Smart Education Foundation

Tag: education-philosophy

  • When Control Kills Learning: Why Our Digital Classrooms May Be Working Against Us

    Photographed by Zoshua Colah

    I spent this semester writing a paper for my graduate program on something that’s been quietly nagging at me: the gap between what we know about how learning works and how we design the digital environments meant to support it.

    The more I read, the harder it became to ignore an uncomfortable conclusion. Many of the features we celebrate in learning management systems, like their efficiency, their analytics, and their tidy automation, aren’t pedagogically neutral. They quietly shape what learning becomes. And often, not for the better.

    Here’s the core idea, as briefly as I can put it.

    Learning requires risk. Our systems are built to remove it.

    James Zull, a neuroscientist who’s written extensively about how brains change through learning, makes a deceptively simple point: real learning is the literal physical reorganization of neural pathways. That kind of change doesn’t happen in comfort. It happens when learners encounter ideas that don’t fit their current understanding, when they sit with confusion, and, crucially, when they test their ideas in conditions where they might be wrong.

    Roger Schank, a cognitive scientist, makes the case even sharper: people learn by doing, failing, and figuring out why. Failure isn’t a bug in the learning process. It’s the engine.

    Now look at what most LMS-based environments are designed to do.

    1. Automated grading rewards correctness, not thinking.

    By Nguyen-dang

    Auto-graded assessments are particularly effective for vocabulary or procedural fluency. But they’ve quietly become the default for almost everything. The problem? To automate grading, you need predetermined right answers. That requirement narrows what kinds of questions get asked, and over time, what kinds of thinking are practiced. Students learn to optimize for the answer the system expects, not to construct and defend their ideas.

    Carol Dweck’s research on growth mindset suggests the issue matters more than we realize: when systems consistently punish wrong answers, they cultivate exactly the kind of fixed-mindset orientation that suppresses real learning.

     2. Public visibility raises the social cost of being wrong.

    By Vitaly-Gariev

    Discussion boards sound like a fantastic idea. Make students post publicly, force engagement, and expose them to their peers’ thinking. But the rational strategy in a graded, archived, instructor-visible forum isn’t to share an underdeveloped thought and see how it holds up. It’s time to wait, watch what gets approved, and produce something safe.

    Immordino-Yang and Damasio’s research on emotion and learning is relevant here: the brain doesn’t engage in deep, exploratory thinking when it perceives social threats. Public discussion forums often produce careful performances rather than honest intellectual risk.

    3. Behavioral surveillance trades intrinsic motivation for compliance.

    A Chosen Soul

    This one is the most insidious. Modern LMS platforms track everything: time on page, login frequency, click patterns, and scroll behavior. It’s framed as a tool to identify struggling students. And occasionally it is.

    But it’s also a panopticon. Foucault’s old observation still applies: what makes surveillance powerful isn’t being constantly watched; it’s knowing you might be. Students start to perform engagement rather than engage in it. They log in on schedule, click through at a pace that registers as “active,” and post within the prescribed window. Schank’s point about intrinsic motivation gets buried: the system has trained them to chase external signals rather than follow their curiosity.

    What is lost is agency.

    The cumulative effect of these design choices is that students learn something. It’s that they learn to navigate the system instead of wrestling with the subject. The exploratory, risk-tolerant engagement that deep understanding requires quietly squeezes out strategic compliance. The habits of mind that students take with them—comfort with uncertainty, willingness to fail, and ability to direct their own inquiry—are the ones we need to cultivate most.

    This isn’t a call to abandon digital learning. It’s a call to design it better.

    A few things would help:

    • Build low-stakes spaces where students can think provisionally without being graded for it.
    • Redesign discussion structures to lower, rather than raise, the social cost of being wrong.
    • Rethink what data we collect. Time on page measures the performance of learning, not learning itself.

    Most fundamentally, we need to stop designing environments that manage learning and start designing ones that support it. Managing implies control and standardization. Supporting implies responsiveness, flexibility, and a willingness to let the process be somewhat messy, because that messiness is, as Zull and Schank would both insist, where the learning happens.

    Education that consistently rewards strategic compliance over genuine engagement doesn’t just produce shallow learning. It shapes the kind of thinkers we become. That feels like a higher standard than we usually hold our edtech to.

    It’s also the right one.

    By Priscilla Du Preez

     

    If you want to go deeper: James Zull, The Art of Changing the Brain; Roger Schank, Teaching Minds; Carol Dweck, Mindset; and Immordino-Yang & Damasio, “We Feel, Therefore We Learn.” And if you’re feeling ambitious, Foucault’s Discipline and Punish.

     

    Curious to hear from other educators, instructional designers, and edtech folks: are you seeing this in the systems you work with? What’s working to push back?

  • I was a top student in Kenya. I’m Not Sure I Ever Really Learned.

    I was a top student in Kenya. I’m Not Sure I Ever Really Learned.

    Reflecting on 8-4-4 system

    The night before our national exams in Kenya, my classmates and I would stay up late reciting paragraphs we had memorized word-for-word from textbooks. Not because we understood them. Because we knew the marking scheme rewarded recognition, not reasoning.

    I was good at that game. I passed.

    Years later, sitting in a 500-seat lecture hall called “Bs” at Egerton University, squinting to make out a lecturer whose voice barely reached the back row, scrambling to copy notes I’d later regurgitate in a closed-book exam. I started asking myself a question I haven’t been able to shake since:

    Did I ever actually learn anything? Or did I just learn how to perform learning?

    Two thinkers helped me make sense of that question. One is a cognitive scientist. The other is a biologist. They come from completely different worlds, and they say the same uncomfortable thing.

    Roger Schank: Teaching is not telling

    Roger Schank spent his career at Yale, Northwestern, and Carnegie Mellon before concluding that most of what we call “school” is fundamentally misconceived.

    His argument in Teaching Minds (2011) is blunt: schools have confused the transmission of knowledge with the development of intelligence. We organize education around subjects like math, history, biology, and literature because that’s how universities are organized. But the human mind doesn’t actually learn that way.

    What we need to develop, Schank argues, are cognitive processes: prediction, diagnosis, planning, causal reasoning, argumentation, and self-knowledge. These aren’t taught by being told. They’re built by doing.

    His sharpest line stays with me:

    “Teach” means to tell, and then have the person who was told do what he was told”.

    Reading that, I thought of every lecture hall I had ever sat in. The teacher talked. We listened, or pretended to. Then there were grades. The whole arrangement assumed that listening was learning. It is not.

    James Zull: Learning is biology

    James Zull, a biologist who ran a university teaching center, comes at the same problem from a completely different angle. His starting line in The Art of Changing the Brain (2002) is disarmingly simple:

    For Zull, teaching is the art of changing the physical structure of the brain. And that change only happens when the learner moves through all four stages of what he calls the learning cycle:

    1. Concrete experience—taking in something through the senses (sensory cortex).

    2. Reflective observation—making meaning of it (back integrative cortex).

    3. Abstract hypothesis—generating your own ideas about it (frontal integrative cortex).

    4. Active testing — doing something with those ideas (motor cortex).

    Skip any stage and the brain doesn’t fully change. You’ve stored some information. You haven’t learned.

    Zull describes a student archetype he calls “Ham,” someone who soaks up information, remembers a great deal, and never does anything with it. Ham, biologically speaking, is living on one side of his brain. He is a receiver, never a producer, of knowledge.

    I read that passage and recognized myself. I had been Ham. We had been trained to be Ham.

    What both of them are really saying

    Schank and Zull start in completely different places, artificial intelligence and cellular biology, and arrive at the same diagnosis.

    Passive reception is not learning.

    You can sit, listen, copy, and memorize for sixteen years and still graduate without the cognitive equipment that adult life and meaningful work actually require. Not because you’re lazy or unintelligent, but because the system you went through was never designed to develop those capacities in the first place.

    Both also insist that emotion and motivation matter. Schank calls it goal alignment: humans learn what they actually want to learn. Zull points to the emotional centers of the brain that modulate memory and attention. An education that ignores what students care about is working against its own biology.

    What the Kenyan classroom taught me about the science

    Looking back at my schooling through their lens is sobering.

    The 8-4-4 system I went through was, structurally, the kind of education both theorists describe as broken. Curriculum organized around subjects and exam content rather than cognitive growth. Classes are taught by chalk-and-talk to forty or fifty kids at a time. Universities where you literally couldn’t hear the lecturer from the back rows because of lack of PA capabilities. Assessment that rewarded the reproduction of model answers and quietly punished the student who came up with her own.

    We mastered the first half of Zull’s cycle, sensory input and memory, and almost never got to the second half, where actual thinking happens. We checked almost none of Schank’s cognitive process boxes. We learned to perform learning.

    And here’s the part that matters for everyone, not just Kenyans: this isn’t only a Kenyan story. The lecture hall, the closed-book exam, and the curriculum-as-coverage model—these patterns show up in classrooms all over the world. Anywhere education is structured around transmitting content rather than developing minds, the same gap opens up between schooling and learning.

    What I’m taking from this

    I’m not writing this to dismiss my education. It got me into rooms I would not otherwise be in. The teachers I had were doing their best inside a system they did not design.

    But I am writing it because I think most of us, students, professionals, parents, and leaders, carry around a quiet version of the same question I had in that lecture hall. Did I really learn that? Or did I just memorize it well enough to pass?

    A few things I’m trying to do differently now:

    · Treat learning as something I do, not something done to me. If I can’t apply, explain, or argue with an idea, I haven’t learned it.

    · Move through the whole cycle. Read, yes, but also reflect, hypothesize, and test. Write the post. Build the prototype. Have the conversation.

    · Pick goals first, content second. What do I actually want to be able to do? Then I’ll find the books, courses, and people that serve that.

    · Be patient with my own brain. Real learning is a physical change. It is supposed to feel slow.

    The promise of education has always been that it changes you. Schank and Zull, in different vocabularies, are saying the same thing: that promise is real, but it’s only kept when learning becomes active, goal-directed, and complete.

    I wish someone had told me that on the night before the exam.

    Have you ever felt the gap between schooling and learning in your own life? I’d love to hear how you’re closing it.

    Sources: Roger Schank, Teaching Minds: How Cognitive Science Can Save Our Schools (2011); James Zull, The Art of Changing the Brain (2002).