Connect the Dots: The Collective Power of Relationships, Memory and Mindset in the Classroom

[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 be joined today by Tricia Taylor. Tricia is the founder of Tailored Practice, an international educator with more than 20 years of teaching and leading in schools in London and New York. She serves as a strategic partner to schools around the world, and she's the author of the new book, Connect the Dots, the collective power of relationships, memory, and mindset in the classroom.

[00:37] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:39] SPEAKER_00:

Trisha, welcome to Principal Center Radio.

[00:41] SPEAKER_01:

Hi, thank you.

[00:42] SPEAKER_00:

Well, take us into the premise of the book here, the collective power of relationships, memory, and mindset. Why do those three factors matter so much in the classroom, and how does that show up in the design of the book?

[00:55] SPEAKER_01:

The reason I wrote the book initially was because I was doing a lot of reading around the research and a lot of work in schools. And I wrote about what I noticed. I noticed that there were three areas— that the research was saying students and leaders needed to pay attention to, and my experience was showing that they were important. So one of them is relationships, the other is memory, and the other is mindset. And then when I really put those into practice and work with teachers in schools, I would see that I couldn't talk about one without referring to the other. So I would start talking about doing some workshops or training on memory, and then I would feel compelled to also bring in metacognition and learning mindset because memory to be able to really use memory the way it needs to be used, you need to be able to value hard work and struggle because learning is something that happens over time.

[01:47]

So one couldn't go without the other. When I was doing work on learning mindset, we're talking about having resilience and challenge, I was then compelled to say, well, wait a minute, though, you need to teach children about the most effective memory strategies because if you don't teach them how to learn most effectively, then you don't build the success and you don't build this learning mindset and metacognition that students need. And then underlying all of that, you know, or that foundation is relationships. So relationships are sometimes the thing that gets lost or it's the thing that is sort of Oh, we do that. We do relationships. You know, we have these days where the staff come together or the children come together.

[02:28]

You know, we we do it. But actually, I'm talking about intentional relationships. I'm talking about ensuring that every single person in the school feels that they belong and is recognized. So those whatever I was doing, it came back to those three things. But because I'm such a practical person and I was a practitioner for so many years. And I was working with real teachers.

[02:52]

I was like, well, the teachers don't have time to put this research into practice. So I would read the research, take it from this huge pile, and then put it down into something that was more digestible. for people to get through in a certain amount of time. And then I would put that into practice. So I would create strategies. I should say that it wasn't just me that did all this work, right?

[03:18]

This is sort of my idea and the work that I was doing. But I had a colleague, Nina Dibner, who's on the cover of the book, who along the way was having these conversations with me in the US about this practice. So research, putting it into practice. And then the last bit is Of each of the chapters, there's an element on how leaders can then teach that back to the teachers. So it's really a cultural shift. It's a culture change in schools.

[03:44] SPEAKER_00:

Well, I think educators everywhere would immediately recognize and agree with the importance of relationships and learning mindsets. But one that I found really interesting that just kind of jumped out at me is that second piece of memory. I feel like memory has gotten a bad rap in the last couple of decades where there's been a big emphasis on maybe thinking, on higher order thinking, and memory has almost become kind of a bad guy in the learning process to the point that we're suspicious of relying on memory or trying to get students to remember things or much less memorize. Getting students to memorize is almost...

[04:24]

wrong in the minds of a lot of educators. I don't know. Do you, do you hear that from people or what's been the reaction to talking about memory?

[04:31] SPEAKER_01:

So this, I mean, it's interesting that you should pick up on this because I think that in the UK, there is a big push for memory and cognitive science, you know, implementing those in schools. But I find in the US that there's less so. You know, as you said, there is more of a focus on relationship building or mindset. And I actually don't recognize myself sometimes because I used to have that same attitude, you know, that memory isn't that important. It's about exploration. But in the research, it's really compelling and clear that students need to understand how to maximize their memories in order to be better learners.

[05:08]

And when they maximize their memory and when they have a knowledge base that They are then able to be more analytical, more creative and, you know, make better judgments. And so we sometimes push aside memory and don't think that children could just Google it. But actually, when you've got the facts in your long term memory, you're much better at you. You have more space in your working memory. So children that come to. And in fact, I would say it's an issue of social justice.

[05:38]

You know, there's a lot of research that shows that children come to school and they don't have the prior knowledge that other children have. And we just sort of assume that they're going to catch up, you know. And if we don't explicitly teach those children how to catch up or explicitly teach them some of that knowledge, then they can't use that to be more creative. And there's a there's a concept in, you know, education or I guess I don't know. in learning sciences called the Matthew effect, which just means that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. So our children who are coming to school with a disadvantage of knowledge are, you know, they're catching up, but they're catching up slowly.

[06:16]

And because they're using their working memory on still trying to understand words and make reference to things that they're not sure about, they're not able to, you know, as I said, be as critical And learn as quickly as other children that do have that. So in schools that I work with, I try to make a really convincing argument that we need to focus on memory. And there are some things that children, when they know them automatically, they can be more creative, analytical thinkers. And that's a big shift to my own thinking. And that's like one of the most exciting things that I teach teachers about. Because it makes sense.

[06:53] SPEAKER_00:

The reason I ask is I recently spoke with Natalie Wexler, author of The Knowledge Gap. And we have a previous podcast, if our listeners would like to check that out on The Knowledge Gap. And I think she makes this argument quite convincingly that often what we see as a gap in thinking skills or some sort of higher order operation is actually a more solvable and more foundational problem. gap in simply knowledge like we can teach knowledge we know how to do that but it's become unfashionable especially in the u.s to teach knowledge because we feel like we're selling students short by not jumping straight to those higher order thinking skills and i think she makes a very good argument based on a lot of the cognitive science that you referenced that says that that knowledge actually is what we do our higher order thinking about and you can't skip it you know And so I'm fascinated to see the importance of memory, you know, at the center of your book, because, you know, like we've heard a lot of kind of bad things about memory, you know, like Richard Branson talks about how he really hated school because, you know, it was all this memorization.

[07:57]

And, you know, of course, Pink Floyd, you know, just another brick in the wall. You know, we have all of this kind of bias against knowledge and memory. And we've been told for a while that that's kind of missing the point of learning. What role does memory play in, as you said, cultivating learning mindsets, building those relationships? How does this all fit together? And why is memory so key?

[08:19] SPEAKER_01:

For us to learn something, we don't learn something automatically, right? Once we learn something or we're told something in a day, we'll quickly forget it. And so our memories are something that happen over time. We build long-term memory over time. When I teach students about memory and I show them the forgetting curve, which shows that, you know, you remember something and then you forget most of it and remember it again. Then you forget a little bit less and so on and so forth.

[08:44]

They're amazed by it. They're like, oh, right. That's how memory works. And then if they think about all the things that they know, they recognize, oh, yeah, actually, that's how I learned everything. For students to really improve their memory, though, they have to value and understand that. They have to value what the Bjorks termed, you know, desirable difficulty.

[09:05]

They have to be able to think hard. And they need to be able to think hard over time. And they need to come back to their learning over and over again. And to do that, they have to have a learning mindset. So actually teaching memory teaches learning mindset. It teaches students that learning is a process.

[09:22]

It's not something that, you know, We have these photographic memories, and some children have it and some people don't, and that's just the way that it is. Memory is much more complicated than that. So they really work well together, mindset and memory, and metacognition as well. So metacognition, which I lumped into mindset because I think even in the U.S., people talk about growth mindset or mindset, but we forget that really important element, which is metacognition, which is just thinking about your learning and reflecting on your learning throughout the process.

[09:54]

So for just using statements like I can do it or, you know, good effort, it doesn't it sells students short because it's not just you can do it and it's not just good effort. You know, it's really being reflective about your learning and coming back and using different strategies and asking for help when you need it. So the two things are almost the same in a way. They're both about learning is a process that is difficult at times. And that's just the way our brains are made. And so they work really well together.

[10:23]

And the teacher can look at it as two different things or really blend the two together, which is what I try to do in the book is to give you an option of doing those two. That's why they're different chapters.

[10:35] SPEAKER_00:

I'm reminded of the idea, and I don't know if this is precisely what the cognitive science is saying, but this idea that knowledge sticks to knowledge, right? Or that as we build schema, as we build our neurons, it's the connections between them that allow new connections to form. And there's this kind of holistic and cumulative connection. effect of building knowledge. And I think probably the best personal example I can give of that is, I don't know if you're into IMDB, the Internet Movie Database, but I am just compulsive about whenever I'm watching a movie or a TV show, you know, if they have a new guest star on a TV show, I just have to look up who that person is and see what else they've been in and who they were in previous movies with. And I've noticed over the past 10 or 15 years of doing this that I'm starting to develop this kind of schema of who's been in what movie and how it all kind of fits together that wasn't there before.

[11:31]

Not that that's something that I'm intentionally trying to learn, but it does seem to work that way, that knowledge sticks to knowledge. I mean, is that true? How can teachers and students use that if that's the case?

[11:46] SPEAKER_01:

Okay, so there's two things coming to mind. Number one is that this is why it's really important for teachers to tap into prior knowledge. And I just did an assembly the other day with some students and said, you know, before you do anything, ask yourself, what do I already know? So then you're allowing yourself to tap into what you know, and you're allowing, you're setting up the situation where your memories can connect, your new memories can connect to other memories, you know, your schema. And so teachers can do, there's a number of different things that teachers can do in the classroom in order to facilitate that. And so if you look at just the, you know, what is it the, what do you know?

[12:23]

What do you want to know? How do you find out? Or what did you learn? Like that whole structure is a great way to get students to think about what they already know. I think one of the problems with it sometimes is that we go on for too long. What do you know?

[12:36]

And the exploration becomes too big. But actually there's an entry point in which a teacher says, okay, Now I'm going to tell you, these are some things that will be really useful for you to know. So to make a long story short, it's tapping into students' prior knowledge and setting up strategies, which I include in the book. But, you know, they're in the memory section and in the mindset section, but included strategies to tap into students' prior knowledge. And then the other part of that that comes to mind when you're talking about schema is really from a teacher's perspective. And as teachers, we don't know what we know, right?

[13:12]

So there's the curse of knowledge, which means that we have a certain amount of information that we take for granted. And so we are teaching students information that we think they might understand. They might understand the things that we're saying, but they might not understand the schema. So when you're teaching children, you can think about schema in terms of a concept almost like a graphic organizer, right? So presenting students with, here's my graphic organizer of how I see things, of how I see this learning. And then you start to piece together for them, you know, the facts and the meaning behind things.

[13:47]

So teacher schema is really important to communicate to students. I put talk into mindset section, although we know that elaboration, which is talking to yourself or talking to someone else, is a great memory strategy. But I put talk into metacognition and mindset because it's really about getting students to think about the process of learning. And again, everything, I keep using the word intentional. There's two words to use. One is intentional and one is visible.

[14:17]

We're trying to make learning visible for students and we're trying to use intentional strategies. So helping students understand firstly how to think hard about something and then how to communicate that idea with a partner is a really powerful strategy in the classroom to help them understand the learning process And you know, it's for so many other things too. It's to help to create a classroom atmosphere where there is respect. It's about making sure that children are using more sophisticated language in the classroom by providing the sentence stems and vocabulary and different types of responses that they can use. And the research shows that to teach metacognition, it's really important to teach verbalization of thought. So all of those things go into talk.

[15:01]

And when I do it in schools, I teach really specific strategies for how you actually turn to a partner, make eye contact, think about what the person is saying, engage in a conversation, have sentence stems, turn back, build on each other's arguments. And all of this plays into creating this learning mindset and developing metacognition with children. And there's so many benefits to talk in the classroom, but those are the two key ones.

[15:32] SPEAKER_00:

I don't know about you, but I've been kind of obsessed with Bloom's taxonomy lately just because of this kind of knowledge issue that we've been talking about. And it strikes me that a lot of what you're talking about is in the at least some of the time is in those foundational layers of the pyramid. You know, I think Bloom's taxonomy is usually depicted as a pyramid pyramid. with knowledge, comprehension, and then further up you've got analysis, synthesis, evaluation, things like that. The talk that students are doing and the metacognition that students are doing really could be at any level of Bloom's taxonomy, right? We could be talking about what we know, what we understand, we could be analyzing.

[16:11]

But I've noticed, and I don't know if you're seeing this as well in your work, a bias toward the top of the pyramid. Like we really want to jump straight to the top of the pyramid and say, well, we're going to do higher order thinking in this classroom because our kids can do it. Our kids are, you know, we don't want to hold them back in any way. So we're just going to jump straight to the top of that pyramid. Do you see a need to expand the role of those lower tiers? Or help me with that.

[16:35]

As you think about what learning really looks like and what developing memory and long-term retention really looks like, how does that kind of overlay onto Bloom's taxonomy?

[16:46] SPEAKER_01:

Well, I suppose there is an implication in Bloom's taxonomy that knowledge is sort of the base, the most simple thing to learn. And I suppose in some ways, it is pretty straightforward if you're learning the nuts and bolts of something. But what's implied is that it's less important. And I think the problem with it is that because of the way that it's shaped, It doesn't show that knowledge plays such a pivotal role in all of those elements going all the way to the top. You can't shoot to the top of Bloom's taxonomy without having this solid base that's underneath it. And again, that comes back to the argument that we were making or I was making before about knowledge being not recognized as important as other attributes in the lesson.

[17:37]

You know, I think one of the arguments that comes up a lot in the UK, at least, you know, between traditionals and progressives, is inquiry-based learning versus direct instruction. And so people say, well, children should take something and they should explore it and figure out things on their own. And other people say, well, direct instruction is what we need to do. We need to teach them the knowledge. We need to teach them directly the information in the classroom. But actually, neither one of those is right.

[18:03]

There isn't necessarily... Yes, you have to make sure that students have some sort of knowledge base before they can do inquiry based learning. Otherwise, they're just sort of floundering around. And B, if you can't, I mean, anyone who's actually taught in a classroom with normal children will know that you cannot just stand and do direct instruction.

[18:22]

There has to be some sort of inquisitiveness, some sort of discovery, some relationship to real life learning for it to happen. So, yeah. I actually am not a massive fan of Bloom's taxonomy. I know about it. I don't use it in my practice. I use more of the idea that things overlap and that it's much more complex than this pyramid shape.

[18:48] SPEAKER_00:

Well, Tricia, one thing that I think is worth noting, since this is an audio podcast, and if we don't mention this, it won't become obvious to our listeners. This is a very visual book. Unlike many education books, you actually have an illustrator for Connect the Dots. Could you talk a little bit about the role that the illustrations play for your reader?

[19:07] SPEAKER_01:

So I'll say the illustrator is not just an illustrator. The illustrator is Oliver Kiviglioli, who is really well known here in the UK and perhaps even some of the US. So he's an educator in his own right. And he is also one of the persons that kind of helped me through some of the process of thinking about learning. And his focus is on dual coding. So he does a lot of illustrations comparing text with visuals.

[19:36]

But what I wanted and what Nina wanted, who wrote the book with me, we wanted the book to be something that was visual as well as verbal. So that, you know, playing on the dual coding aspect of learning and how that can also help teachers to remember the information better. And it just makes it more enjoyable to read. You know, there are elements to it, like in the metacognition section that really the figures really show and help walk a person through what they need to be doing in the classroom. There are other aspects of it that, you know, the charts and the graphs that really bring that point alive to people. And when I found out that he was my illustrator, I was over the moon and because I knew he was smart and I knew he was good.

[20:23]

And he's made the book, the illustrations have made the book look like a beautiful book. And it really helped the learning process of the book as well, because people will learn better when there are images and graphics alongside text.

[20:37] SPEAKER_00:

So Tricia, what are your hopes for how educators will use this book?

[20:41] SPEAKER_01:

Each section has something for leaders. And the key thing here is to make, I think that leaders set the culture of the school. And they can act as models if they just take these three aspects of learning, you know, relationships, memory, and mindset, and apply that to how they relate to the staff, apply that to their professional development at school, apply that to their policy. You know, that philosophy will help guide them and will also set the stage and the agenda for the rest of the school, which I think is really important, which is why we've included made sure to include a leadership section in the book.

[21:17] SPEAKER_00:

Well, Tricia, thank you so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio to talk about Connect the Dots, the collective power of relationships, memory, and mindset in the classroom. If people want to get in touch with you or learn more about your work online, where's the best place for them to do that?

[21:31] SPEAKER_01:

I have two things. I'm on Twitter at Tricia Taylor. Taylor is spelled T-A-I-L-O-R-E-D. And I also have a blog, which I'm quickly putting more information on as I go through that relates to the book. And the blog is tailoredpractice.com slash blog.

[21:52]

And from that, you can link onto my website. And I'm starting to put on my website resources from the book so that people can dip into different pages and handouts that might be useful.

[22:02] SPEAKER_00:

Well, thanks again. It's been a pleasure to speak with you today.

[22:04] SPEAKER_01:

Thanks so much.

[22:05] Announcer:

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