Education

In this episode of Progressively Incorrect, I chat with Dr. Nathaniel Swain about the work he is doing with teachers and middle leaders to ensure that all students receive instruction that is informed by the science of learning.

This is one of those episodes that is jammed packed full of insights and interesting tidbits, including what Dr. Swain describes as the biological imperative we have as humans to learn from others. Instead of falling for the romance that is having students discover or teach themselves the bulk of the material, Dr. Swain talks about the need for teachers to, well, teach the material, and to teach it explicitly and efficiently using principles and findings from cognitive science. As someone who is thoroughly fascinated with the innovations coming out of international education systems, you will also hear me pick Dr. Swain’s brain about the progress being made in Australia to implement evidence-informed instruction and explicit teaching.

Before we go over to Dr. Swain, I wanted to promote an exciting learning opportunity that I am co-convening with Kathleen O’Rourke and Christie Barrett called the Middle Leaders Forum, which is part of Dr. Swain’s Australia-based Think Forward Educators network. I will include a link in this episode’s show notes to our first session, which is titled “How Cognitive Load Theory Changed My Teaching”. This presentation is based on my previous work with schools and should help participants to explore ways to embed the practical applications of cognitive load theory into their classrooms. Check out the description for time zones – which are either on February 6th or 7th depending on your location – and register today!

Links to Dr. Swain’s Twitter, website, and blog (Cognitorim).

Something that changed my teaching was understanding that a) learning most things does not come naturally like learning a first language and that b) kids are unlikely to learn the material very well if we ignore the limitations of working memory. These insights are key to Cognitive Load Theory (CLT).

Come join me in the Middle Leaders’ Forum to learn about CLT and how you can bring it into your school – Time Zones included in the description!

Register here (free): https://thinkforwardeducators.org/events/middle-leaders-groshell-orourke-feb2022

In this episode of Progressively Incorrect, we will continue our journey through the education debates by chatting with Daniel Bundred about behavior, specifically on how to turn around a school that struggles to manage it.

I think this episode is a fantastic example of how networking and social media continues to drive change across countries and schools. A few weeks before I recorded this episode, I was contemplating how to get 100% of students to meet the expectation that they enter the classroom quietly and get started on their entry task, which we call the “Do Now”. The whole point of the Do Now is to create a “Strong Start” to lessons by allocating the first five or so minutes of class to silent retrieval practice involving previous material. Having a routine for a controlled entry with a Do Now projected on the board can do wonders to calmly transition students into their classrooms, and it allows teachers to take attendance in peace without wasting the first few minutes of the class period.

The problem I was seeing as an instructional coach was that far too many students were choosing to opt out of the Do Now, which caused all sorts of power struggles between teachers and students. So, I took to Twitter and asked the world what I should do, and the world answered, but the strategies and techniques that were the most specific and actionable were those offered by Daniel Bundred. Daniel described how the best administrators in previous schools he’d worked at designed whole school systems – rather than relying on individual teachers – to turn around chronic misbehavior and underachievement. Immediately after Daniel and I recorded this episode, I actually implemented several of his suggestions in my context, to fantastic results. I encourage all listeners to share this episode with anyone who is interested in creating the calm, safe learning environments that all our students deserve.

Daniel’s blog and follow him on Twitter (@DanielBundred)

In this episode of Progressively Incorrect, we are going to be talking about one of my favorite topics in instructional design – worked examples!

Worked examples are tools that teachers use to demonstrate a process or a procedure for students. When students don’t know how to do something, showing them how to do it, step by step, is a great way to gently grow their skills in that area without overloading them. Providing multiple examples during the first part of a learning period, and then gradually fading out examples so that students can practice independently, is one of the fundamentals of great explicit teaching.

While most reasonable people will admit that pure discovery learning – where students are given lots of problems without any support from worked examples – is a pretty terrible way to teach, research hasn’t fully resolved whether providing students first with a problem and allowing them to struggle a little with it could benefit learning compared to simply showing them how to do it from the start.

On the one hand, we can imagine that starting by having students explore the problem could help them analyze the problem more fully, and perhaps open their eyes to the knowledge gaps they have around that topic. On the other hand, providing students with a problem they can’t possibly solve on their own could frustrate students, or embed a misconception, or simply be a waste of their time.

So, to learn more about how teachers should sequence and use models and worked examples in their classrooms, I invited Milou van Harsel onto the podcast to take us through her research into the principles of example-based learning. Please be sure to hit subscribe and give this show a 5-star rating, and I’ll see you on the other side.

Milou’s Researchgate: Milou VAN HARSEL | Education Policy Advisor | Master of Science | Avans Hogeschool, Breda | Learning and Innovation Centre (researchgate.net)

Milou’s Bio:

Milou van Harsel was born in Roosendaal, the Netherlands, on November 8th, 1988. After completing her (bilingual) secondary education at the Jan Tinbergen College in Roosendaal in 2006, she started studying Psychology at Tilburg University. After one year, she switched to Teacher Education for Primary Schools at Avans University of Applied Sciences in Breda, from which she obtained her bachelor’s degree in 2010. Hereafter, she enrolled in the Pre-Master (2011) and Master Educational Sciences at Utrecht University (2012), from which she obtained her degree in 2012. During her Master, she completed an internship at the Learning and Innovation Centre of Avans University of Applied Sciences and subsequently remained working there as an education (policy) advisor. After three years (November 2015), she decided to combine her job with a part-time PhD trajectory at the Department of Education at Utrecht University (funded by Avans University of Applied Sciences), resulting in this dissertation (finished in 2021). During her PhD-project, she presented her work at various international conferences and was the recipient of the best poster award at the biannual conference of Special Interest Groups 6 and 7 (Instructional Design & Technology Enhanced Learning and Instruction) of the European Association for Research on Learning and Instruction (EARLI SIG 6-7 2016). Moreover, she co-organized two meetings of Special Interest Groups 6 and 7 in Bonn (2018) and online (2020), as part of her junior coordinatorship for EARLI SIG 7. As a part of her job and her PhD-trajectory, she gave numerous workshops and presentations to various educational professionals in the Netherlands. Most of these workshops and presentations focused on translating findings from her own research project and other research in (technology enhanced) learning and instruction to educational practice. Milou is still employed at Avans University of Applied Sciences in Breda and currently working as a researcher and senior education and research policy advisor.

Some light reading:

Welcome back to Progressively Incorrect, a podcast about artificial intelligence, emotional intelligence, and just plain regular intelligence. I am your host, Dr. Zach Groshell, and in this week’s episode I have the pleasure of interviewing Saskia Giebl about the benefits and perils of using Google for learning.

I’m often told that education today needs to change to meet the needs of tomorrow. One of the reasons given is that students don’t need to go to a teacher or a library whenever they would like to learn something; They can simply Google everything on their smartphones. But before we start replacing human teachers with Google or AI software like ChatGPT, let’s consider some facts. The first problem with a “Google-based” education is well-known: Much of what is found on the internet is unhelpful, harmful, or factually incorrect. In order to sort through all of the nonsense that is on the internet, students need to know how to ask Google the right questions. And therein lies the next problem: In order to ask the right questions, students need to have a lot of knowledge already. We can’t expect a student to spontaneously Google “What materials were used to make sarcophagi” if they don’t have the faintest clue what a sarcophagus is or why they even should care!

Another problem with replacing “old-fashioned teaching” with Google is something I learned very recently from reading a series of articles by this week’s guest. In Saskia Giebl’s research at the Bjork Learning and Forgetting Lab at UCLA, she asked students to either a) Google questions to find answers or b) Think about the answers to questions and then use Google to check their answers. As you probably predicted, the students who thought about the questions first learned more from using Google than the students who Googled without thinking. While Google is a useful tool for finding information, it’s also the case that relying on Google can create passive learning experiences that do not engage the mind. 

I think you’re really going to get a kick out of this episode, which is filled with all sorts of areas to explore, including the difference between learning and performance and a bit of a deep dive into the pre-testing effect. So, without further ado, I give you episode 17 of season 2 of the Progressively Incorrect podcast, featuring Saskia Giebl.

UCLA Bjork Learning and Forgetting Lab

Every week, I write a short blurb about teaching and learning for my school’s parent newsletter. I’ve decided to post old ones on this site from time to time so that teachers and leaders can steal them to use in their own newsletters. I hope doing so saves you time.

– Dr. G

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Is Direct Instruction a Good Teaching Method?

One of the most important questions in education – and also the most controversial – is whether teaching something directly (i.e., direct instruction) helps or hinders learning compared to having students discover the material for themselves (i.e., discovery learning). Most of us can remember a teacher from our schooling whose boring lectures put us to sleep or made us hate going to class. Maybe teachers should be using more “modern” teaching methods and leave “old fashioned” direct instruction for the dinosaurs?

The problem with throwing shade towards direct instruction is that research has shown that it is effective. In studies where students are either provided, or not provided, direct instructional guidance from a teacher, book, or computer, students learn more when guidance is provided than when it is withheld. In fact, the largest, most expensive experiment in education history (See Figure 1) found that Direct Instruction materials outperformed all other forms of materials – by a lot and by every measure. On the other hand, so-called “discovery learning” has been found to consistently lead to unimpressive, and even negative, achievement gains. When it comes to improving learning outcomes for our students, it would be a mistake to disregard these results.

At this point, you might be asking yourself, “But what about the boring lectures I experienced when I was in school. You’re saying that’s good teaching?” The truth is, research shows that direct instruction is most effective when it includes opportunities for students to talk, make sense of the material, and practice the material to mastery. The endless, rambling lectures that too often monopolize class time should be replaced with clear and concise teacher presentations, which are then followed by students discussing, writing, and problem solving with the presented material. When we appreciate that our direct instruction will only be impactful when students are asked to do something with it, we ensure that the material we want students to know doesn’t just go “in one ear and out the other”. 

Reference

Carnine, D. (2000). Why Education Experts Resist Effective Practices. Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.

In this episode, I will be speaking with Rod Naquin and North Landesman, two fantastic educators who are going to be talking to us about the researchED conference that was held in Frederick, Maryland, back in October.

For listeners who are unfamiliar with researchED, it is a UK-based organization that puts on affordable, evidence-informed conferences all over the world. According to the researchED website, the goal of researchED is to bridge the gap between research and practice in education. The conference that was held in Frederick this October, which was dubbed researchFRED, was particularly significant because it was the first in-person researchED conference to take place in the US since before COVID.

As someone who routinely grumbles on this podcast about the terrible PD I’ve received in my career on topics such as learning styles, factory model education, and what North will call “feelings-based” teaching, researchED is right up my alley. Of course, Twitter being Twitter, people have been known to lob their criticisms at researchED from time to time, most of which tend to come off as conspiratorial or just plain weird. I mean, what could be so wrong with a bunch of teachers meeting in an empty school on a weekend to talk about dual coding and retrieval practice? And for 45 bucks, no less? We’ll get into all of this and more in this exciting episode – the 16th of this season, in fact – featuring Rod Naquin and North Landesman.

Rod: Twitter | Blog on Substack

North: Twitter

Every week, I write a short blurb about teaching and learning for my school’s parent newsletter. They’re supposed to be brief, punchy, and informative. I’ve decided to post old ones on this site from time to time so that teachers and leaders can steal them to use in their own newsletters. I hope doing so saves you time.

– Dr. G

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School’s Too Important to Sleep Through

We know that many of the highest paying, most fulfilling jobs require graduates who are skilled at reading, writing, and solving problems. This is one of the many reasons we take academics so seriously here at _________. Previously in this space, I’ve discussed the myth around Google as a replacement for teacher-led instruction. This week, I’d like to talk about sleep.

It’s long been known that teenagers in the U.S. do not always get enough sleep. This is a huge problem that has only worsened now that kids are able to bring cellphones with them to bed. Scientists have found that a lack of sleep leads to poorer performance on activities related to school. Sleep-deprived children tend to get angry quicker, pay attention less, and tend to be more anxious and depressed. While most young people would prefer to stay up late if given the choice, this is not in their best interests. They need a full night’s sleep.

Many students tell me that they have a bedtime, and that their parents hold them to it every night. Starting up a bedtime after your child has gotten used to not having one might be a struggle in the short term, but it pays off in the long run. I suggest having a family conversation about the benefits of sleep for healthy living, and negotiating a bedtime routine that will allow them to get at least 7-9 hours of sleep. This routine should include the rule that their cell phone charges in a separate part of the house, away from earshot. By keeping bedtime sacred, and removing the temptation to check their phones, we give our students the gift of some much-needed shut-eye.   

In this episode, we are going to be talking about the road to becoming an evidence-informed school with the one, the only, Jade Pearce!

Jade is the author of What Every Teacher Needs to Know, and so it was fitting that we began this interview talking about three things that every teacher should know. And the first that she mentions is that teaching can be “evidence-informed”. Approaching teaching and learning in an evidence-informed way means that what we do, to the greatest possible extent, is backed by the best available research on whether or not something will work. Neelen and Kirschner have this to say about the evidence-informed approach: “Only when we use the evidence available to us as practitioners can we improve our practice through making well-informed decisions. [Being evidence-informed] prevents us from wasting time and money and doing potential harm to learners. It also increases our credibility as a profession.”

Unfortunately in education, many schools are much more interested in pyramids and Pinterest than making any real effort to take evidence seriously. Even when a school does decide that research is important, it’s not immediately clear what should be done next. This is why I was so thrilled to have Jade on the podcast to share her expertise of developing a school and a network of educators who read and think about research in ways that seem, to be perfectly frank, much more sophisticated than anything I’ve experienced in my career. So please, sit back and relax with this fascinating episode of Progressively Incorrect, featuring Jade Pearce.

Jade’s blog | Follow Jade on Twitter

Teaching and Learning Spotlight (link)

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Every week, I write these short blurbs about teaching and learning for my school’s parent newsletter. They’re supposed to be brief, punchy, and informative. I’ve decided to post old ones on this site from time to time so that teachers and leaders can steal them to use in their own newsletters. I hope doing so saves you time.

– Dr. G

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Has Google revolutionized education?

I’m often told that education today needs to change to meet the needs of tomorrow. One of the reasons given is that our students no longer need to go to a teacher or a library to gain access to the world’s most powerful knowledge; They can simply Google it on their smartphones.

There’s a lot to unpack there, but if you follow my messages in this newsletter, you’ll know that I love a good unpacking. The first problem with having a “Google-based” education is well-known: Much of what is found on the internet is unhelpful, harmful, or factually incorrect. In order to sort through all of the nonsense that is on the internet, students need to know how to ask Google the right questions. And therein lies the next problem: In order to ask the right questions, students need to have a lot of knowledge already. We can’t expect a student to spontaneously Google “What materials were used to make sarcophagi” if they don’t have the faintest clue what a sarcophagus is or why they should care!

Another problem with replacing “old-fashioned teaching” with Google is something I learned very recently from Saskia Giebl, a scientist who studies Google and learning. In her research, she asked students to either a) Google questions to find answers or b) Think about the answers to questions and then use Google to check their answers. As you probably predicted, the students who thought about the questions first learned more from using Google than the students who Googled without thinking. While Google is a useful tool for finding information, it’s also the case that relying on Google can create passive learning experiences that do not engage the mind.   

So, has Google revolutionized education? Kinda, sorta, but not really. We still need to teach students interesting and powerful stuff, and we still need to encourage them to think hard about that stuff. Only then can we expect Google to expand our scholars’ horizons in ways that weren’t possible before the internet.