasons and also to find something positive to say about it. Which, when you think about it, is a bit like teaching.
That’s an exceedingly wise response Gerald – I’ll forward it to Schools Week 🙂
“The salient points in the book (and there are many) are regrettably obvious: graded lesson observations are rubbish, children need explicit teaching,”
Hmm if it was obvious why did nearly every school in the country grade observations? Why did virtually every course that I went on for the past 20 years or so claim that there was too much teacher talk in lessons? What children needed was “discovery learning”
Funny to see the teaching establishment and their useful idiots denying this was the case and claiming you were tilting at “straw men”.
David, I for one realise that you were one of the first to hold these practises up to the light of reason. You were crucial in changing OFSTED’s mind about grading observations, hence the gradual relaxing of this tyranny in schools across the country. Ignore critics like this and keep up the good work.
How ironic that, in reviewing a book that includes a strong focus on cognitive biases, the reviewer fell so comprehensively into the trap of projection bias, with her statement: “I get it. I am sure most teachers get it.”
An explanation of projection bias: “We tend to assume that most people think just like us — though there may be no justification for it.”
I guess David should have devoted more time, not less, to the explanation of cognitive biases…
🙂 This is what Pinker calls, ‘the curse of knowledge’ – I did cover it somewhere but I suspect Jane didn’t read that bit.
I won’t be surprised if this cognitive bias has already been covered in the book. However the response by Jane seems typical of many people who assume studies are pointless because they are ‘common sense’.
You only need to look towards comment sections of psychology based articles before you stumble upon a comment along the lines of “We pay money to these people so that they can tell us something so obvious?”. Yet people never seem to acknowledge the whole hindsight bias that occurs with these type of debates. They don’t seem to understand that these ideas may not be so obvious straight away, and that for many people, teachers included, they aren’t things that people think about unless you are into cognitive psychology.
I find this whole “saga” really quite disconcerting. You ask someone to review a book. She says she doesn’t like it. You say your unhappy with what she said and she has only reviewed a few chapter of it. She stars her ground. You say you expected better from her and this dialogue continues. Then the edu-bloggers get involved, and lets not ask me to review some of those with their male posturing and sense of importance. I have read you book because someone I know who is a psychologist challenged me about teacher bias and recommended it. I found some of it interesting, some of it challenging and some of it did feel like “common sense”. I am not one of Jane’s circle and nor am I an edu-blogger, Im a teacher and I think all of this has just gone a little too far. I;m also beginning to find the cognitive psychology brigade who are desperate to tell us we don’t know what we are doing incredibly tedious.
Also, when I did my Masters I read a lot of book reviews written by academics and absolutely none of them were “snooty”, so the person who said that is wrong
My answer to Jane:
“The salient points (and there are many) are regrettably obvious: graded lesson observations are rubbish, children need explicit teaching, they need to be taught difficult content, insincere praise doesn’t work.”
I do not think so. At least in Switzerland you will find much practice and theorizing about education that shows you, how many ill-defined or plainly wrong concepts are used in education. David Didaus book may not tell you something, you could not have known before – but at least it tells you, THAT there may be concepts you should think about. And making people think instead of just relying on their sense for the “obvious” is not such a bad thing.