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Every Educator’s Blindspots w/ David Didau · IB Unplugged

0:00
Welcome to IB Unplugged, a Kognity podcast for IBDP educators
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that tackles your submitted questions and challenges by connecting you with
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experts and peers who share their ideas and stories from real classrooms.
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Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of IB Unplugged.
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This week we had the chance to talk with David Didau, and
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this was a long term goal of mine, actually,
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to get to talk with him because he is, a writer.
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He's authored a few, very influential books.
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He’s a speaker, a teacher, educational consultant.
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And for me, reading his books, as an educator, as a practicing educator,
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there were a lot of things that he would bring up that helped me
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think very carefully about what I was doing
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and to think very intentionally about the practices I was using
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and how I was doing that within the classroom.
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And so what we decided
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to kind of lean into with this episode are just every educators blindspots.
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What are the things that were missing?
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What are the unknown assumptions we're making about our teaching
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and about the learning that's happening in our classroom?
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And how do we know if there's actual learning going on,
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and what sort of evidence should we be looking for?
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So, David has some very interesting things to be commenting on.
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And in this episode we explore a lot of stuff.
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But basically the general thing that really pulls out from this is
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how can we be more skeptical as professional educators,
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to know if what we're doing is actually effective and therefore,
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are we creating a really good IB diploma program experience for our students,
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helping them learn a lot along the way by truly, genuinely understanding:
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Do they know what we're talking about?
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Am I being effective and can we progress to the next topic?
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Yeah, no, I agree.
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I really liked the conversation and there were a few things
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that I liked to pick up.
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So when we go through this episode, we're going to hear about some of,
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the topics from his book about like what are some misconceptions?
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For example, he talks about, extrinsic motivation versus intrinsic motivation.
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And it's so important about, working with the students intrinsic motivation.
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But he kind of also talks about like, you can't dismiss extrinsic motivation.
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It's part of society. It's part of the rest of your life as well.
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And some of the kind of pitfalls that might come from not acknowledging
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something that is still inherently present,
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especially in the IB, to be able to say, oh yeah, nobody cares
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about the scores of their IB exam.
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That's not realistic.
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And so I liked ideas like that of like, this is here.
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It's not going away, but what do we do about it?
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And I think another thing that he talked about is,
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your role as a teacher between being,
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really a supportive person
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in this student's life and really showing a lot of kindness.
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And then the
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he talks about the kind of spectrum or not spectrum between kindness and cruelty,
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of where sometimes
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it might feel like you can't be as kind for the student in that moment,
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but actually you're preparing them for being able to be more successful
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and really juggling that balance between supporting and,
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making sure that your students can thrive.
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And so, yeah, those are just a few of the topics that we talked about.
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I also love the professional skepticism because it's so easy to dismiss
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or be annoyed by a teacher who's always saying no or says,
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I don't want to try that. It's never going to work.
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But actually, when you have healthy skepticism,
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that's really where you guys can grow in a school.
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So yeah, a great episode.
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Looking forward to, hearing what you all think.
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And let's, bring on David.
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Hi, David.
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Welcome to IB Unplugged. We're glad you're here.
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Thanks for having me.
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Absolutely. We're really excited for this conversation.
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We're going to be looking into some really great educational practices.
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What we've kind of called every educators blind spots, recognizing that there are
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some things that we could all be doing a little bit better or differently.
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But before we get into all that, we always like to start our podcast
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with asking our guests a few, warm up questions.
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The first one being: why education?
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Well, it wasn't planned,
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to be absolutely honest, it's something that I,
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fell into. The holidays look good,
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and, yeah, I, you know, I finished university.
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I had some really boring office jobs and friends, girlfriends.
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We were down there having dinner, and she said, oh,
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why don't you come into my school and, you know,
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have a look at it, just come and visit and spend the day.
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And I did that.
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And I was inspired to apply to do teacher training and
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the rest, as they say,
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is history.
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Although, I should, I do want to sort of say
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that I was absolutely rubbish when I started.
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I was really, really bad.
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I sometimes joke that I took
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to teaching like a fringe to water.
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I was not a natural.
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Yeah.
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I'm a testament to hard work and perseverance.
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What makes you think that
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you weren't, the world's best teacher on day one?
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Well, you know, students, bless them, give you unambiguous feedback, don't they?
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Yes, they do, yes they do.
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There's no filter often. No.
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Yeah.
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And so I mean you started teaching.
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You've kind of progressed through you've been able to author
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and do a lot of other stuff in the space and education
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and kind of taking all of those experiences.
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But looking forward, how would you see the role
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of educators evolving in the next decade?
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My hunch is that
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I don't expect that much in the way of evolution.
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I think, you know, the the concept of school has remained.
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You know, it's been remarkably consistent for the last 4000 years.
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We've got archeological sort of evidence of schools from ancient Sumer.
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And so where there have been cultural innovations
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which have outstripped,
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you know,
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our ability to pick things up sort of from the environment.
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Schools emerge, they're an emergent technology.
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Steven Pinker talks about schools as being, technology
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for communicating things that we're innately bad at learning.
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And I think if our experience of the Covid pandemic
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teaches us anything, it's that
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doing education other than in schools
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comes with some pretty severe trade offs.
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So I think the role of the teacher, the role of the school is
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I think it will take a lot to dislodge it.
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That's my hunch.
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Okay. I've been wrong before.
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But that's I mean, that's good to hear. Often,
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you know, people are kind of immediately saying, oh,
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it's going to transform quickly because of AI and all this sort of stuff.
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But it sounds like what you're saying is the fundamental aspect
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of being an educator in a school is going to remain intact.
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I think the, you know, the human to human connection
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that's required for to sort of nurture
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children through a cognitive apprenticeship is something that
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I, you know,
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I think we can have a minority of children who are quite happy
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to do that online in some form.
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But I think for the vast majority of us, we need other humans.
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And schools are very convenient ways of gathering
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and scaling that process in a way which makes it affordable for society
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as much as anything else practical for large groups of people.
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I'm always fascinated by the idea that where states don't
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mandate schools, where states don't supply schools, schools emerge.
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So if you look at, you know, rural India and parts of Africa,
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the emergence of low cost, publicly provided schools
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from the community, where a bunch of adults who know some stuff
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and a bunch of kids that don't know that stuff come together in a space
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in order for schooling to happen.
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It's really quite remarkable.
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It's really quite fascinating to kind of create this,
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you know, miniature
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culture dynamic of kind of what we want to create as a society and how that builds
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itself out to help create positive contributors to society as well.
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Yeah. Good point.
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Now obviously, David, you've got a pretty impressive career.
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You've done quite a bit of work,
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obviously as an education consultant teacher, speaker, writer.
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I've got a couple of your books
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that have influenced my teaching over some time as well.
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You know, we've got what every teacher needs know about,
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psychology has been on my shelf for a little while.
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And what if everything you knew about education was wrong?
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Another one that I've just recently been able to dig into a bit.
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They really highlight some important aspects about teaching
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and learning specifically.
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And I think in the IB diploma program, sometimes we focus so much on performance.
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We focus so much on getting
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to the actual grades that sometimes we forget about some of the key things
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that are going to be really important for educational process itself.
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I wonder if you could start us off by talking a little bit
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about what motivated you to write these books in the first place?
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And in particular these two with regard to education
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and what we might be missing and how we could do it better.
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Right. Okay.
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So I started writing. Before I wrote any books
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I was writing a blog,
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I think I started my blog in 2010.
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And initially it was to kind of remember things.
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So I had this sense that I'd be constantly reinventing the wheel.
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I'd, you know, I'd have great ideas and I forget what they were
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because life's busy. Right?
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And so I started just recording
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the things that I was doing in my classroom,
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in order to have a record, if nothing else.
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And as I started writing and as I started sort of communicating
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and engaging with other people in that space,
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it just became clear that a lot of the assumptions that I'd had for years,
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were very much that they were assumptions based on not that much.
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And so I think that a big motivator for me in
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writing was to try and work through my own confusions
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and my own journey into learning
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more about the profession of teaching.
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And so those two books in particular. So,
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what if everything you knew about education was wrong?
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I think that came out in about 2015 or something
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that had quite a yeah, it feels like a long time ago for me.
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And, you know, when I wrote it, I mean, it's a bit of a big beast.
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There's a lot of it.
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And I thought I might never, ever get the opportunity
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to write a book ever again.
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So I'm going to put everything in it.
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That explains the thickness of this thing.
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Yeah. Right.
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It was published in hardback
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and it was twice the width of that copy that you've got there originally.
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Yeah.
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And so I guess what prompted that is that I'd had this sense,
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you know, I was pretty good teacher.
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I knew, you know, I could certainly put on really slick
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lessons and I'd written about,
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a sequence of lessons that I'd
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completed and,
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another teacher on Twitter got in touch.
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Christina Melosh, who at the time was based in,
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Rome, got in touch to say, have you ever seen this?
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And she sent me a video of Robert Burke
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talking about the difference between learning and performance, and
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my world crumbled.
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It changed everything.
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I can't really overemphasize
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what a psychic shock it was to have the rug pulled from under me.
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What was so shocking about it? Right.
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So, what
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Bjork's whole,
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approach and, position
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is that the learning
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is something which is invisible.
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It takes place inside our minds.
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We can't observe it directly.
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All we can do is see performance
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and performance can be, you know, it can be answering a question.
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It can be writing an essay, solving an equation, taking part in a sports
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match, whatever.
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Anything that's perceptible with your senses is performance.
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And the we can only infer learning by looking at performance.
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And he was also making the case that,
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performance can be a very poor proxy
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for learning, especially performance immediately after instruction.
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So, you know, as a caricature,
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I'd be saying to my classes,
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essentially, can you do what I just showed you how to do?
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Oh, you can.
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Great learning.
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Yeah. Look at me.
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An excellent teacher and you of wonderful learner.
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And even, you know,
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and I think back and even, you know, I'd say,
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can you do what I just showed you had to do and they couldn't.
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And I'd say things and I'd say things like, look back in your book,
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talk to your partner. Right.
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It's on the board. Yeah, yeah.
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And, then they'd give me the performance that it was clear
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I was queuing them up to give.
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And I'd mistake that for learning.
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And, you know, that is a caricature.
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But I started seeing it
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and everything I was doing and everything everybody else was doing,
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and I thought, I really want to explore this.
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And so,
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when I
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started writing that book, I wrote to Robert Burke,
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at UCLA,
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and like almost every academic I've ever connected with,
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they are so grateful that people read their academic papers.
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You just feel like, oh, I just have to publish, right? Right.
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I kind of believe they're in this sort of bubble and no one cares beyond academia.
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And so when I got in touch, he was like, yeah, no, that would be terrific.
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I love the fact that,
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you know, my work is making an influence in actual classrooms.
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And then he very, very generously, you know, I was so nervous
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submitting not to the so much to the publisher, but to Bob Burke,
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the final text and, you know, thinking, what if he thinks it's rubbish?
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Yeah.
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And very, very kindly he agreed to write a foreword, endorsing it.
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And that was a very proud moment for me.
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Anyway, so that's what if and then the other of the books
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you mentioned, what have you teaching about psychology.
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So I wrote that with a friend of mine, Nick Rose,
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whose background is in psychology.
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In fact, he used to be a parapsychologist,
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of all, things like a Ghostbuster.
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And that's what I thought. But I was like, I can't be right.
15:02
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
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So he worked, at Bristol University and people, you know, on the,
15:08
the parapsychology departments and people would phone up.
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They have a whole department.
15:12
It was two people. Okay, okay.
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Please tell me they go by Ghostbusters.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah. People would find out and say our house is haunted.
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And he'd say, yeah, it's just the wind.
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Yeah.
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And that was his job basically debunking,
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the fact that
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there was paranormal stuff going on, but they'd run
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proper experiments and they'd run, like, actual legitimate tests.
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And, you know, talked about the fact that despite the
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the robust nature of their investigations, no one ever believed them.
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But I must be a ghost. Okay. Right.
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So come back full circle.
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Even though they could perform
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and they could show the actual evidence and what was performed in England.
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No, no, no, you haven't learned this right.
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There wasn't something there. Exactly.
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So anyway, that was his background.
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And then he retrained, as a teacher and he was teaching psychology.
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And we were talking about the fact that it would be really,
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really useful to have,
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you know, there were lots
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and lots of books on psychology out there, but we thought it'd be really useful
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to have a kind of like, this is the useful stuff for teachers.
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And we both read a book called 59 seconds by Richard Wiseman.
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Okay. Which I really recommend.
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And it's about, the self-help industry
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all of the information that's flooded into that.
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And what he did was he took each of the, you know, the claims
16:37
and the areas of that distilled the actual research and then made a series
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of recommendations, things you could do, you know, in 59 seconds.
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That was the conceit of the book.
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And we thought that would be a fantastic structure
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for this psychology book that we were imagining.
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And that's exactly what we did.
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So in each of the areas of psychology
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that we chose to write about, we distilled the research.
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We thought about it from a classroom perspective, and then we distilled it
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to a series of bullet points, of bits of advice
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that would be useful for a busy teacher.
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And it was really, really interesting.
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I remember being interviewed with Nick, after we'd publish the book
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and, the interviewer who, you know, bless them, hadn't read it, but they were like,
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oh, it's about time that somebody wrote a book about psychology
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in education, because, you know, kids need more
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sort of understanding and caring, and they need more of therapeutic stuff.
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They were thinking more from clinical psychology.
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Well, we're like, no, not that psychology.
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You don't care about that stuff. Yeah.
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Yeah, yeah.
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But actually
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understanding how the mind works and how we can influence that as educators
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as well. How motivation works, how resilience works.
17:52
Yeah. And all of that sort of stuff. Yeah.
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And that was at least for me when I was reading over it,
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the intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation part was really one that stuck out to me.
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And I think especially when we kind of tune
18:03
it back to IB in the diploma program itself, you know, we've got students who
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they put a lot of emphasis on that extrinsic piece.
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What's my grade going to be and how's I can influence in my future?
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I wonder if you could talk a little bit about like,
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that element, that sort of how we as teachers can balance developing that
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intrinsic motivation in students with what's very obviously
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the extrinsic motivation that they're like, well,
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I have to get this grade so I can get on to that university
18:28
so I can go to the next thing.
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How can we kind of navigate that a bit better, you think?
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So, I think there's, a default.
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The extrinsic motivation is bad and intrinsic is good.
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And I think that's unhelpful.
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That we're all extrinsic be motivated.
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And that's completely legitimate that we do what we do
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it, nothing else to sort of pay the rent.
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And, that's a reasonable motivator.
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The self-determination theory is a bit more complex and nuanced than that.
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And I can't remember all the different categories, but
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there are at least three elements of,
19:06
extrinsic motivation and two of which come from inside.
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And so sort of thinking about the fact that,
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you know, the idea of being intrinsically
19:19
motivated, having a love and a passion for what you're doing
19:22
is great, is wonderful, but it's not going to be.
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I mean, you were saying, John, you're a chemistry teacher
19:29
with the best word in the world.
19:30
Not every student you're going to you teach
19:32
is going to have a passion for chemistry.
19:34
But they still have,
19:37
very good
19:37
reasons for wanting to learn the chemistry that you're teaching.
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And they want to do something with it. It's a means to an end.
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And that's a really legitimate thing that needs to be validated.
19:48
I think. So,
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you know, passion.
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Wonderful, but relatively speaking rare.
19:55
And I think it's worth also thinking
19:58
about motivation from an evolutionary perspective.
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So I'm really interested in David Geary's take on, motivation.
20:09
He says that we have a motivational bias to learning
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things which have an evolutionary basis, things like getting on with other people,
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you know, looking at how plants and animals
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work and how to use inanimate objects.
20:25
And these are sometimes referred to as folk disciplines, folk psychology,
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folk physics and folk biology.
20:33
You know, especially as the motivational bias increases
20:37
and sort of is at its most intense during adolescence.
20:42
And you just look at adolescents in schools
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and they want to do things like chat, flirt,
20:49
twang, rules to see what will happen.
20:51
You know, all of that.
20:53
Look at pictures of cats on the internet.
20:54
All of that stuff makes sense from an evolutionary perspective.
21:00
Whereas other culturally specific bodies of knowledge, like chemistry, are things
21:05
which are really useful and arguably very important.
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And we have a capacity, you know,
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the natural plasticity of our brains means that we can learn those things.
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It's just harder for us.
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We have to put more effort in.
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And it's not as much fun for most of us unless we,
21:27
you know, happen to have that wonderful passion for the subject.
21:32
I don't know if that helps. No, absolutely.
21:34
So when I've been able to teach a bit of biology as well,
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when I teach biology, I'm doing a lot
21:38
on, like the evolutionary aspects that lead to fitness
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and how an individual's more fit in their particular group.
21:44
So what you're talking about here
21:45
definitely plays into the idea of that social fitness and where a school
21:49
might be a mini society, and therefore, as they go on to greater society,
21:52
they're going to look at those things
21:53
that are going to help them fit into society more
21:56
and therefore be more attuned to learning them better.
21:58
So from that angle,
22:00
I guess, as you're talking about from an evolutionary psychology point,
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it really makes sense that things like a grade or something
22:06
that's going to lead to,
22:07
as you say, paying the rent is going to be important in the mind's eye of anybody,
22:12
because that's what's going to allow them to fit within their society.
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It's also what they know the parent cares about, too.
22:18
Yeah.
22:18
And it's like there's that conversation and feedback loop with the parents
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as well.
22:23
Yeah. There are, absolutely.
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And I think that there would be a problem
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if we were turning out students who were like,
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I'm only prepared to do what I'm passionate about.
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You know, it's useful for society
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as well as on an individual basis to kind of knuckle down and do stuff
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that we don't necessarily want to do and to have intrinsic, extrinsic
22:45
motivators to those ends, I think is important.
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And I think there's also you can tap into the ideas of from research
22:53
into peer culture here that there are within a school,
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you can have a peer culture
23:00
which is supportive of those kinds of extrinsic motivators.
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And you can also experience schools where that isn't the case.
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And so where where there is a peer culture which values
23:12
learning, which where it's cool to be clever.
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That's much, much easier for children to tap in
23:20
to useful extrinsic motivators than schools where that isn't the case.
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Are you an IB educator wanting to improve
23:28
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Simply visit kognity.com/ibunplugged to submit your question to us,
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and have your question explored in more detail in an upcoming episode.
23:50
And now, back to the show.
23:53
So what I'm hearing here is that we don't have
23:56
to consciously shy away from extrinsic motivation, as if it's a bad thing.
23:59
It's good to recognize that this is actually a human experience.
24:03
It's a human trait, and that as teachers in the IB diploma
24:06
program, for example, it is something that's going to motivate students anyway.
24:09
So we don't necessarily have to shy all the way away from it.
24:13
And also recognize that in our many cultures that we're creating here,
24:17
if we have a group that values that sort of, as you say, it's
24:19
cool to be good at school.
24:21
Therefore we're going to see a little bit better performances.
24:24
We're gonna see better appreciation
24:27
of educational experiences because it helps them fit more into their group.
24:31
Is that okay? Yeah.
24:33
Officially I think we should celebrate both sides that we you know,
24:36
it's lovely when children are passionate about something.
24:39
And we absolutely want to celebrate that.
24:42
But we also want to develop a mindset where we are
24:47
prepared to work and persist with things that we don't find obviously pleasurable.
24:53
I also really like the idea about building the culture, something that
24:56
I was thinking about.
24:58
There's like the analogy of with the crabs in the bucket.
25:02
I don't know if you guys are familiar with that, where the idea is like,
25:04
if a crab is trying to get out of the bucket, the rest of them pull them down
25:08
because they don't want that crab to escape.
25:11
We've talked about it in my household.
25:13
My husband's French of like, with French people, like French students
25:17
mocking students that are trying to lose the French accent
25:20
when they're speaking English, for example.
25:22
And I think that it's about kind of knowing,
25:27
when you're a teacher, like recognizing what's going on
25:30
and like the social dynamics of the class also, and not being against them,
25:36
but also kind of recognizing when you do need to step in and kind of
25:39
influence certain motivators as well.
25:42
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.
25:43
I wanted, a later book that I wrote after those two was one called
25:48
Making Kids Cleverer and,
25:51
I wrote extensively about what you can do as an adult,
25:56
a nonmember of a peer culture to influence peer culture.
26:01
For listeners, viewers,
26:03
I really recommend it's quite old, but I'd really recommend
26:07
Judith Rich Harris's book, The Nurture Assumption, which,
26:11
really explores
26:14
just how powerful peer influences are and the sorts of things
26:18
that we can do to get more of what we want.
26:22
You comment on this kind of often.
26:24
This is like a running theme,
26:25
I think in some of the writings at least that I've been able to encounter,
26:28
I've just this idea of especially educators questioning assumptions
26:32
that we might make, you know, what we think are accepted educational norms.
26:36
We just sort of led into one with like, extrinsic motivation is a bad thing.
26:39
And let's focus on passions and that sort of thing.
26:42
What are some of the other like bigger assumptions you feel like
26:45
we might make as teachers that are limiting our interactions
26:48
with students, and they're ability to learn? Yeah.
26:50
So, that one I mentioned earlier that mistaking performance for learning
26:55
I think is a pretty fundamental assumption that is very difficult to escape from.
27:01
And it's difficult because learning doesn't happen
27:05
in the present tense, but we exist in the present.
27:09
So I characterize learning as being a quality of elsewhere and later.
27:14
The definition I use of learning is,
27:17
the retention and transfer of knowledge.
27:20
And so, you know, if I teach you something and you can't remember it
27:24
tomorrow, it's not very helpful to refer to that as learning.
27:29
Or, if I teach you something and you can perform it
27:32
in the classroom, but you can't perform it elsewhere.
27:36
Is that, again, is that helpful to describe that
27:39
as something that you've learned?
27:41
So if I want to be certain that you've learned something,
27:45
I have to follow you about and check at different times
27:49
and in different places, which we don't really get to.
27:53
That would be quite annoying for students if we were doing that kind of thing.
27:58
So, we don't do that for obvious reasons.
28:01
I think we, you know, we might run afoul of safeguarding.
28:04
Most likely, definitely.
28:06
Yeah.
28:08
But then what could you do
28:10
besides follow children around and ask them random questions?
28:14
So what could you do
28:15
is you have to engineer in the thin slice of the presence
28:21
in which we occupy opportunities for trying to peer into elsewhere
28:25
and later.
28:26
So there's a really, you know, so if we take retention
28:30
first that first bit.
28:32
So that's relatively simple.
28:37
Bjork coined
28:38
the idea of a desirable difficulty.
28:41
And a desirable difficulty is something which induces
28:45
struggle in performance but crucially results in success.
28:50
So something where you have to dredge into your mind
28:55
to try and find the performance, but you're not going to fail,
28:59
you're going to be supported.
29:00
And so if it's too much struggle, you're going to get some help.
29:03
And to that end, you know, what I used to do
29:08
was to say, right, everybody, let's work towards a really slick performance.
29:12
I'll give you all the help and support you need so that you can be perfect.
29:15
Unless it's time and a place for that.
29:17
But it's really, really poor evidence of learning.
29:20
It's great for building up a sense of success.
29:23
It's great for motivation, but it's a very poor proxy for learning.
29:28
So what I'd want to do as rapidly as I could
29:33
would be to say, I'm going to take away some of the structures
29:36
that I've given you, and I'm going to ask you to try
29:39
and remember what they were and try and recreate them for yourself.
29:42
And that acts out that struggle of having to sit with that and try
29:47
and do it increasingly independently is a desirable difficulty.
29:53
And there's lots of,
29:54
you know, there's lots of really good evidence on some of the techniques.
29:57
I'm sure listeners, viewers
30:00
will be familiar with things like the spacing effect.
30:03
You know, that just returning to things after a certain amount of time has passed
30:09
slows
30:09
the rate at which we forget in the future.
30:12
Things like, the testing effect.
30:14
So trying to recall rather than really learn
30:19
information is better for future performance.
30:22
Those kinds of things are things that we can intentionally
30:26
put in place in our classrooms.
30:29
But when it comes to transfer, the evidence on,
30:33
transferring knowledge from one
30:37
domain to another from one place to another, one context to another
30:40
is much, much less robust and secure than the evidence on retention.
30:46
One of the studies which I read
30:49
and it really startled me and I've recreated several times in
30:53
classrooms, is the finding the
30:56
a student will be able to perform something in a certain seat,
31:00
and you move them out, see them elsewhere in the classroom.
31:06
And they'll struggle.
31:08
Yeah. Yeah.
31:08
Because we rely on the cues that we
31:13
visual and emotional of the context in which we learn something.
31:17
So you're sitting next to someone you like and there's
31:21
you know there's various stuff in your eyeline
31:24
and I put you somewhere where you don't have those emotional and visual reminders.
31:28
It's harder. Yeah.
31:30
And if it's hard to change seats in the classroom,
31:33
it's certainly harder to move from the classroom to an examination hall.
31:39
And then moving from the exam hall into life,
31:42
is a challenge.
31:44
And so trying to, again, trying to intentionally create
31:49
those situations where you're not just,
31:53
as easily as possible, being able to lean into those,
31:58
cues and prompts
32:00
that you've absorbed whilst you've been learning to disrupt those,
32:04
in ways which are helpful,
32:07
is something that teachers can experiment with.
32:10
Absolutely.
32:11
It reminds me a lot of,
32:13
Eric Jensen, put out a couple books, teaching with the brain in mind.
32:17
And I remember reading those ones as well, and it really shifted the way
32:20
that I approached my actual lessons in terms of not just the content,
32:23
but the actual environment. How am I shifting the environment?
32:26
Where students seated.
32:27
What, as you say, what's at their eyeline?
32:29
What are they hearing?
32:30
What are the other senses
32:32
that are going on in the room that are going to help them with that,
32:34
with the overall learning?
32:36
And then now as as a DP coordinator at my school, whenever we do mock exams,
32:41
you know, the sort of let's prepare, here's what's going to look like.
32:43
I can't emphasize with team.
32:46
Just we have to make this as real of an experience as possible.
32:50
All the same restrictions, all the same protocol,
32:53
make it as real as the real thing so that students are used to that.
32:57
And it's not a complete, you know, wake up.
33:00
I mean, in the ideal world, all instruction would take place in the example.
33:07
That's not practical.
33:08
That's certainly. Yeah, yeah.
33:10
But I also love what you mentioned there at the end with like,
33:13
you know, they have to learn how to then
33:16
they're kind of surprised by being in this example for lack of better term.
33:18
And then they go into real life.
33:20
And now here's another way that they have to express that.
33:22
And I can't remember exactly the wording of it
33:25
or who I need to attribute this to. So my apologies.
33:27
But it was effectively this idea of like, you learn how to do high school
33:31
and then you have to go to university and you learn how to do university,
33:35
and then you have to kind of relearn how to do life and work
33:38
and that sort of thing again.
33:39
And so this concept of like the skills and the specific content we learn
33:44
is more a vehicle of describing or how to develop a young learner
33:47
so that they can learn quicker when they're put into these new
33:51
environments of wherever they might be, and that the performative aspect
33:54
sort of shifts from the exam hall to whatever that might be in our real lives.
33:59
Is that something that you've come across as well,
34:01
or do you feel like that's kind of an accurate depiction
34:03
of what happens with young people as they move on from school?
34:06
It's hard, it's a struggle for sure.
34:10
Yeah, yeah.
34:11
No, just that idea
34:13
that we're constantly having to adjust to new ways of performing.
34:17
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.
34:19
And I think, a school does its best to be
34:23
a microcosm of the wider world,
34:27
and we try
34:28
to intentionally recreate or create
34:32
environments which are going to be useful and transferable later on.
34:36
But, the other thing that we do in school
34:40
is that we are probably the most understanding and the kindest and
34:45
the most forgiving environment that children will ever experience, that
34:49
when they become adults, the adult world is a lot less supportive
34:54
and forgiving and intolerant and, I don't think it's a reasonable thing
34:59
to say, actually, we want to build in some intolerance
35:02
so that, kids are kind of more prepared for it.
35:05
I don't think that would fly
35:06
well with most educators.
35:08
So that's a trade off, you know,
35:12
there's an interesting dynamic there the old adage that it's kindness
35:17
and cruelty are not as polarized as we might think, and that sometimes
35:22
not being explicitly kind is
35:25
actually the kind of thing to do in the longer
35:28
term, is something I think we struggle with in education.
35:33
We were talking about assumptions.
35:34
I think one of the assumptions that I think is really prevalent
35:38
is that one direct instruction is dull, and two, that children don't like it,
35:44
and both of those are in flat contradiction to my experience.
35:47
If you are doing direct instruction and and it's boring and the children aren't
35:52
enjoying it, you're not doing direct instruction, you're doing something else.
35:56
You're probably lecturing. If you've ever seen
36:01
Ferris Bueller's Day Off, where Ben Stein is the teacher
36:04
and they're talking about economics and he's saying every now and again,
36:10
can anyone answer this question?
36:11
Anyone? Anyone? Yeah, yeah.
36:13
And the kids are all drooling on the desk and sort of paying no attention.
36:17
That's not direct instruction.
36:19
That is antithetical
36:21
to what I think teachers should be doing in the classrooms.
36:23
So the approach to I recommend what I do
36:27
is incredibly fast paced, is incredibly interactive.
36:30
Kids are on their toes.
36:32
They're involved, they're participating all the way through.
36:36
And for me, I think there are three questions
36:39
that teachers have to be able to ask and answer of every lesson.
36:44
And the first is, how do I know if they're all paying attention.
36:47
Yeah. What am I doing.
36:48
What are the moves I'm making to check that everyone's tuned in.
36:53
And secondly how do I know they're all making sense of what's going on.
36:57
You know that's a step up.
36:59
What's their understanding. And what am I going to do
37:01
if their understanding is not what I hoped it would be?
37:04
And then the third question is, how do I know that everybody's
37:08
getting better at the stuff I want them to get better at.
37:10
And if I have those three questions driving what I'm doing,
37:16
it well, one, it results
37:18
in that really interactive, fast paced,
37:22
involving high participation classroom.
37:26
But secondly, it results in me knowing things that I otherwise wouldn't know.
37:31
So if I, you know, what I used to do is I teach
37:35
and I sort of have an assumption, like I said, I think they got it.
37:38
I think they understood, because I didn't know
37:42
that would often be based on a false premise. When I teach
37:46
now, I know whether you know who was paying attention, who was
37:50
and who made sense, who didn't, who's got better, who hasn't yet,
37:54
and so that I can respond to that, I can do something about it.
37:58
What I really like about those three questions is they fit
38:00
kind of anywhere, and they really focus a lot on the learning.
38:04
And so kind of coming back to more the top of the show, when we were saying,
38:08
you know, that we could have,
38:11
people sort of developing at a different pace.
38:14
They didn't have to immediately tell us what they knew.
38:17
If you were a teacher who's with that student
38:19
all the time, then you can get a better idea of like, have they learned this?
38:22
How can they demonstrate their learning over a long period of time?
38:25
And what I really like about those three questions is, again, it comes back to
38:29
how am I emphasizing the learning that's happening
38:32
within students.
38:33
And that can be through a direct instruction model or possibly an inquiry
38:37
based learning or some other thing that might take place within the lesson.
38:40
But if those three questions are driving what I'm doing,
38:42
that can make a bigger difference, I think. Yeah, I think so.
38:45
I think that the reason I have come to use them
38:49
is seeing so many,
38:53
schools investing professional development time
38:56
into training teachers in using techniques and then teachers
39:00
trying to use those techniques, often unsuccessfully.
39:04
Because they don't really know why they're using them.
39:06
They're not sure what they're deployed in service for.
39:10
So I always use mini whiteboards in my lessons.
39:13
I think they're a really incredibly useful bit of kit
39:17
for exposing, thinking and saying stuff that avoids mess
39:21
and and increasing the participation ratio in the classroom.
39:25
But I would use them differently to answer each of those three questions.
39:28
So if I want to check,
39:31
attention then I'd, you know, I'd have little show me routines
39:35
and I'd be getting everybody to sort of very quickly demonstrate
39:38
their responses to a particular prompt.
39:41
If I'm checking understanding I'll have them using them
39:45
as sandpit, as places
39:49
to test out ideas before taking them any further.
39:53
And if I'm using them to consolidate skill development, then I'll be using them
39:58
to as a first step in extending ideas in a more formal way.
40:02
You know, it's the same technique on the surface, but
40:06
because they're deployed in different surfaces
40:09
and it needs a different set of moves that I'm going to make in order to be
40:13
for me to be able to answer the question I've posed to myself.
40:18
Today's KogTip comes from Myles
40:20
Babington from Wellington College International, Shanghai.
40:23
He says, I use Kognity strength test questions as a starter of every lesson
40:27
to support my students in recalling content from the previous lesson.
40:31
It's a really nice way of re-emphasizing points taught in the previous lesson.
40:35
I also try to regularly demonstrate to students where to find strength
40:38
questions in the platform so they know how to self revise.
40:42
And don't forget the battle feature that let students make it into a competition.
40:46
Thanks, Myles.
40:48
Let me try to summarize here.
40:49
I think what I've heard is that
40:51
we can commonly make assumptions about certain techniques
40:54
being bad, like direct instruction is a bad thing, but not all
40:57
direct instruction is the same.
40:59
And therefore the way that I approach my direct instruction
41:02
makes a bigger difference,
41:04
as opposed to just generalizing and saying direct instruction is a bad thing.
41:08
I'd go further than that, John.
41:09
I'd say that unless direct instruction is fast paced, interactive, high
41:15
participation, and essentially joyful, it isn't direct instruction.
41:18
No. Okay, okay.
41:20
So if if you're droning on and boring kids,
41:23
I don't know what you're doing, but it isn't direct instruction.
41:27
Nice.
41:28
Okay.
41:28
So a useful kind of,
41:31
explanatory tool, I think, is to say
41:34
that if you're not assessing, you're not teaching.
41:37
Okay, so if I'm standing in front of, you know, doing
41:41
a professional development lecture for teachers, I'm always really,
41:45
really mindful to say what I'm doing now is not teaching.
41:49
You know, I'm talking to you.
41:51
I've got no real way of assessing
41:54
whether you're paying attention, whether you're making sense
41:56
of what I'm saying and whether you're getting better at anything,
41:58
that if I was teaching, I'd be able to answer those questions.
42:03
In order to be able to answer those questions,
42:06
you would have to be doing a hell of a lot of stuff.
42:10
And that looks really different.
42:11
So one of the things that I always offer when I work with schools,
42:16
is the you know, whether it's at a conference,
42:21
or whether it's in a school itself, I always say if you can round up
42:24
some kids and
42:27
allow me to demonstrate
42:29
what direct instruction ought to look like,
42:33
then the penny drops and nobody's in any doubt that,
42:37
there's a real difference between direct instruction and rubbish instruction.
42:42
But you bring up a great point there with regard to like
42:45
how I'm assessing in order to tell me what's really being learned
42:48
and what sort of teaching and
42:51
when we think about traditional methods of assessment, what are we missing
42:54
and what are some of the opportunities there that could really inform us
42:57
a lot more
42:58
if students have learned something, if we're effectively
43:01
having that sort of knowledge and skill transfer going on.
43:03
So can I check that, John?
43:05
So when you say assessing, are you talking about that sort of classroom process of,
43:09
you know, where are children right now?
43:12
Or are you talking about more formal events where we get them to put pen to paper?
43:17
I mean, I guess to a certain extent, both you know, both the assessment of learning
43:21
and the assessment for learning that like, okay, are we all here on the same page?
43:25
It's kind of move like what you were talking about, that high paced.
43:27
Let me make sure you've got your attention.
43:29
Let me make sure you're with me.
43:30
Yeah. Yeah okay.
43:31
So I have a sort of flowchart in my mind in the classroom where,
43:35
you know, whenever I ask a question, then my next question to myself is,
43:39
did everybody get the question right?
43:43
And now obviously that tells you something about how
43:46
I'm expecting response, which is why I use many whiteboards.
43:49
So when I ask a question, everybody writes an answer, everybody holds it up.
43:53
I'm able to say, did everybody get it right?
43:56
And if the answer to that is no, then, you know, I need to think, did
44:00
anybody get it right?
44:01
If nobody got it right, that's clearly on me.
44:04
If I pose a question, I give a task.
44:07
Nobody can do it.
44:08
Clearly, something's gone wrong.
44:10
My curriculum’s wonky.
44:12
The way I taught it was ineffective.
44:15
I need to own that and do something about it.
44:18
But my next question is
44:20
if somebody's got it right, like, how many, what's the proportion
44:23
of got it right?
44:24
And I'm really guided here by Barak
44:28
Rosenshine in his principles of instruction.
44:31
He talks about 100% of students experiencing
44:35
a success ratio of above 80%.
44:39
So I'm looking there at like, is everybody
44:43
getting at least 80% of stuff right?
44:47
And again, if the answer to that is no, I'm gonna have to own that.
44:51
There's no percentage for blaming the kids.
44:53
That's my responsibility.
44:55
I need to find the gaps
44:57
that they're falling into and fill those gaps appropriately.
45:03
When everybody can answer the question, when everyone can do the thing,
45:08
my next question to myself is, is this the first time?
45:11
Is this a one off, or is this something that I've done on repeated occasions?
45:15
If it's a one off, great.
45:17
That's nice.
45:18
But it's a very poor proxy for learning.
45:21
I'm certainly
45:21
not going to make any assumptions that they're able to retain or transfer it.
45:26
So I'm going to repeat and go over it,
45:31
maybe during the lesson maybe pocket for later lessons.
45:35
But once everybody, once I've got that 100% of students
45:40
getting a ratio of about 80% correct on multiple occasions,
45:45
then I can feel pretty, you know, cautiously optimistic
45:50
about moving on and and considering that being something that's mastered.
45:55
And that that word mastered, I think is,
45:58
you know, does a lot of sneaky work in the field of education. Different
46:03
people use it and it means completely different things.
46:06
But for me, you know,
46:07
it is around that idea of 100% of students
46:11
getting 80% of responses correct.
46:15
So the way in which I think about formal assessment events
46:21
is, well, traditionally,
46:24
if you think about the IB exam
46:27
that in psychometric terms,
46:30
you can describe that as a discriminatory assessment.
46:34
And what I mean by that is its purpose is to discriminate
46:38
between the students who take it.
46:39
So you create a rank order
46:41
and you've got the worst and the best and everybody else somewhere in between.
46:45
And that's how they're going to be judged.
46:48
That's how they're going to get their final award.
46:53
And we definitely need to be mindful that that's in the background
46:57
and something that we're moving towards.
47:01
But replicating that structure,
47:04
just having discriminatory assessment events,
47:08
is not very helpful because the discriminatory assessments
47:13
are designed that not everybody can do everything on the paper.
47:18
Right.
47:19
And so you'll have some children who are being successful on the paper,
47:23
despite the fact they've not been explicitly taught how to do the thing.
47:29
And you'll have other children
47:31
who are being unsuccessful because
47:35
they haven't been taught.
47:36
And again, I think because despite lens is a really,
47:40
really useful way to interrogate practice.
47:43
So what I recommend, what I've put a lot of work into over
47:48
the last few years, is trying to design mastery assessments.
47:53
So a mastery assessment is one where, you know, instead of
47:57
getting a normal distribution at the end of it,
48:01
distribution is much more like a slope,
48:03
where again, you're looking for
48:06
a 100% of students to get at least 80% of the content correct.
48:10
And so you're going to need to have a much, much tighter relationship
48:15
between the construct you're assessing and the item that you're
48:18
using to assess that construct.
48:21
So there's much less ambiguity about what
48:24
exactly they're achieving and why they've achieved it.
48:28
And the usefulness of mastery assessments is it's the only way
48:33
that you can find out anything at all about your effectiveness
48:36
as a teacher or as a school.
48:39
So, you know, if we go back to the discriminator assessments,
48:42
people that are successful in
48:45
for reasons that have nothing to do with you,
48:48
and we nevertheless we claim credit, of course.
48:51
Yeah, yeah.
48:52
In extreme cases it's because they've gone and got tutors
48:56
to compensate for our poor instruction.
48:59
Sure.
49:00
But, even without that,
49:03
that some children are just lucky and others less fortunate.
49:07
So if we have a mastery assessment,
49:09
we're only assessing things that we've explicitly taught.
49:13
And we're trying to remove subjectivity.
49:18
And so I recommend, you know, instead of having rubrics
49:22
which look at how well somebody did something,
49:26
it would be much more of a binary
49:29
mat not mat done achieved, not achieved.
49:32
And so by that I can build up a much, much more useful picture
49:36
of exactly what my students can and can't do.
49:39
And then I can look at that and go, okay, I've got some gaps here.
49:42
If one kid can't do a thing that I assessed,
49:47
then, you know, that's maybe they were absence.
49:51
Maybe, you know, maybe they just really struggled with that.
49:54
Maybe you know, that's something I need to pay attention to.
49:57
But if a 4 or 5 kids
50:00
couldn't do something, that's really useful
50:03
feedback to me that I haven't taught that as well as I needed to.
50:07
And that's
50:07
you can't get that information unless you try and use
50:13
less discriminatory and more mastery assessment.
50:16
What I like about kind of everything you've mentioned here is it's very much
50:19
a digging for evidence and really understanding what that evidence is
50:23
in terms of telling you how you've taught and how well students have learned.
50:27
But also are the students understanding this
50:29
before they can move on to the next thing.
50:31
So it informs the progress.
50:32
But it just what's really clear is
50:35
whatever assessment models we're using, we need to be firstly aware
50:38
are we doing mainly discriminatory assessment
50:40
or are we doing something that's going to help understanding for mastery?
50:43
And then do we use that as evidence to inform our teaching.
50:47
And do we use that as evidence to help the students progress as well.
50:50
Yeah, absolutely.
50:51
And what I like from what you've just said and then also,
50:54
you know, I guess what I've read as well,
50:56
in terms of your books that you put out, is just that
50:58
it's consciously taking on this position of almost being like a skeptic of
51:02
how do I know that this really, actually is working right?
51:05
How do I know that what I'm doing is effective?
51:08
How do I know that the students have learned?
51:10
And even back to what we were talking about
51:11
earlier with assumptions and that sort of thing,
51:13
how do I know that that's a true thing?
51:15
To what extent do you feel like as educators,
51:20
or rather,
51:20
just how much should we be taking on that position more frequently,
51:24
I guess it's a very leading question, I know, but.. No, no, no, no,
51:28
it is a leading question.
51:29
And, you know, you already know something of the answer that I'm likely to give.
51:33
So my friend Nick, that I wrote, what every teacher needs to know
51:37
about psychology with coined this phrase, which I love
51:41
of professional skepticism.
51:43
And, you know that the way I would view it is that
51:47
if you are a teacher, you have a duty
51:50
to be professionally skeptical.
51:54
And, the professional bits
51:56
is important because you don't want people just going, yeah, that won't work.
52:00
You know, they're just annoying.
52:03
And we all know them.
52:04
They're all in our classes, in our schools. Yeah.
52:09
And I do think we should listen more to those people and help them
52:13
be more professional in their skepticism, because they do have often
52:17
valuable insights.
52:18
They tend to be people who've taught for a long time
52:22
and have knowledge that
52:25
we would be enriched by accessing,
52:28
but the way they contribute is often not helpful.
52:34
Yeah, it's you can only see the negative in it instead of the supporting.
52:37
So a professional skeptic is somebody who's got a,
52:41
you know, who isn't credulous,
52:43
who isn't likely to be taken in by gimmickry because they're going
52:48
to be asking questions like, okay, so what's the evidence base for this?
52:53
Like, what are the plausible mechanisms, why this thing might work?
52:58
And to really interrogate and look at that,
53:03
you know, the underlying assumptions for the things that we're asked to do.
53:07
And I think that the best schools,
53:11
the schools which I most enjoy working with
53:13
and I've got the most respect for are ones which encourage
53:17
professional skepticism from their teachers.
53:20
So the worst schools are the ones which just expect compliance.
53:24
This is what we're doing. Just get on with it.
53:26
Those are terrible places to work and to learn in.
53:30
Really, really poor
53:31
modeling for students about what it is to be in the world.
53:35
But schools where there is an expectation
53:38
that we say we think this is a good bet.
53:41
We think that as an organization we should lean into this.
53:45
But of course, we don't know.
53:47
So we invite, you know, this is the evidence base
53:50
we've looked at.
53:51
We invite you to look at it and see if there's anything we missed.
53:54
These are what we think are the plausible reasons why it would work here.
53:58
We invite you to critique that,
54:04
and we're going to hold ourselves to account
54:07
for our implementation of this thing that we're betting on,
54:12
and we're going to do things like we're going to pilot it
54:14
in the smaller groups rather than just going all in.
54:17
We're going to, you know, have clear time
54:20
limits where we say at this point, these are the questions
54:24
that we're going to ask to know whether what's actually happened
54:28
is matching up with what we thought would happen and that
54:32
we will ask you, as a body of staff to engage in a process of discussion.
54:38
We'll do things.
54:39
We'll run pre mortems where before we launch, we'll say,
54:43
what are the things which killed off this policy and will
54:45
then make sure we don't do those things and all of those things.
54:49
I think, are
54:50
really good evidence of
54:53
learning organizations where the teachers
54:56
are being encouraged to be professional
54:59
and that skepticism is occupied
55:02
as a position to avoid bad ideas, and that unless your
55:08
thinking in those kinds of ways, you're going to make mistakes.
55:11
And the people who pay for the mistakes
55:14
are going to be the most disadvantaged children.
55:16
Great.
55:17
Thank you so much, David.
55:18
This has been a fantastic conversation.
55:20
I've really appreciated
55:22
kind of digging into some of this.
55:24
So yeah, I appreciate your time. Thank you.
55:27
You are welcome.
55:28
I think what I've really taken from
55:29
this is the importance of not just taking things at face value.
55:34
And, as you say, like having more skepticism,
55:36
but that around all the assumptions that we might make in terms
55:40
of what type of instruction we're doing, how we're assessing for that learning.
55:44
How do we know if what we're doing is effective, who's benefiting and who's not?
55:47
Yeah. Yeah.
55:48
And I think that's what's really kind of
55:51
sticking with me from our conversation here is really come back to
55:54
how are we benefiting the students through
55:56
what we're doing and what sort of evidence do I have
55:58
that's telling me if that's working or not.
56:00
And I think that's where we can really,
56:02
as educators, whether we're in the IBDP or not,
56:04
really start to thread that line of, am I doing this because I think it's
56:08
right, or am I doing this because I know it's right
56:10
based off of the evidence I'm gathering as well? Yeah.
56:12
And you're never going to know.
56:13
You know, certainties are enemy where that being uncertain is healthy.
56:19
It's uncomfortable. But it's healthy.
56:22
The minute we're certain we're about to make a mistake.
56:26
I think as a general principle.
56:28
David, thanks so much for taking the time.
56:29
And I really appreciate you having this conversation with us.
56:32
This felt like a really, really enjoyable conversation.
56:34
So really appreciate you.
56:36
Thanks for taking the time. And, we'll see you again.
56:38
Thank you.
56:40
IB Unplugged is a Kognity podcast hosted by John Patton
56:43
and Courtney Marline and produced by Katilina Gaffney.
56:46
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56:50
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56:56
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56:57
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57:01
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