Latest / When Will They Learn? / Episode #20 Fighting fascism by not listening to podcasts

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Episode #20 Fighting fascism by not listening to podcasts · When Will They Learn?

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_02: Welcome to When Will They Learn?
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_02: I'm Greg Ashman.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm Caiti Wade.
• 0:06
  This
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_01: is a podcast where we explore what's trending in the world of education.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_01: In each episode,
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_01: we discuss podcasts,
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_01: articles and opinion pieces that are shaping education discourse at the moment
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_01: and examine these through a science of learning lens.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_01: We discuss not just what's popular, but what's supported by the evidence.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_02: In this week's episode,
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_02: we will be tackling so-called rote teaching,
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_02: big DI, little DI, and I don't know, something about fascism or something?
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_01: Hi, Caiti.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_01: I am so curious.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_01: So you were just saying,
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_01: and I rudely stopped you because I'm curious,
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_01: but I feel like the listeners will be curious.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_01: You've been coding.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I...
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_02: Couldn't say that I've actually been coding myself.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_02: My coding ran out when I made a platform game called Flying Fred in the 1980s for
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_02: the Sinclair ZX Spectrum.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_02: After that, my coding career went into a hiatus, let's put it that way.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_02: But I've had this idea for an app for linear algebra,
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_02: for kids practicing doing linear algebra,
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_02: just practicing the moves,
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_02: not having to do all the Arithmetic themselves, just practicing the booze.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_02: And so I had this idea for this app and I've had it for some time.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_02: I tried to get someone interested in it a while back who was into coding
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_02: and they weren't interested in it.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_02: I know you're a bit of a coder.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_01: I'm so disappointed.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_01: I feel like, was this pitched to me?
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_01: Was I the person who wasn't interested?
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_02: No, it wasn't pitched to you.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know why I didn't pitch it to you.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_02: I should have pitched it to you.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_02: You went to the real professionals.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_01: I'm well out at this point.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_02: I've been trying to create it using...
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_02: AI, since the advent of AI, and mostly it's fallen over and not worked.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_02: But it's got to a point with Claude now where it will actually code the thing for you.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_02: So what I did is I produced a PowerPoint slide with exactly what I wanted it to do
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_02: and what I wanted it to look like.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_02: I had like a phone shaped box in the middle and I had lots
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_02: of tags explaining what should show here and what should show there.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_02: And it coded it and it worked perfectly.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_02: So I then had a conversation with it about how we could improve it.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_02: And so now I've got this little app and it does,
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_02: do you know the butterfly wings way that we do the linear algebra at Clarendon,
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_02: you know, that one?
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_01: I actually taught that to your sevens just today, period one.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_02: So it has that in it as well.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_02: So it follows that same methodology.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_02: And it's got obviously capybaras appearing occasionally.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_02: I would hope as much.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_02: So yes, it was kind of fun.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_02: I kind of enjoyed doing that.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_01: That's really cool.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_01: Claude's been,
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_01: and I shouldn't say this,
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_01: but I've created an agent on Claude that builds my maths lessons for me
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_01: and it writes a full,
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_01: because we know that my lessons are controversially,
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_01: it seems, like 150, 180 slides of like,
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I mean,
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_01: it's every now and again,
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_01: it's a question that I model,
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_01: but then it sort of moves into students doing lots of questions that are similar.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_02: Don't you just stand there and press advanced to 150 slides, Caiti?
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_01: Isn't that what you do?
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_01: I'm just clicking the next button constantly.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_01: But it's cool because it's like,
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_01: so for those of you listening,
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_01: when I'm teaching,
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_01: I teach my one problem and then I've taught Claude what a parallel problem means,
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_01: but it's really,
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_01: it's a problem that It should mirror firstly same deep structure,
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_01: same surface features,
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_01: but it's really keeping the problem to be pretty much the same skills
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_01: as what I've done so you wouldn't switch from a positive to a negative number.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_01: But I've got Claude doing that and I've built in, like I've trained it up on a heap of things.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_01: And at one point I did feed it a copy of Engelman's Theory of Instruction,
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_01: which may or may not come up today anyway.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_01: But I've sort of built it up to do this.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_01: And now I've got it building in.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_01: So it's just like it fully writes my lessons for me at this stage.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_01: But it started to build what I'm calling atoms,
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_01: which is where I sort of atomized skills beforehand,
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_01: drawing on some of Chris Bolton's work.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_01: And it's just the fact that like for those of you who are listening
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_01: when I'm teaching means I can do my one teaching example.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_01: And then after that, all of these you do problems I have for kids to practice on.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_01: And these are the ones where if they get the question,
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_01: if they can do it on the first or the second one,
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not going to sit there and make them do all 150 slides.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_01: I'm going to skip them.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_01: But it means that it's just writing all of these questions for me so I don't have
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_01: to write lots of like problems.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_01: So I kind of build part of the structure of my lesson and it just fills it in
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_01: with all of the you do questions.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_01: And it's like my lessons are, they're incredible and they're so quick.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_01: And yeah, and I just build up my skeleton.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_01: Like it's anyway, it's a game changer.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_02: Sounds great.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_02: I tried something similar.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_02: I
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_02: I developed a prototype lesson about linear algebra.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_02: You can see I think about linear algebra a lot.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_02: I can tell.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_02: And I fed that into what?
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_02: So I've got Copilot at work.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_02: And Copilot isn't a thing I didn't realize.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_02: You can go in and you can just select which LMM you want it to use.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_02: So you can either run ChatGPT through it or you can run Claude through it.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: What?
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_01: I use Copilot.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_01: How do you do that?
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_02: You just change it.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_02: It depends what version you've got, but the version I've got, which is like a version.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_01: The one won't be the fancy one, will it?
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I've got the one with the subscription and at
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_02: the top left-hand corner it says you can just select.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_02: It's on auto at the moment,
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_02: but you can choose three versions of Claude or four versions of OpenAI.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_02: So I fed this prototype into, what was it?
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_02: What did I put it into?
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_02: I think I put it into OpenAI.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_02: Because I actually asked CoPilot which LMM would be best for designing lessons,
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_02: and it said the OpenAI one.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_02: So I fed this prototype in and I said, well,
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_02: that's just like one idea of a sequence of like it was several lessons put together
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_02: in a sequence.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_02: It was just how I wanted to expand on the sequence of teaching
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_02: the different components of linear algebra and how I wanted to do it.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_02: And I said, generate some lessons.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_02: So it generated about five lessons for me.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_02: And they were quite good.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_02: I hadn't fed it Theory of Instruction by Zig Engelman.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_02: Who's that?
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_02: Well, that is a little bit.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_02: I hadn't fed it that.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_02: It had inferred some of my instructional principles from previous interactions.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_02: But it did get some things wrong.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_02: So it put all the independent practice in a block towards the end of the lesson.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, no, we hate it.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, we don't teach that way.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_02: We would be doing shuffling between independent practice and modeling all the time.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_02: So I didn't quite get that right.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_02: But it was pretty good.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_02: It was a pretty good product.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_02: And it was better than, well, dare I say, many others that are available for use.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_02: But yeah, it was pretty good.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_01: We're rambling on about AI.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_01: We're just giving a full AI lesson in the podcast.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_02: This was going to be the AI episode,
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_02: but you've got some important things to say about rote teaching, I believe.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_01: I do.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_01: Did you know that one in 10 final year teaching students are going
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_01: to complete their degrees,
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_01: but they're not going to become teachers all because of rote learning?
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_02: Gosh, that's a stunning stat, Caiti.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_02: That must have been derived from a rigorous survey of,
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know, hundreds of pre-service teachers.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_02: Am I right?
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_01: You might be surprised to hear that you're not right.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_01: This is,
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_01: and I should say,
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_01: just to save myself on this one,
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_01: I exaggerated slightly,
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_01: but I only say very slightly, so I'll read you the exact quote.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_01: This is Miss Haley and Ms Haley is lecturer Melissa Haley from Deakin University in Victoria.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_01: She's an education lecturer and the quote is,
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_01: Ms Haley said one in ten of her final year students will be completing degrees
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_01: but not becoming teachers after seeing the realities of Australian classrooms.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_01: And I wasn't against this because I went, you know what, that seems like a lot.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_01: But we've spoken before,
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_01: there's been concerns about the,
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_01: well, I'm going to call it the behaviour crisis in Australian classrooms.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_01: Being a teacher's hard, my own,
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_01: I'm writing a Substack on this at the moment that may or may not be out
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_01: when this podcast episode is released.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_01: But I sort of speak about the fact that I had a lot of people in my teaching degree
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_01: who went on placement and then when they saw what a school was like,
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_01: they went, actually, I don't love teaching.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_01: I think, yes.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_02: The fact that one in 10, I don't know how many teaching students there are on this course.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_02: I could speculate, I don't know.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_02: But the fact that one in 10 of them are not going into teaching is not necessarily a bad thing.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_02: And it could be for all sorts of reasons.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_02: Obviously,
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_02: if your lecturer has an idea of something that they don't like,
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_02: and you're passing the course kind of Depends on the attitude of your lecturer.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_02: There is a possibility that you might infer what they would like you to say about
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_02: the reasons for why you would not necessarily go into teaching.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_02: And they might not necessarily be the ones that are
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_02: the actual reasons why someone doesn't want to go into teaching.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: But this idea, like...
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_02: So I think there is an issue here.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_02: So I had a very, I wrote about this on my Substack, I think on my Curios at the weekend.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_02: I was curious.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I had quite a long response from someone who said, there is a problem here.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_02: There is a problem with this thing that Hayley has identified as rote teaching.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_02: But before we get into that, there is...
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_02: I interview a lot of graduate teachers.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_02: I interview a lot of teachers.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_02: I interview a lot of graduate teachers.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_02: And most of them absolutely welcome the idea of having curriculum materials to teach
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_02: and not having to create them all themselves.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_02: Often they've had that experience on placement of having to create lots
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_02: of curriculum materials themselves,
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_02: even now in this age of rote teaching or whatever.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_02: They've had the experience of having to create lots of lessons for themselves.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_02: And the fact that they can pick up lessons and use them,
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_02: and moreover,
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_02: this is what they'll say to me,
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_02: they know that those have been designed and refined by experienced teachers.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_02: They love that idea because they know that some of the traps and pitfalls
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_02: that you can fall into when you're designing your own lessons,
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_02: particularly when you're inexperienced,
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_02: they're unlikely to be in these lessons so they can learn how to do it themselves.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_02: It's not that they're not interested in ever planning lessons because we talked
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_02: to them about how Initially,
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_02: when they started at school, they won't be planning any lessons at all.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_02: They'll be teaching lessons that other people have designed.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_02: They'll have to prepare.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_02: They'll have to prepare.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_02: You can't stand up and talk about something that you don't know about.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_01: So they have to go through.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_01: Guess what the next slide is.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, do all the questions themselves by hand.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_02: But they don't have to plan them.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_02: But later on,
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_02: they will be involved in planning and we will induct them into that
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_02: and they will learn how to do that and they'll be given feedback on it and so on.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_02: But they mostly like it.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_02: So the idea that This is a barrier to people going into teaching.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_02: I'm sceptical about.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_02: Where I think there might be something is,
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_02: you know,
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_02: when we were talking about this earlier and the criticism that I got
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_02: for apparently mandating PowerPoints across Victoria and New South Wales or failing
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_02: to say not that we shouldn't do that.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that we shouldn't do.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_02: I wasn't vocal enough in my disapproval of I do think I'm getting the impression
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_02: from talking to people out there that explicit teaching is coming as
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_02: a mandate essentially in Victoria and New South Wales.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_02: And a lot of managers who don't really understand what that's all
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_02: about have identified it with slide decks.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_02: So they've reduced explicit teaching down to slide decks.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_02: And in the very worst instances,
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_02: what they're doing is they're going to teachers and they're saying,
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_02: Here's a slide deck.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_02: Stop what you were doing.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_02: You've now got to teach this slide deck.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_02: It's called explicit teaching.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_02: Off you go.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_02: And then not worry about it anymore.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_02: That's it.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that misses your key component of explicit teaching.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_01: I noted down a quote from,
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_01: it's from your Curios that I restacked and a lot of people have liked my restack.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_01: It's gotten quite a lot of traction, but it was actually your quote.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_01: And it was,
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_01: there is zero point in asking students to write answers on mini whiteboards
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_01: if regardless of what these are, the teacher plows on and does not respond.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_01: And your context around this is if you're working with those 150 slides,
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_01: slide decks,
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_01: or whatever form you've got your explicit instruction lesson in,
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_01: if you're working with these,
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_01: the whole point is that you're being responsive in every moment.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_01: You're not just sitting there and doing a click and flick through every single slide.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_01: You should be adapting in the moment and there should be that Like,
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's this really fun back and forth interaction.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_01: I had a lesson the other day where one of my classes got through more questions,
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_01: more slides than we've ever gotten through before.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_01: And I think it was,
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_01: I think it was 170 slides that we got through and they wouldn't have done all
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_01: of them, but they did a good portion factorizing quadratics.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_01: And it was really like the lesson didn't involve a lot from me.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_01: Like it was mostly me sat there with like
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_01: a PowerPoint clicker running around my room,
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_01: talking to students, but They were just doing all the work.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_01: This is one of my favorite things ever.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_01: I taught one example, Greg.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_01: I gave them the first question.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_01: I do a bit of faded guidance and we do that and we do that a couple of times and
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_01: then they're getting it.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_01: And then we got into the questions where I was going to do another example
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_01: where it was slightly different.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_01: And instead I said, well, hey, here's our difference.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_01: We've got this negative number.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_01: How might that change this step?
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_01: And they did that and they got it.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_01: And I didn't even teach it, which is a bit dodgy.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_01: And yeah, and we sort of did that and we did that for the entire lesson.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_01: And the students were like, this has been the best lesson I've ever had.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_01: I learned so much.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_01: It was so much fun.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_01: And I was like,
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_01: well, you also got through like 170 slides, but you had a good time and you learned.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_02: Wow.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_01: That's impressive.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_01: It's very cool.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I don't think I've ever got through that many.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_02: Usually when there's 90 slides,
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_02: I'm thinking I'm picking and choosing from these based on what I'm getting from
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_02: the mini whiteboards.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_02: But that's a lot.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_01: It was insane.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think I've ever taught something so well in my life.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_01: I went, I've cracked teaching.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_01: I've done.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_01: I've won.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_01: I can quit.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_02: I think the issue, like we have talked about this a number of times, that we are not opposed.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_02: We're not opposed to PowerPoints.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_02: Clearly, we use PowerPoint in our teaching.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_02: But PowerPoint is not the thing.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_02: You can do explicit teaching without a PowerPoint.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_02: PowerPoint is just a medium, and it is just a medium.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_02: Now, some people are very critical of it.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_02: And when they're very critical of it, I say, it's just a medium.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_02: It's just a way of displaying questions or notes or something.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_02: And I think some people don't realize that the way that you get it set up is
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_02: that you write all over it.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_02: So I physically project it onto a whiteboard and physically write with
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_02: a boardwalk all over it and collect things at the side so that they're still there
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_02: when the When the slide moves on to the next slide,
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_02: key things are collecting on the whiteboard around it.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_02: And I think a lot of people don't understand that aspect of it either.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_02: They imagine like a business person giving a very dull presentation.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_02: But it is just a medium.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_02: And explicit in teaching, explicit teaching is not PowerPoints.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_02: Explicit teaching is a form of teaching.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_02: So when I went to the Learning First Conference,
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_02: British Ritura,
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_02: Did explicit teaching, excellent demonstration of it using a document camera.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_02: Which I think is great.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_02: And that's explicit teaching.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_02: So people who have identified explicit teaching with a slide deck have made
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_02: a fundamental error because explicit teaching is,
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_02: as far as I'm concerned,
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_02: agnostic on whether you use a PowerPoint slide deck or a document camera
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_02: or However you want to do it.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_02: Now, some people would argue with me and say,
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_02: oh, no, using a document camera is much better than using a PowerPoint or whatever.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_02: And we can have that argument.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_02: Well, someone else can have that argument.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_02: I just don't care how you
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_01: do it.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_02: But absolutely, don't care how you do it.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_02: So someone who comes along and says, oh, OK, so explicit teaching is a slide deck.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_02: They have completely missed the point.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_02: Because it's not.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_02: It's a tool that you could use for explicit teaching,
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_02: but you could use other ones instead if you wanted to.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that this might be what Hayley...
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_02: The nugget of truth,
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_02: the bit inside it that might ring true,
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_02: is that in some circumstances, I can fully imagine...
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_02: It would be completely counterproductive if that's what's happening.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_02: But I would add that to
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_02: A deeper issue we have in Australia with how our schools are structured.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_02: Now, I was talking to Lucy Carroll.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_02: Lucy Carroll, great education journalist.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_02: There are two types of education journalists.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_02: There are those that don't really know much about education and are not
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_02: that interested in finding out.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_02: They just want to go and take pictures of a school doing something faddish
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_02: or they want to run a Scandal story about a school.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_02: That's the one type of education journalist.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_02: And then there's the other type of education journalist.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_02: Lucy Carroll is an example of that.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_02: Rebecca Erdburn,
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_02: one of her predecessors at The Australian,
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_02: is an example of that, where they are genuinely interested in education.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_02: And I was talking to her for a piece yesterday.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_02: So I was talking to her last week for a piece that she wanted to run
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_02: on how we teach maths at Clarendon.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know if you saw that.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_02: That was in The Australian over the weekend.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_01: I've not read it.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_01: I saw it.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_01: I've saved it to read.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_01: I saw reference to, yeah, to yourself and another previous colleague.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_02: So Laura Simpson gave an interview and Lucy Strong was pictured teaching.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_02: So these are people I work with, people you know.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_02: I don't think you overlapped with Lucy Strong, did you?
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_01: No, I didn't know.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_02: But you know Laura Simpson very well.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_01: I still talk to Laura Simpson.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, I imagine you would.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_02: So I was talking to Lucy Carroll and I was explaining that,
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_02: in my view, the way that we structure public education in Australia is problematic.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_02: We have this minister,
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_02: and I think I mentioned this before on the podcast,
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_02: but you know me, my shtick is to repeat myself.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_02: We have this minister sitting in Melbourne or Sydney or somewhere and And
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_02: then you've got this big mushy layer of bureaucracy.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_02: And then you've got classrooms.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_02: And whatever lever the minister pulls, it's got to get through this mushy layer of bureaucracy.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_02: And it has these other problematic effects.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_02: So you know and I know, you know people who work in the government system.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_02: I know people who work in the government system.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_02: We meet up occasionally at various conferences and things like that.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_02: And we chat.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_02: And they tell me,
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_02: and I'm sure they tell you, Caiti,
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_02: that there is a culture in the government system in Victoria,
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_02: in the government system in New South Wales,
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_02: where a school isn't allowed to get too big for its boots.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_02: If a school starts to get too much attention,
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_02: that is seen as a negative because it's showing other schools in the system up
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_02: or it's showing the department up or something like this.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_02: It's an example of tall poppy syndrome.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_02: And so someone from the department will get on the phone and say,
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_02: Stay out of the papers, pipe down a bit.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_02: We want to hear a little less from you from now on.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_02: And this is a problem because if you are running the school
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_02: that is doing exceptional things, other people then don't get to hear about it.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_02: You're not allowed to talk about it on social media.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_02: You've got these media and social media policies that basically gag people.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_02: They're not allowed to,
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_02: they have to get permission from the department to speak to the media
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_02: and all this sort of business.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_02: And so you can't look for these lighthouse schools within the government system
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_02: Because they're essentially prevented from talking about what they do
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_02: and promoting themselves.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_02: When I look to England,
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_02: they have a different system and they have these trusts of,
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know, five schools, 10 schools, 15 schools, something like that.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_02: And they're all independent of each other.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_02: They get funding from the government, but the funding goes to the trust.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_02: And then the trust essentially runs these schools as independent schools.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_02: They can't charge a fee because they're getting this government funding,
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_02: but they don't have to even follow...
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_02: The national curriculum,
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_02: although I think the new Labour government in the UK is trying to change aspects of
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_02: that.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_02: There's a big debate going on about what the government in the UK is doing and
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_02: whether that is undoing some of the things that have caused England to succeed over
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_02: the last few years.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_02: So I think what we're seeing with...
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_02: Just to circle back on this bit of a detour that I've done,
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_02: I think what we're seeing with people interpreting, say,
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_02: explicit teaching,
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_02: not as an interactive teaching style,
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_02: but as a slide deck,
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_02: a PowerPoint slide deck,
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_02: I think that is a feature of the way that we have education structured in Australia,
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_02: where people who don't really know what they're doing,
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_02: sitting in offices as bureaucrats,
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_02: don't really understand the initiative that's come from the minister,
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_02: And they're interpreting it in certain ways that then get sent out into schools
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_02: that don't serve the original point of the leave that was meant to be pulled.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_01: But if somebody did just hand me a slide deck and said,
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_01: you need to teach with this,
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_01: and it's really hard for me now who's so used to that,
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_01: but without the guidance around what that means,
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_01: I can see that that would be a really awful way to teach and it's probably going
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_01: to be ineffective because you're missing...
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_01: You're missing all the elements that actually do make it work in the first place.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_01: When I work with,
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_01: when I'm working with schools or staff at schools and they're saying, well, look,
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_01: we've taken these really great slide decks or these awesome resources
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_01: that we know schools have had a lot of success with and we've deployed them
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_01: to our staff,
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_01: but our staff hate them and they're complaining about them
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_01: and our results aren't better and, in fact, they're worse.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_01: And now we've got this massive, I mean,
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_01: battle between leadership and between staff,
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_01: like the leadership who are And I think there's merit in building up
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_01: that understanding,
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_01: getting people to kind of start playing with it,
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_01: seeing how it works for themselves with the existing resources.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_01: Here's, you know, an element of explicit instruction we want people to use.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_01: So like you're checking for understanding and doing that,
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_01: you know, short cycle, you're every two to three minutes maximum.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_01: Starting to pair that with fader guidance,
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_01: getting people to do that and then introducing the resources where at
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_01: that point you're like,
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_01: now I see the merit in these and the fact that I've got these things
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_01: that are already created and I've got the ability to,
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_01: like I will,
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_01: take and use bits and pieces
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_01: from whatever like pre-existing resources Like slide decks, resources.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_01: There's heaps out there because you've got your impact curriculum stuff, which I love.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_01: But there's also Victoria State have, is it ARC lesson plans I think they're called?
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_01: But they've got theirs.
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_01: And so I'll take and use bits and pieces,
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_01: but I take and use them knowing what I want my finished product to look like
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_01: so I can change them around.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_01: And I think we're just doing it in the wrong order if we hand people a slide deck
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_01: and say, well, that's magically going to change the way that you teach.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_01: Because I It's not.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_01: And it's frustrating.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_01: And in all honesty, I would find it offensive if someone handed me that.
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_02: I agree.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_02: In fact,
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_02: my book,
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_02: How to Improve a School,
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_02: that should be out in late November or early December,
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_02: addresses exactly this point.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_02: And you're absolutely right.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_02: You don't want to just impose a blanket policy on everyone.
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_02: You want to pilot things.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_02: You want to trial them.
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_02: You want to build understanding.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_02: The advantage that we have at my school is And I'm not saying
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_02: that every school needs to write all their own curriculum themselves,
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_02: but we didn't have the choice because when we started this process,
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_02: it didn't really exist.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_02: You can't afford to
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_01: do it now, Greg.
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you can.
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_02: But because we built it ourselves,
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_02: one of the advantages was that when new people came in and said,
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_02: oh, why is it like this?
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_02: There'd be about three or four people in the office saying,
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_02: oh, it's like this because of blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_02: Whereas if you just give people a resource and they go, oh, why is it like this?
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_02: Then the other people in the office go, oh, I don't know.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_02: And so you can quickly build this resistance.
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_02: So you want to pilot things.
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, you want to pilot things.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_02: You want to trial things.
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_02: And just saying you can absolutely imagine why people would resist.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_02: Now, people would resist this for two reasons.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_02: One that you've said, which is they don't really understand the thinking behind it.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_02: And so they can't realistically use it very well if they don't understand
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_02: the thinking behind it, because that's not been explained to them.
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_02: They haven't had the training.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_02: They've had training in something else and not this.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_02: There is a less honorable reason, and some people are quite open about this.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_02: They just want to do their own thing.
• 27:07
  SPEAKER_02: They came into teaching because they view themselves as something of a maverick,
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_02: and they want to be able to go off and do their own thing.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_02: And those people I have a little less time for because they want to be the hero teacher.
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_02: And these are the sorts of teachers who will have a resource,
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_02: They will deliberately not share with their colleagues because they want the kids
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_02: in their class to have an edge and they want the kids in their class to love them
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_02: a little bit more.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_02: And that's when teaching becomes a lottery.
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_02: And that's when parents are like, I want Miss Wade as my teacher.
• 27:39
  SPEAKER_02: I don't want Miss as my kid's teacher.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_02: I don't want Mr. Ashman as my kid's teacher.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_02: And you get all that kind of dynamic going on in a school.
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_02: I think that's not a good reason to be to to be against.
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_02: Low variance curriculum or shared lesson planning or whatever you want to call it.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_02: But I do think that implementation of these things,
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_02: particularly the way that we have the structures that we have in Australia,
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_02: could be very problematic.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_02: And that indeed is why I wrote How to Improve a School, Caiti,
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_02: and why when I went to see you present on pretty much the same issue,
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_02: I was so pleased that we independently had come to so many of the same conclusions
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_02: about what you need to do.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_02: So, yeah, anyway.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's the fact that we, like,
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_01: we really are in a state where it's like you've,
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_01: for years we've had, like,
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_01: we've had, yeah,
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_01: your rock star teacher who goes out and they deliver something and it's amazing
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_01: and you get a lot of credit for that.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_01: But the problem is there's also, like,
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_01: I think part of what feeds that is that If you're a teacher who's been in the career
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_01: for 20 years and you've been developing your own resources and you've had
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_01: to figure it out yourself and you've had to do the hard yards,
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_01: I do think there's an element of seeing that as being a bit of a,
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_01: that's a rite of passage.
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_01: If you want to become a good teacher, you've got to survive.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_01: You've got to do the really difficult stuff before you can become good.
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_01: And I just,
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_01: I fundamentally disagree with throwing new teachers into the field and having them
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_01: in a position where in the Substack that I'm, that I'm about to release.
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's called Why Rote Teaching Kept Me In Education
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_01: because what I think I've probably told you at some point, Greg,
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_01: is back before I worked at Clarendon as a young baby teacher,
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_01: I'd already made the decision that I was going to quit teaching in my first couple
• 29:31
  SPEAKER_01: of years because the combination of workload, I was,
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_01: and I sort of speak to it in the post,
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_01: but I was developing my own Version of explicit teaching,
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_01: reading resources,
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_01: trying to do that,
• 29:43
  SPEAKER_01: trying to build it up myself, going through this process of trial and error.
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_01: And when I came to Clarendon during the interview,
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_01: I think it was you actually who said to me,
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_01: look, we have these shared lessons, so you'll be teaching from these slides.
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_01: Are you okay with that?
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_01: And I got really excited.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_01: I was like, I'm not just okay with that.
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_01: I am so grateful because I am I am staying up until midnight every single night
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_01: and still not getting all of my lessons planned.
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm constantly trying to read things and come up with new strategies.
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_01: And it's not that staff at my school weren't helpful because they were.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_01: It was more that it was like I'm building every single resource from scratch on top
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_01: of trying to figure out how to be a good teacher.
• 30:25
  SPEAKER_01: And it was a lot.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_01: And so when I came to Clarendon,
• 30:27
  SPEAKER_01: it's not that suddenly I was given stuff and told,
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_01: well, just sit there and don't do anything.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_01: But the difference was when I was given the resources and taught how to use them,
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_01: I then really focused on what good instruction looks like and what a good response
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_01: to a check for understanding looks like.
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_01: And from there,
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_01: then I got into, well, hey,
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_01: here are the elements that seem to – I began to generalise,
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_01: I guess,
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_01: elements that make up effective instruction in maths – That I could then move into,
• 30:55
  SPEAKER_01: oh, well,
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_01: if I'm now working on a unit or building a unit from scratch,
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_01: which is a thing that I did later down the line,
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_01: I then went, well, I know what principles work and what don't work so well.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_01: And I could identify those and I could make those changes.
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_01: But I did that because I sort of learnt the teaching.
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_01: Then I learnt the resource creation.
• 31:12
  SPEAKER_01: And it was just like it kept me in teaching.
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_01: And I was getting good results.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_01: Like I think that's,
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_01: if nothing else,
• 31:19
  SPEAKER_01: it's like someone else made the mistakes before me and they wouldn't let me fall
• 31:23
  SPEAKER_01: into that trap.
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_02: Absolutely.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_02: Well, that was the plan.
• 31:26
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm glad that you saw it working.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_02: I mean,
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_02: I certainly learned a lot from you when you started to teach with those materials
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_02: and pick things out and different ways that you would do stuff
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_02: and don't trust your ex and all those sorts of things.
• 31:40
  SPEAKER_01: Great advice from me.
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_02: But that's how this is supposed to work.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_02: You come in with some fresh ideas and me,
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_02: the grizzled old teacher who's been doing it the same way, I get to learn from you.
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_02: And then that goes into a curriculum which everyone uses.
• 31:55
  SPEAKER_02: That's how that is supposed to work.
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_02: But I can see if you've just been given the plans and you haven't been through
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_02: that process and you don't Can I jump in with one more part to that?
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_02: Go on.
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_01: Which is that I think a lot of the resources that are given,
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_01: the methods that are used in them are also very different.
• 32:29
  SPEAKER_01: And so your way of teaching something in English might be really different
• 32:31
  SPEAKER_01: to what you're used to doing.
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_01: Your way of teaching something in Maths Again,
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_01: it could be really, really different to the way that you've taught it.
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_01: And I think when you get those things too,
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_01: it's really hard because you're teaching something in a way that you're not familiar
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_01: with.
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_01: You might not have built your students up to actually be able to do.
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_01: Like a lot of the methods that I use kind of follow on from things I've taught them
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_01: in previous years and I tend to use kind of consistent models.
• 32:55
  SPEAKER_01: But I think when you sort of do that stuff like that, I mean,
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_01: I think that just adds another layer of resistance
• 33:01
  SPEAKER_01: because not only are you being told we'll use this resource,
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_01: but In all honesty,
• 33:05
  SPEAKER_01: and I shouldn't say this,
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_01: but sometimes I look at a method and I go, I know a better way of doing that.
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_01: And I know it's better because I know from back at Clarendon,
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_01: we'd had people teach it one way previously.
• 33:15
  SPEAKER_01: Someone had come out,
• 33:17
  SPEAKER_01: they'd taught it,
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_01: it had been more effective for their class in another way,
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_01: and we changed our methods.
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_01: And so sometimes I know that.
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_01: And so I can see that there's that frustration too.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_02: But what you described,
• 33:27
  SPEAKER_02: the hamster wheel of just having to have lessons for tomorrow
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_02: to teach is Once you get off that hamster wheel, you can think a bit.
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_02: You can start to think, well, how should I introduce more opportunities to respond?
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_02: That's one of the things that we've been thinking about recently.
• 33:45
  SPEAKER_02: We had Ron Rory Jones come and deliver some professional learning.
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_02: Should I do this?
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_02: Should I do that?
• 33:51
  SPEAKER_02: And you're off the hamster.
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_02: You've not got to just produce lessons.
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_02: And it's because education is such a slow burner.
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_02: Like kids go through 13, 14, 15 years if you include kinder.
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_02: And you don't really know,
• 34:08
  SPEAKER_02: particularly in a system like Australia's where the only high stakes assessments are
• 34:12
  SPEAKER_02: at the end of year 12.
• 34:13
  SPEAKER_02: You don't really know for those 15 years until the very end whether it's been a success or not.
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_02: So your teacher in year three or your teacher in year seven can do Some ineffective things.
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_02: And nobody really knows.
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, NAPLAN catches some of it in English and maths, but people don't really know.
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_02: If it was surgery and new surgeons were not told how to do hip replacements,
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_02: they had to plan each hip replacement themselves the night before.
• 34:44
  SPEAKER_02: And it's some pretty crummy hip replacements.
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_02: And all the older surgeons said, well, I had to do that.
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_02: I had to plan my own hip replacement.
• 34:52
  SPEAKER_02: So you've got to do it too.
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_02: People would be complaining.
• 34:55
  SPEAKER_02: People with bung hip replacements would be unhappy about it.
• 35:01
  SPEAKER_02: And so that's why they don't do it like that.
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_02: And that's why engineers don't do it,
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_02: because the bridges would fall down, all this sort of business.
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_02: But the reason we get away with that in education is because
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_02: the result is so far away.
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_02: And even then,
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_02: people don't necessarily,
• 35:17
  SPEAKER_02: it's hard to ascribe the result to an individual teacher
• 35:20
  SPEAKER_02: an individual practitioner, which is why we need much more assessment.
• 35:25
  SPEAKER_02: And accountability,
• 35:27
  SPEAKER_02: not heavy-handed,
• 35:30
  SPEAKER_02: you're going to get the sack if you don't get this many B-grade type accountability,
• 35:35
  SPEAKER_02: but just the original meaning of the term,
• 35:38
  SPEAKER_02: being able to give an account of what you did and how we got here so that we can
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_02: then unpack that and go back through it and see if there's some way we can improve
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_02: that,
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_02: re-engineer it so the next time round we can We need much more of that in education.
• 35:54
  SPEAKER_02: And this idea that standardized tests are evil and that, well,
• 36:00
  SPEAKER_02: explicit teaching,
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_02: which we will come on to, is only any good for raising test results.
• 36:07
  SPEAKER_02: But actually, there's some other things vaguely defined that...
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_02: Deliver on other outcomes vaguely defined.
• 36:14
  SPEAKER_02: That's very convenient to a story where we don't want accountability
• 36:19
  SPEAKER_02: and we don't actually want to get better.
• 36:21
  SPEAKER_02: Shall we go on to the reaction to Sol the Story?
• 36:24
  SPEAKER_01: I think we've kind of naturally begun to.
• 36:27
  SPEAKER_01: So let's jump into it.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_02: So a couple of weeks before Sol the Story came out,
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_02: I tweeted, so I did, And I'm now going to look for it because –
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_01: That's right.
• 36:45
  SPEAKER_01: Because while you look,
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_01: I'll – sold a story just for anyone who's not heard of it,
• 36:51
  SPEAKER_01: although I'd be surprised if you're listening to this and you've not.
• 36:55
  SPEAKER_01: I've been listening to the Sold a Story podcast,
• 36:57
  SPEAKER_01: which is presented by Emily Hanford,
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_01: and it's getting into – I mean,
• 37:03
  SPEAKER_01: at the moment it's been getting into explicit instruction and teaching – And
• 37:08
  SPEAKER_01: the story there.
• 37:09
  SPEAKER_01: And for those of you who have not listened,
• 37:11
  SPEAKER_01: I will try to remember to pop a link down into the show notes.
• 37:16
  SPEAKER_02: Shall I do the definitions, Caiti?
• 37:18
  SPEAKER_02: Please.
• 37:19
  SPEAKER_02: So Solder's Story at the moment is talking about Big D.I.,
• 37:22
  SPEAKER_02: capital D,
• 37:23
  SPEAKER_02: capital I,
• 37:23
  SPEAKER_02: which is direct instruction as in developed by Zig Engelman and colleagues.
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_02: That book you were talking about earlier,
• 37:33
  SPEAKER_02: Theory of Instruction, is by Zig Engelman and Doug Carnine.
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_02: And Big D.I.,
• 37:39
  SPEAKER_02: Is a system that Engelmann developed himself,
• 37:42
  SPEAKER_02: started teaching with kids,
• 37:44
  SPEAKER_02: tried to get other teachers to do it,
• 37:46
  SPEAKER_02: tried to train them,
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_02: found that the training was so intensive and the teachers just kept doing it wrong.
• 37:51
  SPEAKER_02: They kept over explaining things,
• 37:54
  SPEAKER_02: kept using different ways, several different ways of saying the same thing.
• 37:58
  SPEAKER_02: And he eventually alighted on scripts for the teachers.
• 38:02
  SPEAKER_02: And this is the big bogeyman thing.
• 38:05
  SPEAKER_02: So
• 38:11
  SPEAKER_02: this story talks about the development of big DI,
• 38:15
  SPEAKER_02: direct instruction, project follow through where big DI was a big winner and so on.
• 38:23
  SPEAKER_02: And we use big DI at Clarendon in very limited ways.
• 38:28
  SPEAKER_02: We use it for interventions with kids who are not making The progress we would like.
• 38:34
  SPEAKER_02: But we also teach everyone spelling mastery because we found
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_02: that we were giving spelling mastery as an intervention for some kids.
• 38:43
  SPEAKER_02: Those kids who needed it as an intervention were then outperforming the rest of
• 38:47
  SPEAKER_02: the cohort on spelling.
• 38:48
  SPEAKER_02: So we decided to teach everyone spelling mastery.
• 38:51
  SPEAKER_02: But these are the scripted programs.
• 38:53
  SPEAKER_02: So there's a few of them.
• 38:55
  SPEAKER_02: There are similar programs around the world.
• 38:56
  SPEAKER_02: So that's Big D.I.
• 38:58
  SPEAKER_02: What you and I have been talking about when we talk about our own teaching up
• 39:02
  SPEAKER_02: until this point in the podcast,
• 39:04
  SPEAKER_02: when we've been talking about how we teach, we're talking about little di.
• 39:07
  SPEAKER_02: Now, I call it explicit teaching because I find direct instruction is
• 39:12
  SPEAKER_02: a really troublesome term because I've now spent a couple of minutes trying
• 39:16
  SPEAKER_02: to define what we're on about.
• 39:17
  SPEAKER_02: There's a paper by Barack Rosenstein, Five Meanings of Direct Instruction.
• 39:21
  SPEAKER_02: That indicates it's not helpful.
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_02: So I talk about explicit teaching.
• 39:24
  SPEAKER_02: But explicit teaching or little di doesn't have the scripts.
• 39:28
  SPEAKER_02: It's not as systematic and programmatic,
• 39:31
  SPEAKER_02: and it's not following the principles set out in principles of instruction.
• 39:37
  SPEAKER_02: It might make use of some non-examples and might pick and mix from those ideas.
• 39:42
  SPEAKER_02: But this is just the highly interactive teacher-led instruction
• 39:47
  SPEAKER_02: where you model things, you guide student practice, you interact a lot.
• 39:53
  SPEAKER_02: And the thing that distinguishes that from what a lot
• 39:56
  SPEAKER_02: of people think Explicit teaching is,
• 39:59
  SPEAKER_02: which is what I used to think explicit teaching is.
• 40:00
  SPEAKER_02: So I had a post about this the other day.
• 40:03
  SPEAKER_02: When I first started teaching, I would spend, I don't know, 10 minutes.
• 40:07
  SPEAKER_02: I might even have taught you physics this way, Caiti.
• 40:10
  SPEAKER_02: I would have spent 10, 15 minutes modeling different problems.
• 40:15
  SPEAKER_02: And then I'd set some independent work.
• 40:16
  SPEAKER_02: And of course,
• 40:17
  SPEAKER_02: I now know that the first problem I modeled has been forgotten by the kids
• 40:21
  SPEAKER_02: when they started independent work.
• 40:22
  SPEAKER_02: So that's why I now got lots of stuck kids who I'm walking around and trying to help
• 40:26
  SPEAKER_02: who are stuck.
• 40:28
  SPEAKER_02: But that is what a lot of people think explicit teaching is.
• 40:31
  SPEAKER_02: That is a kind of default form of teacher-led instruction.
• 40:36
  SPEAKER_02: I used to use it not because I thought it was great.
• 40:38
  SPEAKER_02: I thought I was doing the wrong thing, but I couldn't get inquiry learning to work.
• 40:42
  SPEAKER_02: So that's why I resorted to that sort of explicit teaching.
• 40:47
  SPEAKER_02: Now, my article that I published a couple of days ago,
• 40:53
  SPEAKER_02: He's on that topic because two weeks before Solder's Story came out,
• 40:57
  SPEAKER_02: remember Solder's Story is about big DI.
• 41:00
  SPEAKER_02: I'm sure everyone's switched off by this point.
• 41:02
  SPEAKER_02: There's so much DI.
• 41:04
  SPEAKER_02: Big DI scripts.
• 41:06
  SPEAKER_01: Big DI is we don't tend to use it.
• 41:08
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 41:09
  SPEAKER_02: So I tweeted with mainstream articles on education,
• 41:12
  SPEAKER_02: so Matty Iglesias had written about education as well,
• 41:16
  SPEAKER_02: and Solder's Story 2 coming out,
• 41:17
  SPEAKER_02: we are about to experience a period of intense gaslighting.
• 41:21
  SPEAKER_02: This is what I wrote.
• 41:23
  SPEAKER_02: It's already started.
• 41:25
  SPEAKER_02: We will be told repeatedly that nobody is or ever has been
• 41:28
  SPEAKER_02: against explicit teaching,
• 41:30
  SPEAKER_02: which is easily falsified, but these falsifications will be dismissed.
• 41:33
  SPEAKER_02: We will be told repeatedly that all teachers use explicit teaching,
• 41:36
  SPEAKER_02: which is true to some extent because the alternatives are so ineffective,
• 41:40
  SPEAKER_02: but they're using it without knowing the research and often under pressure
• 41:43
  SPEAKER_02: to do something else.
• 41:44
  SPEAKER_02: Why do people try to deny the debate in this way?
• 41:47
  SPEAKER_02: Why don't they just come out and make an honest argument?
• 41:49
  SPEAKER_02: So I predicted that people would come out and say, no one's opposed to explicit teaching.
• 41:53
  SPEAKER_02: And they would come out and say, but everyone does explicit teaching anyway.
• 41:56
  SPEAKER_02: And one article by Michael Pershing then subsequently proved me right.
• 42:01
  SPEAKER_02: So Michael Pershing writes this Substack saying,
• 42:04
  SPEAKER_02: direct instruction is the American default.
• 42:07
  SPEAKER_02: And he talks about...
• 42:09
  SPEAKER_01: But can you read the tagline?
• 42:11
  SPEAKER_01: Do you have that printed as well for the article?
• 42:12
  SPEAKER_02: But not the version that researchers want.
• 42:15
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, but not the version that researchers want.
• 42:16
  SPEAKER_02: I feel like that's important.
• 42:17
  SPEAKER_02: Go on.
• 42:18
  SPEAKER_02: So essentially...
• 42:21
  SPEAKER_02: Michael Pershing and I agree.
• 42:24
  SPEAKER_02: He thinks that most people out there are not using inquiry learning.
• 42:29
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know.
• 42:30
  SPEAKER_02: The point is there's no great data on this.
• 42:32
  SPEAKER_02: And whenever anyone says, oh,
• 42:34
  SPEAKER_02: there's too much inquiry learning out here,
• 42:35
  SPEAKER_02: all these people like piranhas come out and say, where's your evidence?
• 42:39
  SPEAKER_02: Where's your data?
• 42:41
  SPEAKER_02: There isn't any.
• 42:41
  SPEAKER_02: There's no strong data on what teachers do every day in their teaching in America,
• 42:47
  SPEAKER_02: in the UK, in Australia.
• 42:49
  SPEAKER_02: Michael Pershing's had to go back to these studies from the 90s to try
• 42:53
  SPEAKER_02: and get some sort of feel for what that looks like.
• 42:56
  SPEAKER_02: But he reckons that most people are using a form of explicit teaching,
• 43:01
  SPEAKER_02: the form probably that I was just talking about,
• 43:03
  SPEAKER_02: where a teacher does a bit of modelling,
• 43:05
  SPEAKER_02: maybe several problems, then sets some seat work for the kids to do.
• 43:09
  SPEAKER_02: And if you want to call that explicit teaching,
• 43:12
  SPEAKER_02: it's not the research bit of form of explicit teaching.
• 43:16
  SPEAKER_02: As he says, not the version that researchers want.
• 43:19
  SPEAKER_02: If that's what you want to call explicit teaching, I'm not going to challenge Michael.
• 43:24
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not going to do unto others what they do to me.
• 43:26
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not going to say, oh, you need lots of evidence to make that assertion.
• 43:30
  SPEAKER_02: I'm going to say to him, yeah, I reckon you're probably right.
• 43:35
  SPEAKER_02: I reckon a lot of teachers are using a kind of default form of explicit teaching,
• 43:40
  SPEAKER_02: not least because inquiry learning just doesn't work very well.
• 43:43
  SPEAKER_02: And at some point you do have to explain things to the kids.
• 43:45
  SPEAKER_02: The problem is that They don't think they're supposed to be using it.
• 43:48
  SPEAKER_02: They're getting all this pressure from outside to do weird and wacky things.
• 43:52
  SPEAKER_02: They're experimenting with the weird and wacky things.
• 43:54
  SPEAKER_02: They're not working.
• 43:55
  SPEAKER_02: There's a lot of opportunity cost here.
• 43:58
  SPEAKER_02: There's a lot of wasted time.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_02: And yes, they're using probably a lot of default explicit teaching.
• 44:04
  SPEAKER_02: But if they knew... Now, this is where Michael Pershing and I depart from each other.
• 44:09
  SPEAKER_02: I think that if these teachers knew about...
• 44:13
  SPEAKER_02: The practices that you and I have read about and know about and try to implement
• 44:18
  SPEAKER_02: that they would go,
• 44:20
  SPEAKER_02: oh, I can make this default explicit teaching isn't a guilty secret.
• 44:24
  SPEAKER_02: It's not something I should try and hide from admin.
• 44:27
  SPEAKER_02: I can actually make it better and I can make it a lot more effective for my kids.
• 44:30
  SPEAKER_02: And the reason I think teachers would think that is because when I started reading
• 44:34
  SPEAKER_02: about explicit teaching in 2011, 2012,
• 44:37
  SPEAKER_02: when I first moved to Clarendon,
• 44:39
  SPEAKER_02: actually not about explicit teaching, just about education research.
• 44:42
  SPEAKER_02: I realized that this way I'd been teaching wasn't as effective as it could have been.
• 44:47
  SPEAKER_02: I realized I could introduce some of these other strategies and be more effective.
• 44:51
  SPEAKER_02: I was angry about that,
• 44:54
  SPEAKER_02: that I'd managed to get so far in my teaching career and I didn't know these things.
• 44:57
  SPEAKER_02: And that's why I wanted to start writing about it.
• 45:01
  SPEAKER_02: And so I started trying to introduce those in my practice,
• 45:04
  SPEAKER_02: not all at once, not in a big bang, one at a time.
• 45:07
  SPEAKER_02: Probably when I was teaching you physics,
• 45:09
  SPEAKER_02: I was probably starting that process and introducing some of these things,
• 45:13
  SPEAKER_02: but not others.
• 45:16
  SPEAKER_02: But Pershing doesn't think that.
• 45:18
  SPEAKER_02: Pershing thinks that explicit teaching,
• 45:21
  SPEAKER_02: the type that researchers approve of,
• 45:23
  SPEAKER_02: the type that is backed by the evidence, is just too hard.
• 45:27
  SPEAKER_02: And the reason teachers aren't using it is because it's too much work.
• 45:31
  SPEAKER_02: And you are on The whole lesson.
• 45:35
  SPEAKER_02: If you are using interactive teaching, you are on.
• 45:39
  SPEAKER_02: There's nowhere to hide.
• 45:40
  SPEAKER_02: You're commanding that room for the entire time.
• 45:42
  SPEAKER_02: And it is quite tiring.
• 45:44
  SPEAKER_02: And he thinks because of that, that's why teachers are not using explicit teaching.
• 45:49
  SPEAKER_02: And therefore, sold a story.
• 45:54
  SPEAKER_02: Telling everyone about Big Di is...
• 45:58
  SPEAKER_02: He's missing the point that that's not the issue in American classrooms
• 46:03
  SPEAKER_02: and it's something else or whatever.
• 46:06
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know.
• 46:07
  SPEAKER_02: I disagree with Michael Pershing on that.
• 46:09
  SPEAKER_02: We've had a bit of an exchange on Twitter X,
• 46:14
  SPEAKER_02: but I did predict that that's what people would say.
• 46:16
  SPEAKER_02: Now, I'm not going to speculate on Michael's motives,
• 46:20
  SPEAKER_02: but I did say in my original tweet,
• 46:22
  SPEAKER_02: Why do people try to deny the debate in this way?
• 46:25
  SPEAKER_02: Because it feels to me as if people are trying to stop us having a discussion
• 46:30
  SPEAKER_02: about different teaching strategies,
• 46:32
  SPEAKER_02: about whether inquiry learning or whatever you want to call that is more effective
• 46:36
  SPEAKER_02: than explicit teaching.
• 46:36
  SPEAKER_02: They don't want to have that discussion.
• 46:39
  SPEAKER_02: And that will do anything to not have that discussion.
• 46:41
  SPEAKER_02: And so these things get wheeled out.
• 46:44
  SPEAKER_02: No one's against explicit teaching or everyone does explicit teaching anyway.
• 46:48
  SPEAKER_02: As smokescreens and diversions to stop us having...
• 46:52
  SPEAKER_02: The debate,
• 46:53
  SPEAKER_02: the only really meaningful debate to have as to whether
• 46:57
  SPEAKER_02: which this strategy is more effective than that one.
• 47:01
  SPEAKER_01: But it undermines exactly what explicit instruction is.
• 47:04
  SPEAKER_01: Like if you said to me, again, I'll talk about this in the Substack I'm writing.
• 47:08
  SPEAKER_01: I speak about how I started my lesson with my,
• 47:11
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 47:11
  SPEAKER_01: somewhere between 10 and 20 minute chunk of just teaching problem after problem.
• 47:15
  SPEAKER_01: And I teach it and the students would copy it.
• 47:17
  SPEAKER_01: And I would have said, I say I would have said I went back.
• 47:21
  SPEAKER_01: I have very detailed notes from my uni degree.
• 47:23
  SPEAKER_01: So I went back and that's what I thought explicit instruction was.
• 47:26
  SPEAKER_01: So I would call that the explicit instruction chunk or segment or portion of my lesson.
• 47:31
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas I would now say that wasn't explicit instruction.
• 47:34
  SPEAKER_01: I wasn't doing it at all.
• 47:35
  SPEAKER_01: And my entire 70-minute lesson is explicit instruction.
• 47:39
  SPEAKER_01: But I think, yeah,
• 47:41
  SPEAKER_01: if you go back and you undermine it and you say,
• 47:43
  SPEAKER_01: well, that is explicit instruction, 100%.
• 47:46
  SPEAKER_01: At some point in my lesson, I am absolutely...
• 47:48
  SPEAKER_01: Going to be explicit with my students about what they need to do.
• 47:51
  SPEAKER_01: And I would say that almost every teacher is.
• 47:53
  SPEAKER_01: You're explicitly telling them when you give them an inquiry task what
• 47:57
  SPEAKER_01: the directions are or where to access them or which page on the OneNote
• 48:01
  SPEAKER_01: or whatever it is you're doing.
• 48:02
  SPEAKER_01: You're going to give some form of explicit instructions to your students.
• 48:07
  SPEAKER_01: So what it does is it just undermines the entire premise of explicit teaching
• 48:11
  SPEAKER_01: by completely misrepresenting it and saying that it's something that it isn't.
• 48:18
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, but I've kind of given up on this a little bit,
• 48:21
  SPEAKER_01: Katie, because I'm of the opinion now that if someone wants to say,
• 48:35
  SPEAKER_02: To me explicit teaching can be combined with inquiry learning because
• 48:40
  SPEAKER_02: to me explicit teaching is,
• 48:41
  SPEAKER_02: as you say,
• 48:42
  SPEAKER_02: it's just a teacher standing at the front and being explicit about something.
• 48:45
  SPEAKER_02: And I do that when I tell them where to find the equipment to do the experiment
• 48:51
  SPEAKER_02: where they're going to discover physics for themselves.
• 48:53
  SPEAKER_02: And I explicitly tell them where to find that equipment.
• 48:56
  SPEAKER_02: Well, if they want to call that explicit teaching,
• 49:00
  SPEAKER_02: They can because you can define words however you like.
• 49:04
  SPEAKER_02: If you want to say, for me,
• 49:05
  SPEAKER_02: the defining feature of swimming is getting wet and therefore any time you get wet,
• 49:11
  SPEAKER_02: you're swimming.
• 49:12
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I mean,
• 49:13
  SPEAKER_02: it's a bit absurd,
• 49:15
  SPEAKER_02: but if that's how they're going to define it, what can I do about it?
• 49:18
  SPEAKER_02: So instead now I spend all this time trying to explain what I mean by it
• 49:25
  SPEAKER_02: and whatever label I give it, I know that someone's going to Try and pervert it.
• 49:29
  SPEAKER_02: This is what happened to direct instruction.
• 49:31
  SPEAKER_02: So at one point, it was very clear what that meant.
• 49:35
  SPEAKER_02: But people don't like direct instruction.
• 49:38
  SPEAKER_02: They don't want it in the classroom.
• 49:42
  SPEAKER_02: They're ideologically opposed to it.
• 49:44
  SPEAKER_02: So they start defining it to meet their own ends.
• 49:47
  SPEAKER_02: So it becomes a lecture or it becomes oppressive or whatever they want to associate.
• 49:54
  SPEAKER_02: And so then you've got a choice.
• 49:56
  SPEAKER_02: Well, do I stick with this term that they've tried to propagandise or do I come up
• 50:02
  SPEAKER_02: with another term?
• 50:03
  SPEAKER_02: And that's why I use explicit teaching.
• 50:05
  SPEAKER_02: But I'm under no illusion that explicit teaching is just as vulnerable
• 50:08
  SPEAKER_02: and people can do what they want to that too.
• 50:13
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 50:14
  SPEAKER_01: I do like speaking,
• 50:15
  SPEAKER_01: I think,
• 50:15
  SPEAKER_01: in more detail about faded guidance has become the one
• 50:18
  SPEAKER_01: that I probably use most often when I'm doing any kind of teacher education work.
• 50:23
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 50:23
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 50:24
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 50:52
  SPEAKER_01: And I've become a little bit more open to that.
• 50:56
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 50:57
  SPEAKER_02: The we do bit.
• 50:59
  SPEAKER_02: That's the bit that a lot of people don't get about explicit teaching.
• 51:08
  SPEAKER_02: When you're doing default explicit teaching,
• 51:10
  SPEAKER_02: you explain something and then you get the kids to do something.
• 51:13
  SPEAKER_02: Whereas the we do where you hold them with you,
• 51:16
  SPEAKER_02: that bit is the bit that I think most distinguishes people.
• 51:20
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, dear.
• 51:21
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 51:50
  SPEAKER_02: We do is most of the lesson.
• 51:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, we do is like all of it.
• 51:54
  SPEAKER_01: I've been throwing out the fact that my PowerPoint slide deck,
• 51:59
  SPEAKER_01: I have an I do slide,
• 52:00
  SPEAKER_01: I have a you do slide as my like consistent cues on there,
• 52:03
  SPEAKER_01: but I don't have a we do because I don't know how long we do is going to last,
• 52:07
  SPEAKER_01: but it's probably going to be 90% of my you do slides if I'm teaching properly.
• 52:12
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, absolutely.
• 52:13
  SPEAKER_02: And some of your I do's because you'll get them to do the bits they can already do.
• 52:17
  SPEAKER_02: We must move on.
• 52:18
  SPEAKER_02: To the last story, which is absolutely crackers.
• 52:27
  SPEAKER_02: So again, this is, um, I'm so glad this is a reaction to sold a story.
• 52:33
  SPEAKER_02: And it is so funny.
• 52:34
  SPEAKER_02: So Ben Riley is this guy, right?
• 52:37
  SPEAKER_02: So Ben Riley, I first came across him.
• 52:40
  SPEAKER_02: He was working in New Zealand, somehow advising the New Zealand government or something.
• 52:45
  SPEAKER_02: Um, Then he moved back to the US and founded Deans for Impact.
• 52:48
  SPEAKER_02: And Deans for Impact is this non-profit, I think.
• 52:53
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know actually whether it's non-profit,
• 52:54
  SPEAKER_02: but it advises education faculties on teacher training and it advises them
• 52:59
  SPEAKER_02: on cognitive science and things like that.
• 53:01
  SPEAKER_02: He moved on from that, I know, four years ago or something.
• 53:04
  SPEAKER_02: He fell out with me online many years ago.
• 53:07
  SPEAKER_02: I can't quite remember why, but I don't know.
• 53:13
  SPEAKER_02: But he's very...
• 53:15
  SPEAKER_02: Or he was,
• 53:16
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know if he still is,
• 53:17
  SPEAKER_02: very into kind of like social justice and all that sort of stuff.
• 53:21
  SPEAKER_02: So, which a lot of Americans are, that's kind of their bag.
• 53:25
  SPEAKER_02: And he now, not sure exactly what he does, he's never been a teacher.
• 53:30
  SPEAKER_02: But he's emerged as a bit of a critic of Alpha School.
• 53:33
  SPEAKER_02: And in a way, like, I'm a skeptic of Alpha School.
• 53:38
  SPEAKER_02: But some of the things he's done with sharing posts that their students have made
• 53:42
  SPEAKER_02: in blog posts, I think is a bit...
• 53:46
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not a big fan of that.
• 53:47
  SPEAKER_02: And I wrote about that in my Substack.
• 53:49
  SPEAKER_02: And this post now is, well, it's just, I mean, it really is something.
• 53:55
  SPEAKER_02: He's explaining, it starts like this, okay, friend.
• 53:58
  SPEAKER_02: They're talking about Soul The Story 2.
• 54:00
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, should we act this?
• 54:02
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, okay.
• 54:04
  SPEAKER_02: I'll be friend.
• 54:06
  SPEAKER_02: No, wait a bit.
• 54:06
  SPEAKER_02: That makes... You be friend and I'll be me.
• 54:10
  SPEAKER_02: You be friend.
• 54:10
  SPEAKER_02: Go.
• 54:12
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 54:13
  SPEAKER_01: Are you listening to it?
• 54:14
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 54:15
  SPEAKER_01: Wow, really?
• 54:16
  SPEAKER_01: Why not?
• 54:17
  SPEAKER_01: Just too busy.
• 54:19
  SPEAKER_02: So
• 54:23
  SPEAKER_02: Ben Reilly's writing is the most self-righteous,
• 54:30
  SPEAKER_02: self-important and lacking in self-awareness writing that I have come across,
• 54:37
  SPEAKER_02: particularly recently.
• 54:38
  SPEAKER_02: So it's the same with the Alpha School story.
• 54:40
  SPEAKER_02: He's so pompous.
• 54:42
  SPEAKER_02: So he just...
• 54:46
  SPEAKER_02: We've got to start with this bit.
• 54:48
  SPEAKER_02: I'm just going to read your paragraph.
• 54:50
  SPEAKER_02: I have not spent a single minute of my life lately wondering whether the proportion
• 54:55
  SPEAKER_02: of direct instruction taking place in our nation's classroom is at
• 54:58
  SPEAKER_02: the optimal balance,
• 54:59
  SPEAKER_02: nor does it make my top 10 list of concerns about US education in 2026 or even 100.
• 55:05
  SPEAKER_02: America is presently Is presently the grips, sick,
• 55:08
  SPEAKER_02: that doesn't make sense,
• 55:09
  SPEAKER_02: is presently the grips of a fascist government,
• 55:12
  SPEAKER_02: one that I,
• 55:13
  SPEAKER_02: with the help of our techno-fascist big tech oligarchy,
• 55:18
  SPEAKER_02: sorry, one that, with the help of our big What's it?
• 55:21
  SPEAKER_02: A techno-fascist big tech oligarchy,
• 55:23
  SPEAKER_02: that's a mouthful,
• 55:24
  SPEAKER_02: is explicitly working to systematically dismantle public education in this country.
• 55:28
  SPEAKER_02: If they succeed,
• 55:29
  SPEAKER_02: I promise you this will matter far more to our children's future than the amount
• 55:33
  SPEAKER_02: of Zingengelman-approved teaching techniques they happen to receive or not
• 55:37
  SPEAKER_02: during their schooling.
• 55:39
  SPEAKER_02: So it's just, it's absurd.
• 55:42
  SPEAKER_02: But the meat of it is he puts up a clip of Pritesh,
• 55:45
  SPEAKER_02: who we mentioned earlier,
• 55:46
  SPEAKER_02: Pritesh Rattura teaching,
• 55:48
  SPEAKER_02: and then He says he shows it to people and they all think it's great,
• 55:51
  SPEAKER_02: really excellent stuff,
• 55:53
  SPEAKER_02: but then they'll work really hard to try and figure out why it isn't.
• 55:56
  SPEAKER_02: And they come to the conclusion that they could be answering all the right questions.
• 56:01
  SPEAKER_02: They could be and everything, but they might not understand anything.
• 56:05
  SPEAKER_02: They might not be making meaning.
• 56:06
  SPEAKER_02: Now, I suppose that's true.
• 56:09
  SPEAKER_02: How would we know?
• 56:10
  SPEAKER_02: Well, The only way I know whether kids understand stuff is by asking them questions.
• 56:16
  SPEAKER_02: And the best,
• 56:19
  SPEAKER_02: the most objective way of doing that is through some sort
• 56:21
  SPEAKER_02: of standardized assessment.
• 56:22
  SPEAKER_02: And I know that the kids that Pradesh was teaching in that clip did extremely well
• 56:26
  SPEAKER_02: in standardized assessment.
• 56:27
  SPEAKER_02: So my assumption is that they understand what was being taught really well.
• 56:32
  SPEAKER_02: If Ben Reilly has some other way of measuring understanding and meaning
• 56:36
  SPEAKER_02: that I'm unaware of,
• 56:37
  SPEAKER_02: That shows that these kids don't actually understand what they're doing very well
• 56:42
  SPEAKER_02: and kids taught in a different way understand better,
• 56:45
  SPEAKER_02: then I'd be really interested in it.
• 56:46
  SPEAKER_02: But of course he doesn't.
• 56:48
  SPEAKER_02: It's all about poo-pooing standardized assessments and all that sort of stuff,
• 56:54
  SPEAKER_02: criticizing essentially in a roundabout sort of way this mode of teaching,
• 56:58
  SPEAKER_02: but not actually presenting anything Any evidence of anything that's any better?
• 57:04
  SPEAKER_02: Because you can't, really, when it comes to explicit teaching.
• 57:07
  SPEAKER_02: He shows a couple of other videos.
• 57:08
  SPEAKER_02: He gets into this whole default explicit teaching thing.
• 57:11
  SPEAKER_02: So there's a video from one of these old 90s... Is it 90s studies?
• 57:15
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know.
• 57:15
  SPEAKER_02: There's a video of someone teaching where it's default explicit teaching and there's
• 57:20
  SPEAKER_02: a bit of classroom management issues.
• 57:22
  SPEAKER_02: And then he goes into the whole, well, everyone teaches explicitly anyway.
• 57:26
  SPEAKER_02: Then there's another video.
• 57:28
  SPEAKER_02: And...
• 57:30
  SPEAKER_02: Then he returns to this completely pompous, like hero complex stuff.
• 57:39
  SPEAKER_02: So this is the last paragraph.
• 57:41
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm going to struggle to read it without, well, keeping a straight face, I have to say.
• 57:46
  SPEAKER_02: It just is that absurd.
• 57:48
  SPEAKER_02: But y'all, sorry.
• 57:51
  SPEAKER_02: I'm already amused at saying y'all because that's not something we say in Australia.
• 57:56
  SPEAKER_02: Y'all.
• 57:57
  SPEAKER_01: I'm going to turn into the soundbite.
• 58:00
  SPEAKER_02: But y'all will have just, sorry,
• 58:03
  SPEAKER_02: I can't,
• 58:04
  SPEAKER_02: but y'all,
• 58:07
  SPEAKER_02: but y'all will just have to tell,
• 58:10
  SPEAKER_02: to let me know how that goes, listening to Solder's Story.
• 58:14
  SPEAKER_02: Because I plan to maintain my focus on fighting American fascism
• 58:20
  SPEAKER_02: and its direct threat to the core principles underlying public education
• 58:25
  SPEAKER_02: and democracy.
• 58:28
  SPEAKER_02: If Hanford does a podcast about the radical danger to schools,
• 58:33
  SPEAKER_02: this radical danger to schools,
• 58:35
  SPEAKER_02: and how it's eroding our shared humanity, well, consider me soul.
• 58:44
  SPEAKER_02: It's just ridiculous.
• 58:47
  SPEAKER_00: But anyway.
• 58:49
  SPEAKER_02: I suppose.
• 58:49
  SPEAKER_02: The article is called Selling a Story That's Lost the Plot.
• 58:54
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not sure it sold the story that's lost the plot there.
• 58:59
  SPEAKER_01: I had a really good time reading this one.
• 59:01
  SPEAKER_01: I had a good time listening to you read it.
• 59:05
  SPEAKER_01: I'd like to petition in the next podcast,
• 59:08
  SPEAKER_01: can we just have you put on voices and just read out different,
• 59:14
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, articles, sub-adacts or opinion pieces.
• 59:18
  SPEAKER_01: Can you just read them to us?
• 59:21
  SPEAKER_02: I don't think anyone deserves that, Caiti.
• 59:25
  SPEAKER_01: I feel like that's going to be my prep for next podcast, I think.
• 59:29
  SPEAKER_02: Have you heard The Rest is History?
• 59:32
  SPEAKER_02: No.
• 59:33
  SPEAKER_02: The history podcast.
• 59:34
  SPEAKER_02: Have a listen to one of those.
• 59:35
  SPEAKER_02: It's a very popular history podcast.
• 59:37
  SPEAKER_02: And they always start with doing the voice of someone and reading...
• 59:42
  SPEAKER_02: All right, well.
• 1:00:06
  SPEAKER_01: You know what?
• 1:00:07
  SPEAKER_01: I'm editing it, so we'll see if I chuck that at the start.
• 1:00:11
  SPEAKER_01: People will think they've hit the wrong podcast.
• 1:00:13
  SPEAKER_02: Have you got anything else to say on this piece?
• 1:00:18
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, on this piece,
• 1:00:24
  SPEAKER_01: I struggle to say things that I feel like I would want to go out into the world
• 1:00:28
  SPEAKER_01: about this piece.
• 1:00:32
  SPEAKER_01: I tried to,
• 1:00:32
  SPEAKER_01: when I was writing my notes on it,
• 1:00:34
  SPEAKER_01: I was like, oh man,
• 1:00:35
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:00:36
  SPEAKER_01: I don't often get AI to write things for me because I quite like my little snarky,
• 1:00:40
  SPEAKER_01: bitey, like tone of things.
• 1:00:43
  SPEAKER_01: But I was getting AI to help me rephrase things because I went,
• 1:00:46
  SPEAKER_01: oh, what's a, how do you word this politely?
• 1:00:49
  SPEAKER_01: Because I just, what I'd settle on is It's great for you to have an opinion on something.
• 1:00:57
  SPEAKER_01: I think there was a lot of time dedicated to a Substack about a podcast
• 1:01:01
  SPEAKER_01: that you won't
• 1:01:02
  SPEAKER_02: listen to.
• 1:01:03
  SPEAKER_01: And in fact, the podcast isn't that long.
• 1:01:05
  SPEAKER_01: Each episode is like half an hour.
• 1:01:07
  SPEAKER_01: I listen to it on my way to work and then on my way home from work and that's how I do it.
• 1:01:13
  SPEAKER_01: So it's not that long and I suspect that was less than the amount of time it took to write this.
• 1:01:16
  SPEAKER_02: Katie, you know,
• 1:01:19
  SPEAKER_02: if you don't get invited to a party and you make a great Deal
• 1:01:25
  SPEAKER_02: about how you didn't want to go anyway.
• 1:01:28
  SPEAKER_02: That's kind of what it, that was the kind of the tone it struck.
• 1:01:33
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I guess next time we're having a party,
• 1:01:35
  SPEAKER_01: we'll have to invite some of these people so that they write nice substacks
• 1:01:38
  SPEAKER_01: about us.
• 1:01:39
  [music]
• 1:01:45
  SPEAKER_01: Well, thank you everybody for listening to today's episode.
• 1:01:48
  SPEAKER_01: If you have a podcast,
• 1:01:50
  SPEAKER_01: Substack,
• 1:01:50
  SPEAKER_01: Opinion,
• 1:01:51
  SPEAKER_01: Peace or any of the above that you'd like Greg and I to talk about on
• 1:01:54
  SPEAKER_01: a future episode,
• 1:01:55
  SPEAKER_01: please make sure you drop it to either of us on our socials down below and anything
• 1:01:59
  SPEAKER_01: that we've referenced today should be found in the show notes.
• 1:02:02
  [music]