Education News from Down Under

Education in Australia seems to be ahead of the U.S. in some ways and behind in others.

Photo by Caleb on Unsplash

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If you’ve noticed that I haven’t posted anything on this Substack lately, part of the explanation is that I’ve been in Australia for the past two weeks or so, with a packed schedule of speaking engagements, meetings, and school tours (and some sightseeing, when I can slip it in). I’ve been wanting to write about my impressions of Australian education and how it compares to the U.S., but (this is the other part of the explanation for why I haven’t written anything), I’ve had so many impressions that it’s hard to know where to begin.

It’s been a thrill to finally meet Australians whose names and work I know well and whose faces I recognize from Zoom tiles, etc. These include Greg Ashman, Nathaniel Swain, and—most thrillingly—John Sweller, the father of cognitive load theory. I could go on about my conversations with them and others, but this post would end up being even longer than usual. So I’ll stick to less personal matters.

As always when dealing with education, the situation in Australia is complicated. I’ve been hesitant to make pronouncements because I’m not sure I grasp all the nuances. But I’m going to take the plunge and hazard a few observations. (Australian readers, please feel free to post comments correcting or modifying anything I say that doesn’t sound right!)

There’s more awareness of cognitive science in Australia than in the U.S., especially of the need for “explicit teaching.”

So far I’ve given seven presentations, including one at a researchED conference in Sydney and others at several “Sharing Best Practices” conferences, which are similar. These gatherings tend to draw teachers who are already interested in and somewhat knowledgeable about cognitive science. (It’s been gratifying to see that so many educators have read and been influenced by The Writing Revolution.) Clearly, this is not a representative sample.

As in the U.S., large-scale change is slow. One of the people I’ve met here who is working to bring instruction in line with science, Elena Douglas—who heads an organization called the Knowledge Society—estimates that no more than 500 of the nation’s 9500 schools have implemented “the full suite of evidence-based practices.” A recent report documents the fact that many Australian teachers subscribe to beliefs that have been discredited by cognitive science, such as that students have different “learning styles.”

Still, even making allowances for the unrepresentative group I’ve met, it does seem that there’s more enthusiasm here for cognitive science generally than I’ve seen in the U.S. That’s certainly true among Australian government officials in some regions, particularly in the state of New South Wales. I met with more high-level government officials in one week in Sydney (which is in New South Wales) than I ever have in the U.S.

Most American education officials and policymakers these days are on board with the “science of reading,” but what they generally mean by that is “phonics.” A few states have recognized that cognitive science also says that to enable kids to understand text, you also need a curriculum that is rich in content beginning in the early grades. Few if any states have gone beyond that.¹

I’m told that in Australia too, discussions of cognitive science used to stop at “phonics.” But in the past few years, something has changed. Educators and policymakers have begun to recognize that cognitive science also tells us that certain instructional methods work best to enable kids to absorb and retain new content—namely, explicit, interactive teaching.

The names I keep hearing here as gurus of this approach are American: the late Siegfried Engelmann, founder of the approach known as Direct Instruction, and Anita Archer. From what I can tell, these Americans have had more influence in Australia than in their home country. Influenced by Archer, some teachers I’ve seen here are adept at keeping up a “perky pace,” ensuring that students are continuously engaged and absorbing information.

A teacher might say, for example, “Freezing means ‘really cold,’” and then immediately follow that with “What does freezing mean?” That elicits the quick choral response from students that freezing means “really cold.” Or students might get a recently learned vocabulary word with multiple-choice definitions and have a few seconds to write the correct answer on a whiteboard. Teachers and students repeat these interactive activities frequently throughout the lesson.

This approach goes against longstanding orthodoxy in both the U.S. and Australia holding that the teacher should serve as a facilitator and that students should be in charge of their own learning as much as possible, ideally acquiring knowledge through inquiry and discovery. While I’m told that philosophy still holds sway at Australian teacher training programs, Australian teachers seem increasingly to be abandoning it. In the U.S., however, many teachers, as well as many teacher-educators, would probably be horrified by the kind of explicit instruction I’ve seen in Australia, or at least reluctant to adopt it.

Even I have some doubts. At a certain point, students also need time for reflection and what cognitive scientists call “elaboration”—asking and answering open-ended questions like why and how, perhaps through writing. Yes, explicit instruction is effective when learners are new to a topic, but once they understand the basics, they should get an opportunity to go beyond absorbing and retrieving information and start adding their own thoughts and observations. Perhaps students in the schools I visited do get that opportunity at some point, but I didn’t see it.

Still, the schools I visited serve students who have serious learning challenges or who are just far behind where they should be. It’s clear that this tightly controlled method of teaching works well for them. At one school serving students diagnosed with conditions like ADHD, even glass-walled classrooms and a group of curious visitors didn’t distract them from their high-paced lessons. Kids who previously felt like failures are getting a chance to experience success, and that’s crucial.

Australia doesn’t yet have the equivalent of the knowledge-building curricula that exist in the U.S.

Australia has a national “curriculum,” and some states have their own “curricula,” since they’re not required to closely follow the Australian one. But the word curriculum doesn’t mean the same thing in Australia that it does in the U.S.

In the U.S., we mean detailed instructional materials that generally include the texts teachers will use and, often, scripts that guide their instruction, along with assessments to measure what students have learned. In Australia, curriculum is vaguer than that, outlining skills to be acquired or general topics to be covered—in other words, what we would call academic standards.

As in the U.S., Australian teachers have often learned during their training that good teachers don’t follow a detailed curriculum. The theory is that all students are different, and only the teacher knows her individual students well enough to tailor instruction to their interests and needs. Many teachers in both the U.S. and Australia have simply been given a vague framework—standards in the U.S., curriculum in Australia—and told to “teach” them or it. That imposes a heavy burden on teachers, and it can lead to incoherent instruction for students, with each teacher doing their own thing.

But it’s more common for school districts in the U.S. to adopt a curriculum, in the American sense, than for Australian schools to adopt detailed resources. The curriculum in American school districts may not be very good, and some teachers might just ignore it or pick and choose what they want to use, but at least it’s there. In Australia, according to one survey, 85 percent of teachers don’t have access to “a shared bank of high-quality curriculum materials,” and teachers in schools serving disadvantaged students are only half as likely to have such access.

Over the past few years, states and districts in the U.S. have become more directive about curriculum (in the American sense), often requiring districts to choose from a list of “high-quality” options, particularly in reading. While some of those options aren’t actually high-quality, others do a good job of both teaching phonics and building the knowledge that enables comprehension. More and more U.S. schools appear to be using those curricula.²

In Australia, the movement towards truly high-quality curriculum—in the detailed American sense—is just getting underway. An organization called Ochre is putting lesson plans online, for free, for anyone to use (including teachers in the U.S.). While it’s still a work in progress, Ochre now offers “novel studies” of widely taught children’s books like Matilda that include overall objectives, questions for class discussion, suggested supplementary nonfiction texts, and writing activities influenced by The Writing Revolution.

Caroline Reed of Ochre, who I encountered at more than one education conference here, told me that the resources are now being used in 92 percent of Australian schools—which is remarkable, considering the effort is only three years old. But since these are one-off, freely available lessons, that could mean that only one teacher at the school is using them—or maybe teachers are using only one lesson rather than a whole suite of them.

That’s unlikely to provide the coherent educational experience that would be optimal for students. But Reed told me that the number of schools signing up for Ochre institution-wide is increasing, and that she expects it to grow organically. I hope she’s right.

To make real progress, teachers need both an understanding of cognitive science and detailed instructional materials grounded in that science.

It’s great that knowledge of cognitive science is spreading among educators in Australia and, to a lesser extent at this point, in the U.S. But it’s asking a lot of teachers to translate that new knowledge into effective classroom practice. New ideas have a way of getting taken to extremes. We should teach phonics? Okay, we’ll do two hours of it! We should have kids engage in retrieval practice? Okay, we’ll quiz them every morning on minutiae they probably don’t remember from the day before.

More of a good thing isn’t necessarily better, and in fact can be worse. I don’t know of any phonics experts who would recommend two hours a day of it—and the additional time spent on phonics is time taken away from other things kids need to become proficient readers. Retrieval practice only works if kids can successfully retrieve information.

Teachers are doing the best they can with sometimes limited information—and always with limited time. What they need is guidance from a curriculum put together by someone with the expertise and resources to translate cognitive science into effective routines and practices, with time allocated appropriately.

Of course the curriculum won’t always work for every student, and teachers will need to adjust it as they go along. That’s why they need some knowledge of cognitive science. But if they’re expected to create science-informed lessons from scratch, they may, despite their best efforts, come up with something that doesn’t actually work well. And the risk is that at that point, people may decide that cognitive science itself “doesn’t work.”

Still, I’m cautiously optimistic that things are going in the right direction, both in Australia and the U.S. Increasing numbers of teachers are gaining not only knowledge of cognitive science but access to detailed and effective resources. And even if what transpires in the classroom as a result doesn’t always exactly align with science, it’s often so much better than what was being done before that students benefit nonetheless.

1. One recent exception may be Maryland, which has adopted legislation requiring that all teachers be trained in the “science of learning.” Holly Korbey has written about that here. It remains to be seen what that will look like and to what extent it will include explicit teaching of the kind I’ve seen in Australia.

2. While all of the curricula identified as knowledge-building by the Knowledge Matters Campaign are rich in content, they don’t all include teaching methods aligned with cognitive science. EL Education, for example, leans more on inquiry and discovery that cognitive science indicates is optimal.