Education Bookcast

Any teacher in a Western cultural context knows that classroom behaviour is the most challenging part of the job. A lot of the time, it seems like crowd control is the main issue, and "teaching" is secondary. Unfortunately, teacher training courses don't do a good job of preparing teachers for this reality, with behaviour management rarely instructed at all. Bill Rogers has been helping teachers develop their classroom behaviour management and discipline skills for decades. He has brought his calm and relationship-focused approach to innumerable schools, often including those with very challenging behaviour, or those in "special measures". His practical insights into what to do in the classroom, and the principles behind his approach, offer a valuable guide for teachers struggling with this aspect of their jobs. I intend this to be one of several behaviour management books that I will cover on the podcast. Hopefully, in this way I can direct some teachers and school leaders to some useful resources, share some practical advice, and draw some general conclusions about school discipline and learning. Enjoy the episode. *** SUPPORT You can support Education Bookcast and join the community forum via Buy Me a Coffee using the following link: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/edubookcast .

In the second part of this two-part episode about lessons learned from my time working in the education technology sector, I wanted to share a very significant quantitative finding to improve learning: what I call the "90% rule". Desirable difficulties is a concept that many know about and try to apply to teaching situations, but there is a question of how difficult one should make things. Surely there is a level at which things are too difficult? In which case, what is the perfect level of difficulty that we should aim for? The secret is this 90% number. Enjoy the episode. *** REFERENCES Eglington, L.G., Pavlik Jr, P.I. Optimizing practice scheduling requires quantitative tracking of individual item performance. npj Sci. Learn. 5, 15 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41539-020-00074-4 See also the SuperMemo Guru wiki: https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Optimum_interval. SUPPORT If you would like to support Education Bookcast and join the community forum, you can do so at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/edubookcast.

This is the second part of the message for my friend Guy about becoming a better lecturer. In this part, I go over 27 practical techniques and tips for improving lecturing (as well as improving the way homework exercises are designed), referring to the principles and theory outlined in the previous part to explain how and why these work. To be completely honest some of the suggestions are more general pedagogical suggestions rather than being specific to lecturing, but I decided to throw them in as well for completeness. Enjoy the episode. *** You can support Education Bookcast and join the community forum by visiting https://www.buymeacoffee.com/edubookcast.

Benjamin Bloom is best known for Bloom's Taxonomy, a scheme for categorising ways of thinking about or interacting with learning content on a scale from less to more sophisticated. However, the project he led investigating the lifelong development of expertise should be much more famous. The book's full title makes it feel as though it was published in 1685 rather than 1985: The dramatic findings of a ground-breaking study of 120 immensely talented individuals reveal astonishing new information on Developing Talent in Young People. Bloom's team looked at extraordinary achievers in six domains: pianists, sculptors, swimmers, tennis players, mathematicians, and neurologists, so that he had two each from artistic, athletic, and academic pursuits. He was trying to understand the life circumstances during childhood and adolescense - particularly the practice routines and social milieu - which led to the development of the subjects' expertise. Their research methods were unusual. Rather than using a large sample and taking quantitative data (which would have been difficult anyway due to the lack of a large number of exceptional people, by definition) or presenting qualitative interviews of individual case studies, Bloom's team interviewed around 20-30 people from each domain and then summarised the findings of these interviews. It leaves us with a sense of the qualitative experience of going through their learning processes, while also reducing the chances of over-generalising from a single case. Pianists were the main focus of discussion where Bloom and his colleauges tried to generalised the findings, although all six categories had a full exposition as to the findings for their domain in particular. The pianists followed an especially clear pattern which is worth starting from, and subsequently comparing with the others. In the context of an abundance of information about how people think and learn on shorter timescales (from seconds to weeks), having information about how people develop over the lifespan is invaluable. I will definitely be referring to this book a lot in future. Enjoy the episode. *** RELATED EPISODES This book is related to the development of expertise, which I talk about on a lot of episodes, but the one specific one I mentioned in the recording was: 22. The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle SUPPORT You can support Education Bookcast and join the community forum via Buy Me a Coffee using the following link: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/edubookcast.

Season 2 of the Pedagogue-Cast is here! The Pedagogue-Cast is a separate podcast project I share with Justin Matthys, founder of Maths Pathway. We discuss the kinds of questions that teachers might have about good practice which touch on cognitive science, making sure both to make the most of the research findings while also making it practical for use in the classroom. In this new season, Justin and I are going to discuss music, flow, focus, student choice, social & emotional learning interventions, and how motivation develops over time. Some places where you can find the Pedagogue-Cast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-pedagogue-cast/id1637019084 - Apple podcasts https://open.spotify.com/show/437GYDF4jkkFxfkGR4cknc - Spotify https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5idXp6c3Byb3V0LmNvbS8xOTg0NDY3LnJzcw?hl=en - Google podcasts You can also try searching for the Pedagogue-Cast in your favourite podcast app. Enjoy!

My friend Zoë (hi Zoë!) is taking a course on learning design. In it, she heard about Behaviourism, Cognitivism, and Constructivism, and while she said that she found it confusing, her main takeaway is that "you need a bit of each". I recorded this episode to help her have a clearer sense of what these three words really mean, and that "a bit of each" is emphatically not the right message. I thought that others might benefit from the same summary. This is a frequent topic in education courses, and I think it generally gets a pretty poor treatment. Hopefully this will clear things up for a lot of people. Enjoy the episode. *** RELATED EPISODES Note how the distribution of episodes reflects the importance of topics. Behaviourism is important to know about but it really isn't current as a way of thinking about learning, it's more of a historical relic with some lasting applicability to animal training. Constructivism is a mistaken and misleading theory that keeps negatively affecting educational practice and never seems to go away, so I keep having to talk about it. Cognitivism is a really effective approach which deserves to be known more widely - it took me a long time to find out about it, hence why the episodes about it tend to be more recent. Behaviourism: 3. Don't Shoot the Dog! The New Art of Teaching and Training by Karen Pryor Constructivism: 42. Do Schools Kill Creativity? by Ken Robinson; 65. Beyond the Hole in the Wall by Sugata Mitra; 87. Experiential Learning by Colin Beard and John Wilson; 88. The Failure of Constructivist, Discovery, Problem-based, Experiential, and Inquiry-based Teaching; 90. Discovery learning: the idea that won't die; 124. The Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences Cognitivism: 79. What learning is; 80. The Chimp Paradox by Prof Steve Peters; 82. Memorable Teaching by Pepps McCrea; 85. Why Don't Students Like School? by Daniel Willingham; 95. The Reading Mind by Dan Willingham; 132a. Direct Instruction and Project Follow Through; 132b. Direct Instruction: the evidence; 135. Professional writing expertise; 136. Congitive architecture and ACT-R; 136+. Interview with Prof. Christian Lebiere on ACT-R and Cognitive Architecture REFERENCES I mention the following article as one where the authors (eminent figures in cognitive architecture, one of whom is a Nobel Prize winner) ask Constructivists to stop misrepresenting their work and saying things in direct contradiction to the evidence. Anderson, Reder, & Simon (1999). Applications and Misapplacations of Cognitive Psychology to Mathematics Education. SUPPORT You can support the podcast and join the community forum by visiting https://www.buymeacoffee.com/edubookcast.

Please be advised that this episode contains mentions of violence and may be unsuitable for some listeners. I'd like to flesh out what I've been saying before about the power of economic analysis in explaining people's actions. Whereas when we normally think about motivation we think in terms of psychology, economists naturally think in terms of incentives. This kind of thinking is generally missing in educational discourse. There are two books that I found particularly fascinating and instructive on this point: The Social Order of the Underworld: How Prison Gangs Govern the American Penal System by David Skarbek; and The Invisible Hook by Peter Leeson. This recording focuses on the former. David Skarbek's book is fascinating and rich in both detail and theoretical explanation, so I focus on what I find most compelling and most relevant to transfer over to thinking about other contexts. First of all, he introduces existing criminological theories that aim to account for the rise in prison gangs, namely Deprivation theory and Importation theory. The former suggests that inmate behaviour is a result of the pain of imprisonment, and the latter focuses on pre-prison beliefs and experiences that are brought into prison. Skarbek departs from both of these theories, grounding his own analysis in political economy. He introduces us to the basic assumptions of economics - that people are self-interested and respond rationally to incentives - and goes on to describe the role of governance in society. His fundamental thesis is that prison gangs provide governance, meaning that they provide a form of public good which enhances personal safety and opportunities for trade (mostly in drugs). While I'm yet to fully apply the ideas of political economy to education (except for reading about it inThe Beautiful Tree, China's Examination Hell, and Education and the State), I feel that digging in to some examples like this can help us appreciate the reasons why people do things. Crucially, they are not all psychological. Enjoy the episode.

This is the second episode concerning self-related beliefs taken from chapters of The Cambridge Handbook of Motivation and Learning. Here I talk about self-efficacy, which concerns how much you believe that you can do something specific, e.g. solve a particular kind of maths problem. Self-esteem, self-concept, self-efficacy - it's easy to get confused with so many "self-words" flying around. There are even other words which aren't used by academics but are in common parlance, such as self-belief. I go into more detail and give more examples of the difference in the recording, but basically, whereas self-concept concerns your attitude to an entire domain (e.g. how good you think you are at sports), self-efficacy refers to how likely you think you would be to succeed in a specific class of activity (e.g. do you think you could run a marathon). Like self-concept, self-efficacy has been found to be strongly correlated with a bunch of positive behaviours, such as perseverance, but also outcomes, such as academic interest and academic performance. Unfortunately causality doesn't seem to have been established (as far as I can tell from the article), which blunts my enthusiasm about it somewhat. Nevertheless, this is definitely something to keep an eye on. The article also explains the sources of self-efficacy beliefs, which are four: mastery experiences (succeeding or failing); vicarious experiences (watching another person suceed or fail); social persuasion (including encouragement); and physiological state (e.g. anxiety). This list suggests interventions that can be used to increase self-efficacy, namely encouragement and the presentation of models (i.e. peers who can also succeed, possibly after some struggle). One thing I forgot to mention in the recording: in Chinese culture, it is common to tell children stories of famous successful people both from China and from around the world who struggled through great difficulties to achieve their life goals. Marie Curie seems to figure particularly prominently in these biographies, being somebody who had to move to a foreign country (France) to study, breaking the mould as a woman in science, being famed for her extraordinary work ethic, and going on to be the first person to ever achieve a Nobel Prize in two different disciplines (Physics and Chemistry). While there are many ways to interpret the details of how such stories would affect people, it might in part have a self-efficacy effect, by showing young people that it is possible to succeed even in difficult circumstances. Enjoy the episodes. *** RELATED EPISODES 13. The Psychology of Self-Defense: Self-Affirmation Theory by David Sherman & Geoffrey Cohen 45. The problem with self-esteem 46. Self Compassion by Kristin Neff SUPPORT If you would like to support the podcast and join the community forum, you can visit https://www.buymeacoffee.com/edubookcast.