Education News from Down Under

If you’ve noticed that I haven’t posted anything on this Substack lately, part of the explanation is that I’ve been in Australia for the past two weeks or so, with a packed schedule of speaking engagements, meetings, and school tours (and some sightseeing, when I can slip it in). I’ve been wanting to write about my impressions of Australian education and how it compares to the U.S., but (this is the other part of the explanation for why I haven’t written anything), I’ve had so many impressions that it’s hard to know where to begin.

It’s been a thrill to finally meet Australians whose names and work I know well and whose faces I recognize from Zoom tiles, etc. These include Greg Ashman, Nathaniel Swain, and—most thrillingly—John Sweller, the father of cognitive load theory. I could go on about my conversations with them and others, but this post would end up being even longer than usual. So I’ll stick to less personal matters.

As always when dealing with education, the situation in Australia is complicated. I’ve been hesitant to make pronouncements because I’m not sure I grasp all the nuances. But I’m going to take the plunge and hazard a few observations. (Australian readers, please feel free to post comments correcting or modifying anything I say that doesn’t sound right!)

There’s more awareness of cognitive science in Australia than in the U.S., especially of the need for “explicit teaching.”

So far I’ve given seven presentations, including one at a researchED conference in Sydney and others at several “Sharing Best Practices” conferences, which are similar. These gatherings tend to draw teachers who are already interested in and somewhat knowledgeable about cognitive science. (It’s been gratifying to see that so many educators have read and been influenced by The Writing Revolution.) Clearly, this is not a representative sample.

As in the U.S., large-scale change is slow. One of the people I’ve met here who is working to bring instruction in line with science, Elena Douglas—who heads an organization called the Knowledge Society—estimates that no more than 500 of the nation’s 9500 schools have implemented “the full suite of evidence-based practices.” A recent report documents the fact that many Australian teachers subscribe to beliefs that have been discredited by cognitive science, such as that students have different “learning styles.”

Still, even making allowances for the unrepresentative