How Learning Happens: Seminal Works in Educational Psychology and What They Mean in Practice

[00:01] Announcer:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, helping you build capacity for instructional leadership. Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center, Dr. Justin Bader. Welcome, everyone, to Principal Center Radio.

[00:13] SPEAKER_00:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to welcome to the program Dr. Carl Hendrick. Carl is professor at Academica University of Applied Sciences in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, where he translates research findings into practical teaching strategies. He taught English at the secondary level for 18 years and holds a PhD in education from King's College, London, and is the author of three books, including How Learning Happens, Seminal Works in Educational Psychology, and What They Mean in Practice.

[00:42] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:45] SPEAKER_00:

Carl, welcome to Principal Center Radio.

[00:47] SPEAKER_01:

Thank you for having me.

[00:48] SPEAKER_00:

I've been looking forward to speaking with you for quite some time because I know you have your finger on the pulse, not only of the research that affects education, but but the failure in education to learn from that research and the many ways in which often we get it wrong. We get some basics wrong about how learning actually happens. And I was very excited to see your book endorsed by Daniel Willingham, the cognitive psychologist who's very well known in American education circles, as well as Dylan William. Talk to us a little bit about what you saw happening in the field that prompted you and your co-author, Paul Kirshner, to write the book.

[01:25] SPEAKER_01:

Well, it's a strange thing. If you go to any university, you'll find an education department that is filled with philosophers, sociologists, but very little in the way of cognitive science. So you'll see this kind of divide between the psychology department and the education department. whatever about the philosophy of education and sociology, and there may be important things to look at, but what was really of concern to me as a teacher at the time was, well, you know, what are the key takeaways I'd want to know about how learning happens or what John Sweller calls cognitive architecture, specifically relating to things like memory, how the brain processes, stores, retrieves information. I found, you know, the longer I was going ahead and teaching that these things were really important. And I was curious as to why I'd never heard of them.

[02:17]

And then I thought, well, I, you know, I'll do some further research in the field. And I did a master's degree in modern literature. So I did it on T.S. Eliot, Joyce, stuff like that. But then I decided to do a PhD in education, and I, again, didn't encounter any of this.

[02:34]

And it was really off my own bat that I encountered, starting, I think, with probably Dan William, as you mentioned, but then reading specifically about research probably beginning around the 1950s with George Miller. to do with things like the limitations of working memory. And I remember thinking, God, this is really important. Why is this not included in teacher education? Why is this not a part of teacher training? And that kind of began my journey probably 10 years ago.

[03:01]

So I then became really interested in, well, how do we democratize this research? How do we get this into the hands of teachers and how can they use this? So that was kind of the start of my journey probably 10 years ago.

[03:10] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, very interesting. And I would echo much of what you said about reading Dan Willingham's work. Another turning point for me was reading Natalie Wexler's book, The Knowledge Gap, where she talks about how we've really downplayed knowledge, which to me, it makes total sense that we would downplay memory that we would not really value and understanding of. how memory works and how we acquire new information. Take us into a little bit of what you think educators need to understand about memory that we're simply not taught. Because I would say the same thing, that I went through all of my education, all the way through without ever learning any of this as part of education courses.

[03:47]

And I did take some psychology courses and got some of that there. But yeah, it's absolutely not part of what we expect teachers to acquire in the process of becoming teachers. So yeah, help us understand what we need to just at a high level about memory and kind of how the architecture of the brain works in that regard.

[04:06] SPEAKER_01:

There's really three major paradigms about learning that we have. One is behaviorism, which is this idea that we can measure learning through external observable behaviors. We can condition it, really not interested in any internal models of the mind. The second one is constructivism, which is a belief that each individual constructs their own knowledge, their understanding of knowledge. This has its roots in Rousseau, but it really gets moving in the turn of the century in the US with Dewey and then Piaget in Europe. And then specifically around the 1950s, where educators really got hold of the work of Vygotsky and Brunner.

[04:48]

And out of that tradition then becomes this broader tradition of minimally guided instruction, the idea that you learn things best for yourself when you discovered for yourself, or you know, things are not taught to you. And that's kind of the default position. You know, if you see any Hollywood movies, you'll see that, you know, the kind of authoritative teachers a bad figure, you just look inside yourself, if you just kind of figure things out for yourself, that's best. The third major paradigm is cognitivism, which I suppose the real roots of that is Ebbinghaus in the 1880s, but really in the 50s with people like George Miller, whose famous paper, The Magical Number of Plus or Minus Seven, Plus or Minus Two, measures the limitations of working memory. Built on that, then you get these models of the mind, Badley and Hitch.

[05:39]

They really come up with this idea of working memory as opposed to short-term memory. You have other figures like toving, episodic memory. And then in the 1980s, we get John Sweller. And John Sweller comes up with cognitive load theory. John Sweller really has been working in this field for probably 50 years. And the basic premise is very simple.

[06:02]

We have evolved to acquire information in two ways. One, we can learn it from other people. And that's really our superpower as mammalian species. No other species do that. We can acquire extraordinary amounts of complex information from other people. In other words, if we're told it or shown it.

[06:22]

The second way is we can figure things out for ourselves. And that's really inefficient and really a poor way of trying to learn specifically complex things. So cognitive load theory tells us that really based on that and based on the limitations of working memory and the relative, as far as we know it, infinite store of long-term memory, more stuff you have in your long-term memory, the more creative you can be, the more your working memory is freed up. And the best way to do that is fully guided instruction, at least in the initial stages. So if you want to learn stuff or if you want kids to learn stuff, particularly if it's stuff they don't want to learn, like quadratic equations or Shakespeare, The most kind of evidenced way of doing that is to show them, is to tell them, is to explain to them very clearly. And then in the latter stages, when they have built up a store in their long-term memory, then they can do independent practice.

[07:16]

In education, for whatever reason, we have that backwards. The idea that you can discover things for yourself, that teachers talking to students is a bad thing. And I would say that that belief is... the default position in many areas of education today.

[07:32]

It's changing in different territories, but certainly it's what Richard Mayer would call the dominant view of how learning happens. And it's fundamentally wrong.

[07:42] SPEAKER_00:

It's interesting, as you ran through that list of about half a dozen names, all of our listeners will be familiar with Dewey and perhaps Piaget and Vygotsky. And I haven't heard the name Vygotsky in a couple of years, but I remember hearing it constantly throughout my entire education. But I don't think I had heard prior to your book of any of the authors that you mentioned whose work we'll get into today about how the brain actually learns. And if I'm understanding what you're saying correctly, it's not false that we do learn on our own. We can figure things out. We have that capacity and certainly understanding human development and how people learn on their own might be worth knowing.

[08:18]

But as you said, it's grossly inefficient compared to what we have learned from cognitive science. And you said cognitivism, do I have that word right? Yeah. Let's get into that a little bit more because there's some very interesting research around working memory and kind of an interesting backstory to phone numbers. Take us into that if you would.

[08:39] SPEAKER_01:

Well, George Miller was tasked by Bell Labs, I think, in the 50s. He was asked, what's the optimum number of digits that you would have in a phone number? So he did a series of experiments, quite weird experiments, actually. You would think that you would simply get people to, you know, well, how many things can you remember? But he did a series of experiments around things like musical notes, musical tones, color hues. And what he was trying to get at was how many novel units of information we can hold in our working memory at any given moment.

[09:10]

Ebbinghaus did a series of experiments on himself in the 1880s, where he looked at sort of nonsense syllables, three-letter words. Now, on the one hand, it was a really good idea because he was isolating what he could remember and not remember. If you ask someone to remember the word cat, it's so confounded or so influenced by what you already know that he wanted to kind of isolate those things and see, well, how long can you remember them? he didn't realize was that's not really how memory works we don't remember things verbatim memory is not a tape recorder it's not a file drawer where you pull things out and again this was my journey was really getting to grips with this memory is really reconstructive and in the book i wrote a chapter on frederick bartlett and his work showed that we really understand things

[10:03]

through what we already know. Memory is semantic in nature. Every time we recall or retrieve something, we relay down that memory. And that's kind of where the learning happens, which is why retrieval is such a powerful learning event. So Miller did these experiments and he sort of found that the optimum number is five plus or minus two, sometimes seven, sometimes lower. And that was the number then that became the standard, however many digits it was in the 1950s.

[10:29]

Yeah.

[10:30] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, so when we transition from the Transylvania 65000 format to the modern, in the US we have the three-digit area code and then a seven-digit phone number, that comes from that research on the working memory. So Carl, talk to us a little bit more about how working memory plays into how we teach, because certainly the whole constructivist perspective and the idea that making meaning is what matters, downplays the role of memory in the first place. And we've been taught, you know, that higher order thinking is better memory and certainly memorizing is bad, but memory, you know, just does not play a very important role in the leading theories that are circulating in the education profession. Take us into more. that a little bit more?

[11:11] SPEAKER_01:

Well, you know, as my colleague Paul Kirshner would say, constructivism is best thought of as an epistemology or philosophy, not so much a pedagogy. And that's really where the confusion occurs. I think it's true in the broadest sense that we do construct meaning ourselves. So that's consistent with what we know about memory, that we Encounter novel information or knowledge, and it must stick to something that's already there. Actually, Dan Willingham has a wonderful phrase for this, understanding is remembering in disguise. This idea that when you have this feeling of, oh, right, so it's like this, that's really us drawing together different strands of our memory.

[11:52]

So that's, you know, the more stuff we have in our long-term memory, the more we can understand the world. And the incredible thing is that working memory, the limitations of working memory are obviated by what's in our long-term memory. Right now, I'm speaking to, I'm not even really thinking about what I'm saying. It's all automated. I'm using an incredible amount of words, phrases, language, letters, meaning, all relatively effortless. But if I was to speak in another language, A, or if I was to talk about something that I didn't understand or know about, B, all of that would be extremely limited.

[12:29]

It would be kind of narrowed down. When we're teaching kids stuff in school, that's what their experience is. So their working memory is the kind of bottleneck. It's the driver through which learning happens. It occurred to me, how do we leverage that? That's really what cognitive load theory is looking at.

[12:46]

How do we get around that? What are the techniques that we can use? What are the ways in which we can circumvent those limitations? And you know, minimally guided instruction techniques such as discovery learning, elements of inquiry learning. They're just inconsistent with what we know about how the mind works, the limitations of working memory. And then you have this extraordinary, again, these are models and all models are wrong, but some are more useful than others, schemas of knowledge.

[13:17]

And knowledge is an extraordinary thing. And it really is only in education departments or in certain circles that it's seen as not essential or the value of explicit instruction and teaching things.

[13:32] SPEAKER_00:

Well, it's so interesting, Carl, that we have heard so little about working memory and cognitive load theory. You know, what we hear a lot about as we become educators and work in the field of education is Bloom's taxonomy. And we hear the idea that higher order tasks are good. Students should be doing more higher order learning and maybe less learning. of the lower level kind of work that memory would focus on and really a downplaying of memory and knowledge and seeing those as kind of the worst form of learning. Take us into cognitive load theory a bit more and what it means for helping students acquire new information efficiently, because that question of efficiency, I think, has to matter, right?

[14:14]

Like if we have students learn at one-tenth the speed they could be learning, because we're committed to, you know, a more constructivist approach, we're going to miss some real opportunities to help students move forward. So what does cognitive load theory mean for education?

[14:28] SPEAKER_01:

So I think, you know, what we've seen really is the dead's poetification of teaching where it's sort of seen as this inspirational, wonderful thing at a kind of very superficial level or at a very cursory level. And if you ask anyone, you know, the average person on the street, they'll say, well, you know, I kind of learn things best if I do it for myself or I'll, you know, they might even talk about debunked ideas like learning styles. But really the best predictor of performance in any given domain is the presence or absence of knowledge in that domain. So we talk about thinking skills or 21st century skills, but what are you going to think with? And what you're going to think with is knowledge about that particular topic, that particular domain. Otherwise, we're into a kind of something supernatural where you just kind of like magically come up with some great thing.

[15:25]

And that's maybe true of a very small percentage of people who just have an innate ability to autodidact or very small percentage of people, the vast majority of people really need explicit instruction in a given domain, and then particular practice. Cognitive load theory is based on a number of things. One of them is David Geary's work on evolutionary psychology. He makes a distinction between two types of knowledge, biologically primary knowledge, biologically secondary. Biologically primary knowledge are things we've kind of evolved to do. So, you know, teamwork, talking is a good example.

[15:58]

I have... three-year-old twins and a six-year-old and you know just watching them learn to talk and as any parent will experience it's extraordinary how they just kind of you hear them use phrases and you go well you know how did you know to pick that up they just have this innate ability to do it but then i noticed with my eldest daughter that when it came to learning how to read it was a completely different thing And she did not pick that up. And she needed very specific and explicit forms of instruction to learn letters. You know, reading is a relatively new thing in our evolutionary history.

[16:32]

Talking is not. So biologically secondary knowledge then are things like reading, you know, academic knowledge, expertise, and those things, you only acquire them through explicit instruction from an expert. So we're really talking about the stuff that we want kids to learn in school. Cognitive load theory has a number of effects. And the interesting thing about cognitive load theory is that a lot of research from cognitive science is done in a laboratory. So there's a broad extrapolation of how that would work in a classroom.

[17:06]

And criticism of it is fair, because what works in a laboratory with undergraduate students is not always going to work with sixth graders on a Friday afternoon. But a lot of the work in cognitive load theory is done in classrooms. It's done in the field. And what we find is that there are a number of effects associated with the theory. For example, the worked example effect, which is a very basic thing, and I think which most teachers know, which is you show students fully worked through or partly worked through examples. The teacher does it themselves, shows them how to do it.

[17:44]

You do it kind of together or partial thing. And then the student does it.

[17:50] SPEAKER_00:

Which is how we teach math, right? Everybody's experienced that in math, but maybe not any other subject.

[17:55] SPEAKER_01:

Well, that's the thing. Yeah. And certainly in the humanities and English, for example, English is often has some of the worst. I'm an English teacher, has some of the worst examples of instruction. Maybe, you know, some of the answers or some of what we want students to learn is a little bit more ambiguous and a little bit more philosophical in nature. And that's fine.

[18:11]

But you can't really discovery learn your way through Othello or Hamlet. Or you can do it, but it will look pretty awful. And so... Cognitive load theory then says that, well, a very simple way, clear, explicit instruction in the early stages of a given domain, and then a gradual handing over, scaffolding, and then independent practice.

[18:31]

As Paul and I said in the book, the paradox about independent learning is that independent learning is a bad way to become an independent learner. So we all want students to be autonomous, working independently. It's just that within the field of cognitive science, we have a very different way about how to get there. And the way to get there is often counterintuitive. That's the thing about learning is that it's highly, highly counterintuitive. The things that we think would work don't.

[19:00]

And this is why I think we would call it a science because, you know, pre the germ theory of disease, there was this sense, well, you know, if you have something bad in your blood, you need to do some bloodletting, or maybe there's an external supernatural force that we need to ask to help us, or maybe there's bad spirits, or X, Y, Z. And then we discovered there was a germ theory of disease, and you have the counterintuitive thing of, well, if you are vaccinated or inoculated for something, by getting a small amount of that thing, that's effective. And I think the same is true of learning in the sense that things are counterintuitive. So Robert Bjork's work on desirable difficulty shows us that, for example, learning in the early stages can often feel like you're not learning. So things that lead to long term learning often don't feel like learning.

[19:50]

And paradoxically, things which do feel like you're learning stuff are often very short lived and don't work. Now, we accept that in so many different other fields. So everybody knows if you want to lose weight, if you want to get healthy, you need a little bit of short term pain. You need to go to the gym. You need to do things that you instinctively don't want to do. You need to, when you kind of start training and you start running, everything in your body is screaming, no, this is terrible.

[20:14]

Get back on the sofa. You want to eat the chips. You want to eat the cake. You don't want to eat the salad. You don't want to eat the lentils. But we know through evidence and through science that actually these things, although they feel bad in the short term, they're much better for long-term gain.

[20:30]

But yet we don't seem to have understood this about learning. That, you know, things in the short term, and we can maybe talk a little bit about what those things are, but you experience this period of what Björk calls kind of an illusion of competence. So you have this feeling of, oh, I know this. So if you're kind of talking about a topic in a group or if you're reading it and highlighting it or whatever, you can have this feeling of, oh, I'm learning this. I know this is fine. But really, you don't.

[20:58]

And conversely, when you're forced to kind of repeat it or retrieve it or learn it, it can feel like, oh, I'm confused. But actually, the opposite is true. So learning is counterintuitive. Cognitive load theory takes this into account. It has tested a lot of these things. And, you know, probably the biggest piece of education research ever done was done in the US in the 60s.

[21:19]

uh project follow-through the results were completely unambiguous and they were com and it was done over about 11 year period and the results were that direct instruction was the most effective way of getting from students from a to b in a particular domain of knowledge and weirdly it had a better effect on things like self-efficacy and their belief about themselves so that was another counter-intuitive thing about the finding Much more effective in discovery learning, inquiry learning, minimally guided instruction. But for whatever reason, we've not adopted that. And I think it's to the great detriment of many students.

[21:55] SPEAKER_00:

One thing you say in the book, I believe, is that novices are not mini experts. What does that mean?

[22:03] SPEAKER_01:

Well, there's a belief, I think, in certain circles that children are sort of like mini adults. I tried to avoid social media. I use it to sort of flesh through ideas and connect with people that I like. But as you know, Justin, you say something on social media and the next thing you're in this...

[22:18]

hellscape of idiocy. You know, I see things like a recent one was why should we have kids sitting in rows? After all, you know, in no workplace in the world would you sit in rows? And the thinking there is, well, in order to prepare kids for the workplace, we should treat them like you know, adults. Well, if that were true, then should we also treat them about alcohol, about driving cars, about adult relationships, and all the other inappropriate things? No.

[22:48]

So things that we would deem appropriate for kids, such as certain foods, bedtime, certain behaviors, that belief comes from this idea, well, kids are many... So they're kind of preformed. And it really comes, I think, from Rousseau and his idea that kids are innately good and that you just need to get out of the way as an adult. You just need to allow them to discover that goodness within themselves.

[23:15]

Again, I think this is another idea that's pretty dominant within society. And again, deeply, deeply flawed. It's not that children are good or bad, but children will flourish in an environment where there are boundaries. Yes, where there's love, where there's regard, where they're cared for, where they're really looked after and respected. But As any parent will know, without rules and boundaries, kids will often not be good with others, but it's not good for themselves. And again, the paradox of learning is that sometimes through constraints comes creativity and comes this sense of exploration and fun.

[23:53]

So, yeah, I think that idea that kids are little small adults and we should kind of pull that out of them. It's nonsense. As a society of responsible adults, we need to provide the best environment in which kids can flourish. And unfortunately, in many schools, that's one where there is an absence of rules and where...

[24:16]

The very worst behaved kids are the most rewarded, and the students who are the best behaved are often the ones who suffer the most, which is a shame.

[24:26] SPEAKER_00:

The desks and rows discourse has been an interesting lens for that because we tend to think, you know, on the basis of really nothing more than vibes, that rows are bad, that sitting kids around a cluster of desks where they're all facing one another, they're not facing the teacher... They're spending a lot of time doing things in groups, having discussions, doing kind of less structured tasks, not getting explicit instruction. You know, vibes wise, that has felt better to us, at least in kind of American progressive education circles. But from the studies in your book that you review, and I do want to talk about the structure of the book, it sounds like that is not the best way to produce learning and not the best way to produce the vibes that we want, right?

[25:10]

We want kids to enjoy the school day. We hear phrases like drill and kill to kind of downplay explicit instruction. We hear vibes like constructivism seem to create the kind of experience that we want. But you're saying they don't really create the learning that we want. And that is not the experience that we want students to get.

[25:29] SPEAKER_01:

Right. I would really encourage any of your listeners to go and Google Siegfried Engelmann, his lessons in the 1960s, the originator of direct instruction, which most people think is just lecturing. Nothing could be further from the truth. Go and look at Siegfried Engelmann, his lessons in the 1960s, where he's teaching. His whole thing was, how do we teach disenfranchised, disadvantaged kids? often in inner city environments.

[25:56]

How do we get them good at maths and reading? And if you look at those lessons, they are unbelievably engaging, unbelievably fun. The kids are so happy. They have this feeling like they're learning things. He's constantly asking questions. One of the great misconceptions about direct instruction and the variant explicit direct instruction from Hollingsworth and Ybarra, and they're even more sort of extreme about this, I would say, that it will come as a big surprise to many people to learn that in explicit direct instruction, the guidance is that you should not go longer than two minutes without checking in on the students.

[26:28]

In other words, the teacher shouldn't talk for longer than two minutes before they check for understanding. And there's very clear ways of doing that. So you want this constant interaction and engagement between the teacher and the student. And it's just overwhelmingly powerful. And so what you get is you get on, particularly on standardized tests, you get these dramatic scores where there is explicit direct instruction. And then what the kind of, and again, I don't like the way many educations have hijacked the word progressive.

[26:57]

For me, direct instruction is progressive. If we mean by progressive, something that is emancipatory, that helps the most students needy members of our society, then that method is explicit direct instruction. It is not inquiry learning. Where you see inquiry learning is often with the most privileged end of our culture. I have visited many schools around the world, including in the US. I've been to places like Phillips Exeter Academy, where they have Harkness learning in classrooms of 12 students, where they have extremely knowledgeable, able students, zero teacher instruction, and the kids just talk for an hour.

[27:36]

And that's great if you have very able students whose parents are lawyers and doctors and philosophers and all the rest of it. And there's classrooms, you can afford to have 12 in a classroom, but for the vast majority of kids, that's just not how learning happens. So desks and rows. Again, another weird thing, many kids are introverts. Many kids don't really like the clamor, the noise. They want to read.

[27:59]

They want to read a book. They want to read with their own thoughts. They want to reflect and think about what they've learned. They want to listen to the teacher. And they're deprived of that because as you say, just vibes, this idea, well, you know, if they're sitting in groups and they're kind of talking, then that's how learning happens. Certainly, you know, in the first five years of my career, it was the idea, you know, when we talk about constructivism, it's really this idea that learning is dialogic, which it is, of course, but it doesn't mean that kids learn through talking through each other.

[28:25]

I was always struck by a brilliant book called The Hidden Lives of Learners by Graham Nuttall. He did research where he showed that 80% of what kids learn, they learn from each other. which sounds great until you learn that 80% of that is wrong. So all these kids sitting in groups and tables and talking to each other, it's often a very kind of superficial form of learning. So again, like you say, desks and rows, it's seen as a draconian thing. Direct instruction is a draconian thing, but nothing could be further from the truth.

[28:54]

It's a powerful and explicit direct instruction classroom. It's a dynamic, fun, engaging place to be. But again, it has been... very much sidelined in contemporary education.

[29:08] SPEAKER_00:

Very well said. I wonder if we could talk just briefly about the structure of the book and then where it ends up. Every chapter, and there are quite a few chapters, 30 or so, is organized around a specific paper, probably, frankly, that none of us have ever heard of. for, and you very quickly explain why you should read this article, what it's about, what it says, and then what it means for teaching and learning. Help us think about these papers. How did you come across them, and why have we never heard of so many of these papers?

[29:37] SPEAKER_01:

Paul Kushner, who I wrote the book with, is an incredible man in many ways. He is incredibly knowledgeable about cognitive science. He's been working in the field for 40 years. He's originally from New York, moved to the Netherlands. We had worked on a few things before and he asked me to write this book with him. And the idea was that we would take research and make it available to teachers.

[30:00]

So we kind of had this idea of, well, what are the greatest hits? You know, like what's the, like the Rolling Stone top 100 albums? What's the education version of that? And we kind of spoke to a few people and we thought, well, We want to take this from the field of education, psychology, cognitive science. And, you know, Paul had a pretty good idea of what that was, but we spoke to a few people and we kind of made this list. We had about 50 papers originally, and they were either their papers or their chapters and books.

[30:27]

You know, some of them are, as you say, known within some systems, but the vast majority of them, as you say, are not known. We kind of thought, well, what would we want teachers to know about how the brain learns? Like what are the seminal works? So we went back and we looked at research and papers and we thought, okay, we'll post the abstract from the work and then we'll write a little kind of introduction to why you should read this. Then we'll break down what's in the chapter and then we'll kind of try to link it to the classroom in terms of what teachers need to know. And just this year, actually, when we wrote the book and then we wrote a follow-up book, but really the How Learning Happens book was an attempt to bridge the gap.

[31:10]

But in subsequent years, we realized that there's still so much work to do to translate that into different classrooms. So we came up with this online course that is going to be launched. It's being pilot tested in the US right now, but we are going to launch it in the new year. And we're going to update that regularly. And the idea is to really think about those original papers and that original research. And what if you're a fifth grade teacher?

[31:36]

What if you're a high school teacher? What if you teach history? What are all the different permutations? How would you harness this research? What would be the thing that would be helpful to do? and really to help teachers have a pretty good mental model of how learning happens so that they can make a decision.

[31:52]

This is about really the empowerment of teachers. When I look at myself and I just go back to that guy in the first couple of years of teaching, he really didn't know any of this and was just flailing around blindly and just kind of going with what he had learned through education theorists and what would I want that person to know And what we're talking about is probabilities. We're talking about the best bets. This is the best available evidence we have about how learning happens, about our learning sticks, and the ways in which teachers can, what are the levers we can pull as educators to help students learn things? So that was our idea for the book. And this year, Justin, I've been fortunate to travel around talking to many teachers in many environments and What strikes me and also through the work that you do is how few teachers know this and also the thirst for this.

[32:42]

You know, many teachers will say, wow, you know, as Dan Willingham, I was at a conference with Dan Willingham and he was, you know, he was telling me how he's just constantly surprised at how many teachers go, I'd never heard this before. You know, why had I not known this? So that's the mission and that's the task. And I'm happy to be and grateful to be doing the work.

[33:03] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, and ironically and frustratingly, the part that I think most of us will be the most familiar with is actually the chapter toward the end on myths. You have a chapter called The Ten Deadly Sins in Education, and then The Lethal Mutations, The Dirty Dozen. That's... mostly what we're taught.

[33:20]

The rest of this book is new information to us. Talk to us a little bit about the myths and the lethal mutations that have somehow become much more widely known and thought of as than the rest of the book. This is about an inch thick book full of foundational studies. Take us into those myths and why they're so pervasive.

[33:37] SPEAKER_01:

Well, probably the most egregious example is learning styles. If you walk out in the street now and ask anyone, would you say you're a visual learner or a They'd go, oh, you know, yeah, I guess I learn best through, you know. The idea is that with learning styles is not that we have learning preferences, which may or may not be true. For example, you may learn best. Some people like to listen to audiobooks. Some people like to see things visually.

[34:01]

The theory claims that if you attenuate instruction or if you plan your lessons to meet the style or the learning preference of the student, that they will learn it better. In other words... If you're a visual learner, then I need to plan what I'm teaching you to be visual.

[34:16] SPEAKER_00:

And many of us were explicitly required to do that as part of our teacher training and, you know, lesson plans that we had to turn in. Absolutely required long after this idea had been debunked in the research.

[34:27] SPEAKER_01:

Long, long after, Justin, long after. And, you know, incredibly inefficient. I mean, I remember effectively writing, planning three lessons for one lesson, one for the auditory learners, one for the visual learners, one for the kinesthetic learners, you know, the learners who have to learn by moving around. Really no evidence for this whatsoever. There is evidence that if information is presented in kind of two channels, so visual, so if you're teaching math, for example, having a, you know, a circle with the different fractions and the shape, there's strong evidence for that. Again, think about how stupid it is.

[35:00]

If you, let's say someone's an auditory learner and you want to teach them about the continent of Europe, should you do an audio book of a map? You know, it's just absolutely ridiculous.

[35:09] SPEAKER_00:

It's a property of the material much more than a property of the learner.

[35:12] SPEAKER_01:

Exactly. There's many such myths. The idea that we're right brained and left brained. And again, you know, weirdly, a lot of these things, they have a little grain of truth in them. So it seems like it could be right. But of course, it's not.

[35:23]

These ideas, ideas like them, are really really bad for things like equity things like inclusion things like the type of words that many progressive educators feel that they own which i think is you know a shame. So we just, we wrote this chapter, which is, you know, here's things to avoid. But I would say, actually, the worst example of all of this is the idea that you learn things best through, you know, discovering things for yourself. That's maybe the worst myth of all. You know, there's things that are, for example, the idea that only 10% of communication is verbal, you know, just absolute nonsense. Bloom's taxonomy.

[36:04]

In fact, Bloom himself later said that triangle, it's nothing to do with me. He never, you know, He never said anything to do with that. So there's all these myths about learning. And again, it's the low hanging fruit. And I think as a profession, we are many decades behind other fields, engineering, medicine, so on and so forth. And until we are a truly professionalized profession, I think that we're unfortunately letting down many kids and many educators and teachers as well who are doing things and planning lessons that are just you know who are doing extremely difficult work in difficult circumstances and not having the effect so I'm proud to be a part of a group of people who are seeking to help that like yourself and you know a lot more work to be done.

[36:53] SPEAKER_00:

Well, I greatly appreciate your contributions. I'm buying your other book today and hope we can talk about that sometime. But the book is How Learning Happens, Seminal Works in Educational Psychology and What They Mean in Practice. Carl Hendrick, thank you so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio. It's been a pleasure.

[37:11] SPEAKER_01:

Thank you, Justin.

[37:12] Announcer:

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