10 Things Schools Get Wrong and How We Can Get Them Right

[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.

[00:14] SPEAKER_01:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to welcome back to the program Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath, and welcome to the program for the first time, David Bott, authors together of 10 Things Schools Get Wrong and How We Can Get Them Right.

[00:29] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:31] SPEAKER_01:

Jared and David, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having us on.

[00:34] SPEAKER_00:

It's great to be here. Thank you.

[00:35] SPEAKER_01:

So, both of you have education backgrounds, and Jared, I know you have a neuroscience background, and we've talked about your previous book here on Principal Center Radio. Tell us a little bit of the background story of how the two of you came to work together and ultimately to write this book.

[00:49] SPEAKER_00:

Jared and I both do a lot of work with Australian schools and speaking at Australian conferences and so forth. Jared has a very specific angle on neuroscience and the science of learning. My background and passion is neuroscience. around student wellbeing and pedagogy as well. So we overlap, our work overlaps, but I think Jared has some, as you know, some fairly extreme, powerful views that are pretty moving and passionate, and so do I. And so it's kind of a Venn diagram, you might imagine, Justin, where Jared has some extreme kind of research-based ideas and I also have some around wellbeing, but we intersect in the middle.

[01:24]

So we have lots of arguments and discussion, but also agree on a lot of things. So we decided to write the book which has both our elements of argument and some nice, beautiful intersection in the middle.

[01:35] SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, that's what I always like. If I'm coming at it from kind of the learning science of learning angle, he's got this real on the ground because I haven't been in a classroom in 10 years. He still teaches also real on the ground focus on students well-being development. So you can assume, yeah, the take he what he brings is very different than what I've always thought. So it kind of led to this really sweet middle ground where a lot of these ideas come together. And I just love where a lot of these chapters ended up.

[02:03] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I love the way that you're tackling really what are tensions or dilemmas or kind of core debates in our profession that show up in so many different ways. And one that I spent a lot of time soaking in when you first sent me the book was this idea of teacher expertise and the idea that everyone has experienced teaching, but that that doesn't necessarily mean that everybody knows what good teaching is like or that everybody should be able to tell teachers how to do their jobs. Take us into that argument that you make.

[02:32] SPEAKER_02:

in chapter one about expertise and experience yeah we've got a really weird thing with teaching in that it's the one profession that everyone and their mother thinks they can do because they've experienced it which is weird because we all go to the dentist but nobody presumes to understand dentistry and we all watch law and order but none of us presume to know what it means to be an actor or a lawyer but we've all gone to school so yeah we all know what it means to be a teacher i i can teach those who can't do teach right that's easy and here's where you start to recognize that no when you actually drill down into the science of expertise and the field, the craft of teaching, you realize that no, teaching is a very specific set of skills. It is a practice you have to do. And just like any practice, if you want to get good at that practice and start to develop mental models so you can start to move and adapt on the fly, You have to devote time, effort, energy to that practice.

[03:23]

It's not enough to have watched somebody teach. You need to devote ample time. I'm talking years of your life to the craft of teaching. If you want to start to move on the fly and develop what we call expertise in teaching. So knowledge of a field, very different than knowledge of how to teach that field.

[03:40] SPEAKER_00:

Let me add just a tiny little angle to that, Justin. That is that we've just had the Australian Open Tennis Tournament just finished here in Australia. And I love, love watching tennis. When you watch Roger Federer or Ash Barty or Kyrgios, who's this Australian kind of incredible tennis player, right? They clearly are professionals. The reason they're professionals is because they have thousands of hours practice in their back pocket.

[04:05]

And they do these amazing things which are incredibly creative and they perform at this high level under pressure. They do that because they've had thousands of hours of practice. They've made mistakes. They've been on the court for so long. They've had coaching. They've had mentorship.

[04:18]

They've had a huge amount of experience. Professional teachers are the only people in the world that have had that amount of practice in the classroom. And so we have to start accepting that just as we acknowledge tennis players or dentists, as Justin, as Jared said, are experts in their very specific niche field. Teachers are the only people that have had the relevant experience, the relevant amount of training, the relevant number of mistakes to have. that amount of experience in their back pocket ready to perform at that level. But we sort of don't see teachers often in the same light as we see other professionals.

[04:52]

Even teachers themselves often don't view themselves as professionals at that level. So we're really encouraging teachers to elevate themselves and for the community more broadly to see teachers as the only experts in teaching that exist.

[05:05] SPEAKER_02:

And a lot of people say, well, then what's, who cares? Like, what's the point? Just teach, teach to teach. This matters because once you start to pull this back and you recognize that teachers have almost no voice whatsoever in policy decisions or in, cause I was just at a government meeting a couple of years ago. 100 people in a room talking education, not a single acting teacher in that room. Why?

[05:27]

And when I pressed the issue, I said, why? Their argument was because teachers are merely levers, right? We make the decision, kids are the customers, teachers are just levers that we pull to get the results we want. Why would they ever think that? Because nobody recognizes that teaching is a craft, a field. Right now, what we've done is we've conflated learning with teaching.

[05:49]

So I work at university with a bunch of people who know a ton about learning. They're scientists in the field of learning. Please go to any of their lectures and you'll see real fast that knowing about learning and knowing how to teach are two very different fields. And once we can start to reassert our expertise and start to step back up and get the world to recognize that no, no one does what teachers do, then ideally we can start to build that voice back up and start to have a say again and agency in our own work and in the larger context of school.

[06:17] SPEAKER_01:

It strikes me so strange that teaching is one of the only professions that's treated as a completely flat profession. There are no entry-level teaching positions, and then mid-level teaching positions, and then senior teaching positions. But if you look at almost any other profession, it's structured that way, where you start as a beginner, you start as a novice, and you can work your way up. Nursing, for example, has many, many levels of kind of uh of skill and certification and seniority but teaching like you're a teacher on your first day and you're a teacher until the day you retire and we don't really respect you know or organize things around the professional growth and the professional uh not professional development as an event or as a training but like the the growth in professional skill Like we don't recognize that in any kind of consistent way in our profession.

[07:08]

And even some of the ways that we used to like national board certification or, you know, kind of second level professional certification, often those take a back seat because we're so interested in being able to easily get more people into the profession to solve shortages, to be able to keep salaries low. that there's just not that career ladder there.

[07:27] SPEAKER_02:

And that is a huge problem, this idea, because we do the same thing down here in Australia. It's kind of called Teach for Australia, where it's like, let's get professionals in, and it's this revolving door of teaching. And the idea, of course, is that teaching is teaching is teaching. Everyone can do it, right? So give me somebody who's an expert at math, get them into the classroom to teach math, and everyone's going to do better. Well, no, aside from the fact that teaching and learning are very different things, and experts are usually the worst people to try and teach a field to novices, If you look at the trajectory of teachers, it's exactly what you would expect.

[07:59]

If teaching was just a thing, then from day dot one, they would be as good as 10 years later. But they're not. You see a steady progression in the effectiveness of teachers in about the first five years. And that five years is when they hit their what we're going to call their competency plateau. It takes five years to get good at teaching. Now, the trick is to recognize at that five years, once people plateau, because as you said, there's no structure to keep pushing harder, farther, faster.

[08:25]

Most people will stick with that plateau now for the next 30 years. But if you recognize and have the impetus to keep growing and learning, That five-year plateau doesn't stay. Now you can keep building until you get to your 10-year new plateau, 15-year new plateau. And we see all this data everywhere. Put in the work, the effort, you get better at it. It's not a, you were born with it, you got it, congratulations.

[08:48]

It's just like every other skill.

[08:50] SPEAKER_00:

I think it's actually a lot worse than even both of you are saying, because I think what we see in Australia and the same, Justin, in the US is that teachers are entering the profession unprepared really you know teacher training courses are not preparing teachers well enough anyway because it's too theory driven we don't teach the the profession of teaching is a practice and it should be a practice-based training that we do as we do with plumbers and nurses as you said but we we don't train teachers properly enough so they actually enter the workforce not they're ill-equipped actually i was ill-equipped in the classroom in year one and then i did develop in the first five years and i think jared's wrong actually i think what happens and is that after four or five years, not only do you plateau, but as you kind of reach a level of competency, you're not allowed to teach anymore. They start taking you out of teaching and put you into management position. So not only is there no kind of development trajectory, but you're actually disallowed to even practice your profession further, which is crazy.

[09:46]

And it doesn't really happen in any other mainstream profession in that way. So I think there's a lot that we can do structurally to try and rectify that. And I think the number one thing that I'm seeing, and it's an emerging trend in education, that we're seeing in Australia and kind of accelerated by COVID is the unbundling of the role of the teacher. You know, teachers need to be allowed to teach. And unfortunately, they're not. Not only do we take them out of teaching, put them into management positions, administration positions, but we also ask teachers to be marketers and accountants managing budgets and nurses putting on plasters and Band-Aids and kids get hurt.

[10:22]

You know, the teachers do so many roles that we don't allow teachers to teach. So I think the unbundling the role of the teacher, allowing teachers to sustain their growth trajectory through those four, five, six, 10, 20 years and allow the best teachers to teach even more, not even less. So we are seeing some evidence of, you know, mirroring some of the most, you know, the most esteemed professions, including medicine and law, et cetera. We're seeing that starting to come into teaching a little bit.

[10:48] SPEAKER_02:

And I think your two points there that I just want to doubly hit is one, you made the great point. Teaching is a craft, not a theory, but training for it is theoretical rather than craft-based. So we can start to ask questions about training. How do we get people on the site? That's where you're going to learn the skill. And two, once you extend, as you were saying, you're kind of...

[11:09]

you're getting to competency, that's when we take you out and that's when we bring in the new people. And if expertise takes time, about five years to become an expert at teaching, then all these programs about revolving door of let's get new teachers in every three years, nobody has the time to develop competence. And teaching will always look like a lesser profession if we never have the time to develop the expertise to actually do it. They'll just keep saying, oh, they suck bringing new ones. Oh, they suck bringing new ones. Well, yeah, that's what happens when you don't give us time.

[11:39] SPEAKER_01:

And I think so much of this does come down to, you know, the financial incentives and the kind of structures of the profession. You know, like one of the reasons that nursing is set up so well as a career ladder is that, you know, you can get more advanced certification, you can get more advanced skills and get paid more. Like you can get a more senior job and not necessarily do exactly what we do to teachers and say, now you can stop doing that thing that you've been practicing. You can do a completely different job. You can go into management or policy or something else. We can leave people in the classroom, but pay them more and continue to develop their skills.

[12:12]

It's just something we don't typically do.

[12:14] SPEAKER_02:

And that's what I'm hoping with this chapter of the book. it starts to lay out the arguments and the research to say, now go push back. So we've had this conversation before. People know this intuitively, but now you have the argument to make. Here's the foundation. So if anyone says, well, what are you talking about?

[12:31]

Boom, here's an outlined argument with all the data. Now you know what I'm trying to say.

[12:36] SPEAKER_01:

Well, let's jump into the next chapter here, because I think this is also a very important piece of the puzzle. The idea of evidence of effective practice and the problem of translating that evidence into practice so that we can benefit from it. Set that up for us, if you would.

[12:52] SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, so I think we've kind of got two angles. So the primary angle this is here is, yeah, everyone wants evidence-based practice. Everyone wants evidence-inspired, influenced practice. Cool. But the next time somebody asks you, hey, are you using an evidence-based practice? The only question you have to ask is, whose evidence do you want?

[13:11]

Here's where we start to learn that evidence isn't a unified thing. It's not one box that if it's in there, it's evidence. If it's out of there, it's not. Evidence across every field, across every level of science is very different. Me as a neuroscientist, what I consider evidence is totally different than what a psych considers evidence, totally different than what a anthropologist or a lawyer would consider evidence. And the joke is to recognize none of us think the other ones are wrong.

[13:38]

We just say your evidence is irrelevant in my field. I don't say a lawyer, oh, you're not doing science. Of course, I'm not doing science. They're doing law. They're allowed to develop their own standard of evidence. That is their field, their definitions.

[13:50]

Congratulations. However, in education, when we say evidence, we've just taken that to mean scientific evidence. Do you have laboratory-based data to support what you're doing? Without the recognition, and this is the translation, we believe that the classroom and the laboratory are part and parcel. If it made sense in my lab at uni, it's going to make sense in your classroom. And in this chapter, we go through the philosophical and actually now scientific arguments that demonstrate that no, the laboratory is a very different space than your classroom.

[14:21]

And evidence garnered in one field does not necessarily and might actually be contrary to practice in another field. So when we're talking about evidence, we start to recognize that by just deferring to scientific evidence, we're making a huge mistake because we're using evidence that wasn't defined by us, that might be meaningless to our field, and that might not actually help push us forward. That actually in the end demeans our field because all we start to say is, well, we don't know what we're looking for. So let's ask these outsiders who have never taught to tell us what evidence is valid and meaningful. And once you start to recognize the disconnect between the different types of evidence, then you can start to ask questions about what role does research play in practice and how do we draw a bridge between the laboratory and the classroom that's actually meaningful and not just browbeating top down, do as I say, don't have your own opinions, your own ideas.

[15:15] SPEAKER_00:

David, what do you think? Yeah, I completely agree. What you see in the medical field is that medical research is done in a laboratory first. And medical research is highly scientific. And what we see in medical research is that 90% of drugs that are developed in the laboratory are In vitro, in a petri dish, 90% of those drugs in the real world, in vivo, are either inert or they're harmful to humans. So even though they work in a lab, almost all of them fail in the real world.

[15:45]

And that's because the laboratories, as Jared said, in the real world are very, very different environments. And the classic example in education that we outline in the book is mindset theory. Now, Carol Dweck's mindset theory is the most dominant theory that's ever emerged out of psychology that's really impacted mainstream education probably in the last 20 years. It's had a huge worldwide impact in terms of gaining traction in mainstream education. And it got that traction because it was so successful in the laboratory. There's overwhelming evidence that mindset works.

[16:17]

in a laboratory and there is zero evidence that it works in the real world in mainstream education settings. There is some evidence it works for severely disadvantaged students in very specific settings. Time and time again, the research shows That mindset as an intervention works in a lab, but in mainstream education, it has zero or very close to zero impact. And that makes sense, right?

[16:40] SPEAKER_01:

Now, I have to ask there, Dave, do people throw things at you when you say that? I'd be a bit concerned for my safety if I were to say that at an education conference.

[16:48] SPEAKER_00:

I think you're right that people do get angry because the thing with mindset, it has such high face validity. This is the problem with mindset. It makes so much sense. Teachers want it to work. It's clean, efficient. It's such a beautiful packaged concept.

[17:03]

But the reality of teaching, as you know, is that... Teaching is beautiful and messy. Classroom is a wonderful, beautiful mess. And that's why we love it.

[17:14]

You know, it's world-class teaching is about embracing variables. World-class science is about eliminating variables. They're completely different worlds, right? And this is where we need to be very smart as educators. We need to be translators. We need to look at the science, absorb the science, but then translate it into this craft that we do.

[17:34] SPEAKER_02:

For those listeners who are wondering, okay, so they're just talking out of their bums. No, the theory that we're using here is called emergence theory. And it is in the last 20 years, it has thrown an absolute wrench into scientific research for the good, in my opinion. It stopped a lot of wheels that were going off the track. And what emergence essentially says is as you move between fields, so what we call levels of organization, different properties emerge that are unpredictable in any other field and that will feed back and change how things work. So as a simple example, if you have a cell and you put a bunch of cells together to build a tissue, that tissue has unique properties, permeability, malleability, elasticity, that no individual cell has.

[18:16]

That if you knew everything there was to know about a cell, you couldn't predict these things coming because they're not in the cell, they're only in the tissue. So emergence starts to say is now you start to see when you take a drug from the lab into the real world, the drug works perfectly fine in a lab. It's the emergent properties of an actual human body that feedback and actually start to change how that drug works. And now it becomes inert or harmful. When you take something in a lab where I've got one kid at a computer in a silent room and everything is really heavily controlled and throw that into a classroom, the emergent properties of the real world classroom will start to feed back and change the impact of that intervention. And in a lot of cases, it either kills the intervention or it actually flips it and makes it harmful.

[19:00]

This is why we can't, so emergence, it's not, we're not just saying, I think it should be like this. No, emergence is a very clear process, which demonstrates why this issue of evidence and translation is so important. And once you get to the end of this and you start to recognize that, okay, Evidence in a classroom has to be defined by teachers, by people working in a classroom. What is meaningful evidence in this context can only be defined by people who work in that context. Just like as a neuroscientist, I can define what evidence is meaningful for neuroscientists. And so long as we all agree, congratulations, that's evidence no one can tell us otherwise.

[19:37]

Teachers have that power in schools to say, no, Counting things isn't evidence to us. Button clicks or page views isn't meaningful evidence to us. Here's what we need to know about learning and growth. And so long as every other teacher agrees, congratulations, you've got valid evidence. And the last step to recognize once you've got that evidence then is collection and dissemination so the one reason every field major profession in the world works is because they have a consistent body of knowledge sitting behind them so if you want to be a neuroscientist the first couple years of your job you will have to read the last hundred years of what neuroscientists have done so you start where we're at today law you've got bookcases full of stuff in teaching we don't have a body of knowledge we've never consistently gathered evidence because we've never really defined our evidence In which case, when I retire, all my skills and abilities go with me.

[20:30]

The next teacher has to start where I started, not where I ended. So once we recognize that evidence is unique to us, then we can start to ask, how do we consistently build, collect, document that evidence we're getting every day to build a body of knowledge so that in 20 years, we have a bookcase to point to and say, you want to tell me how to do my job? There's my last 20 years of work. Go understand all of that and then we'll start talking. But until then, once we get that body of knowledge, that's when professionalism agency starts to stand up. Expertise becomes recognized again.

[21:00] SPEAKER_01:

Now, I think a lot of people would say, but don't we have all of this evidence on effective practices and effect sizes from, say, John Hattie's research? How does that kind of effectiveness research or effect size research factor in? Because, you know, obviously these studies are being done to some extent with real teachers in real classrooms, and there's a level of abstraction that's happening. But how do we think about that?

[21:24] SPEAKER_02:

to a much smaller extent than you would possibly understand. So again, you have to recognize, so John Hattie, colleague of mine, we worked together. He was my supervisor for years. Wonderful human being. He's a statistician. He's not a teacher.

[21:35]

When you do work in scientific fields like statistics, there is only a certain amount of evidence that counts as evidence. Essentially, you have to be able to quantify it in order to run statistics. In order to quantify information, you then have to necessarily strip back a lot of what we would refer to as learning and use easy learning measures that are quantifiable. So we haven't done this explicitly with visible learning yet, but we've done it with all of Marzano's stuff, so you can assume it's going to extend. If you take a look at Marzano's stuff, he does the same thing Hattie does, 93% of all the research that goes into his effect sizes defines learning as short-term recognition or recall of facts between 20 minutes and one day. 93%.

[22:21]

Now, that's not a bad definition of learning. It's just a highly narrow definition of learning that works in the laboratory. Here's a list of facts. Go away for half a day. Come back. Do you remember those facts the next day?

[22:35]

Congratulations. That's learning. Now that is, again, that's the beginning of learning. Think now, learning, we always talk about learning like a moment or an event. Learning is a trajectory. It's a long process.

[22:47]

It's not a thing. It's a long drawn out series of things. This version of learning, short-term recognition or recall of facts, is the beginning of learning. But most of what we care about in the classroom extends way beyond there. And unfortunately, most research doesn't ever look past there. So these effect sizes that Hattie and all these people use is really good.

[23:08]

Those are wonderful effect sizes at the start of learning, day one of learning, but they have almost nothing to say about deeper levels of learning. What do you mean by conceptualization? What do you mean by concept shifting and testing? What about transfers? And it's not that they don't want to explore these things. It's that quantitatively, we can't.

[23:27]

It's very hard to talk about deep learning in a number or an effect size. So what do they do? They just don't talk about it. And they define learning as a very narrow thing. So at the end of the day, you see no one is wrong about teaching and learning. Pretty much anyone who's ever said anything about learning at any level is going to be right.

[23:44]

The question is, where on the learning trajectory are they talking? Where are they aligning that evidence? The IB, Cultures of Thinking, Project Zero, they talk about deep learning. They have almost nothing to say about surface learning or transfer. Marzano, all them, they're talking at the surface with little to say about deep transfer. Everyone's right.

[24:02]

Our job is now as teachers is no longer to say, okay, what is the answer? Our job is to say, I got all these answers. Now I'm going to start to align and adapt for my context. With my kids, my emergent properties, how does this actually work? What does this mean for year five math kids on a Friday afternoon in deep level two of learning? And that's where we start to see the expertise of teachers.

[24:25] SPEAKER_00:

Two very quick points. One is that Hattie's work as a statistician is all looking at on average, what are the most effective strategies to use globally, right? So it's all about this on average, which for me as a teacher who's interested in amazing world-class practice is the wrong question to ask. I want to ask, what is it that the world-class teachers are doing that's different to average? I want to know, what is it that the weird, quirky things that people are doing that work? I want to look at those elements.

[24:52]

And I think that's also why we shouldn't be directing teachers always to look at, on average, what seems to work most of the time. Because you'll never have a lesson that is average. You'll never have a group that's average. I think it's a false kind of way to look at how to develop teachers. It has some value and we need to be looking at the idiosyncrasies of the world's best teachers, right? And the uniqueness of people.

[25:15]

The second point I just quickly wanted to make is this, that I think, you know, I've been in classrooms for 20 years and the magic that exists in a classroom, the actual artistry, the craft that occurs there, a lot of what happens is invisible, literally invisible. You know, the most powerful moments I experienced as a student that I could talk for hours about were things where I walked into a classroom and a teacher didn't say something to me, or it was a look or as a hand on the shoulder or as a vibe or a feel. And all of these kind of ethereal stuff that drives scientists crazy is the reality of what great teaching is about. It's the invisible beauty of great teaching that will never be measured in quantitative studies that we have to embrace if we're really trying to elevate this craft that we have to another level. So I think we also need to acknowledge that.

[26:08] SPEAKER_01:

Very well said. And I use the metaphor of an iceberg in thinking about the work that administrators and other instructional leaders do to help improve teaching. Often we're interested in evidence of practice. We're interested in what people are doing and documenting that and talking about that and how to improve it. But I've noticed that we tend to prefer things that are easy for us to see. And I call that tendency observability bias, that we are kind of preconditioned to notice things that are easy to notice and discount things that are more invisible, that are harder to see.

[26:40]

So thinking in terms of a metaphor of an iceberg, most of what you see when you're looking at an iceberg is the part, what you see is what's above the surface of the water. That's not where most of the iceberg lies. 90% of an iceberg is underwater. It's hidden. It's there. It matters.

[26:58]

And it can't be ignored, but it is harder to see. And I think when we're so preoccupied with what's easy for us to observe as administrators, sometimes we really do discount and underestimate the importance of that depth of practice and those harder to measure, certainly, aspects.

[27:14] SPEAKER_02:

It's important to recognize them with when we're talking about evidence is a lot of people still think evidence has to be quantitative, countable, observable. And you start to see that, no, there's anthropologists don't count a dang thing. Lawyers don't count things. They use precedence. So we can use quantitative. Sure.

[27:30]

We can also choose to use qualitative. We can use student input. We can use expert judgment. Yes, we are allowed to say, hey, the vibe in my room is dead. And so long as every other teacher knows what you're talking about. That's a viable source of evidence.

[27:43]

So yeah, exactly as you guys are saying is the measurement stuff isn't bad. It's just super narrow. And how do we consider evidence that's a lot further than that?

[27:52] SPEAKER_01:

And one topic that you tackle in chapter seven of the book, I wish we had time to go into every single chapter because it's fascinating. But in chapter seven, you talk about computers. And I feel like computers might be another one of those areas in education where there's been a lot of attention. There's been a lot of attempts at measurement because it's something that can be studied easily and measured easily and counted. And researchers tend to like things like computers. What's the reality on the ground?

[28:16]

What's your argument in chapter seven?

[28:18] SPEAKER_02:

This is funny, is you think mindset and computers would be the two biggest topics that people get angry at? Believe it or not, once you actually lay out the evidence, none of them do. A lot of them say, oh yeah, that makes perfect sense. You're like, gah. Computers are hilarious in that we've been studying them for 30 years and I don't know how much more data we need. They are not good for learning.

[28:38]

If you look at all the research done on everyone who's ever done a review on it comes back and says, ooh, it looks like it actually harms learning compared to live and in person. Ooh, it looks like at best it's equivalent. It's not harming, but it's not bringing anything new to the learning table. And at worst, it's actually making it worse. Yet we still love it. Why?

[28:56]

Because it exists. Because it's ubiquitous. Because I have a computer at home. If you want to understand the problem with computers, and we go into all these different arguments in the chapter, but the easiest way to understand it is nobody has ever argued that a computer can't be used for learning. There's nothing inherent about the tool that says it's not a learning tool. Literally any tool can be used for learning.

[29:16]

My coffee mug can be used for learning if I do it in the right way. The argument is that computers, kids spend so much more time using computers, not for learning purposes, that when we now try and shoehorn that purpose in, we have a massive hurdle, an obstacle we have to overcome, where now I've got to change your thinking about a tool to now use it in a different way than you're used to. And the one thing human beings are bad at is changing our story, our patterns, once we sit down and start to use a tool. It's as if you told me, I need you to start using your car to do jumping jacks on. Technically I can, but I spend so much time using my car to drive that anytime I'm not paying attention, I'm just gonna start driving it again. I'm like, oh, wait a second, jumping jacks.

[30:00]

It's a hard thing to do. So when I say they use it more often than not, when you actually extend the numbers, On average, teens and tweens, so 8 to 18, use computers for 200 hours a year for learning purposes. That's homework and schoolwork. Seems like a lot. Do you recognize they use that same computer over 2,000 hours every year to watch movies, listen to music, play video games, switch between media content? 200 hours versus 2,000 hours.

[30:30]

And we're wondering why when they sit down in front of a computer, they make it six minutes before they begin multitasking. This is why. It's not that the tool, no one says computers can't be used for learning. It's we've already lost this battle. It has become a tool of the world, and now we're trying to shoehorn it into education. Kids already have a really deep story about how it should be used, and it ain't for homework.

[30:51]

So that's why it tends to harm learning in the long run. It's just extra mess we have to try and fight through to get kids to do what we want them to do.

[30:59] SPEAKER_00:

A couple of points. Firstly, you know, Justin, as well, the book has 70 pages of references. There's almost as many pages of references as there is pages of argument in the book. So if you're interested in digging into all of the stuff that Jared's talking about, it's all there available for you. Just to counter Jared's argument a tiny bit, there is some evidence, small pockets of evidence that when used effectively, mostly by students who have not used computers before, as is the case in this really cool study in Malawi, Africa, that's just showing that amazing learning can come from students accessing iPads that are full of knowledge for the first time. You know, they've never had access to any kind of digital technology.

[31:39]

and you put an iPad in front of them with really cool software, and they use the tool for the purpose it was intended as an education tool, then they do learn to very rapidly accelerate their learning. So there are cases, and obviously during COVID, there are some amazing examples throughout the world of schools adapting rapidly to use online technology platforms to sustain learning, which otherwise might have stopped dead in its tracks 30 years ago. So we're not at all suggesting that technology is evil or that there is no place for computers or that we should just pull the plug. But we are suggesting we need to think very, very carefully about how we're using the tool, why we're using the tool, and to think about the design of the tools going forward. And we should not just use computers because, as Jared said, they're ubiquitous. So we have to be very, very careful with this tool as we need to be careful with homework, which is another chapter, another tool.

[32:31]

And as we have to be careful with grades, which is another chapter, which is another tool. These are all tools. They're all ubiquitous. And often we get them wrong because we don't analyze them enough. So we'll be quiet there and hand back to you, Justin.

[32:43] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I think for each of those examples that you focus on in the book, as you said, computers, rewards, 21st century skills, mindset, homework, grades, for all of those, it seems like we're getting increasingly detailed and definitive answers to very narrow questions. But the people who are formulating those answers and drawing those conclusions, for the most part, are not teachers. And it's teachers who have the craft knowledge, who have the specific expertise and the responsibility of making this all work. So narrow answers to narrow questions from outside the field of education are useful, but they don't translate directly into, what do I do on Monday? I think that's such a huge contribution of your book.

[33:31] SPEAKER_02:

That's the big translation issue that what we call prescriptive translation. What do I do? When you get narrow answers to narrow questions outside of education, the only thing you'll hear are what we call principles. So go back to what you were talking about with Hattie. Feedback works. Metacognition is good.

[33:50]

Practice and retrieval is strong. Those are awesome principles. The hell am I supposed to do with any of this stuff? Knowing that metacognition is good doesn't tell me how to teach metacognition, doesn't tell me how to engender it, doesn't tell me what do I do with my year six math students on a Friday afternoon to make sure they're being metacognitive. There is no prescriptive value. So we view this research what we call conceptually as a way of saying, cool, here's a new idea to think of.

[34:17]

But what does it mean when the rubber hits the road? The only people that can answer that question are practicing teachers themselves. And that's the type of evidence of work that we need to start building into a body of knowledge. Just so that the next teacher, when they read Hattie, they don't say, well, shoot, what does this mean for me? They can now go read the last 20 years of teachers working with it and say, oh, okay. here's how I can start to apply this.

[34:42]

Here's how I can start to gauge whether or not it's meaningful. So that final step can only be done by teachers. Until we recognize that, we're going to be fighting an uphill battle.

[34:50] SPEAKER_00:

Teaching is, in my opinion, probably in our opinion, the most beautiful profession on the planet. We choose this job because we want to nurture and guide the lives of young children, right? We passionate, we love kids, we want to help contribute to a world that's better, more peaceful, kinder, more forgiving than the one we're in now. And that in itself is should be the guiding principle about every every that should guide us every time we walk into the classroom, we should be looking to science, we should be looking to evidence, we should be looking to outside experts, because The obligation of a professional is to grow. There's an obligation, in my opinion, to get better every single day. And we do that by scanning the world for opportunities to grow.

[35:40]

But ultimately, teachers have chosen to be in the most important, most beautiful profession on the planet. And we need to start trusting ourselves that we are with students all day, every day. We are honing our craft all day, every day. And therefore we are the right people to be trusting ourselves, to be developing this body of evidence that Jared's talking about, to have courage and confidence in ourselves, to share our work with others, to push back at the fringes of the status quo and to document that as we kind of write in the outro of our book. And so I think, you know, we, I feel this excitement that's in the teaching profession. I think the times right now where we can accept that we have a crucial role to play in a, in a fractured world, you know, and particularly in the US where, you know, there's so many social challenges that are emerging or friends in Hong Kong, where there's all these sorts of social challenges, teachers are poised to help really shape the next generation.

[36:41]

And there is no one better than that. There's no one more expert than teachers. There's no one more important in this whole next evolution of where the next generation is going than teachers. We are the future, right? And we are literally crafting the future. And therefore we need to stand up.

[36:57]

We need to be courageous and not keep looking for answers elsewhere. And when, you know, Jared hates his least favorite question of all. And maybe Jared, I don't know if you want to answer this, but Jared's least favorite question of all is, um yeah but it's the system you know so what can i do no the answer is you are the system you know teachers do have this incredible capacity to change the lives of children so stand up and do the right thing and i think when we collectively start to do this we grow a voice and we have the capacity to make systemic change so we are passionate about and i hope the book really helps people not only see that things can be done differently but also helps provides a clear pathway forward.

[37:42] SPEAKER_01:

So the book is 10 Things Schools Get Wrong and How We Can Get Them Right by Jared Cooney Horvath and David Bott. If people want to go online and learn more about the book, where's the best place for them to go?

[37:54] SPEAKER_02:

Oh, you can go on. It's online everywhere. Amazon, Booktopia, all those. Or if you look up 10thingsbook.com, you've got some videos for each of the chapters. That's just the book, dedicated book page.

[38:05]

So extra resources there too.

[38:06] SPEAKER_01:

Well, Jared and David, thank you so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio. It's been a pleasure. Thank you so much. It's been awesome.

[38:12] SPEAKER_00:

Thanks, Justin.

[38:14] Announcer:

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