The Paradox of Pedagogy

Abstract

One of the few principles that all educationalists seem to agree on is that learning takes an active involvement on the part of the learner. Moreover, it is generally assumed that the more active the involvement is, the better learning will result. Pedagogy, on the other hand, is about helping the learners, making it easier for them to learn. Bringing these two principles together might then mean that the more powerful the pedagogy is, the less powerful the learning becomes. This sounds not only counter-intuitive, but clearly paradoxical. We will try to point out a way of solving this paradox, by means of an empirical study in which two groups of teachers set out for finding the best way to teach a difficult concept/phenomenon in Economics. Both groups worked according to the learning study model (which is a combination of design experiments and Japanese lesson studies). One group varied one aspect of the phenomenon at a time, and brought the different aspects together subsequently, while the other group let all aspects vary at the same time. Following the above paradox, the second group would outperform the first group (because of higher active involvement), but in actual fact the opposite happened (the first group outperformed the second group, both on immediate and a delayed test of understanding after learning). These results could be interpreted within the framework of variation theory: Pedagogy is not so much supposed to make learning easier, but to make learning possible. When learning is possible and the learners want to learn - they will. If pedagogy fails to make learning possible, it fails to support learning at all. But making learning possible is not enough. Only the learner can make it happen. By realizing this, our results can be understood and the above paradox can be solved.