Great piece. A bit tangential, but on the subject of making learning fun—I saw Hamilton on stage last year. On the way out, I overheard a particularly grumpy audience member chastising secondary school history teachers for not making their lessons as fun and engaging as the hip hop musical. I didn’t have the heart to point out that if teachers could write a global smash hit stage show, they probably wouldn’t be stuck marking essays—and I don’t think anyone could pass a test on the American Revolution based on watching the musical.
Totally agree. It's exactly like expecting a tortoise to evolve into a cheetah. A) you can't expect individual teachers to compete with West End productions B) even if teachers were capable of this (which most realistically would involve playing videos while supervising the class), what they'd be doing wouldn't be education any more.
Having said this, is there any reason why we can’t punctuate our lessons with well-timed scenes to ‘entertain’ as we educate? That’s what I suggested to a colleague.
Very thought provoking as always. But I think the analogy is a bit different. Classrooms absolutely can be like Duolingo. The engagement in Duolingo is not that it is entertaining (I am one of the daily users who hates it). The engagement is that you are constantly successful because of the way information is chunked and practice is organised and sequenced. Lessons can absolutely be organised this way.
Likewise the incentives of points gained, league tables and slightly annoying celebrations of streaks within lessons and across days and weeks creates proof of success and progress, which motivates despite the lack of 'fun'.
I'll go a step further - students would learn languages in school much better if 50% of lesson time was devoted to Duolingo. 25 hours took me to grade 5 on a reading paper, which is the equivalent of January in a year 7 curriculum.
My fear for this approach, Dominic, is in normalizing the sense that the only things worth doing are those that are highly engaging in a neurochemical sense. A better word than “engaging” is “stimulating”, which is really what tech companies, including Duolingo, mean when they talk about engagement. This is the architecture of addiction, and it’s why they’ve been so successful at getting consumers to use their products. It’s also why kids have become less engaged in school.
But more importantly, to turn classrooms into algorithmically-driven stimulation factories would be an abdication of our fiduciary responsibilities. We should not seek to compete with apps for engagement, nor should we seek to employ their methods. To do so would be to endorse and facilitate something fundamentally unhealthy.
Instead, we need to first recognize why these methods of “engagement” are unhealthy and developmentally inappropriate for youth, then work tirelessly to remove them from educational environments, and finally advocate for protections against their ill-effects outside of school as well.
Is it possible to create tools and technological aids that actually support learning without hijacking the limbic systems of our kids? Yes. Is gamifying education by plopping kids in front of a dopamine-generator the best way of getting them to learn? No.
If you do so, good luck asking for anything to occur without extrinsic reward. That’s not the world I’d like to live in.
You’re right, we might arrive at different answers.
Before introducing Duolingo, or other such platforms, to traditional learning environments, I think it’s crucial that we ask why we might do so. Is that imperative a consequence of our educational agency, or is it motivated by a response to a crisis of attention?
By doing so, are we making the best possible choice for kids and their long term wellbeing, or are we deferring better options because the marketplace has pushed us in a particular direction?
Are we, as professionals, dictating the terms of education, or are we responding the dictates of the private sector?
Is extrinsic motivation good at the expense of personal autonomy?
Is the process of learning less important than the outcomes of learning? Does that process facilitate the development of agency or dependency?
Do we want free thinkers or algorithmic conformity?
Thanks for this, Daisy. Your arguments are crucial for educators to understand today.
As a teacher, I agree that we need to take the architecture of our learning environments much more seriously, which is why I advocate for “Walled Garden” schools. These are places where the physical spaces of learning, the digital infrastructure they use, and the pedagogical methods they employ serve the cognitive development of their students, unlike the “embrace-all-tech” classrooms we’re familiar with today.
In a world where attention is commodified and cognition is automated, it’s crucial that schools become a bulwark against those processes. Our schools have the opportunity to become embodied alternatives to our kids’ screen-saturated norm. They needn’t mirror the marketplace in the way they have for the better part of the past two decades. We can and should do better.
If interested, I write on these topics in detail. Feel free to explore my four-part series on the matter below:
Thank you for putting in words an issue that we see everyday in classrooms, not only in senior levels, but in junior levels too. Often we, teachers, are competing for student’s attention and trying to engage them in learning.
Agreed on 99% — thanks for making the optimization challenge so clear. However, I believe than democracies can legislate behavior. We do all the time. Drug use? Speed limits? We know we can't teach kids with their eyeballs on their screens; we don't have a chance. Legislators can and are giving teachers a tiny sliver of time without phones in classrooms. This is a chance to sneak in a human connection and hope it's deep enough to touch something that sparks curiosity or joy or even antipathy. Let's celebrate the possibility of using our representative systems of governance to help slow the end of education by human beings.
Thanks for this. I can only just remember the flowerpot men. I do remember loving Paddington Bear narrated by Michael Hordern and being weirdly frightend by Fingerbobs.
However, nostalgia aside, I think Duolingo is ok, but I've gone back to using a text book. I need to see the grammar explained and to have a list of vocabulary in front of me. I use Duolingo to practice my listening and speaking.
I too noticed that comment by Andrew Rotherham about cellphone bans and making classes more exciting. It's a silly response, and not the sort of thing that someone with a lot of real-world classroom experience would say. Without getting too *ad hominem*, I find him to be a puzzling figure -- apparently he is highly respected in the US educational community, but he doesn't seem to be doing very much actual teaching. I think he's more oriented towards public policy rather than pedagogy, which would explain his simplistic thinking about cellphone bans.
The first problem with trying to make maths education "fun" is that maths itself is not particularly "fun". It can be challenging, dynamic, fascinating, beautiful, practical, . . . but it's not "fun". If maths were fun, then there would be lots of maths rides at Disneyworld and maths shows on TV and famous celebrities would be doing maths. None of these things are in fact observed in the real world, however, and the explanation is simple: whatever maths is or can be, it's not "fun".
The second problem with trying to make math education "fun" is that maths educators themselves are not particularly talented at devising "fun" things. Often they are delusional about how "fun" their ideas are, and vastly overestimate how much students are actually enjoying the experience.
Think about a professional football coach. In order to maximize learning, naturally all coaches want their practice session to be engaging. But a good coach doesn't worry about making practice "fun" and "entertaining" for the players -- the expectation is that the players are capable of working hard without those inducements.
“Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice. The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death.” - Neil Postman 1985
Looking back to my own time at secondary school the teachers who engaged me the most and the lessons that I enjoyed the most included activities that I'd say were fun. When I studied O level English Language in the dark days of the 20th century we had to learn clause analysis. Our English teacher gave us jokes as practice pieces. My history teacher always included drama to bring to life whatever we were studying. I loved history and thought it might be something I'd continue with until A level when the three teachers who taught different aspects simply sat at the front and read us notes which we had to copy down and turn into an essay. I hope that's not the style now!
Thank you for pointing out that educators can't always compete with the engagement of cell phones. As a teacher, I make my lessons as engaging and personalized as I can. However, I know that I am battling the dopamine "hits" that students are getting every time they log onto their cell phones. It's not something I can compete with. Having that technology limited in schools, gives me the opportunity to show students other ways to engage socially.
If we were to look at traffic to porn sites, people aren’t rejecting sex they are probably consuming it in a different way…
And I think there is something there about how we access and consume educational elements online. Perhaps less deep in a way. If we are to think about how we use the internet for educational purpose there are elements where we lean in deeper to a subject but also without necessarily gaining explicit knowledge? So I’m thinking with how I use podcast it might give me an initial interest but it really doesn’t give me the deeper knowledge or understanding that I have to seek out
That bit about adults having less sex…wow! Exactly!! I’ve worked so hard to raise passionate little readers. Feels like most of the other kindergartners in our area are Minecraft addicts. Tablets in the car. T-shirts. YouTube videos.
And we need to work on developing the cognitive skills and motivation for deep learning and hard thinking. I don’t think we fully know how to do that, but we have to move in that direction.
I agree with the basic point of the post, but: Duolingo? Really? That's your example? I'm something of a language nerd myself, you see. (I speak four languages that are non-native to me at C1 level or better. Yes, I have the certificates, i.e. it's not just self-evaluation). I've come to see Duolingo as a marker of a person who'll never learn his/her target language. Why? Because I've seen the users. Those who "tried to learn" whatever language they were learning. Some of them were at it for years. Some of them are at it still. I would ask them how exactly they were going about their language learning, and the one thing that kept coming up was Duolingo. Successful learners never mention it. Whether it's because they've literally never used it, or because they only used it briefly to get their feet wet before moving on to more serious materials - I do not know. But either way, you are NOT going to learn a language from Duolingo. It's a bad example.
I mean, there ARE apps that serious language users use. Anki comes to mind. I've only used it minimally, but I am beside the point! (We are all entitled to personal preferences.) There definitely are serious and successful language learners who heavily rely on Anki. Of course, Anki is a tool among tools, and it certainly won't get you to fluency by itself, either.
Great piece. A bit tangential, but on the subject of making learning fun—I saw Hamilton on stage last year. On the way out, I overheard a particularly grumpy audience member chastising secondary school history teachers for not making their lessons as fun and engaging as the hip hop musical. I didn’t have the heart to point out that if teachers could write a global smash hit stage show, they probably wouldn’t be stuck marking essays—and I don’t think anyone could pass a test on the American Revolution based on watching the musical.
Totally agree. It's exactly like expecting a tortoise to evolve into a cheetah. A) you can't expect individual teachers to compete with West End productions B) even if teachers were capable of this (which most realistically would involve playing videos while supervising the class), what they'd be doing wouldn't be education any more.
Having said this, is there any reason why we can’t punctuate our lessons with well-timed scenes to ‘entertain’ as we educate? That’s what I suggested to a colleague.
Very thought provoking as always. But I think the analogy is a bit different. Classrooms absolutely can be like Duolingo. The engagement in Duolingo is not that it is entertaining (I am one of the daily users who hates it). The engagement is that you are constantly successful because of the way information is chunked and practice is organised and sequenced. Lessons can absolutely be organised this way.
Likewise the incentives of points gained, league tables and slightly annoying celebrations of streaks within lessons and across days and weeks creates proof of success and progress, which motivates despite the lack of 'fun'.
I'll go a step further - students would learn languages in school much better if 50% of lesson time was devoted to Duolingo. 25 hours took me to grade 5 on a reading paper, which is the equivalent of January in a year 7 curriculum.
My fear for this approach, Dominic, is in normalizing the sense that the only things worth doing are those that are highly engaging in a neurochemical sense. A better word than “engaging” is “stimulating”, which is really what tech companies, including Duolingo, mean when they talk about engagement. This is the architecture of addiction, and it’s why they’ve been so successful at getting consumers to use their products. It’s also why kids have become less engaged in school.
But more importantly, to turn classrooms into algorithmically-driven stimulation factories would be an abdication of our fiduciary responsibilities. We should not seek to compete with apps for engagement, nor should we seek to employ their methods. To do so would be to endorse and facilitate something fundamentally unhealthy.
Instead, we need to first recognize why these methods of “engagement” are unhealthy and developmentally inappropriate for youth, then work tirelessly to remove them from educational environments, and finally advocate for protections against their ill-effects outside of school as well.
Is it possible to create tools and technological aids that actually support learning without hijacking the limbic systems of our kids? Yes. Is gamifying education by plopping kids in front of a dopamine-generator the best way of getting them to learn? No.
If you do so, good luck asking for anything to occur without extrinsic reward. That’s not the world I’d like to live in.
You raise a lot of questions Andrew.
Is extrinsic reward damaging?
If students achieve success, and this raises dopamine, is that dopamine and that success damaging?
If lessons lead to better long term knowledge with similar structures to Duolingo, would that be worse than achieving less success with other methods?
Do we have a financial responsibility to help students learn more?
Is Duolingo addictive? If so, is that addiction harmful?
I suspect we might give some different answers.
You’re right, we might arrive at different answers.
Before introducing Duolingo, or other such platforms, to traditional learning environments, I think it’s crucial that we ask why we might do so. Is that imperative a consequence of our educational agency, or is it motivated by a response to a crisis of attention?
By doing so, are we making the best possible choice for kids and their long term wellbeing, or are we deferring better options because the marketplace has pushed us in a particular direction?
Are we, as professionals, dictating the terms of education, or are we responding the dictates of the private sector?
Is extrinsic motivation good at the expense of personal autonomy?
Is the process of learning less important than the outcomes of learning? Does that process facilitate the development of agency or dependency?
Do we want free thinkers or algorithmic conformity?
I understood. My point is not really about attention, it is about the flabbiness of the languages curriculum and indeed other subjects.
"Insightful piece about education" with "random footnote about sport" is the Daisy Christodoulou brand.
I can also do insightful pieces about sport with random footnotes about education…
Thanks for this, Daisy. Your arguments are crucial for educators to understand today.
As a teacher, I agree that we need to take the architecture of our learning environments much more seriously, which is why I advocate for “Walled Garden” schools. These are places where the physical spaces of learning, the digital infrastructure they use, and the pedagogical methods they employ serve the cognitive development of their students, unlike the “embrace-all-tech” classrooms we’re familiar with today.
In a world where attention is commodified and cognition is automated, it’s crucial that schools become a bulwark against those processes. Our schools have the opportunity to become embodied alternatives to our kids’ screen-saturated norm. They needn’t mirror the marketplace in the way they have for the better part of the past two decades. We can and should do better.
If interested, I write on these topics in detail. Feel free to explore my four-part series on the matter below:
https://open.substack.com/pub/walledgardenedu/p/the-disappearing-art-of-deep-learning?r=f74da&utm_medium=ios
Thank you for putting in words an issue that we see everyday in classrooms, not only in senior levels, but in junior levels too. Often we, teachers, are competing for student’s attention and trying to engage them in learning.
Agreed on 99% — thanks for making the optimization challenge so clear. However, I believe than democracies can legislate behavior. We do all the time. Drug use? Speed limits? We know we can't teach kids with their eyeballs on their screens; we don't have a chance. Legislators can and are giving teachers a tiny sliver of time without phones in classrooms. This is a chance to sneak in a human connection and hope it's deep enough to touch something that sparks curiosity or joy or even antipathy. Let's celebrate the possibility of using our representative systems of governance to help slow the end of education by human beings.
Thanks for this. I can only just remember the flowerpot men. I do remember loving Paddington Bear narrated by Michael Hordern and being weirdly frightend by Fingerbobs.
However, nostalgia aside, I think Duolingo is ok, but I've gone back to using a text book. I need to see the grammar explained and to have a list of vocabulary in front of me. I use Duolingo to practice my listening and speaking.
I too noticed that comment by Andrew Rotherham about cellphone bans and making classes more exciting. It's a silly response, and not the sort of thing that someone with a lot of real-world classroom experience would say. Without getting too *ad hominem*, I find him to be a puzzling figure -- apparently he is highly respected in the US educational community, but he doesn't seem to be doing very much actual teaching. I think he's more oriented towards public policy rather than pedagogy, which would explain his simplistic thinking about cellphone bans.
The first problem with trying to make maths education "fun" is that maths itself is not particularly "fun". It can be challenging, dynamic, fascinating, beautiful, practical, . . . but it's not "fun". If maths were fun, then there would be lots of maths rides at Disneyworld and maths shows on TV and famous celebrities would be doing maths. None of these things are in fact observed in the real world, however, and the explanation is simple: whatever maths is or can be, it's not "fun".
The second problem with trying to make math education "fun" is that maths educators themselves are not particularly talented at devising "fun" things. Often they are delusional about how "fun" their ideas are, and vastly overestimate how much students are actually enjoying the experience.
Think about a professional football coach. In order to maximize learning, naturally all coaches want their practice session to be engaging. But a good coach doesn't worry about making practice "fun" and "entertaining" for the players -- the expectation is that the players are capable of working hard without those inducements.
“Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice. The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death.” - Neil Postman 1985
Looking back to my own time at secondary school the teachers who engaged me the most and the lessons that I enjoyed the most included activities that I'd say were fun. When I studied O level English Language in the dark days of the 20th century we had to learn clause analysis. Our English teacher gave us jokes as practice pieces. My history teacher always included drama to bring to life whatever we were studying. I loved history and thought it might be something I'd continue with until A level when the three teachers who taught different aspects simply sat at the front and read us notes which we had to copy down and turn into an essay. I hope that's not the style now!
Thank you for pointing out that educators can't always compete with the engagement of cell phones. As a teacher, I make my lessons as engaging and personalized as I can. However, I know that I am battling the dopamine "hits" that students are getting every time they log onto their cell phones. It's not something I can compete with. Having that technology limited in schools, gives me the opportunity to show students other ways to engage socially.
If we were to look at traffic to porn sites, people aren’t rejecting sex they are probably consuming it in a different way…
And I think there is something there about how we access and consume educational elements online. Perhaps less deep in a way. If we are to think about how we use the internet for educational purpose there are elements where we lean in deeper to a subject but also without necessarily gaining explicit knowledge? So I’m thinking with how I use podcast it might give me an initial interest but it really doesn’t give me the deeper knowledge or understanding that I have to seek out
I’ve just realised I said think a lot, you’ve obviously made me think…
That bit about adults having less sex…wow! Exactly!! I’ve worked so hard to raise passionate little readers. Feels like most of the other kindergartners in our area are Minecraft addicts. Tablets in the car. T-shirts. YouTube videos.
Yes!
And we need to work on developing the cognitive skills and motivation for deep learning and hard thinking. I don’t think we fully know how to do that, but we have to move in that direction.
I agree with the basic point of the post, but: Duolingo? Really? That's your example? I'm something of a language nerd myself, you see. (I speak four languages that are non-native to me at C1 level or better. Yes, I have the certificates, i.e. it's not just self-evaluation). I've come to see Duolingo as a marker of a person who'll never learn his/her target language. Why? Because I've seen the users. Those who "tried to learn" whatever language they were learning. Some of them were at it for years. Some of them are at it still. I would ask them how exactly they were going about their language learning, and the one thing that kept coming up was Duolingo. Successful learners never mention it. Whether it's because they've literally never used it, or because they only used it briefly to get their feet wet before moving on to more serious materials - I do not know. But either way, you are NOT going to learn a language from Duolingo. It's a bad example.
I mean, there ARE apps that serious language users use. Anki comes to mind. I've only used it minimally, but I am beside the point! (We are all entitled to personal preferences.) There definitely are serious and successful language learners who heavily rely on Anki. Of course, Anki is a tool among tools, and it certainly won't get you to fluency by itself, either.