Customize Featured Slider: remove hyperlinks from image and page title

Hi there, I am trying to customize Featured Slider by removing hyperlinks from the featured image as well as the page title. I did the following but it didn't seem to fix it, please help. Editor > featured-slider.php > function clean_education_post_page_category_slider() <figure class="slider-image"> '. $image .' </figure><!-- .slider-image --> ... <h2 class="entry-title"> '.the_title( '<span>','</span>', false ).' </h2> Fairly new to this and I was only editing the theme itself didn't create a child theme... hope that's okay for small change like this... :) Thank you! stefyc