Latest / When Will They Learn? / Episode #16 A Load of ACPUE

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Episode #16 A Load of ACPUE · When Will They Learn?

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to When Will They Learn?
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Greg Ashman.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm Caiti Wade.
• 0:06
  This
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_01: is the 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_00: This week we will be talking about aeroplanes with propellers,
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: we will be talking about Research Ed Canberra,
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: the aero stuff that's going on with ACPU,
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: the Australian Centre for Something or Other,
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: and we will be talking about lethal mutations.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: Hey Katie, how are you going?
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: I'm good, thank you.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: How are you?
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: I'm good.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: Now, we saw each other again at the weekend up in Canberra.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_01: Actually, in person too, for once.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, in person.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: So we went to Research Ed Canberra, which was quite marvellous.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: And, Caiti, I flew back on an aeroplane that had propellers.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_01: That's absolutely horrifying.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_01: So if anyone's followed along at all on LinkedIn or my various socials,
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_01: I am terrified of flying.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_01: And I didn't particularly care for the flight down from Brisbane, which did not have propellers.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: No.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I say, how does that work?
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_01: I know how that works.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_01: It doesn't make me feel better.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: How did that feel?
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_00: I looked it up and I thought,
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: this is going to take longer to get home than it took to get there.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: Because I went to Canberra on a proper aircraft and then I'm getting on this one
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: with propellers.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: I'm thinking, this is going to take me longer to get home.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: But apparently the journey,
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: it's only like 500 miles or kilometers, I don't know, whichever one it is.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: And...
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: It's so short that you don't cruise at your maximum speed for very long.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: So although this propeller aircraft has a maximum speed that's a little bit less
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: than a jet aircraft, it's not a huge amount actually, it's still quite fast.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: The Dash 8, I know all about this now.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_01: Were you searching this on the plane?
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_01: Is there Wi-Fi on a propeller plane?
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: No, no Wi-Fi on the propeller plane, no.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: So no, this was afterwards.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah, it only cruises at its cruising speed for like five minutes.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: And then you're descending again.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: So it doesn't actually make any difference.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: So it's still about an hour.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: And of course,
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: they run around throwing pies at you and all this sort of stuff because they've got
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: to do their food service.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: Because it's only it's a very short flight.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah, propellers.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: We're all a little bit phased by the propellers.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: My colleagues who are traveling with that, they weren't too sure about these propellers either.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: But we all got home.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: We all got home fine.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: And yeah, it was an experience, Caiti.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: But you obviously didn't go home with propellers.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_01: No, thank goodness I didn't.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: You'd have had to eat some pies if you were confronted with propellers.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_01: And I wish I had, because I do love a good airplane pie.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_01: No, ours was just,
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_01: it was a nice,
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_01: it was a little plane,
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_01: unlike it was a little two-seater plane,
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_01: little two-seater plane, little two-seats together plane.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_01: There were more than two seats, that'd be horrifying if there was only two.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, no, ours was just, it was a much smaller plane.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_01: It was my first time being on a plane in Australia with no Wi-Fi,
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_01: which sounds like such a silly comment for me to make,
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_01: but when I've spoken to people in the past and I've been like, oh,
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_01: just work,
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_01: I've got the Wi-Fi on the plane,
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_01: they question this and they're like, but you don't have Wi-Fi on a plane.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, what do you mean?
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_01: I always do.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_01: But it turns out you don't.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I...
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, no, you don't.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: And it's quite unusual.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_00: And I always put on GPS and it never works, but then occasionally it does.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: And all the way to Canberra and back,
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: I was able to track my flight on the GPS as if I had the little thing on
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: the international flight where you can see where you are.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: Have you done that one, Caiti?
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: Have you flown Long Haul?
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_01: Once, way back in secondary school, I flew...
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_01: You know the trouble with it is that you're a physicist.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: As a physicist, I don't really believe that aeroplanes work.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's a fairly fundamental problem, isn't it?
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: I sort of look at them and I think, well, they shouldn't work, really.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: I know that they do, but I think it's a physicist thing.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, no, it makes me uncomfortable.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like, it's not natural.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_01: It shouldn't be the case.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_01: But it was worth me getting on that flight because where I ended up was obviously
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_01: in Canberra for Research Ed and that was an absolutely brilliant Research Ed.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_01: It was the inaugural Canberra Research Ed, right?
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: Yep.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: So hopefully,
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: so what,
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: so for those listeners who don't know,
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: I've still got a bit of a flu and I'm still getting over a bit of flu,
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: so I'm a bit croaky today, folks, so I do apologise for that.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: For people that don't know,
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: Research Ed is obviously Tom Bennett's baby,
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: but I kind of look after it in Australia,
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: and my strategy,
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: and I think we talked about this when we were talking about Research Ed Melbourne,
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: is I want really the same event to take place in the same place at
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: the same time each year, so that people can plan their time around it.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: Previously, Research Ed in Australia...
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: It's generally been like an event, like someone might be here.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: I know Nat Wexler or someone will say, okay, let's put on a research ed.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, those are great,
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: but I think a better model,
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: a more sustainable model for the future is to say,
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_00: well, basically it's the end of August, it's Canberra.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: We're going to have research ed Canberra.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: We have that every year.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: It's these guys that organize it.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: They hold it at the University of Canberra and off we go.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_00: And we know that's what's going to happen and people can sort
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: of organize their time around that.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: So that's my plan.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: For the future and I'm looking to establish some research eds in different parts
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: of Australia to do that.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_01: And so if somebody did want to have a research ed or wanted to host one
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_01: in whatever state doesn't have one right now, Greg, what would they do?
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: Well, they get in touch with me.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: I have a fact sheet which goes through the detail of what's involved,
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: and it's a little bit scary,
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_00: I'll be honest,
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: that you have to be prepared to do a few things to make that work,
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: but it's also very rewarding.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: So you get in touch with me,
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_00: you get a fact sheet,
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_00: and there's some formalities in terms of linking up with research ed,
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: the mothership, Wonderful.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: Well, look, let's give them a reason to be interested then.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_00: Let's talk about what we saw throughout the day.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, cool.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so it was a bit different in that most research eds take place in a school,
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: although I know the one in Toronto in Canada takes place at the University
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: of Toronto, I think.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_00: And this was a similar model to that.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: So this took place at the University of Canberra.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: It's an interesting site.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_00: It was a very sunny day.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: Lots of vegetation.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: I'm so glad it's sunny.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, lots of gum trees,
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_00: quite pretty,
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: but 1960s buildings,
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_00: it was a real, it had that kind of vibe, campus university vibe.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_01: Look, it reminded me,
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_01: I was writing about this today,
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_01: I was writing that when I walked into the first lecture theatre for your keynote,
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_01: Greg,
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_01: when I walked in, I had,
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_01: completely unsurprisingly for anyone who knows me,
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_01: I was running a little bit late in the morning and I had mismanaged my time
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_01: while enjoying I had my first experience with a hotel buffet breakfast and I got
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_01: a little bit too excited.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you sent me a photo of breakfast on...
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_00: Well, not the actual breakfast, but where you were having the breakfast on WhatsApp.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_01: That does sound like something I would do.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_01: I was very invested in the breakfast.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_01: But I also insisted on going to a particular cafe and getting a coffee,
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_01: so I had to sort of be dragged away from the breakfast to get this coffee so
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_01: that I would then have my coffee to get to research ed.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_01: And when I walked in with my cup of coffee to the back of this lecture theatre...
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I did mention you.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_01: I can't remember why now.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_01: What was that about?
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_01: You mentioned an article we'd spoken about.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, something we'd spoken about on the podcast.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so, yeah, it started off, I got there a bit early because I'm doing a keynote.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_00: I'm fairly relaxed about these things because I've done a few of them before.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_00: So to the point that the day before,
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_00: I wasn't quite sure what the schedule was and when I was on.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I could have looked it up, but I was just a little bit.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_00: But when that day actually comes, I want to be early because I want to be in the room.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_00: I want to be set up.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_00: I want to know what it looks like.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_00: I want to have a bottle of water because obviously I'm getting over this kind of,
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_00: well, flu, cold, whatever it is.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_00: Knocked me for six at the start of last week.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_00: Dreadful.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_00: And so bottle of water in case I start coughing.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: So I wanted to get all those sorts of things ready.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_00: And I want to project my screen so I know what that looks like.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_00: So I was there quite early, but no one else was.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_00: So I sat in this lecture theatre for some time before the helpers came and set me up.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: Initially,
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: I was sent to the wrong lecture theatre,
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_00: but then they came and got me and put me in the right lecture theatre.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: And yeah, so I gave my little talk on...
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_00: It was two things, really.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: And I wonder whether I tried to do too much, because it was the science of learning, but very...
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_00: Potted science of learning,
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_00: which was like the first half of the talk,
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_00: and with a focus on cognitive load theory, because that's my area.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: So no trees growing out of people's heads,
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_00: no retrieval practice and things like that, although that's really important.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: It was really more my account of Kind of the principles of cognitive load theory,
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_00: biologically primary, biologically secondary knowledge.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: I got one question at the end, Katie, from Mandy Natan.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_00: And the question was almost as long as my lecture about that.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_00: I think Mandy Natan might be a bit of a skeptic on the old biologically primary,
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_00: secondary knowledge.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: So she asked me a question about that and vocab learning,
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_00: and I just about managed to answer that, but then we all had to go.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_00: So I took no more questions after that.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_00: So I talked about that, and then I went into implementation.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: So I've been interested in your thoughts on that, Caiti,
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_00: given that the last talk I saw you give was basically on implementing this stuff in
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: a school.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_00: And I've got this book coming up later this year, How to Improve a School.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_00: And so the second half...
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, thank you.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_00: Well, the second half of my talk was essentially that.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_00: So we've got this science of learning stuff.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_00: And I've failed initially to make the connection to explicit teaching,
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: why the science of learning implies explicit teaching.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_00: So I had to backtrack a little bit for that.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_00: But then you've got this science of learning stuff.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_00: You've got explicit teaching.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: You want a knowledge-rich curriculum because knowledge is what you think with.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: And I tried to make that point again that really it's knowledge all the way down.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_00: That's what you're triggering in long-term memory when you're thinking.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: So we've got this...
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_00: We've got this plan.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_00: How do we then enact it in schools?
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_00: And really, it was a cautionary tale.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_00: Don't go big bang.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_00: Don't launch it with everyone in January because it'll all fall over.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_01: Well, one of your quotes was,
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_01: if you stuff it up,
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_01: it'll just be another one of those fads, which is absolutely right.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_01: I mean,
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_01: that's the general premise of that's what a school does is you get a group of people
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_01: in a room and usually they're the people who don't teach a lot of classes.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_01: And they get in a room and they go, well, this is what we want for the school.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_01: And they get to January and they do exactly what you said.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_01: They run a massive launch with staff or with students or sometimes not with staff
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_01: for some reason,
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_01: which doesn't make a lot of sense because they're the ones enacting it.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_01: And they do that.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_01: And then it kind of things happen and it fails.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_01: And you've tried to, I mean...
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_01: Like I say,
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_01: your two reliable ways to make change fail is you do too much at once and you do
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_01: with too many people at once.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_01: And that's what we typically do in a school system.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_01: So one of the big takeaways that I had from yours was around launching something in term four.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't know if other countries have terms, but that's end of the year.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_01: That's your final quarter of the year.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_01: And I liked your rationale around this, but since you're here, do you want to explain it?
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, sure.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_00: So in Australia, we have four terms.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_00: I know in England,
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_00: when I used to work in England,
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_00: there were three terms,
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_00: but they had this marvellous thing we don't have in Australia called
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_00: a half-term holiday,
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_00: which is a week in the middle of the term where you had a break.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_00: Now, we have four terms here.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: And the way we have it structured at Clarendon is we have this set
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_00: of Three pivotal professional learning days at the start of term four.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_00: So the government system has two weeks off in September, October.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_00: We have three,
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_00: but we bring the staff back three days early
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_00: and we have these three professional learning days.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_00: So they have two weeks and two days instead of two weeks.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_00: And we have these three professional learning days.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_00: And we've talked about it at Clarendon and we've thought about the best way
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: to use this and the rationale on how it makes sense.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_00: And it means that we can introduce ideas at the start of Term 4
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_00: in these professional learning days.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_00: And then people can tinker with them.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_00: They can play with them.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_00: They can pilot them.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_00: They can do stuff with them during Term 4.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_00: We might do something with a particular department or...
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_00: Or everyone might just try different bits of it.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_00: If there's an idea, say for instance, it's about routines, classroom routines.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I might try an exit routine.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_00: The teacher down the hall might try a call to attention routine.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we might try some things out in turn four.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_00: We get to the end of term four.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_00: We then have our thing called Head Start.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_00: So we've taught the classes that we know really well for a few weeks
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_00: and we've tried some new things out with them.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_00: It's great that because those kids trust us.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_00: We've had them all year.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_00: They trust us to try a few things out.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_00: If they don't quite work, that's okay.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: Then we roll into this thing called Head Start where we have two weeks
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_00: with our classes for the following year.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_00: So we flip over into the next year's programme.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_00: We do that from year six and above at my school.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_00: We don't do it for the years below that.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_00: So for those teachers in those years, they have now two weeks with a new class.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_00: And again, they can go, OK, what did I learn when I tried these things with my old class?
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going to launch these things with my new class.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_00: And then they've got two weeks.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_00: Then we've got some more professional learning days.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_00: Then we go away for a big summer holiday.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_00: Then we come back.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_00: We've got some more professional learning days and we can make some decisions.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_00: OK, so what do we want to commit to now?
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_00: We tried some things out.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_00: We tried them out with the classes who knew us well.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_00: We then try to launch things with our new classes.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_00: What is it we want to commit to?
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe whole school, but probably not.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_00: We don't generally go all in with something in January.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_00: We would usually pilot.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_00: But it provides a bit of structure.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_00: Because what happens if you launch everything in January,
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_00: not only have people seen this before,
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_00: they know this game, they know how it plays out.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_00: So the new graduates think that we actually mean it and they try and implement the thing.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_00: But the cynics in the staff room just know that this is going to fall over by about April.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we don't talk about it.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_00: It's a bit embarrassing.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_00: No one ever takes it away because that would require someone losing face.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_00: But we just stopped talking about it.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_00: And the problem with launching things in January like that is I'm the graduate teacher.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_00: I've rocked up with these new kids who don't know me from a bar of soap.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_00: And I've got to enact this new thing that's new for everybody.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_00: The kids don't quite trust me.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_00: I haven't built that relationship yet.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_00: That's not the best time to be introducing a new thing with your class.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_01: You're also learning names and just figuring out your new classrooms
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_01: and you've probably got new subjects at the very least or new year levels
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_01: or it depends what you teach.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_01: But there's so many other new things in that moment.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_00: But by the start of term four, you've been teaching that class for three terms.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_00: So now is a great time to experiment and try something and bring something in
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_00: because everyone's very forgiving.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_00: And if the exit routine isn't working very well, well,
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_00: you've got three terms of So I think that that system seems to work quite well
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_00: for us.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_00: But regardless of the whole term for thing and kids you know and kids you don't,
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_00: The idea of introducing things to deliberately disrupt that start of
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_00: the year big bang cycle,
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_00: to pilot things,
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_00: to do things in a slightly different way so that you haven't got that big bang and
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_00: then sort of gradual fizzle that most initiatives have.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_00: I think that's it.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_00: That's a way to go.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it's the classic issue where over time,
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_01: like there have been fads after fads and they're always introduced in January or
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_01: the start of your year.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_01: And you just get sick of it.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_01: Like there is a,
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_01: I think it was Anna Stocky in her keynote at Research Ed Melbourne who said that
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_01: the innovation cycle,
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_01: it's really broken down trust between teachers and,
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_01: school leaders or school systems who are trying to implement these changes.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_01: And it's hard to know whether this initiative is actually
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_01: a good initiative that's going to stick around or whether this is just going to be,
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_01: your flavour of the month,
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_01: I'm going to make you do some work on it in the Initial staff days
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_01: in January were up where I also think you are so busy getting yourself set up
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_01: and getting your head around you classes.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_01: You don't really have time anyway.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_01: And it sort of does just become this little box ticking admin exercise.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_01: So I love that idea.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_01: But I also like I'm a huge fan of a pilot and piloting with smaller groups,
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_01: picking people who are eager,
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_01: getting them involved and actually testing things out before you try to go for
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_01: a full school rollout.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_00: You don't.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and that social piece.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, absolutely.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, that social learning that the teacher's going to the staff room saying,
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_00: oh, this thing's going really well.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_00: And then other people get interested.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_00: I saw, I've just got my little book of notes.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_00: So after my keynote, I went to see Blaise Joseph.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_00: We can't talk about Blaise Joseph.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_00: We, he's got, well, we can,
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_00: we just can't talk in any detail because he's got a report coming out next,
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_00: next week, this week or something.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_00: Then I saw Steph Degani.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_00: Degani.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_00: Degani.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, from Temple State.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_00: From Temple State.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_00: She's really thoughtful on MTSS.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_00: I was chatting to Jeanette about that
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_00: after ResearchEd, and it's really interesting to me.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_00: Steph didn't say anything wrong.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_00: Steph was really on the money, and it was a really interesting reflection on how it goes on.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_00: If you talk to the people from, say,
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_00: Multilit about this,
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_00: so the debate here, which I'm getting to very, very slowly, is there's two things.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_00: There's one called response to intervention,
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_00: RTI, and one called multi-tiered systems of support, MTSS.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_00: And what people like Steph and what people these days would say is RTI is
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_00: for academic learning.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_00: So tier one, tier two, tier three instruction.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_00: MTSS includes things like behavior, positive behavior interventions and support.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_00: If you say that to some people who are A bit old school,
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_00: they'll get a bit grumpy because they'll say,
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_00: well, response to intervention was always about behaviour as well.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_00: So they'll say there's actually no difference between response to intervention and MTSS.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_00: But that's a very arcane point, not a very interesting one.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_00: And so I probably shouldn't have mentioned it, but I did.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_00: And Steph's talk was really interesting.
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_00: And thinking about how you would,
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_00: because apparently what seems to be happening is MTSS,
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_00: people are,
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_00: we're going to talk about MTSS,
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_00: We'll have fatal mutations later, hopefully, forget the time.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_00: But people are interpreting MTSS as having an intervention group.
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_00: MTSS means you've got an intervention group set up
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_00: where you're doing some targeted intervention with some students.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_00: And Seth's point was, no, no, the whole point of MTSS is the Tier 1 instruction.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_00: That's the absolute starting point.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_00: That's what you're teaching all your kids,
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_00: whole class,
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_00: and you're trying to make sure that 80% of kids plus will make progress from
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: that Tier 1 instruction.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_00: If the Tier 1 instruction is no good,
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_00: you'll just end up with over-referrals,
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_00: too many Too many people referred to Tier 2 and the whole thing becomes unwieldy
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_00: and it doesn't work.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_00: So MTSS is definitely not intervention groups.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_00: MTSS is a whole system and the Tier 1 instruction is possibly the most important part of it.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_01: Well, that's your protective mechanism.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so I thought that was really good.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_01: Interestingly, I saw Jeanette Breen first from Templestowe.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_01: And Jeanette was, I mean,
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_01: she was speaking about Writing in the curriculum,
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_01: but her entire session was just underpinned in this idea that you can't write
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_01: about what you don't know.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_01: And what she did was like, I mean,
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_01: she did the classic part where she obviously builds a bit of a case for
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_01: a knowledge-rich curriculum and being very deliberate about the way
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_01: that knowledge is embedded and taught and what knowledge is taught
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_01: and how that's taught and how that's reviewed within the curriculum,
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_01: making the point that The only thing that really matters is what your students learn
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_01: at the end of the day.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_01: So we can have all these beautiful curriculum documents, beautiful resources.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_01: But if the students don't remember things or they've forgotten things,
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_01: then they can't actually use that knowledge.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_01: And that knowledge is obviously what forms the foundation of what they need to write with.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_01: And I just look at somebody who is actively in the process of learning as much
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_01: as I can about effective writing instruction.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_01: What I liked about Jeanette's presentation was she drew directly on here are
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_01: the things that we do at Templestowe Heights to actually embed this
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_01: in our curriculum.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_01: But there was one part in particular where she had up sort of
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_01: It was an Excel spreadsheet that showed the proportions of different,
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_01: I'm going to call them different components for want of a better word,
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_01: so correct me if I'm wrong,
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_01: but the different components of writing and how much they're taught
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_01: in each different year level from sort of foundation or prep right through
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_01: to grade six.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_01: And there's this huge focus in prep on just understanding the grammar and
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_01: the punctuation or spelling or knowing words.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_01: And as time sort of moves on,
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_01: when they get to grade six,
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_01: there's a much bigger focus on text composition or actually just writing.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_01: And as someone who is very,
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_01: very new to this space and who is planning on doing the aero courses
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_01: that were spoken about at Research Ed,
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_01: who's reading the writing revolution,
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_01: is reading writing fitness, I think that aligns perfectly with that.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_01: It's just starting with those granular details,
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_01: making sure your students can do those before we make the classic mistake we do
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_01: where we've got a bunch of students who can barely write their own name
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_01: and we're asking them to write stories about their weekends.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, absolute classic.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_00: I won't talk at length about all the others.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_00: I saw Chloe Rees and Adrian Bunting,
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_00: who are my colleagues,
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_00: they came,
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_00: they travelled with me,
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_00: and they gave a talk on attempts that we've made at Clarendon
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_00: to establish some classroom routines, which I thought was very, very good.
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_00: Saw Katie Roberts-Hull and Andrea And Jenny Donovan gave a keynote.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_00: Jenny Donovan of Aero gave a keynote at the end of the day,
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_00: all about,
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_00: as you were just talking about there,
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_00: Aero writing,
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_00: which was a very,
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_00: very good keynote,
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_00: very well received,
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_00: and links actually quite nicely to what we're going to talk about next.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_00: But who else did you see, Caiti?
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, absolutely.
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_01: So I will,
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_01: by the time this episode is released,
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_01: I will have a summary of the sessions that I saw and just my key learnings
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_01: on my Substack.
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_01: So you will be able to check that out and I'll pop it in the show notes.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_01: But to give you a quick summary,
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_01: I saw Brendan Lee speak about different types of learning,
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_01: which is not learning styles.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_01: And I mean, look,
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_01: he's got Substack articles on this anyway,
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_01: which I will also put into the links that I've also linked in my own Substack.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_01: But just even the basic things about psychomotor learning,
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_01: which is like learning to physically do something versus fact recall.
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_01: And it's something that I feel like when you hear it,
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_01: it feels obvious,
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_01: but it's also not necessarily something that I would consciously use
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_01: when I'm planning my lessons.
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_01: And so I thought it was an interesting take.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_01: And I think it was a really nice way of putting words to something
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_01: that I think I think I kind of knew was the case,
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_01: but I didn't really get down into the detail of.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_01: I saw Sarah Sycu next speaking about the implementation gap,
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_01: which is that idea that we have the funding to do things,
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_01: we've got these ideas,
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_01: we've got leaders at schools who are really invested in making change,
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_01: but obviously that change doesn't necessarily result in good implementation
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_01: or even implementation at all.
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_01: And then the final session,
• 27:19
  SPEAKER_01: this is my big complaint,
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_01: is every time we go to a conference,
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_01: there's always great people on at the exact time I'm presenting.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_01: And it's always a couple of people that I desperately want to see.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_01: And every year I crack or every conference,
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_01: I crack the same joke that I don't see the point in going to my own session
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_01: because I know what I'm going to speak about.
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_01: So maybe instead I'll go to someone else's.
• 27:39
  SPEAKER_01: And of course, yeah,
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_01: finish up with Jenny Donovan's session,
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_01: which Again, I have taken and written, I think, pages and pages.
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_01: I think I wrote three or four pages of notes just while she was speaking.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_00: So Jenny Donovan, obviously, so Jenny, obviously, I'm doing that again.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_00: I'm doing that one again, Caiti.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_00: Obviously, it's back.
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_00: Jenny Donovan is head of Aero and people don't like Aero, do they, Caiti?
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_01: No, no, that's what I'm hearing.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, there's some people out there that really don't like Aero.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_00: So...
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_00: There's an outfit that has emerged,
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_00: blinking from the twilight, called the, what are they called again?
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_01: The Australian Centre for the Public Understanding of Education.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_00: Or ACPU, for short.
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_01: That's what I'm calling it, yeah.
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_00: ACPU.
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_00: So ACPU have appeared.
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_00: And then loads of people, so they did this report, ACPU, Well, it wasn't really on AERO.
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_00: It was on a publication by AERO.
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_00: They wrote this report.
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_00: And all of a sudden, loads of people are excitedly sharing this report.
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_00: And I asked one of them- Came from nowhere.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_00: Adam Voigt.
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_00: I said, well, who is this?
• 28:58
  SPEAKER_00: Who wrote this?
• 28:58
  SPEAKER_00: He didn't know.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_00: But he was happy to share this report.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_00: Coincidentally, this report is very critical of the Aero paper that it is analysing.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_00: And they produce some statistics at the top.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_00: Now I had a go at trying to reproduce these statistics, Katie, and I wasn't able to do so.
• 29:17
  SPEAKER_00: But I did engage in the analysis and have a look at that.
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_00: And I've written a couple of blogs last week, where I looked into this.
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_00: And the first one, I just looked at the analysis that they'd done of Aero's report.
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_00: So the report that they analysed, I can't remember the name on it.
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_00: Oh yes, no, it's called How Students Learn Best.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_00: And it's a 2023 report by Aero, How Students Learn Best.
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_00: Which is a really great read.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_00: It is.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_00: And what ACPU have done...
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_00: Is they've listed every claim made in that report by Aero,
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_00: sometimes several times, and that's important.
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_00: And then they've taken the citation that Aero have used, and they've looked up that citation.
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, this would have taken them a while.
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, fair play to them.
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_00: They've looked up the citation,
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_00: then they've made a judgment as to whether the citation meets the claim.
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_00: Meets the claim?
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_00: Supports it?
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_00: They don't say supported.
• 30:25
  SPEAKER_01: What do they say?
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_01: They say, sorry, I'm on it right now.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, no, they say they contain 106 claims supported by 61 references.
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_01: A substantial share of the cited material does not support the statements attached.
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_00: The word is matches.
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so they take the citation.
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_00: They say it matches the claim.
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_00: Plausible, that's the sort of, they're not sure, and then does not match the plane.
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_00: So that's the rating that they do.
• 30:57
  SPEAKER_00: But say I'm Aero and I've written a statement and I've put four citations at the end
• 31:03
  SPEAKER_00: of my statement.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_00: They treat every one of those four separately.
• 31:07
  SPEAKER_00: So what could happen, and I've got an example of this, they say...
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, this is the claim.
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_00: This approach,
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_00: and I'm not sure exactly what approach,
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_00: I'd have to go back to the original Aero document to see,
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_00: but this is the bit that they've excised from it.
• 31:23
  SPEAKER_00: This approach to building and sustaining high expectations fosters belonging,
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_00: positive relationships, and effective teaching and learning.
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_00: And they give four citations to support that, right?
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_00: Now, for a start, I'm not sure this is the most controversial thing anyone has ever written.
• 31:40
  SPEAKER_00: The idea that building and sustaining high expectations fosters belonging
• 31:43
  SPEAKER_00: and positive relationships and effective teaching and learning.
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, is anyone seriously disputing that?
• 31:49
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not entirely sure.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_00: But I'm not sure what,
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_00: without looking at what this approach is that they're referring to anyway.
• 31:55
  SPEAKER_00: But what ACPU do, which I think is deeply misleading...
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_00: There's four citations for that.
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_00: They assess each one separately.
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_00: So my understanding when I read that is that en masse, those citations support that claim.
• 32:13
  SPEAKER_00: Taken together, those four citations support that claim.
• 32:17
  SPEAKER_01: As is how it's often done.
• 32:19
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 32:20
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't know,
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_00: maybe I've been getting it wrong and maybe I don't understand how this works
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_00: and maybe I shouldn't have got a PhD.
• 32:25
  SPEAKER_00: But that was my understanding of how this works.
• 32:28
  SPEAKER_00: But what they've done is they've looked at every single citation,
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_00: and each citation they test against the claim individually.
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_00: And unless it meets the whole claim, they say it doesn't match.
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_00: So of these four citations for this fairly unsurprising,
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_00: uncontroversial claim, for the four of them, two of them, they decide match.
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_00: So what's the problem?
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_00: Aero have made a statement.
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_00: The citations that they've used support the statement.
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_00: Let's move on.
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_00: No, no.
• 33:01
  SPEAKER_00: We've got to analyze the other two.
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_00: And one of them, they actually can't find the reference.
• 33:07
  SPEAKER_00: And I tried to find it myself and I couldn't find it either.
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_00: This is Cobben Crown Apple, I think.
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_00: And when I tried to look that up on Google Scholar, I got something really weird.
• 33:17
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm not quite sure what that is.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that they had the same issue as me.
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_00: But instead of that, they put that as plausible.
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_00: So now, in their column of matches, it's not one of them.
• 33:29
  SPEAKER_00: So it is in the bucket of not matching the claim.
• 33:32
  SPEAKER_00: Even though they couldn't actually find the reference,
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_00: the plausibles add up into the not matches basket.
• 33:39
  SPEAKER_00: Sorry, yeah, into the other basket.
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_00: And then the final one, Miller and Steele, they say it does not match the claim.
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_00: Because Miller and Steele do not say
• 33:51
  SPEAKER_00: that high expectations foster positive relationships,
• 33:53
  SPEAKER_00: but treat positive relationships as equally foundational.
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_00: However, they do say that high expectations are vital to improving academic achievement.
• 34:01
  SPEAKER_00: So that does not match the claim.
• 34:04
  SPEAKER_00: So what they then do is they total up all these things and they say something like,
• 34:08
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 34:08
  SPEAKER_00: only 42% of Eros' claims, Eros' references match the claim that they're making.
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_00: But then in the other column are these things where they couldn't find the reference.
• 34:18
  SPEAKER_00: Or where it sort of does, but not fully.
• 34:21
  SPEAKER_00: So the idea that the Miller and Steele reference does not match the claim
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_00: because it doesn't wholly match every little bit of what was written.
• 34:31
  SPEAKER_00: Even though there are two other citations that ACPU will accept entirely match the claim.
• 34:37
  SPEAKER_00: I think that this is deeply misleading.
• 34:39
  SPEAKER_00: And it almost seems, almost, Caiti,
• 34:41
  SPEAKER_00: and I would never accuse them of doing this,
• 34:44
  SPEAKER_00: and so it's obviously entirely coincidental,
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_00: but it almost seems as if the methodology has been chosen
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_00: to make Aero's report look weak when analysed in this way.
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_00: And I have to say, Caiti,
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_00: I got contacted by someone who was reading this,
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_00: someone on the other side of the world in England.
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_01: I'm intrigued.
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_00: And this person said, do you know what?
• 35:10
  SPEAKER_00: This is exactly what people did with Ofsted's subject reports.
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_00: So Ofsted released a whole bunch of subject reports a few years ago
• 35:19
  SPEAKER_00: on teaching maths, on teaching history, various things.
• 35:23
  SPEAKER_00: And they were analysed.
• 35:25
  SPEAKER_00: And they were subjected to exactly this analysis in
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_00: that every citation was treated separately, not en masse.
• 35:33
  SPEAKER_00: And they pointed holes and found holes and they said, this is a problem with these reports.
• 35:39
  SPEAKER_00: So it seems as if this methodology has been used before.
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_00: Inspired perhaps by.
• 35:45
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I couldn't possibly comment on that, but it is not uncommon.
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_00: Now.
• 35:51
  SPEAKER_00: The next thing you'll be asking, of course, Caiti, as you are a bit of a curious cat.
• 35:56
  SPEAKER_00: I am.
• 35:57
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, just don't they kill you, Caiti.
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_00: The next thing you'll be asking is,
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_00: who are these mysterious defenders of academic standards and citation practices?
• 36:10
  SPEAKER_00: And I have to say...
• 36:11
  SPEAKER_00: I know.
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_00: Well, for a while, it was very unclear.
• 36:14
  SPEAKER_00: So I wanted to get to the bottom of who ACPU were.
• 36:19
  SPEAKER_00: And I...
• 36:21
  SPEAKER_00: I went to their about page and their about page didn't say who they were,
• 36:25
  SPEAKER_00: which is unusual because usually for an organization it will say who their board are
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_00: or who their CEO is.
• 36:31
  SPEAKER_00: Who's funding them.
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, who their team members are.
• 36:33
  SPEAKER_00: None of that.
• 36:35
  SPEAKER_00: And so I got AI on the case.
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, I'm trying to find out who these people are.
• 36:41
  SPEAKER_00: And AI did a big search and it searched LinkedIn.
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_00: And this was the spark for a second article that I wrote.
• 36:49
  SPEAKER_00: And what AI found was somebody called
• 36:55
  SPEAKER_00: Rebecca Bertenshaw on LinkedIn.
• 36:59
  SPEAKER_00: And Rebecca Bertenshaw posted to LinkedIn.
• 37:03
  SPEAKER_00: The newly launched Australian Centre for the Public Understanding of Education,
• 37:06
  SPEAKER_00: brackets,
• 37:07
  SPEAKER_00: founding researchers include people like Robert Hattam,
• 37:11
  SPEAKER_00: who's always sharing and provoking great discussions,
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_00: close brackets,
• 37:15
  SPEAKER_00: have released a systematic evaluation of AIRES 2023 report, How Students Learn Best.
• 37:21
  SPEAKER_00: So I asked Bert and Shaw about this on LinkedIn,
• 37:25
  SPEAKER_00: and for my troubles, I was immediately blocked, immediately blocked.
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_00: I located Robert Hattam on LinkedIn and I found that he'd been saying lots
• 37:35
  SPEAKER_00: of really negative things about air and quite Well,
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_00: quite disobliging, I would say, Caiti.
• 37:42
  SPEAKER_00: Quite disobliging things he'd been saying about Aero.
• 37:45
  SPEAKER_00: And I asked him if he was involved and he did not answer me.
• 37:48
  SPEAKER_00: So I got a response.
• 37:50
  SPEAKER_00: Don't get me wrong.
• 37:51
  SPEAKER_00: I got a response,
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_00: quite a lengthy response,
• 37:53
  SPEAKER_00: where he referenced my PhD and the research that I did and things like that.
• 37:58
  SPEAKER_00: But he didn't ask my question about whether he was involved in ACPU,
• 38:01
  SPEAKER_00: which was the thing that I was interested in, Caiti.
• 38:03
  SPEAKER_01: That is the classic move,
• 38:05
  SPEAKER_01: though, is you reply to only part of a message and not the whole thing.
• 38:09
  SPEAKER_01: When I don't want to answer something,
• 38:10
  SPEAKER_01: and I'm not saying that's the case for Robert Haddon,
• 38:13
  SPEAKER_01: but it's just if there's a message I get from someone,
• 38:16
  SPEAKER_01: I don't want to reply to part of it, I just reply to everything else.
• 38:20
  SPEAKER_00: Well, yeah, I mean, that is a possibility.
• 38:25
  SPEAKER_00: But it looked like there was certainly a synergy.
• 38:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's a little less temperate, is Robert Hattam's LinkedIn feed than maybe the Atapu report.
• 38:35
  SPEAKER_00: A little less temperate,
• 38:36
  SPEAKER_00: a little less academic in tone, a little bit more disobliging towards Aero.
• 38:44
  SPEAKER_00: But I thought, well, maybe this seems...
• 38:47
  SPEAKER_00: It does seem to me that there's a good chance that this guy might be involved.
• 38:52
  SPEAKER_00: But I couldn't get him to say.
• 38:54
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that this is an issue because we're not talking about some anonymous blogger here.
• 38:59
  SPEAKER_00: Often teachers will blog...
• 39:01
  SPEAKER_00: Anonymously, because they worry about their repercussions if they speak publicly.
• 39:07
  SPEAKER_00: I know teachers in the public system in Australia have very stringent media
• 39:12
  SPEAKER_00: and social media policies.
• 39:14
  SPEAKER_00: The policies themselves,
• 39:15
  SPEAKER_00: I've looked at them,
• 39:16
  SPEAKER_00: they don't seem that bad,
• 39:17
  SPEAKER_00: but the way they tend to be applied by managers is quite heavy handed.
• 39:21
  SPEAKER_00: And so sometimes they will blog under a pseudonym or something like this.
• 39:25
  SPEAKER_00: But that's not what this is.
• 39:26
  SPEAKER_00: This is setting itself up as an Australian centre for the public understanding of education.
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_00: Clearly, there are academics behind it.
• 39:34
  SPEAKER_00: Academics have academic freedom.
• 39:37
  SPEAKER_00: And a key part of being an academic is transparency.
• 39:41
  SPEAKER_00: It's about, well,
• 39:44
  SPEAKER_00: at the most basic,
• 39:45
  SPEAKER_00: saying who you are and then taking that into disclosing sources of funding and all
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_00: that sort of thing.
• 39:52
  SPEAKER_00: These are fairly basic academic requirements.
• 39:54
  SPEAKER_00: And so it does seem a bit dodge to set up this centre and not actually say who you are.
• 40:01
  SPEAKER_00: There's an asymmetry there because we all know who Aero are.
• 40:06
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, they've got a great description on their website.
• 40:08
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 40:09
  SPEAKER_00: And then later on, on the About page, all of a sudden appears two names.
• 40:17
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, this is so much fun.
• 40:18
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 40:19
  SPEAKER_00: What are the names?
• 40:21
  SPEAKER_01: David Clements and Natasha Chabatti.
• 40:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 40:25
  SPEAKER_00: Now, this is very interesting because...
• 40:30
  SPEAKER_00: If we go to them.
• 40:32
  SPEAKER_00: So I looked them up.
• 40:33
  SPEAKER_00: So this was a few days ago.
• 40:35
  SPEAKER_00: This is towards the end of last week.
• 40:36
  SPEAKER_00: So I'd already published my article where I suggested Robert Hatton might be involved.
• 40:42
  SPEAKER_00: And also that I was quite happy to remove that suggestion if he came out and issued
• 40:48
  SPEAKER_00: a denial, but he hasn't done so.
• 40:50
  SPEAKER_00: So it's still up at the moment.
• 40:52
  SPEAKER_00: And then we get these two people, David Clements and Natasha Ciabatti.
• 40:59
  SPEAKER_00: David Clements does not have much of a publishing record at all.
• 41:02
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, the only published article I can find, well, I can find two things by him.
• 41:06
  SPEAKER_00: One is an article on intercultural studies,
• 41:10
  SPEAKER_00: which he published with Natasha Ciabatti, and the other is a book review.
• 41:15
  SPEAKER_00: Which you published with Natasha Chabatti.
• 41:17
  SPEAKER_00: Natasha Chabatti hasn't got that many more articles than David Clements.
• 41:21
  SPEAKER_00: So they both seem to me as if they're fairly early career researchers.
• 41:26
  SPEAKER_00: They mostly seem to be, well, David Clements, there's only those two things.
• 41:32
  SPEAKER_00: Natasha Chabatti,
• 41:33
  SPEAKER_00: she comes from overseas and she seems to be really interested in this idea
• 41:36
  SPEAKER_00: of intercultural studies.
• 41:37
  SPEAKER_00: And this article that they published together is a bit like...
• 41:42
  SPEAKER_00: You can't teach intercultural understanding in a way that the OECD think that you can.
• 41:49
  SPEAKER_00: Essentially,
• 41:49
  SPEAKER_00: you develop intercultural understanding through immersion and experiential learning,
• 41:55
  SPEAKER_00: and that's what we should... And I don't really have very strong opinions on that.
• 42:00
  SPEAKER_00: I haven't spent much time thinking about intercultural studies or intercultural understanding.
• 42:05
  SPEAKER_00: But it did strike me as a little bit of a...
• 42:08
  SPEAKER_00: As a straw man version of what maybe the OECD is arguing for when I read that,
• 42:13
  SPEAKER_00: but I couldn't really offer any more than that.
• 42:17
  SPEAKER_00: What did strike me as odd is that these two people don't seem to be the sort
• 42:23
  SPEAKER_00: of people who would be writing the paper taking down Aero.
• 42:28
  SPEAKER_00: It seemed quite removed from their work, this paper.
• 42:37
  SPEAKER_00: Continuing, I found a post.
• 42:38
  SPEAKER_01: More has happened.
• 42:40
  SPEAKER_00: Well, yes, so ACPU have a LinkedIn page themselves.
• 42:45
  SPEAKER_00: And interestingly, they've been posting, you sent me something today.
• 42:49
  SPEAKER_00: I did.
• 42:51
  SPEAKER_00: An explanation of their methods for how they deconstructed the error report,
• 42:57
  SPEAKER_00: which I've replied to because I don't buy it.
• 43:00
  SPEAKER_00: And I think it is still very misleading.
• 43:03
  SPEAKER_00: But it also led me to another post of theirs.
• 43:06
  SPEAKER_00: And here they explain why they haven't said who they are, Caiti.
• 43:10
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, go on.
• 43:11
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 43:12
  SPEAKER_00: We've just sent out our first newsletter introducing ourselves to those
• 43:16
  SPEAKER_00: who have subscribed so far and updated our website.
• 43:18
  SPEAKER_00: Well, introducing themselves but they haven't said who they are
• 43:20
  SPEAKER_00: so I'm not sure that's quite right.
• 43:22
  SPEAKER_00: We started the Australian Centre for the Public Understanding of Education
• 43:25
  SPEAKER_00: without funding and it isn't affiliated with any university.
• 43:29
  SPEAKER_00: We're also in the process of formalising what are currently an informal group of advisors.
• 43:33
  SPEAKER_00: We initially left our names off the site at first Because we wanted attention on
• 43:39
  SPEAKER_00: the method and the findings rather than on us.
• 43:43
  SPEAKER_00: Well, yeah,
• 43:45
  SPEAKER_00: it didn't work if that was the plan because the question that arose for everyone is,
• 43:51
  SPEAKER_00: who are these people?
• 43:52
  SPEAKER_00: Because they didn't say who they were.
• 43:53
  SPEAKER_01: And for good reason.
• 43:55
  SPEAKER_01: They think I've said that their line is they said they're,
• 44:01
  SPEAKER_01: quote, committed to rigorous open inquiry, end quote.
• 44:04
  SPEAKER_01: And I just...
• 44:06
  SPEAKER_01: I think that it's curious that they're not applying those same standards
• 44:09
  SPEAKER_01: to themselves as a research organisation who should really be identifying
• 44:15
  SPEAKER_01: who they are so that we can,
• 44:17
  SPEAKER_01: as readers,
• 44:18
  SPEAKER_01: assess any potential conflicts of interest or any biases they might have
• 44:22
  SPEAKER_01: or just any other incentives that might be informing those reports or those claims
• 44:28
  SPEAKER_01: that they're making.
• 44:29
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, because on their site, Caiti,
• 44:30
  SPEAKER_00: they've got a list of targets,
• 44:34
  SPEAKER_00: sorry, they don't call them targets, projects that they're going to work on.
• 44:37
  SPEAKER_00: Upcoming projects.
• 44:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, upcoming projects.
• 44:40
  SPEAKER_01: There was a theme, wasn't there?
• 44:41
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, cognitive load theory is one of the targets, sorry, projects.
• 44:47
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, we have VTLM 2.0,
• 44:48
  SPEAKER_01: which is the Victorian teaching and learning model,
• 44:51
  SPEAKER_01: which is all, again, I mean, that's all Your evidence informed explicit instruction.
• 44:56
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 44:56
  SPEAKER_00: Randomized control trials is another target.
• 44:59
  SPEAKER_00: Sorry, the project.
• 44:59
  SPEAKER_01: Blows my mind.
• 45:00
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 45:01
  SPEAKER_00: So if we could see who they were, like,
• 45:04
  SPEAKER_00: this is why I thought Roger,
• 45:06
  SPEAKER_00: Robert Adams,
• 45:07
  SPEAKER_00: LinkedIn profile was very interesting because as I said,
• 45:10
  SPEAKER_00: he's made some really disobliging comments about Aero.
• 45:13
  SPEAKER_00: And if he is involved in ACPU, then that makes a lot of sense.
• 45:18
  SPEAKER_00: But it also tells you,
• 45:20
  SPEAKER_00: gives you a context Through which to interpret this output of ACPU,
• 45:25
  SPEAKER_00: if that was the case,
• 45:26
  SPEAKER_00: we would think,
• 45:26
  SPEAKER_00: well this is not,
• 45:28
  SPEAKER_00: if he was involved,
• 45:29
  SPEAKER_00: Then you would think, well,
• 45:30
  SPEAKER_00: this is not necessarily the work of completely impartial researchers
• 45:35
  SPEAKER_00: who are just interested in citation accuracy and just so happen
• 45:39
  SPEAKER_00: to have picked this particular report to analyse.
• 45:43
  SPEAKER_00: There might be a bit of an agenda perhaps there,
• 45:46
  SPEAKER_00: and that agenda might be expressed in the selection of targets,
• 45:52
  SPEAKER_00: sorry, projects to take down...
• 45:58
  SPEAKER_00: Analyze.
• 45:58
  SPEAKER_00: Analyze.
• 45:59
  SPEAKER_00: Analyze.
• 46:00
  SPEAKER_00: Projects to analyze.
• 46:02
  SPEAKER_00: And that might be reflecting some of these biases.
• 46:06
  SPEAKER_00: But if we don't know who they are,
• 46:08
  SPEAKER_00: then that's a real transparency issue and it's a real problem.
• 46:11
  SPEAKER_00: And it feeds this wider narrative.
• 46:13
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, there were lots of people very quick to share this stuff who claim
• 46:16
  SPEAKER_00: to not know who's involved in the project at all.
• 46:19
  SPEAKER_00: And this feeds a...
• 46:21
  SPEAKER_00: There is essentially, I'm pretty convinced, Caiti, a campaign running against Aero...
• 46:27
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 46:28
  SPEAKER_00: It's been running for over a year.
• 46:31
  SPEAKER_00: It's been running in the Australian Association for Research and Education blog.
• 46:36
  SPEAKER_00: It's been running, I think, behind the scenes of politics.
• 46:41
  SPEAKER_00: And I think this is,
• 46:43
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not necessarily,
• 46:44
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not saying all these people are talking to each other and coordinating
• 46:48
  SPEAKER_00: and things like that.
• 46:49
  SPEAKER_00: But this does seem to be the latest expression of essentially a campaign against Aero.
• 46:54
  SPEAKER_00: And Aero is, Why would people be campaigning against AERO?
• 46:58
  SPEAKER_00: Well, my thoughts on this, Caiti, is that AERO do what academics should be doing.
• 47:04
  SPEAKER_00: They provide practical, evidence-informed advice that is actually really useful to teachers.
• 47:10
  SPEAKER_00: They share videos of teachers enacting these things.
• 47:14
  SPEAKER_00: The fact that the whole of the education research establishment has signally failed
• 47:19
  SPEAKER_00: to produce practical,
• 47:21
  SPEAKER_00: useful advice means that when AERO come along, they're a threat to them.
• 47:25
  SPEAKER_00: And it's as simple as that really.
• 47:27
  SPEAKER_00: And that's why they must be destroyed.
• 47:29
  SPEAKER_00: And that's why people like you and me and the listeners to this podcast need
• 47:34
  SPEAKER_00: to defend our error.
• 47:35
  SPEAKER_00: We need to stick up for these people who are providing teachers with useful
• 47:40
  SPEAKER_00: and practical advice.
• 47:42
  SPEAKER_00: And I intend to continue to do so.
• 47:45
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's also that this attack on error that we're seeing,
• 47:49
  SPEAKER_01: I describe it as being a proxy war over evidence-informed practice itself.
• 47:55
  SPEAKER_01: There is a layer in this where it's just people who,
• 47:59
  SPEAKER_01: for whatever reason,
• 48:00
  SPEAKER_01: and I'm not questioning your reasons for not wanting to,
• 48:02
  SPEAKER_01: but for whatever reason,
• 48:04
  SPEAKER_01: don't like the very real and what is probably very unsettling,
• 48:09
  SPEAKER_01: if you don't like it,
• 48:10
  SPEAKER_01: movement towards evidence-informed practice in Australia across a lot
• 48:14
  SPEAKER_01: of different bases.
• 48:15
  SPEAKER_01: And so rather than trying to just come in with an attack on the evidence,
• 48:20
  SPEAKER_01: what's happened is EROs sort of become I mean,
• 48:23
  SPEAKER_01: AERO has really become the target of those attacks and it's become the,
• 48:28
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know, what's the phrase or what's the word that I'm looking for?
• 48:31
  SPEAKER_01: It's really become the main, yeah, absolutely.
• 48:35
  SPEAKER_01: For any attack that's against anything evidence-informed,
• 48:38
  SPEAKER_01: which is exactly why, I mean,
• 48:41
  SPEAKER_01: that's exactly why the evidence-informed community needs to really step up
• 48:45
  SPEAKER_01: and be their defending AERO team.
• 48:48
  SPEAKER_01: Like I said earlier, I'm planning on doing Eros writing courses.
• 48:51
  SPEAKER_01: Eros writing courses are free.
• 48:53
  SPEAKER_01: I'm someone who wants to learn about how to write.
• 48:55
  SPEAKER_01: And I have,
• 48:56
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 48:57
  SPEAKER_01: I have this or I have this collection of resources that I can go on that are going
• 49:01
  SPEAKER_01: to tell me as a maths person, this is how you teach students how to write.
• 49:06
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't have to take everything in there and use it exactly as is.
• 49:10
  SPEAKER_01: But it's stuff that's accessible and written for teachers to understand.
• 49:14
  SPEAKER_01: And it's paired with videos and courses and There's a lot of great resources in there.
• 49:18
  SPEAKER_01: I'll link them below.
• 49:23
  SPEAKER_01: So our last piece is by Dr.
• 49:25
  SPEAKER_01: Haile Hughes,
• 49:26
  SPEAKER_01: who we spoke about,
• 49:27
  SPEAKER_01: I think it was the last episode, maybe the episode before at Research Ed Melbourne.
• 49:32
  SPEAKER_01: This one was sort of partly a request from a listener who said, hey,
• 49:36
  SPEAKER_01: I keep hearing the phrase lethal mutations mentioned,
• 49:39
  SPEAKER_01: but I don't really know what that is.
• 49:43
  SPEAKER_01: And I thought, I actually initially went to Haileys.
• 49:45
  SPEAKER_01: I knew that Kyle Hendrick had a great post on lethal mutations
• 49:48
  SPEAKER_01: of retrieval practice,
• 49:49
  SPEAKER_01: but I actually went to Haileys Substack because at Research Ed Melbourne,
• 49:53
  SPEAKER_01: she'd spoken specifically about lethal mutations.
• 49:57
  SPEAKER_01: And to give a little bit of an overarching description of a lethal mutation
• 50:01
  SPEAKER_01: and chime in at any point, Greg,
• 50:04
  SPEAKER_01: that's really where we've got,
• 50:07
  SPEAKER_01: and I mean,
• 50:08
  SPEAKER_01: I should actually clarify first and say,
• 50:09
  SPEAKER_01: Hailey breaks this into,
• 50:10
  SPEAKER_01: I think it was eight or nine different types of lethal mutations,
• 50:14
  SPEAKER_01: but just as a general overview, And so what we get is people in the classroom...
• 50:45
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you know,
• 50:46
  SPEAKER_01: the classic,
• 50:46
  SPEAKER_01: the click and flick on your slideshow where it's that case of schools going, well,
• 50:50
  SPEAKER_01: I know that schools who are using these slides are doing really well,
• 50:53
  SPEAKER_01: so we're going to start to implement slideshows.
• 50:57
  SPEAKER_01: But what happens is,
• 50:58
  SPEAKER_01: you referenced this actually in your keynote, Greg,
• 51:01
  SPEAKER_01: what happens is people do it,
• 51:03
  SPEAKER_01: but they're not doing a very good job because they're not responding to the students
• 51:07
  SPEAKER_01: in front of them.
• 51:07
  SPEAKER_01: And the reason that slides are effective is because it allows you to flick
• 51:11
  SPEAKER_01: between questions quickly and to be responsive in the moment and Have,
• 51:14
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 51:15
  SPEAKER_01: a curriculum,
• 51:15
  SPEAKER_01: but it doesn't mean that you're tied to following that exact sequence
• 51:19
  SPEAKER_01: or reading it exactly as it appears.
• 51:23
  SPEAKER_01: So Haile obviously talks about that.
• 51:25
  SPEAKER_01: She gives a couple of really common examples of lethal mutations.
• 51:31
  SPEAKER_01: And the one that I would start with here is this.
• 51:34
  SPEAKER_01: It's what she calls the purpose loss mutation.
• 51:38
  SPEAKER_01: And this is what I was talking about.
• 51:39
  SPEAKER_01: This is we have a routine.
• 51:41
  SPEAKER_01: That is detached from its reason.
• 51:44
  SPEAKER_01: And her example is the classic, it's retrieval practice becoming a quiz.
• 51:49
  SPEAKER_01: It's where you're doing something so that when people walk past
• 51:51
  SPEAKER_01: and they're doing their checklist lesson observation,
• 51:54
  SPEAKER_01: they can go, oh yeah, I saw that Caiti starts every lesson with a retrieval quiz.
• 51:58
  SPEAKER_01: But what I've missed in that might be the fact that, well,
• 52:01
  SPEAKER_01: for retrieval to be effective,
• 52:03
  SPEAKER_01: it should be something that students have learnt in the past
• 52:05
  SPEAKER_01: because they should be retrieving learnt material.
• 52:09
  SPEAKER_01: It should be something that they can be successful with,
• 52:11
  SPEAKER_01: but there's still got to be a level of effort.
• 52:14
  SPEAKER_01: Ideally,
• 52:15
  SPEAKER_01: the most effective retrieval practice should be something that your curriculum is
• 52:18
  SPEAKER_01: about to build on in that lesson.
• 52:21
  SPEAKER_01: And a lot of that stuff gets lost,
• 52:22
  SPEAKER_01: and that's not to mention the classic interleaving versus interweaving
• 52:25
  SPEAKER_01: that we get mixed up.
• 52:27
  SPEAKER_01: And that's the general premise, as she goes through in this article.
• 52:30
  SPEAKER_01: I think it was eight or nine different types of lethal mutations and examples of those.
• 52:37
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and I think, yeah, this is not a new problem.
• 52:42
  SPEAKER_00: So I remember back in the day teaching in the UK and at
• 52:46
  SPEAKER_00: the time Dylan Williams' work on formative assessment was quite popular.
• 52:51
  SPEAKER_00: It was the government were trying to get schools to engage with it.
• 52:55
  SPEAKER_00: And formative assessment is a process.
• 52:57
  SPEAKER_00: It's an assessment that leads to changes in the instruction as a result.
• 53:02
  SPEAKER_00: So I ask a question, I find that only 30% of the class can get it right.
• 53:09
  SPEAKER_00: So instead of moving on, I sort of re-explain, do it a different way.
• 53:14
  SPEAKER_00: So I made a decision about the next step of instruction that's been informed by the assessment.
• 53:21
  SPEAKER_00: But formative assessment became to be like...
• 53:24
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, have you got the formative assessments that were doing period three?
• 53:27
  SPEAKER_00: It came to be the name of like a kind of quiz that you would do or some sort of assessment.
• 53:34
  SPEAKER_00: And it wasn't necessarily a formative assessment because unless you use that data
• 53:39
  SPEAKER_00: from those quizzes to make a decision that's better informed,
• 53:44
  SPEAKER_00: it wasn't acting formatively.
• 53:46
  SPEAKER_00: But this happens a lot.
• 53:47
  SPEAKER_00: And It's a really hard one to combat because people want to just do stuff.
• 53:52
  SPEAKER_00: They want to launch something in January.
• 53:55
  SPEAKER_00: I hear of schools sort of adopting the ochre lesson slides,
• 54:00
  SPEAKER_00: which, you know, maybe that's a good idea.
• 54:03
  SPEAKER_00: If you haven't got resources, they're free, so why not use those resources?
• 54:07
  SPEAKER_00: But if a school thinks that that's all they've got to do is just adopt lots of slides...
• 54:13
  SPEAKER_00: They've kind of missed the point at a fairly fundamental level.
• 54:16
  SPEAKER_00: You need to use those in aid of something.
• 54:20
  SPEAKER_00: And So these lethal mutations occur.
• 54:25
  SPEAKER_00: The one that stood out to me is the one that highly calls oversimplification.
• 54:29
  SPEAKER_00: But I come across this a lot, the idea that you should always minimize cognitive load.
• 54:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's not true.
• 54:35
  SPEAKER_00: You want to optimize it because without some cognitive load,
• 54:38
  SPEAKER_00: students are not going to learn anything.
• 54:40
  SPEAKER_00: True.
• 54:40
  SPEAKER_00: Most of maths,
• 54:42
  SPEAKER_00: when you're introducing it to kids,
• 54:43
  SPEAKER_00: you want to reduce the load because maths tends to be high in element interactivity.
• 54:50
  SPEAKER_00: But there are other things where you wouldn't, from the outset, lower the load.
• 54:53
  SPEAKER_00: You might even try and increase it,
• 54:55
  SPEAKER_00: particularly if it's remembering names or labels or things like that.
• 54:59
  SPEAKER_00: So this is quite a common issue.
• 55:04
  SPEAKER_00: And I've heard people say things like, oh,
• 55:07
  SPEAKER_00: this kid's doing six subjects and I think he should really do five
• 55:11
  SPEAKER_00: because it's too much cognitive load.
• 55:14
  SPEAKER_00: I hate it.
• 55:14
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and that's not what cognitive Cognitive load means the items you're processing right now.
• 55:21
  SPEAKER_00: The fact that you're doing French and history and maths doesn't mean
• 55:25
  SPEAKER_00: that you're processing all of those things in your working memory right now.
• 55:29
  SPEAKER_00: Presumably you're doing them one at a time.
• 55:31
  SPEAKER_00: So that's not what cognitive load means.
• 55:34
  SPEAKER_00: So I get quite frustrated when people do that.
• 55:38
  SPEAKER_00: And I think the only solution to this really is...
• 55:42
  SPEAKER_00: Having a professional learning program that includes the what,
• 55:47
  SPEAKER_00: in other words, what you're going to do.
• 55:48
  SPEAKER_00: So you're going to, this is how you're going to do mini whiteboards.
• 55:51
  SPEAKER_00: You're going to go three, two, one, chin, or whatever.
• 55:54
  SPEAKER_00: The really practical stuff,
• 55:56
  SPEAKER_00: the stuff that will actually change what people are doing in the classroom.
• 55:59
  SPEAKER_00: But you've got to have the why.
• 56:01
  SPEAKER_00: And the why isn't really going to affect what people do in the classroom so much.
• 56:05
  SPEAKER_00: I can stand up and talk about cognitive load theory,
• 56:07
  SPEAKER_00: and it's not really going to change what anyone does when they go to period three.
• 56:12
  SPEAKER_00: But what it's supposed to do,
• 56:14
  SPEAKER_00: the thinking is,
• 56:15
  SPEAKER_00: that if people really understand cognitive load theory,
• 56:18
  SPEAKER_00: then when they've got choices to make in a classroom,
• 56:23
  SPEAKER_00: they're not going to choose the fatal mutation.
• 56:26
  SPEAKER_00: They're not going to choose form over substance.
• 56:28
  SPEAKER_00: They're going to say, well,
• 56:29
  SPEAKER_00: actually,
• 56:29
  SPEAKER_00: I could do that, but that's not really the point of what we're trying to do here.
• 56:33
  SPEAKER_00: The point of what we're trying to do here,
• 56:34
  SPEAKER_00: I understand more deeply, and I'm going to make a different decision instead.
• 56:37
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's the only way...
• 56:39
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, the only other alternative I can think
• 56:42
  SPEAKER_00: of is fully scripted programs like Zing Engelmann's Direct Instruction,
• 56:46
  SPEAKER_00: where it literally tells the teacher what to say.
• 56:50
  SPEAKER_00: This is what I would call a scripted program,
• 56:52
  SPEAKER_00: not a PowerPoint, because you can put a PowerPoint up and say what you like.
• 56:57
  SPEAKER_00: A scripted program literally says,
• 56:58
  SPEAKER_00: the teacher says this, the teacher says that, the students say this.
• 57:01
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe if you have a fully scripted program like that, it can be done.
• 57:05
  SPEAKER_00: It can be delivered by people who don't fully understand what the program is trying to achieve.
• 57:10
  SPEAKER_00: But even then, the chances It's funny you say that because I...
• 57:42
  SPEAKER_01: I run a lot of PD sessions for the schools,
• 57:46
  SPEAKER_01: but I'm running one on Friday for Independent Schools Queensland,
• 57:50
  SPEAKER_01: so the overarching body there.
• 57:52
  SPEAKER_01: I'm running one as part of one of their maths conferences.
• 57:55
  SPEAKER_01: And I begin in this,
• 57:56
  SPEAKER_01: like I'm really speaking about formative assessment or checking for understanding,
• 58:00
  SPEAKER_01: but I really begin with the fact that I'm starting with a lot of the principles
• 58:04
  SPEAKER_01: and it will be kind of principle heavy.
• 58:07
  SPEAKER_01: And when I say principle, I mean the research because And it's a couple of reasons.
• 58:11
  SPEAKER_01: Like part of that is because when you understand the underlying mechanisms
• 58:14
  SPEAKER_01: that make something effective, you can choose when to use it and when not to use it.
• 58:19
  SPEAKER_01: And that's where you are pairing with your professional expertise and you're going,
• 58:23
  SPEAKER_01: this is going to be the appropriate thing in this moment
• 58:25
  SPEAKER_01: to achieve this particular goal that I've got.
• 58:29
  SPEAKER_01: But I also,
• 58:29
  SPEAKER_01: I make the point like,
• 58:30
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 58:30
  SPEAKER_01: and apart from also avoiding lethal mutations as much as possible,
• 58:34
  SPEAKER_01: by understanding the mechanisms that make something work,
• 58:37
  SPEAKER_01: it actually allows you to make Adaptations to apply that particular thing
• 58:42
  SPEAKER_01: to different contexts or different learning areas.
• 58:46
  SPEAKER_01: If I go into a classroom with a strategy that I understand how it actually works,
• 58:52
  SPEAKER_01: I might walk in and, I mean,
• 58:54
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 58:54
  SPEAKER_01: my understanding of mini whiteboards,
• 58:55
  SPEAKER_01: like I use mini whiteboards all the time in maths,
• 58:58
  SPEAKER_01: but I use them in maths because it allows me
• 59:00
  SPEAKER_01: to simultaneously see what every single student
• 59:02
  SPEAKER_01: in my classroom can do really quickly.
• 59:05
  SPEAKER_01: I do my questions line by line so I can do a big extended response on one.
• 59:09
  SPEAKER_01: But if you threw me into a PE lesson and asked me to teach a kid to kick a footy,
• 59:13
  SPEAKER_01: it was a conversation we had on the weekend,
• 59:16
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not going to hand them a mini whiteboard and go,
• 59:18
  SPEAKER_01: all right, now draw me a picture of kicking a footy or explain to me how to do that.
• 59:23
  SPEAKER_01: But it's because I know that my purpose for using that is so that I can see,
• 59:26
  SPEAKER_01: well, what do my students currently know?
• 59:28
  SPEAKER_01: What have they understood about the process from what I've taught them?
• 59:31
  SPEAKER_01: What do I need to readdress?
• 59:33
  SPEAKER_01: Do I need to make a correction?
• 59:35
  SPEAKER_01: That's the reason that you use them.
• 59:37
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, that's not even me.
• 59:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, look, it is predictable that people will replicate the format of the function.
• 59:42
  SPEAKER_00: And if they don't really understand,
• 59:43
  SPEAKER_00: they won't say, I don't really understand, because that's a hard thing to do.
• 59:48
  SPEAKER_00: And so they will just...
• 59:49
  SPEAKER_00: So you'll have PE teachers who,
• 59:51
  SPEAKER_00: because other people in the school are using PowerPoints,
• 59:54
  SPEAKER_00: they'll bring the kids into a classroom at the start of the PE lesson and project
• 59:57
  SPEAKER_00: a PowerPoint with the aims of the lesson,
• 59:59
  SPEAKER_00: which is obviously completely antithetical to what you're trying to do with PE.
• 1:00:03
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:00:04
  SPEAKER_00: But they're replicating the form of the thing over the substance.
• 1:00:07
  SPEAKER_00: That's very predictable.
• 1:00:08
  SPEAKER_00: And so you always have to plan for that.
• 1:00:12
  SPEAKER_00: And there are things that are very predictable.
• 1:00:15
  SPEAKER_00: So if, for instance, you introduce a procedure for exiting a kid from the classroom.
• 1:00:20
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, kids,
• 1:00:22
  SPEAKER_00: their behaviour gets to a point where they're preventing other people from learning.
• 1:00:25
  SPEAKER_00: So this is our system.
• 1:00:27
  SPEAKER_00: We send a card to the office or we press this button or whatever, this is our system.
• 1:00:31
  SPEAKER_00: It is 100% predictable that a teacher will exit a kid from
• 1:00:36
  SPEAKER_00: the classroom inappropriately,
• 1:00:38
  SPEAKER_00: that the kid is not actually preventing the other kids from learning,
• 1:00:41
  SPEAKER_00: that they're being,
• 1:00:43
  SPEAKER_00: as the teacher would describe it,
• 1:00:44
  SPEAKER_00: disrespectful by maybe tapping a pencil on the table or swinging on their chair,
• 1:00:49
  SPEAKER_00: and that they will get exited from the classroom for that.
• 1:00:53
  SPEAKER_00: And that's not what the system's for.
• 1:00:56
  SPEAKER_00: But that doesn't mean you shouldn't have a system.
• 1:00:59
  SPEAKER_00: It means that whenever you introduce a system like this,
• 1:01:03
  SPEAKER_00: you can predict that people are going to misuse it.
• 1:01:06
  SPEAKER_00: And so you have to give them that feedback fairly early on, fairly quickly.
• 1:01:10
  SPEAKER_00: As soon as people start to misuse it, you give them the feedback quickly.
• 1:01:13
  SPEAKER_00: Just like PowerPoints, it's very predictable that someone would join my school.
• 1:01:18
  SPEAKER_00: And they would put up a PowerPoint that they haven't spent a huge amount
• 1:01:21
  SPEAKER_00: of time engaging with, and they would simply click through it.
• 1:01:25
  SPEAKER_00: This is predictable.
• 1:01:26
  SPEAKER_00: This is predictable that this is what people will do.
• 1:01:28
  SPEAKER_00: Now, they're not supposed to do that.
• 1:01:29
  SPEAKER_00: And we tell them that they shouldn't do that,
• 1:01:32
  SPEAKER_00: and we explain the purpose of it and all that sort of stuff.
• 1:01:34
  SPEAKER_00: But when they do it,
• 1:01:35
  SPEAKER_00: which they will,
• 1:01:36
  SPEAKER_00: you have to give them that feedback fairly quickly,
• 1:01:39
  SPEAKER_00: not in a threatening way, not in a...
• 1:01:44
  SPEAKER_00: So there's
• 1:01:51
  SPEAKER_00: some features of these lethal mutations that you can't really design out.
• 1:01:57
  SPEAKER_00: They're predictable and you just have to see the train come in and you have
• 1:02:02
  SPEAKER_00: to provide the feedback.
• 1:02:04
  SPEAKER_01: But I think that's also that case around general professional learning that,
• 1:02:08
  SPEAKER_01: again, you made earlier.
• 1:02:10
  SPEAKER_01: Which is that professional learning should really continue to cycle through
• 1:02:14
  SPEAKER_01: the same ideas over and over because you're not at a point where you just go,
• 1:02:19
  SPEAKER_01: oh great, I'm now an expert at this, I do it so I don't need to learn more on it.
• 1:02:23
  SPEAKER_01: The learning more is also what helps,
• 1:02:25
  SPEAKER_01: I mean it helps you to protect yourself against accidentally,
• 1:02:28
  SPEAKER_01: lethally mutating something but also it's,
• 1:02:31
  SPEAKER_01: that's what allows you to I don't know,
• 1:02:33
  SPEAKER_01: to adapt your practice and to build on it or to come up with a new context
• 1:02:37
  SPEAKER_01: because... Yeah, and
• 1:02:37
  SPEAKER_00: it gives you a lens to see other things.
• 1:02:40
  SPEAKER_00: Like last week, not last week, the week before I saw Pradesh Raitura teach, he taught...
• 1:02:46
  SPEAKER_00: They taught about photosynthesis at a conference I was at.
• 1:02:50
  SPEAKER_00: And I got really excited about it because he did things that I've never done in the classroom.
• 1:02:54
  SPEAKER_00: And I looked at them through the filter of what I think I know and thought,
• 1:02:59
  SPEAKER_00: yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
• 1:03:01
  SPEAKER_00: And I was quite eager to get the opportunity to try them out myself.
• 1:03:05
  SPEAKER_00: So that why I think is important.
• 1:03:11
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you so much for listening to When Will They Learn?
• 1:03:14
  SPEAKER_01: Any of the resources or articles that we've mentioned can be found in today's show notes.
• 1:03:19
  SPEAKER_01: And as always,
• 1:03:20
  SPEAKER_01: if there is an article,
• 1:03:21
  SPEAKER_01: podcast or opinion piece that you would like Greg or I to discuss in
• 1:03:24
  SPEAKER_01: a future episode,
• 1:03:25
  SPEAKER_01: we do get a lot of requests,
• 1:03:26
  SPEAKER_01: but do still shoot it through to the two of us on either of our socials below.