The Complexity Paradox in Education

In 1988, Jobs famously told Business Week, “simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”

The teaching methods we help teachers apply in their classrooms are typically applicable to teachers of all grades and subjects. As such, we’ve been following the Simplicity principle in all our content creation and materials design for coaching our teachers. Our content focus has been on practical, actionable tips and techniques that teachers can implement right away in their lessons. This has been working quite well with most of our teachers and schools.

However, over the last couple of months, some schools have been asking us for advanced materials and trainings for their high-school teachers — but within the same course topics like Classroom Management and Active Learning. When pressed further, the school principals couldn’t elaborate further than by saying we need more technical content. Some feedback also indicated that high-school teachers also “feel” the content is too simple, even though they have not been exposed to these teaching techniques before.

Over a few conversations, our team were able to learn two things:

1. Some high-school teachers and school principals want more differentiation in their trainings compared “low-level” primary school teachers.
2. These teachers did not trust the new teaching strategies despite evidence, as they felt the content was too simple and too easy and these strategies would not give them results.

So our team had to design content and structure the model so that these few high-school teachers could be appeased but also ensure that they actually learn and follow the new content and increase adoption and engagement in the classroom.

Enter Complexity Bias.

Complexity bias is a logical fallacy that leads us to give undue credence to complex concepts.

Faced with two competing hypotheses, we are likely to choose the most complex one. That’s usually the option with the most assumptions and regressions. As a result, when we need to solve a problem, we may ignore simple solutions — thinking “that will never work” — and instead favor complex ones.

Marketers make frequent use of complexity bias.

They do this by incorporating confusing language or insignificant details into product packaging or sales copy. Most people who buy “ammonia-free” hair dye, or a face cream which “contains peptides,” don’t fully understand the claims. Terms like these often mean very little, but we see them and imagine that they signify a product that’s superior to alternatives. — Via Farnam Street

So, we came up with two hacks to quickly test this hypothesis that the illusion of complexity drives engagement:

1. We renamed the courses with a “201” suffix. For example, our usual classroom management modules were renamed to CM 201, CM 202 and CM 203.
2. We included 1–2 slides to our existing content where we present theoretical models, research studies and their design, citations, etc.

The response has been extremely positive. One school principal, in fact, gave a resounding endorsement to the “new and improved” content. We are also observing a strong uptick in the classroom performance of these high-school teachers.

Live and learn. Everyday.