S04E02 - David Didau on Five Things Teachers Should Stop Doing

Welcome to the Knowledge for Teachers podcast. My name is Brendan Lee, and on this podcast I speak with researchers, teachers, and experts about what evidence-informed practice is and the nuances involved with actually implementing effective and sustainable school-based education.

Before we begin, I acknowledge that I am recording this podcast on the unceded lands of the Daruk and Gondagaru people in the lower Blue Mountains, and I feel very grateful to live and work on country that holds such deep history and significance. As we connect to talk about teaching and learning today, I want to pay my respects to elders past and present. I honour the fact that teaching, learning and storytelling have taken place on this country for tens of thousands of years.

I also want to acknowledge the various traditional lands that you are all tuning in from, and I extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander colleagues and listeners joining us today.

This always was and always will be the land of our First Nations people. Before we get started, I want to quickly let you know about two online courses I'm running in twenty twenty six for teachers and school leaders who want more clarity in maths instruction.

The first is the Primary Maths Instruction Framework. This is a three-day online course for teachers where we focus on how learning happens and how to design maths lessons that support acquisition, build fluency, and help students journalize what they know. The second is implementing effective primary maths instruction. This is the two day online course for school and middle leaders.

and it is all about implementation. We look closely at curriculum and lesson design, assessment, coaching and the systems that help teachers. Change practice in a sustainable way. If you are planning your maths professional learning for next year, you can find more information about both courses at learnwithlee.net.

Today's guest is someone who had a big influence on my own journey, David Didau. David was one of the first experts I came across when I started seriously questioning what actually works in the classroom. Long before the current wave of evidence informed practice really took off, he was already sharing it.

He's the author of The Secret of Literacy What if Everything In New About Education Was Wrong? What every teacher needs to know about psychology, making kids cleverer, intelligent accountability, making meaning in English, and bringing the English curriculum to life. He has also just announced that Writing Fitness, co written with Ricky Cole, will also be released soon.

In this episode we discuss five things teachers should stop doing, and while that title sounds a bit negative, I promise you we won't stop there. We dig deep into what you should be doing instead. If you've ever had a student nail a lesson one day but completely forget it the next, This episode is going to be a bit of a light bulb moment for you.

David breaks down the massive difference between performance and learning and why sat nav teaching, where we guide students too perfectly, might actually be preventing them from learning how to navigate problems on their own. We also cover why practice doesn't make perfect, it only makes permanent, and how to use tools like mini whiteboards to ensure you aren't just getting an illusion of knowledge from your class.

David is incredibly open about his own early struggles in the classroom, which makes his advice feel genuine and earned. There is so much gold in this conversation to help set you up for a great school year. Let's dive in. Really excited to welcome today's guest to the Knowledge for Teachers podcast, David Didier. David was one of the the very first edu experts that I came across. Uh when I started seriously questioning what actually works in teaching.

long before podcasts and substacks were everywhere and and everyone's got a hot take on on this and that, David was writing very cleverly and thoughtfully about Teaching and learning and uh a a lot of the evidence that we now

know about. Uh he yeah, he was coming across quite a few years ago and he's written a number of books on all of that and he's he's on a a mission to to help uh educators and schools Make a bit of a change and it's great that he's going to be making the trip out to Australia later this year, which we'll we'll chat about later.

Today uh we're we're going to try to make it really practical and I guess there's a little little bit of a negative spin on on today's episode of five things teachers should stop doing, but I promise you we won't stop at that. We'll also go into what you should do instead as well.

Uh but David, yeah, welcome to the podcast. And and before we really get into those five things that teachers should stop doing, are you able to just share uh with listeners a bit about your yourself, a bit about your your journey into education and and what you're currently doing? Yeah. Uh well thanks for having me, Brendan. It's great to great to be here. And uh yeah, so my background is the um as an English teacher.

in England and I started teaching nineteen ninety nine. That feels like a long time ago now. And I think that I think it would be fair to characterize my first few years of teaching as being really shit. So I was I was I was not a natural. I I think it w you know

I've described in the past that I think I took to teaching like a fridge to water. Um and uh and and yeah, I was just really, really bad for some years. And And I think that's you know, I I I definitely see these days, you know, I wonder whether or not I'd have survived with the sort of impatience that there is for young teachers to hit the ground running and to be excellent immediately and

I'm I very well might not have survived that and it's it did definitely take me a long time to hit my stride and and to work out how to get children to sit down in their chairs and stop throwing things around and and listen to me. Um and uh and so eventually um I did manage to become competent. And the era, you know, the the early two thousands was an era in England where there was a lot of messaging from the school's inspectorate, Ofsted in England, which was telling teachers Things like

You shouldn't talk in lessons, shouldn't tell kids things. Uh, you should let them, you know w talk to each other and work in groups and you're there as a facilitator and ideally yeah I I remember in a training session once um so the the trainer said When children are in year seven, which is eleven year olds in the UK, uh when they're in year seven, they can you can talk for seven minutes. And when they're in year 8

You can talk for eight minutes. And it's just, you know, all of this stuff which left you sort of scratching your head a little bit, but at the same time You know, I took the view well that these people must know what they're talking about. They they can't just be making this stuff up. It must be it must be real. And and struggled to try and

teach in the way that I was expected to teach and and I've got quite good at it. And I remember um a few years later when I was I was running an English department in a school and the head teacher was conducting a review of all the different departments in the school and he came in over a week we had a We had loads of visits and and interviews in our English department and we'd we'd put on a show, you know, we'd done all of the things and and I was having my final meeting with him.

And he was in ah took some great lessons, all really, really good. And there was this I just saw in his eyes a sort of momentary flash of panic. And he said to me, I've just got one question. When do you actually teach them stuff?

And it's like, mate, when you're not here, you know, when the door's closed because, you know, this is the th you know, this was the this was the setup where you had to pretend that you weren't teaching. And so in Two thousand eleven I I started blogging and I started I started blogging really because I wanted to I wanted to write and I wanted an audience for writing and I started I started writing just mainly so I could remember the things that I was doing in my classroom because

I'd have this I don't know if you've ever had this, Brendan, you know, I'd I'd do something and I'd think, Oh, that's really, really cool and then I'd forget what it was, you know, and it it would just have gone. So I I started sort of recording things like that and then and then the early days of Twitter was just a really

a really great space to be able to share ideas and to talk to other people. And in those in those early days, in sort of two thousand eleven, two thousand and twelve, you know, it It wasn't obviously as ideologically a riven place as it is now, social media. And even people who disagreed would disagree

relatively politely and and uh and and it wasn't as personal as it was then and it was that was really great for me because I I came across people who believed things that were the opposite to what I'd been told and they challenged the the the beliefs that I had, the expectations, the assumptions that I had.

in a way which made me think, Ah, okay, well, maybe it is okay to tell people stuff. Maybe you know, maybe maybe it does matter what what knowledge we teach kids and all of this stuff and and I just have this space with w in which I could think about this. And and that um culminated in I think it was two thousand and fourteen and I wrote a

book called What If Everything You Knew About Education was Wrong? And it was really sort of documented that was about me, you know, that everything I'd thought I'd known about education had turned out to be wrong, you know, as I as I looked into the research and and and found what was actually

known, you know, the little bits that are that are out there and and started piecing that together. And that was a yeah, it was a revelation for me and a very exciting time and you know, and that's uh that's yeah, I've just carried on doing that kind of stuff. Yeah, it's uh it's interesting I guess hearing about your journey because Uh, I think, you know, here in Australia we're we're probably a few years behind a lot of the the the changes that you've seen happen.

over in the UK and and so yeah, it's it's interesting how early you did come across, um, you know, a lot of the research that we're really only coming across the last few years here.

What's like just kind of going back to a couple of things that you said early on there around your early years as a teacher, because I think it's it's also interesting that reflection that you had around, you know, if you were a beginning teacher now, whether or not you would have would have lasted and What do you at that point in time, what do you think helped you, I guess, um, you know, make that next step into being a fairly competent teacher?

So the school I was working at failed an inspection, which, you know, I wouldn't recommend but it failed an inspection after I'd been there for a year, and suddenly people s people sort of took an interest in what I was doing. So until then I've just been alone in my classroom with nobody sort of giving a damn what I was doing. And uh and I remember um a guy who worked in the school doing a training session for us as a staff body on how to use learning objectives

And I was like, Oh, I've never heard of those before. You know, all of this stuff which people take for granted, you know, things that it was a diff it was a different world back then. I remember um, a couple of years later being asked to do exam analysis on how well my students have done and me thinking, Never really thought about how they'd done before, you know, that's interesting. And all of these these

mechanisms for trying to improve teaching, trying to improve the educational experience for children that we take for granted now just didn't really exist in the same way when I when I started. And so I think I think the fact that I became less isolated. But also I think a another big thing was just You spend some time in a school and kids get to know you and and they just accept you a bit more.

'Cause I remember in my first year of teaching that one of the senior teachers in the school, the deputy heads, had said to stuff, If anyone's struggling with behaviour, let me know and I'll come and support you. And very naively I went, Yeah, I'm struggling with my with this class. Can you come and help? And he came in.

And uh, you know, the the class was mid riot and he came in and everyone sort of froze in place and uh and he told everyone off and, you know, glared at everyone. They all sat down and I gave them a bit of a lecture. Um and then he said to me, I think I know you know, he said, I'll s I you know, can I see you at break time? And uh anyway he left and then they started rioting again and um

He came to see me at break time and said, I think I know what the problem is He said, Great,'cause I don't and he said, uh yeah, I think a problem is is you're not planning your lessons well enough. And I was like I was gutted'cause you know, I remember that particular day I'd been up past midnight planning my lesson, trying to, you know, think of the ch the the chess moves that would keep them in place and keep them busy. And uh and nothing nothing I I racked my brains with words.

And to be told that I hadn't planned it well enough was was obviously really devastating. And it sort of dawned on me that he hadn't planned anything, he just pitched up. And and and the difference really really the difference between him and me was that the kids knew him and they knew there were consequences for misbehaving when he was around, and that they knew that I was a nobody and they could do whatever they wanted with no

with no consequence. And and so as it be you know, as it became clear that I was sticking around Um, they just started going, Oh, you know, might as well give them a break. And I and and that's that same school, I was I was there for five years, and by the time I left.

I was that guy. I could walk into a room, do the death stare at everyone and they'd all sit down and be quiet and and it's just You know, that was a real revelation to me that it's just time, it's just familiarity, it isn't planning, it all those things are important and help. But it's your reputation and your relationship and the and the the way children view you in a school that makes the difference, I think. I don't know if that answers your question Yeah.

I think what's interesting about that response is that often, you know, when we we had these sorts of discussions about like evidence based practice. And most of the time we'll be talking about like effective instruction, right? And and so then what what you'll start having is all these arguments about like that that they're they're strawman arguments essentially because they have nothing to do with what we're we're not talking about the same thing, right?

And what you're talking about there is actually about how That is only one part of the complex Classroom and school life that we have to deal with day to day, right? Is that effective instruction part. But there are all of these other parts to the jigsaw that also have to be put in place in order for effective instruction to happen. And and a lot of those there is evidence around like how we can do things uh more effectively. But but some of those things you're right, like Something like that.

where a school has a a pretty rough culture, sometimes you've just got to put in the L's and and the time and the effort and the energy and that's part of that relationship building, isn't it? Yeah. No, I it like I had to be a warlord in a failed state, you know, sort of holding power in my own classroom and then accepting the fact that they left and they did whatever the hell they liked elsewhere and uh I could only exert authority in that in that small space.

And I wouldn't recommend that for anyone. It's a grim reality to occupy. Um but yeah, I mean and it you know, that back in those days, um it was just You know, the the outcomes for children were a lot worse. I remember this particular school when I when I joined it, being told that the results had gone up.

to sort of twenty percent A star to C for for students, which is, you know, it's pretty low. And uh me thinking I just I'd just been training in a school where they were in like single digits and me going, Oh, that's pretty good. You know, you don't get that these days in England. So despite all of the you know, the the the the really legitimate complaints and concerns we have about what education is like here now. It isn't like that.

It isn't the Wild West in the same way. And that's gotta be, I think, on the whole, a lot better for children, even though we've got all these concerns about, you know, their well being, their mental health. their anxiety, which we didn't have, or at least I was not aware of back then. It's s something that nobody spoke about. But the fact that children now leave more equipped to Get on with adult life. It's probably yeah, it's gotta be good for them. Yeah.

All right, look, let's let's get onto the five things teachers should stop doing. All right. And so the first one is avoid mistaking performance for learning. Yeah. I mean this is a big one for me because so when I started teaching I you know, every ev the my approach to sort of planning was how do I keep kids busy, how do I how do I

Just keep them in their seats and and and keep them occupied. And and over time, as I became, you know, more effective, I'd start thinking about what I wanted them to learn. And the whole The way in which and it's and it's maybe not massively different now, but the way in which the the culture in schools operated was there was an expectation that that children in lessons would make make rapid progress and the way that you did well in an observation was to

was was to have you know, to keep teach some kids something they didn't know and then check whether or not they knew the thing that you just taught them. And if they did, you could claim oh, they've made rapid progress. And um and I got really good at that and I you know, and I I remember putting to get I put out a blog, which was called something like the anatomy of an outstanding lesson.

w in which I I described the process of teaching and planning a lesson where, you know, it all it had all gone perfectly. And and someone I'd got to know on Twitter, a woman called Christina Milosh, who I'm not in contact with these days, I don't know what's happened to her. Um but um she got in touch and said, Have you ever seen this? And she sent me a video of Robert Björk explaining the difference between learning and performance and uh it blew my mind.

I was just like, Oh my God, that changes everything. And for those that for those that don't know, that what essentially what Björk um talks about was that there's a very thin correlation between what you can do in the here and now and what you can remember elsewhere and later. And so that that by improving and maximising performance in lessons, we might

be unwittingly undermining children's ability to create more durable, flexible learning which which will have a greater impact in elsewhere and later. And all of the things that I was doing were all of the things that the body of research that he was was referring to said actually that you shouldn't do those things. You should you should look at and this is the listeners might have heard of desirable difficulties. That's that's one of Bjork's coinages.

and where all of that research led him to think about things like interleaving and spacing and and and the testing effects and all of these things which have become the coron c currency of the science of learning. And that was the that was such a wake up call for me. You know, it was it was absolutely blew my mind and it and never went back. You know, it was uh it was it was the passing through a threshold. The scales fell from my eyes.

And I just started thinking, I have to do everything differently. And and that was so and what it m what it kind of makes you realise once you've had that understanding, that moment, is that everything that we tend to do as teachers is geared towards trying to trying to create slick performances. Try so I you know, as a caricature, you know, I'd say to my classes, you know, things like, Can you remember what I've just taught you?

Oh, you can. Great learning. Great progress. You know. Or, you know, as was more often the case, can you remember what I've just told you how to do? And they'd go, No. And I'd say things like, Talk to your partner. Look in your book. It's on the board. And then they'd give me the answer that they kind of worked out that I was trying to get them to give and I'd and again, you know, I'd go great learning.

And I think one of the things that I didn't know anything about was a concept you might you know, you're probably aware of, Brendan, called the illusion of knowledge. And that that typically, you know, and this is this is endemic in schools, is that children believing that they know things that they don't actually know. So they remember that they had a lesson, you know, they remember you were there and they were there and they remember that you know, their mate was there and

They remember a bee came in the room and somebody farted and all of that stuff. That's all solid. But they can't remember what you actually taught them. And so, you know, if you say, if you say to kids, you know, and I I've I've definitely had this in the past where I've started teaching something and the kids have said, Oh, we've done this.

We've done this before, and I've gone. Okay, we'll do something else then. And actually, what happens, what I do, what I would always do now is if if kids said, We've done this, I'd go, Great, okay, tell me what it is you know and I'd and I'd tease that out and typically, you know, th they remember that they did the Tudors or they remember that they did

you know, quadratic equations, but they can't remember how to do them now. They just remember that it happened. And so So the the gearing lessons towards combating the illusion of knowledge is I think a really, really important position for teachers to take. So the we remember you know, and it's even more it's even harder for us as relative experts because we do remember what we taught, we remember the substance of it.

And one of the characteristic differences between relative experts and relative novices is that we massively overestimate what novices know. And so as teachers, I think we go from lesson to lesson, overestimating what children know. And so do children. You know, they they think, Yeah, I know that, I know that. They remember they got an answer right.

They just can't remember what the answer was. So ch you know, being g if trying to gear everything in your classroom to words challenging that status quo, challenging that false often false belief. that children remember things. Like it's great that they get the answer right, but that's very that's very inflexible and very fragile. And if we want something more durable and flexible, we have to

have that mindset the the performance in the here and now is a it's very different and a and a poor predictor of more flexible, more durable learning. Does that make sense? Yeah, definitely. My big one was uh writing something on the board and then getting them to copy that down in their books and thinking they've got they've got today's

I mean it's mad, isn't it? I mean you say it out loud and it's like obviously the fact that they've written it in a book tells you nothing about what's in their head. But that Still common practice in in England. You know, I still see loads of copying stuff down. And when I ask teachers like w wh why are you doing that? And they say things like it helps them remember it.

And and I I'll do things like in lessons where I'll sit next to a kid who's just written something down and I'll say, What did you just write down? and they go, Dunno They literally can't remember like moments later. Um, and a and definitely if you go back to something that's like from last lesson and go, Oh, you know, you've written this piece of vocabulary down last lesson, what does it mean, dunno? You know, they remember that they wrote it down. Just not what it means.

Mm. And that's endemic, I think. And it's really hard to chat. I mean, it's what's so difficult is that we live in the present. Lessons happen in in the here and now but uh but what happens in the here and now isn't what we want kids to be good at. We don't want them to be good at lessons. We want them to leave with the ability to do things in other times and spaces.

And we you know, th in the context of a lesson, I can't see whether a child will remember something tomorrow. I can't see if they'll be able to do anything anywhere else. And I think one of the You know, the things that I started talking about from that experience of first seeing the the the the the video by Bob Bjork was that learning's invisible, you know, you can infer its presence.

you know, we know we know learning does happen, but we cannot actually see it happen. And so you know, I've I've thought a lot about definitions of learning over over the years and so the the When I talk to teachers about this, the the definition of learning I tend to use is um that learning is the ability to remember knowledge and apply it in new context. And if you accept that as a definition and you know, other definitions are available, I'm not saying no

It's as simple as straightforward as that. But if you accept that um as being at least true, it means that you c well, w one of the things it means is that you can no longer say that you can see learning taking place in a classroom. 'Cause I'd used to have experiences where, you know, people would come into my lessons and say, you know, there was a boy in the corner who wasn't learning. Oh that way he didn't look like he was.

And um and and so we we tend to mistake, you know, if children are giving us the kind of the body language and the responses that we associate with learning, like nodding and and making eye contact and you know, looking engaged, then we assume that they're remembering stuff and that's often false. Yeah, I remember a remember a particular student years ago

um who I'm gonna call him Carl. Um he was he wasn't a naughty boy, but he was just he never did anything that I wanted him to do. So he like he's he viewed my lessons as an opportunity.

make sculptures out of the contents of his pencil case and he'd just, you know, stare longingly out the window and all the And um, you know, I phone his mum'cause he hadn't done his homework and she'd go, I know, I don't know what to do and like nothing I tried made any difference and eventually I decided, you know, I'm just gonna ignore him. a and work with a with a coalition of the willing. And I just sort of wrote him off, which obviously is bad. And when the the day came when, you know, they

Wh where the exam results for that class came through. And I w I got the the exam results the day before they came to pick them up and uh I was looking at how well he'd done. He'd got an A. The bastard. I couldn't believe it. Like how's that happened?

And uh you know, why why didn't she get hey, she worked really hard? How's that anyway, next day I came into school and they're all they've all come in to get their GCSE results at the end of the summer and I saw Carl, I thought, I'm gonna go and talk to him and I went over to him and I said Congratulations. Um I said, Carl, Carl, you know, how did that happen? I had no idea you were capable of getting an A and I'll never forget he looked me in the eye and said,

Oh yeah, it was all going in. And then he walked off, and that's the last I ever heard from him. And, you know, I would have bet money he wasn't learning. I would have absolutely put my life on that, but I'd have been wrong. And that's he's unusual, but I think we get it far more the other way around where we're like, oh yeah, they're they're soaking it all up, they're definitely getting it, and then there's a test, and it's like, oh my god, what happened?

I've had that that way round far more often.

So rather than judging those poor proxies for learning in the classroom, what can we be doing, both I guess, in the moment and then over time to actually assess for learning that learning is actually happening?

Yeah, I mean I think that this is this is the the important bit underneath all of this kind of science of learning stuff, you know, that the the performative nature of doing retrieval practice is just another way of doing performance, of trying to make slick performance, unless you think really, really carefully about

what though what that signal's telling you about what's been learned in the past. So deciding in advance what's really important and what we really need students to know and then committing to regularly getting them to think about that stuff and to improve their understanding of it. to move from something more flexible over time is is is a is a provides better signals.

So can they do something that you taught them how to do last week, last month? That provides better evidence that they're still gonna be able to do it next week. somewhere else than what I've taught them today. And it's just that being able to pivot between performance following instruction and performance over time. And so all we ever get to see is performance. It's not that performance is bad, you know, everything's performance, whether it's answering a question or writing an essay or

solving an equation or taking part in a production or a performance of any you know, musical performance, sports performance. It's all performance. But having that understanding the just'cause you've shown somebody how to do it and they can do it, tells you nothing about whether they can do it again later.

Think I think that's the bit that is the mindset change that we need to make as teachers and to think, Yeah, great, great, you can do it, but I'm definitely still gonna need to come back to it'cause you'll you'll you'll forget that's not gonna be very durable yet.

And so having that as you know, there's all sorts of techniques that you can build into your lesson, the most straightforward of which is to do something along the lines of retrieval practice. But it's understanding what it's for. It's not about kids getting the answer right. It's about them having to struggle and dread. in their minds to try and reestablish what the theme was. And I think that what I see here in England far too much is the a teacher's doing retrieval practice.

or something calls re that they're calling retrieval practice and they've got some questions on the board. N I'll go in and I'll you know, what will happen is that children will be copying down the questions and then waiting and I'll you know, I'll sit next to them and say, What's the answer to number one? They're going to know And uh and then the teacher tells them what the answer to number one is and then they write it down. Like no retrieval has taken place.

There's been no struggle, no dredging, and therefore the likelihood that that's led to something more flexible and more durable is really remote. Whereas Uh and and also, you know, the the other bad thing about that is it starts them off in a lesson having failed at something quite simple. So they're beginning by going, Oh, I'm just really rubbish at this. So instead I'd encourage a teacher to to firstly

Yeah, try and make sure if you're gonna do this kind of thing, make sure everyone's successful. And that and that kind of is about performance, but it's performance for a different reason. It's performance to get the right mindset in students to to change their self belief. about their efficacy in the subject. So I would always commit to a hundred percent of students are going to get a hundred percent.

And I you know, my job is to make sure that happens. So they're writing down, you know, the I've put the questions up on the board and I'm getting them to use mini whiteboards and I'm and I'm

circulating the room and I'm seeing, okay, there's a bunch of kids who can't answer question one. So I go back to question one and uh and I start adding letters to you know so that they're playing like a really rubbish game as hangman where they're not guessing I'm putting Until even if there's only one letter left and they're able to retrieve what that is and work out what that is, some retrieval is taking place.

There's some benefit to that, which is completely undercut cut the moment to tell them. Now obviously if they've had that much help and support, it's really fragile. So I would log that and go, okay, I'm gonna be asking that really regularly'cause that You know, they don't know it. And and over time I'm expecting that to get quicker and quicker and quicker and quicker.

And that m has two benefits. You know, that one, they're starting lessons feeling really, you know, much more confident, much more, yeah, you know, I can do this stuff and I can do it really quickly and I can do it effortlessly. But also It's starting with you know, providing a much stronger signal to me, Yeah, they're getting this stuff. They and then and then I can h then use that stuff in the lesson.

to explore how the concepts that I'm getting them to retrieve can be applied meaningfully in a range of i of different examples and and and and context. I don't know if that would make sense. Yeah, look at that. One of the things I do, Brendan. Sorry, go on. One of the things that I do I've taken to doing these days, you know, from someone who was like a hopeless teacher at the beginning, my bread and butter is I when I go into schools, I teach model lessons.

So in a traditional sort of inset day, I just did one of these yesterday. Like the staff will be there and we'll make a little fake classroom desks and kids will come in and I'll teach them and I'll you know, so that I can demonstrate the things that we're talking about now and then the kids leave and then we debrief with the staff about what what they saw and w what they felt about what I was doing. And one of the things that

you know, really has become, you know, really standard. Uh that two things really that that um are really, really consistent in that process is one, teacher saying Oh I didn't realise it was as basic as that. I didn't realise that when you're saying all of this stuff that it wasn't some kind of weird lap coated oddness that you're talking about. Yeah, the minute you say science of learning or something like that, people assume that something bizarre going on. and it's just human interaction.

And the other thing they say is, I didn't realise how warm it would be, I didn't realise like how much kids would enjoy it. You know, I thought they'd like they'd feel kind of really threatened and and unhappy about being taught in this kind of way. And the surprise being like how much they enjoy knowing stuff and getting stuff right and and being successful and that being cumulative.

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And if you're part of a larger organization and interested in sponsoring the show, feel free to reach out at Brendan at LearnWithLee.net. Thanks so much. And now let's get back to the episode. Yeah, one of the things that we are finding here in Australia is that a lot of teachers and schools are starting to learn about retrieval practice and and so they're implementing it or they think they're implementing it.

But they're doing retrieval practice without actually understanding the key principle of we're trying to get the students to experience desirable difficulties.

Do you just wanna yeah, talk about how you've seen both schools and and individual teachers actually implement this effectively on a a day-to-day basis so they're able to not just implement uh activities that they're doing but ensure that they're able to keep track of how hard students are thinking while they're doing this retrieval practice.

Yeah, okay. So I think it's it's routine now in England that schools say Rydyn ni'n gwneud rhywbeth, rydych chi'n gwneud rhywbeth, rydych chi'n gwneud rhywbeth, rydych chi'n gwneud rhywbeth, rydych chi'n gwneud rhywbeth, rydych chi'n gwneud rhywbeth, rydych chi'n gwneud rhywbeth, rydych chi'n gwneud rhywbeth, rydych chi'n gwneud rhywbeth, rydych chi'n gwneud rhywbeth.

They're doing something that has a superficial resemblance to retrieval practice, but they're not actually exactly as you're doing, they're not harnessing the idea of a desirable difference. And, you know, the the typical thing is that uh there'll be th this process where a teacher has questions on the board and kids copy the questions down, then they wait for the teacher to tell them the answer, and then they copy down the answer and then no retrieval.

In some cases, when I talk to school leaders about that this is what's happening in their in their school and they go, Well, you know, it's an effective settler, it's sort of it's a it's a familiar routine to a lesson and by that token maybe it's kind of okay. And, you know, fair enough, maybe maybe that is okay if that's all you want, but it doesn't take much to make it something much, much more effective. And

The I think there are there are three main things that you have to think about with the type of stuff that you're getting children to recall. So firstly, like the biggest error I think is that teachers ask questions that are too hard. You know, and I'm looking at the question thinking, bloody hell, I don't know the answer to that. You know, it's really kind of vague or you know, it's just it's just something and so kids look at these questions that are too hard and just go, Dunno and and and

you know, like it's too much effort even to think about it. So they just they don't bother even thinking about it. They just it's sort of they they just bounce off it. Um so always ask questions that you think children can answer. And the reason they can answer it is because you've already taught the answer. So if you're asking a question to which you haven't already taught the answer, you're all you're immediately doing it wrong.

So that that would be the first thing, a as things that you you expect a hundred percent success rate on. And then and then when children aren't a hundred percent successful or when they struggle a bit, you'll you can then go, Oh, okay, so they don't know it as fluently as I thought they did, I need to recalibrate what I'm doing. That's the point. You know, the the error signal.

that we get as teachers. I think sometimes teachers think if kids can't do something and they visibly struggle, that's an indictment of my teaching. Whereas in fact it's the only way we get more effective in teaching to find out what kids can't do and then fill the gap.

Yeah, that's the so removing the possibility of an accurate signal as a teacher is like the worst thing you can do. You really want to find out if kids can't do something you think is important. So that's something they should be able to answer and if they can't you've got a piece of knowledge. The second thing is is that I routinely again see teachers asking questions that they don't care about the answer. So it's trivial. I'll say to them, why are you asking them that? Who cares?

And they're going to know. I just thought, okay. And uh they haven't really thought about it. And so yeah, even if kids could answer it, it wouldn't make any difference. You know, like in English lessons it will be something like, you know, what date

was Macbeth written. Who cares? You know, how's that gonna help them think about anything in there? You know, that d it's it's trivia. It's nice to know, but it certainly isn't important. So trying to remove that nice to know stuff from the retrieval

And then the other thing the other massive mistake is that teachers do ask the question which is meaningful and they do ask a question where they've really tried to calibrate it so that children are gonna get it right and then they never ask it again. Yeah, it's like a once and done thing and you need to commit to asking the same questions over and over and over and over and over again. Because it isn't what they can do now, it's what they can do tomorrow that counts.

So the more familiar the students get with their ability to retrieve and piece together and form connections in their in their memories, the the better for the future. And I think that those those three things are what we need to do to make something like retrieval practice really effective. Is it Is it something that children are going to get right because I've taught them? Is it something meaningful that matters? And is it something repeated that I'm going to ask again and again and again?

And even if they all get it right, I'm still if it's important, I'm gonna ask it again, but I'm probably not gonna ask it as soon or as maybe as often as something they're getting wrong. Which is potentially a bit more urgent to to weave into the the the repetition.

And there's some good ap apps for that. There's there's uh there's a company uh headed by Adam Boxer here in the UK called Carousel Learning, which does a really good job of making it easier for teachers to get these things right. So I'm not on commission but um I'd really recommend that for anyone that's interested in trying to do something like retrieval better.

Yeah, some great tips there. And uh look, uh we could we could talk about this this stuff all day, but let's get on to the second point. So your second one of of things that teachers should stop doing is don't confuse compliance for understanding.

Yeah. I mean, we've already talked about this a little bit, that the I think that it's and you m you use the phrase, Brendan, poor proxies for learning. still a very prevalent thing if you walk into a classroom and everyone's sitting down, writing, working hard, looking attentive, that we just automatically make the the the assumption that they understand what's going on.

And I think that that it's much, much easier for schools to create a culture of attention than it is to create a culture of understanding. So And although it's easy easier to create a culture of attention, it's still hard. It still takes quite a bit of effort from from school leaders and from teachers to kind of to make sure that they're doing the things that ensure that children are m more likely to be attending than not.

Once they're paying attention, once they're kinda listening to each other and you the next and the harder thing to do is like do they m what's the sense they're making from this? What kind of understanding are they getting at? And and I find this very often that when I'm visiting someone else's lesson and um, you know, th there's been an interaction happened like a teacher's asked the question and the student's given the answer. And I'll say to a student I'm sitting next to

What did that mean that they'd just said? And what happens as uh for us as teachers is that the the fact that somebody a answered the question correctly is is often understood as a signal that everybody shares that understanding. Everyone's heard the answer.

even if they weren't sure before the answer was given, they now get it. And that's an erroneous assumption. That is, I would say, you know, very unlikely ever to be true. And so you've got to have some kind of mechanism where you in every lesson you're you're trying to find out how can I how can I make sure that all of the students understand all of the stuff that's being taught and what am I going to do

when I inevitably find out that some of them don't. So when I was saying before about, you know, that one of the the major the major the the the mo the most important ways of framing what you're doing in a lesson is to tr is to try and get good error signals. You know, that it's really, really important for me to find out when kids don't understand. That's an error signal that I really want because then I can do something about it. If I don't know, I'm I'm lost.

So one of the things that I can do is to have much better sampling. So that one of the and and this is this is matters I think because in the UK context, when I asked school leaders in the school, as I visit a school and I say, How does questioning work? and they go, Well, we have a no hands up policy. We've trained teachers to to to to pause between asking questions and

um waiting for answers. We've trained them to put the student's name at the end of the question rather than the beginning. So they know all of this stuff and uh and I say to them, how confident are you that that's happening in every lesson? They get very confident And then we go into lessons and it's not happening anywhere. It might be that teachers know these things, but they're not doing it.

And they maybe they're not doing it because they don't understand the importance. Maybe they're not doing it because it's not ha you know, or or maybe they just didn't they weren't listening. Yeah, who knows?

But it's not happening. I find that such a familiar outcome. So we've got it's routine where you know where where I see lessons where you know everyone the kids are doing superficially the right things. They're sitting down, they're being compliant, they're they're they're not causing any problems. But they're not. It's it's clear to me when I speak to them that they don't understand a great deal of what's happening in the letter.

So so one of the ways out of that is to make mini whiteboard use a very, you know, a common thing. And and so every time I ask a question, getting everybody to answer it. um helps because then you don't just see the person that's put their hand up, you can see what everyone's thinking and and then choose how you're going to respond to that. But also it's trying to build in opportunities to get ch you know, to get children to

to share their understanding. So one of the things that's very prevalent in England at the moment is that we're we're very excited and keen on auracy. And there's lots of auracy happening in lessons in schools. But very often it's to no effect. You know, like I'll go into a class and the kids did some talking and I'll say to the teacher, Why did you get the kids to talk then? and they'll go

dunno, I'll just have to do some all russy. So we did it then. And and and so instead of that which, you know, I I kind of I I get it, but instead of that thinking, okay, I'm gonna harness it to trying to generate opportunities for children to share their understanding and for me to lean into that and and pick up some error signals. So if I have you know, here's a question. I'm going to, in a moment, ask everybody to give an answer to this question.

So at the moment what I'm gonna get you to do is drop down on your mini whiteboard some initial thoughts on how you might answer the question and and then I'll circulate and I'll be looking and I'll be like, Brendan, that doesn't make any sense. Don't do that. Yeah. What about this? And and I'm having those interactions we've got. Brilliant, that's a really good idea. I really hope that you share that in a moment. All that kind of stuff.

And then I'll say to them, right, okay, what I want you to do now is I want you to explain to the person sitting next to you, to your partner, what you've written down, what you think the answer to the question might be. Here here it is again, here's the question. And and I'll give them a an opportunity to share their understanding with each other. And I think that the benefit of doing that at that point is they all get a chance to speak.

You know, the process of trying to articulate what's internal to make it external means that you get your thoughts in order, that there's There's a body of research which suggests that saying something out loud makes it more cognitively sticky. So it's m they're more likely to remember something they've said rather than something they've heard. And I get a chance to listen in. Obviously that's fairly weak because there's

thirty kids all talking at the same time and I can only get snapshots of what's going on. But if anything's veered too badly wrong, I'll pick that up. And then after that I can then say, Right, okay, now I'm going to now I'm gonna ask a question where I'm pausing and putting the name at the end of the question.

And I can be really confident that everybody should be able to give an answer. Nobody should be saying, I don't know, because we've really warmed it up. We're no longer cold calling, we're doing boiling hot calling. Because everyone everyone has had the opportunity to think

and and ex and and express their thoughts to s to at least one other audience member and uh and then you know then if I get somebody, you know, here's the question, what's the answer? And they say something weird Okay, now I can you know, now we I need to drill into what's happened and what's gone wrong, but we massively increase the likelihood that one, everybody understands what's being what's happening, and secondly, if they don't, I'm aware of it.

And that's the key bit, me being aware of it. Sorry. Yeah, look, I was just gonna say look thanks for walking us through that process because again here in Australia, um, I think a lot of schools, especially primary schools, are starting to make

mini whiteboards a regular part of their practice. But we probably haven't seen the same shift happen in the secondary space. And I know that, you know, your background is is in that space as a English teacher. And so to hear you talk about, you know, how you've used these different ways of of modes of checking for understanding and how they can all link together and work in unison, I think can be quite useful for for listeners.

Yeah, I think it's I mean so I m my my default position now is when I visit lessons is all I almost always say in lessons that where many whiteboards weren't used It would have it y you'd have you'd have taught much more effectively how do you use many whiteboards. There's so many there'd have been so many fewer missed opportunities.

And that's not a hundred percent true. There are some lessons where I think mini white was might not have been appropriate here, but almost always they are, and almost always they'll enhance what's happening. But not if they use badly, you know, anyone can do anything badly. And so, you know, and I I think chuck teachers have quite legitimate concerns, you know, like what if people draw

you know, like a cock and balls on the mini whiteboard, what do I do then? And it's like, well, you know, yeah, you don't want that happening, but I'd rather they did that on a mini whiteboard rather than in the back of their exercise book where I can't see it. You know, at least I know if they're doing that. And and I need to create a culture where that's not okay, you know. So

So it's important to get through that kind of stuff. And they're a faff as well. Like how do you how do you distribute them? What's your plan for getting them out of the cupboard and in into students' hands? And that's not straightforward. You've got to have a strategy for that kind of thing if they're going to be an effective part of your lesson toolkit. So all of that stuff, I really get why there's barriers to effective use. I think that's a good thing.

The question I would ask to to teachers is that if unless you've got a better mechanism for trying to work out whether all children are attending, all children are understanding. Unless you've got a more effective way of doing that than mini whiteboards, use many whiteboards because it will allow you to get information about that stuff that you wouldn't be able to get easily any other way.

Yeah, I completely agree. I couldn't be a a bigger advocate for uh for mini whiteboards and I yeah, I was working with the school start a mini whiteboard company. Yeah, I was working with a school last year and and yeah, there was some a secondary teacher. There was I think it was a year n year nine or year ten English teacher and he was quite reluctant.

to yeah, to to use mini wipers with this class. Hadn't really done it at all. And we had this cool session where I I delivered some PL, then they went and um had a go at at um implementing it in their classroom and then we we um met up again after they had done that and and had a bit of a reflection session together and he got the best piece of feedback from one of his students.

who actually said to him, you know, oh, you know, thank you for um using the mini whiteboards today because what it allowed me to do, like'cause usually she said, I feel reluctant to ask questions. Ah. And and so he yeah, he received this feedback that I actually didn't have to ask questions today because you already knew what I knew and didn't know.

And so yeah, I didn't and yeah, he so he completely shifted in that one session just around how effective Minnie Whitewoods can be. And and I hadn't really thought about it in that sense before. Maybe from a a shi yeah, from a student perspective of how yeah, it it also I guess means that they don't stressful and And this actually links up quite well to the next point, which is actually on

Um, so number three, yeah, don't allow students not to answer questions. Yeah. So, you know, do you wanna elaborate on that one? Yeah, I so I I haven't phrased that really very well. I couldn't really get closer to what I was want what was in my mind. But basically Speaking in lessons is really highly correlated with being successful, you know, and and learning more.

So essentially the children that speak most, that ask the most questions, that answer the most questions, are likely to be the ones that learn the most in your in your class. And so those children who who their their aim in life is to avoid being noticed. that if we allow that to happen, we're allowing them to learn less, which is not fair. And

I don't know if this is the same in Australia, but at the moment in the UK, we've got a bit of an epidemic of parents writing into schools and saying, Please don't ask my child any questions'cause it makes them anxious. Um, you know and schools being really sort of hamstrung, you know, because they're kind of agreeing with families that, you know, that

we're so keen to you know for your child to be physically in school that we're not we're gonna we're we're gonna we're gonna allow them not to learn anything in lessons. And obviously they don't phrase it that way. But that's tends to be the reality of what happens and you know, the the and I'm not for a minute suggesting that the level of anxiety that children feel in schools isn't isn't something that we should take seriously.

But if we allow our concern for their anxiety to trump the core business of getting them to learn more, then I think we're in a very difficult position. And I think I'd much rather try and tackle anxiety at asking and answering questions through classroom culture, school culture, rather than just letting them opt out. Um so

Why why do they feel anxious? Normally they feel I think they feel anxious because they're maybe like that student you were just describing, they feel maybe a bit silly about getting things wrong or or demonstrating to the rest of the class that they don't get something that they think everyone else gets.

And that can be quite exposing and they'd much rather just, you know they'd much rather just copy stuff down off the board and and there seems to be in a lot of schools that I work with there seems to be like a tacit agreement where the children have said, I will I will behave well, I will be nice and quiet and compliant in your lesson as long as you leave me alone.

And and the teachers kind of tacitly go along with that. They there's there's various children who are kind of out of bounds that, you know, okay, I d don't ask them a question. And I've had that when I've gone into work with schools and I'm and I'm I'm teaching lessons and they go, Oh, don't ask him a question because, you know

We're not allowed. And I'll say, Can I give it a go? Can I see how it works? You know, I'm gonna I'm gonna ask them a question. But I'm gonna I'm gonna try and you know, I'm not gonna I'm not gonna like make them feel ill. I'm gonna try and do it in a way which makes them feel good about themselves.

So in the way that you just described and I've never actually thought it through in the way that you just expressed it, Brendan. But I think using mini whiteboards is a great gateway to that, because I'm asking a question.

when children are answering, even if they haven't articulated the answer out loud. But I still think it's really important that that we get used to hearing our voice, using our voice in lessons, hi having our voice being heard. One of the things that I routinely say to teachers is that we should commit every lesson that every single child in the classroom

speaks at least once. At least once. Probably mu uh ideally multiple times. So one of the things that I I do'cause I normally I'm teaching kids that I don't know, um, that I've not met before. So one of the things that I do when I when I um

start a lesson is I'll just quickly map out the classroom and I'll put you know I'll I'll draw in the desks and write down the kid you know, I'll say to the each of the kids what's your name, what do you want me to call you and and I'll and I'll create a little really rough seating plan. And um and then I'll I'll use that, I'll put that on a clipboard and th and I'll tick off.

on there, you know, who's answered the question, who said I don't know, and I have a different symbols for that. So ensure that I'm not relying on my fragile memory that that I've got this I'm outsourcing it to I call it a messy Mark book on my on my clipboard and and then I've got much It's much easier for me to keep the promise.

that every student needs to speak and that if I've said I'll come back to you about something, that I keep that promise and I do come back to you because I've made a little note on my on my seating plan to do that. And so I think that's a really useful, simple tool that every teacher can use. to ensure that nobody gets through a lesson without having to speak. But what you absolutely don't want, and and I see this more times than I'm comfortable with.

is where a teacher is rightly, you know, they're committed to teachers to student speaking and then they f get themselves into confrontations. And and so the typical s the typical student snooker move is just to go and and and I've seen teachers going, Yes you do

Yeah, you do know, I I know you know. Come on, just and and and sort of browbeating the kid. And I know they're doing it'cause they're frustrated and and that they're doing it because they believe that the child you know, but it's never going to end well. It's never going to end well. So I think the way that you build the culture of participation there is when a child says to me, I don't know, maybe it's genuine.

And I don't want to get into an argument with them about whether or not they do or don't know. So I'd simply say Okay. I want you to listen really, really carefully. I'm gonna ask a couple of other people and I'm gonna be coming back to you and I'm and I'm gonna be asking the same question again in a moment and you can either repeat what someone else has said or you can say what you think. But

Well I'm gonna come back to you. So don't worry, it's fine not to know at the moment, but I will check in with you in a minute. And then I'll ask a couple of other people what's the answer to this? They'll give their answer and then I'll come back to the the f the first person and and I'll ask them what's the answer and then they Then they can answer it. There's no humiliation involved. It's a very and this in and I'll and I'll make them feel good about having done that. Brilliant, well done.

Because I'm noting this stuff down on my piece of paper, my little seating plan, I can I can ensure that that happens. And I can also sort of annotate it to say, make sure that I find a low tariff way of coming back to that student later into the lesson and making them feel successful in other ways and

And it's all about creating this culture where people feel good about speaking. That there's no confrontation, there's no there's no feeling of sh of guilt or shame for not being able to do something. And it's making success feel Like the starting points and that nobody should have to struggle before they've experienced success.

Does that make sense? What about for the classes uh yeah, what about for the classes where the psychological safety isn't there and it's due to the social norms, you know, obvious Yeah, where where the kids just don't feel safe to make a mistake because they're gonna get'cause they think other kids will take the Mickey out of them or Yeah, I mean, so, I mean, so, I...

It's easy to say, but I wouldn't let that happen. So so I make it really, really clear to students in l in in classrooms that we're respectful of each other and uh That's the thing I'm gonna come down on harder than anything else. And I'll be more intolerant of that than anything else. And if I think that those sorts of things are happening. But I but I don't just say it, I kinda role play it through. So, you know, I'll say, Okay, so in a in in a moment I'm gonna be asking this question

And and I'm gonna be calling on people to answer the question. You might not feel confident answering it. And some of you might feel super confident and Uh, you know, and wanna put your hand up and answer it. But I'm not interested in that. I wanna find out whether everybody knows. So let's imagine, you know, so I I might I might um I might take some of the really confident kids in the classroom and go, Okay, so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna answer the question

and you're gonna get it wrong and then we're gonna and then and then like your partner that you're sitting next to is gonna go is gonna jeer at you. So we're kinda we'll role play that out and I'll you know, and I'll say how did that make you feel you know and

And and we'll go, okay, that's n that's not gonna happen. Okay, we're in the moment we're gonna do it for real. And if anything like that happens, you know, we all know what I mean now, it's very, very clear, if anything like that happens, there will be serious consequences.

You know, if kids are reading aloud and somebody else wants to correct them or or or make them feel bad about the way they pronounce the work, again I'll role play that in advance to make sure everybody knows what I'm talking about and everyone knows it must not happen. And I think so you don't leave that sort of thing to chance, you know, if you've got that kind of

if you if you walk into that kind of culture. So it's easy to say that and then it's so much easier if you're doing that in a school which is going to back you than if you're in a school which isn't going to back you. So and I've I've worked in both and if you're like if I go back to what I was saying earlier about having to be a warlord in a failed state, you know, there are times when I have to do all the heavy lifting myself'cause I know no one's gonna support

And that's really tough. And that's but unless I do that, I haven't as you put it, Brendan, I haven't created a space with the psychological safety needed for teaching and learning to proceed effectively. And so it's worth committing to that. And I think a bit of a bit of upfront discomfort and pain at the beginning of a of a a sequence of lessons with a group of

children is much more preferable than allowing that culture to persist long term. So committing to, you know, t talking to their parents and and putting consequences in place and and just absolutely making sure the and also making sure, you know, that if someone has stepped out of line and behaved in that way

That they know part of the deal is no one's gonna take the Mickey out of you either. You know, you're safe too. And one of the reasons I don't want you to behave like that is because I want you to feel good about it. Learning not just the other kids, you as well. And very often kids are doing that kind of thing because they don't feel safe. So it's a kind of two way sort of relationship I don't know if that helps.

Yeah, definitely. And and it's really timely advice for teachers here in Australia because we're about to start a new school year and and so it's a great time to really kick off with setting your expectations yeah and teaching them and and being really clear with that through doing exactly what you're you're describing there. Look our our next point

to look at is don't let students practice making mistakes. Yeah, I love this one. Um so uh yeah. So My mum used to say to me as a youngster, like when I w she wanted me to do things like learn the piano, she'd say, David, practice makes perfect and it's not true. And you probably know this. Um but practice doesn't make perfect, it makes permanent. What you practice you get good at and if you practice doing something badly

you get good at doing it badly. And I remember like this came clear to me some years ago when um I was working with a tennis coach and I was trying to improve my tennis game. And the very first session, the guy who was coaching me said, Are you holding the racket run? And uh and I'd spent twenty years holding the racket wrong and I was really good at holding it badly. And when he made me change my grip, you know, my tennis game collapsed. I was hopeless. And it took me weeks.

to get back to the point at which I could hold the racket like effectively and sort of return a return a serve or whatever it was. And um that experience really made me think about the fact that in classrooms it seems endemic. that children are allowed to practice making mistakes.

And and I'll give you an example of that. So one of the things that I think's really routine is something I've come to call the capital letter problem. Especially in secondary school, you almost never meet a child that doesn't conceptually understand the idea of a capital letter. It's not a knowledge problem. Like the you know, if you ask them to do an exercise putting capital letters in the right place, they could absolutely do it. But then they ha they give you

a piece of writing and there are no capital letters in it. And you'll they'll say things like, Oh yeah, it's just the way I write. And uh it used to frustrate me and I'd think, Oh, why are they so lazy? They're not lazy. They're they're no lazier than me.

I've practiced using capital letters correctly. So for me it's effortless, you know, that if you made me I can I can write my name entirely in lowercase, but I'd have to concentrate because it wouldn't be Rydyn ni'n gwneud hynny'n gwneud hynny'n gwneud hynny'n gwneud hynny'n gwneud hynny'n gwneud hynny'n gwneud hynny'n gwneud hynny'n gwneud.

that if they're gonna use capital letters correctly they have to concentrate. So it's more effortful. And so when they say things like it's just the way I write, that it's it's it's true. And they've become superb at not using capital letters. And if I wanna change that.

Then I need to change the conditions of practice. It's a practice problem, not a knowledge problem. So there's no point me teaching them how to use capital letters. They already know that. That's just a waste of everyone's time. I need to say to them something along the lines of

I'm gonna give you some I'm gonna remind you first off, you know, like w one of the important criteria for success is that you correctly use capital letters. I'm gonna continue mentioning that all the way through the activity that we're doing. before I take you working, I'm gonna give you a couple of minutes to check that you haven't made any mistakes.

And you haven't li left out any capital letters. And then what once you've handed your work in, you are saying to me there are no missing capital letters. And if I find that's not the case, I'll make you rewrite the work with all the correct capital letters in place. So that there's a consequence to practising badly. Which sounds a bit mean, but I think it's far kinder to do that than to allow children to get better at being worse at some

So capital letters, potentially, you might think that's relatively trivial. But I think this is true pretty much for everything that that children do. And I think that over the years I think writing, you know, for those subjects that rely on extended writing to assess children's understanding of the subject, I think are particularly prone to this, that

that there's a there's a naive belief that children need to do more and more writing and we get them to do more and more extended writing and they just spend lesson after lesson after lesson writing rubbish, creating rubbish writing So it should be no surprise that what they get good at is being bad at writing.

Because that's what they're practising. And if we turn that around and said, I'm gonna refuse to allow children any opportunity to get better at being worse at something, that could change everything. So the question would sh would be: how do you do that? And I think there are a couple of strategies that I think help. So one is

Do less for longer. So whatever your subject is, whatever it is that you're teaching, get children to allow them time and space to master the atomized section. So within writing, that would be the sentence. So we're gonna practice writing particular sentences over and over again to the point of automaticity, to the point where it's effortless. So

when it comes to practice, that th three three broad rules. One, don't let children practice making mistakes. Do lots of practice at smaller things and get those right before you move on to bigger things. And then over practising. You know, there's a large body of research into a concept called overlearning where you don't you don't learn something to the point that people know it, you learn it to the point where they can't possibly forget.

And the same's true with practice. Don't practice until you can do something. Practice until it's impossible not to do it, that it's automatic. And uh we we rarely do that in school. Yeah, we d n we w there's a lot of pressure to move on and often we move on before lots of kids had gotten it.

and and it's and it's and it's fragile. And were we able to give more time, were we able to sort of roll back on the extended answer and think that's much less important than that they have mastered the components of the extended answer. And that we've done those to the point of auto automaticity. And then when it comes to later on in schooling, then it comes to okay, now we need create extended answers. We've got really, really solid command of the of the the components that make that part

Mm. And and really what you're talking about is linking quite strongly with your first point, just around when when teachers don't actually understand how learning happens. Yeah. That they're you know, they're feeling that pressure of the curriculum, we've got to get through things. And so they just keep moving on less and less in the lesson.

But they're not actually allowing students both that retrieval practice but then also that that kind of fluency practice that you're talking about as well. Particularly, yeah, for those foundational skills. Instead what we're doing is we're just moving them through the curriculum uh without actually mastering anything. And so then they're doing exactly what you're saying not to do is is they're practicing those mistakes and that's what becomes alert behaviour.

Yeah, absolutely. I think that that it's a useful lens to sort of view what you're teaching is is is is it a knowledge problem or is it a practice problem? You know, so if uh if kids can't remember what the square of the hypotenuse is, that's a knowledge problem. But if the if they can't remember, you know, how to add together the sides of a triangle That's a practice problem, pretend.

you know, that that's something they just need to do more and more of. And they need to do it correctly, they need to practice without making mistakes. So sort of dividing things into those two rough categories. I think is a really helpful tool as to what should I as a teacher do next,'cause uh there's no point If you misdiagnose or if you haven't thought about it at all, you end up giving the wrong prescription and nobody makes any progress.

Hm. All right, last point. Stop making students struggle before they've experienced success. Yeah, and I've already alluded to this. I think, you know, success is the foundation upon which everything else is built. And there's kind of a I don't know if this is true in Australia, Brendan, but there's a vogue in lots of you know, lots of schools that I visit that it's kind of good for kids to fail.

that they become more resilient if they fail at stuff and you know, we need to deliberately create opportunities for them to fail. And that is only true for children that have a strong foundation of success. If you've never succeeded and then you failed again, all you learn is that you're it can just confirms your sense that you're rubbish at the thing that you're trying to get better at.

And so unsurprisingly, children that have never experienced success, they just uh they just detach and they just disengage. They just decide, you know, school's not for me. I hate English, I hate math. hate school, hate you, you know, and they're not playing the academic game, they're gonna play a different game and that makes complete logical sense.

So the most important thing and especially as you say at the start of a new academic year, a really good time to make this resolution is the ensure every single child experiences success, every single lesson. And if they don't, then the risks are enormous. You know, that why why would they continue persisting in your lesson if they don't feel that they can be successful in it? So

I think of this as as satnav teaching. You know, the satnav is the perfect assessment for learning machine. It knows exactly where you are in your learning journey. you tell it your learning goal And it gives you step by step feedback on your progress until you you reach your goal. When teachings like that, you know, w where the the level of support and structure is such that it's kind of impossible for students not to reach the learning goal.

they're not learning very much in about how to do the thing independently. Well what they are learning is that success is possible, even though you've really helped them and supported them. And that foundation of success is absolutely essential if you're then going to g ask them to do something more difficult and struggle later on.

So satnav teaching needs to really has an important place, but then you need to stop doing it. So when support instruction is too readily available, we're not motivated to to learn things. So following the analogy of Satnav teaching, I then moved to map reading.

you know, the maps are much more effortful to use. I'm really rubbish at map really. I'm a sort of person that has to sort of rotate a map to kind of make it fit with what I can see in front of me. So I avoid using it wherever I can because uh You know, I and and so I commit deliberately to thinking about landmarks and thinking about oh what did I do last time? And so in the classroom

moving to map reading kind of instruction is saying to kids things exactly like that. Things like, Okay, last time I told you the answer, this time, what did I tell you last time? What was what try and get them to recall the solutions or or giving them options like you could do this or you could do that, which one's likely to be most effective. And That's more annoying. That's that takes more effort. And so then they're more incentivized to try and remember

remember what's going on. You know, that one of the really counterintuitive things that the that underlies underlies teaching and learning is that it's really possible to be successful at something and to perform a task successfully and remember nothing about how to do it later. And that's deeply, deeply counterintuitive and it often kind of upsets teachers when I tell them this. But the the example I always give is the clock in my car. Twice a year it's wrong the wrong time.

And all the other clocks in my life are really in really straightforward, like my you know, phone just resets itself correctly. But a clock in my car I have to reset it manually. And it's been designed by an idiot, it's really difficult I can never remember how to do it. And so every every six months I have to break out the manual and look up how to reset the clock with the s and I successfully solved the problem of the the time in my car.

But I with the certain knowledge that I'm not gonna remember it again in six months' time. And lessons are a bit like that, you know, where children routinely uh successfully solving problems in lessons but not remembering how to do it elsewhere and later. And because we've got a limited amount of bandwidth, we can either

design lessons where children are s successfully solving problems or we can design lessons where they're motivated to remember how to solve them in the future. But if we're giving children complex problems, it's unlikely they'll be able to do both at the same time. 'cause they interfere with each other. So if we if we go back to that first point about prioritising learning over over performance, then it's much better, I think, generally speaking,

to rather than having children perform slickly in the here and now and be successful and generate that illusion of knowledge that instead we're sticking with the struggle. And that's only possible though with that foundation of success. So if I'm asking somebody to stick with struggle and they've not experienced what it feels like to be successful, you know, what firstly, crucially, they don't have that mental model of what success looks like. They can't visualize what it would be.

to be successful. So I've given it to them. Like it looks like this. I've walked you through it step by step. That's that's what we're aiming for. You've got that in your head now. You can't remember how to get there, but at least you know what it looks like and feels like.

And now I'm gonna take away the support that I gave you bit by bit by bit until you can be independent, until you can do it without my help. And so the kind of messaging that I would give to students is You can have the support and the structure for as long as you need 'Cause I don't want you ever you know, if you're struggling too much, you could have it.

'Cause I don't want you I don't want you to give to give up and to believe you can't do something. But you can't really do it until you can do it without the support and structure. So I'm there for you all the way through, but we're moving towards not needing it. And so You know, like little things like if you I often say in classrooms teachers put supporting material on the classroom wall.

And uh and I would you know, the one of the things I would say to a teacher is that if you've got something on your classroom wall that you would like children to remember, the fact that it's on your wall undermines the likelihood that they'll remember it'cause they don't need to. They can just look at the thing. So better to have some removable tabletop resource where you can say, you can have it today, look at it now, or you can have it for five minutes.

Well then I'm gonna take it away. See if you can do it without. And that process of gradually removing the support book is what not reading instruction looks and feels like and the point of it being, you know, that building on that SATMAV teaching, the foundation of success, it motivates and incentivizes children to think it's worth it's worth remembering this. It's worth learning this because it's easier than having to go to the back and forth the whole time.

Hm. I love what you've spoken about there because you kind of addressed two issues that we can see in the classroom and they're at complete opposite ends of the spectrum. We you know, we have that one where the teachers completely backed off and not offering any guidance or support or modelling. We hear a lot about that productive struggle. Um we d we get that in Australia as well.

And then you've got the at the other end where the teacher keeps that scaffolding up for too long and then the students end up becoming, you know, prompt dependent and they rely on that and they feel like they can't um move on without it. And that analogy you used, um, yeah, it it uh it definitely hit on for me because I know that now with

having nabs in the car with us all the time, right? I find that it takes me so much longer to remember how to get to anywhere than it did previously. Before we had nabs. No, yeah, we d we don't we don't have to think anymore. Oh, we don't have to remember it.

We can rely on it um on, you know, Google Maps to tell us everywhere um that we need to get to. And you're right, we will get there. Um it's gonna get us there eventually. It's great for performance. Yeah, it's absolutely I mean, we talk a lot at the moment about cognitive offloading.

chatbots and all the rest of it. But it's always been present in classrooms, you know, that children where they can, it's human nature to cognitively offload and not have to go through the hard work of learning something yourself. And so being aware of that. I mean, you know, yeah the the p I think, you know, s to speak to the productive struggle crowd, um, the I think the

W one of the reasons that persists is because of faulty error signals. And so in that and I've been there, I've done that kind of stuff. And what You know, I remember as a young teacher saying things to to to a class like, I want you to analyse this passage. And they'd say to me, What do you mean? And I'd say, Look.

Just analyse it. And uh and some of them would. Some of them would do it and I'd go, see, you know, that's what I meant. And some of them wouldn't. And I'd go, Oh, well, what can you do with kids like that? I tried my best. And what I failed to notice for years was that the children that could be successful in that paradigm were from advantage backgrounds.

And that they had support networks which allowed them to fill in the gaps that I was leaving. They had you know, they were used to having dinner table conversations where people would talk about current affairs. all sorts of stuff which allowed them to to to negotiate the deficits of the classroom. And then the other the children who were unsuccessful tended to be from disadvantaged backgrounds. And they just didn't have the wherewithal

to fill the gaps on left. So if I wasn't going to fill the gaps, nobody was. So they were unsuccessful because of me, whereas other children in a productive struggle classroom, they're successful despite me. Mm. And I think that's a really sort of powerful way of putting it. Uh I don't know if that's how

Yeah, it is. And and look i I I'm really mindful of of time today, uh and and I think it's it's been a a great conversation. But before we we start to wrap up, I do have to just, you know, touch on um the scenario of Say a school, um, you know, school leaders have delivered some professional learning on on all these great ideas that you've just um spoken about today.

Why does it still not land? Why does it still not stick? Why does it still not work in the classroom, you know, despite the fact that we've we've presented these great ideas and and what sorts of things can we do instead to make sure that that implementation process is actually successful? Yeah. Okay. I mean I think the first thing to say there is that adult learning and student learning are not that different. Um the the the the

The mistake that we tend to make as teacher educators, as tra in in training staff, is to assume expertise. And obviously, you know, everybody's expert at something and everybody's a novice at something, you know, that there are things that we're all gonna be good and bad at. So it's not to say You know, you're you're you don't know anything as a teacher. But it's it's more to take the view you're not an expert in this thing that you're currently learning about and therefore you will benefit.

from the kind of things that kids benefit from when we're teaching about something they don't know about. So that means that we really explicitly spell it out, but it also means that we uh that we give lots of opportunities for practice and mastery. And I think that tends to be the bit that's missed out in professional learning environments that we tell we tell teachers stuff And then we expect them one to remember it.

Two, to be convinced by it and then three, to be able to use it. And and that those bec those th the three things become increasingly fragile the further away we get. So So what what w the first bit about can they can they remember the thing that we've trained them in? If they can't remember it, they don't want to do it. Um, is that we need to we need to be

asking them to recall that. We need to be putting in retrieval opportunities in the learning environment that teachers exist in. And and I think what stops us doing that is it feels patronizing. it feels like, oh, you know, they're a professional and they're just gonna be annoyed of me if I if I If I treat them like this. And in fact it's respectful to do that. It's respecting the fact that it's hard to remember new stuff.

And it's also modelling, you know, affective classroom behaviour. So I think we should we should not worry about whether or not that's res you know, the we that that it's it's the best thing to do and and not get confused about adults being upset by it. So the second thing is they've remembered it. Do they believe it? Has it convinced them?

And very often, you know, ch teachers will know some something but they just don't think it's relevant or they don't think it's appropriate. Like the example that you gave of the guy about the mini whiteboards was a really good one, that he knew about them. He just didn't think it was for him. And well done for convincing him to try it. And then what convinced him, as you put it, was the response of the students. And I think that that

That's something that we can't leave to chance. Or if we leave to chance, we shouldn't be surprised if teachers find ways of not being convinced by stuff, you know, that we're likely, as human beings, to look for reasons not to do something we don't believe. So if we take something like, you know, a secondary teacher, being asked to use mini whiteboards and they think, you know, that looks a bit babyish, why would I bother with that?

primary school stuff that doesn't apply to me. That so it's not a knowledge problem, it's a belief problem. So I need to work on that. I need to help them. I need to help demonstrate that it's gonna be w worth doing. And then The third bit is the practice problems that I was talking about before, that they they believe it and they know it, but they they're not doing it because

For really again, really, really understandable reasons and it's like me holding my racket wrong as a as a in tennis, you know, that we as teachers have practised teaching. We're really good often at teaching suboptimally. And so when someone comes along and says, I want you to hold the racket differently, it makes us worse at teaching.

And nobody no teacher wants to feel like they're not as good at teaching as they were. So we have to make it safe. You know, we talked about psychological safety earlier. We have to make it safe. And productive and worthwhile and we have to convince people it's going to pay off in the longer term to get worse in the short term. And to and to feel kind of like, oh, am I doing this right? And and that uncertainty. There's have you come across the idea of the okay plateau?

Yeah. So that I mean that's like a really good way of thinking about it. So it's human nature to improve to the point of automaticity and then as soon as we automatise something we stop improving. If we want to improve further, we have to take away the automaticity and make make progress effortful again. And And that's uncomfortable. People don't like that. So we have to create a safe space in schools where we're saying to teachers

We want you to practice doing something that feels difficult. We know it's going to feel difficult. We're going to be really un super understanding and supportive of that difficulty. And we're going to model it as as leaders and teacher educators ourselves. And I think that that when school leaders go into classrooms and sort of observe what's happening in classrooms and then say to the teacher, Oh, you haven't done the thing I want you to do.

That's that creates a really toxic environment and it's much more helpful to have a reciprocal thing. Where I think w often the most useful thing that school leaders can do with their additional time is instead of observing teachers, you know, the person that learns most from an observed lesson is the observer. So you're much better off saying to a teacher, Right, okay, I'm gonna teach your class and you can either observe me teach your class or you can go and

use the time to go and observe another teacher that you think is doing the thing really, really well. But that frees them up to do all of the otherwise all of their cognitive bandwidth is on trying to do something they're not very good at, rather than watching somebody else. And that's likely to really be more likely to jump start the thing that you want them to do. And the

I think the most beneficial thing and it takes real courage but it also creates that psychological safety we need is to say as a leader, watch me teach your class. And sometimes that's not appropriate. If I'm a PE teacher, you probably don't want me teaching. you know, a maths lesson potentially. You know. But where it's possible, watch me teach your class, watch me model the thing that I'm trying to get you to do. Because let me make it safe to make mistakes.

that we can debrief afterwards and go, That bit didn't work the way I intended and that's so healthy. That makes such a difference to teachers to to see people with seniority being acceptant of error and mistake. Now that's the way we want to be with kids. I mean, you'd never ever endorse a teaching practice which was humiliating kids and making them feel bad about trying to master something difficult. But we end up inadvertently doing that with teachers.

Yeah, look David, I I knew that you were gonna come up with a whole A lot of gold in in that last response. And as I said before, we started recording. I'm a a big fan of your book. intelligent accountability. Um and so yeah, if if listeners are keen to know more about this stuff, definitely give that one a read as well. And yeah, I I I do just want to before we wrap up, I I just want to touch on yeah, that last point you're making there. Just around, you know, that that

kind of that struggle that teachers can face when they're trying to actually understand what they have to do and and I love that idea of actually going out and modelling it yourself because or the school leader doing it because um firstly it's part of that that culture building but then also

Often the the gap is in they've got this abstract understanding and they need to have a concrete understanding of what it actually looks like. And and so that's yeah, that's what you're closing there by um giving them that opportunity to see it in action. Great summary, Brendan. What was that, sir? Great summary. Yeah. No. Yeah. Um I mean it just remains to say you mentioned at the beginning, I'm I'm visiting Australia for the first time in March.

So maybe I I know I'm visiting uh well I'm I'm starting out at the research ed in Ballarat on I think that's the third March. Um uh but I'm also visiting Melbourne and Sydney and Canberra and Perth. Um and so there's a there's a schedule of of stuff that I'm doing. I'm also doing a At one point I'm doing a double hander with Carl Hendrick. I know listeners are familiar with Carl. Um and uh so we're we're doing some sort of thing together. And we're gonna we're gonna be doing it on

um the intelligent accountability stuff. That that'll be in Sydney. I don't think the date's confirmed yet, but um more more will be revealed. I'm really excited about coming. Be great. Yeah, great. And uh I'll get get all the the dates and the links and everything. Hopefully we can meet up, Brenders.

Look, I hope so, yeah. I'll uh I'll find out where I'm gonna go. Where are you based? I'm in New South Wales, so yeah, about an hour out of Sydney. But um yeah, look if the the dates line up I'll definitely um yeah come in and even when you're when you're in Australia we'll we'll try and uh yeah, find a time to meet up for sure. But Brilliant. Uh look Dave, uh really appreciate your time. I you know, I think this is really gonna hit home for a lot of presenters

Um yeah, as I said before, it's it's quite timely, uh, this conversation and the tips that you've given out today. I've given that, yes, uh the start of an academic year here in Australia. So yeah, thank you. Have a great year, everyone. How good new year.

With such a rich conversation with David, here are my key takeaways. First up, learning is invisible. This is a big mindset shift for many teachers. We have to stop mistaking performance, what students can do in the moment with our help, for actual durable learning. As David said, just because they're busy and getting answers right in the lesson doesn't mean it's

Beware of Satnav teaching I love this analogy. If we provide perfect turn by turn directions constantly, students arrive at the answer, but never learn the route. We need to be careful not to keep the scaffolding up so long that students become prompt dependent and stop thinking for themselves.

Practice makes permanent, not perfect. If we let students practice mistakes, they just get really good at doing the wrong thing. Whether it's capital letters or a maths process, we need to intervene early so they aren't automating errors.

Success must come before struggle. There's a lot of talk about productive struggle, but David reminded us that students need a foundation of success first. If they haven't experienced success, struggle just confirms their belief that they can't do it and leads to disengagement. Cool variation of cold cooling is turning turning it into boiling hot cooling. I love this phrase from David. Instead of putting students on the spot immediately, use the mini whiteboards as a drafting tool first.

By having students jot down their initial thoughts before they have to speak, we ensure everyone has done the thinking and has a script in front of them. It dramatically increases the success rate and ensures we aren't just getting answers from the confident view.

Culture takes time. David's reflection on his early years was really honest. Sometimes effective instruction isn't enough on its own. You have to put in the time to build reputation and relationships to get that behavioral culture right. Model it, don't just observe it. For the school leaders listening, this was Gold. To help teachers improve, we need to move from abstract feedback to concrete modeling. Actually teaching the class yourself to show what a strategy looks like.

can can be far more powerful than just observing and giving feedback. Next episode I'm thrilled to be joined by doctor Brian Poncey for a deep dive into the often misunderstood world of maths fluency. We're going to tackle the F word of mathematics head on. Why fluency isn't just about rote memorization, but actually the gateway to higher order thinking and problem solving.

Brian is also going to walk us through his updated program Facts on Fire 2.0 and explain exactly how we can build automaticity in our students without killing their love for numbers. However, that's it from me for today, and as always, stay curious, keep learning, and Bye for now.