One of the main lessons from the story of Jaime Escalante's career at East LA's Garfeild High School was that it was ultimately a team effort to reach the academic level that the school eventually did. Apart from Escalante himself, there are two figures who stand out as central to the story: Henry Gradillas and Benjamin Jimenez. Gradillas joined Garfield High as a biology teacher after six years in the US army and a short stint as an orchard manager. He saw clear similarities between the young p...
Feb 06, 2019•34 min
Jaime Escalante was a Bolivian teacher who came to Los Angeles in the 1960s. After joining the chaotic failing school Garfield High as a mathematics teacher in 1974, he soon began an Advanced Placement Calculus program that grew to an unheard of size for such a disadvantaged community. In 1982, the Educational Testing Service (ETS), which wrote and marked the tests, suspected Garfield High students of cheating. This led to interest from the media and later fame for Escalante as people started to...
Feb 03, 2019•20 min
I first read You Haven't Taught Until They Have Learned almost five years ago. In that time, I have learned much about how people learn. Re-reading the book now, I am struck by how much of what John Wooden did in his teaching is well supported by modern cognitive science. This is what I try to convey in this short addendum to the notes on John Wooden's pedagogy. Enjoy the episode.
Jan 28, 2019•20 min
John Wooden was a basketball coach for UCLA and an English teacher. He is renowned as one of the greatest coaches of all time, winning 10 out of 12 NCAA championships, including seven in a row, and has been named Coach of the Century by ESPN among others. You Haven't Taught Until They've Learned is a book about his pedagogy, written by one of his former players (Swen Nater) and by an education researcher who had the rare privilege to observe his basketball practices and ask him detailed question...
Jan 20, 2019•40 min
John Hattie is an education researcher from New Zealand with a very ambitious goal: to synthesise the myriad quantitative research studies on education in a single publication. The number of articles affecting his book Visible Learning numbers in the region of 80 thousand (!). The results of his analysis have been hailed as the "Holy Grail" of education by such prestigious authorities as the Times Education Supplement. So, how did he and his team do it? Hattie uses an approach known as meta-anal...
Jan 01, 2019•21 min
Graham Nuthall was an education researcher from New Zealand who spent most of his career on classroom observation, both by directly sitting in on lessons and by recording them by the hundred, watching them back, and analysing them with his team. He also made extensive use of interviews with students to clarify their thought processes. This short book communicates his most important findings to other researchers and to teachers. His most impressive achievement is being able to predict, with some ...
Jan 01, 2019•49 min
It's been three years since the start of Education Bookcast. I will be attempting to change the format to make episodes shorter. I also mention some successes of the past year.
Jan 01, 2019•47 min
I've spent a total of seven episodes up till now on Edward de Bono's work on creativity, lateral thinking, and the workings of the mind. While reading his books, a number of criticisms arose in my mind which I never felt I had the chance to fully express. In the name of balance, I also looked for any criticisms of de Bono online, and I found some quite damning allegations. My criticisms from his books and these allegations are topics I would like to spend one episode talking about. The main prob...
Jul 30, 2018•1 hr 25 min
Stress is broadly understood to be a serious health risk and a destructive factor in many people's lives. It has been advertised as such for several decades. In The Upside of Stress, Kelly McGonigal explains how new research shows that stress may actually be something positive and life-enhancing rather than ruinous. The most central concept is that of "stress mindsets". Similar to fixed vs. growth mindset as described in Carol Dweck's book (covered in the first episode of this podcast), stress m...
Jul 16, 2018•1 hr 42 min
Edward de Bono has written a lot of books. Although they often contain small novelties, overall his bibliography is quite repetitive, meaning that it's not worth making an episode about every one of his books individually. In this episode, we'll look at six of his books in quick succession. It's the audio summary equivalent of "skimming" these books, which deserve little more if you're already familiar with the books of his we've considered so far on the podcast. First we look at the "six series...
Jul 02, 2018•26 min
Teachers are leaving the profession in droves in Britain - over half have left before having worked for five years. New and experienced teachers alike leave, making the government consider other options for recruitment - generous stipends for training, or bringing in teachers from overseas. This is the UK teacher crisis. In this episode, I recount a conversation I had with a former teacher and current co-worker of mine which elucidated the root of the problem. The core issues were three: time, e...
Jun 24, 2018•47 min
Sugata Mitra gained widespread acclaim after his TED talk on the Hole in the Wall experiment. In the experiment, he put a computer in a wall of a New Dehli slum, and found that children learned to use it all by themselves. His explorations continued, trying out whether such self-organising learning environments or SOLEs could perform as well as traditional classrooms in terms of children's learning. He since received funding from the World Bank to expand his project to a range of developing coun...
May 27, 2018•55 min
A while back, I listened to an interview with Bruce Lee*. There were two things that I took away from it, neither of which I understood at the time: Bruce Lee's insistence that martial arts are first and foremost about self-expression; and the concept of "acting un-acting" or "un-acting acting" (elsewhere I have heard him talk about "fighting un-fighting"). Recently I was reminded of this interview, but this time it made sense to me, because of what I had learned in the meantime about the nature...
May 07, 2018•1 hr 19 min
We've already seen a number of books by Edward de Bono. I am Right, You are Wrong is (was?) probably my favourite book of his, but since it is such a synthesis of his ideas I wanted to save it for after books that discuss his "core" ideas in detail. Now, having done that, it turns out that there is little to say about this book, for the very same reason - as a synthesis, it doesn't provide very many new ideas. That said, there are 7 ideas from this book that I would like to share, as they provid...
Apr 23, 2018•23 min
I've recently been doing a series on creativity on the podcast. Edward de Bono has featured heavily, but there are other creativity-related topics and authors who I also want to talk about. In this episode, we look at the research on brainstorming, the technique for coming up with new ideas. The provocative title of this episode needs a little clarification. The most strongly supported finding in the research is that brainstorming in a group is not as effective as coming up with ideas individual...
Apr 09, 2018•1 hr
Edward de Bono has long stressed the need to be open to the creation of new words in order to support the development of new concepts and ideas, even in areas not considered "cutting edge". For example, in his book Simplicity, he makes the case (not too convincingly) that the words "simple" and "simplify" are too long and complicated, and they should themselves be simplified to the word "simp", as in "We should simp this so it will be more simp." (Understandably, de Bono has his detractors when ...
Mar 26, 2018•1 hr 27 min
In the previous episode, we looked at a range of articles concerning the effectiveness of so-called "brain training" in general, with a particular focus on Lumosity, one of the big players in the market. In this episode, we home in on perhaps the most promising type of "brain training": dual n-back. Dual n-back has more evidence than most other forms of "brain training" that it can increase working memory. This is a big deal, since working memory has otherwise not been found to change due to any...
Mar 12, 2018•1 hr 34 min
Could specially designed exercises on your computer or mobile phone make you smarter? "Brain-training" is now a multi-billion pound industry, and that money comes from people hoping to get a boost in their mental faculties from spending time playing the various games in the apps in question. Do these apps work as they are supposed to? And if they are, shouldn't we have all children (and maybe adults too) make use of them? In this episode, I go through the research on this topic, with a particula...
Mar 05, 2018•1 hr 2 min
In this episode, we will look closely at Edward de Bono's idea of lateral thinking by considering two of his books, The Use of Lateral Thinking (1971) and Lateral Thinking: A Textbook of Creativity (1977). Lateral thinking is the central idea behind all of de Bono's work. It grows out of the models of mind that de Bono presented in his first book The Mechanism of Mind (1969), and was initially introduced in the second part of that book. De Bono coined the term himself, but now it is a commonly u...
Mar 03, 2018•1 hr 3 min
Although ostensibly about economics, this book is in fact about the effect of poverty of various kinds on the mind. Poverty is a shortage of resources. It could be money, time (busy people are "time-poor"), or some other resource. When people experience scarcity, their minds automatically, subconsciously devote mental resources to the issue. The results of this are two. 1. They are more rational in their approach to the use of the resource, and use it more prudently. For example, usually superma...
Feb 28, 2018•53 min
Edward de Bono's work can mostly be divided into two parts: models of how the mind works; and applications of principles extracted from those models to improve thinking, particularly creative thinking. The Mechanism of Mind is his first book, and it primarily deals with the first of these two parts. De Bono wrote The Mechanism of Mind in 1969, at a time when not much was known about the brain, nor about complex adaptive systems (the types of physical objects and situations studied by the fields ...
Feb 27, 2018•1 hr 1 min
Cal Newport is a computer scientist at Georgetown University who writes a blog called Study Hacks about effective study methods. We have covered one of his books already, So Good They Can't Ignore You , when I wanted to discuss career advice. Before writing How to Become a Straight-A Student , Newport visited a number of university campuses in the USA and looked for students who got the best grades. Curiously, he found that these usually came in two types - those who were constantly grinding awa...
Feb 01, 2018•1 hr 17 min
Edward de Bono is an expert on creativity, author of over 40 books on the subject. He invented the term "lateral thinking" in the 1960s, which is now a part of common parlance. Over his long career, he has worked with numerous large corporations such as Microsoft, Apple, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Siemens, Bose, HP, LinkedIn, and Texas Instruments, as well as schools, charities, and governments. His basic premise is that creativity can be taught by direct teaching of thinking skills and tech...
Jan 31, 2018•31 min
This is the second part of the episode about Brain-Based Learning . In the previous part, I discussed the chapters concerning relative lateralisation (left/right hemispheres), rhythms (such as circadian rhythms), gender, physical activity, stress and threat, and the senses (vision, touch, taste, smell, and sound). In this episode we look at the chapters on emotions, teacher communication, motivation, attention, teaching how to think, memory, meaning making, and enriching the brain. Enjoy the epi...
Jan 09, 2018•56 min
Eric Jensen is a former teacher with a PhD in Human Development from Fielding Graduate University. In 1981, he co-founded "the United States' first and largest brain-compatible learning program"[1], and he has been the head of Jensen Learning, a company that trains teachers what he calls "brain-friendly" or "brain-compatible" teaching and learning principles, since 1995. Brain-Based Learning is one of the first books that I read as I was getting into finding out more about education research sev...
Jan 09, 2018•1 hr 20 min
This is an episode which requires little justification for its relevance to education - the title says it all. How We Learn presents a selection of cognitive science's more recent findings, some of which are rather counterintuitive, and gives several "tips" for how one might study more effectively based on these. Topics covered include the importance of forgetting (!) for learning; the effect of context on learning, and the idea that varied context provides for better learning by enhancing the n...
Dec 22, 2017•1 hr 27 min
I've spent some time thinking about the past 50 episodes of the podcast, and I've identified a number of themes - why people do things; how people get good at things; inner states and beliefs; mathematics education; and educational myth-busting, to name a few. But I decided that this episode would be more interesting and helpful if it linked as many ideas as possible under a single umbrella. So, what's the most important idea that I talked about these past (almost) two years? To my mind, many ep...
Nov 28, 2017•1 hr 7 min
Explanations can broadly be categorised according to two adjectives: nomological and mechanistic. Mechanistic explanations are to do with cause and effect, and focus on events and causes that immediately precede the fact that we desire to explain. Nomological explanations are based on general principles. The following is the definition of the word "nomological": nomological. adj. Relating to or denoting principles that resemble laws, especially those laws of nature which are neither logically ne...
Oct 03, 2017•1 hr 13 min
Josh Waitzkin was the international under-18 chess champion at age 18, only to quit chess at age 22 and pursue Tai-chi Push Hands, the martial application of Tai Chi. He became world champion in this martial art at age 28, and won the title several more times since then. As an accomplished competitor in two fields - one mental, one mostly physical - a book written by him about how he learns is obviously going to contain some interesting ideas. The main themes of what he writes about are two: lea...
Sep 28, 2017•1 hr 38 min
This book is about shame. Shame is a taboo emotion in our culture. It is not talked about, which is part of what makes it so powerful, and part of its essence - it is an emotion of disconnection, or feeling rejected or not worthy of the group. It can affect students as well as teachers, almost always negatively. Students can experience it coming from teachers (often with good intentions), or coming from other students as a form of bullying. In an educational or work setting, shame is often used ...
Sep 27, 2017•1 hr 15 min
