He didn’t reply to my email. It’s been over a week!
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| My slightly crap rendering of the ladder of inference |
But this talent for spotting what’s ‘really’ going on, doesn’t always work well in online discussions. The ladder can at times work to colour our views before we have all the facts. For example, after watching my talk on pseudoscience, one commenter wrote:
You seem to support traditional teaching. Any new technique needs a licence. …Nowadays, you have to focus on the learner.
When climbing the ladder you start with real evidence, that is ‘He doesn’t supports learning styles’. From there you move to selected data and experience ‘old-fashioned teachers don’t use learning styles’. Next you affix meaning ‘he must be an old fashioned teacher’ and make an assumption ‘old fashioned teachers aren’t interested in students, they are teacher-centric and don’t value individuality’ and then act on these beliefs ‘I can disregard this opinion because the teacher is not progressive and doesn’t care about students.’
The talk mentions nothing whatsoever about my preferred teaching method or my view on ‘traditional teaching’ or ‘learner-centred’ approaches. Yet this commenter is already half-way up the ladder. The inference here is that my dismissal of neuromyths must mean that I basically want kids sitting in silence while I crush their individuality and stomp all over their creativity. This is a shame since my lessons are actually filled with rainbow-coloured unicorns.
