Sold a Story 2: What Happened to Teaching

0:00In the 1960s, the federal government set out to answer a profound question. What are the best ways to teach? They evaluated different philosophies of education. The idea is let's try to find out what works. The study involved hundreds of thousands of students and cost hundreds of millions of dollars. It was groundbreaking at the time. The largest educational experiment, at least that we know of in the history of the world. It took almost a decade. When it was over, one way of teaching stood out above the rest. We beat them in everything. We got our time up at bat and we just hit a home run. This way of teaching had kids doing basic algebra. Seven plus, uh, equals. In preschool. Seven plus how many equals 11? Yeah, five, five. Yeah, how'd you work that out? You got seven you want to get to the left. And if I had that type of teaching throughout my life, I don't know where the would have taken me.

1:03Kids would come into school just knowing nothing. And they'd be in the lowest group and then they'd move up and up and up. I said that is exactly what I want for my school. But a lot of people didn't like it. One educator is called the approach totalitarian, another horrible. There was a terrific backlash against the program. It was totally new and totally controversial. There's a wide range of people against it. It doesn't fit what they want education to be. And the critics won. When the results didn't turn out the way people hoped, they were sort of like never mind, you know. They know attention to the man behind the curtain. It was like a baseball bat to the head. The study was buried. Most teachers have never heard of it. And the kind of teaching that works so well, most schools don't do it. I'm Emily Hanford. My podcast, Soul to Story, investigates the science behind learning.

2:04And what happens when deeply held beliefs clash with evidence? The first season of Soul to Story revealed why so many schools were struggling to teach kids how to read. And it sparked a wave of change across the country. And after the podcast came out, teachers were telling me, it's not just reading. And one of the math coaches said to my staff, you should not be teaching math. You should be facilitating math. The majority of our kids are two to three grade levels behind. In the new season of Soul to Story, we go beyond reading. We look at teaching itself. And we dig into decades of research on what actually works. Soul to Story season two, what happened to teaching? Coming October 15th to your favorite podcast app. And if you want to learn more about what we've uncovered, sign up for our newsletter at Soul to Story.org slash email.