What does it mean to know something?

George Duoblys
8 min readJun 8, 2023

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This is an extract from a longer conversation about knowledge, teaching and schools. The full text is available here.

Henry Welwyn: We’re coming back to my original question. Is the problem knowledge, per se, or is it that what we’re calling ‘knowledge’ is somehow deficient, something that falls short of genuine knowledge? That’s what I’m interested in: what does it mean to know something?

Grace Jackson: You two: classic humanities graduates, always trying to make things more complicated than they need to be. We all know what it means to know something. If you can remember it, say it, do it; well, then you know it.

HW: I’m not sure it is so simple, though, Grace. I was observing one of your team teaching chemistry to Year 9 recently. The lesson was about calculating the number of moles in a gas.

Angela Oakley: Goodness me, I feel queasy already.

HW: Bear with me, Angela! So the point is that this teacher was teaching the students really well. She brought in all the I do-we do-you do, checking for understanding, deliberate practice, and so on. She modelled the first example, showing them how to identify the right numbers from the question using the units; she then showed them how to substitute the numbers into the formula; finally she did the calculation and showed them how to write the answer down with the correct units. After she’d done the first example, the students did another example on their mini-whiteboards. She checked everyone’s work, gave some feedback, then gave them a few more examples to complete independently.

GJ: I’m happy to hear that everything we’ve been practising as a department is actually happening in lessons.

HW: It is, for sure, and it’s really great. It feels pacy, punchy, slick; there’s an energy in the room, students feeling that success that you mentioned earlier. But there’s a problem.

AO: What, that it sounds like an Orwellian nightmare?

HW: Well, that, obviously, but a serious problem too.

GJ: Go on.

HW: Once the teacher had set the students off on the independent task, I circulated the room a bit, as she was doing too. You could see students doing the questions and she was ticking their work, which suggested they knew what they were doing. I went up to one student, after the teacher had given him a tick, and asked him about what he’d just done. I think it was a question on HCl — does that sound right?

GJ: Yes, I can imagine that being one of the examples.

HW: OK, so let’s say it was HCl. Now, I’m not a scientist, so I’m not an expert on these things, but I seem to remember H being hydrogen and Cl being chlorine?

GJ: It certainly is: house point for you, Mr Welwyn.

HW: Thank you, thank you. So I asked this student, knowing only a very small amount about what he was doing, what HCl meant. I asked him what it was and what it looked like; he just looked at me blankly and shrugged his shoulders. I probed him a bit further and he said to me, “I’m not gonna lie sir, I’m really bad at science. I’m just good at maths.”

GJ: Typical.

HW: I dare say it is, and that’s the interesting point. This student could do the question, he could decode all the words, I’m sure he could identify the correct units and so on, but he actually had no idea what he was calculating. I could have replaced the words in the equation he was using with nonsense words — red equals blue over green or something — and he could have followed exactly the same procedure and churned out exactly the same number.

GJ: Well, no, because, as you said, he has to work out the number for each quantity from the units.

HW: But the teacher could have told him, red has the units ‘moles’, blue has the units ‘grams’, or whatever. He could have committed that to his long term memory and been perfectly capable of solving the problem. He knows something, clearly. But what does he know? I’m not sure it had much to do with science.

AO: Exactly! These methods train students to be mindless automatons; they completely miss the point of education.

HW: I’m not sure I’d go that far. I happen to think there is a role for these techniques. In fact, I thought the way she taught the lesson was brilliant. The problem was not with the methods, it was with what she was using the methods to achieve.

GJ: What do you mean?

HW: I think the problem was that the teacher was focused entirely on the outcome, rather than the thinking required to achieve that outcome. She very effectively gave them a tool to solve that problem, but the students were left without any appreciation of what the problem actually was in the first place. It might as well have been a game or a puzzle: the students simply had to learn the rules and apply them to achieve the desired outcome. There wasn’t much sense that what they were doing linked to anything out there in the world.

AO: But that’s exactly my point. These methods are very good for training students to memorise facts and procedures, but those facts and procedures bear no relation to the students’ actual lives.

HW: I think that’s a valid critique. We have the same problem in history. We spend a lot of time modelling how to answer 9 mark questions on the exam paper, giving students various rubrics and techniques to help them score full marks, but what this leads to is students thinking about how to score 9 marks on the exam question, rather than thinking historically, about their own lives or otherwise.

GJ: I think you’re both trying to get to the end point too quickly. Of course, at some point in their lives we want students to be able to think for themselves, to apply their knowledge to new and unusual situations, to relate what they learn to their own lives and the world around them, but surely we can’t start from this point, otherwise we’re presupposing students have already reached the state we’re trying to get them to. The kinds of things you’re talking about are complex tasks made up of a large number of component procedures. It’s only through extended practice of these procedures, so that each one is forged into a student’s long term memory, that the student is able to synthesise them into a fluent performance. That’s what we mean by mastery. I won’t bore you both with football or baseball analogies but it’s the same principle.

AO: Those analogies are misleading, anyway. A student who likes football doesn’t mind practising procedures, e.g. doing passing drills, because they have a sense of how this component fits into a broader whole. Whereas what you’re advocating is never giving students a glimpse of the whole until they’ve practised all the procedures and achieved this so-called ‘mastery’. Unless we give students a glimpse of the whole early on, there’s no way they’ll ever be motivated to put the practice in that’s required.

HW: I think you make a very good point, Angela. I’m thinking about it in terms of a journey.

GJ: Oh God, this sounds corny. ‘It’s not about the destination; it’s about the journey.’

HW: Bear with me! Let’s imagine I want to go from my house in Leyton to Oxford Circus in Central London. Maybe I want to go shopping or something. The quickest way for me to get there is to take the tube. I can jump on the Central Line at Leyton station and emerge exactly where I want to be. This is all well and good, but besides my start point and end point I have no idea where I’ve been. Now, let’s say the thing I was looking for is out of stock at the shop near Oxford Circus, but the person in the shop tells me they have availability at their store in Piccadilly Circus. If my only knowledge of where I am is based on the tube map, then I’m going to have to go all the way back to Holborn on the Central Line then take the Piccadilly Line three stops down to Piccadilly Circus. But if I actually know my way around central London then I can just walk down Regent Street and be there in half the time.

GJ: How does this relate to teaching?

HW: My point is that we want our students to know their way around our disciplines. We want them to be able to think fluently and intuitively without having to rely purely on the methods we give them. What I saw in the science lesson I described earlier was equivalent to putting the student on the tube at Leyton station. He emerged with the right answer, but he had no idea where he’d gone to get there, or even where he was when he started. It’s almost as if the method was too efficient, too effective at getting him to the destination. By tunnelling the student straight to the correct answer, the teacher actually prevented him from thinking about what he really needed to think about.

GJ: OK, I see your point. I’ve always hated formula triangles but never really known why. I think this is a helpful way of thinking about it.

HW: Exactly. So there are two issues with what I saw in that lesson. The first was pointed out by Angela: the students were practising but with no idea about why such practice was important, to what broader whole this task related to. This is a bit like the students being told they have to go to Oxford Circus without being given any reason why. And when it comes to our disciplines — solving science problems, writing history essays, reading poetry — many of our students have no idea why anyone would want to do these things in the first place.

The second was the nature of the task the students were being asked to practise. I take your point, Grace, that students really do need to practise component procedures before they can carry out a broader, more complex performance, but as teachers we need to choose the correct procedures to practise. What I saw in the science lesson was a lot of students being sent to Oxford Circus and back on the tube. What they needed to be thinking about was the underlying concept.

GJ: What was the underlying concept?

HW: Again, I’m not a scientist so I’m not 100% sure, but I guess it had something to do with the idea of the mole.

GJ: That’s definitely something students find difficult.

HW: I can imagine, and that’s why it’s essential that we get students thinking about it. The same can be said for other important concepts. It’s only by asking them to think in terms of these concepts that we can give students a feel for the broader disciplinary landscape. Every task that prompts them to think in terms of a new concept is an opportunity to practise walking individual sections of the journey above ground. It’s not just about getting from A to B: it’s about knowing how A and B sit in relation to one another as well as to all the other ideas of the discipline.

This kind of approach is inevitably going to take a lot longer, but I think it addresses Angela’s objection about making student learning more meaningful, while still taking into account your arguments around developing mastery and fluency.

This is an extract from a longer conversation about knowledge, teaching and schools. The full text is available here.

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George Duoblys
George Duoblys

Written by George Duoblys

School Improvement Lead for Science at Greenshaw Learning Trust. All views my own.

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