BONUS: Harnessing the Science of Learning with Nathaniel Swain

But I keep hearing the science of learning kind of creep up in more and more conversations and we just want to make sure before we even jump into it . What is it ? What is the science of learning ?

It is really a broad body of knowledge and , like the science of reading , it comes from lots of different fields and lots of different studies , thousands and thousands of research studies that have been conducted over the last at least 50 years , if not much longer , and it's a growing consensus about some of the principles about how learning happens , how best to

teach . But and it includes all subjects and all sort of learning areas . So broadly it's science of learning and development , but particularly for the classroom sort of work .

It basically is the overarching body of research that explains why the science of reading and also the science of maths , for example , sort of works and has general principles that can be applied to any subject or principles that can be applied to any subject .

Yeah , so in the science of reading there's obviously a big focus on explicitly teaching the code and explicitly teaching phoneme graphing correspondences and helping students to make connections between all the other parts of the reading rope , if you want to use that metaphor , so vocabulary and morphology and sentence structure and comprehension strategies , all those things .

So the science of learning essentially has very similar principles and principles that also emphasise the importance of explicitly teaching things , but also the importance of retrieval practice , of giving students spacing and interleaving in the practice that they receive and also in the level of responsiveness that you need as an educator when you're dealing with new content

and new information that we haven't actually evolved to learn .

So reading is a great example of something that is relatively new in our evolutionary history , but mathematics , history and science and geography all of these other bodies of knowledge and skill sets are actually relatively new as well and , as a result , they lend themselves to much more explicit modeling , guidance and practice . That's intentional by the teacher .

So really , the science of learning is just a way of thinking about all the choices that you could make as a teacher and which principles and practices will best support the most amount of learners in the most efficient way possible . Because of that , instructional time really does matter .

So I'm gonna pull out three and list them and then we can go back and talk about each one if that sounds good . The first mindset shift is make effective and engaging teaching the norm . The second is plan curriculum that is coherent , knowledge rich and includes regular review . The third is teach at the whole class level responsibly .

So let's go back to that first one make effective and engaging teaching the norm . What does this mean and how do we do this ? And if you can answer this question , I feel like you get a million dollars , because this is huge .

It's a collaborative project with a lot of other co-authors and you'd see a list of those if you jump on the website and have a look Great people that have actually been on this podcast as well , for example , professor Pamela Snow and others and it's also a way of capturing great practice from schools as well , and these schools that have showcased how they've

utilized the science of learning in their practice really have changed the definition of what engaging means .

I think engaging has lots of different meanings , but the most useful one for us as educators is one that links back to engagement in learning and engagement in things that make you feel successful , and so I try and really unpack in this particular section of the book that engaging teaching is really about helping students experience that success , to feel supported and

having that motivation come from , that focus on you know . Oh , wow , I couldn't do something I couldn't do before .

So when you make engaging and effective teaching the norm , you're basically ensuring that those good feelings and those great successes happen , win after win after win , every day , and that the way that you've actually structured your teaching sets everyone up for success , not for failure .

There's actually a lot of competing ideas at the moment that say that struggle , and even productive struggle , is a good thing and we want students to get in there and feel uncomfortable . And I'm not saying that that's unavoidable in the learning process .

But certainly with complex skills and with things that are biologically secondary , that is not acquired naturally , it doesn't make sense for us to make it intentionally harder for our students to master those skills .

So by this first sort of mind shift really is about knowing exactly what you're trying to teach , breaking it down into manageable chunks and ensuring it links together with students' prior knowledge and therefore making it really effective , but also therefore really engaging because there's that sense of success .

The other thing that improves engagement , rather than you know the best GIF , like all the fantastic fonts or the you know fancy graphics and posters around the room , something that really helps students feel engaged in their learning is ensuring that there's no time to feel anything else but that excitement and challenge .

So having routines and having quick transitions and having pacey what you call perky pace in the US , but we might just call pacey because perky is a funny word in Australia .

For some reason , you know having that pace that is really exciting and that you know teachers know when it's fallen apart because I've struggled to find my next resource , or I can't get this thing to load , or you suddenly get those little sort of sounds in the corner , or you know kids starting to sort of muck around and play with their mini whiteboards ,

ensuring that those moments are as minimal as possible and that you are literally on the ball every single second of your lesson .

When you're doing all of that explicit teaching , that essentially makes it a normal thing for students to feel engaged , to feel challenged , but also to feel really supported and ensuring that every single minute does really count and it builds towards that growing independence . So they really need you at the front end .

When you're explicitly modeling and demonstrating , you're practicing , you're checking for understanding , no-transcript , maximum amount of learning possible and that it's engaging but it's also really , really effective and efficient .

Would you like to elaborate on anything Like how can we use those whiteboards to be effective and engaging ? Cause I think they're incredible tools . I mean , I use them all the way through when I taught high school and I just think it's a great way to make what's in kids' brains visual . But I'd love to hear from you .

These are really powerful , low-tech and very low-cost tools that we should be using routinely in our classrooms for things like spelling , obviously for writing , but also for responding to multiple choice questions , for completing sentence starters about content and rich sort of questions that we're engaging with in the lesson .

For all kinds of things we could is because they take what's inside students' heads and they represent what might be going on on a way that we can actually see , and they therefore give you a window into whether your teaching is working or not .

So , if anything , checking for understanding is one of those big themes and big ideas that I tackle in the book , because it's , you know , the evidence and the science of the learning really points to . We need to know what's going on with our students in real time , not just at the end of the lesson or the end of the test .

So the mini whiteboard is just one really , really powerful way that you can do it . I know some teachers shy away from them . It's annoying to get them out . The kids play with them , they start doodling , they cause issues , there's fights about them .

Essentially , what we want to do is treat the setup of the routine like a mini white is just as much importance as the use of them down the track . So we actually need to invest time and explicit instruction and modelling and rehearsal in how those routines are going to work .

And my routines are like completely like structured , and there's no sort of question of what to do with your whiteboard when there's always a thing that's waiting for you to do the next thing . So there's chin it , and everyone says chin it at the same time .

There waiting for you to do the next thing , so there's Chinit and everyone says Chinit at the same time . There's Parkyboard , clearboard . You've got five seconds , show me your hands .

All of these things that sort of make it easier for students to know what's right and what's expected , so that those tools don't become a hindrance but become a real helper for the learning that's going to happen . And that's why I bang on and on about mini whiteboards .

But they are just so useful and you know , rather than relying on remembering what your partner has said , you can look at your partner's answer and discuss it , it becomes a mini artifact you can use to increase the amount of rigor of thinking and participation within your classroom , the way Douglas Moff talks about thinking and participation ratio .

This is a big way that you can make it sort of happen . So hence , if mini whiteboards become part of your regular diet of instructional choices , you're going to make engaging and effective teaching the norm in your classroom .

That's a really important part of helping students to feel comfortable , because I know there's many kids progressing through elementary and middle school never having to answer a question in front of their peers and this is a way that they can do it as well as I'm being kind of cold call as well , but this is a way that they can do it .

Where there is it's this low stakes . No one has to look at what your answer is , but the teacher needs to know , which is the most important thing .

It's kind of limitless . The second mindset shift I want to go back to is plan curriculum that is coherent , knowledge rich and includes regular review . So I want to dig into this because I think there are so many nuances here . I'm so curious , especially about the regular review part .

But I also think I want to make sure we speak to the fact that teachers may not have a say in the curriculum that is chosen or that they're using . So I'll leave it to you , nathaniel .

So , depending on how you're coming at this , any way that you can improve the coherence , the way that the lessons but also the units or the sequences of learning connect with each other and the way that they support each other , the better . So what you're doing in reading should actually connect with what you're doing in writing .

You should be able to write about interesting topics that you've been reading about . You should be able to bring lots of sentence level work into the reading sort of space so that even if your focus is on a novel or your focus is on a rich text , you are still writing about it and you're using those writing skills in real time .

The other coherence level might be how things from history and science and geography actually connect to each other and you can show how something that we've learned last year actually builds and connects to this new topic now , because none of these disciplines exist in a silo .

There are logical distinctions between them and I talk about that in this knowledge-rich curriculum chapter with Reid Smith , who's the leader of OCRE education , a set of free resources in Australia which are really really widely used .

Here we talk about knowledge-rich curriculum because of just how important that knowledge is for building up students' understanding and seeing those connections . But coherence is . The other part of that chapter is that you can't just throw facts at students and sort of hope that they stick .

You need to help see the bigger ideas and the bigger connections and having things like advanced organizers that show how all the knowledge within a unit or sequence of lessons is meant to fit together , or the big ideas within a particular novel or text , and helping students to make that sort of click for them .

There's this great theory that I mentioned in the book and I'd love to write more about it , but it's called Meaningful Learning Theory by Augebel is the theorist I never know how to pronounce his name , so forgive me if I've said that wrong but he invented advanced organizers and also had this idea that you have to connect what students are learning now to what

they've learned previously . If it doesn't connect and if it doesn't cohere , that means sort of stick together , then there's no point really teaching it . Because the other part of this principle is that we have to use regular review .

Because of something called the forgetting curve , 90% of things that we teach actually get forgotten and it's like so depressing as the teacher to know that 90% of your time is potentially wasted .

But the thing that doesn't make it wasted and the things that ensures that it does stick better is things like retrieval practice , using regular review , using spacing and interleaving , so you're not just cramming a whole subject into a two-week intensive .

You actually have time to build up students' understanding over a longer period and then allowing them to start to forget before you ask them to remember again . So that coherence , the knowledge rich and the review really does help the curriculum come to life . And if you've got a strict curriculum that you have to stick to that you're not a big fan of .

One way that you can improve it is by showing what those connections are , actively connecting things that you're teaching to what you've taught before , adding those bits in , but also including regular daily retrieval practice so that students can actually be forced to try and retrieve what they've learned weeks and months before , and even the day before as well , in the

initial stages , and this has a huge power . I talk about lots of case studies of schools that have seen huge shift just because of improving their retrieval practice and that's all that they've done . And that can be a big game changer and doesn't require you to choose a new curriculum .

It's just using the best available resources you have and spacing that sort of practice out over time and giving students lots of chances to start to forget and then be tested to see if they remember . That self-testing effect is really what retrieval practice is .

I think we assume that we've taught it , we've moved on to the next semester , like let's just forget about all that other stuff . But that's how we actually allow the forgetting curve to plague our work as teachers .

If we are not so fussy about having to do things simultaneously because there's actual benefit to spacing and interleaving , going back and forth between topics , then we can really take a load off ourselves and not put that pressure on in terms of scheduling and also take advantage of that benefit of spacing , interleaving . These are big benefits and big effects .

I know that everyone probably remembers cramming for an exam the night before and feeling like on the exam you did pretty well and you might have . But you know , you ask yourself two weeks later if you remember much of what you've crammed over that one intensive practice session probably not much at all .

But if you space that learning out over many months over many weeks , ideally and continue coming back to it year after year in relevant , meaningful ways , then that learning is going to stick forever . That's why we tend to you know that old saying of use it or lose it is still very true .

If you don't use that old information or content or learning or skills , it does disappear . That's one of the challenges that we have as educators and as learners ourselves too .

I feel like that's caught my attention when you mentioned it and I want to make sure we chat about that before we move on to the final mindset shift .

So I referenced this in the book and I find it really really helpful for getting into this conversation . And it's sort of intuitive ideas that you don't want to teach something that has no relevance and no connection point to previous learning or previous experience .

But if you don't consciously make a decision to connect it and to show how it connects and do that in a coherent way , then it's really easy for students to just be like , well , that obviously wasn't important . I'm just going to disregard that and they might even just do that subconsciously .

It might not even be a malicious thing where they're trying to forget all the great things you've taught them . It's just , you know , the brain has to prune stuff and it's going to prune the things that it thinks aren't relevant . So advanced organizers basically give you like a one pager of what the whole unit of work is going to look like .

So if it's a novel study it'll talk about , it'll have key sort of characters and very brief descriptions of who they are . It might have a character map that shows how they connect to each other .

It'll have key events , maybe key themes , essentially like all the the meaty but high level sort of stuff that you hope students to gain from that unit of work or sequence of lessons . And it'll look different in different subjects , but Ideally students are actively engaging with this material as well .

They look at it before the unit begins and it's sort of introduction . You might introduce it progressively , so you show one subtopic and then keep adding to it until it becomes a one pager . I've seen teachers sort of chop it up and sort of allow one piece to be added at a time so that they don't get overwhelmed by looking at the whole page at one time .

But then you have retrieval practice exercises based on that knowledge organizer .

So you cover up the key terms and you leave the descriptions and see if they can retrieve what the key terms were and do the reverse and all kinds of other things , create flashcards with the same information , essentially building up as many opportunities for students to get that core content and core learning from the any one sequence of lessons that you're doing .

I'm imagining that I could do a one do that for that and then be helping her . You know , with the different terms , cause there's so many that are used interchangeably , there's a lot of morphology that comes into play there , about the history of language and and the different roles and of people in society .

Okay , so you could do it with with any any content .

But when it is something that students actively engage with and maybe have to do retrieval practice with , that's when it becomes a bit more useful .

I haven't seen it used in the early phonics sort of space as much , but it probably does lend itself more to sort of content , that's vocabulary and sort of morphology and sort of facts and dates and key concepts and ideas and connections .

But with the example of medieval history it's perfect because you can get a brief look at what the whole unit is meant to cover , how things are meant to fit together , and when you delve into a topic on Anne Boleyn for example , and you're looking at that particular figure in history , you know where that fits in .

You might have a timeline , for example , with history that shows some basic dates . That allows you to plot what you're learning about in time and in relevance according to the unit . I think some schools have experimented with this in the UK quite a bit and some have probably gone over the top with how much they've used it .

So I think there's some learning to be had by looking at some of the blog posts from the UK where they've been bringing in knowledge , organizers , refining them , potentially cutting the back a little bit , but essentially finding the right balance there .

I love thinking about that as like a little I mean , I'm just thinking about it right now as a personal anchor chart right , it's helping me anchor myself into the content and kind of situate before we even begin and instead of just my teacher taking me on this journey , I can situate where things fall and where you know where characters in a story might land if

they lived . You know from reading a fictional story about the time where they might be . Or if I'm reading realistic , you know stuff they they obviously would situate in history . So that's so cool . Thank you for that explanation . Okay , so on to mindset shift three teach at the whole class level responsibly .

I feel like this is just bringing together all the things we just talked about , but I want to ask what does this look like in practice ?

I think this is a space where the evidence , as I look at it now , and the science of learning does point to the fact that if you're teaching something for the first time , it doesn doing that in a way that automatically connects to what students have learned before , because you know part of that coherent knowledge that we just talked about , then you should be

able to do that initial instruction as a group together . That doesn't mean I think this is where the myths about explicit instruction come in that doesn't mean that you're just lecturing at students . It doesn't mean that you're making them sit there and just digest information and sort of do stuff randomly .

Them sit there and just digest information and sort of and do stuff randomly , um . And it doesn't mean that you're just hoping for the best and sort of delivering information and not knowing if it's going to work . Um , it is possible to teach at the whole class level in a more um responsive way than we're probably used to seeing .

I think when we think of whole class , we might think of the mini lesson , as in the in the guided reading and balanced literacy sort of era , and a mini lesson .

My problem is that it's basically an intensive lecture , so it's five minutes of the teacher lecturing , because the belief is that the learning will actually happen when they go off and do it themselves .

But here I think there's a real point to saying that if we break our instruction down into manageable chunks , if we consciously model and explain and show the things that we want students to master , we can do that in a gradual sort of fashion and that gradual release of responsibility can essentially happen at that whole group level .

What this might mean in practice is that you are obviously explaining , modeling , showing , but you're then checking for understanding constantly .

So you're using the mini whiteboards , you're using pair shares , you're using cold calls , you're getting that responsiveness in your class using something that Craig Barton from the UK calls checks for listening , where you're just breaking up your instruction with little checks being like so what did I say , Laurie ? What was that one , Melissa ?

Can you tell me this one again , Laurie ?

And then you just get them to repeat that bit . Yeah , she did it beautifully . Look , it's not a stressful thing at all , but there's obviously that's the presentation side of things . In terms of the responsiveness . The most important thing about checking for understanding is what you then do with it .

So you could be observing things on mini whiteboards as students are completing a sentence prompt or they're answering a question , and what you can do then . And there is the differentiation .

So I go to my students and I strategically place in the room so it's easier to spend more time with them and I give them you know , I see what they're doing and I potentially give them a question or a follow up prompt or , you know , repeat some of the instructions so that they've got a chance to hear it again , because I know that I'm going to need to

give more of myself and more of my time and energy to those students who need me more . To give more of myself and more of my time and energy to those students who need me more . There's obviously diversity within every classroom and you're going to have students that are able to do things more independently and others that are just going to need you more .

You could fix that problem by creating three or four different groups and sort of teaching them differently .

The problem that I think that causes and I think that we really need to interrogate both in a research-based way but also a practice-based way as we start to nut out the best possible ways to move forward is that we don't want to lock students into that trajectory .

If they're in the low group , you don't want them to stay in the low group , and I think if you think critically about your own practice , you might sort of realize that kids that were in the low group in kindergarten were probably in the low group in year one and year two as well . It's just how things tend to go .

But I've seen the opposite happen when we've taught at a whole class instruction level , where there's teachers teaching dynamically , engagingly , responsively . There's checking for understanding , there's lots of modeling . They're connecting it to prior learning .

They're giving lots and lots of chances to respond and I get lots of extra support for those students who need in the moment . I always give bonus words and bonus sentences and , you know , ask students to apply things further .

If I need to buy myself some time to work with my five students who are closer to the front of the room , so those students will challenge themselves on the next part of the task , or you have one half of the class of the slide that you're showing for the taskies or on the board that says the standard task , and then you've got the extension sort of

challenge task or super challenge task on the board already . So students know , once they finish that first one , they keep going and you can then work with that sort of group or that whoever's needing that trouble . You don't need to , actually you don't need to define the groups in the moment . That's the best thing .

You can just work with whoever is needing you right then and there you can then go and support them on the base level example , because that's what you want everyone to be able to achieve .

So I know I'm going into my whole class teacher rant here and sort of just stop me when I get too over the top , but I think this is something that really I think is exciting to interrogate and something that I've really tried to capture from the schools that I included in this book as well .

They talk about , you know , finding their profession again and feeling like they can be a really good instructor and not just a facilitator of different stations , and I think this is something really cool about .

What the science of learning is pointing to is that we need to be really , really good educators and make great in the moment decisions beforehand and great planning decisions sorry , in the moment decision then and then planning decisions beforehand , and this would help every instructional minute actually count , rather than having that dead time or that you know perfect

non-example of what I've been talking about , where teachers are teaching the same thing to five or six different students in a row when they're doing that individual work and it's like why did you need to teach it five times ? Just bring that group back together and teach it again .

If they need that initial , that extra instruction after the initial , just provide it in the moment when they need it .

It is a part of their instruction for a lot of them and I'm just wondering , especially when they're teaching foundational skills , I would say do you think there is any place for small group instruction or do you think what you described is the way to go ?

Ideally you do it during reading fluency pairs or when students are doing something meaningful and you're not sort of having to create those arbitrary sort of stations that don't necessarily add up to a good use of their time .

So or they're doing the task that they would have been doing independently anyway and you've got 15 minutes where students are meant to be independent because they've just done the explicit lesson and that makes sense to take that group then and work for 15 minutes intensively in a really responsive sort of way .

So I think just reshifting when the small group instruction happens and for what purpose , is really getting the best of both worlds . The other thing about small group is that it should occur as part of a multi-tiered systems of support .

We can't expect the classroom teacher , who's one person with a group of 25 or 30 , to be able to provide the tier two and the tier three intervention . That really should be additional resources that your school provides and you know it's obviously difficult depending on your circumstances to guarantee that , but you can't intervene your way out of a tier one problem .

So if your initial instruction isn't on grade level , it isn't challenging enough and it isn't maybe responsive and effective enough because you're breaking it up into five different mini lessons with five different groups , then there's no way that you're going to resolve that sort of tier three sort of issue because you're not giving that first instruction to everyone to

give them the chance of sort of catching up .

I think if we went harder and a little bit more responsive and a little bit more vigilant with our kindergarten students when we first get them and say , well , we're just going to jump into this instruction and give it a go , we're going to learn these codes and we're going to get them saying the sounds , we can get them jumping up and getting excited about

words and syllables and actually feeling that this is a useful time to try and minimize those gaps , then we'd actually have a situation where halfway through kindergarten there isn't a huge gap between students because they've all had that initial instruction at the same time and you've actually started applying some of that extra support from the get-go and I think it

would resolve many of the challenges we see in year two and grade three and grade four where the gaps are just so big , like what do you do with those gaps ? By the time it's that large they're not nearly as big in kindergarten and year one . There's something you can really do really well and do really effectively with that opportunity .

It's not necessarily a challenge if you say , well , this gap could be closed now or we could just leave it to continue widening as students progress through the school years , which is basically what happens now because of you know , these practices aren't well utilized and the principles of the science of reading , let alone the science of learning , are still finding

their way into a lot of these places , which would ultimately improve the instruction and the intervention .

And you know , just to be mindful that we know there are a lot of teachers listening who are not kindergarten teachers .

So , people listening , you can learn more about Nathaniel and his new book Harnessing the Science of Learning at his website , nathanielswaincom , and , of course , you can find the book at Amazon or probably wherever you buy books .