Latest / IB Unplugged / Mastering Approaches to Learning w/ Lance King
Transcript
- 0:00Welcome to IB Unplugged, a Kognity podcast for IBDP educators
- 0:04that tackles your submitted questions and challenges by connecting you with
- 0:08experts and peers who share their ideas and stories from real classrooms.
- 0:12Hi everybody.
- 0:13Welcome to an episode of IB Unplugged.
- 0:15I'm Courtney Marline.
- 0:17I'm John Patton,
- 0:18and we are very happy to be coming to you
- 0:21from Saint Gilgen in Austria
- 0:24to record this episode.
- 0:25And for this episode, we get to talk with Lance King, who is somebody
- 0:30that I've had the pleasure of doing different workshops with over the years.
- 0:35And he's here to talk about ATL’s.
- 0:37Lance is an internationally recognized author, teacher, workshop facilitator
- 0:42who, in the last 30 years has worked in over 300 schools in 39
- 0:46countries, with many thousands of students, teachers and parents.
- 0:50He is the creator of the Art of learning program, taught to over 250,000 students
- 0:55worldwide, and within the IB, he's designed and developed the approaches
- 0:59to Learning framework for both the MYP and DP programs.
- 1:03He is a sought out
- 1:05presenter for his workshops for teachers, students and parents.
- 1:08He's the author of seven books on teaching and learning,
- 1:11and he is married with four grown children and lives in New Zealand.
- 1:16And talking with Lance was absolutely incredible.
- 1:19There's so many things from this episode that you could pull out as like highlights
- 1:23and key takeaways.
- 1:24So, we just want to dive straight in here
- 1:26because there's something for every educator in this conversation with Lance.
- 1:30We hope you’ll enjoy the show.
- 1:37Good morning, Lance.
- 1:39Thank you so much for joining us this morning.
- 1:41Thank you, Courtney.
- 1:42Nice to be here.
- 1:44Yeah.
- 1:44Welcome to IB Unplugged.
- 1:45We're super excited to have you here.
- 1:47I've loved working with you in the past. You've done
- 1:51quite a few different conference sessions, things like that with Kognity.
- 1:55So we knew we had so many people that were asking about ATL’s,
- 2:00not just for IB Unplugged, but in Kognity in general.
- 2:03It's always been a, hot topic for us.
- 2:05And I knew you were the right guy to talk to.
- 2:09So thank you for taking the time.
- 2:11I'm really excited to jump in.
- 2:13And so before we kind of dive right into the ATL’s, something that we
- 2:17like to ask all of our guests is the big wide question of why education?
- 2:22Why did you kind of go down this career path?
- 2:26Well, I guess
- 2:28funnily enough, my first teaching job
- 2:31was simply I never, ever considered myself to be a teacher.
- 2:36My first degree was in food technology,
- 2:38so I was working in the food industry as a kind of industrial chemist.
- 2:42And I was out of work because of the birth of my first son.
- 2:46And, I just took the first job I had
- 2:49I could find, which was teaching, at a polytechnic.
- 2:53And, suddenly discovered that I love teaching.
- 2:56I never even considered that.
- 2:58So I discovered that.
- 3:00And then,
- 3:02I guess in my
- 3:04in that first job, I was teaching all sorts of highly content
- 3:10focused subjects, microbiology and process engineering and all sorts of things.
- 3:15And I discovered that the best students in the class
- 3:19weren't necessarily the smartest students.
- 3:22They were the students that had the best process skills.
- 3:26They were the ones who could focus well, who could concentrate
- 3:29well, who went over their notes,
- 3:31who did the extra reading, who were good at summarizing
- 3:34all the information, who were good at all the process skills of learning.
- 3:38And that's what sent me down the direction of the
- 3:42skills of learning, which ultimately led to ATL skills.
- 3:48Yeah, it was I kind of fell into it and discovered
- 3:51I love teaching, and I've been a teacher now for 40 years.
- 3:55Wow. That's, that's incredible.
- 3:57That's a really cool way to get into it.
- 3:59You know, sometimes many people have different backstories.
- 4:01I guess when it comes to education, that's a cool one. I like it.
- 4:04We also like to ask all of our guests,
- 4:07how do you feel the role of education is going to be changing,
- 4:10or what sort of experiences are we going to see in the next decade or so?
- 4:14Well, I mean, the obvious answer is AI. It will take over.
- 4:18I don't think there's any question about that.
- 4:22Certainly not take over. We still have it, right?
- 4:24Like I'm not out of the job, Lance.
- 4:26Well, I don't know.
- 4:28I'm not so sure because I have a quote from Mustafa Suleyman.
- 4:34I don't know if you know who Mustafa Suleyman is.
- 4:36He's the CEO of Microsoft AI,
- 4:38former head of DeepMind, founder of Inflection AI.
- 4:42Like he's one of the four top people in AI in the world.
- 4:46And he said,
- 4:48I have a quote here from him which is..
- 4:53He said that in two years he expects every person
- 4:57to have in their pocket the best teacher in the world.
- 5:01Wow. A teacher who can absolutely give you as a student
- 5:06the experience of learning, but in the way that suits you best
- 5:12as an individual.
- 5:13And so I think subject teaching is actually on the way out.
- 5:18I think the subject teachers will be replaced
- 5:21by AI and not, you know, not in the long term future.
- 5:25I think subject teaching is actually,
- 5:30a thing of the past.
- 5:30I did a keynote presentation
- 5:33at a conference in Korea just a couple of months ago,
- 5:37and this was the substance of my keynote, and it did not go down well.
- 5:42I was going to say. I wonder why. I'm smiling right now,
- 5:45but I know my anxiety levels just went up as you said that.
- 5:48Like I feel my blood pressure change, right?
- 5:53This thing I've dedicated my life to..
- 5:56Well, you see, the thing is
- 5:58you haven't just dedicated your life to teaching a subject.
- 6:02You're also probably really good at the process of learning that subject,
- 6:07so that I think the shift is going to have to be for subject teachers
- 6:11to move from delivering content
- 6:14to focusing on process to become basically ATL teachers.
- 6:18I think the future of education as everyone becomes an ATL teacher,
- 6:22which I think is a great move,
- 6:24Obviously.
- 6:25So the future of education is to return to when you developed
- 6:28basically the ATL framework in itself.
- 6:32Yes. Well, yes.
- 6:33For all teachers to focus on how the student is learning, not so much
- 6:37what the student is learning, because the what will be provided
- 6:40by a brilliant online tutor.
- 6:43Right.
- 6:44So, really effective teaching and learning of the ATL
- 6:47skills will help to create those lifelong learners, then,
- 6:50and then I guess in that respect, are we still able to fulfill
- 6:54like the mission of the IB in this idea of like creating a better,
- 6:57more peaceful world, you know, intercultural understanding, respect,
- 7:00that sort of thing that's going to come from really effective ATL skills.
- 7:03And therefore we don't really need to focus on the subject.
- 7:05We just need to get lifelong learners.
- 7:08I think absolutely.
- 7:09And I think it actually,
- 7:11if you think about it from the external point of view,
- 7:13I think it enhances the role of a teacher because a teacher becomes
- 7:17so much more important, because the teacher is looking after
- 7:20the mental health of the student, the ability of that student
- 7:25to learn by themselves, using every resource.
- 7:29And so I think it enhances teaching because,
- 7:33you know, the thing that grabbed me
- 7:35as a teacher was being able to make a difference for students,
- 7:38being able to help them, help their minds expand, be able to help them
- 7:44to learn without needing me as a teacher.
- 7:49And I think that's where we're all heading to.
- 7:52And so I think it actually enhances the teaching role.
- 7:55The teachers become more important because they're helping the holistic
- 7:58development of that child to do or to achieve all those objectives.
- 8:03And those objectives of the IB are not subject to objectives
- 8:06when you read them.
- 8:07They are objectives about being a whole person and having an impact on the world.
- 8:12And I think that's the role that teachers will take.
- 8:15So more of that guide on the side, kind of mentality
- 8:18that idea of like being a coach in the process.
- 8:21And I think, you know, as you mentioned,
- 8:22there are so many teachers I've come across
- 8:23who say, like, I'm not necessarily a biologist or I'm not a
- 8:26I'm not a historian, you know, I'm a teacher of kids,
- 8:29and I do that through biology or through history or something like that.
- 8:33Yes.
- 8:34Okay, good. I've just calm down. I feel better now.
- 8:40Sorry.
- 8:42No, no, I think it's good.
- 8:43And I think it's important to have the conversation
- 8:45sometimes, you know, you start with that big, bold statement
- 8:48of, yeah, no more teachers.
- 8:50And then it's like, okay, no, we're going to break this down.
- 8:52And what does this actually mean?
- 8:53But then it's about what value can you bring into your job.
- 8:58And I mean I think that teachers, they're not all teachers.
- 9:04And maybe to the IB is maybe one of the more progressive options.
- 9:06But there are teachers that are teaching the exact same way that their teachers
- 9:10teachers have been teaching.
- 9:12And this is forcing you out of that kind
- 9:15of lack of evolution of the profession.
- 9:20Yes.
- 9:21I think the essential nature of teaching where one
- 9:25teacher stands in front of a group of students and delivers
- 9:28their wisdom hasn't changed for 4000 years.
- 9:33And you know, we have tablets from Samaria which show exactly the same thing.
- 9:37And I think that's the thing that's going to change
- 9:40is that no longer will it be subject delivery, it will be,
- 9:45you know, like they've always said,
- 9:46no one cares how much you know, until they know how much you care.
- 9:50It's the caring nature of teaching.
- 9:52It's the ability to connect with students at an emotional level,
- 9:56and the ability to help that child to cope with their world.
- 10:00That's going to be the teacher role, I think, which is much more fulfilling
- 10:04as a teacher,
- 10:05than delivering biology or delivering whatever it is you people deliver.
- 10:09I think it's a much more connected way of being a facilitator.
- 10:15Absolutely.
- 10:16And I think that's one of the really beautiful parts about the IB.
- 10:20And I think that especially when we got to the ATL’s, that's something
- 10:25that is really a powerful differentiator between maybe a traditional curriculum
- 10:30and the diploma program, or especially the MYP.
- 10:34But I mean, you designed the ATL framework
- 10:37and you were able to create this really powerful part
- 10:43of the IB program.
- 10:45And I would love for you to just talk a little bit about that process of how
- 10:49you were able to create that and really ultimately
- 10:52how you came to that model.
- 10:56Yes. Well,
- 10:57I guess by the time I came across the IB, which was, you know, I started
- 11:04my work in 1995, and I knew nothing about the IB.
- 11:09The IB doesn't have a bigger presence in New Zealand.
- 11:12It certainly didn't have almost any presence back then.
- 11:16And so I was delivering workshops
- 11:19for students, teaching students how to learn more effectively.
- 11:24And that's when I started and I delivered them all over New Zealand for many years.
- 11:29I had other people worked for me, you know,
- 11:32I had six people on the road at one stage running these courses in schools.
- 11:37And then there was a big change in the funding that the government
- 11:40made available for things like what I did.
- 11:43And so I started to look offshore for work.
- 11:46And the first place I went to was England, because they had
- 11:50a similar curriculum to New Zealand and, but the seasons were around the other way.
- 11:54So when there was no work in New Zealand, there was work in England.
- 11:57So I started going to England.
- 11:59And the stop off point halfway to England from New Zealand is Thailand.
- 12:03And we had some friends who lived in Thailand, so I used to stay with them
- 12:06and after a while I picked up some schools in Bangkok
- 12:11that I would work in, and one of the schools was Nist.
- 12:15and the deputy principal of Nist at the time was Malcolm Nicolson.
- 12:20And Malcolm saw me work with the students in class every year I'd pass through
- 12:26and I'd do 2 or 3 workshops, work with the students and then leave.
- 12:29And he saw that what I did seemed to have a very positive effect.
- 12:33And so then Malcolm became the,
- 12:37development director for the new NYP at the head office.
- 12:42At that point, which was in Wales. In the 90s, that would have been
- 12:48in Cardiff. Yes.
- 12:50And so he got in touch with me
- 12:52and he said, look, I want to redevelop the whole ATL thing.
- 12:56I think we need to put more emphasis on it.
- 12:59Can you help?
- 13:01And so I wrote some papers for him.
- 13:03And the upshot of that was he ended up asking me to develop
- 13:07a new NYP ATL framework.
- 13:11And so I just did lots and lots of research about the
- 13:15how people taught these kind of skills,
- 13:19and built the framework
- 13:22over six months or so.
- 13:24And then he moved on to become the development director for the DP
- 13:29and redid the whole thing for the DP.
- 13:33And so the basis of the framework was just simply all the research
- 13:38I could do at the time on who taught these kind of skills
- 13:42and how did they teach them, and what were the existing frameworks.
- 13:47And just developed it from there.
- 13:50Yeah. It's really actually quite amazing.
- 13:53You know, like I'm
- 13:54IBDP coordinator at my school and you know, often
- 13:57when I'm presenting about the ATL’s
- 13:58or helping students or teachers kind of understand
- 14:00a little bit more about why these are important.
- 14:02I'm often like relating to,
- 14:05you know, Forbes projections for like the skills that are going to be
- 14:08most useful in the next 5 to 10 years or something like this, or like top, top
- 14:12ten skills are gonna be necessary for university or careers.
- 14:14And every single time that comes out over the last 15 years or so,
- 14:17I've been doing this, it's like you can't see the ATL’s pull out from it.
- 14:21So obviously did some great research at the time to find something
- 14:24that, you know, stands the test of time.
- 14:27And at the top of the show, we were talking about what
- 14:29is, you know, how is education going to evolve over the next few years.
- 14:31And I think you're right, like it's still going to come back
- 14:33to these five effective, like five essentials sort of ATL’s
- 14:37developing these things within our students
- 14:39and our young people and really trying to focus in on those.
- 14:41So, I guess
- 14:43I'm just kind of singing some praises right now, like I think you
- 14:46nailed it in many respects, but I guess, you know, with that regard,
- 14:50are there any, when you think about those kind of key ATL’s, are there
- 14:54some that are maybe misunderstood or maybe less..
- 14:58they're not delivered so well or they kind of get less emphasis compared to others.
- 15:02And that could relate back to like traditional styles of teaching.
- 15:07I guess, is there one that's neglected compared to others in your opinion?
- 15:10Well, you're right, John.
- 15:15It's very interesting
- 15:16because the work I was doing in 1995 with students
- 15:21when I started out was
- 15:24I started with the skills that were most,
- 15:29obvious the exam passing skills, the skills you need to pass exams.
- 15:34So, you know, you need to be out of focus.
- 15:36You need to concentrate.
- 15:37You need to be able to summarize information really well.
- 15:39You need to be able to remember well, you need to add up, etc., etc., etc.
- 15:43all the basic cognitive skills,
- 15:46but it became clear relatively early
- 15:49that those skills were all really important.
- 15:52But if a child didn't know how to self
- 15:55motivate, for example, didn't know how to overcome,
- 15:59to overcome procrastination, they didn't know how to persevere,
- 16:02didn't know how to, feel good about the outcome,
- 16:06the purpose, the reason for doing what they were doing.
- 16:10Then they wouldn't even get started.
- 16:12And so the effect of what what tends to get
- 16:16put into the affective group, the skills that are
- 16:20more emotionally based, those became much more significant.
- 16:26And so all the work I ever did working with students,
- 16:30always had a blend of the emotionally based skills.
- 16:34What is the purpose of that exam?
- 16:36How do you generate intrinsic motivation?
- 16:39How do you overcome your tendency not to want to work?
- 16:42How do you get yourself to do the study when you need to, but you really don't
- 16:47feel like doing it?
- 16:50All those kind of skills became significantly more important,
- 16:55and that led to all the work that I did.
- 16:58On failure.
- 16:59And so my master's was all about, learning from failure, what I call failing well.
- 17:05And that actually became the key, the core of everything that I did,
- 17:09by the time I was working with the IB.
- 17:13And so that is something that is,
- 17:16I don't know how well that is addressed by teachers because I haven't,
- 17:20I guess, really gone back into classrooms and look at how teachers teach that.
- 17:25But to me, that's the essence of all learning is learning
- 17:30how to deal well with life when it doesn't work out the way you want it to.
- 17:36How to deal well with failure.
- 17:38And so I guess that would be the one I would focus on as being
- 17:41the thing that is: A most important to all forms of academic and,
- 17:47and emotional success,
- 17:49and is the one that is probably the least
- 17:52well explained, the least well understood, the least well taught.
- 17:56But I'm just guessing there.
- 17:58Yeah.
- 17:58It's, also, I think probably one of the hardest ones
- 18:02to really integrate into your classrooms, especially in a program like the IB
- 18:06that is quite rigorous.
- 18:07And there is the pressure from the parents,
- 18:10the internal pressure of all of these children.
- 18:12And it's like,
- 18:14it's such a mindset shift to be like,
- 18:18your parents are want you to do perfectly right.
- 18:21We really want you to fail and mess up and make mistakes
- 18:24and learn from them and feel good about failing.
- 18:27And I mean, that's a huge difference that you're dealing with there.
- 18:32Like just teaching it like you see
- 18:33so many students coming in and expecting to just be great, right?
- 18:36They want to just come in and like hit you know the top scores right away.
- 18:40And so often in those first, you know, formative assessments
- 18:43and the many different ways that you might be assessing
- 18:45how students learning not just quantitatively but otherwise, you know, they
- 18:50they want to
- 18:52they want to show themselves as perfect just as you mentioned.
- 18:54So really trying to reshape that a bit and understand this idea
- 18:58of like formative type assessment.
- 19:00And this is a process that like failing is actually very, very good.
- 19:04So let's try to create an environment that's really quite safe.
- 19:07And if you're comfortable trying failing and getting better at it, you know,
- 19:12it's an explorative practice, I think for most educators for sure.
- 19:17But I think there is I mean, everything you said is correct,
- 19:20but I think there are some very simple things that teachers
- 19:23can do in the classroom which reinforce this model.
- 19:26It's like, for example, if you're a subject teacher
- 19:29and you've just had this test
- 19:30and the students have got their results back from a test,
- 19:34what do you do when you hand the papers back?
- 19:38Because that seems to me the most important thing to do first,
- 19:42from a student's point of view at that moment is to look at the result.
- 19:47Not so much look at the score, the grade, the mark,
- 19:51but to look at the questions you got wrong.
- 19:54And the most important thing to do with every question you got wrong
- 19:58is to find the right answer and rewrite the answer to that question.
- 20:02Actually, physically sit down and rewrite the answer.
- 20:05Doesn't matter how big it is.
- 20:06Rewrite the answer.
- 20:08Now, if that is done as a homework assignment.
- 20:11So the teacher says, take your paper home and I want you
- 20:13to work out what you did wrong and rewrite it.
- 20:16That is one way to do it, which has some impact.
- 20:21I feel like you're leading to that's not the right way to do it.
- 20:25Well, I think that's a step, but I think it would be much
- 20:29more significant for the students if that step was done in the classroom.
- 20:33So if the teacher said, in my classroom, I'm going to put
- 20:37a whole lot of emphasis on people learning from their mistakes.
- 20:40So I'm going to give them time to learn from the mistakes.
- 20:43I'm going to put the students together into groups and learn from each other
- 20:48So after I've handed the test papers back, everyone is going to work
- 20:52on all the things they got wrong and rewrite those answers.
- 20:56But we're going to do it in the classroom, and you can ask me and you can consult,
- 20:59and we're going to work it through
- 21:01until everyone has got a perfect paper written.
- 21:05Yeah. And then we're finished.
- 21:06So what I've done in my classroom, I've said that
- 21:09for any assessment, there are three possible outcomes
- 21:14you can succeed, you can fail badly or you can fail well.
- 21:19And two of those are positive.
- 21:22So I'm saying in my classroom it's just as good to fail
- 21:26well as it is to succeed first time.
- 21:30And if you think about it, most kids think about assessment as being a pass
- 21:35fail situation.
- 21:36There are only two possible outcomes and they're about 50-50.
- 21:40Now I've created three outcomes and two of them are positive.
- 21:43So I've actually increased the possibility of a positive outcome by 25%.
- 21:48And so suddenly every child has actually got
- 21:51a higher motivation to try
- 21:55because it's not just a pass fail situation.
- 21:59You've always got the possibility of redoing the answer
- 22:04and learning from your own mistake.
- 22:07It reminds me, you know, I had the pleasure
- 22:09working with a colleague named Kenny Dahl for a while,
- 22:12he would always say, you know, try, fail, try again, fail better
- 22:17and just kind of keep that mantra going, which I think is,
- 22:21it kind of just as you were mentioning that I really reminded me
- 22:24a lot of that process.
- 22:25But, you know, as you were talking there, I could hear kind of every IBDP teacher
- 22:30kind of screaming in my ear, like, but then there's no time for the content.
- 22:33When am I going to get all this content done?
- 22:35If I spend all this time, like developing resilience on, like,
- 22:39how to fail better and how to learn from my mistakes and create a perfect answer,
- 22:43I can just hear them being like, but that's going to be,
- 22:45you know, 2 or 3 hours of a lesson spent on just this exam.
- 22:48And I got to get going.
- 22:49So, you know, I guess, like, I know I've got some strategies
- 22:53with regard to like flipping a classroom, for example,
- 22:55and doing a lot more content stuff outside of the classroom.
- 22:59I of course, I use Kognity for that,
- 23:00and that helps a ton in terms of getting that information across.
- 23:04But from your perspective,
- 23:05are there ways that you feel like teachers can emphasize just use that time
- 23:10to teach that failure, teach that like safe space of like learning
- 23:14from those mistakes
- 23:15and yet not lose the time that you know that they do need to cover
- 23:19all the other different aspects of the curriculum.
- 23:23Or does this come back to you,
- 23:25We're no longer going to be teachers of content anyway, so just focus on this?
- 23:29Well, I guess that's the ultimate answer for sure.
- 23:33But there is no easy answer.
- 23:34I mean, the DP is overloaded with content.
- 23:38There is no question of it.
- 23:39There is too much content which restricts the ability to,
- 23:43go through the process of failing well,
- 23:45like I said, but it also restricts the ability to teach ideal skills
- 23:49because there is no extra time.
- 23:51And I mean, that's the essential problem, which as you said, once
- 23:54we get to the AI tutor environment, we will be able to get past this
- 23:59until in teachers are totally focused on delivery of content,
- 24:04on getting this information across in a way that's understood by the students
- 24:08so they can move on to the next piece of content
- 24:10and this is the essential problem in all forms of education, not just the DP.
- 24:15It's the same problem everywhere.
- 24:17And it's a difficult problem, which I, as I said,
- 24:19I think will be solved by the AI tutor interface.
- 24:23This is great.
- 24:24You’ve taken me for being scared of AI
- 24:26to being comfortable with it, to now excited.
- 24:28That was a nice little journey that we've been on together.
- 24:31Thank you.
- 24:32But yeah, I think it's a wonderful environment.
- 24:35I think it's the best possible thing that could happen to education
- 24:38because as a teacher you get stuck.
- 24:41It's so much content delivery because you're trying to pass
- 24:45this knowledge across to a student in a way that helps them to understand it.
- 24:50If that part of your job was taken away, you could actually focus on
- 24:54what was most important.
- 24:55And I mean for the existing teacher.
- 24:57Before we get to that point, I think that the whole failing well at ATL
- 25:02thing is more about, changing a mindset,
- 25:06to use an overused term.
- 25:09It's to do with trying to make sure that in every lesson we're focused
- 25:14as much on the process of learning as we are on the content of learning.
- 25:21That shouldn't require much time.
- 25:26It seems to me. I mean,
- 25:28the content that I've always taught has been process.
- 25:31I've always taught a process.
- 25:34I've not been a content teacher,
- 25:37since about 1995. Yes.
- 25:41That's when I shifted from being content to process teacher.
- 25:43And so I can't say with any assurance that a teacher can focus on
- 25:48the process of learning without using up valuable time.
- 25:52But it seems to me that focusing on the process of learning in all ways
- 25:57increases the efficiency of learning and the effectiveness of learning.
- 26:00And as soon as you increase the efficiency and effectiveness,
- 26:03then you are actually becoming a more effective content teacher.
- 26:07And so the content learning happens quicker.
- 26:10And when it happens quicker because there's more effective learning,
- 26:12then you have more time for a more of a focus on the process
- 26:16so that is the interim solution as far as I can see.
- 26:21Sorry, it's the first bit of like the IB mission
- 26:24is like developing inquiring and there's knowledgeable, caring young people.
- 26:28But if you can develop that inquiring like learning to learn thing,
- 26:32then the rest of it kind of falls into place.
- 26:34I think that that's something that's been a bit tricky with the IB,
- 26:36with a lot of teachers, especially if they start out
- 26:38maybe as a subject teacher in a different curriculum,
- 26:41and then they switch to the IB.
- 26:42It's kind of almost like, how do I put the IB
- 26:45layer on being a biology teacher?
- 26:48It's not like I'm an IB teacher who teaches biology.
- 26:52It's I'm a biology teacher in the IB, and that's something where
- 26:56I think even earlier you were mentioning with the ATL skills,
- 27:00it's not something extra, but it's so easy to think of it as something extra.
- 27:05Same with TOK or international mind.
- 27:07It's like, man, I forgot to include that.
- 27:10Not this is the fundamental structure of how I teach my lesson.
- 27:14It's kind of that outside in thinking versus like inside out, right?
- 27:18If you think about the diploma program model, like,
- 27:20I want to start with a learner profile, and I'm going to go to like my 80 hours,
- 27:25to like deliver that and kind of build that.
- 27:26If I go from the inside out,
- 27:28then it becomes an integrated part of the entire curriculum.
- 27:30Whereas if I'm coming from the subject's back into it like, oh, I need to,
- 27:34I'm going to do my subject and then, yeah, I'll touch on TOK, and I'll touch on
- 27:37all these things as well.
- 27:38Then you can easily kind of miss the mark, right?
- 27:41Oh, absolutely.
- 27:42And I mean every teacher
- 27:46their self esteem in some respects is
- 27:49based on what they know and what they know is their subject matter.
- 27:54And so I am a biologist, I am a physicist, I am an English teacher.
- 27:58You know, it is my content that makes me feel valued
- 28:02and so for it to suggest to a teacher that actually
- 28:06that's only half the job, the other half is the process.
- 28:09Maybe that's a bit
- 28:12threatening to the self-esteem of a teacher,
- 28:14because a teacher doesn't necessarily understand
- 28:18or understand how to teach the process of learning,
- 28:22but they do understand absolutely how to teach their content.
- 28:25So the natural inclination is to focus entirely on the content
- 28:29and treat the process as being the extra piece,
- 28:32the extra bit that maybe I'll get around to and maybe not.
- 28:35And yet it's the focus on the process that will actually improve
- 28:39the understanding and retention of the content.
- 28:43It makes perfect sense when you describe it that way.
- 28:46But obviously you've been going into who knows how many schools at this point
- 28:50trying to really help teachers and do these teacher workshops
- 28:53and get them into this way of thinking.
- 28:55But, I mean, where do you start with that?
- 28:58Like, how do you I mean, it's a huge leap to get there.
- 29:04Well, yeah, a bit. But it's completely obvious isn't it?
- 29:07I mean, it's completely obvious to you two.
- 29:09No, that's why I asked you.
- 29:12And all I'm ever doing is saying what is completely obvious.
- 29:15Everyone knows that an efficient, effective learner
- 29:19will learn their subjects and pass their exams much more easily
- 29:25and, brilliantly than someone who was an ineffective learner.
- 29:29So helping them to become an effective learner
- 29:32is actually the core mission.
- 29:34Helping them to become a knowledgeable biologist is the second part.
- 29:40But we don't usually dedicate specific
- 29:44time to teaching them how to be a brilliant learner.
- 29:48We assume that, well, some of them will and some of them won't.
- 29:51And that's just, you know, evolution is just the way of the process.
- 29:55It's just the process, yes.
- 29:57My whole mission is actually to get teachers to explicitly
- 30:02teach the ATL skills, which then crashes straight into exactly what John said
- 30:08before about, yes, but where am I going to get the time to do this?
- 30:12And so I just focus on
- 30:14strategies for teachers can use to help children to become better learners,
- 30:20like through homework tasks and through a process,
- 30:24using process assessment as well as content assessment
- 30:27and various tools to help the child become much more aware
- 30:32of how they learn while they are doing the learning.
- 30:37Today's KogTip was submitted by Jaishree Vinod,
- 30:40who is offering a help on how to best use Kognity in your classroom.
- 30:44Jaishree says: one of my top tips for using Kognity effectively
- 30:48is the Leveraging the Adaptive Assignments feature to personalize student learning.
- 30:52I can ensure differentiated instruction and targeted support
- 30:56by assigning specific readings, practice questions,
- 30:59or quizzes based on each student's strengths and weaknesses.
- 31:02Additionally, I find real time analytics extremely useful
- 31:06for tracking student progress.
- 31:08It helps identify which concepts need reinforcement,
- 31:11allowing me to play an intervention strategies accordingly.
- 31:17And do you find
- 31:19that's accessible for all students kind of everywhere.
- 31:23I mean, you know,
- 31:24I teach in an international school where we have students
- 31:26that come from all sorts of different backgrounds
- 31:28and therefore, like their expectations of what education is going to be,
- 31:33comes with their culture and where they're from in terms
- 31:35of like what their parents are putting on them.
- 31:36And here's what the scores mean, and here's what the numbers mean.
- 31:40And this is, you know, they may have come from an educational system
- 31:42that is very like, learn this and like spit it back to me kind of thing.
- 31:47Less about learning how to learn, less about analytical critical
- 31:51thinking skills, that sort of stuff.
- 31:52And definitely no failing. And definitely no failing, you know?
- 31:56So, at least obviously I'm speaking from better personal experience.
- 32:00You know, you have some of those students who I find a really
- 32:02they're quite open to trying out this stuff,
- 32:04and they recognize that you're developing a learner,
- 32:07but then you also find some resistance from some students who are just like,
- 32:10but what do I actually need to know for the test?
- 32:13And they kind of comes back to that because so much of their identity
- 32:15is wrapped up in that, like quantitative measurement of who they are.
- 32:19And I guess in your experiences, have you
- 32:22have these
- 32:23sort of strategies worked regardless of where people are from?
- 32:26Or do you find, like there's another way to approach those students
- 32:29who might have a bit more of a fixed mindset to this?
- 32:33Certainly the strategies have worked in every.. I've worked in 39 countries.
- 32:37I've worked in over 300 schools.
- 32:40All the strategies work in every single environment I've ever been in.
- 32:45John, bad question. Carry on.
- 32:47No, no, no, it's perfectly reasonable question,
- 32:50because the bat is, is that students are completely pragmatic.
- 32:54Absolutely.
- 32:56Most pragmatic people on the planet is a DP student who will only do what works.
- 33:01And you can use that.
- 33:04It's why, you know, when teacher teachers starts to teach
- 33:07an ATL skill, the students say, is it in the test?
- 33:10Right. And the teacher has to say, well, no.
- 33:12And they say, well, why are we learning it? Right.
- 33:14And so there has to be a selling job done for students.
- 33:18Now in all, like I've run full day workshops for students
- 33:22for over 30 years and half day workshops as well.
- 33:27But the most important thing I have to do in
- 33:29those workshops is prove to the students
- 33:32right at the beginning
- 33:34that I can improve their ability to learn.
- 33:39That in a very short exercise,
- 33:41I can show them that they can get more out of their mind
- 33:44then they realize.
- 33:46That they can do things that they thought were impossible.
- 33:50Now, once you've done that, students are so pragmatic
- 33:54that they go, oh, that worked okay, I'll do that.
- 33:57And I mean, once you've got over that hurdle of showing them
- 34:01that they can improve the efficiency, effectiveness of their learning,
- 34:04and they can learn things that they didn't know were possible.
- 34:08Bingo. Then everything else just works.
- 34:11They go, oh, okay, I'll do that. I'll do that.
- 34:12I'll do that. Because they're
- 34:14pragmatically oriented towards wanting to improve their own success.
- 34:19So you have to be a magician is what I just heard.
- 34:22You have to do a magic like get them to, you know, no just kidding.
- 34:25It's very very simple.
- 34:27I mean I'll give you an example. I'm going to demonstrate
- 34:31what I do with students to help them,
- 34:36discover that they can do things that they think are impossible.
- 34:39So I'll be standing in front of a group of students and I'll say to them,
- 34:43oh, first we do an exercise on visualization,
- 34:47where I get them to do a certain physical stretch,
- 34:50and then I get them to run through a visualization.
- 34:53And then when they do the same stretch again, they find they go much further
- 34:57and they're suddenly intrigued, because just by using your mind,
- 35:01you've actually increased, an ability.
- 35:05And that is intriguing for them.
- 35:08So I've got the curiosity going by that point.
- 35:10And then I say to them, okay, so now we have to apply
- 35:13what you've just learned to a real life learning situation.
- 35:16So what I'm going to do is I'm going to attempt
- 35:18to teach you something which you might think is impossible.
- 35:22And you'd have to agree that if I can teach you how to do that,
- 35:25then I've obviously got some magic.
- 35:27I've got something that will help you to learn more effectively.
- 35:30And they're all kind of nodding by this stage.
- 35:33So what I'm going to do is I'm going to teach you how to do this.
- 35:38For those of you who are
- 35:39only listening, we've got some juggling going on.
- 35:42Yeah. Yes.
- 35:43So I'm going to teach them how to do this.
- 35:46And whoops, I'm getting caught up in my mike.
- 35:51And so what happens is by this stage, the students,
- 35:56there some of them are thinking, that's impossible.
- 35:58I can't do that.
- 36:00That's ridiculous.
- 36:01Some of them are thinking, yeah, that'll be great,
- 36:02but a lot of them are thinking, that's impossible.
- 36:05I could never do that. I've never been any good at ball skills.
- 36:07I've never been any good at that sort of thing.
- 36:10And so then I take them through a whole process of getting them
- 36:13to notice their internal dialog, the way they talk to themselves,
- 36:16getting them to notice what they imagine, what they visualize and take them
- 36:20through a step by step process of, I guess, skill building.
- 36:24Here you start with a very simple step and move on to move on and move on.
- 36:28And within 15 minutes or so, most of them are juggling.
- 36:31Yeah.
- 36:32And by the end of the day, they're all, you know,
- 36:37I carry bags of like three balls for every student.
- 36:4140 students. Yes.
- 36:42So I've got hundreds and hundreds of juggling balls
- 36:45in wheelie bags all around the world..
- 36:49Airport security is probably sitting there, what is this man doing.
- 36:54There is something just mentioned there with regard to like the internal dialog.
- 36:58And that just really captured me because, you know, when you talk about,
- 37:03you know, earlier at the top of the show, we were talking about like, you know,
- 37:05resilience and developing this specific ATL skills and this idea of failing well,
- 37:10And so often the barrier there is that internal dialog, like,
- 37:14what am I actually saying to myself
- 37:16before I start a task like the one you just started
- 37:19when I'm expecting to do some..
- 37:21when I first started diploma program, I know, like many of the students
- 37:24who serve the diploma program in high school,
- 37:26their internal dialog is like, okay, now it gets serious.
- 37:29Yeah, now it's going to be hard.
- 37:30Now I, like everybody says, it's just like so much work,
- 37:33I'm not gonna be able to sleep.
- 37:34So I'm very interested in how you coach that.
- 37:38How do you coach that internal dialog to help students be aware of it,
- 37:42but also to shift the way that they approach that?
- 37:47John.
- 37:48Yes, I think that this is actually the most important thing.
- 37:51If I was going to teach one thing
- 37:53for the rest of my life, that would be that internal dialog.
- 37:57And because it is so,
- 38:00a lot of people seem to have the idea
- 38:03inside their head that this dialog comes from somewhere else.
- 38:07Like it's not in their control.
- 38:10It's almost as if it's beamed in from a satellite
- 38:13circling the Earth or something.
- 38:14This negative voice that comes into the head.
- 38:18So I start by, while talking to students about,
- 38:23how that that voice is just there a negative aspect of their own dialog.
- 38:29It is their voice.
- 38:30And because it is their voice, they can actually control it.
- 38:33They can actually, have it do whatever they wanted to do.
- 38:37But they've got to realize that.
- 38:39So I teach them various strategies for
- 38:43noticing.
- 38:44You've got to start noticing, the voice inside your head,
- 38:48and notice that sometimes it's a positive aspect of yourself,
- 38:51and sometimes it's a negative aspect of yourself, but it is just yourself
- 38:55and teaching them how to notice the negative and interrupt the negative.
- 39:00And they use various visual metaphors for this interrupt
- 39:05the dialog and replace it with something positive.
- 39:08So that's when I'm dealing with young children.
- 39:11It's about, you know, holding up the stop sign
- 39:13and interrupting that dialog and replacing it with,
- 39:17and you've got to be very careful about how you the language you replace it with.
- 39:21It's very important to replace that I can't
- 39:24and that I'll never and this is awful to replace it with
- 39:27I can manage this, I can handle this today.
- 39:30I can get through this today. I can deal with this today.
- 39:32I'm bigger than this. I'm stronger than this.
- 39:34I can manage this.
- 39:36Talking about drawing strength out of the person through language.
- 39:41And then when we get to
- 39:42the specific task, like the juggling ball task, I will get students to notice
- 39:47anytime they say I can't because I can't is a problem.
- 39:52Because if you're saying to yourself, I can't, you're suggesting
- 39:55you never, ever will.
- 39:56It's a permanent fixed state.
- 39:58And so I suggest to them, is that true?
- 40:01How do you know that you can't?
- 40:03How do you know you never, ever will?
- 40:06Or you can actually say if you're trying to be accurate
- 40:08is up to this point in my life, I haven't learned how to juggle.
- 40:12That's true. Up to this point in my life.
- 40:14But who knows what might happen in the future.
- 40:17So the simplest thing I do, the mantra of my courses for over
- 40:2230 years has been the shift from I can't to I haven't yet.
- 40:26Yeah.
- 40:27And you discover that any time you replace an I can't with an
- 40:30I haven't yet, it actually opens up possibility. I can closes down
- 40:35possibility I haven't yet is actually more accurate.
- 40:39It's true.
- 40:40And it opens up the possibility that I might. Now start saying,
- 40:45you see, I always avoid changing an I can't into an
- 40:50I will or an I have because once again, you don't know that.
- 40:56Or you can actually say for sure is that it's very true.
- 40:59I haven't done that yet.
- 41:02But as soon as you say that to yourself, I haven't written this report yet.
- 41:06I haven't done this work yet. I haven't done this assignment yet.
- 41:10You're opening up the possibility that maybe you will.
- 41:12And to me, that's the first step.
- 41:14That's the way you start to take control
- 41:17of your own internal dialog and start to make that work for you in your life
- 41:23rather than against you, is to change every I can't into an I haven't yet.
- 41:28And the thing is, you're not lying to yourself.
- 41:32It's not like pretending that you already have.
- 41:35It's actually accurate.
- 41:36It's focused, it's precise, and it's opening up the possibility that you might.
- 41:42And that's where we start.
- 41:43And I love that it's I haven't yet and that I might
- 41:47because then that's also
- 41:48I think it can get really problematic if you as a parent or a teacher,
- 41:52even for yourself, if you're always like, you can do anything,
- 41:56it's that puts an unrealistic expectation on you too.
- 42:02It creates the perfectionism.
- 42:03Exactly.
- 42:04It's the about, oh, you can do anything.
- 42:06You just have to put your mind to it.
- 42:08And it's like, no, you need to do more than that.
- 42:11But I do like the idea of like, you might be able to do it.
- 42:15Well. It's everything you talk about here.
- 42:16That's the foundation of the growth mindset, right?
- 42:19And that's the foundation of that lifelong learner.
- 42:21And then ultimately that lends itself to the ATL skill of like,
- 42:25you know, self-management, for example.
- 42:26Like, I can look after myself because I am aware of the things
- 42:30that I can do, and I'm aware of the things that I haven't done yet.
- 42:33Yes. And the process I need to do to get to those things.
- 42:36Excellent. That's exactly right, I love that.
- 42:38Yeah, that's really good.
- 42:39So I guess, you know, with that in mind, when we think about like the IBDP
- 42:43educational system itself and kind of all the things that are there,
- 42:47is it really just a good opportunity
- 42:50to really develop all these skills to essentially that philosophy,
- 42:54the approach of the IB diploma program, is it just there like an exercise
- 42:57in developing resilience, self-management and that sort of stuff?
- 43:00If it's approached from the right angle, like if we take it from the inside out,
- 43:04does it actually do all those things that we aim for?
- 43:06Or do you feel like the way that it's set up, the philosophy and that sort of stuff
- 43:09just sort of turn people into almost that more sort of fixed mindset?
- 43:12I got to get things right kind of approach.
- 43:15Well, I mean, it has the potential to be all the things that you mentioned.
- 43:20It's the best educational curriculum in the world.
- 43:22Absolutely.
- 43:24Because it contains that potential.
- 43:26The problem is always getting hijacked by the content.
- 43:32And so for a teacher, it's a difficult task.
- 43:36It's not an easy thing.
- 43:38But then if it was easy, everyone would have one.
- 43:40You know, of course it's difficult.
- 43:42It's difficult to develop resilience.
- 43:45But it is the most important thing
- 43:48because it lays the foundation for a self
- 43:52motivated, self managed child, learner.
- 43:58And so for a teacher,
- 44:01I think developing the affective
- 44:04skills is much more important
- 44:08than becoming a biologist or becoming..
- 44:12Much more important than the content.
- 44:14So, if I was a teacher, I would devote specific time
- 44:19to helping children to realize
- 44:23how they process inside their own head
- 44:29and how they can make that work for them, which is about resilience
- 44:34and perseverance and self-motivation.
- 44:37Because if that gets put in place, everything else becomes possible.
- 44:42But if it's the content that gets put in place first,
- 44:45then a child can easily get sucked down
- 44:50that rabbit hole of grade scores marks,
- 44:54and I'm not getting the marks I want, so I'm failing.
- 44:56So it's terrible.
- 44:57So my life is a mess. So what am I going to do?
- 45:00Pressure pressure stress stress stress stress stress
- 45:03which also happens with DP students.
- 45:05But I mean, I love working with grade 12 students
- 45:10because if they are in grade 12
- 45:15then they have learned how to do this.
- 45:17Usually.
- 45:18Well, I guess 50% of them, at least.
- 45:22And they're wonderful because they've realized that themselves.
- 45:25But I mean, I think that ultimately we need to have specific lessons
- 45:31on ATL skills.
- 45:32We need to be explicitly teaching them the most important skills
- 45:36that set them up as a resource for resilient learner.
- 45:40But we need to be teaching those explicitly and specifically,
- 45:43which means time. And of course, there is no time.
- 45:46So we've got to come up with a different way to do it.
- 45:49You got to create it, right?
- 45:50And I think any educator could listen to what we're talking about right now
- 45:54and recognize, you know, when you talk about that internal dialog,
- 45:56it's very easy to make the leap, not just in the self-management skill,
- 46:00for example,
- 46:01but you can see how an internal dialog that says, like, I haven't done this yet
- 46:05can support with like research skills, it can support with social skills
- 46:08it can support with the communication skills,
- 46:10with the thinking skills like how to think more critically.
- 46:12So you really do recognize, like I keep visualizing like a slingshot,
- 46:16you know, in terms of content, if it has to kind of go at this direction,
- 46:19I'm going to stop and I'm going to kind of like pull back into just like ways of
- 46:23thinking, powers of the mind and how I'm going to approach these things.
- 46:26And by investing that time almost kind of going
- 46:28for like a better term backwards a bit, once I've got those sort of skills, I'm
- 46:32going to slingshot through the content and actually catch up and have that time
- 46:36essentially what you were talking about at the top of the show.
- 46:39But I mean
- 46:40it's the one of the problems is that it's a very individual thing
- 46:43and different children get developed these skills at different ages.
- 46:47And within one class it's very difficult for a teacher to focus on,
- 46:53helping the ones who don't,
- 46:56who aren't proficient at managing their own mind.
- 47:01And continuing with the ones who do, you know.
- 47:06You just inspired me a ton though because that's our role as teachers right.
- 47:09Is to get to know our kids well, to understand each one and help them grow.
- 47:12So yeah look at that.
- 47:14The whole journey here.
- 47:15Now I'm like fully inspired.
- 47:18Thank you.
- 47:19Yes it's good.
- 47:22Are you an IB educator wanting
- 47:23to improve your practice and needing a just a bit more support getting there?
- 47:27Have you ever wanted to learn more about a specific aspect of the DP program?
- 47:31Or ask a question to an educational theorist about a specific IB aspect?
- 47:35IB Unplugged is the place for you.
- 47:37Simply visit kognity.com/ibunplugged to submit your question to us,
- 47:42and have your question explored in more detail in an upcoming episode.
- 47:46And now, back to the show.
- 47:50I think that, in the past, you
- 47:52one of the workshops that you've done with us was strictly on resilience.
- 47:56And I think maybe
- 47:56because of that workshop, maybe because it's just a really great part of it,
- 48:00that's one piece that really has resonated with me and stuck with me.
- 48:04And I think that it's something that you can argue
- 48:08is the main way you will succeed in the diploma program.
- 48:13Like if you don't build resilience, you are going to have
- 48:16an extremely difficult time getting through the diploma program.
- 48:20And so I think
- 48:22I like some of your examples, especially with the failing and things like that.
- 48:25But do you have any tips you were saying, how can you explicitly teach resilience
- 48:30for DP students?
- 48:32The difference between teaching
- 48:34cognitive skills and teaching affective skills to me is that
- 48:39if you're teaching
- 48:40cognitive skills
- 48:41like how to make a good exam, study timetable, how to summarize information,
- 48:45how to remember well, you as a teacher, you can give students
- 48:51practical examples of how other people do that.
- 48:56Because there are the best ways to summarize information, the best ways
- 49:00to remember, they're all there. They're very easy.
- 49:04But when we're teaching something like resilience,
- 49:07it's not something that I can say to you,
- 49:10this is the best way for you to become resilient.
- 49:14But if I explored your life in enough detail, I would be able
- 49:19to find moments in your life when you were astonishingly resilient.
- 49:24And it may not be in an academic situation.
- 49:26It may be in a completely different
- 49:27situation, but a time when you had to face something that was really difficult
- 49:31and you managed to pull yourself together, you managed to harness the resources
- 49:35and overcome that difficulty and get to a successful outcome.
- 49:39So how did you do that?
- 49:40You see, that's the key question is to utilize your own..
- 49:44You see,
- 49:46every student knows how to persist.
- 49:48They know how to persevere.
- 49:50They know how to self motivate.
- 49:51They know how to be resilient because they have done it somewhere in their life.
- 49:55But they may not relate that to an academic situation.
- 49:59It may have been on the football field when they fell over half a dozen times,
- 50:04but they managed to get themselves back up and get back into the game.
- 50:07How did they do that?
- 50:09You see, that's the thing to explore.
- 50:11So in all my books,
- 50:14the sections on affective skills,
- 50:19all well, part of them
- 50:20anyway, is about getting students to reflect on their own life,
- 50:24on moments when they were resilient and work out how they did that.
- 50:28Right.
- 50:29And then also, I get them to do exercises on role modeling, like find role models
- 50:35who you aspire to be like, who, you know, admire and look at their life.
- 50:40You know, so many young people, they admire people who might be famous
- 50:44in some sphere or other, but they never actually explore
- 50:47their life and discover how did they get there.
- 50:50And so I ask them to read biographies.
- 50:54I ask them to find out what actually happened
- 50:57in that person's life that enabled them to become so successful.
- 51:00And you always find,
- 51:03some key things.
- 51:04One is an extraordinary capacity for hard work.
- 51:07Another is the ability to learn from every experience.
- 51:11And the other
- 51:12is dealing well with failure, you know, overcoming failure, coming back strong,
- 51:16working at what you haven't done right yet
- 51:18and making a change to that and coming back and doing it again.
- 51:21All those things exist in every successful person's life.
- 51:24But if a child doesn't research and find out how
- 51:29their role model became so successful, then they don't realize that
- 51:34those are the things they need to develop in themselves.
- 51:36So I've created lots and lots of exercises for students
- 51:41on these, which are in my,
- 51:44student workbooks on ATL skills.
- 51:47And I guess these are the things that,
- 51:48you know, you're trying to pull out from the student as well,
- 51:50you know, as you were talking about, like, you know,
- 51:52you need to know from the individual student for them
- 51:54to kind of go into their own experience bank and pull out.
- 51:56What is that thing that made me think back to the root of the word educate,
- 52:01which is, of course, to draw out, to pull out from the individual,
- 52:04and that then maybe a little bit more inspired
- 52:06when we were talking earlier about, you know,
- 52:08some of the things that can be fearful for teachers when they say like,
- 52:10oh, I'm not going to be a subject specialist anymore.
- 52:12I need to be more on this other side.
- 52:14I need to start teaching these ATL skills.
- 52:16You know what concept came to mind is, a friend of mine, Declan Fleming,
- 52:19who's a phenomenal, teacher, he was introduces himself as
- 52:22I'm an educator.
- 52:24He doesn't say I'm a chemistry teacher.
- 52:25He says I'm an educator.
- 52:27And I think that's a really powerful, just way of looking at things like,
- 52:31it's my role to draw out these experiences from the young person.
- 52:35It's my role to help the student identify their internal dialog
- 52:39and what that's doing to their resilience development, their approach
- 52:42to learning skills, all these sort of things.
- 52:44And so I think, you know, for any educators out there
- 52:46who may be a little bit apprehensive of like thinking of themselves
- 52:50not as a chemist, not as a physicist or whatever it might be.
- 52:54But now I'm an educator.
- 52:55I draw out the best from others.
- 52:57Yes, to draw out rather than to feed in.
- 53:01And I think a lot of teachers do get hooked up into the feeding
- 53:05in because here's the syllabus, here's the content,
- 53:08and I have to feed it in and that's my task is to feed it in.
- 53:12Well, in fact, like you say, the more important thing you can do is to draw out.
- 53:17Yeah, yeah.
- 53:18And it's also suggesting to every student that they
- 53:22that I am not
- 53:25I can't teach you how to manage your own emotional state.
- 53:28I can't teach you and I don't have any right to
- 53:31I don't have any right to tell you how to feel.
- 53:34But I can help you to draw out.
- 53:37The more, the detailed and nuanced your own nuanced way
- 53:41of doing that, I can draw that, help you draw that out of yourself
- 53:44so you can look at it, and work with that and develop that more for yourself.
- 53:49So yes, the difference between drawing out and feeding in.
- 53:53Yeah.
- 53:54And so let's say, you know, if you get a school that kind of decides,
- 53:57like, right, we get all this, we want to buy into that,
- 53:59we want to focus in on this idea of like drawing out developing
- 54:02the ATL skills a little bit more than, let's say, the content,
- 54:05you know, and I can think of schools, you know, mine, for example,
- 54:08and a few others who explicitly report on ATL
- 54:11skills, for example, like we we want to show like this as an emphasis.
- 54:14This is an important thing.
- 54:15So it's something that shows up in our reports.
- 54:17It's something that we have our students reflect on.
- 54:19You know, we'll have teachers comment
- 54:21on your collaboration skills, your communication skills,
- 54:24all this sort of stuff to kind of pull that out.
- 54:27You know, in your opinion,
- 54:28does that help to support that overall philosophy of the ATL in general
- 54:32or does putting a mark to it or some sort of report
- 54:36that's like officially looked at?
- 54:37Does that suddenly like pull away from the original intent?
- 54:40I'm completely against the quantitative assessment of ATL skills.
- 54:46I don't see any point in doing that, in fact.
- 54:49And it's got to be a terrible burden on a teacher to actually take something
- 54:53like self-motivation and oh yeah, Johnny, I think he's a six for self-motivation.
- 54:58And I think, Mary no, she's a four.
- 55:01And it's ridiculous because it's totally subjective.
- 55:03It can't be done well.
- 55:05But I am a great fan of qualitative
- 55:08reflection on ATL skills.
- 55:11And so for a teacher to notice, to take notes throughout the year,
- 55:17because usually this is going back to parents, isn't it,
- 55:20to give parents some feedback on the children's ATL skills
- 55:23from the point of view of well, yes, he's doing this really well
- 55:27and seems to cope really well in this situation
- 55:30and seems to have these skills well developed.
- 55:32But when he's in this situation and these skills
- 55:35don't seem to be so well developed, so he could work on these skills.
- 55:39So a qualitative assessment I think is useful.
- 55:42A quantitative assessment I think doesn't help.
- 55:45In fact I think it's quite detrimental to the process of developing those skills
- 55:51because you see, the point really is that when a school
- 55:55has got a good ATL skills program in place,
- 55:58then all the normal assessment grades will go up.
- 56:02The average for the GCSE
- 56:05exam will go up, the average for the DP exam will go up.
- 56:08The average for all the normal summative assessments will go up.
- 56:13So you don't need to be assessing the ATL skills in isolation,
- 56:17because the effect of good ATL skills is to boost the results
- 56:21in all your normal assessments.
- 56:23And what I put in place in all of my work is self-assessment.
- 56:30So, to self-assess an ATL skill
- 56:32you've got to have a mastery statement.
- 56:35To define a mastery statement is
- 56:39what is the performance you
- 56:41would like to see from the students by the time they reach,
- 56:44and usually I make at the end of grade 12.
- 56:48So that's the ultimate mastery of the ATL skills by the end of grade 12.
- 56:51So as a grade nine students I'm looking at that as my mastery.
- 56:56I've got this full rubric of stages I can go through to get to that point,
- 57:00the rubric in terms of the process.
- 57:03And I can then, decide where they are.
- 57:07They could they can self-assess.
- 57:09And I just use one simple rubric for all ATL skills.
- 57:13So not turning each ATL skill into a rubric of its own,
- 57:17just one rubric, which is about skill development.
- 57:21I'm not very good at this.
- 57:22I'm getting better at this.
- 57:24I can now do it by myself.
- 57:26I can now do it without any teacher help.
- 57:29You know, that sort of progression.
- 57:31For all ATL skills, I think self assessment works really well,
- 57:37because it doesn't count.
- 57:39What I like about that is, you know,
- 57:40because so many times you might take like a qualitative statement
- 57:43and in order to standardize it or to put it in a rubric or something
- 57:46like that, you'd say, okay, here's the qualitative statement.
- 57:49And then sometimes we'll put like a word to describe that statement
- 57:53to make it a little bit simpler. Right?
- 57:54So just as you were mentioning before,
- 57:56like I can do this on my own, I can do this without much help.
- 57:58You might see some people say like, I'm a novice at this or I'm,
- 58:02you know, developing in this, I'm advancing this.
- 58:04I'm an expert in it, and that's her thing.
- 58:06But ultimately,
- 58:06I mean, does that not just sort of turn into another quantitative method?
- 58:10Like it's not a number, of course, but it's like,
- 58:13I mean, the students then just kind of walk around me like,
- 58:15I'm experts at this and, oh, I've only got a novice on this thing
- 58:18and I'm not, you know, do they suddenly kind of fall back
- 58:20into that quantitative style of thinking, even though the intention was to create
- 58:24a qualitative way of reflecting on the ATL development?
- 58:29That's a very good point.
- 58:30I mean, I guess I go back to the pragmatism
- 58:35of students. In order to develop an ATL skill,
- 58:39they have to see it as being beneficial to them.
- 58:41If it's not beneficial to them, then they won't do it or they'll
- 58:45do it for grudgingly.
- 58:47So if you have to show them
- 58:50that by becoming a good researcher, by being able to identify the different
- 58:55the primary and secondary sources, for example, that's a finite ATL skill,
- 59:01you have to show them that by learning that skill,
- 59:04they will actually be much better at inquiry learning,
- 59:07because they'll understand the difference
- 59:10between primary and secondary data. They'll go to the primary source.
- 59:13They'll always find the right data.
- 59:14They'll write better reports, they'll get better grades.
- 59:17It's going to work for them.
- 59:18So I think that the way is to get students to move up that,
- 59:24across that, rubric to the mastery level,
- 59:28it's got to have a pragmatic, practical application
- 59:33of improving the grades that they're getting in the normal assessment.
- 59:37You know, like, I mean, one of the simplest things
- 59:39I've always done for more than 30 years is teach memory skills.
- 59:45And I've never understood why schools
- 59:47don't have a class on memory because everyone can improve their memory.
- 59:52It's really easy to do, everyone can.
- 59:55And yet we don't teach kids how to remember.
- 59:58And yet we expect them to remember an enormous amount of information.
- 1:00:01We don't teach you how to do that.
- 1:00:02We just think, well, the smart ones will remember and the others won't.
- 1:00:05And that's just life.
- 1:00:06Well, I think that's tragic.
- 1:00:09I think it's a waste of talent.
- 1:00:12And so like there's a good example I can teach kids in ten minutes,
- 1:00:18I can show them that I can double their memory just like that.
- 1:00:21It's very, very easy to do with simple, simple exercises.
- 1:00:26And then suddenly what's happened for the student is they go,
- 1:00:30what just happened there?
- 1:00:33What have you done to me?
- 1:00:37I juggle, I can remember things.
- 1:00:39This is incredible.
- 1:00:40Yeah.
- 1:00:41And it's like I remember in England.
- 1:00:44I used to go to England and run school courses for students a lot.
- 1:00:48And, I developed this exercise on the Prime Minister's of England.
- 1:00:53Now, these are simple memory techniques, which is not the same
- 1:00:57as developing understanding, but it's still amazing for students.
- 1:01:01So, I get these students
- 1:01:02who never, ever thought of themselves as having a decent memory at all.
- 1:01:05They always thought that they were underachieving.
- 1:01:09And I had this list.
- 1:01:11I think in the list it had.
- 1:01:14I'm trying to remember it's quite a long time ago now.
- 1:01:17More than 40 names
- 1:01:19of British prime ministers, 40 names on the list,
- 1:01:23and I give them this page and I say, you're going to memorize all those names
- 1:01:26and you're going to memorize them in order,
- 1:01:28and you're going to do it in the next ten minutes.
- 1:01:30And they would all just.. They just think that's impossible.
- 1:01:33The internal monologue comes in, says, no, that's not happening.
- 1:01:36I haven't memorized this list yet.
- 1:01:40But ten minutes later they could do it,
- 1:01:43and they could do it, and they could share it with their friends.
- 1:01:46They could rattle off this list of 40 names.
- 1:01:50And they were so amazed.
- 1:01:52They were absolutely knocked out that
- 1:01:55‘till half an hour ago, I thought I had a terrible memory.
- 1:01:58Now I realize that actually I have undiscovered
- 1:02:02ability, undiscovered talent I can remember well.
- 1:02:06Now that's just one little exercise.
- 1:02:09A very simple exercise.
- 1:02:11But what it does for the child is it boosts self-esteem.
- 1:02:14They suddenly feel like, hey, I can remember
- 1:02:18maybe I could remember my biology better.
- 1:02:21Maybe I could remember my languages better..
- 1:02:24And suddenly that creates the possibility of them
- 1:02:27investing more effort into those areas and becoming much better on this subject.
- 1:02:31So yeah, that's where it starts.
- 1:02:33So I think simple, simple exercises to develop the skills.
- 1:02:38Yeah. No, I think that's fantastic.
- 1:02:40And I think I want to wrap up with one last question, something that I think
- 1:02:45is really an interesting place for you to be as you develop this framework
- 1:02:49and you probably had a pretty good idea
- 1:02:53of how you thought it would play out.
- 1:02:56And then it probably did not play out that way in a lot of different cases.
- 1:03:01And I think, John, we were talking about earlier,
- 1:03:03he made this amazing, amazing scavenger hunt,
- 1:03:09and he gets he gets to the first clue and..
- 1:03:12What did you say?
- 1:03:12Zero people got it?
- 1:03:14They all ran in the opposite direction.
- 1:03:17I was like, oh, this will take him like 40 minutes.
- 1:03:19And then the first clue was like, it's right here in front of him.
- 1:03:21And they completely missed.
- 1:03:22And they just went like running
- 1:03:24in the opposite directions, like, oh my God, what have I done?
- 1:03:26We're going to be here forever. Yeah.
- 1:03:28And so I'm wondering if you are,
- 1:03:30on John's level of scavenger hunts when it comes to ATL’s.
- 1:03:34And did everybody run in a different direction
- 1:03:37that you thought they would, or is there anything that now
- 1:03:39that you've seen how it's played out, you would do differently anything
- 1:03:43like that, that you've now that it's stood the test of time?
- 1:03:49I'm sure I would do things differently, but no,
- 1:03:52I think it's been a very positive journey.
- 1:03:55I mean, in John situation, I mean,
- 1:03:57this is the advantage of having a failing, well, model at the back of your mind.
- 1:04:01So as soon as that happens, it's a wonderful opportunity to stop
- 1:04:04everyone and say, I just like to teach you something else for a minute.
- 1:04:08It's all about failing well.
- 1:04:11Yeah. Please come back. There's more.
- 1:04:14It's right here. Just go.
- 1:04:15Just go to the first one.
- 1:04:17But in general, I think that the ATL model
- 1:04:21has been picked up very well by teachers.
- 1:04:22And in general, teachers do regard it as being
- 1:04:26a very important aspect of their teaching.
- 1:04:30I've recently written this book.
- 1:04:33This is Teaching ATL skills, a book for teachers.
- 1:04:37Now, the key things in that book,
- 1:04:42are two things we've discussed already.
- 1:04:44One is the assessment and avoiding quantitative assessment.
- 1:04:49And using self-assessment in its place.
- 1:04:51I think that's vital.
- 1:04:53But the other is the necessity of teaching these skills
- 1:04:56explicitly, which requires time.
- 1:04:59I don't want to promote my stuff except to say that these are
- 1:05:03my skills books for students, and each one is a workbook
- 1:05:07that students can work through and learn the skills exercises.
- 1:05:13So the point that I'm trying to make is that if we want to
- 1:05:16explicitly teach students the ATL skills,
- 1:05:20we have to either start inserting
- 1:05:24explicit exercises into our lessons.
- 1:05:27So now I'm going to take you to what I said before,
- 1:05:29the difference between primary and secondary sources.
- 1:05:31Now there's a little exercise
- 1:05:32which would take maybe five minutes, ten minutes to do explicitly.
- 1:05:36So you do that at the beginning of a lesson,
- 1:05:38and then you get them in back into their inquiry.
- 1:05:40And they're starting to differentiate
- 1:05:42between primary and secondary sources in your own way.
- 1:05:44But you've had to dedicate ten minutes of that lesson to do it,
- 1:05:47which is difficult for some teachers.
- 1:05:49The second way is to use something like my books
- 1:05:53and to have students do the exercise at home.
- 1:05:56Tonight, I want you to do the exercise on the difference between primary
- 1:05:59and secondary sources.
- 1:06:00I want you to bring what you learned from that back to class tomorrow,
- 1:06:03and the next inquiry exercise we’ll do
- 1:06:06will have that built into it because you will have learned it for homework.
- 1:06:10The third way that I can think of is,
- 1:06:14is to have a,
- 1:06:17maybe an after school class.
- 1:06:19And I know this sounds tricky, but
- 1:06:22every DP student
- 1:06:24has a CAS project they have to complete, correct?
- 1:06:29Now, CAS, unfortunately, sometimes degenerates
- 1:06:32to going to the nearest old people's home and singing a song
- 1:06:42Yeah, I guess they must get what they need from it.
- 1:06:44And I suppose it does help the elderly, but the point is that
- 1:06:48what about if the in center was to run a class for younger students?
- 1:06:54So after school we have an ATL class run by DP students
- 1:06:59and any other students can come to that class and learn and ATL skill.
- 1:07:03And it's an ATL skill that the DP student has chosen
- 1:07:06because it was one that seemed to help them improve their grades.
- 1:07:10So we have this great improvement class run by DP students,
- 1:07:14which is a CAS project in itself, and it could be a huge CAS project
- 1:07:18that all students could be involved in by rotation.
- 1:07:21And what the benefit would be enormous for the younger students,
- 1:07:24because they'd learn the skills they need in order to go forward.
- 1:07:28And so it's always finding the time.
- 1:07:31So if we're not going to take the content out of the DP,
- 1:07:35then somehow we need to find the time to teach these skills explicitly.
- 1:07:39Oh the fourth method I haven't mentioned because it's
- 1:07:42almost heretical,
- 1:07:45is to have one hour per week
- 1:07:47as an ATL skills class for every single student.
- 1:07:51Yeah, so one hour per week.
- 1:07:53Somehow you have to squeeze an extra hour into the timetable,
- 1:07:56and there has to be a teacher, and there has to be some resources
- 1:07:59for the teacher to teach.
- 1:08:01If every student had one hour per week
- 1:08:04learning an ATL skill, just the skill,
- 1:08:08then every teacher could start using that skill after that
- 1:08:11because the students will have already got the skill.
- 1:08:14Now, I had a school in London.
- 1:08:17It was the Fahad Academy
- 1:08:21and they what they did was they set up that particular program.
- 1:08:24They set up an hour a week for every MYP student,
- 1:08:27and they bought all these books for their MYP students.
- 1:08:30So every student had a copy of this book.
- 1:08:33And so I went in and I ran a workshop with the teachers,
- 1:08:37teaching them how to teach from that book and how to get it across to the students.
- 1:08:42And I went away, and a year later I went back
- 1:08:45and I went back to the school and I talked to the teachers
- 1:08:47and said, well, how's it going?
- 1:08:48And they said, well, I don't know.
- 1:08:50It seems to be going alright. Yeah.
- 1:08:52They didn't have much to say.
- 1:08:55But then I went and talked to the students
- 1:08:57and I said to the students, how do you like the ATL class?
- 1:09:00And they said, we love it.
- 1:09:01And I said, why do you love it?
- 1:09:03And they said,
- 1:09:05because it doesn't count.
- 1:09:07Really?
- 1:09:08They said, because it doesn't count.
- 1:09:11Because every other class, every other every single thing that they did.
- 1:09:14And every other class, it counted.
- 1:09:16It was grades and scores and marks and it was count.
- 1:09:19The ATL class didn't count.
- 1:09:21They could actually do whatever they wanted
- 1:09:23with guidance from the teacher, and they could learn a skill.
- 1:09:26And when I went and looked at their books, they hadn't just done
- 1:09:30the exercises that we decided was going to be in the program for the year.
- 1:09:33They'd done all the other exercises, too, and I asked them, how come you two?
- 1:09:37And they said, we do it at our home time.
- 1:09:39This is like an owner's manual for school.
- 1:09:42That was a comment I got.
- 1:09:44This is like an owner's manual for school.
- 1:09:46This is how to do school.
- 1:09:49And you see, that's the whole point.
- 1:09:51But to do it like that, you have to have time.
- 1:09:55And so somehow this is the biggest problem
- 1:09:58in all education worldwide, not just IB,
- 1:10:03is how do you find the time?
- 1:10:05Where do you find the time?
- 1:10:06And can we find administrators
- 1:10:08bold enough and courageous enough to actually put a process focused lesson
- 1:10:13in the curriculum of every child, every week, to teach them the skills
- 1:10:17they need to cope with the learning challenges
- 1:10:20that they have at that year level, at that grade, at that moment.
- 1:10:24And so you plan the learning skills curriculum to perfectly match
- 1:10:27the content curriculum.
- 1:10:29So they're learning the skills they need when they need them,
- 1:10:32and they've got that skill.
- 1:10:33And then suddenly they the teachers can start using it
- 1:10:36and it encourages the teachers to use more inquiry learning,
- 1:10:39because they know that the students coming to the class have already got
- 1:10:42the skills they need to handle inquiry learning.
- 1:10:45And so to me, that's the solution.
- 1:10:47And that's the next step forward.
- 1:10:48And that's what I wrote that book, for teachers all about.
- 1:10:52So to me that's where we've got to go.
- 1:10:54But what I, what I like about what we've said so far
- 1:10:56is that like, okay, even if you're at a school
- 1:10:57that can't do that, they can't do that sort of one hour week kind of thing.
- 1:11:01So much of what you've mentioned here is kind of like..
- 1:11:04They can do it, John.
- 1:11:06They just haven't done it yet.
- 1:11:09But no, a big part of it is just like that awareness of,
- 1:11:14of the mindset, sort of like, how am I there's the payoff,
- 1:11:17there's all this sort of stuff
- 1:11:17that's going to be the buy in and that sort of stuff.
- 1:11:19And so it's really like being flexible and demonstrating that flexibility
- 1:11:23in our own selves.
- 1:11:24Like,
- 1:11:24don't be so fixed, don't be so controlled by the content..
- 1:11:29Have some flexibility.
- 1:11:30Take that risk and take the time to really invest in that skill,
- 1:11:34recognizing that slingshot is still going to come into play
- 1:11:37and you'll catch up on some of that other stuff.
- 1:11:39So, you know, when you prioritize the great ways
- 1:11:43of how to learn, learning becomes better.
- 1:11:47As opposed to if I prioritize content, content content
- 1:11:50doesn't necessarily mean my learning is going to get a lot better.
- 1:11:52It just means I'll get a lot.
- 1:11:53I'd get through the content,
- 1:11:55and getting through the content is one of these pet peeves that I always have
- 1:11:57when I talk with teachers who are just like, yeah,
- 1:11:58I need to get through the content.
- 1:12:00Like, well, certainly education is more than getting through, right?
- 1:12:03It's something more than what we want to get from that.
- 1:12:05So, I think even if you can't get that one hour a week,
- 1:12:09you can still shift a little bit of that mindset,
- 1:12:11try to break free of that fixed approach to the content.
- 1:12:13And just saying, I have some control here.
- 1:12:15Yeah. Absolutely.
- 1:12:16It's helping teachers to take a dual focus, a focus on process
- 1:12:21and content in every lesson.
- 1:12:25That's all ATL is attempting to do, I think.
- 1:12:28Yeah.
- 1:12:29Lance, thank you so much for this.
- 1:12:31This has been such a joy to talk about it.
- 1:12:33It's been a really yeah, a great conversation.
- 1:12:36I feel like I could keep this going for a really long time,
- 1:12:40except, our time difference of 12 hours is not conducive to that.
- 1:12:44But we would love to
- 1:12:47continue this conversation another time, see what else we can learn.
- 1:12:50I think a lot of teachers will get a lot out of it.
- 1:12:53Absolutely. Yeah. This has been a ton of fun for me.
- 1:12:55Thanks for taking the time, Lance.
- 1:12:56Really, really enjoyable to speak with you about these things.
- 1:12:59Thank you, Court.
- 1:13:00Thank you John. It's been great.
- 1:13:02IB Unplugged is a Kognity podcast hosted by
- 1:13:04John Patton and Courtney Marline and produced by Katilina Gaffney.
- 1:13:08Be sure to subscribe or follow and share with your fellow IB educators.
- 1:13:12If you'd like to submit a topic, request, or question, please do
- 1:13:15so on kognity.com/ibunplugged.
- 1:13:18Let's keep the conversation going
- 1:13:19and support each other in teaching with confidence, creativity, and joy.
- 1:13:23See you next time.