Misconceptions
“A misconception remains a misconception even when it is shared by the majority of people.” — Tolstoy.
Students don't come to learning — about any subject, at any age — as a tabula rasa. No matter how much we might think teaching is pouring knowledge into an empty vessel, it’s simply not true.
While students’ existing knowledge is tremendously helpful, some of what students know may be incorrect — illogical, ill-informed or just simply wrong.
Misconceptions.
Written while founding director of HaileyburyX.
A decade or so ago, I taught entrepreneurship to Masters’ students. Having done this before, I had an insight into some of the misconceptions that students might have in approaching this subject and knew that the most common one is the myth of the garage entrepreneur. Entrepreneurship, so this misconception goes, is a young dude in his garage inventing something people didn’t know they wanted and becoming instantly, insanely rich.
Why this misconception exists is easy to understand. Silicon Valley started, in folklore at least, when William Hewlett and David Packard built a prototype for an audio oscillator that enabled them to start Hewlett-Packard (HP), for a long time one of the largest tech companies in the world. And yes, it was in a garage at 367 Addison Avenue, Palo Alto. And of course, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak assembled the first Apple computers in Jobs’ Father’s garage, and Walt Disney experimented with animation techniques in his uncle’s garage.
The garage is merely a cover term for a whole range of desirable entrepreneurial attributes — innovative ideas, hard work, ingenuity, bootstrapping, chasing a dream, rejecting the status quo, and independence — which may contribute to the longevity of this particular misconception, along with the thought that I have a garage so I can become famous too.
The reality is much different. Entrepreneurs are most often the products of organisations, not garages. They have psychological, social, intellectual and often financial resources built up through being in organisations. They use these resources to start a new venture, frequently in the same industry as their former organisation — often retaining ties with it or attracting co-founders from it. The reason: organizations provide access to industry knowledge and an insight into market opportunities that are otherwise hard to come by. The all-important social ties that work in organisations work brilliantly for entrepreneurs — a network of well-connected, trusted and informed allies that can give a new venture the necessary launchpad to succeed. And, as this report from HBR shows, among the top 0.1% of startups based on growth in their first five years, the founders started their companies, on average, when they were 45 years old.
In the case of this misconception, as with many others, it can lead to problems with effective learning.
Dispelling the garage entrepreneur myth is important not just because it is inaccurate but because it opens up a whole range of opportunities to learn about the subject —in this case, about some of the core elements of success in entrepreneurship, including the power of social ties, but also re-evaluating the intrinsic benefit of creativity or understanding the role of theatre in the entrepreneurial journey. The garage is a story, and like all stories, it is a form of theatre, too.
Misconceptions are not unusual, and recognising them and doing something about them is an essential part of teaching anything — maths, science or entrepreneurship.
But misconceptions are stubborn because the knowledge that learners already have is tough to reorganise, and some of those misconceptions are ontological — about fundamental understandings of the world. Unravelling them can be hard, as we have seen again and again during the pandemic.
So how do you address misconceptions?
One approach is to ask students to identify their own misconceptions in the form of “I believe…” statements upfront. This has the useful property that students can return to these statements after learning has happened to see how far they have come in terms of new knowledge.
Another is to figure out whether a misconception can be useful. In the case of the garage entrepreneur, I was able to use it to segue into other topics by asking, “what else do you think you know to be true?” and so make students aware of how they have thought about the subject — activating a productive set of metacognitive and analytic skills.
To correct a misconception, you have to have a plausible, evidenced and rational alternative — and this can be done using what has been called refutational teaching, where a misconception is activated, then refuted with evidence. And having encouraged students to question their beliefs, they are much more likely to look for markers that alternative explanations can be trusted. Presenting an alternative and encouraging students to question it too — and contrast it to other misconceptions — can be incredibly helpful in developing their ability to self-repair mistaken assumptions.
But simply being willing to engage in argument may be one of the most powerful ways to cement new thinking and innoculate against misconceptions in the future.
Even in the early years, children can spot what makes for a plausible explanation, discuss it, and demand explanations that are not ad hoc or inconsistent but empirically accurate, consistent, simple, and plausible. My son, now fifteen, totally bought my (overly-theatrical) explanation at three years old that a Mr Toothbadger, visiting from Denmark, took away newly-lost teeth and made them into false teeth for the elderly badgers in the Home for Retired Badgers in Aarhus — while simultaneously seeing, and often challenging and arguing, the many logical inconsistencies in that story.
If misconceptions are everywhere and are problematic for learning, it makes sense to focus on them.
This is why we are about to release the Misconceptions series of HaileyburyX online courses, built with our Haileybury Teachers Adam McCarthy and Brendan Magilton, starting with Maths Misconceptions: minus and negative, which looks at the misconception that minus and negative are the same thing. One of the reasons for this particular misconception is that people often use the words interchangeably. Even though this usually doesn't cause a problem in everyday life, it can when you are trying to learn maths.
By drilling down into the history of minus and negative numbers, giving specific examples of common misconceptions and through examples of why they aren’t true, we hope to be able to help students avoid some of the common pitfalls.
Maths Misconceptions: minus and negative is just one of the many maths misconceptions we’d like to tackle. We’re also planning to expand the Misconceptions courses to many other STEM (and LEAP) subjects. It’s not like there is a shortage of misconceptions to tackle: anything from artificial intelligence to climate change is full of misconceptions and provides fertile ground to improve learning by identifying and remedying them.
Aside from supporting those students who choose to look at the courses to develop more accurate knowledge, what else do we expect to get from Misconceptions?
One is to look at the ways that microlearning works.
The pandemic and its continued effects have wreaked havoc on our attention spans. The fatigue being heaped on everyone by hour after hour of screen time has been well-documented. Although there are good habits that students can adopt to offset this (we talked about some of them in our LEVELUP! A little handbook for learning online), fatigue isn’t good for optimal learning.
Microlearning suggests that we break learning experiences down into smaller pieces, thereby making the best of small amounts of time and overtaxed neurological resources and encouraging what we have called before learning agility. The ways we present material should facilitate microlearning, which is why many of the HaileyburyX courses are microcourses structured into pathways that students can pursue, as you can see in our HaileyburyX AI platform.
Although our courses right now are demand-pull — students visit course pages — we are starting to incorporate new interactive elements like The Observatory, that uses tools like Discord in our AI platform and Figma in our sustainability microcourses, to facilitate collaboration spaces where students can share work and using techniques like autoplay, second-screen learning and the use of a variety of different platforms for specific types of learning.
So to return to entrepreneurship misconceptions, let’s name another, one explained in A Garage and an Idea: What More Does an Entrepreneur Need? by Pino G. Audia and Christopher I. Rider — that entrepreneurs are lone wolves, going it alone, bravely forging forward, overcoming obstacles and generally being heroic etc.
This is just another part of the garage myth, and while there are many lone wolves, by and large, entrepreneurship is a team activity. In this paper's (limited and older but well-evidenced) research study, 50% of companies were co-founded by people who had previously worked together. And as we saw earlier, entrepreneurs benefit massively from strong social ties and from a range of mastery experiences gained in previous careers in organisations.
You have to be, for sure, insanely confident to be an entrepreneur. Still, you also have to have some knowledge and skills — along with a realistic appreciation of the complexity of the challenge (as Elon Musk said, starting a company is like “staring into the face of death…if that sounds appealing, go ahead”) — and this knowledge may be better gained inside the safe confines of an organisation before playing it out in the entrepreneurial arena.
But, unlike the misconceptions in our maths misconceptions course, there is some debate about whether going solo may actually be a good strategy. A 2019 paper by Jason Greenberg and Ethan Mollick suggests that the assumption that new ventures perform better when launched by teams rather than individuals is so pervasive that investors rarely, if ever, fund startups founded by a solo entrepreneur. In contrast, their study suggests that companies started by a single founder survive longer and generate more revenue than those started by teams.
Identifying and correcting misconceptions like these is essential because left alone, they result in ill-founded and ineffective teaching and learning, which can seriously misinform students and, amongst other outcomes (and in the case of entrepreneurship) can lead to ill-advised employment choices.
