Wondering how to develop great learners? In this episode, we answer that question with the help of the very well-known education researcher, John Hattie. Before we start, we would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which this podcast is recorded today, the Kabi Kabi and Gabi Gabi people, and also the Jinubara people.
We honour their songlines and storylines and pay our respects to the elders, past, present and emerging, and a particularly big nod and grateful thank you to those emerging First Nations people and artists and storytellers and consultants that we're working with today. We would also like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which you are listening to this episode today.
Welcome to Raising Wildlings, a podcast about parenting, alternative education, stepping into the wilderness, however that looks, with your family.
Each week we'll be interviewing experts that truly inspire us to answer your parenting and education questions. We'll also be sharing stories from some incredible incredible families that took the leap and are taking the road less traveled.
We're your hosts Vicki and Nikki from Wildlings Forest School. Pop in your headphones, settle in and join us on this next adventure.
Hello and welcome to the Raising Wildlings podcast. I'm your host, Nikki Farrell. Our guest today, John Hattie, is Emeritus Laureate Professor at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Melbourne. He is one of the world's best known and most widely read education experts, and his visible learning series of books has been translated into 29 different languages and has sold over 1 million copies.
Now, before we start, don't forget to take a screenshot of the time of your favorite quote this episode and share it with us on Instagram. or Facebook. We absolutely love seeing which gold nuggets have pulled at your heartstrings and it helps us curate our podcast by choosing our topics and guests that resonate with you the most. Also, if you have a guest that you think we would love to interview, please just DM us.
We know that if someone in our audience already loves someone, then the rest of you will too. But now let's chat to John. Music Hello and welcome to Raising Wildlings. John, thank you so much for joining us and especially you've had a bit of a hectic afternoon.
It's been fun, Nicky, and it's good to be here. And I've just arrived back from sunny, beautiful Darwin to lovely, cold Melbourne. And so it's been a bit of a contrast, but still good to be home.
Thinking of a change of location, perhaps?
Oh, sometimes you wonder why. There's no reason you should have to live in a gold place. We live in the gold, in the Sunshine Coast. That's very pleasant. So maybe we'll move up next year.
I do think we should have renamed ourselves the Rainy Coast this year. It's like nothing I've ever seen before. So, so much. I mean, it looks glorious here. Usually it's dry and a bit sparse in our dry season. But right now it is glorious. But I'll take the heat any day. So I'm going to jump straight in it because I'm so excited to have you on the podcast. I absolutely loved your book, which was... I'm showing it because I may use this in a video, just so you know.
So it was 10 Steps to Develop Great Learners. I'm an ex-high school teacher and now run Wildlings, but I homeschool now. And I found the overlap was really wonderful. Also brought up some contradictory feelings in me as well, which I'd love to pull apart a bit more with you. But that's great. That's what we're here for. So can you first of all, tell us a little bit about your book and what the aim of writing up was with the
Sure. It was about six, seven years ago now, and I became a grandfather for the first time. And, of course, I had so much eternal wisdom. And I kept giving him the blessing of my internal, external wisdom. And he said to me one day, he said, Dad, is there evidence for what you're saying or not? Ooh, that hit home. And so I said, well, yes, of course there is. Can you show it to me? Let me look. So I started looking at the research on parenting.
And what I've been doing in the school sector is looking at what we call a matter analysis. That is a statistical way of accumulating many studies about a topic. I wonder what's going on in the parenting area. And it turns out there is quite a lot of metastudies in parenting. So we started collecting those together, and it got rid of a few of my pet theories, which I didn't like.
And we said for him it was his first book, and he's sorry he can't be on tonight, but being a teacher just back from the new semester, he's picked up the germs and his voice is gone, which is what happens with the germ factories of schools sometimes. And so we started exploring that. And the other thing that he is – In the teaching space, one of the big findings for me was it's not what teachers do. It's how they think about what they do. You could give two teachers exactly the same script.
They could follow it to a T. One can make a huge difference. Why not? Because it's how they think, how they make decisions on the moment, what they're looking for. Like great teachers are often very nosy. They want to know what's going on in the kid's mind. They want to know what's going on. Now, there's a limit to that. as a teacher. But that was another incentive, is what are the nature of the thinking? And that's hence the 10 steps, the 10 different ways of thinking.
But the other part of it for me, after working by myself all these years, it's just fun to write a book with your son. We know he'll find it. We know how to resolve fights. We know how to get through those things. We know when we hurt each other with a comment we make about, oh, that's a load of nonsense, et cetera. We know how to get over all that stuff. And so it really was a pleasure.
It took us six years, but it was a very pleasurable six years, and you'll be pleased to know we started our second.
Oh, that's fantastic news. And still friends. Yes. Yes,
yes. And got great grandchildren.
How exciting. Now, you say early on in the book that the research showed that almost everything done to improve a child's learning will improve their learning. But can you talk to us then about how and why you narrowed it down to the top 10?
Harking back to what I said before, you can look at, like in the school sector, I've looked at 350 different influences from the home, from the parents, from the kids, from the teacher, from the students. student from the curriculum, you name it. And you can cut with a top list, kind of like a league table. And I did. And then people misinterpreted it and said, oh, we're going to do the things at the top, not the things at the bottom.
Some of the things at the bottom we should deeply worry about.
And
so when we looked at the parenting, I wasn't going to make that same. Well, it wasn't a mistake. I deliberately did it for the achievement book. And then I've modified it over the years. We said, let's look at the underlying big picture arguments. what actually links together those big effects. And hence, we call it ways of thinking or mind frames, which is not very sexy. And so 10 steps was the other way of saying it.
But if you actually go through them, it's 10 different ways of thinking about being a parent. And I'm intrigued in your case, Nikki, because you're not only a parent, you're a teacher with your kids. So it's fascinating. And we make one of our strong arguments in the book is parents are not. First teachers.
And that was one of it. I was like, oh, John, but, but, but, but, but that was right at the start. And then I went further in and went, okay, I can see your reasoning. But can you expand on that? Because that was one that I was like, oh, I don't know about this.
Take homeschooling, for example. Homeschooling is as good as the teacher, which happens to be you. But most parents, they don't do what you do and they don't do what teachers do. And I think it's a mistake to say parents are first teachers because many of them don't have the skills of a teacher. We saw that in COVID in spades. Many parents, even though they'd all been to school themselves, some of them very successfully been to school, had forgotten about struggle is a good word.
Failure is a friend and a learner. You don't go to classes to learn that which you don't know. And in the early days of COVID, we heard many parents complaining, oh, my child's struggling. My child doesn't know what to do. My child's lost. And you think, yeah. Yeah. That's the right moment for learning. That happens in classrooms. And this notion that they, like, you know, there are some parents, and we talk about some of these parents in the book, who are overly pressurized on their kids.
They have to get 100% and everything. Well, for kids, the learning's too easy. They can get turned off when they get 100%. There's no challenge in what they do. So this notion that you're not a first teacher, so let's not confuse the role of teachers and parents, but you are the first learner. How you go about learning, your kid is mimicking, your kid is modelling. And if you never make a mistake and it was perfection, your kids will mimic that and it will not do them any favours.
Yeah, isn't it? If you make errors, yeah, and if you learn from errors, your kid will pick that up. And so our big argument throughout, and it's the big dominant theme as you've picked up, is parents are first learners. Holly Carroll directed a great study a few years ago with three-year-olds and she got the kids to play with toys. And watch what happened when the kids made a mistake, like building up blocks or whatever, and it fell over or the Lego didn't work.
The parents who stepped in and fixed it compared to the parents who let the kid and perhaps helped the kid. Perhaps you should think of this or what these things happened. The difference 15 years later was dramatic. Parents are first learners.
Yeah. We see it over and over again, you know, the helicopter parents and whatnot. And we're obviously, as a forest school, we're huge advocates of play with risk. And it's a big challenge. Big job convincing a lot of parents these days that actually the cotton wooling is doing more damage than letting little Johnny cut his finger every now and then. So, yeah, 100% agree. And
I hope that you are going to, if you haven't already, interview John Marsden, who runs the Wilderness School. Yeah,
we have. But I would love to interview him again on his new one, which was, I think, Take Risk is his new book, isn't it? Yeah, it's stunningly good.
Yeah.
And it's great to chat too because he loves to shake up
the narrative, which is what we're about too. And I've been to his school and it's very impressive. And you're right, they do take risks. And one of our arguments in the book, and I learnt this from John, is there's a dignity in risk-taking. And another thing we have is it's not about the stresses that your kids face. It's about coping and the strategies you have.
Because you can take the same stress, like cutting your finger some kids react one way some kids another way it's the reaction to that it's a bit like i say about principals who you know complain about their stress loads um yeah but why is it you're the best in the world at coping with those stresses that's that you're best at and so we talk a lot about the coping strategies that you know parents have a massive influence like if a parent has a problem and just vents and rages and does emotive
coping guess what your kids are going to do? Whereas if they move into problem-based, now, if you're like me, I tried to teach my kids what we called the Tiger Woods. I don't know if Tiger Woods ever said it, but for kids it was impressive. The rule of count of five. If something happens that's bad, you can vent to your count of five and then it's over. And I use that as a cricket coach. If someone in your team drops a catch, you've got five seconds to say, damn, that was a silly thing to do.
Five, over. And so venting can have its place. But problem-based coping is what we need to teach kids. And three and four-year-olds can learn it. Yeah.
I've brought it up before on the podcast that my dad in my ear my whole life is don't fix the blame, fix the problem. But, again, vent about it quickly and then switch. Switch from that victim mentality and blame and then to, right, how do we fix this? And my poor kids, now I'm in their ear.
How can you learn about coping? If you don't make mistakes. Yeah. How can you be challenged at anything if there's no mistakes in challenge? And one of my fascinations, Nikki, is why is it most gifted kids don't grow up to be gifted adults.
You should see the underlining in this book, John. It's a bit ridiculous. But that was one of them. I was really curious. Has there been much research about why that is? Is it perfectionism traits? Is it a fear of failure? What is it?
It's all those. When they get to be like less than 2% of child prodigies grow up to be gifted adults. So, yeah, it's a well-known phenomenon. Well, yeah, because the problem is when they get to around 14, 15, they're forced to do some subjects that they hadn't done before.
And
they don't know how to fail. They don't know how to be challenged. They're fearful of that, fearful of failure. And some of them have parents that magnify that fear of failure. And so they give up. They lose their passion. And so that's a really thing to watch. And that whole area of giftedness, it's all about acceleration. It's not about enrichment. It's all about acceleration. And here's the good news. Acceleration works even better for kids that aren't gifted.
And so we do try and cram too much in. And so if we took out half of the curricula, we'd have a much better education system. But that's a real big battle. But my point with parents is that challenge them, challenge them, enjoy the challenge and enjoy it with them.
I love, and please, if... Let me know if quoting you feels uncomfortable, but I love this one, which was, we're yet to meet a group of adults who cannot shove even more into the curriculum under the name of streamlining, reducing or modernising the curriculum. And I just as a teacher went, hallelujah. Every time a new one rolls in, I'm sure half of the teaching cohort rolls their eyes.
We have close to 3,000 pages in our curriculum here in Australia because it's been updated and lengthened. Some countries like New Zealand when I was living there, for every subject, for every grade, it was 49 pages. Now, they've had curriculum reviews, so it's now up to 65. But it's a dramatic difference from here. And I think there is that notion that coverage that we aim is the killer of challenge and curiosity. And my grandkids now, they're between two and six.
That curiosity is just every minute and every day. And I just worry that it's going to be drummed out of them. Like, you know what your kids ask at age three or four. Why? Why is it so?
Curiosity. By eight. They've switched to what? That stat was incredible. What was that one? I'm going to find it and I'm going to quote that. Sorry. It was something along the lines of exactly that. They start off being, oh, I want to find
it. Asking why, then they switch to what? And it's all about a good learner is someone who knows loss and or someone who's incredibly compliant.
Yeah, here it was. Children start school with much excitement, but it's followed by years of declining interest for most until they're 16. So does the research tell us why that is?
Because one of the things we do in our work in schools is we ask teachers, what does it mean to be a good learner in your class? And they usually give you really rich, powerful descriptions. Then we interview their students. And by age eight, most students say a good student is someone that comes well-prepared, sits up straight, and watches the teacher work.
But the good news is when you show that to the teachers, they're really confronted because that's not the image they have because they think that if the kids are doing the work, they're learning. Well, unfortunately, sometimes in a lot of doing, there isn't much learning. But that compliance, can they hand it in? When you ask many teachers, how do you know the kids are engaged? They say they're doing the work. You were a kid once.
You know that some of that doing is just mindless drivel and you're learning nothing and you're just trying to finish it. You don't care whether it's an A and a C. You want to get it in on time. I'm being a bit extreme here, but it is that notion of how do you even show parents what does your kid understand what it means to be a learner? And you don't want to hear compliance. Now, some parents do. And I'm glad to say those kids might do okay in a compliant world.
But they're not going to have a rich life.
No. And I think that's the important thing to remember, that there's a big difference between success in school and success in life as well. And then how do we bridge that gap between being a successful player of the game at school? I was one of those. I got A's. I would go to my teacher and say, how do I get an A on this, sir? And she would say, this, this, this, and this. And I would go, great. And then I'd get it done and then I would stare out the window and be quiet and compliant.
But I wouldn't ask to get pushed. I just wanted to get the work
done. So what do you do when your kids come to you and say, how do I get an A on this, Mum?
Yeah, that's right. It's not. The beauty is we don't have grades. So there's the curiosity still.
You can take that away. I'm not an advocate to say whether you should have grades or not. I'm an advocate that if you have grades, the kids have to understand what next.
Yeah.
But that's another story.
But it is, isn't it? It is what next? What next? It wasn't on A. Well, what's in the A plus? Or take the grade out of it. That's great. Exactly that. What next?
Yeah.
I would love for you to tell us about the, really briefly, because I know we haven't got long, the 10, well, we're not calling them steps. What was it? The 10?
The 10 steps. Yeah, we don't call them mind frames.
Mind frames. And I've probably got a question for most of them once we fill them in. So the first one was, I have appropriately high expectations. And I'd love for you to tell us a little bit about the Goldilocks principle.
Well, the Goldilocks principle is that those high expectations, which are pretty powerful, And it's one thing that kids, it's so transparent to them, no matter what you say. If you think the kid's not going to be successful at a task, those kids can pick it up. They're lightning at picking it up. Now, the Goldilocks principle is you don't want those expectations too high so that the kid says, what's the point? I'm never going to get there. Mom says I've got to go and clean my room.
What's the point? It's never good enough. Or you don't want it too easy. Don't clean your room. If you've been up there half an hour, then obviously you've done your job. You want it to sit in that Goldilocks mode, not too hard, not too easy, and not too boring. And one of the parts of that is, in our jargon, telling the kids up front what success looks like. Like, don't clean your room. If you put all your clothes away, if the floor is clean and your bed's made, your room's clean.
So it's quite clear what the challenge is. And so that high – and of all the parent influences, that's the most powerful. We – They were studying many years ago in five very low socioeconomic schools in one country. And we interviewed parents when their kids came into school at age five and said to them, what do you want your kid to do when they leave high school? Go to university, they said, or some equivalent. We interviewed those same parents when they left primary to go to secondary.
And the parents said, get a job.
Oh, wow.
Schools have failed those kids. Parents had an expectation. You can't tell me over 5,000 kids that none of them could have got onto a tertiary. But those Expectations need to be fair, need to be understood by teachers, need to be set appropriately high. And part of it also is understanding from your kid. What do you think my expectations are for you for this role? And having a conversation about that so that the notion of what success looks like is pretty transparent.
And I'd love to add in there that success, you know, it's not just happiness. It's feeling the full range of human emotions. And what does success look like? for you as a family or for you as a person as well, because it might not be going to university. It might not be just getting a job. It might be travel. It might be whatever else.
And I certainly would hope here in Australia that we could move forward from our current crazy debates about upper high school. The model I like is let's attest what kids actually can do and the level of which they do it. And if they're going to be an excellent basketball player, a water polo player, a barista or a chemist, let's give them attestation for what they can do and how well they do it and get away from this narrowing that goes on. It's a tough ask, but it's worth doing.
And again, one country I worked in, when they got rid of that kind of system and introduced a model where they attested what the kids could do, the retention rate in high school went from 80% to 92% within three years. And here in Australia, we have a retention rate, kids who start high school and finish at one in five don't do it. Now, That's just criminal.
It's very hard to get that on the table because the contingencies of high school is, yeah, the maths and the chemistry teacher is much more important than the other teacher. Well, that's nonsense for some kids. There are multiple ways to be successful.
That's right. And I think showing those pathways more clearly. But it's funny that, you know, the guidance councils are generally fantastic in schools, but there's still this pressure, whether it's from the media, societal, you know, a child's village, that's still this expectation that this is the best route. And if you can't meet that, then you level up as a success as well.
So I 100% agree that the conversation needs to change on that because it's incredibly infuriating what your child in year 10 or 11 choose to leave when you know how much potential they had to do whatever they want to do. I also love throughout your chapter on high expectations was that you were talking about the message that children are not there to be developed for some future time, that they need to enjoy being children now. Can you talk to us a bit more about that?
We so often talk about the future and the jobs that are not created and we're going to prepare kids for the future. Well, the hard core reality, Nikki, is the kids are going to create their future, not us. So let's accept that as the premise. They're going to to it. In 20 years' time, when they get up to their 20s and 30s, they're going to create their future. So let's deal with them right as we have them now.
And the other philosophy that I've certainly had as a parent, and trying to inculcate in my sons and their kids, is let them enjoy childhood. Let them enjoy the thrill. Because as we treat them now, when they're 7 and 8 and 10, that's what our best chance of inculcating the values that we like about respect for self, respect for others, about democratic, about critique, et cetera. We're doing it right now.
And that's what I remember, not this kind of notion that we have to drum something in them because they're going to be a doctor or they're going to be a sports player, et cetera, when they're seven or eight or nine. Let them be kids. And that passion for learning, those skills of how to learn. Now, yes, there is precious knowledge. And you have to look at that passion and look at those skills of learning around certain precious knowledge.
We did an accidental study actually a few years ago by chance. This country decided to ask parents to name their best teacher and why. And the prime minister got up and did it first and the minister of education did it and I did a few. And we had about 10,000 adults who did this. And I got the data. And I analysed it, and there's two things.
The teachers you remember are either those teachers who turned you on to their passion and or those teachers who saw something in you you didn't see in yourself. Not one said it was because of maths or English or because they were males or females or anything like that. It was passion and expectation, no different to parents.
And how simple that is to relay to a child, both as a teacher and as a parent.
Yeah.
And you know your kids, because how old are they now, eight or ten?
Seven and ten, yeah. They will go through
a million passions. Let them enjoy them.
Yeah, I love it. You know, they go through drama and rollerblading and I just think how exquisite that they get to go and they have the time. It's the beauty of homeschooling for me personally is that they have this time and this space to really follow those interests and I just love that we can do that. But I really love seeing the joy and the spark in their eyes when they're pursuing and the curiosity.
It's great. The other one which we learned through COVID, let me give you the example of a 14-year-old I interviewed at one point and I said to him, what happens in COVID in your school? He said, oh, each night... the teacher sends us the work for the next day. He said, I get up at 6 o'clock in the morning. I've done it by 9 o'clock. I have fun with my friends all day. What do I do at the five or six hours when I'm at school?
That notion of efficiency you can do in homeschooling, it's harder to do at school.
Yeah, and there's that intrinsic motivation too to get it done. So I have this free time all of a sudden too, which I think is a wonderful reward. You also touch in this chapter, I believe, on attachment skills. Can you chat to us about the importance of attachment as well?
Well, if you take the premise that challenges, errors, you don't do tasks that you can do easily yourself, then that implies that there is mistakes, there is misunderstandings, there is not knowing. And so the environment, the climate has to be incredibly high trust because it's not just the climate of the parents, it's the climate of the siblings. which sometimes can be, I'm sorry, that can be quite direct. Can I say that?
Yes. And so how do you build a climate where failure is the best friend, where making errors is okay in the home? Because if you do that in the home, they're more likely to do that in the school. And that's where it starts. And I go back, as I said to Carol to Exworth, from zero to five, particularly around that three or four age period, if you don't allow your kid ever to make an error, ever to make a mistake and learn from it, you are damning that kid to a very unfortunate future.
And so it's not too late at any age. How do you go about it? And I bet, I don't know about you, but I can certainly admit that I make many, many mistakes with my kids and whatever. They relish it. We relish it. And it's not making the error. It's learning from the error.
Yeah.
And so that's the notion of attachment that we're getting to is that how do you build that climate that you are responsive? And one of the skills, and we'll come to it probably later, is that we often talk about what we say to our kids.
We're
much more interested in how you listen.
That was the next line,
yeah. And if you can demonstrate to your child that not only can you listen, you can understand. So, Nikki, you're my seven-year-old. I understand this is what you said. Now, you don't have to agree with that, but that mere act of demonstrating you're listening creates that attachment. It's probably
the
highest level of respect you can play to another human being. I've listened to you. Did I have to agree with you? And so that notion of attachment is how do we get it so it's okay for kids to talk to us? It's okay for us to talk to them about what bothers us. And there isn't nasty repercussions. It is a learning exercise. It's an open-to-learn conversation.
I love that. We call ourselves scientists at forest schools. We're all scientists. This is all just hypotheses and... You know, the Apple iPhone wasn't born in one day. We're up to version 13 and look at them. No one called the first version a failure. So I love that and I love that constant validation of emotions because, you know, if we stuff that in and we don't let it out, it will explode somewhere anyway.
I've got another one for you then. If you like being a scientist, have a go at being a learning detective.
Oh, nice. Yeah. It is, isn't it? And then failure is gone then. It just disappears from the conversation, doesn't it?
Yeah.
And better than that, talking about how you made the error is often the best learning exercise to not make it again. One of the things we often give to kids in the work we do them is we give them a problem and we say, and there's a mistake and there's the mistake. How do you think it made that mistake? And there's so much learning in that exercise.
Yes, absolutely. All right. So essentially we just covered number two, which was I make reasonable demands and I'm highly responsive to my child. So what about number three, I'm not alone? Can you speak to us about that?
In today's world we know that even single parents, any kind of, you're not alone. Social media has demonstrated that dramatically for good and bad.
And
there are lots of resources out there. that we can have access to. And sometimes finding someone you can talk to at the end of the day, particularly if you're a lone parent, is not easy, but with many apps and various notions now. But it's that, and it's also how you can, for some parents, learn to talk to teachers. Yes. It's not always easy. And how you can actually negotiate on behalf of your child, which is not easy in a school system.
And so that notion, you're not alone, that there are resources out there. There are ways of doing it. And sometimes it's hard to get access to them because you don't know where to start. But we talk about that in the book, about this is the way to get going and ways in which you can perhaps start to think about how you talk to a parent, how you talk to a teacher. So, yeah, that notion that you're not alone. There are things out
there. All right. What about number five? I develop my child's skill, Will. And I love that you had sense of thrill on there.
Yeah. You often think of, the learning side about achievement. And then we get into all kinds of problems that, you know, bright kids last year tend to be bright kids next year and vice versa, same at the other end of the distribution. And sometimes that's seen as a pattern where kids aren't very smart. I don't say it that way. But that's focusing on achievement. We want to focus on the progress the kid makes, no matter where they start, because that's what learning is about.
And our society, unfortunately, is a bit fixated with achievement, which gets in the way. Some of our best schools in Australia are kids who start really down the distribution. And some of our work schools are kids who start really high up and they don't add a year's growth or a year's progress. They're cruising. And it's the same notion with parents is that, yes, you want your kids to achieve certain things, whether it be academically, whether it be socially.
But your focus is on how to get there. Your focus is on progress. Your focus is on those dispositions, or as we call them in the book, the will. And the most powerful one is that sense of confidence that they can achieve. And that's where parents are so critical. If you set up a climate where you set your kid up for failure, the damage you do is dramatic. And so how do you scaffold it? You want to do all the work for the kid. You want them to fail, dignity of risk.
But you do want them to learn from that risk. And then the thrill part of it is what we were talking about before. You want your kid to not only know stuff, but go deeply. And I don't care whether it's about dinosaurs or about skateboarding or whether it's about chemistry, whether it's about music. That going deep. And again, when you ask parents to think about the best things they did at school, it's usually some project where they went deep.
Yeah. Yep.
So coverage is the killer. And so those people who want to cover it, and unfortunately some of our kids think that good learners are the kids who know lots. It's not necessarily. No, memorisation isn't the key. There is a moment for memorisation, but it ain't the answer. You're right. And so that's trying to look at those three things. You want dispositions. You want that will to be a learner. You want that thrill of learning, and you do want progress and you do want achievement.
So that's the skill, will and the thrill.
Which will then develop number five. I love learning. There was a quote in here, which I love, play is fun and having fun is critical to childhood. But then I also love that your focus here was on executive functioning. So if you could break that down for people that might understand what that is.
Yeah, we've got into it. a lot of trouble with this we wrote a book a couple of years ago on visible learning and early childhood and we had a whole section on play and it wasn't welcomed by some people because our argument is play actually doesn't make much difference
and that was one I'll be honest I was like oh hang on a minute but again
play with language makes a huge difference and like I've worked with with people in the early childhood sector. You can go to early childhood places and they're playing, but there's no language. I had a colleague once said, if you have to go about choosing whether you keep your kid at home, you send them to an early play school or whatever, count the language and send your kid there. It's about that language.
And so play that helps responses to language, spreads the language, gets it deeper, gets it wider, dramatically powerful.
So I just want to add there that it can be with peers as well, but TV doesn't count, does it? Because
you don't
have to
interact. Yes. So I can't say to the TV, explain what you just said. I don't agree. Well, you can, but it's not. But that's where peers in the playgroup are so powerful. That's like reading books. What reading books is, is it expands the language. If you're a parent and you don't want to read a book, tell a story, invent a story. It's that interaction, that language that the kid's developing. It's that trying to make connections.
And this jargon we use of executive processing, it's that ability to focus and not be distracted. It's a really powerful skill. Unfortunately, with some kids, we drug them to get that. And that says they've missed being taught how to, in the jargon, not be disinhibited, to focus. And when is the right time to focus and when is not. For many years of my life, I've been a cricket umpire.
Now, the skill of cricket umpire is how after each ball you turn off because you can't focus for six hours a day. So learning not to focus is as important a skill as learning how to focus. That ability to switch from one way of thinking to another, this is not working. So let's stop it and go over there. There's no point pursuing something that's not working more. It's going to give you the same outcome. And those are the skills that we learn or don't learn.
particularly in the very early years, that become very important as we grow up. And this is where I go back to play. This is where play can be very, very powerful. Like when you say something and I'm playing with you, Nicky, on some game or dough or whatever, and I look at what you're doing and say, oh, what are you doing? I'm starting to focus. I'm starting to get rid of the disinhibitions. I'm starting to look at alternative ways of doing things, different ways of relating.
It can be so powerful. So every time someone says play is good, I want you to pause and say, no, it's not. Play the language. Yes.
Yes, and I love that. And we'll go further into some studies later, but if I could, as an ex-English teacher, so if I could preach that to the rooftops, the children are born readers in the laps of their parents, my work is done. All right, what about number six? I know the power of feedback and that success thrives on it.
When your kid doesn't do what you want them to do, when they make a mistake, their feedback is so, so powerful. But the thing that... It's about feedback. It is one of the most powerful, but it's also one of the most variable. A third of feedback is actually negative. And trying to understand why that is the case is what we delve into in that chapter. And it turns out it's actually quite simple. It took me 20 years to get to this quite
simple. Not that simple then.
What it is, like I focused a lot of my career on the nature of feedback that teachers and parents give to kids, the frequency of it, the timing of it, the quality of it. That's the point. Teachers actually and parents give an incredible amount of feedback to their kids, but hardly any of it's received. Yes. And you'll find out when your kids are teenagers, you're going to have to say them many times, tell me about what you heard me saying, because you know they're not listening.
Like feedback costs if you're a kid. I'm going to have to do it again. It wasn't good enough. Now, I've been with Janet for close to 40 years, and my secret is I'm the world's best selective listener.
I might be competing.
Well, so are our kids. And they learn very quickly that a lot of the feedback they get is not going to help them. It doesn't help them to know where to next, which is what they want. What do I do next? How do I get better? And so they don't listen. And then, so is the feedback heard, understood, and actionable? Do they hear it? Do they understand it? And oftentimes they don't understand it. So we get angry. I gave you feedback and you didn't listen. Well, I actually didn't understand it.
So say to your kids, What do you understand by the feedback I've given you? What are you going to do next? And that's a really, really fascinating question to ask because if the kids can't give you where to go next, your feedback was lousy. It's a really good test of the quality of your feedback. And it's fascinating when you look at it. I've done it in schools with assignments, whether it be a grade or whether it be comments.
And you ask kids to say, well, what did you understand and what would you do next? Teachers are shocked that there's no where to next. And you think, well, why did you write all those comments? The kid wants to know how to improve. That's what drives them. And so this is our message with parents with feedback. Check the understanding. Check the where to next. And focus particularly on helping your kid improve. It's about improving. That's what your kid wants to do. That's what you want to do.
Look, they got it wrong. They made a terrible mistake. Got it wrong. Okay. So how do you improve? And so that's the message to that chapter.
Yeah, I think I'm still like, did you hear me? Just repeat that back. Okay, we're there. Now we're doing the next step.
Now I want you to add. I now want you to add your kids. What do you think you should do next then?
Yeah, in regards to cleaning your room. Can I say that I'm already using your cleaning the room script? So thank you from the bottom of my heart. Just for that alone has been powerful. All right, we've kind of covered I expose my child to language, language, language. But for those people that haven't, I had heard of the Matthew effect, but I know many people haven't. So can you explain the Matthew effect to people?
By about age eight, if your child can't get a minimum level of reading or numeracy, they never catch up.
Can I? Sorry, we have a huge homeschooling listenership here. Is this only in school or is this across the board or have we not got the research on homeschoolers?
No, it's across the board. Now, let me not get pessimistic here. The reason we don't catch up is teachers, homeschool or otherwise, are very generous and they find ways for kids to do the work so they don't have to read and that is not favouring them. They stop teaching the fundamentals of reading and find ways around it. Here's the good news, Nicky. If your child's 9, 10, 11, 12 and doesn't have the skills, go and deliberately teach them. Don't assume them. Don't find ways around them.
And then you can find a way to catch up. The reason we don't catch up is because we find ways around it. And particularly when the kid starts to hit high school where that doesn't happen anymore, it's over. And so, you know, the Matthew effect from the Bible, the rich get rich, the poor stay poorer. That's unfortunately very sad. And, you know, we did a metasynthesis a few years ago on this. And unfortunately, it is a very common phenomenon.
It also means that those first years of teaching those skills is pretty critical. But my message here with you is don't let it be the problem. Find out. And this is why great teachers, great homeschool teachers, diagnosis, diagnosis, never presume.
Don't
presume that kids necessarily have those skills. Check them out. If they don't have them, teach them. I love that. And don't blame them. An analogy I often use is that if you're feeling ill and you go to the doctor and the doctor says you have disease X, the doctor doesn't then say you're a bad person. Whereas in schooling, when sometimes we say the kid can't read or can't write, automatically they're not a very good person or they're a poor learner. No, they're
not. They
haven't had the opportunity.
I used to break my heart. Children coming in from primary school, the first day of high school, first English lesson, they say, oh, you know, I do a bit of a survey and a welcome and a hands up who loves English, hands up who doesn't like it. And straightaway the ones that hated it, I knew were the ones I needed to work with straightaway because they'd had those, they'd already been labelled and they carried those labels and so they'd lost their curiosity.
Those labels are expectations. As we were saying before, they are so crystal clear what that means.
Yeah. Whether it's outright or not, they know. They know. And it just kills the light. And then, like you said, that Matthew effect. Do you have any more detail? I didn't write much down on the effects of the Matthew effect further down the track. Oh,
it's scary. Like if you think of the Matthew effect, by about age eight, if you don't make it, you don't make much gain forever. the schooling system. We find labels for them. We find categories for these kids. We find for things to do because they can't read. It's not because they can't read. It's because they haven't been taught to read. Like Italy is a great example here. They've banned all ability grouping in schools and across schools.
And it's had a dramatically positive effect because then every teacher has to worry about diagnosis and what the kids can do. So, you know, there are some solutions there. But my message here, particularly to you as the home school sector or to all parents, is don't presume. It's not a bad thing if your kid doesn't. I've been to my 70s. There's a lot of things I don't know. That's okay. Learn. But
when they're 10 or 11, if they don't know, we label them. Kills me. Absolutely kills me. Because like you said, you can see the trajectory that they think they're on and that they've put themselves on because of the skills they're lacking. When it's us, it's society that's labelled them. I think if we do our whole society a huge disservice by knocking these kids back. All right, number eight, I appreciate that my child is not perfect, nor am I. Now, I love this. As a teacher. As a parent.
As a parent. And, you know, we're a business that wholeheartedly believes in the need for children to play and experience risk. So part of what you chatted to here is the premises of that dignity with risk. So can you cover that and the damage we do when we assume that our children are perfect little beings?
No, no, no. I learned very quickly when I first became a parent, you never criticize another kid's parents because you're not your own. I sometimes wonder how some parents haven't picked up that message.
Same. I get constantly slapped in the face.
I remember one of my kids, you know, he was naughty at school. There was no question he was naughty. And we had one of those conferences where the teacher was saying with the principal, you're going to have to do something. I said, look, I don't have a problem with him at home. Why do you have a problem with him at school? Who's got the problem here? Now, I went on further than that. I was warned by the principal beforehand because I knew him quite well what was going to happen.
And it got to the point where the teacher said, look, I'm not prepared to teach him anymore unless you put him on Ritalin. No, no, no. I had it worked out. And I had a moment's silence. And I said, look, I'll agree to that on one condition, that you also go on Ritalin, teacher. Well, she hit the roof. I went mad. And Dan calmed her down. And I said, but Ms. X, how do you think my reaction is? It's the same as yours. My son doesn't have the problem. You have the problem. You can't teach him.
He couldn't teach anyone, as it turned out. He'd been in the school many years. But the notion was that I knew he wasn't perfect, and yet another teacher who realised that he was born. He wasn't challenged. She challenged him. He got second in the whole US NASA science competition that year because she pushed him, pushed him, pushed him. And so that's the message here is that your kid's not perfect, and sometimes when they're not perfect, your job's to – Help them. Deal with those distractions.
Give them appropriate challenges. I wish it was always as simple as this. You know what? Kids are like that. They go into their own right. They're seven-year-olds. They don't know everything. They are going to make mistakes. Learn from the mistakes. It's not a punishment. If you punish them for their mistakes all the time, what are they going to think learning is about? Don't do it if you're not going to get it right. Don't take on challenges.
And one of the best predictors of success is the confidence that you can succeed. Not that you'll succeed, but that you can succeed. Sometimes, and I know we're coming to this, you have to learn to ask for help. And that's a really important part of your child, that it's one of the successful parts of learning is knowing when you don't know and seeking out expertise, either on the web or from your mum or from the school or from your peers. And some kids never learn that.
They think seeking out help is an admission of failure. And that's very sad.
Yeah, and I see that in the classroom. And I remember that from the classroom. And it wasn't necessarily teachers. Well, sorry, let me take that back. Teachers would say that they, you know, put your hand up, there's no wrong answer. But then if they were classmates, was allowed to mock somebody, then instantly there was this, you know, not bullying, not going to call it that, but there was this fear of putting your hand up, you know. So it's still the
teachers. There's a double whammy here, Nicky, because there was a great study a few years ago and they said what happens when a kid in the class puts their hand up and gives the wrong answer? Up to 50% of the time the teacher corrects that kid. Up to 50% of the time the teacher asks another kid who corrects that kid. Less than 3% of the time, That error is used as an opportunity. Party for what you say. And parents, teachers, sorry, don't want to affect your kid's self-esteem.
So parents, don't replicate that. Treat the error as an opportunity. That's such a low stat.
You know, when you're talking about those negative feedback cycles, I just think, you know, what is it, one to nine, one positive to nine negative or something like that? No,
I'm not a fan of that stuff. No. Praise has no effect. If anything, it has a dilution effect.
No, it breeds, again, perfectionism and external validation.
If I say to you, Nicky, look, I really like the job you've just done on this task and you've got a huge year over here we're going to have to fix. But the energy you put into it, the commitment, the way you spent the time. And then I wait a day so it's not short-term memory. And then I say to you, Nicky, tell me about the feedback I gave you. Guess what you're going to tell me?
You liked what I did, John. Thanks. Did I get an A?
See, praise is a diluter. Now, the point we make, praise your kids. Nothing wrong with it. But don't mix it up with information about the task. Keep them separate. Like, you didn't clean your room, so this is what you need to do. Keep the praise. Keep the negative out of that conversation. You might have another conversation. I'm not happy that you weren't prepared to put in the effort, et cetera. But keep it separate from the information that you want to impart.
And that's, we're going back to the power of feedback. But, you know, that's... the major message we want to get across on that chapter.
Yeah. Oh, gosh. Again, I had so many, so many quotes underlined here. But I'll get to number 10 because there's a couple I do want to cross before we finish up. But so number 10 is I'm an evaluator of my impact. And the quote I loved was, if you want to be a better parent, learn to see what you look like, feel like, and do by managing you as a child. Stand in their shoes and see their world to better understand how to parent. And I think, gosh, if we could all do that.
Wouldn't we be different people?
As we learned in the school sector and the same in the parent sector, that's the only one that matters dramatically. All the other nine are variants of this one. And we were going to put it first and we thought, no, we'll put it last to reinforce the argument. You've got to learn to stand in the shoes of your kids. You don't have to agree with them. But it's their world you have to understand. It's their world that they think. They do. They have confidence about.
They have that whatever that you need to understand if you're going to be a great parent. And so that whole notion, you don't have to agree, but that notion of standing in their shoes. And so often as parents, we think, you didn't do what I expected you to do. You're not an adult like I expected you are. You don't perform with all the expertise that I have. You're not like me. And that's the message they hear because we never understood from their point of view.
Let's go back to what we said before. They probably didn't hear us or understand us. Not because they were willful or they were deliberately wanting to be naughty. They didn't go in. They didn't know what success looks like. And so that whole notion of after you've had your conversation with your kids, step back, maybe to your spouse, maybe to someone else. How did that go? What do you think? Having someone critique what you did. Sometimes your kids will critique what you did.
And that's not necessarily a bad thing if it's done in the right spirit. It's a thing they need to learn how to critique. That notion of evaluating your impact is the most powerful one. It's the hardest one. Sometimes I wasn't very good at some of the things I did with my kids. And it's hard to think as a parent that, hey, it wasn't good enough.
But
that is the most critical and powerful one throughout the life. And let me also comment here, Nikki. What keeps me going as an educator is I see so many stunning teachers at schools. I don't want to imply by any of this discussion that we have bad parents out there. We have a mixture. But we have some stunning parenting.
Yeah, and I love that you quote one of the beginning and ending quotes was, you know more than you think you do, and as a parent remember also to trust your child. And I just think that's all. That's it. I learned that from Dr Spock. I love that little preface in there. It was a really beautiful nod because what an influence he's had on multiple generations now.
Yes, he was not the pointy, eerie one. It was the start of his book, the end of his book. You do know more than you think you do. We want you to go that one step further and listen to what you think you know and listen to it, particularly through the eyes and ears of your kids.
So there is so much I could talk to you about, but I'm aware that we're running out of time. So do you have a little time for some rapid fire questions?
Sure, go for
it. Amazing. What is your favourite book of all time or what are you currently reading? The Power Broker by
Robert
Caro.
Stunning book about the guy who built all the... Sounds boring. The roads and bridges in New York and how power corrupted.
Ooh. Oh, that does sound interesting, actually. He
gets into the shoes of Robert Caro in ways that you can't imagine. It's just impressive. He was a very interesting man, not always a nice man.
Quite often the way, isn't it? Where do you go or what do you do to reset after a tough day?
Crosswords, jigsaws, I read a lot. Puppy dogs, spouses here, so I mentioned spouse.
Well done, well played. And this is a loaded question, but if you had to choose just one thing to change about the education system, what would it be? I
want the education system to recognise success, regardless of what that success is, and the kids get within limits, not socially desirable, and the level to which they attain it. So if your nine-year-old wants to be good at dinosaurs, wants to be good at chemistry, wants to be good at music, we can recognize that. And when they leave school, we can attest what they have been good at. It's not whether they do chemistry and history. Nothing wrong with that.
Whether they do reading or business, nothing wrong with that. It's have we turned them on to a passion?
Oh, that's so powerful. And again, another reason I've gone the homeschooling route for now. But we have plans. And where can we find out more about your work, John and Kyle's?
Well, if you type into the internet visible learning, you'll get swamped. There's a video out there and we do have a webpage on the Corwin site, C-O-R-W-A-N. And I don't actually have a personal website, website myself. I've got too much OCD. I'd spend too much time on it. But there's many out there and always happy to talk to anyone.
Thank you so very much for sharing Your work has been an influence on my teaching for as long as I can remember. So it's been such a privilege to get you to myself for an hour and to read your work and Kyle's as well. And to see it now from not just the classroom perspective, but it was so wonderful to have a book that helped me as a parent as well. So thank you for doing that crossover because it's been beautiful. It's been really nice to see the amalgamation and the crossovers between the two.
And I think it's a beautiful asset for any parent. And there's some great tips there about you using schools, looking at childcare centres. There's such a plethora of information. They would actually call it a parenting book.
Thank you for having me. You can see I love talking about this. So thank you.
Honestly, with the amount of underlining I did in this book, this episode and conversation could have been 24 hours long.
I have to admit, when I was reading the book, I struggled at times to delineate where I fell in amongst the research as a homeschooling parent you know am I a child's parent or my child's teacher and as a homeschooler how can I not be both so it was so nice to chat to John today and hear both sides of the coin and know that I as a homeschooling mum and my child's first learner and their first teacher that did make me feel a lot better about my choices I have to admit I too suffer from imposter
syndrome when it comes to homeschooling at times John's research has influenced my career in both of the schools that I worked at before I left the state system. So I mean, like what a job I have. I'm so grateful to all of you who listen every week, which enables me to chat to some of the biggest influences in my life and the people that still inspire me to educate children in the best way that I know possible and backed by research.
So thank you for helping me realize my dreams every week just by tuning in. And on that note, I'm going to leave it right there. Until next week, stay wild.