Christian Moore-Anderson Talks Teaching Meaning & Cognitive Science

In this episode of Conceptually Speaking, I sit down with Christian Moore Anderson — veteran biology teacher and author of Teaching Meaning: What Works When Telling Isn’t Enough—to complicate the conversation about cognitive science and teaching. Like me, Christian has felt frustration at the canonization and commodification of a handful of concepts from cognitive psychology being treated like they are THE science of learning, as opposed to a collection of (somewhat) useful theories. His fantastic book draws on a much wider and deeper set of thinkers and theories to articulate pedagogical approaches that are both intellectually rich and incredibly applicable to every day practice. His two rules—meaning is enacted and cannot be transmitted, and a student’s capacity must at least match the complexity they face—provide the foundation for how we can “teach meaning” in more generative ways.

Key Concepts from the Episode

Meaning Cannot Be Transmitted

• Communication provokes the construction of meaning rather than moving it between minds. What a word does inside a learner depends on the associations already available to them, which places a hard ceiling on what any explanation can accomplish on its own.
• If meaning must be constructed, the teacher’s real leverage lies in the conditions under which students construct it. Dialogue then becomes structurally necessary, since it is the only means of discovering what students have actually made of what was said.
• Consider where your practice treats a fluent explanation as evidence that learning has occurred. What would have to happen in the room for you to know otherwise?

Meta Content teaches students how to attend to content

• Every act of teaching works at two levels. In addition to making meaning about content students also absorb ways of attending to it: what counts as a question, what deserves notice, what makes an answer satisfying, etc. This second curriculum operates whether or not anyone names it.
• Ways of perceiving are inherited from disciplinary communities rather than invented by individual teachers. That inheritance relocates a teacher’s authority from institutional position to disciplinary participation, and it makes modeling an act of rendering a shared way of seeing visible.
• Consider what your discipline has trained you to notice that a newcomer would walk past. How might you externalize that perception instead of the conclusions it produces?

Learning as Becoming

• We are constituted by the conversations we take part in. Learning a discipline expands the range of conversations a person can enter and the moves they can legitimately make once inside, which is a larger claim than the accumulation of content.
• Capacity must match complexity. A broad disciplinary education is necessary because each discipline supplies a distinct way of perceiving, which students can then use to understand our rapidly changing world. Access to academic discourse therefore becomes a question of equity rather than one of career preparation.
• Consider which conversations your teaching equips students to enter, and which it quietly closes off. What would it take to make the rules of your discipline explicit enough that students could carry them elsewhere?

What I keep returning to from this conversation is Christian’s insistence on intellectual honesty about “rule sets.” He has no objection to the #EduCogSci crowd building a set of rules about what makes good instruction; that is what all of us do. The objection is to presenting a constructed rule as a law of the universe (e.g. compressing a real distinction between novices and experts into the sixty minutes of a lesson, then using that compression to justify a fixed sequence of instruction). There is a lot more at stake here than social media beefs. When these constructed rules get laundered into what the public and/or profession believe is settled science, they become legislation, inspection frameworks, and mandated lesson structures, as teachers in England and Australia can attest and as the science of reading statutes are beginning to demonstrate here. What gets narrowed is not just method but perception itself: what a teacher is permitted to notice, what they perceive the purpose of education to be, and ultimately which conversations students are equipped (or not) to join.

Links:

• christianmooreanderson.com
• Teaching Meaning: What Works When Telling Isn’t Enough — Christian Moore Anderson
• Evidence-based educational movements are actually games —Christian Moore Anderson
• There is no such thing as “THE science of learning” —Nick Covington & Michael Weingarth
• New Right 2.0 Teacher populism on social media in England —Dr. Steve Watson

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