I now have a new podcast, the Pedagogue-Cast! Together with Justin Matthys, co-founder of Australian education technology company Maths Pathway, we discuss how education research can be applied in the classroom. It's designed to be an easier listen for busy teachers, with a more immediate practical takeaway. Website: https://thepedagoguecast.com.au/ Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/437GYDF4jkkFxfkGR4cknc I've shared the first episode of Season 1 in this recording so you can get a sense of ...
Aug 10, 2022•43 min
In this part of the episode, I will discuss the evidence for the effectiveness of Direct Instruction, drawing from Project Follow Through, but also from 50 years of studies that have been published since. Enjoy the episode. *** REFERENCES The Direct Instruction Follow Through Model: Design and Outcomes by Siegfried Engelmann, Wesley Becker, Douglas Carnine, and Russel Gersten (1988) No Simple Answer: Critique of the "Follow Through" Evaluation by Ernest House, Gene Glass, Leslie McLean and Decke...
Aug 09, 2022•59 min
I've spent a lot of time on the podcast so far discussing discovery learning, but not had any episodes explicitly dedicated to what might be considered its antithesis, Direct Instruction. In this episode I finally get round to this worthy topic. First of all, uppercase "Direct Instruction", or DI for short, should be distinguished from lowercase "direct instruction". The latter refers to explicit teaching in general, whereas the former, as a proper noun, refers to a specific implementation and p...
Aug 08, 2022•55 min
[By the way, the cover image is of the proportion of children in different countries who have a growth mindset (darker red is more). The data was taken from PISA 2019 and I constructed the image using Python. Grey countries are those for which I didn't have data.] I was initially a huge supporter and admirer of Carol Dweck's work on fixed vs. growth mindset. The very first episode of the podcast was about her book, and I mentioned it many times afterwards, talking about how amazing it was. Then ...
Aug 01, 2022•1 hr 10 min
I stumbled across a fascinating paper looking into how children conceptualise the world around them. Mental Models of the Earth: A Study of Conceptual Change in Childhood shares an experiment where children were asked questions about the shape of the Earth, and the authors found six (!) different mental models that the children had: rectangular, disc-shaped, spherical, flattened sphere, hollow sphere, and the bizarre "dual Earth" model. There are important theoretical and pedagogical implication...
Jul 25, 2022•36 min
You can now support Education Bookcast and join the community forum, where we discuss all things education. Visit https://www.buymeacoffee.com/edubookcast to learn more.
Jul 20, 2022•7 min
This episode has such huge implications that I didn't know what to call it. Efficiency and Innovation in Transfer , the actual name of the book chapter, seemed far too dry to put across the fundamental shifts in thinking about pedagogy, assessment, education research design, and cognitive theory that this article suggests (at least to me). The authors suggest that the current literature on transfer of learning has too negative a view of the possibilty of transfer, and suffers from too many inter...
Jul 18, 2022•56 min
I wanted to talk a bit about some areas in which my thinking about education has improved with the addition of nuance, and about the ways in which thinking can be more nuanced. Desirable difficulty - a case where quantification and the awareness of countervailing forces / costs improved my initial, flawed understanding. Cognitive load theory - a case where I was so enamoured with the power of the model that I had started to equate the it with truth (or confuse the "map" with the "territory"), bu...
Jul 11, 2022•39 min
A listener of the podcast by the name of Malin Tväråna (senior lecturer at Uppsala University's Department of Education) requested in a review of the podcast that I cover this book, and so here it is! Ference Marton is a professor of Education at Göteburg University. His big idea is about discernment of important features of a situation (what he calls "critical aspects") being a (the?) key element of learning, and therefore the importance of the nature and quantity of variation in instruction. H...
Jun 27, 2022•59 min
"Are you left-brained or right-brained?" Brain lateralisation has been known about in neuroscience since the early days, but it has been a taboo over the past few decades since pop science sources distorted the literature and made the topic disreputable. Neuroscientists could detect differences between the hemispheres in different activities, but they were having trouble understanding the big picture of why there was asymmetry at this fundamental level of brain structure. Iain McGillchrist used ...
Jun 19, 2022•1 hr 11 min
Dr Rasmus Koss Hartmann is an associate professor at Copenhagen Business School and author of the article that I covered in the first part of this episode, entitled Towards an Untrepreneurial Economy: the Entrepreneurship Industry and the Veblenian Entrepreneur. In this interview we spoke about where he got the idea, the damage that Veblenian entrepreneurship can do to the economy, urban myths about entrepreneurship, potential flaws of popular mottos such as those promoted in The Lean Start-up b...
Apr 02, 2022•1 hr 34 min
Entrepreneurship is an important part of a thriving economy, and entrepreneurship education is intended to make sure that those who have the potential to succeed in this way have the resources and knowledge to do so. But the opportunity for innovation, being one's own boss, and making money are not the only reasons that people become entrepreneurs. Some do so to fulfil a kind of fantasy, or simply to look good. And there is an entire educational sub-industry offering to help them to indulge this...
Mar 09, 2022•43 min
I picked up The Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences hoping for a longer term project of enrichment from a volume published by one of the most prestigious universities in the world. However, it only took reading the introduction by editor R. Keith Sawyer to see that this book is suffused with ideological stances commonly supported and even dogmatically preached in educational circles, whose major tenets have been shown wanting time and again by empirical evidence from cognitive science - ...
Dec 13, 2021•1 hr 35 min
How the Brain Learns is one of the first books I bought about education, all the way back in summer of 2014. It sat on my shelf for seven years before I finally got round to reading it. Now, with the benefit of knowledge gained from so many years of investigation, it is much less impressive to me than it would have been when I started. After introducing some basics of brain anatomy, the author starts to describe learning, covering a lot of ground that we've already seen in this podcast in a gene...
Nov 29, 2021•1 hr 3 min
In my episode on Stuart Ritchie's Intelligence: All that Matters I spoke about IQ and intelligence, after a long silence on this issue. In Hive Mind, we get a look at how IQ affects the fate of entire nations, rather than just the individuals living in them. Jones' argument rests on data showing that IQ correlates positively with patience, win-win thinking, productivity in teams, supporting "good" policies (i.e. those endorsed by experts), and saving more money. There is also data to indicate th...
Nov 15, 2021•49 min
This is the second part of the episode on the book Multiple Faces of Attachment - Cultural Variations on a Fundamental Human Need. In this section, we will look at three societies - the Beng (Ivory Coast), Nso (Cameroon), and Makassar (Sulawesi) - to see how children are brought up there, and the extent to which Attachment Theory as it is currently formulated makes sense within these example societies. We will see the themes of the child not "belonging" to parents, alloparenting or additive pare...
Nov 02, 2021•1 hr 10 min
The title of this episode might ruffle some feathers. Attachment Theory is developmental psychology's shining star, the theory with the greatest predictive success, and one which has become popular among child psychiatrists. You can now hear it spoken about wherever child psychology is the main topic, and it has become something of a buzzword. Could this scientific theory really be "cultural ideology"? What would that even mean? Attachment Theory as Cultural Ideology is the name of an essay with...
Nov 01, 2021•59 min
Which country was the first ever to have universal, free, compulsory education? Zero points if you said "Prussia". The correct answer is the Aztec empire, almost four centuries before the oft-cited German state. I happened to find out this bizarre fact from an aside in a YouTube video, and decided to look into it. If this isn't an independent societal data point on the development of education, then I don't know what is! In this episode, I discuss the article Developing Face and Heart in the Tim...
Oct 18, 2021•53 min
I realised I missed something, and I kicked myself. For a while I've been toying with the idea that learning occurs in two stages, which can be mapped between cognitive science and neuroscience: Exposure to new material -> neuronal connections Practice and repetition -> myelination ...with elaboration (e.g. relating one piece of information to another) being a practice that involves both stages. This model appeals to me for several reasons. Firstly, it is simple, which is a relief in the c...
Oct 04, 2021•35 min
This book touched my heart, and it changed my mind about neuroscience. I wasn't going to read this book. While I was at my friend's house, I picked this book up and read the preface, written by Will Self. He wrote that Oliver Sacks is extraordinary in the way in which he fuses such humanity with his scientific probing of the brains of his patients. At that point, I got interested, and my friend told me I could borrow it. I gobbled the book up in two days. Having read the book, I can see what Wil...
Sep 20, 2021•1 hr 18 min
This episode feels almost nostalgic, as it is a return to the theme of the roles and interactions of the conscious and subconscious mind, something which I focused on early in the podcast and came out strongly in my main series on expertise (around episode 20). It also shares some relation to books on the topic of cognitive biases on the one hand, and the complexity of the world on the other. Psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer has two main points to make: firstly, that ignorance and cognitive biases o...
Sep 06, 2021•50 min
This episode concludes the series on Jin Li's fantastic book Cultural Foundations of Learning, East and West. After reviewing the key differences between the cultures of learning, we quickly look once again at the evidence for these claims. Then we will see what Chinese teachers think of American educational practices. Finally, I will add some commentary of where in my own learning I have some apparently Eastern views and practices. Enjoy the episode.
Aug 09, 2021•32 min
This is the final part of the series on Jin Li's book Cultural Foundations of Learning, East and West before the summary and conclusion. Speech is seen in the West as a distinct personal quality, a right, a leadership trait, and an art. Rhetoric was part of university curricula since the Middle Ages, and we celebrate famous orators like Cicero, Martin Luther King, and Winston Churchill. But in the East, speech is not seen so favourably. Chinese people assume that those who speak less are likely ...
Aug 08, 2021•41 min
This is a continuation of the series on Jin Li's book Cultural Foundations of Learning, East and West. In this recording, we will see how mothers interact with their children in such a way as to promote their cultural worldview, which goes a long way to explaining how the culture is perpetuated. Interestingly, it is clear from the sample interactions that the children often do not know how to respond to the parent, and so have not yet learned the cultural mindset, so we get a real sense of attit...
Aug 07, 2021•31 min
This is a continuation of the series on Jin Li's book Cultural Foundations of Learning, East and West. In this episode, we will see the emotional side of learning, with a Western focus on interest, curiosity, and enquiry juxtaposed against an Eastern focus on dedication, conviction, and commitment. This also leads to a different conceptualisation of time within the sphere of learning, which leads to concepts like success and failure make less sense in a Chinese cultural context. Since the proces...
Aug 06, 2021•1 hr 8 min
This is a continuation of the discussion of Jin Li's book Cultural Foundations of Learning, East and West. In this recording, I discuss the differences between Western learning process concepts (active learning, exploration and enquiry, critical thinking, and self-expression) and Chinese ones (sincerity, diligence, endurance of hardship, perseverance, and concentration). Enjoy the episode.
Aug 05, 2021•1 hr 11 min
This is the third in a series of recordings on Jin Li's book Cultural Foundations of Learning, East and West. In this episode we will see a range of empirical data reflecting the differences between the cultures in question, mostly from psychology, including issues of motivation, attitudes to competition, and the language which is used to describe learning. I will also discuss British and Chinese students' views of the nature of understanding, pointing out what existing cognitive science has to ...
Aug 04, 2021•1 hr 8 min
This is the second in a series of recordings on Jin Li's book Cultural Foundations of Learning, East and West. In this part, we will see how the fundamental aims of education differ among the cultures in question, and how this is grounded in philosophical traditions that go back thousands of years. At the end, we will see a startling and unexpected piece of evidence which supports the author's hypothesis. Enjoy the episode.
Aug 03, 2021•1 hr 31 min
You may have noticed that I am generally quite disappointed in professors of education. It seems that the work of cognitive scientists, (some) psychologists, anthropologists, (some) economists, historians, and even machine learning researchers and philosophers is reliable, trustworthy, and can offer a good contribution, whereas that has not been my experience with people explicitly employed by university education departments. However, Jin Li breaks that trend. And boy, how she breaks it. Cultur...
Aug 02, 2021•33 min
"It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working. And here, precisely, lies the mystery." The above text is from David Graeber's super-viral article On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs. His basic, audacious thesis is that there is a large and increasing number of "bullshit" hours worked in the economy, through a combination of some outright "bullshit jobs", and previously normal jobs that have become increasingly "bullshitised". Graeber's int...
Jul 12, 2021•1 hr 52 min
