However, true believers are as likely to claim they are being misrepresented or bullied than realising that they have behaved in a way which provoked the reaction. After all, what is the rational evidence that something is very silly? Everyone pointing and laughing is a pretty good indicator, and sometimes it is enough to point something out and wait for the audience reaction in order to establish that, yes, what looked absurd to you also looks absurd to others. I want teachers to be able to say “Are you having a laugh?” when confronted with the very silly, but I also know that those who are unashamedly doing those very silly things will get very angry and accuse those teachers of not engaging in proper debate. Even Ben Goldacre, who is probably the most high profile advocate of greater use of RCTs in education has, to my knowledge, never once suggested that we need any RCTs on whether rubbing brain buttons actually works. ![]() After all, you probably won’t have become deeply engaged in studying something if it is obviously crazy. In fact they can even claim that you haven’t understood the idea. Moreover, they can complain that by pointing out absurdity then you are not actually engaging with constructive criticism of the ideas. If something is absurd, but people haven’t noticed, then they don’t take well to having it pointed out. Those who have been suckered are going to read anything that says “this is obvious nonsense” as “you are an idiot”. David Didau wrote about it here and quickly discovered that few things get more of an angry reaction than pointing out the obvious. The learning bicycle certainly qualifies as absurd but is far too obscure.īuilding Learning Power is not obscure and is almost there on the absurdity front, but the only really obvious example I can think of something popular, that is as ridiculous as Brain Gym is “Thinking Hats”. Things which are widespread but can safely be dismissed immediately as absurd are far rarer. Ideas like SOLO taxonomy or Kagan Structures at least have a surface level of plausibility about them and can only really be objected to from a position of knowing how we actually learn. While baseless, bad ideas are pretty common in education they are not necessarily ridiculous. However, it is for this reason, that I have tended to be sceptical about talk of “the next Brain Gym”. The teaching profession was undermined by its willingness to engage with such obvious nonsense. ![]() Instead of becoming incredibly fashionable and being endorsed by people in the highest levels of the education establishment, it should have just been laughed at for being utterly ridiculous from the start. Why it has become so infamous is, in my view, due to the sheer implausibility of the claims. Take a look at this or this for more information or watch this: If you aren’t familiar with it, it was a branded series of strange exercises that were meant to improve learning. Both Robert Coe and Tom Bennett raised the question of what might be the next Brain Gym. ![]() One thing that came out of the ResearchED conference, perhaps inevitably with Ben Goldacre among the speakers, was the general acceptance that Brain Gym was pretty much the gold standard for nonsense in education.
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