Education Bookcast: Recent Episodes

Stanislaw Pstrokonski

Education Bookcast is a podcast principally for teachers and parents who would like to know more about education. We cover one education-related book or article each episode, going over the key points, placing it in context, and making connections with other ideas, topics, and authors.

Topics include psychology, philosophy, history, and economics of education; pedagogy and teaching methods; neurology and cognitive science; and schools and school systems in historical and international perspective.

Hello everyone,

I have not been recording podcast episodes for over a year. This is because I started a company this year, Panglot Labs Ltd, and I've had to put all my energy into it. This looks like it will continue for at least the medium term, so I've decided to formally state that I'm not going to be adding new material to the podcast regularly anymore for the foreseeable future.

At Panglot Labs we make language learning apps for minority and endangered languages. We're currently working with the indigenous Formosan languages of Taiwan in collaboration with the Taiwanese government's Council of Indigeous Peoples; there are several other upcoming projects as of the end of 2024. My ambition is to create the most effective language e-learning experience in the world (based on my own experiences learning 9 languages and on my understanding of cognitive science and instructional design), but to use it specifically to help with the global problem of language endangerment. If you're a member of a minority or endangered language community, please don't hesitate to get in touch - you can search for Panglot Labs online or contact me via the podcast.

In this episode I explain what I've been doing in 2024, my three biggest lessons from 8 (or 9) years of Education Bookcast, and recommendations I would have given myself all the way back in 2015 when I was reading education books and articles in preparation for starting the podcast. I mention the book Theory of Instruction: Principles and Applications by Siegfried Engelmann and Doug Carnine; I forgot to mention Mayer's 12 Principles of Multimedia Learning, which I also recommend.

It has been a long journey. I believe it has been a success. I hope it has been of use to the audience. Wishing you all the best in 2025 and beyond!

Goodbye :)

In order to understand learning, we need to understand the result of learning - expertise. This is much easier to approach in so-called "kind" domains, such as chess, where the rules are fixed and all information is available. However, there exist more "wicked" domains than this, such as tennis (where your opponent changes each match) or stock market investment (where the world is different each time). How do we study the development of expertise in fields such as these?

Chapter 22 of The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance, entitled Toward Deliberate Practice in the Development of Entrepreneurial Expertise: The Anatomy of the Effectual Ask, concerns expertise in the art of entrepreneurship. This is a wicked domain par excellence, so much so as to throw into doubt the applicability or at least the generalisability of ideas about expertise from other domains, and yet the Handbook has a chapter approaching this topic, which is commendable.

In this episode, you will hear about two key concepts that have arisen out of research on expert entrepreneurship - the Effectual vs. Predictive Frame; and the Entrepreneurial Ask. In other words, we will look at what research has to say about successful entrepreneurs' true attitudes vs. the popular conception in the media, and how they develop their skills.

Enjoy the episode.

RELATED EPISODES

Entrepreneurship education and conspicuous consumption

125+. Interview with Rasmus Koss Hartman

There has been a ton of research on how experts see things differently than novices. (Like, with their eyes.) Everything from where they look, how long they focus for, and their use of peripheral vision, to their ability to anticipate what is going to happen through picking up subtle visual patterns.

In this episode, I summarise and discuss this research.

Enjoy the episode.

Mindset was the first thing I spoke about on this podcast. I even did a separate episode going into the controversies surrounding replication of Carol Dweck's original work. Then there were stress mindsets, introduced by Kelly McGonigal in her book The Upside of Stress. (I happen to have also covered a book by her twin sister Jane, Reality is Broken, about applying the motivational principles learned by game designers in wider life situations).

But now I've encountered another kind of mindset: self-motivation mindset. Although the authors of Self-Regulation of Motivation: A Renewable Resource for Learning (2019) didn't name it that, it clearly is a type of mindset, in that it is a belief about oneself and one's potential. So now that we have not one, not two, but three mindsets to think about, I think it's time we tried to generalise as much as we can, and simply admit: mindsets matter. What other beliefs could there be that are affecting people's learning?

Enjoy the episode.

RELATED EPISODES

Mindset by Carol Dweck
The Upside of Stress by Kelly McGonigal
Mindset: Does it Replicate?

I haven't spoken on the podcast yet about my personal experience learning dancing. At university, I took part in dancesport, which is competitive ballroom and latin dancing; and in the last few years I have been learning to dance tango. I am struck by the differences in philosophies, skill sets, values, and learning cultures between these dance styles, so I wanted to share my experience with you.

Enjoy the episode.

Music used in this episode:

Uno by Anibal Troilo https://open.spotify.com/track/5TFzKLS8tjVMikVaOllr8L?si=69d0c8fbee934d2e

Orgullo Criollo by Osvaldo Pugliese https://open.spotify.com/track/74CjrywI50qOpaLrXo02ik?si=91b1644591a74407

Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go by Wham! https://open.spotify.com/track/0ikz6tENMONtK6qGkOrU3c?si=76304e73b1b04754

Dear Future Husband by Meghan Trainor https://open.spotify.com/track/3cU2wBxuV6nFiuf6PJZNlC?si=0dd4a5e2a23c46bc

...plus one surprise I won't spoil.

This is my first ever attempt at a VIDEO podcast. If you just listen to the audio, you should be fine.

This was a video produced for the STEM MAD conference in Melbourne in October 2023. Unfortunately I couldn't attend the conference, so I made this video to introduce the panel discussion on the role of generative AI in education.

Enjoy the episode.

This is a quick review of where I am now after 150 episodes and just short of 8 years of Education Bookcast.

Thanks for all of your support! Feel free to leave a review of the podcast, or, if you wish, support me on https://www.buymeacoffee.com/edubookcast .

Enjoy the episode.

Since I've now reached episode 150, I've decided to do something I've never done before - discuss a fiction book. (This episode contains spoilers.)

A Wizard of Earthsea is a fantasy novel from 1968, a time when the genre was still not very well-developed. Ursula Le Guin deliberately wanted to contravene some trends she saw in the existing genre, including the main characters being fair-skinned, and war as a moral analogy. In this book, the key issues are internal to a character, a fact that becomes increasingly clear as we read further.

The main character Ged (a.k.a. Sparrowhawk) goes through several educational regimes - a local witch who wants to take advantage of him; a regional wizard, Ogion, who hopes to provide him with the wisdom not to abuse his precocious powers; and a school, on the island of Roke, which teaches him all the knowledge he wants. Ged learns through bitter experience the value of Ogion's wisdom, though he spurns it as a child hungry for knowledge, power, and other people's approval.

I've read this book at least four times, and in three languages - English, Polish, and Spanish. Although its relevance to education is tenuous, I wanted to take advantage of episode 150 to talk about the book I've read the greatest number of times in my life.

Enjoy the episode.

A lot of the classic expertise research, especially the research about deliberate practice and the "10,000 hour rule", is inspired by K. Anders Ericcson's study of violinists at the Berlin Conservatory. However, we have seen before how misleading sampling a particular culture and generalising the findings over the whole of humanity can be. Thankfully, Lucy Green's How Popular Musicians Learn gives us something of an antidote to this classical music bias.

Green's book is based on interviews with 14 musicians in south-east England, of which 13 were instrumentalists and one, a singer. Their musical genres were all "guitar-based popular music" which includes rock and folk music. In her book, a number of findings undermine standard narratives about learning, including the inevitability of practice being unpleasant (the musicians enjoy their practice, unline classical musicains); the need for sheet music in order to learn (they all worked from recordings, and most couldn't read music); and the need for instruction (none of these musicians had been extensively formally trained, and those who had been had found it unhelpful).

Enjoy the episode.

RELATED EPISODES

Check out other episodes on anthropology and culture, and how they help provide wider samples for our understanding of psychology:

Developing Talent in Young People by Benjamin Bloom
Attachment Theory as Cultural Ideology
Cultural Foundations of Learning, East and West by Jin Li
The Anthroplogy of Childhood by David Lancy
The World Until Yesterday by Jared Diamond
The Geography of Thought by Richard NIsbett

SUPPORT

You can support Education Bookcast and join the community forum via Buy Me a Coffee using the following link: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/edubookcast .

Any teacher in a Western cultural context knows that classroom behaviour is the most challenging part of the job. A lot of the time, it seems like crowd control is the main issue, and "teaching" is secondary. Unfortunately, teacher training courses don't do a good job of preparing teachers for this reality, with behaviour management rarely instructed at all.

Bill Rogers has been helping teachers develop their classroom behaviour management and discipline skills for decades. He has brought his calm and relationship-focused approach to innumerable schools, often including those with very challenging behaviour, or those in "special measures". His practical insights into what to do in the classroom, and the principles behind his approach, offer a valuable guide for teachers struggling with this aspect of their jobs.

I intend this to be one of several behaviour management books that I will cover on the podcast. Hopefully, in this way I can direct some teachers and school leaders to some useful resources, share some practical advice, and draw some general conclusions about school discipline and learning.

Enjoy the episode.

SUPPORT

You can support Education Bookcast and join the community forum via Buy Me a Coffee using the following link: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/edubookcast .

Dr Guy Emerson (a.k.a Guy Karavengleman) is a computational linguist working at the Cambridge University Computer Laboratory. In this episode, we discuss issues surrounding LLMs such as ChatGPT, GPT-3, GPT-4, and Google Bard.

Guy is concerned about misinterpretations of what the technology does and is capable of. As a computational linguist, he works on language models with a focus on semantics and human language acquisition, and thus questions of linguistic meaning and understanding are particularly relevant to his work. While LLMs are an impressive technology with startling capabilities, we need to be aware of when we may be fooling ourselves about their potential.

In this episode, we discuss what LLMs are; ways in which they have been misrepresented and misinterpreted; ethical questions about the companies developing this technology; and what they might be used for.

Enjoy the episode.

SUPPORT

You can support the podcast and join the community forum by visiting https://www.buymeacoffee.com/edubookcast .

In the second part of this two-part episode about lessons learned from my time working in the education technology sector, I wanted to share a very significant quantitative finding to improve learning: what I call the "90% rule".

Desirable difficulties is a concept that many know about and try to apply to teaching situations, but there is a question of how difficult one should make things. Surely there is a level at which things are toodifficult? In which case, what is the perfect level of difficulty that we should aim for? The secret is this 90% number.

Enjoy the episode.

REFERENCES

Eglington, L.G., Pavlik Jr, P.I. Optimizing practice scheduling requires quantitative tracking of individual item performance. npj Sci. Learn. 5, 15 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41539-020-00074-4

See also the SuperMemo Guru wiki: https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Optimum_interval.

SUPPORT

If you would like to support Education Bookcast and join the community forum, you can do so at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/edubookcast.

I've now been working as a data scientist in educational technology for over four years. In that time I've thought a lot about various educational concepts within edtech, and I want to share some of what I've learnt.

In the first part of this two-part episode, I want to talk about what I call the Fundamental Duality of Educational Materials. The Fundamental Duality is that we use our content to measure our students / users (e.g. what they know), but we also use our users to measure our content (e.g. how difficult it is). This leads to a sort of chicken-and-egg problem, where all we see is the interaction of the users with the content, but from that single fact we have to somehow extract information about the two different interacting entities.

For example, suppose that a user gets a question wrong. This could mean one of a number of things:

Is the question difficult?
Does the user not know this area very well?

There is also a third possibility: Is this question faulty? i.e. did the user actually answer the question correctly, but it was marked as incorrect due to a bug in the system, or in the way the content was created?

Answering these questions is difficult because they are apparently all possible in this situation. This is an illustration of the Fundamental Duality.

In the episode, I make some mention of Item Response Theory (IRT), which is a method used in computerised adaptive testing (CAT) to handle this very issue. But IRT is quite difficult to explain to a lay audience, especially without the use of images, so I will focus on Elo and Glicko rating systems as examples of handling this duality.

Enjoy the episode.

You can support Education Bookcast and join the community forum by visiting https://www.buymeacoffee.com/edubookcast.

This is the second part of the message for my friend Guy about becoming a better lecturer. In this part, I go over 27 practical techniques and tips for improving lecturing (as well as improving the way homework exercises are designed), referring to the principles and theory outlined in the previous part to explain how and why these work. To be completely honest some of the suggestions are more general pedagogical suggestions rather than being specific to lecturing, but I decided to throw them in as well for completeness.

Enjoy the episode.

You can support Education Bookcast and join the community forum by visiting https://www.buymeacoffee.com/edubookcast.

Another in the series of "really long voice notes from Staś". My friend Guy is a lecturer in natural language processing. He asked me if I could give him some tips about how to lecture better, so I told him I would record a podcast episode about it.

I've divided the episode into two parts. In this first part, before we speak about practical things to do, I will discuss what the basic aims are, and some important preliminary framing questions - what are we trying to achieve? How does learning work? And when can I stop punching the ground with my fist?

There is some extra pressure when talking about how to be a good lecturer, as in effect I might ironically give a bad lecture about how to lecture well. I think I did ok.

Enjoy the episode.

You can support Education Bookcast and join the community forum by going to https://www.buymeacoffee.com/edubookcast.

Benjamin Bloom is best known for Bloom's Taxonomy, a scheme for categorising ways of thinking about or interacting with learning content on a scale from less to more sophisticated. However, the project he led investigating the lifelong development of expertise should be much more famous.

The book's full title makes it feel as though it was published in 1685 rather than 1985: The dramatic findings of a ground-breaking study of 120 immensely talented individuals reveal astonishing new information on Developing Talent in Young People. Bloom's team looked at extraordinary achievers in six domains: pianists, sculptors, swimmers, tennis players, mathematicians, and neurologists, so that he had two each from artistic, athletic, and academic pursuits. He was trying to understand the life circumstances during childhood and adolescense - particularly the practice routines and social milieu - which led to the development of the subjects' expertise.

Their research methods were unusual. Rather than using a large sample and taking quantitative data (which would have been difficult anyway due to the lack of a large number of exceptional people, by definition) or presenting qualitative interviews of individual case studies, Bloom's team interviewed around 20-30 people from each domain and then summarised the findings of these interviews. It leaves us with a sense of the qualitative experience of going through their learning processes, while also reducing the chances of over-generalising from a single case.

Pianists were the main focus of discussion where Bloom and his colleauges tried to generalised the findings, although all six categories had a full exposition as to the findings for their domain in particular. The pianists followed an especially clear pattern which is worth starting from, and subsequently comparing with the others.

In the context of an abundance of information about how people think and learn on shorter timescales (from seconds to weeks), having information about how people develop over the lifespan is invaluable. I will definitely be referring to this book a lot in future.

Enjoy the episode.

RELATED EPISODES

This book is related to the development of expertise, which I talk about on a lot of episodes, but the one specific one I mentioned in the recording was:

The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle

SUPPORT

You can support Education Bookcast and join the community forum via Buy Me a Coffee using the following link: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/edubookcast.

Cover image: horse and rider by Nadia, age 5.

The nature of talent is something that I dealt with near the beginning of the existence of Education Bookcast, reviewing books like Genius Explained, Outliers, The Talent Code, and Bounce. The general consensus was that talent is an illusion - people simply get better at things through exposure and practice.

My confidence in this assertion was shaken when reading the IQ literature, but now, in the book The Road to Excellence edited by K. Anders Ericsson, the article The Rage to Master: the Decisive Role of Talent in the Visual Arts by Ellen Winner. She points out how some exceptional children are obsessed with drawing, and draw in a way that is qualitatively different to ordinary children. She argues that the aforementioned orthodoxy of talent apparently not really existing is in fact incorrect, in light of these prodigies and their extraordinary output.

In the recording, I discuss these findings and try to find a way to put it all together. Benjamin Bloom's book Developing Talent in Young People also comes in handy, as not only does Ellen Winner cite it (incorrectly, in my view), but he also provides a valuable insight into his forty years of research into learning in schools which helps us make sense of the conundrum of talent's apparent non-existence while we have well-documented examples of extraordinarily talented individuals, in the visual arts at least.

Enjoy the episode.

RELATED EPISODES

Bounce by Matthew Syed
Genius Explained by Michael Howe
The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle
Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

SUPPORT

You can support the podcast and join the community forum by visiting https://buymeacoffee.com/edubookcast.

Season 2 of the Pedagogue-Cast is here!

The Pedagogue-Cast is a separate podcast project I share with Justin Matthys, founder of Maths Pathway. We discuss the kinds of questions that teachers might have about good practice which touch on cognitive science, making sure both to make the most of the research findings while also making it practical for use in the classroom.

In this new season, Justin and I are going to discuss music, flow, focus, student choice, social & emotional learning interventions, and how motivation develops over time.

Some places where you can find the Pedagogue-Cast:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-pedagogue-cast/id1637019084 - Apple podcasts

https://open.spotify.com/show/437GYDF4jkkFxfkGR4cknc - Spotify

https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5idXp6c3Byb3V0LmNvbS8xOTg0NDY3LnJzcw?hl=en - Google podcasts

You can also try searching for the Pedagogue-Cast in your favourite podcast app.

Enjoy!

After my last episode on behaviourism, cognitivism, and constructivism ("A Message for Zoë"), I heard back from Zoë herself, and also heard from Malin Tväråna, an education researcher in Sweden. I decided that it was worth recording an episode relating what I heard from them, and my thoughts about it.

Enjoy the episode.

###

REFERENCES

Miłosz, Czesław (1953): The Captive Mind.

Radford, Luis (2016): The Theory of Objectification and its Place among Sociocultural Research in Mathematics Education.

Radford, Luis (2018): Teaching and learning (algebra or something else): Working together to make sense of similarities and differences between theories (and understanding oneself).

My friend Zoë (hi Zoë!) is taking a course on learning design. In it, she heard about Behaviourism, Cognitivism, and Constructivism, and while she said that she found it confusing, her main takeaway is that "you need a bit of each". I recorded this episode to help her have a clearer sense of what these three words really mean, and that "a bit of each" is emphatically not the right message.

I thought that others might benefit from the same summary. This is a frequent topic in education courses, and I think it generally gets a pretty poor treatment. Hopefully this will clear things up for a lot of people.

Enjoy the episode.

RELATED EPISODES

Note how the distribution of episodes reflects the importance of topics. Behaviourism is important to know about but it really isn't current as a way of thinking about learning, it's more of a historical relic with some lasting applicability to animal training. Constructivism is a mistaken and misleading theory that keeps negatively affecting educational practice and never seems to go away, so I keep having to talk about it. Cognitivism is a really effective approach which deserves to be known more widely - it took me a long time to find out about it, hence why the episodes about it tend to be more recent.

Behaviourism: 3. Don't Shoot the Dog! The New Art of Teaching and Training by Karen Pryor

Constructivism: 42. Do Schools Kill Creativity? by Ken Robinson; 65. Beyond the Hole in the Wall by Sugata Mitra; 87. Experiential Learning by Colin Beard and John Wilson; 88. The Failure of Constructivist, Discovery, Problem-based, Experiential, and Inquiry-based Teaching; 90. Discovery learning: the idea that won't die; 124. The Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences

Cognitivism: 79. What learning is; 80. The Chimp Paradox by Prof Steve Peters; 82. Memorable Teaching by Pepps McCrea; 85. Why Don't Students Like School? by Daniel Willingham; 95. The Reading Mind by Dan Willingham; 132a. Direct Instruction and Project Follow Through; 132b. Direct Instruction: the evidence; 135. Professional writing expertise; 136. Congitive architecture and ACT-R; 136+. Interview with Prof. Christian Lebiere on ACT-R and Cognitive Architecture

REFERENCES

I mention the following article as one where the authors (eminent figures in cognitive architecture, one of whom is a Nobel Prize winner) ask Constructivists to stop misrepresenting their work and saying things in direct contradiction to the evidence.

Anderson, Reder, & Simon (1999). Applications and Misapplacations of Cognitive Psychology to Mathematics Education.

SUPPORT

You can support the podcast and join the community forum by visiting https://www.buymeacoffee.com/edubookcast.

In the previous recording, I was speaking about political economy using the example of prison gangs, taken from David Skarbek's book Social Order of the Underworld. In this recording, I give the example of 18th-century Atlantic pirates, as discussed in Peter Leeson's The Invisible Hook. (It's a pun on Adam Smith's "invisible hand of the market".)

We may have an image of pirates as fearsome, but this is at least somewhat deliberately manufactured by the pirates themselves. They wanted to have such a reputation so that their victims wouldn't resist as they looted their ships. There are parts of the pirate lifestyle, such as democracy and voluntarism, that we don't tend to discuss because they were part of life on a pirate ship but not something that they felt the need to advertise widely.

What is most notable is that pirates' way of life seemed to be significantly preferable, and their governance significantly more "progressive", than that on merchant ships, which tended to be highly autocratic and abusive. It also provides a different perspective when we realise that sailors went into piracy at a time of labour market oversupply due to the ending of the War of Spanish Succession, when the British Navy didn't have the funds to keep on so many sailors, and yet this was the career of tens of thousands of young men who now had to find a job elsewhere.

Overall, in these two recordings, I hope to have shown you that thinking about people's motivations and situations from the perspective of political economy makes a lot more sense, and builds a much richer picture, than merely psychological or sociological explanations (such as childhood trauma, psychopathy, or people's fundamental evil or violent nature). With this in mind, I hope that in future we can use more of this thinking when considering education, so that we can understand better how it works and how to improve it.

Enjoy the episode.

Please be advised that this episode contains mentions of violence and may be unsuitable for some listeners.

I'd like to flesh out what I've been saying before about the power of economic analysis in explaining people's actions.

Whereas when we normally think about motivation we think in terms of psychology, economists naturally think in terms of incentives. This kind of thinking is generally missing in educational discourse.

There are two books that I found particularly fascinating and instructive on this point: The Social Order of the Underworld: How Prison Gangs Govern the American Penal System by David Skarbek; and The Invisible Hook by Peter Leeson. This recording focuses on the former.

David Skarbek's book is fascinating and rich in both detail and theoretical explanation, so I focus on what I find most compelling and most relevant to transfer over to thinking about other contexts. First of all, he introduces existing criminological theories that aim to account for the rise in prison gangs, namely Deprivation theory and Importation theory. The former suggests that inmate behaviour is a result of the pain of imprisonment, and the latter focuses on pre-prison beliefs and experiences that are brought into prison.

Skarbek departs from both of these theories, grounding his own analysis in political economy. He introduces us to the basic assumptions of economics - that people are self-interested and respond rationally to incentives - and goes on to describe the role of governance in society. His fundamental thesis is that prison gangs provide governance, meaning that they provide a form of public good which enhances personal safety and opportunities for trade (mostly in drugs).

While I'm yet to fully apply the ideas of political economy to education (except for reading about it inThe Beautiful Tree, China's Examination Hell, and Education and the State), I feel that digging in to some examples like this can help us appreciate the reasons why people do things. Crucially, they are not all psychological.

Enjoy the episode.

Education Bookcast released its first episode on the 1st of January 2016. I'd like to take this opportunity to talk about some of the big things that I think I've learned in that time. I speak about:

Psychology is overrated - the replication crisis and the bias in cultural sampling, and therefore the importance of anthropological evidence;
Psychology is underrated - how amazing the field of cognitive architecture is, and how little known it appears to be as a field;
apparent resistance to scientific findings from some people in the field of education;
understanding expertise as a key to knowing how to improve education;
the power of economic thinking in understanding motivation and behaviour;
the failure of behaviourism, and the incorrect conclusions some people have drawn from it; and
how school seems to be good for society, but the mechanisms of how this happens aren't completely clear, and I remain neutral on this point as I gather further evidence.

Enjoy the episode.

###

SUPPORT

You can support the podcast and join the community forum by visiting https://www.buymeacoffee.com/edubookcast.

This is the second episode concerning self-related beliefs taken from chapters of The Cambridge Handbook of Motivation and Learning. Here I talk about self-efficacy, which concerns how much you believe that you can do something specific, e.g. solve a particular kind of maths problem.

Self-esteem, self-concept, self-efficacy - it's easy to get confused with so many "self-words" flying around. There are even other words which aren't used by academics but are in common parlance, such as self-belief. I go into more detail and give more examples of the difference in the recording, but basically, whereas self-concept concerns your attitude to an entire domain (e.g. how good you think you are at sports), self-efficacy refers to how likely you think you would be to succeed in a specific class of activity (e.g. do you think you could run a marathon).

Like self-concept, self-efficacy has been found to be strongly correlated with a bunch of positive behaviours, such as perseverance, but also outcomes, such as academic interest and academic performance. Unfortunately causality doesn't seem to have been established (as far as I can tell from the article), which blunts my enthusiasm about it somewhat. Nevertheless, this is definitely something to keep an eye on.

The article also explains the sources of self-efficacy beliefs, which are four: mastery experiences (succeeding or failing); vicarious experiences (watching another person suceed or fail); social persuasion (including encouragement); and physiological state (e.g. anxiety). This list suggests interventions that can be used to increase self-efficacy, namely encouragement and the presentation of models (i.e. peers who can also succeed, possibly after some struggle).

One thing I forgot to mention in the recording: in Chinese culture, it is common to tell children stories of famous successful people both from China and from around the world who struggled through great difficulties to achieve their life goals. Marie Curie seems to figure particularly prominently in these biographies, being somebody who had to move to a foreign country (France) to study, breaking the mould as a woman in science, being famed for her extraordinary work ethic, and going on to be the first person to ever achieve a Nobel Prize in two different disciplines (Physics and Chemistry). While there are many ways to interpret the details of how such stories would affect people, it might in part have a self-efficacy effect, by showing young people that it is possible to succeed even in difficult circumstances.

Enjoy the episodes.

RELATED EPISODES

The Psychology of Self-Defense: Self-Affirmation Theory by David Sherman & Geoffrey Cohen
The problem with self-esteem
Self Compassion by Kristin Neff

SUPPORT

If you would like to support the podcast and join the community forum, you can visit https://www.buymeacoffee.com/edubookcast.

This is the second episode concerning self-related beliefs taken from chapters of The Cambridge Handbook of Motivation and Learning. Here I talk about self-efficacy, which concerns how much you believe that you can do something specific, e.g. solve a particular kind of maths problem.

Self-esteem, self-concept, self-efficacy - it's easy to get confused with so many "self-words" flying around. There are even other words which aren't used by academics but are in common parlance, such as self-belief. I go into more detail and give more examples of the difference in the recording, but basically, whereas self-concept concerns your attitude to an entire domain (e.g. how good you think you are at sports), self-efficacy refers to how likely you think you would be to succeed in a specific class of activity (e.g. do you think you could run a marathon).

Like self-concept, self-efficacy has been found to be strongly correlated with a bunch of positive behaviours, such as perseverance, but also outcomes, such as academic interest and academic performance. Unfortunately causality doesn't seem to have been established (as far as I can tell from the article), which blunts my enthusiasm about it somewhat. Nevertheless, this is definitely something to keep an eye on.

The article also explains the sources of self-efficacy beliefs, which are four: mastery experiences (succeeding or failing); vicarious experiences (watching another person suceed or fail); social persuasion (including encouragement); and physiological state (e.g. anxiety). This list suggests interventions that can be used to increase self-efficacy, namely encouragement and the presentation of models (i.e. peers who can also succeed, possibly after some struggle).

One thing I forgot to mention in the recording: in Chinese culture, it is common to tell children stories of famous successful people both from China and from around the world who struggled through great difficulties to achieve their life goals. Marie Curie seems to figure particularly prominently in these biographies, being somebody who had to move to a foreign country (France) to study, breaking the mould as a woman in science, being famed for her extraordinary work ethic, and going on to be the first person to ever achieve a Nobel Prize in two different disciplines (Physics and Chemistry). While there are many ways to interpret the details of how such stories would affect people, it might in part have a self-efficacy effect, by showing young people that it is possible to succeed even in difficult circumstances.

Enjoy the episodes.

RELATED EPISODES

The Psychology of Self-Defense: Self-Affirmation Theory by David Sherman & Geoffrey Cohen
The problem with self-esteem
Self Compassion by Kristin Neff

SUPPORT

If you would like to support the podcast and join the community forum, you can visit https://www.buymeacoffee.com/edubookcast.

Among the huge academic tomes that I've been ploughing through recently is The Cambridge Handbook of Motivation and Learning. I've long felt that my understanding of motivation is superficial and incomplete, and I wondered whether motivation was understood at all by anybody in the academic literature, or whether remained a mysterious and convoluted problem. The Handbook has shown me that there is much good research that has been done that sheds light on motivation, interest, curiosity, and how they relate to learning.

The Handbook starts off with five chapters on "The Self and Its Impact". I have previously covered a number of self-related concepts on the podcast, such as self-esteem, stereotype threat, self-affirmation theory, and self-compassion, but my conclusion was that raising self-esteem does nothing to help people academically or to improve their character, and in fact could lead to narcissism, which is now at epidemic levels following the self-esteem movement that began in California in the 1980's.

However, the Handbook has shown me that a closer look at self-related beliefs paints a more positive picture, and shows that such beliefs are central to students' academic success, as well as to people's life outcomes. I have had to radically change my understanding of the role and impact of this kind of belief, as well as greatly increasing how important encouragement seems to be for young people to flourish.

In this first of two episodes on the science of self-belief and beliefs relating to the self, I will discuss self-concept, which is similar to self-esteem but domain-specific rather than global. For example, somebody might have a high self-concept for physical appearance (i.e. they think they are handsome / beautiful), but a low self-concept for physical performance (i.e. they think they are bad at sports); or a high self-concept for English (i.e. they think they are good at those classes) but a low self-concept for Mathematics (they think they are bad at maths). This domain specificity allows us to see through experiments where self-esteem interventions seem to do little, as often they do a lot for one specific self-concept, while not affecting the rest, thus making it seem that globally not much has changed, when in fact there has been a major positive impact.

Overall, self-concept seems to be a very important concept (ha) for understanding what makes people successful, and a vital lever to pull in helping people reach their potential.

Enjoy the episode.

RELATED EPISODES

The Psychology of Self-Defense: Self-Affirmation Theory by David Sherman & Geoffrey Cohen
The problem with self-esteem
Self Compassion by Kristin Neff

SUPPORT

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In this interview, I have the honour to speak with Professor Christian Lebiere, researcher in cognitive architecture, co-author of The Atomic Components of Thought, and one of the main developers of the ACT-R architecture. We talk on a range of topics relating to cognitive architecture, cognitive modelling, and psychology. My questions are listed below, by theme.

A note on cover art: this is a diagram of ACT-R version 2.0 from 1993. More modern versions of ACT-R contain somewhat different components, but we discuss this diagram in the interview so I have shared it here.

OVERVIEW. What is cognitive architecture? What is ACT-R? Why should we care?

EVIDENCE. What evidence is there for ACT-R? How much evidence is there? What sort of human activities can it model? Can it model non-goal-driven behaviours such as daydreaming, for instance? Has ACT-R been tested with people of different ages (children vs. adults vs. the elderly)? Has it been tested with people of different cultures?

SCOPE & ELEMENTS. ACT-R version 2.0 had no working memory component - why not, and what were the circumstances that led to it being introduced? How does ACT-R deal with consciousness? How is ACT-R being extended to deal with emotions?

APPLICATION. When did ACT-R become mature enough as a theory for you to move from basic science and theory-building to application? What are the educational applications of ACT-R?

PUBLIC RELATIONS. It took me over 7 years before I found out about cognitive architecture as a field. Nobody in education, or in the general public, seems to know about it, and it seems to never be mentioned by the vast majority of psychologists either. Given its achievements in modelling human cognition, why do so few people know about it?

Enjoy the episode.

RELATED EPISODES

What learning is
The Chimp Paradox by Prof Steve Peters
Memorable Teaching by Peps McCrea
Why Don't Students Like School? by Daniel Willingham
The Reading Mind by Daniel Willingham

SUPPORT

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I have recently discovered the field of cognitive architecture. I have been reading around the area for the last couple of months, and I would like to introduce it to my audience. It's an area of study with incredible achievements which revitalises my belief in psychology as a field, but which for some reason is not at all well known, even in education circles where it deserves to be known to all as the most impressive set of theories of cognition and learning ever produced.

I particularly focus on one theory known as ACT-R, though I have also been reading about other architectures such as Soar, LIDA, EPIC, and CLARION. I will be able to go into more detail about some of these in later episodes of the podcast.

For the moment, the biggest takeaway is what a cognitive architecture is and how impressive the achievements of the field have been so far. Cognitive architectures aim to describe human thinking and learning through analysing the mind into parts, and clearly specifying the role of each part and its interaction with other parts. It then makes predictions of how people would behave in a given situation based on these models - predictions that often achieve startling levels of accuracy, over a wide range of scenarios. The field is now mature enough that the architectures are routinely used by some psychologists to explain the results of their experiments, and the architectures are also used in technology as a basis for robot cognition or for computer game AI characters.

Enjoy the episode.

RELATED EPISODES

What learning is
The Chimp Paradox by Prof Steve Peters
Memorable Teaching by Peps McCrea
Why Don't Students Like School? by Daniel Willingham
The Reading Mind by Daniel Willingham

SUPPORT

You can support Education Bookcast and join the community forum by visiting https://www.buymeacoffee.com/edubookcast.

One of the patrons of the podcast wrote to me on the forum that while I have covered the research on learning to read in a fair amount of detail, I'm yet to speak about learning to write, and he would really like to know more about this since he teaches writing day to day. I happen to have been reading Cambridge Handbook on Expertise and Expert Performance edited by the late great K. Anders Ericsson (among others), and there is a chapter entitled Professional Writing Expertise which I thought might be relevant. So this one's for you, Tom.

The chapter starts with an overview of the definition of what expert writing is as a task, followed by a description of the characteristics of expert writers, and finally goes on to describe something of the learning process of becoming a writer. Writing is a difficult skill to characterise because it comes in so many different forms, genres, and domains of expertise, but commonalities among expert writers are still possible to elucidate.

While this article is more of a study of experts and expertise rather than a detailed map of how to go from zero to hero in writing, it does help us to understand the nature of the task and the kinds of skills that need to be mastered in order to write well, as well as identify the sorts of issues that even the pros struggle with.

Enjoy the episode.

If you would like to support the podcast and join the community forum, go to https://www.buymeacoffee.com/edubookcast.

In this episode, I have Judith Millecker on as a guest. Judith is the author of the Philosocats series of books, which aims to help children ages 4-10 to engage in philosophy. It is an outgrowth of her work running philosophy for children sessions in London. We discuss her most recent book, social and emotional learning, critical thinking, and how pedagogy might vary by domain.

Enjoy the episode.

I was reading the Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance edited by K. Anders Ericsson yesterday, and after going through a chapter on medical experts, something struck me about the nature of expertise, automaticity, and Kahnemann and Tversky's System 1 vs. System 2 (also known as dual-process theory, popularised by their book Thinking, Fast and Slow), which joined together what I know about chess players, doctors, and how literacy works. I'm excited to share it with you today.

Enjoy the episode.

RELATED EPISODES

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahnemann
Blink by Malcolm Gladwell
Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
How We Learn by Benedict Carey
What learning is
The Reading Mind by Daniel Willingham
Philosophy of Science - the good bits
The Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences

SUPPORT

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I now have a new podcast, the Pedagogue-Cast!

Together with Justin Matthys, co-founder of Australian education technology company Maths Pathway, we discuss how education research can be applied in the classroom. It's designed to be an easier listen for busy teachers, with a more immediate practical takeaway.

Website: https://thepedagoguecast.com.au/

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/437GYDF4jkkFxfkGR4cknc

I've shared the first episode of Season 1 in this recording so you can get a sense of what the podcast is like. To listen to further episodes, visit the Pedagogue-Cast itself.

I'm excited!

Enjoy the episode.

In this part of the episode, I will discuss the evidence for the effectiveness of Direct Instruction, drawing from Project Follow Through, but also from 50 years of studies that have been published since.

Enjoy the episode.

REFERENCES

The Direct Instruction Follow Through Model: Design and Outcomes by Siegfried Engelmann, Wesley Becker, Douglas Carnine, and Russel Gersten (1988)

No Simple Answer: Critique of the "Follow Through" Evaluation by Ernest House, Gene Glass, Leslie McLean and Decker Walker (1978)

Follow Through Revisited: Reflections on the Site Variability Issue by Russel Gersten (1984)

The Effectiveness of Direct Instruction Curricula: A Meta-Analysis of a Half Century of Research by Jean Stockard, Timothy Wood, Cristy Coughlin and Caitlin Rasplica Khoury (2018)

RELATED EPISODES

Comprehensive School Reform

SUPPORT

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I've spent a lot of time on the podcast so far discussing discovery learning, but not had any episodes explicitly dedicated to what might be considered its antithesis, Direct Instruction. In this episode I finally get round to this worthy topic.

First of all, uppercase "Direct Instruction", or DI for short, should be distinguished from lowercase "direct instruction". The latter refers to explicit teaching in general, whereas the former, as a proper noun, refers to a specific implementation and philosophy as designed by Siegfried Engelmann and colleagues, starting in the early 1960s. Direct Instruction is also considered to be a type of Comprehensive School Reform (CSR), and indeed, in my episode covering a meta-analysis of CSR I pointed out that DI was one of the three most effective CSR models.

Direct Instruction came to fame in the early 1970s as a result of Project Follow Through, which was the largest educational study ever funded by the United States government. DI was one of the 13 models used in the program and performed very well. Since then it has had a further half century of evidence gathering, which will give us plenty to look at.

In this first part of the episode, I introduce the nature and methods of Direct Instruction, as well as a brief introduction to Project Follow Through. The aim is to have you familiar with exactly what this approach is before we go into how well it does or doesn't work in the later recordings of this episode.

Enjoy the episode.

REFERENCES

The Direct Instruction Follow Through Model: Design and Outcomes by Engelmann et al. (1988)

The Effectiveness of Direct Instruction Curricula: A Meta-Analysis of a Half Century of Research by Stockard et al. (2018)

RELATED EPISODES

Marva Collins' Way by Marva Collins and Civia Tamarkin
Comprehensive School Reform
The Failure of Constructivist, Discovery, Problem-based, Experiential, and Inquiry-based Teaching
Discovery learning: the idea that won't die

SUPPORT

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[By the way, the cover image is of the proportion of children in different countries who have a growth mindset (darker red is more). The data was taken from PISA 2019 and I constructed the image using Python. Grey countries are those for which I didn't have data.]

I was initially a huge supporter and admirer of Carol Dweck's work on fixed vs. growth mindset. The very first episode of the podcast was about her book, and I mentioned it many times afterwards, talking about how amazing it was.

Then a couple of years ago I lost confidence. Angry about being misled by advocates of constructivist, project-based, or discovery learning, and pessimistic about psychology as a whole with my recent discovery of the degree to which studies would have completely different results depending on cultural sample, I heard that Dweck's work was having trouble replicating. In episode 100, I spoke about my concerns with mindset, which was particularly bitter since I'd once been such a strong advocate of it. It just seemed like the entire field of psychology was collapsing around me and there was nobody I could trust.

Since then, a listener of the podcast asked me to elaborate on my position regarding mindset. Why had I changed my view? What do I currently think? I decided to take a deeper look at what had been happening in the mindset scene, and this episode is the product.

Enjoy the episode.

RELATED EPISODES

Mindset by Carol Dweck
The Upside of Stress by Kelly McGonigal (about stress mindsets)

REFERENCES

Mentioned in this episode (in order of appearance):

Does mindset affect children's ability, school achievement, or response to challenge? Three failures to replicate by Li & Bates (2018)

Failure to Replicate: Testing a Growth Mindset Intervention for College Student Success by Brez et al. (2020)

Changing Mindsets: Effectiveness trial Evaluation Report from the Education Endowment Foundation (2019)

To What Extent and Under Which Circumstances Are Growth Mind-Sets Important to Academic Achievement? Two Meta-Analyses by Sisk et al. (2018)

THE ONE VARIABLE THAT MAKES GROWTH MINDSET INTERVENTIONS WORK by Russell T. Warne (2020)

Schools are buying "growth mindset" interventions despite scant evidence that they work well by Brooke Macnamara (2018)

What Can Be Learned From Growth Mindset Controversies? by Yeager & Dweck (2020)

SUPPORT

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I stumbled across a fascinating paper looking into how children conceptualise the world around them. Mental Models of the Earth: A Study of Conceptual Change in Childhood shares an experiment where children were asked questions about the shape of the Earth, and the authors found six (!) different mental models that the children had: rectangular, disc-shaped, spherical, flattened sphere, hollow sphere, and the bizarre "dual Earth" model.

There are important theoretical and pedagogical implications of an enquiry like this. Cognitive scientists argue about the right way to think about novices' preconceptions - do they have small, fragmented pieces of knowledge with no consistency on further probing; or self-consistent "alternative theories" that can generate answers to novel questions, albeit wrong answers? The answer to that theoretical question leads to different implications about teaching - are we aiming to provide knowledge where there is very little, and consolidate the little bits of correct thinking into a larger whole; or are we looking to change children's theories of how the world works, which would generate some resistance from the children, and would require careful targeting of the weak points of their existing models?

In the case of basic astronomy, this paper supports the latter view, that children construct self-consistent "alternative theories" that make sense as a whole, given the constraints on their thinking based on their everyday experiences. There are some fascinating examples of children making up imaginative models to accord with what they've been told and what they have experienced, and overall it offers a window into the way that children think.

Enjoy the episode.

REFERENCES

Mental Models of the Earth: a Study of Conceptual Change in Childhood by Vosniadou & Brewer (1992)

SUPPORT

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You can now support Education Bookcast and join the community forum, where we discuss all things education. Visit https://www.buymeacoffee.com/edubookcast to learn more.

This episode has such huge implications that I didn't know what to call it. Efficiency and Innovation in Transfer, the actual name of the book chapter, seemed far too dry to put across the fundamental shifts in thinking about pedagogy, assessment, education research design, and cognitive theory that this article suggests (at least to me).

The authors suggest that the current literature on transfer of learning has too negative a view of the possibilty of transfer, and suffers from too many internal contradictions. They propose a new perspective on transfer called Preparation for Future Learning (PFL), as opposed to the generally accepted standard which they label Sequestered Problem Solving (SPS). In short, when you ask people to solve an unfamiliar problem and grade them on whether they get the right answer (SPS), they universally do badly; but when you ask them how they would approach solving the problem, including what questions they would ask (PFL), then you get a completely different perspective - not only do people do much better on the whole, but more educated people tend to do better, showing that education is apparently teaching some more broad kinds of problem solving (which is otherwise very hard to demonstrate). In addition, when you allow students a bit of time to invent solutions to problems at the start of the class before teaching the standard solution, not only do they perform just as well in a test as those who spend the whole time learning the solution, but they far outperform them on measures of transfer of learning, getting in one case almost triple the score of the control groups. Mind-blowing!

When I discovered this article I was slightly shocked and somewhat whiplashed, as I felt forced to change my mind again on discovery learning, to a third position (it has its place at the start of a class learning a new concept, where it can dramatically improve transfer of learning for students). I was sort of ready for it though, as I had been thinking recently that while I had seen a lot of research on discovery learning and more didactic approaches (such as Direct Instruction), I hadn't yet seen anything where the two were used within the same lesson. Well now I have, and the results are astonishing.

Enjoy the episode.

Link to paper: https://aaalab.stanford.edu/assets/papers/2005/Efficiency_and_Innovation_in_Transfer.pdf

RELATED EPISODES:

Mention of generative learning: 127. Necessary Conditions of Learning by Ference Marton

Transfer of learning: 98. Range by David Epstein; 108. Expert Political Judgement by Phillip Tetlock; 110. Transfer of Learning by Robert Haskell

Discovery learning: 88. The Failure of Constructivist, Discovery, Problem-based, Experiential, and Inquiry-based Teaching; 90. Discovery learning, the idea that won't die

I wanted to talk a bit about some areas in which my thinking about education has improved with the addition of nuance, and about the ways in which thinking can be more nuanced.

Desirable difficulty - a case where quantification and the awareness of countervailing forces / costs improved my initial, flawed understanding.
Cognitive load theory - a case where I was so enamoured with the power of the model that I had started to equate the it with truth (or confuse the "map" with the "territory"), but a well-put listener comment made me realise that there are phenomena that the theory cannot account for.
Motivation - a case where perspectives offered from other cultures and other disciplines undermined my initial confidence in the findings of psychologists.

I also discuss the idea put forward by Ference Marton in discussing the following questions:

Is learning by yourself better than learning by being taught?
Does homework enhance learning?
Is problem-based learning better than lectures for big classes?
Is individualized learning preferable to group work?
Is project work a good idea?

Marton writes:

The problem with questions of this kind is that they cannot be answered. It is not that they cannot be answered yet, and it is not because of a scarcity of research funds or a scarcity of good ideas. They are simply imponderable because of the
degree of generality. Asking these questions is like asking whether pills are better than operations, or whether a hammer is better than a screwdriver, or whether eating is good for your health.

While I do believe that there are some ideas that can be flatly considered wrong or unhelpful, there is something to say for Marton's view. Ultimately a mature understanding requires a well-developed worldview or philosophy, which can't be transmitted in a single sentence. Questions at the level of generality of "Is eating good for your health?" demand a structure to be put in place explaining the nature of human nutrition and digestion, not simply a "yes" or "no" answer.

Enjoy the episode.

A listener of the podcast by the name of Malin Tväråna (senior lecturer at Uppsala University's Department of Education) requested in a review of the podcast that I cover this book, and so here it is!

Ference Marton is a professor of Education at Göteburg University. His big idea is about discernment of important features of a situation (what he calls "critical aspects") being a (the?) key element of learning, and therefore the importance of the nature and quantity of variation in instruction. He explains his ideas in theory at length, after which he provides a number of examples of experiments that provide evidence for his interpretation.

This is one of those cases of a simple and apparently obvious idea being particularly fruitful when thoughtfully applied. Of course we can't learn something if we can't notice it, and of course it's difficult to notice something if it's always the same - hence the classic "fish in water" problem. But this retrospectively obvious principle can be used to make learning more effective, and, among other things, is partly responsible for Chinese students doing so well at mathematics.

The book also brings a few other interesting ideas to light, such as starting a lesson from "discovery learning" with a problem and following up with instruction causing a kind of pre-testing effect (I have elsewhere on the podcast spoken about the danger of the former and the value of the latter); and the bizarre case of "generative learning", where people do better on a delayed test than on an immediate test. Marton uses his own theory in trying to explain these and other anomalies (who could blame him?), even in cases where I would find it more natural to reach for a different kind of explanation, but I'm grateful for hearing about these counterintuitive tidbits regardless.

Thank you again Malin! Were it not for you, I wouldn't have known about this author or this book.

Enjoy the episode.

"Are you left-brained or right-brained?" Brain lateralisation has been known about in neuroscience since the early days, but it has been a taboo over the past few decades since pop science sources distorted the literature and made the topic disreputable. Neuroscientists could detect differences between the hemispheres in different activities, but they were having trouble understanding the big picture of why there was asymmetry at this fundamental level of brain structure.

Iain McGillchrist used to be an academic of English literature at the University of Oxford, but after becoming frustrated with what he saw as the over-analysis of poetry so as to make it lose its implicit meaning, decided to change career entirely and pursue medicine. Since that time, he has taken ten years to research and write this book about brain lateralisation and its importance to life, culture, and our moment in history.

For me personally, reading this book made me realise that my most commonly used approach to thinking about the mind - cognitive load theory, dividing long-term memory from working memory, and describing the structure and schemata of long-term memory in order to understand the nature of knowledge and learning - never included any reference to brain lateralisation, despite, as it turns out, enormous differences between the two sides. I also had some takeaways regarding my own philosophy and ways of thinking.

In this episode, we will be focusing on McGillchrist's characterisation of the differences between the left and right hemispheres of the brain, with references to many findings from scientific papers, as well as overall themes that emerge from this synthesis. While I can see no real practical insights regarding what to do in a classroom, I believe that this book is a major contribution to our understanding of the mind, the brain, and humanity, and therefore it should interest many listeners.

Enjoy the podcast.

Dr Rasmus Koss Hartmann is an associate professor at Copenhagen Business School and author of the article that I covered in the first part of this episode, entitled Towards an Untrepreneurial Economy: the Entrepreneurship Industry and the Veblenian Entrepreneur. In this interview we spoke about where he got the idea, the damage that Veblenian entrepreneurship can do to the economy, urban myths about entrepreneurship, potential flaws of popular mottos such as those promoted in The Lean Start-up by Eric Ries, and the role of entrepreneurship education. Enjoy the episode.

Entrepreneurship is an important part of a thriving economy, and entrepreneurship education is intended to make sure that those who have the potential to succeed in this way have the resources and knowledge to do so. But the opportunity for innovation, being one's own boss, and making money are not the only reasons that people become entrepreneurs. Some do so to fulfil a kind of fantasy, or simply to look good. And there is an entire educational sub-industry offering to help them to indulge this fantasy, for a price.

In Towards an "Un"trepreneurial Economy: the Entrepreneurship Industry and the Veblenian Entrepreneur, authors Hartmann, Spicer, and Krabbe try to explain a strange trend in recent years: while entrepreneurial activity has gone up, success rates for entrepreneurial ventures have gone down. After considering several possible explanations, they ultimately conclude that a major reason for "excess entry" into what one might call "high-class" entrepreneurship (e.g. founding a tech start-up) is due to a sub-class of entrepreneurs who are not driven to pursue real opportunities in the market, but are simply trying to adopt the identity of an entrepreneur because of its high social status. Dubbed "Veblenian entrepreneurs" (or sometimes "wantrepreneurs") after Thorstein Veblen, the sociologist who coined the term conspicuous consumption at the end of the 19th century, these are individuals who are drawn in by a huge industry designed to sell people a dream and a lifestyle which can take them away from everyday mundanity and make them seem successful to their peers. Consumers of the entrepreneurship industry's products (such as courses, conferences, publications, and consultancy) have been shown to engage in more entrepreneurial activity, while actually having lower success rates.

This idea is somewhat analogous to the notion of human capital vs. signalling in education economics - in other words, what is the value of education? Does it make you a better and more productive person, or does it just make you look good to employers? (What is the value of entrepreneurship? Does it contribute to the economy, or does it just make you look good on social media?) It also has implications for entrepreneurship educators. Should we really be encouraging entrepreneurship for everybody who is interested, or should we be discouraging those who are least likely to succeed, so that they can make better choices?

Enjoy the episode.

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Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber
What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy by James Paul Gee
So Good They Can't Ignore You by Cal Newport

I picked up The Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences hoping for a longer term project of enrichment from a volume published by one of the most prestigious universities in the world. However, it only took reading the introduction by editor R. Keith Sawyer to see that this book is suffused with ideological stances commonly supported and even dogmatically preached in educational circles, whose major tenets have been shown wanting time and again by empirical evidence from cognitive science - not to mention the practical experience of teachers.

The whole thing is made all the more facepalm-worthy for the extent to which the author emphasises that his ideas apparently are based on "cognitive science" ideas of "deep learning". In practice he has paid attention to some important facets of the cognitive science of learning (mainly the value of the novice vs. expert axis of comparison), but draws from this ludicrous conclusions which are not, in fact, supported by the science at all.

Ultimately, I decided that this book is a good opportunity to discuss widely circulated claims which are invalid or misleading. Among these are the denigrating of "instructionism" (read: common sense teaching) by use of a combination of straw men and false dichotomies; the suggestion that learning should be "authentic" (i.e. inefficient); motte-and-bailey arguments concerning the (un)importance of factual knowledge; and the fallacy of gaining expertise by direct mimicking of experts' day-to-day activities (even though that isn't the way those experts themselves became experts).

Enjoy the episode.

How the Brain Learns is one of the first books I bought about education, all the way back in summer of 2014. It sat on my shelf for seven years before I finally got round to reading it. Now, with the benefit of knowledge gained from so many years of investigation, it is much less impressive to me than it would have been when I started.

After introducing some basics of brain anatomy, the author starts to describe learning, covering a lot of ground that we've already seen in this podcast in a generally acceptably accurate way. As usual for books about learning with "brain" in the title, it feels as though this word is maintained largely for the purposes of hype, as references to brains in this book, as in others, do little to help us understand the nature of learning.

The book does have several important flaws, most striking of which is the author's apparent lack of understanding of the concept of working memory, perhaps the most important learning concept to grasp. The author seems to think that cramming for a test only keeps information in working memory and doesn't allow for transfer to long-term memory, which suggests that crammers have miraculous working memories that can hold far in excess of the pruported limit 2-7 items of information, and that they hold this information in there for days (presumably there is nothing they can divert their attention to in the meantime).

How the Brain Learns does contain a few interesting nuggets, and there are a number of ideas that it explains more or less correctly. This puts it way above its apparent cousin Brain-based Learning, put still far behind Why Don't Students Like School? and other books on this podcast for helping us understand how learning works. I do not recommend it, but I've seen worse.

Enjoy the episode.

###

RELATED EPISODES

Brain-based Learning by Eric Jensen - a similar, though considerably worse, book about learning and brains.
What learning is - about the modal model of memory (cognitive architecture: working memory and long-term memory), the most important thing I've learned in six and a half years of researching this stuff.
Why Don't Students Like School? by Dan Willingham - the classic cognitive science book for teachers.
The Chimp Paradox by Prof Steve Peters - a model very similar to the modal model of memory.

In my episode on Stuart Ritchie's Intelligence: All that MattersI spoke about IQ and intelligence, after a long silence on this issue. In Hive Mind, we get a look at how IQ affects the fate of entire nations, rather than just the individuals living in them.

Jones' argument rests on data showing that IQ correlates positively with patience, win-win thinking, productivity in teams, supporting "good" policies (i.e. those endorsed by experts), and saving more money. There is also data to indicate that richer countries tend to have higher average IQ, and some indications that causality goes from IQ to national wealth.

The Flynn effect - a constant increase by the equivalent of 3 IQ points per year around the world throughout the 20th century - shows that IQ can be increased, but a more important question is whether that increase can be encouraged somehow. Jones also covers this ground, although it seems that we don't really know good answers to this. Nevertheless, that doesn't stop authors like David Didau in Making Kids Cleverer proposing that the purpose of school is to increase IQ so that children can benefit from the associated health, wealth, and other benefits.

Overall, by combining economics and intelligence research, Hive Mind brings new perspectives to each of these domains.

Enjoy the episode.

###

RELATED EPISODES

Intelligence: All that Matters by Stuart Ritchie

This is the second part of the episode on the book Multiple Faces of Attachment - Cultural Variations on a Fundamental Human Need.

In this section, we will look at three societies - the Beng (Ivory Coast), Nso (Cameroon), and Makassar (Sulawesi) - to see how children are brought up there, and the extent to which Attachment Theory as it is currently formulated makes sense within these example societies. We will see the themes of the child not "belonging" to parents, alloparenting or additive parenting, the need for the mother to get back to work after birth, the lack of an ideology of mother love, and child autonomy and choice concerning its caregivers as factors that undermine the basic thinking of Attachment Theory, and expose it as ultimately ethnocentric. Finally, we will see an example of where application of Attachment Theory's suggestions seems to actually lead to harm, as a final demonstration of the shortcomings of this psychological theory.

Enjoy the episode.

The title of this episode might ruffle some feathers. Attachment Theory is developmental psychology's shining star, the theory with the greatest predictive success, and one which has become popular among child psychiatrists. You can now hear it spoken about wherever child psychology is the main topic, and it has become something of a buzzword. Could this scientific theory really be "cultural ideology"? What would that even mean?

Attachment Theory as Cultural Ideology is the name of an essay within the volume Multiple Faces of Attachment - Cultural Variations on a Universal Human Need which I talk about in the recording. It is a collection of essays written by anthropologists plus one evolutionary psychologist on the problems with existing Attachment Theory - mainly its lack of applicability outside of a Euro-American context. The Cultural Ideology essay in particular was the one that got me to buy the book, and it shows how Attachment Theory is in fact deeply intertwined with 20th century Western moralisms around the treatment of children.

In this part of the episode, I describe what Attachment Theory is, how it was developed, and biological evidence that would at least partially weaken its existing claims.

Enjoy the episode.

RELATED EPISODES

Anthropology: 39. The Geography of Thought by Richard Nisbett; 106. The Anthropology of Childhood by David Lancy; 116. Cultural Foundations of Learning, East and West by Jin Li

Which country was the first ever to have universal, free, compulsory education?

Zero points if you said "Prussia". The correct answer is the Aztec empire, almost four centuries before the oft-cited German state.

I happened to find out this bizarre fact from an aside in a YouTube video, and decided to look into it. If this isn't an independent societal data point on the development of education, then I don't know what is!

In this episode, I discuss the article Developing Face and Heart in the Time of the Fifth Sun: An Examination of Aztec Education by Timothy Reagan. You will hear about Aztec society and values, and how the education system fit within the society in order to achieve its educational aims. You will also hear a lot of bloody stories of human sacrifice.

Enjoy the episode.

I realised I missed something, and I kicked myself.

For a while I've been toying with the idea that learning occurs in two stages, which can be mapped between cognitive science and neuroscience:

Exposure to new material -> neuronal connections
Practice and repetition -> myelination

...with elaboration (e.g. relating one piece of information to another) being a practice that involves both stages.

This model appeals to me for several reasons. Firstly, it is simple, which is a relief in the complex world of teaching and learning. Secondly, it is grounded in the idea that learning is all about addition to long-term memory, which is now a deeply ingrained idea with me. Thirdly, it is in line with the way that most teachers would teach, which makes sense - you would think that teachers tend to do something more or less right after so many years of experience.

However, there is one anomaly that I couldn't place in this model: pre-testing. It turns out that when you are given a test on something before you start learning, even if you're completely ignorant of the topic, it boosts your learning compared to just starting off with study straight away. How could this make sense with the above? For a while I just brushed it aside, but now I realised how it would fit in, as "stage zero": humility, or realisation of ignorance.

As I understand it, this is a stage where you can overcome your cognitive biases which make you not want to expend effort to learn anything, by assuming that you already know this, or that there is nothing to learn. Immediate exposure to a test shatters this illusion, and makes you more able - even subconsciously - to pay attention to the lesson.

One of the great things about this way of thinking is that it makes room for some "progressive" ideas within the starkly "traditional" view of stages 1 and 2. While I still feel that progressive education is largely a bad idea and a failure, I don't want to become dogmatically married to another way of thinking, especially not one which is to some extent defined by its opposition to progressivism. The chance for at least some reconciliation through synthesis is something that I warmly welcome.

In the recording, I also discuss how this relates to ideas of mental warm-ups, desirable difficulty, and the differences between learning and performance.

Enjoy the episode.

This book touched my heart, and it changed my mind about neuroscience.

I wasn't going to read this book. While I was at my friend's house, I picked this book up and read the preface, written by Will Self. He wrote that Oliver Sacks is extraordinary in the way in which he fuses such humanity with his scientific probing of the brains of his patients. At that point, I got interested, and my friend told me I could borrow it. I gobbled the book up in two days.

Having read the book, I can see what Will Self was saying. I used to feel that neurologists were dehumanising of people, seeing them as a pile of neurons, and seeing themselves arrogantly as masters of the most important discipline. Oliver Sacks couldn't be more different. He has a real care for the humanity, for the soul of his patients, even as he describes the areas of brain damage. He marries up scientific description and human concern in a way that is life-affirming and touching.

I used to think that neuroscience is too low-level to be relevant to education, and that higher-level cognitive science is enough. To a large extent, I still believe this. Neuroscience in education seems to me like trying to understand why your browser plugin isn't working properly by inspecting your computer's microchips - yes, the fundamental problem is there somehow, but it's just not the best way of solving the issue. Eric Jensen's useless book Brain-based Learning also vividly showed how neuroscience seems incapable of making a tractable theory or set of coherent principles for teachers and others in education to work from (I covered this book in detail in episode 53).

However, I now see a different relevance to neuroscience. Just as psychologists have been sampling too narrowly by focusing almost exclusively on Western university undergraduates, so have they been sampling too narrowly by only looking at people without brain damage. I see neurology now as a new ground in which to sample widely, in order to get a proper sense of how the mind works by considering really different minds, or minds that don't seem to work properly.

Enjoy the episode.

This episode feels almost nostalgic, as it is a return to the theme of the roles and interactions of the conscious and subconscious mind, something which I focused on early in the podcast and came out strongly in my main series on expertise (around episode 20). It also shares some relation to books on the topic of cognitive biases on the one hand, and the complexity of the world on the other.

Psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer has two main points to make: firstly, that ignorance and cognitive biases often outperform knowledge and "clear thinking"; and secondly, he proposes a way in which gut feelings work.

On the first point, Gigerenzer points us to some experiments which are convincing of their point but difficult to know how to make use of. It turns out that, in tasks like guessing which of two cities has the larger population, if you've heard of one but not the other, the one you've heard of is probably more populous. This requires that you are "somewhat ignorant" - you know one city but not the other - as if you are completely ignorant (not heard of either) or somewhat knowledgeable (heard of both) then you can't use this trick. It seems very impractical to try to reach a perfect state of mild ignorance in everything in order to use this trick, and you would have to give up the benefits of knowledge in order to do so... Nevertheless, the theoretical point is well made.

On the second point, Gigerenzer proposes that gut feelings are simple rules that cut out most of the information, and they often make use of an algorithm called "take the best". The algorithm works like this: you compare whether the available options in the most important feature, then the next important feature, and so on, until in one of the comparisons one of the options is clearly better, at which point you choose that one. So, for example, if you're choosing a restaurant, maybe you first think about the food, but two places both have good food; then you compare atmosphere, but both atmospheres are good; then you compare price, and find one is considerably cheaper, so you go there.

Overall Gigerenzer's work makes a welcome contribution to thinking about the nature of intuition. Probably the most insightful idea is that gut feelings use simple rules, because that way they can cut out the noise and make decisions easier. Richard Dawkins apparently once claimed that when we catch a ball we must be implicitly solving partial differential equations; Gigerenzer shows that this is probably not what happens.

Enjoy the episode.

RELATED EPISODES

Phenomenology of learning / relation between conscious and subconscious mind: 7. The Practicing Mind by Thomas Sterner; 9. The Inner Game of Tennis by Timothy Gallwey; 10. Flow by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi; 17. Blink by Malcolm Gladwell; 49. The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin; 64. What Bruce Lee taught me about learning

Mental architecture: 79. What learning is; 80. The Chimp Paradox by Steve Peters

Expertise: 18. Bounce by Matthew Syed; 20. Genius Explained by Michael Howe; 22. The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle; 24. Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

Expertise in "wicked" domains: 98. Range by David Epstein; 108. Expert Political Judgement by Phillip Tetlock

The world is complicated: 113. The Hidden Half by Michael Blastland

Cognitive biases: 11. Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman; 12. "Picture yourself as a stereotypical male" by Michelle Goffreda

This episode concludes the series on Jin Li's fantastic book Cultural Foundations of Learning, East and West. After reviewing the key differences between the cultures of learning, we quickly look once again at the evidence for these claims. Then we will see what Chinese teachers think of American educational practices. Finally, I will add some commentary of where in my own learning I have some apparently Eastern views and practices.

Enjoy the episode.

This is the final part of the series on Jin Li's book Cultural Foundations of Learning, East and West before the summary and conclusion.

Speech is seen in the West as a distinct personal quality, a right, a leadership trait, and an art. Rhetoric was part of university curricula since the Middle Ages, and we celebrate famous orators like Cicero, Martin Luther King, and Winston Churchill. But in the East, speech is not seen so favourably. Chinese people assume that those who speak less are likely the more intelligent (in America it is those who speak more who are thus perceived), and Chinese culture has a general distrust of speaking, seeing it as inferior to action and potentially a way to mislead. Notably, unlike Cicero, King, and Churchill, there are no famous speakers in East Asia.

This different attitude to speaking has consequences for education. Notably, we know from experiment that Chinese people's thought process is inhibited when they vocalise, whereas this is not true for Americans. But it also leads to a different set of educational aims and practices, and changes what is valued in students.

Enjoy the episode.

This is a continuation of the series on Jin Li's book Cultural Foundations of Learning, East and West.

In this recording, we will see how mothers interact with their children in such a way as to promote their cultural worldview, which goes a long way to explaining how the culture is perpetuated. Interestingly, it is clear from the sample interactions that the children often do not know how to respond to the parent, and so have not yet learned the cultural mindset, so we get a real sense of attitudinal transmission going on through the interactions.

Enjoy the episode.

This is a continuation of the series on Jin Li's book Cultural Foundations of Learning, East and West. In this episode, we will see the emotional side of learning, with a Western focus on interest, curiosity, and enquiry juxtaposed against an Eastern focus on dedication, conviction, and commitment.

This also leads to a different conceptualisation of time within the sphere of learning, which leads to concepts like success and failure make less sense in a Chinese cultural context. Since the process of learning never ends (or, at least, is considered to be very long), one cannot that one has reached "success" or "failure" at any stage, as things could always get better (through application and virtue) or worse (through becoming slack and irresponsible). Westerners, in contrast, have a much shorter-term and piecemeal view, seeing motivation as dependent on the nature of the material (empirically shown to not be important to Easterners), and viewing learning problems as requiring technical solutions (rather than heart- and character-based solutions proposed by the East). This is also reflected in (Western) psychology research, with emphases on achievement motivation, intrinsic motivation, and self-esteem, none of which have much currency or empirical validity, or for that matter make any sense, in an East Asian context.

Enjoy the episode.

This is a continuation of the discussion of Jin Li's book Cultural Foundations of Learning, East and West. In this recording, I discuss the differences between Western learning process concepts (active learning, exploration and enquiry, critical thinking, and self-expression) and Chinese ones (sincerity, diligence, endurance of hardship, perseverance, and concentration).

Enjoy the episode.

This is the third in a series of recordings on Jin Li's book Cultural Foundations of Learning, East and West. In this episode we will see a range of empirical data reflecting the differences between the cultures in question, mostly from psychology, including issues of motivation, attitudes to competition, and the language which is used to describe learning. I will also discuss British and Chinese students' views of the nature of understanding, pointing out what existing cognitive science has to say about this issue.

Enjoy the episode.

This is the second in a series of recordings on Jin Li's book Cultural Foundations of Learning, East and West. In this part, we will see how the fundamental aims of education differ among the cultures in question, and how this is grounded in philosophical traditions that go back thousands of years. At the end, we will see a startling and unexpected piece of evidence which supports the author's hypothesis.

Enjoy the episode.

You may have noticed that I am generally quite disappointed in professors of education. It seems that the work of cognitive scientists, (some) psychologists, anthropologists, (some) economists, historians, and even machine learning researchers and philosophers is reliable, trustworthy, and can offer a good contribution, whereas that has not been my experience with people explicitly employed by university education departments. However, Jin Li breaks that trend. And boy, how she breaks it.

Cultural Foundations of Learning, East and West follows Jin Li's research into the nature and causes of differences in learning beliefs, attitudes, and behaviours between Westerners (mainly European-Americans) and people from "the East" (mainly Chinese, Taiwanese, and Chinese-Americans). She goes into issues of parenting, teaching techniques, student attitudes, language usage, and underlying philosophy. Overall, she paints a coherent picture which is invaluable to helping see the water in which we are swimming.

What is really striking about her work is the degree to which she peers into people's souls. By explicitly stating hidden assumptions of Western culture, she not only deftly expresses how well she understands you (which can be a bit unnerving), but demonstrates how your most deeply held beliefs, so deep that you would not have even considered them beliefs but obvious truisms, not only don't have to be accepted by other cultures, but in fact usually aren't. In the process, she peers into her own soul (with the help of a large body of cultural evidence) to reveal the thinking style of her own Chinese origins. The result is mind-expanding in the way only good anthropology can be.

I will be covering this book over many parts. This first part will serve as an introduction to the main themes of the book, and to the author herself.

Enjoy the episode.

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RELATED EPISODES

39a, b. The Geography of Though by Richard Nisbett (on the differences between "Eastern" and "Western" cultures more broadly, not just about learning)

106a-h. The Anthroplogy of Childhood by David Lancy (comparing childhood across many human societies, not just "East vs. West")

"It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working. And here, precisely, lies the mystery."

The above text is from David Graeber's super-viral article On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs. His basic, audacious thesis is that there is a large and increasing number of "bullshit" hours worked in the economy, through a combination of some outright "bullshit jobs", and previously normal jobs that have become increasingly "bullshitised".

Graeber's intention with the word "bullshit" is completely unnecessary work that is useful to nobody, and a "bullshit job" typically contains much pretending to work while actually browsing social media, as well as carrying out a number of tasks that really don't need doing, but not being able to face up to the Kafkaesque reality head-on as there appears to be a taboo about letting people know that you aren't doing anything, or that your job is pointless. Ironically, such soul-destroying employment is often considered to be quite prestigious and sought-after by outsiders (who can't see what your day-to-day looks like), which only intensifies the confusion and feeling of being lost that holders of such jobs experience.

It must be noted that jobs which are merely unpleasant, "shit jobs", are not in the same category. Being a cleaner at a university, for example, might lead to you being badly paid and looked down upon, but your job really counts. This is evidenced by the fact that if you strike, there will be problems. Compare this with the case in the 1970's when there was a strike of Irish banks for many months, and yet there appeared to be no problem, and the economy trundled along without a hitch.

Graeber's article unleashed a reaction that he couldn't have possibly predicted. Not only did the article become so viral that, in the weeks after it was published, the site hosting it repeatedly crashed from the number of visitors (it was apparently particularly popular in finance circles), and anonymous donors paid for adverts quoting the original article to be placed on the London Underground; Graeber also received so much press and mail that he ended up able to conduct a book-length study on the subject on the basis of the qualitative data that he managed to gather.

Bullshit jobs are a real conundrum, as they are theoretically impossible in an idealised capitalist system. Graeber rises to the challenge of at least trying to explain their existence. After proposing a taxonomy of bullshit jobs (flunkies, goons, duct-tapers, box-tickers, and taskmasters), the author leads us to compare the current situation with feudalism, pointing out that the idea of an economic sphere separate from politics only arose in the Enlightenment because that's the only point when it started to make sense - prior to that, economics and politics were too tightly intertwined for such an idea to even have been considered. On that basis, we can see how an economic system that is heavily geared towards redistribution rather than production (like feudalism), together with a historically unusual ideology of work and time, could lead us to the present situation.

This book is certainly a mind-expanding and wild intellectual ride, but it appears that the study of bullshit employment is only in its infancy. Nevertheless, I certainly believe the question to be relevant to education. If education is supposed to prepare people to enter the workforce, and the workforce is significantly, or even predominantly, engaged in bullshit, what does that say about what we should be preparing young people for?

Enjoy the episode.

I was recently contacted by a fan of the show asking for advice in the choice of their research topic. Oddly, the best advice I could give them pertained to philosophy of science. In this episode, I expand on what I told them, to explain the most important ideas in the philosophy of science that I think are worth knowing about.

My ultimate target is Imre Lakatos. If you can understand Lakatos' idea of research programs then you have all you need. However, in order to properly understand Lakatos, you need to know about Thomas Kuhn's concept of paradigms, "normal" science, and scientific revolutions; and to understand Kuhn, it helps to have some grounding in what Karl Popper had to say about falsificationism before him. I add in Francis Bacon as the founder of science and William of Occam just to mention his timeless razor.

The "feel" of this episode is to say that science is done by people, and people are imperfect. Philosophers of science have long discussed the ways in which science should be (or is) done, and as we get to Kuhn and Lakatos it becomes more a case of explaining the often infuriating way that people don't seem to rationally update their worldviews. Paul Feyerabend makes an appearance between Kuhn and Lakatos in this episode to show off some of the more anarchistic views of science, and to help demonstrate through the apparent "cheating" of Galileo and the failings of the Copernican system how sometimes a little stubborn imagination in the face of rational refutation has been good for scientific progress.

I am also very happy to bring in my favourite scientific paper of all time, The Myth of Language Universals: Language Diversity and its Importance for Cognitive Science by Evans and Levinson. I use it as an example of how a longstanding theory seems to be alive and kicking despite what seem to be decades of continual refutation, and how this exemplifies Lakatos' idea of research programs, while also seizing the opportunity to talk a little bit about the wonders of linguistic diversity.

Overall, I hope that I can convince some people of the relevance of ideas in the philosophy of science to the much more practical issues of research, including why people who are wrong are so hard to convince.

Enjoy the episode.

When we ask the question of whether something is "nature or nurture", we are implicitly suggesting a dichotomy, or excluded middle - it is either nature, or nurture, or a mix of both, but not a mix of both plus something else. In The Hidden Half, Michael Blastland takes us on a journey of skepticism which somehow magically reveals the presence not only of a "third factor", but shows, startlingly, that such a factor has been known to account for as much as half (!) of the variation in some traits. References to dark matter immediately spring to mind.

After reflecting on a paradigm-shifting species of parthenogenic crayfish, the author discusses, among other things, how you only have a 50% chance of developing the same mental disorder as your identical twin you were raised with is already suffering from (shared genes and environment, remember - shouldn't this be close to 100%?); the mysterious inability to transfer infant mortality reduction measures to new regions; and the still inexplicable sudden drop in teenage pregnancies in the UK around 2008.

One could see Blastland as occupying allied but opposite territory to the human irrationality parade, spearheaded by the likes of Daniel Kahneman and Dan Ariely. Blastland contends that yes, we do misunderstand the world a lot, but rather than focusing on the human weaknesses of irrationality, he draws our attention to the fact that the world is just really, really, intractably hard to understand. In that sense, you could see him loosely affiliated with Nassim Taleb.

Another way of seeing Blastland is as a voice (however inadvertantly) in the incredibly important but widely ignored literature on transfer of learning. I covered Robert Haskell's book on the topic recently, and one of the central messages was that people don't seem to be very good at transfer of learning. Blastland's position would be that the world is not very amenable to transfer of learning. Again, it's not people's fault, the world just is that way.

This book came as a powerful message to me on the limits of human knowledge (relevant to the enterprise of this podcast) and an alternative view on human irrationality and transfer of learning (relevant to its content). I would like to get a picture of a marmokrebs crayfish and put it in a frame on my desk, so that I never forget the book's central message.

Enjoy the episode.

RELATED EPISODES

Transfer of Learning by Robert Haskell
Expert Political Judgement by Phillip Tetlock
Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

So far, one of my most downloaded episodes has been number 42, on Sir Ken Robinson's talk Do Schools Kill Creativity? Numerous members of the audience have told me that they appreciated my critical eye on the matter. But at that time I had not read any of Ken Robinson's several bestsellers. "Don't you think you should? How can you be critical of him when you haven't even read him?" It was goading from someone else, asking me to rise to my own intellectual standards, that made me finally give in. I decided to read a book of his. Suffice to say, it was not a very good use of my time.

Out of our Minds comes with the subtitle Learning to be Creative, and yet it gives very little concrete advice on that point. A jumbled book with no clear order, it mixes worn-out platitudes with click-baity list articles ("Nine qualities of a creative leader" - all that was missing was "Number six will shock you!!"). He weaves in talk of a "schism" between arts and sciences without properly defining what he means by this, as well as the occasional anecdote about children and potential that he is so well known for.

Probably the most startling of his theses is that the current school system (by which he means children sat at desks learning knowledge from books and a teacher) is a product of the Enlightenment. Besides the questionable relevance of this to the book's pruported subject matter, the idea itself immediately makes no sense to anybody with the faintest inkling of the history of education. How, I wonder, does he think school looked before the Enlightenment? Did children in ancient Babylonia engage in "active learning" according to their kinaesthetic learning styles? Did Jesuit schools organise project-based learning and focus the curriculum around dance? Were Chinese boys studying for the Imperial examinations letting their curiosity go wild through the freedom of discovery learning? The irony that the intellectual tradition to which Robinson himself belongs owes much to Jean-Jacques Roussea's 1763 book Emile, and so is itself a product of the Enlightenment, is completely lost on him.

But the problem I want to focus on is not the structure or even the content of the book, but simply the methodology. Robinson is revered around the world, and yet his arguments can hardly be called cogent, thorough, or research-backed. Sprinkling in clever anecdotes and aphorisms might work for a casual chat, but it doesn't do much when you're trying to seriously prove a point. I suppose this book is not meant to convince unbelievers, but for consumption by those already sympathetic to his message.

I would like to remind you that I was at first a fan of Robinson, all those years ago. It was a combination of his charisma and my values that made me like him, and I was intrigued by his arguments (such as they were). Had I been better armed with knowledge of how learning really works I could have realised what was wrong from the outset. At least now, all those years later, I can share my criticism of him and hopefully make more people realise the flaws in his ideas - and his methodology.

Ultimately, the questions that the work of Robinson raises are worth discussing, but properly. Let's not simply swallow his words whole without thinking about their validity. Let's think about what he is suggesting, and investigate it with proper scientific scrutiny and broad humanistic erudition, as far as we can.

Enjoy the episode.

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Do Schools Kill Creativity? by Ken Robinson

Let's set things straight - intelligence isn't really all that matters. The editor seems to have forced a provocative title that even the author doesn't agree with. But intelligence does really matter, and the evidence on this point is overwhelming.

Early on in my study of education, I was enamoured with Carol Dweck's Mindset research, and in all of my growth mindset zeal I couldn't bear to even consider that people might differ in some apparently "fixed" way. However, with time I have had the courage to face this issue; or, more realistically, it has beseiged me enough that I have had to give in.

Intelligence is real, it varies from person to person, and it has a large heritable component. Research on intelligence has continued for well over 100 years, and it has several findings which are very well supported by evidence. The most important finding is the positive manifold, which states that all mental capacities - from vocabulary size to social intelligence to mental rotation to reaction time - are positively correlated with one another. The standard way of explaining this is that they all share a reliance on some general intelligence, or g-factor, in common. IQ tests aim to measure the g-factor.

Another finding is that almost all of the things that one could wish for in a life well-lived also correlate with IQ: health, grades, earnings, and a successful marriage, to name a few. IQ also predicts patience, willingness to cooperate, win-win thinking, and generally being a good citizen. (For many of these, causation has also been shown.) IQ does not merely concern how well you can do a paper-and-pencil test, as many would argue. Due to the positive manifold, it basically concerns everything, which is an only slightly hyperbolic way of putting it.

Intelligence: All That Matters serves as an introduction to intelligence and IQ research, a subject I would like to get into more on the podcast with time. I hope the general topic of IQ research will open your mind as much as it has mine.

Enjoy the episode.

This is the second part of the episode about Robert Haskell's book Transfer of Learning.

In this part, we go in detail into the importance of rich declarative knowledge for transfer. Topics include:

The difference between surface structure and deep structure of problems, and how experts can see through the former to get at the latter, allowing transfer to happen
How pure scientific discoveries with no application resulted in groundbreaking technological breakthroughs decades later
Prolific inventors' advice on what it takes to be a great inventor (hint: "irrelevant" knowledge)
How even specialists in procedural knowledge ("skills") openly admit that rich, well-structured declarative knowledge is the cornerstone of transfer

Enjoy the episode.

One central question which I find very difficult to answer is "What is education for?". There seem to be many parallel purposes, most of which are subjective, ill-defined, and hard to measure. It is difficult to navigate between the Scylla of unrealistic expectations far from the core activities of school (e.g. developing well-adjusted entrepreneurial job-ready good citizens) and the Charybdis of uninspiring flat-footed apparent irrelevancies (e.g. hoping that they at least remember Pythagoras' Theorem).

However, there is one aim that seems to me to pass both of these criteria: the ability to use what one has learned in novel situations. It seems absolutely necessary to make for a justifiable education - after all, if you are unable to apply your knowledge anywhere outside of the classroom, what's the use of learning it in the first place? On the other hand, it also seems eminently achievable and related to real classroom content.

Application of what one has learned to new scenarios is known in the psychology literature as transfer of learning (or knowledge transfer), and it is the subject of Robert Haskell's book. Haskell makes the compelling point that gaining knowledge and skills plus the ability to adapt them to a range of unfamiliar situations is what can properly be called education; if you can only rigidly perform a set of tasks in their original circumstances, this should be considered merely training.

After spilling considerable ink explaining what the term might really mean (scoring points with me for taking defining one's terms so seriously), the author tells us how, in over a century of research, psychologists have repeatedly shown transfer of learning to be nearly impossible to achieve. After walloping us with that shocker, he rallies us with the promise of his Eleven Points, a sort of manifesto which, he claims, can make transfer of learning possible after all. He then spends the rest of the book detailing what these points mean, and showing evidence (some convincing, some circumstantial) of the importance of each of the points in his program.

Transfer of learning is an incredibly important idea, and it is shocking that it is so little talked about in education circles. Instead, we get lectures about "21st century skills", with very little basis in actual science, as far as I have been able to figure out. After critiquing "critical thinking" in the previous episode, this one serves to draw attention to a more promising-looking educational aim with around 120 years of research behind it, but which nobody seems to be talking about.

Enjoy the episode.

"Critical thinking" is an idea commonly discussed in education. Most people who talk about it say we need more of it. Almost nobody seems willing or able to define it. I have trouble believing in it.

With anything that I believe, I keep an open mind and even force myself against my cognitive biases to hear out those whose opinions I disagree with. This has been very useful to me in the past, as there have been a number of education-related ideas that I have had to eschew on further investigation. In line with this attitude, I was happy to give this book a chance, particularly since the author claimed to be a fan of the show, and therefore would presumably have some sense of my predisposition to this issue.

The book opened with promise. The author writes that he is aware of the many criticisms levied at critical thinking - that "it cannot be defined, ... or that it takes away from the content of the course, or that it is different in every discipline, or that it depends on knowledge..." (all of which would be exactly my criticisms). "You name the excuse; we heard it." Clearly, I thought with a mixture of trepidation and excitement, the author will show in this book why those criticisms don't stand up to scrutiny - I will have to part with a long-held belief of mine again to get closer to the truth.

He goes on to mention the success that he has had in teaching critical thinking: "Together [with collaborator Dave Carillo], we were charged with raising critical thinking outcomes across campus. And we did." (Emphasis in original.) So not only was I wrong in theory, the author wanted to show me in practice how effective he could make such interventions!

Alas, I found no more mention of the details of his interventions, no description of what he did and evidence showing that it worked. Neither did he ever again mention the criticisms that I had, saying that he'd heard them all before, but declining to explain what is wrong with them. To add insult to injury, right at the outset he deliberately omits discussing what critical thinking actually is, claiming "that's a very complex question" which would require "a whole other book in itself", and overall it would be a "tediously lengthy affair". I would rather a lengthy affair than an undefined concept lacking evidence and avoiding facing up to criticism.

Among the many failings of the book, there is one place where I picked up something new and useful - it seems that the research on project-based learning (PBL) is less negative in its conclusions than I had understood thus far. I have taken note to look into this more in future.

To be clear, I still hold that critical thinking might be a thing, it's just that (a) the cognitive science I've learned so far seems to have no need for the concept, (b) I only ever hear people talk about it in a stand-on-your-soapbox high-sounding sermon without reference to any actual evidence or even theory, and (c) this book does a terrible job of supporting the idea, as do so many others who love to talk about it. Perhaps one day I will encounter work that explains what it really is, shows that it really exists, and demonstrates how important it is using proper evidence rather than rhetoric. Or maybe all there is on the topic is impassioned oratory rather than solid science.

In case you are interested, Steven Pearlman co-hosts two podcasts: The Critical Thinking Initiative and Smarterer!.

Enjoy the episode.

Phillip Tetlock is an expert on expertise, but of a different kind to the late K. Anders Ericsson. While Ericsson's work focused on experts within "kind" domains (as defined by Range author David Epstein) such as music and chess, where feedback is near-immediate and clear and the rules are known to all and stated at the outset, Tetlock is interested in those who specialise in "wicked" domains, such as economics and politics. These are fields in which we can't run experiments or train for specific, recurring situations; where the rules are unknown; and where the situation at hand is not bounded, but can be influenced by a myriad of unpredictable forces.

The author's most important finding is that cognitive style plays a major role in deciding who is good or bad at predicting world events. He reaches for Isaiah Berlin's concept of the Hedgehog and the Fox: "the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." Hedgehogs tend to view the world through their particular favourite lens, basking in the power and glory of their pet theory. Foxes, on the other hand, are much patchier in their choice of models, and continuously second-guess themselves as they piece together a tentative view of the many ways things could unfold. While it seems that hedgehogs would make good political leaders (and are much more charismatic), foxes outperform them on prediction tasks to a stunning degree - or perhaps we should say, hedgehogs perform so terribly that foxes have an easy win.

Tetlock has published another book on the topic of expert predictions in the political and economic arena called Superforcasting: The Art and Science of Prediction, which is aimed at a general audience. Expert Political Judgement is an earlier work, written for academics, and therefore deeply concerned with methodology and epistemology, and more willing to discuss probability theory and mathematical modelling. The full details of this are not amenable to sharing via audio, but the approach does provide a reassuring amound of skepticism to his own conclusions.

Enjoy the episode.

RELATED EPISODES

Expertise (in "kind" environments): 18. Bounce by Matthew Syed; 20. Genius Explained by Michael Howe; 22. The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle; 24. Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell; 49. The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin

Breadth of learning (characteristic of "foxes"): 97. The Polymath by Waqas Ahmed; 98. Range by David Epstein

Moral hazard of people who talk too much (generally scathing about economists): 84. Skin in the Game by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Jaron Lanier is a Silicon Valley veteran and a pioneer of virtual reality technology. In Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, as you might expect, he outlines his dissatisfaction with the status quo of the Internet. He admits that his generation of Silicon Valley engineers and entrepreneurs made a grave error in the early days of the Internet by paradoxically believing in the power of everything being "free", while at the same time hero-worshipping successful billionaire capitalists such as Steve Jobs.

Lanier is a very witty writer, and the book is peppered with eminently quotable phrases. I structure the recording around these. Here are some of my favourites: "Social media is biased, not to the Right or Left, but downward."; "Your character is like your health, more valuable than anything you can buy. Don't throw it away."; "Hypnosis might be therapeutic so long as you trust your hypnotist, but would you trust a hypnotist who is working for unknown third parties?".

Having just recorded the epic nine-part episode of The Anthropology of Childhood, I wanted to go for something a bit lighter here. The topic is serious, but the approach is laid back.

Enjoy the episode.

RELATED EPISODES

Addiction by Design by Natasha Dow Schüll

This is the last part of the multi-part episode on David Lancy's The Anthropology of Childhood. I share the main points of what I've learned, what I think of the book, and the way that Professor Lancy summarises the main points of the text.

Among the things we've learned are the differential ways that WEIRD (western, educated, industrialised, rich, and democratic) societies and most societies throughout history approach topics such as:

Reproduction;
Family structure;
Parenthood;
The social status of children;
The value of children, economic and sentimental;
The stages of childhood (baby, toddler, child with "sense", adolescent);
Children's relationships with adults;
Play;
Learning and teaching;
School;
Discipline;
Children's work and responsibilities; and
How young people change society.

I hope you learned a lot - I certainly have!

Enjoy the episode.

This is the second from last part of the multi-part episode on The Anthropology of Childhood by David Lancy.

This part concerns school. It answers questions such as:

What are parents' attitudes to school when exposed to it for the first time?
How do children from traditional pre-state societies fare when schools are introduced to their communities?
What has the experience of schooling been like in most times and places in the world?
How do parents from different societies prepare (or not) children for school?

Enjoy the episode.

This recording is the seventh part of a multi-part episode on Professor David Lancy's book The Anthropology of Childhood.

In this episode, we look at adolescence, including questions such as:

Does adolescence really exist?
How does it vary across societies?
What role do adolescents play in social change?
Why are teenaged boys so obnoxious?

Enjoy the episode.

This recording is the sixth part of a multi-part episode on Professor David Lancy's book The Anthropology of Childhood.

In this episode, we look at children learning through work, including questions such as:

When do children start doing chores? What is their attitude to them?
How does learning through chores tend to differ by gender?
How do young people learn crafts?
What are apprenticeships like? Why do they exist separately from the main body of craft learning?
How similar are any of these learning situations to school?
What ancient institutions might school have evolved from?

Enjoy the episode.

This recording is the fifth part of a multi-part episode on Professor David Lancy's book The Anthropology of Childhood.

In this episode, we look at the nature and role of play in children's lives, including questions such as:

In societies without many material possessions, what do children play with? Are there any toys?
What kind of games do children play? How does this vary from culture to culture?
What commonalities are there in play behaviour between humans and other animals, and across human societies? Why do human societies, and animal species, vary in their play behaviour in the way they do?
In what way is play an evolutionary adaptation? What is the "purpose" of play, biologically speaking?
How do adult attitudes to play vary across cultures?
How does play influence children's development?
What implications are there for education more broadly?

Enjoy the episode.

This recording is the fourth part of a multi-part episode on Professor David Lancy's book The Anthropology of Childhood.

In this episode, we look at the transition in children's lives into the "age of sense" and the way in which they learn their culture, including questions such as:

What ways of learning do we see consistently across cultures?
What differences in attitude to learning do we see between industrialised cultures and pre-state societies?
How does this vary over the lifespan?
What role does the family play in children's education in different societies?

Enjoy the episode.

This recording is the third part of a multi-part episode on Professor David Lancy's book The Anthropology of Childhood.

In this episode, we look at community involvement in childrearing, including questions such as:

Why do some anthropologists consider attachment theory, the most well-established component of developmental psychology, to be "cultural ideology"?
Why, in most societies, are older sisters so keen to raise their younger siblings?
What is "toddler rejection" and why is it so common cross-culturally?
Do modern ideas of investing in children through parent-child play really make a difference?

Enjoy the episode.

This recording is the second part of a multi-part episode on Professor David Lancy's book The Anthropology of Childhood.

In this episode, we look at reproduction and the family, including questions such as:

What attitudes and practices are there to family size and family planning in pre-state societies?
What are the roles of mothers and fathers in these societies?
How do cultural practices such as patri- vs. matrilocal residence or monogamy vs. polygamy vs. polyandry affect family structure and the raising of children?
How do all of the above vary in societies with different subsistence patterns (subsitence farmers vs. herders vs. hunter-gatherers)? Can the variation by subsistence pattern be explained through evolutionary and/or economic factors?

Enjoy the episode.

The Anthropology of Childhood is a monumental work of scholarship. Professor David Lancy has combed the ethnographic record with an eye to understanding the range of experiences of children around the world in different types of societies - hunter-gatherers, subsistence farmers and herders, pastoral nomads, and modern industrialised societies, particularly in the West and in East Asia. The author also considers juveniles of other primates, such as chimpanzees and bonobos.

I consider it to be so rich in content, and so important, that I am doing my longest episode ever, splitting this up into nine (!) individual recordings. Otherwise I would be talking continuously for over six hours straight.

The reason I think this is so worth studying is that it provides us with insight into what we take for granted. Culturally, we are all fish that can't see the water that surrounds us. By looking at a broad survey of human and other primate societies we can see what we might have thought to be cultural and yet is in fact a human universal (such as family drama or boys forming gangs); and, on the other hand, behaviours that we may have thought to be part of human nature but are actually specific to a very restricted set of cultures (such as parent-child play or - importantly! - teaching).

The material in this many-part episode includes a number of difficult themes, since unfamiliar societies often do things in a way that violates our moral sense. However, I am not interested in judging the morality or not of other cultures' practices, but simply want to know about them and understand them. For this reason, I might talk about some shocking things in an apparently blasé or rather academically detached fashion - not because there are no practices mentioned that I consider distasteful, but because I am not interested in discussing these issues. Please bear this in mind when listening.

Enjoy the episode.

RELATED EPISODES

The World Until Yesterday by Jared Diamond; 99. China's Examination Hell by Ichisada Miyazaki

Rote memorisation is commonly reviled. I think some careful consideration of its role is in order.

In short, my position is that rote memorisation is an inefficient approach, but sometimes difficult to avoid (such as when learning foreign language vocabulary), and should not be shied away from when there is no other option, though we should certainly do what we can to use alternatives.

In the recording I also talk about ways to reduce or eliminate rote memorisation where possible, cultural differences between China and the West, and my own experience of learning vocabulary, among other things.

Enjoy the episode.

RELATED EPISODES

Cognitive science (general): 19. Seven Myths about Education by Daisy Christodoulou; 52. How We Learn by Benedict Carey; 79. What Learning Is; 80. The Chimp Paradox by Steve Peters; 81a. The Myth of Learning Styles; 81b. on the Expertise Reversal Effect; 82. Memorable Teaching by Pepps McCrea; 85. Why Don't Students Like School? by Dan Willingham; 86. Learning as information compression

This book is about slot machines. It is creepy.

By way of this book, we can arrive at a new psychological idea which Natasha Dow Schüll calls "the machine zone", but I prefer to call "dark flow". The word flow is already used in psychology to refer to Mihály Csíkszentmihályi's concept of optimal experience, in which time distorts, the sense of self disappears, and the subconscious and conscious mind work in harmony.

Dark flow is similar to flow, but... for want of a better term, it's evil. Whereas flow allows us to both enjoy our lives to the fullest and grow as a person, dark flow entails the same kind of perfect absorption but with the goal of self-destruction. Both the aim and the result are an obliteration of one's life. It's like a disease that swallows all of a person's time, money, and thought; the subject craves the sense of release from reality that the flow process provides, and ultimately acquiesces to, or even seeks, the destruction of their life that follows. Death metaphors are very common in participants' descriptions of this phenomenon and their state of mind.

While reading this book, I had something of a recognition of this feeling of escape, driven by a pathological desire for more flow in a fantasy world. I've had this feeling playing (and anticipating playing) computer games. I happen to have played them a fair bit as a teenager, and so the psychology of it is subjectively familiar to me. The fact that I wish to avoid their negative consequences is why I perceive technologies such as slot machines to be outright unholy.

Apart from revealing a potential dark side to the otherwise much-lauded concept of flow, this book's relevance concerns its appearance in an era of addictive digital technology, particularly such that is available to and targeted at children. The analogy between a slot machine and a smartphone is hardly far-fetched.

Enjoy the episode.

RELATED EPISODES

Flow by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi

Episodes I have done on computer games are somewhat relevant, but they generally do not look at the phenomenon of addiction, which would be most pertinent to this episode's content.

In future I intend to record more episodes on the pitfalls and strange psychology of digital technology.

This recording serves as an appendix to the episode on James Paul Gee's book What Video Games Have To Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. In his book, he provides 36 principles of learning that he proposes in his book on the basis of the psychological effectiveness of computer games.

In my opinion, 36 principles is far too many; ideally, I would have five or fewer. I thought that a principle was supposed to be a distillation, and so a proliferation of them seems counterproductive and rather ironic. But I still wanted to go through his principles to be fair to him and his book. What's striking is how he is occasionally absolutely correct in his assertions, yet at other times completely off the mark. He is another example of somebody who is apparently academically respected within the field of education, and yet says things which are completely unreal and make little if any sense to those who know the basics.

Enjoy the episode.

What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy is a book that I read early in my education research quest. At the time, I thought that it had interesting points to make, but I was unclear on quite how to react to it. After several more years of reading and research, it's clear to me that this book is deeply flawed.

First of all, the author redefines "literacy" in a very strange way. He takes any form of semiotic system to count as a "type" of literacy. So, for example, if you know how to use a smartphone, then you are "literate" in the layout, symbols, and conventions of smartphone user interface. This is obviously not the kind of literacy that most people are interested on or concerned about, and it is less valuable than "conventional" literacy, partly because of barrier to entry (learning to read is relatively hard, learning to use a phone is relatively easy) and partly because of utility.

Secondly, he coins a lot of new terminology for no apparent reason. During the recording I've had to translate some of his terms into more ordinary language, including the usual technical terms rather than his special ones. His terminology only serves to obscure his message and make it seem as if there is more content here than there really is.

Finally, and most importantly, his central point is misguided. He essentially says that learning a subject is mostly about socially getting on in that world - knowing how to get on with other artists, mathematicians, surgeons, or whatever other skill "community", depending on the domain. However, this completely overlooks the glaring difference in difficulty between getting to know social conventions and attitudes of a subculture and learning the requisite knowledge and skills in order to be useful and productive in that domain, let alone to actually understand what is being said by other practitioners. The former takes a matter of weeks or months of acculturation, and the latter years or even decades of dedication. If we focus on the social context of knowledge rather than the knowledge itself, to coin a phrase, it would be like making beautiful light fittings for a house that you haven't built - pointless in the absence of the larger task that is left undone.

Enjoy the episode.

RELATED EPISODES

Cognitive science (general): 19. Seven Myths about Education by Daisy Christodoulou; 52. How We Learn by Benedict Carey; 79. What Learning Is; 80. The Chimp Paradox by Steve Peters; 81a. The Myth of Learning Styles; 81b. on the Expertise Reversal Effect; 82. Memorable Teaching by Pepps McCrea; 85. Why Don't Students Like School? by Dan Willingham; 86. Learning as information compression

Cognitive science (literacy-related): 41. What Reading Does for the Mind by Keith Stanovich and Annie Cunningham; 91. Vocabulary Development by Steven Stahl; 93. Closing the Vocabulary Gap by Alex Quigley; 95. The Reading Mind by Dan Willingham

Expertise: 20. Genius Explained by Michael Howe; 22. The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle; 24. Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell; 49. The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin; 97. The Polymath by Waqas Ahmed; 98. Range by David Epstein

Games and play (including computer games): 34. Reality is Broken by Jane McGonigal; 35. Minds on Fire by Mark Carnes; 36. Fun, Play, and Games; 37. A Theory of Fun for Game Design by Raph Koster

Other fads / critical reviews: 42. Do Schools Kill Creativity by Sir Ken Robinson; 53. Brain-based Learning by Eric Jensen; 59, 60 on Brain Training; 62. Brainstorming makes you less creative; 65. Beyond the Hole in the Wall (on Sugata Mitra); 71. Visible Learning by John Hattie; 81. on Learning Styles; 87. Experiential Learning; 88. The Failure of Constructivist, Discovery, Problem-Based, Experiential, and Inquiry-Based Teaching

I endeavour to understand and explain the field of education through many disciplines, including neuroscience, cognitive science, psychology, anthropology, economics, and evolutionary biology. Over the course of this podcast's history, I have changed in my reading habits and focus across these disciplines, and in my attitude as to how useful they can be, and where they are best applied.

Psychology stands out as a case in point. At first, I thought that psychology would hold all the secrets to knowing how to improve education, by revealing what motivates people, how they think, and how they learn, and showing behavioural "laws" or tendencies that explain the framework from which we should approach understanding ourselves and others. Since then, I have realised that the psychological subfield of cognitive science has profound implications for learning, but the rest of psychology has been a disappointment.

Firstly, it suffers from sampling bias. Almost all those who have been tested in psychological experiments are Western university undergraduates. This introduces a cultural bias to the data, and so rather than explaining universal features of humanity (as it supposes), it actually uncovers peculiarities of Western culture. This is dramatically less useful than what I had hoped for, and is no foundation on which to build an understanding of humanity as a whole.

Secondly, it has frequent replication issues. There are numerous studies which become famous and frequently cited, only to be shown down the line not to replicate, invalidating their apparently tremendous insight. One high-profile example of this is mindset research, popularised by Carol Dweck, which I mistakenly lauded again and again on this podcast, only to find out down the line that replication studies have shown it not to be such a big deal.

In place of psychology, I argue that anthropology and economics are powerful fields that can bring a lot to the table. Anthropology is like psychology but with proper sampling, and economics is like psychology but with much simplified models, which are flawed but also more powerful than many people realise (myself included, until recently). Bringing these two fields in essentially says that culture matters, and we can only understand human universals by looking cross-culturally; that we "fish in water", blind to the forces that shape us all, and we can only see these with outsider's spectacles; that value is a fundamental thing that everyone seeks, and that needs elucidating; and that people more often than not behave in a way that is in line with their own desires.

In the episode, I discuss all these, plus also a range of other disciplines that have appeared or will appear on the podcast.

Enjoy the episode.

This episode starts with some unfinished business from episode 100. Then I review the topics and themes that have arisen over the history of the podcast.

I started the podcast on the 1st of January 2016 with an episode introducing myself. In this episode, I reintroduce myself, my reasons for starting the podcast, and what I hope to achieve. I also talk about the broad strokes of the development of the podcast and of my own thinking over the last 5 years.

Chinese culture has the concept of the "four great inventions" (四大發明) - inventions from ancient China that are points of pride in Chinese history, and symbolic of Chinese technical and scientific sophistication. The inventions in question are the compass, gunpowder, the printing press, and paper. One could say that there is one "invention" that is conspicuously absent.

During the Sui dynasty (581-618 AD), the emperor was concerned that the aristocracy held too much power, in particular by occupying all of the positions in the government bureaucracy. In a shrewd political move, the emperor decided to start holding examinations, open to all males regardless of class, to recruit for positions in the civil service. At first regarded with contempt by the aristocrats, they were eventually won over, and after some decades started sending their own boys to be educated in order to pass the government exams. The Chinese civil service examination system (科舉) was born.

The system persisted in China for over a millenium, with the final exams held at the start of the 20th century, just prior to the fall of the Qing Dynasty and the end of imperial China. However, the system was to have a lasting influence outside of the country. In the 19th century, the British East India Company, inspired by the Chinese system, set up its own examinations to make employment decisions. Before long, written examinations were taken up by Oxford and Cambridge universities, and from there spread to the rest of Europe and the world. So China's fifth great invention was the written examination, and its societal influence can still be felt around the world.

Ichisada Miyazaki was a Japanese historian of China. In his book, he goes through the nature of the system in great detail - what examinations had to be taken where and how; how boys prepared for them; the arms race between cheaters and government anti-cheating and anti-corruption measures; what the societal implications were; and how it shaped Chinese culture. It is clear that the importance of the system for Chinese history is profound, and many argue that it still exists in modified form in the Chinese university entrance examination, the Gaokao (高考), and in the furious educational competition that still exists within China. China's Examination Hell gives us an important perspective on why China is the way it is today.

Enjoy the episode.

Range is a book that I saw in a bookshop and called out to me like little else can. Subtitled "Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialised World", I felt as though it were written for me personally. It seems as though the way to "get ahead" is to specialise early and specialise hard, drilling deeply into a single topic until you become a world expert. Get your 10,000 hours of deliberate practice in before the competition gets there first. And yet I find myself always moving from topic to topic, weaving a wider web of apparently unrelated experience and knowledge. This very podcast is a testament to that. Could I be wasting my time?

David Epstein says no. As the author of the bestselling book The Sports Gene, he is no stranger to criticising the prevailing view, based originally on the work of K. Anders Ericsson (and subsequently reinterpreted, or distorted, by journalist Malcolm Gladwell), about the primacy of deliberate practice within a single domain. In Range, he shows that there is another, more common path to deep expertise that is not as well known - that of Roger Federer, among others. As children, they try out multiple sports (or musical instruments) in order to build up a more general sense of athleticism (musicality). After many years, they tend to gravitate to one sport (instrument) more than others, and really put their heart into practice because they made their own choice when they were ready. At that point, they catch up with the early specialisers with a new laser focus on their target field.

Sport and music aren't the only fields that seem to reward an early "sampling period". The author discusses scientists and inventors, who often make breakthroughs precisely because they use knowledge from a domain outside of that in which they are working. Their advantage is from what they know that other scientists (inventors) don't - and that could be something from a completely different field of science (technology), or even from history, economics, literature, or art.

Overall, Epstein's book is so rich and eclectic in findings concerning the value of breadth of knowledge and skills that it is hard to summarise in a blurb like this. In the audio, I do the best I can to organise his key points into a kind of theory with big take-home ideas, but it's just not possible to fit everything in. Whether you've read the book already or not, I hope my attempt to consolidate his writing into some key points will help you understand the thrust of the work.

Enjoy the episode.

When we speak about people who have achieved a lot in their lives, we usually apply a single noun to describe them. Winston Churchill - politician; Nicolaus Copernicus - astronomer; Isaac Newton - mathematician; Christopher Wren - architect; Omar Khayyam - poet.

In The Polymath, Waqas Ahmed reminds us that this is a misrepresentation of their lives. Did you know that Winston Churchill won the Nobel Prize - for literature? That Copernicus also had discoveries in economics and mathematics, while spending most of his time managing Church estates? That Newton's main occupations were alchemy and biblical exegesis, and that he ran the Royal Mint? That Khayyam was in fact an astronomer and mathematician who wrote poetry on the side? Wren's career was variegated enough not to be able to fit inside a single sentence.

Ahmed introduces us to a compendious collection of famous and not-so-famous historical figures with great accomplishments, and shows us just how varied their lives, careers, and output were. They were all Renaissance men and women, polymaths, polyhistors, universal geniuses... It seems as though half the world are poets and polyglots, and most of the rest are lawyers, doctors, diplomats, revolutionaries, or businesspeople, at the same time as they make great strides in the fields which they become famous for.

At least, that's the history. Waqas Ahmed makes the further point that most people don't do it this way anymore, even though there's no good reason why we shouldn't - even the rapidly growing body of human knowledge makes this approach neither impossible nor unprofitable. His arguments about education and the fate of the world seem under-researched and based heavily on speculation, but the sheer volume of biography and variety of historical and cultural perspective that he brings to the task is immense.

While I take issue with some of his ideas about education, the broad thrust in the first half of the book - that breadth is much more common among great thinkers than we assume, and that therefore extreme specialisation is not a prerequisite for doing important work at the top of one's field - seems irrefutable. The book also serves as a fount of biographical knowledge about great people from the past.

Enjoy the episode.

People often talk about how to work better, but it is rare to hear discussion of how to rest better. Take the famous so-called "10,000 hour rule". This is adapted (with some distortion) from the work of K. Anders Ericsson, the late great psychologist of expertise. The nature and volume of practice among top performers in various fields, as described in his work, is widely cited. But the same research contains details of how high performers rest differently. And yet nobody seems to have taken notice.

In Rest, Alex Soojung-Kim Pang argues that work and rest are not adversaries, but partners. Looking closely at the lives of many great writers, mathematicians, scientists, politicians, and businesspeople, he reveals that although their lives revolved around their work, their days did not. They would have ample leisure every day; they would rarely do more than four hours' work per day; and they often seem to take more naps than other people.

Scientific research on this topic seems thin on the ground. Pang shares what little he found, including a study of physicists in the 1950s showing that those who worked around 15-20 hours per week published more research articles than those who worked 40 or more hours a week. Another startling finding is that scientific Nobel laureates are 20 times as likely to have a hobby of dancing or acting than the scientific population at large, and 9 times more likely to be involved in the visual arts.

Overall, this is a book to make you rethink the commonly assumed view of rest as passive recovery that takes away time from work, rather than an active process that changes the nature and quality of work itself.

Enjoy the episode.

Having looked into research on first language vocabulary development over two recent episodes, now it's time to get into literacy more generally. What happens in people's minds when they read? And how do they learn to read?

This book breaks down the cognitive elements of the process of reading. Starting from written signs, it describes how these are turned into sounds (via two different mechanisms), and then how those sounds relate to word meanings; these meanings then combine with context and our knowledge of the world to create a picture of what is happening in a given text. On the way, we learn about word segmentation, phonological awareness, orthographic mapping, motivation and attitude, and a range of other important concepts in learning to read.

Daniel Willingham is a cognitive scientist who I've already covered on this podcast for his book Why Don't Students Like School? He spends a lot of time on outreach to explain to teachers (and anybody else) what learning is and how it works. His books are approachable, but also maintain rigour, and stay close to the evidence base of cognitive science. I'm glad to be covering another book of his on the podcast.

Enjoy the episode.

James Tooley is a specialist in private education. One day, on a work trip to India, he was frustrated that his position seemed to only allow him to help the rich, and not those who were most in need. So he decided to take a walk around the local slum. What did he find?

Private schools. A lot of private schools! All affordable, run for and by those living in the slums. As he investigated further, he found that such low-cost private schools abound in the slums and villages of India. Later he went on to Nigeria, Ghana, and Kenya, and found exactly the same thing. He even found some in China.

How can it be that there are private schools for the poor? Why aren't they attending the free government schools? Are these places actually any good? What is the government's response?

Governments and NGOs responded with either dismissal or contempt, saying that the schools were insignificant in number and enrollment, or that they were exploiting poor families and providing low-quality education. What James Tooley found was quite different. It was the government schools that were failing, and the people were exercising their free choice to send their children to the private schools, which were significantly better.

The Beautiful Tree documents Tooley's personal adventure through the world of private schools for the poor; his struggles with government bureaucrats, both well-meaning and corrupt; and his encounters with parents, children, and teachers doing what they can for themselves and each other. He explains his research about the economics and pedagogy of these schools, and explores the little-known history of private schooling in India, and how it has affected instruction in places as far away an the UK and South America.

This is the first book about economics of education on the podcast, and as such it is difficult for me to add much commentary or be very critical. But Tooley provides ample evidence (as well as sharing many personal experiences) about the structure of the education sector in developing countries, and writes in a balanced way that makes him seem trustworthy. In future, I intend to get more into economics of education, as I now see it as one of the key elements in coming to understand the nature of education as a whole.

Enjoy the episode.

This is the second episode in a series on vocabulary and literacy. The first was episode 91 (Vocabulary Development).

Closing the Vocabulary Gap is a slightly longer book on vocabulary than Vocabulary Development was, and peeks into the domain of literacy more generally. In this episode, we will focus on the following questions:

What is the relationship between vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension? (Does learning vocabulary increase your reading comprehension? Or is there no direct connection - maybe smarter people just do better at both?)
How many words do people know? And why is this question important?
How do people learn words from context?
How should you teach vocabulary?

The next part of the series will be focused on learning to read, which builds on knowledge from this book.

Enjoy the episode.

Mindfulness is a concept originating in Buddhism, but has in recent years spread like wildfire in the UK and elsewhere. Aside from its adoption by enthusiastic members of the general public, it has come into UK schools and even the National Health Service. Yoga and other forms of meditation have also placed themselves firmly in the mainstream. As I myself became interested in these practices, I spent some time looking into the academic research on them. Luckily I found this book - Drs Farias and Wikholm had done my work for me.

Subtitled "Can Meditation Change You?", The Buddha Pill is an investigation into the science behind yoga, mindfulness meditation, and transcendental meditation. Both psychologists of religion and spirituality, the authors have their own extensive and positive experience with meditation.

The first time I read the book, as I was halfway through, I found myself doing a double take. How could people who were so invested in the idea of meditation also spend so much time discussing its limitations and outright negative aspects? The book almost felt like an attack on these practices, although a measured and fair one

Upon second reading, while preparing this episode, I realised that the shock I had experienced was in fact due to my unrealistic (but not uncommon) expectations - that meditation does nothing but good, brings nothing but calm, and is more effective at improving your quality of life than any other activity that you might engage in. Drs Farias and Wikholm merely show their readership the extent to which these practices have been "hyped up" by the underlying assumption of the perfection of exotic Eastern ideas, and a misunderstanding of their philosophical basis and context.

Overall, the message of the book is a "yes, but". Yes, meditation can be beneficial, but it can also be harmful - it can lead to mental disturbances, including, in extreme cases, psychosis, mania, and suicidal ideation. Yes, meditation can be therapeutic, but more "standard" methods tend to work just as well - things like CBT or exercise. And yes, meditation can make you happier, but that's not what it was originally designed or intended for - the original purpose was to destroy your sense of self, to reveal the illusions that permeate your psyche and your life, to better understand yourself through a radical undermining of your ego.

Enjoy the episode.

In 2018 and 2019 I worked for an education technology start-up in London called Mrs Wordsmith. The company produces materials for developing literacy and augmenting vocabulary among first-language learners of English. While I was there, I had the chance to dig into a lot of research about vocabulary and literacy.

I gradually came over to the view that, in a sense, all learning is the development of literacy. (Or, adding some caveats, all non-mathematical academic learning is the development of literacy.) When we learn a new field, we become "literate" within that field, because previously we would not have understood its literature due to a lack of domain-relevant vocabulary and content knowledge. Just try reading academic papers outside of your domain of expertise.

Vocabulary Development is the first in a series of podcast episodes about literacy. Steven Stahl is one of the big names in this field, and in this short pamphlet he puts across the most important information about vocabulary for teachers.

The book is very short, but I manage to turn it into a very long episode. This is mostly because I have much to comment. I will be working through books on literacy and vocabulary on the podcast, gradually adding layers of information, until we will finally be ready to tackle the most detailed books on the subject.

Enjoy the episode.

Discovery learning is an approach that I was trying out at around the time I was in the 20's of episode numbers of this podcast. I tried out the idea of Maths Circles, running a few of my own and attending a course about them in Notre Dame University in the United States. I also tried running a Self-Organised Learning Environment or SOLE, modelled on the work of Sugata Mitra, famous for his "hole-in-the-wall" experiments in India.

Since then, I have discovered the reasons why these sorts of approaches don't work, and I've been discussing this recently on the podcast. I also discussed the Sugata Mitra's apparent dishonesty in the episode on Hope in the Wall.

In this episode, we look at the history of the idea of discovery learning. First suggested in the 1960's by Jerome Bruner, it has since gone through several rounds of re-branding and repeated research.

The article in question is called Should There Be a Three Strikes Rule Against Discovery Learning? The Case for Guided Methods of Instruction by Richard Mayer. Specifically, it shows that pure discovery learning methods (where students are mostly left to their own devices) have abundant evidence that they are not as good as guided discovery methods (where the teacher provides feedback and hints during problem solving), though it seems that there is also some evidence that guided discovery methods are better than expository approaches (i.e. explaining everything in detail beforehand).

The defining features of the human mind that seem to be the cause of this are two: the limitations of working memory capacity on the one hand; and the human desire to avoid thinking where possible on the other. Discovery learning appears to overload working memory, whereas expository approaches might result in the students not actually thinking. In a way, it is two sides of the admonition "they need to engage with the material." Discovery learning focuses on engagement at the expense of the material, and expository methods focus on the material often at the expense of engagement, but it appears that guided discovery can avoid both of these traps with greater reliability, at least in some cases.

Enjoy the episode.

Jared Diamond is a geographer and author of many bestselling books about civilisation, including Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse. In The World Until Yesterday, he combines his scholarship and his personal experiences in the New Guinea highlands to discuss how non-state societies of hunter gatherers and subsistence farmers and herders differ from modern industrialised state societies. In so doing, he sheds a light on the differences between our modern world and the way that humans have lived for the majority of our existence on this planet.

Although the whole book is fascinating, there is only one chapter that is really relevant to the themes of this podcast: the one entitled Bringing Up Children. In it, we can get a much broader perspective on the ways that different societies approach childhood and education than we ever could by comparing industrialised state societies with one another (say, comparing the People's Republic of China to the United Kingdom).

The chapter deals with the following themes: childbirth; infanticide; weaning; birth interval; breastfeeding; infant-adult physical contact; fathers and "allo-parents"; responses to crying infants; physical punishment; child autonomy; multi-age playgroups; and child play and education.

There are two reasons that I wanted to talk about this topic. The first is that I want to understand the range of human societies, cultures, and attitudes as well as possible, to make sure that my own understandings and viewpoints can take a broad perspective and discover and challenge any assumptions I might have rather than myopically studying the same society all the time. I believe that this makes me less likely to be an "accidental extremist" - somebody who holds an extreme viewpoint but doesn't realise it because everybody around me assumes the same as a matter of course, since we belong to the same culture. One potential example of this is the assumption of the need for school itself, as most humans that have ever lived have not spent a single day in school, nor have they ever felt the need to.

The second reason is actually to do with other people's arguments around what is "natural". For example, the unschooling movement, an offshoot of homeschooling where no instruction takes place, is largely based on the idea that copying the way that children have been brought up for hundreds of thousands of years is a better way to do things than to submit to modern assumptions about the necessity of schooling. By understanding something about the societies that inspire this line of thinking, we can both come to appreciate their perspective, and be in a reasonable position to engage with their ideas.

Enjoy the episode.

Earlier in the life of this podcast I was experimenting with discovery learning. I was even something of a fan. I tried out "Maths Circles", a form of discovery- and inquiry-based teaching, with students aged 16-18 and 10-11, and even went on a course in the USA to try to learn more about it. My exploits are recorded in previous episodes. I could hardly call them a great success.

Subsequently, I tried to find research on Maths Circles. The Internet didn't bring anything up. Eventually I put that obsession away and focused on other books and research in education and cognitive science.

After much rummaging about the literature reading whatever I thought was interesting, I found this article, or perhaps it found me, and it was difficult for me to face it at first. I was already so strongly bound to my way of thinking that it was too much cognitive dissonance to read this. I had serious confirmation bias. It took me a while before I was brave enough to actually read it and shatter my illusions.

It turns out that this kind of teaching has been shown many times over to be ineffective. My failures with my experiments weren't just because I was doing it wrong, it was because the whole approach is flawed. Evidence has been mounting about this for over half a century, I just didn't know about it.

This was certainly an eye-opener for me. I hope that it inoculates you against something that could waste your time - or convince you to stop doing what you're doing, if you are currently using these inefficient and ineffective methods.

Enjoy the episode.

I'm just about to do another episode where I talk about a scientific article on this very topic, criticising the approach. I thought it only fair to see it from the side of the proponents as well.

Unfortunately, this book is something of a disappointment. There are many minor annoyances early on such as inconsistent use of terminology and a lack of back-up to some claims. But there are much greater issues than that.

For one thing, the authors seem to have difficulty defining the concept, and certainly find it hard to do so succinctly. This is not a good sign.

The thing that really strikes me, though, is how the central idea of the book is not very useful at all. It proposes a way in which we can view any lesson or educational experience from various perspectives, by considering aspects of the experience (such as which senses are being used, and how the learner responds emotionally). The trouble is, this only leads to a combinatorical explosion - there are so many possibilities, but which possibilities are good? So many perspectives, but which ones are useful? A real expert focuses on providing the right way of thinking about a situation, not on all the different ways you can view a situation.

Ultimately I find that there is little that is useful here. I still wanted to talk about the book a bit in order to be clear about what my expectations are, and why this book doesn't meet them.

Enjoy the episode.

The inspiration for this episode is a rather technical tome entitled Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms by David MacKay. It's basically an infromation theory / machine learning textbook. I initially got it because it's known to be a rewarding work for the most nerdy people in the machine learning (a.k.a. "artificial intelligence") world, who want to get down to fundamentals and understand how concepts from the apparently seperate fields of information theory and inference interrelate.

I haven't finished the book, and as of this writing I'm not actually actively reading it. I still wanted to talk about something from it on the podcast though. In the early chapters of the book, MacKay mentions how learning is, in a way, a kind of information compression. This fascinating idea has been circling in my head for months, and so I wanted to comment on it a bit on this podcast.

Enjoy the episode.

Daniel Willingham is a cognitive scientist who specialises in the study of how people read. In this book, he brings forward nine principles of cognitive science that both have a substantial evidence base and are relevant to teachers. Although he wanted there to be ten, nine is all that he could find that would match those criteria.

He names the chapters after questions that they answer rather than the principles that they expound, as this would pique the readers' interest more and make them more likely to remember the principles (he is a cognitive scientist after all). The questions (and answers, paraphrased) are as follows:

Why don't students like school? (because people are not designed to think, but to not think in most situations)
How can I teach students the skills they need when standardised tests require only facts? (factual knowledge must precede skill)
Why do students remember everything on TV and forget everything I say? (the importance of repetition, emotion, and stories)
Why is it so hard for students to understand abstract ideas? (because we understand things in terms of what we already know, and what we already know is mostly concrete)
Is drilling worth it? (practice is essential)
What's the secret to getting students to think like real mathematicians, scientists, and historians? (don't - experts are fundamentally different from novices)
How should I adjust my teaching for different types of learners? (learning styles are a myth)
How can I help slow learners? (hard work can improve intelligence and beliefs about intelligence matter, but some difference is genetic)
What about my mind? (teaching is a skill like any other)

When I first read the book, there were a number of truths that shattered my pre-existing notions, which was scary but beneficial for me. I hope it helps you as much as it helped me.

Enjoy the episode.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a former options trader who noticed that the financial markets were unstable ahead of the crash in 2008, and made a lot of money from shorting the market (betting that it would crash). Since then, he has written a quadrilogy of books on risk and decision-making under uncertainty which he calls the incerto. The books in the series are Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan, Antifragile, and the one I cover in this episode, Skin in the Game. At least two of his books - The Black Swan and Antifragile - have now made it as concepts and vocabulary of popular parlance.

Taleb is a very well-read and insightful author. He follows a philosophy of education in the extremes - a combination of long library visits and street fights, to paraphrase his own description. More accurately, he spent much of his teenage years reading stacks of books at home while bombs went off outside, as he was a civilian during the Lebanese Civil War. His writing has generated a following, and his erudition inspired me years ago to try to read as much as I could - something that ultimately influenced my decision to start this podcast.

Taleb's writing is fiery, to say the least, as he pulls no punches to those who he finds morally abhorrent, which seems to be a large section of the population. His favourite targets are economists and journalists, and in a way that is what Skin in the Game is all about - the moral peril of people who don't take risks.

The reason for covering this book on the podcast is quite self-reflective. If education commentators aren't teachers themselves, if they don't have to test their ideas by actually carrying them out and seeing them succeed or fail, if it doesn't hurt them when they are wrong, then what's to stop them blindly commentating with full confidence, even if they don't know what they're talking about? What's to stop them bullshitting their way to fame and fortune? What's to stop them polluting the idea space with worthless junk to make themselves sound good?

This is exactly the sort of trap that I feel that some commentators may have fallen into - and one that I am in danger of falling into myself. As I enter the first year in almost a decade when I am not teaching in any capacity, might I lose contact with reality? Might I not end up selling snake oil? The danger is real.

So, this episode is largely a moral discussion, as well as a personal reflection. I think we should be aware of the effect that risk profiles have on the incentives of people within a particular domain - in this case, education.

Enjoy the episode.

SuperMemo is a flashcard and spaced repetition software that has been around since 1991. Its founder, Dr Piotr Wozniak, maintains a blog with many interesting discussions of learning and memory. One that stood out to me was the 20 rules for formulating knowledge, available via this link: http://super-memory.com/articles/20rules.htm.

I read the article with an eye to finding fundamental or deep principles of learning, rather than improving the quality of my flashcards. The following rules were the ones that seemed to fit the bill:

Do not learn if you do not understand. (Rule 1)
Learn before you memorise. (Rule 2)
Build upon the basics. (Rule 3)
The minimum information principle. (Rule 4)
Avoid sets and enumerations. (Rules 9 and 10)
Combat inteference. (Rule 11)

I discuss these rules in context of my own experiences and of the theory that I have covered on the podcast.

Enjoy the episode.

Continuing with our information processing model theme (i.e. seeing the mind as made up of long-term memory and limited working memory), we now have a book on teaching practices that is based on this very model. The title of this book comes from the idea that as teachers, our aim is to make long-lasting, high-quality additions to students' long-term memories.

After an introduction to this model of the mind, Peps McCrea goes on to elucidate 9 principles of memorable teaching:

Manage information (information is always in competition for students' attention)
Streamline communications (consider the way you communicate ideas to maximise clarity and conciseness)
Orient attention
Regulate load (overloaded students can't learn; underloaded students get bored)
Expedite elaboration (ways of making new ideas stick)
Refine structures (going from a vague sense of an idea to a deep understanding)
Stabilise changes (making knowledge last)
Align pedagogies (don't teach badly?)
Embed metacognition

Something that I am quite impressed by, and I mention several times in the episode, is how succinct and clear the author's writing is. It really looks like he has been using the principles in the book to expound the principles in the book (which is a bit of a mind-bending mouthful to say or think). In other words, he takes his own advice.

This is a great book. I recommend it.

Enjoy the episode.

There one major, well-documented factor that effects what the best kind of instruction is for different people: expertise.

This episode's article is The expertise reversal effect by John Sweller et al. (2003). The effect is so called because certain changes in instructional materials and practices that have repeatedly been found to enhance learning in novices, have actually been found to reduce learning in more advanced students. Hence there is a "reversal" in effectiveness.

The effect can easily be understood by considering the information processing model of the human mind (i.e. the idea of the thinking mind being made up of long-term memory and a limited working memory). Thus, this episode makes up part of a series on the podcast about this model of the mind and its implications.

Enjoy the episode.

Learning styles are one of the most widely believed psychological ideas known by scientists to be invalid. Over 90% of university students in the USA believe in them, and most adults will gladly share whether they consider themselves to be visual, auditory, or kinaesthetic learners (VAK theory is the leading learning styles theory).

In this episode, we look at six publications showing the problems with learning styles theories. The problems fall into three layers:

The questionnaires for many learning styles theories (i.e. the way in which the learning style of a given person is determined) have problems of validity, meaning that they don't measure anything, or they don't measure what they claim to measure. For example, if everyone answers that they would rather learn a dance by dancing it rather than by watching it or listening to an explanation, then that probably says more about what a good way to teach dancing is, rather than what learning style the individuals have.
The questionnaires also suffer from problems of reliability. This means that when the same person is re-measured, they get a different result, which means that the measurement isn't trustworthy, and therefore means that nothing is being measured.
Those few theories that are shown to be both valid and reliable then have to be tested for whether they actually make a difference to student learning. Is it better to teach visual learners visually, auditory learners auditively, etc.? It turns out that there is no evidence for this in the research in high-quality studies, and in fact there is much evidence to the contrary (that your supposed learning style makes no difference to the way you learn).

Thankfully, the lack of validity of the idea of learning styles simplifies the task of teachers and other educational professionals greatly. You don't have to think about learning styles!

Enjoy the episode.

Notes

The articles covered in this episode are the following:

Dembo & Howard (2007). Advice about the use of learning styles: a major myth in education.

Pashler et al. (2017). Learning styles - concepts and evidence.

Willingham et al. (2015). The scientific status of learning styles theories.

Cuevas (2015). Is learning-styles based instruction effective? A comprehensive analysis of recent research in learning styles.

Kirschner (2016). Stop propagating the learning styles myth.

Reiner & Willingham (2010). The Myth of Learning Styles.

This is a book with a terrible title and wonderful ideas. Isn't there a saying about not judging the quality of a publication's contents by the attractiveness of its external design?

Many famous athletes credit Steve Peters with being essential to their success, including footballer Steven Gerard and rower Sir Chris Hoy. This book summarises his ideas in a way that makes them accessible to everyone.

Our minds are modular. Sometimes we are "at war with ourselves" or we "don't know why we did something". There are different parts inside us that sometimes cooperate and sometimes clash.

Professor Steve Peters goes into a detailed description of the three elements of the psychological mind: the Chimp, the Human, and the Computer. He then goes on to explain their interactions, the ways in which their misbehaviours can cause problems in our everyday lives, and how to deal with it. Understanding these three elements will, for the first time in your life, give you a fully working model of how your mind works (and how the minds of others work), as well as a way of thinking about what to do when things go wrong.

One thing that strikes me about this model is how compatible it is with the information processing model of the mind and cognitive load theory, which are based on splitting the mind into two parts: working memory and long-term memory. It seems as though working memory is approximately the same thing as the Human, long-term memory is the Computer, and the Chimp is the emotional centre, which is not included in the information processing model. (The information processing model seeks to simplify thinking down to just its non-emotional elements.)

Understanding the mind in this way is invaluable to people trying to understand learning. I hope you find this book as insightful as I have.

Enjoy the episode.

This may be the most important episode on the podcast so far.

When I started out on this journey of coming to understand education, I had a lot of questions. As I started to interrogate my questions further, probing the more fundamental holes in my understanding that lay behind them, I realised that I was missing answers to the most basic questions you could think of: What is education? And what is learning?

I now feel that I have an answer to at least one of these questions. It's a very simple answer. So simple, in fact, that when I first encountered it I felt a mixture of bemusement at its simplicity, and annoyance or even rage at its apparent reductiveness. The definition is as follows:

Learning is additions to long-term memory.

It felt as though all the other aspects of learning that I had been thinking about - skill development, change in self-perception, the change in who a person is and who they say they are, and the experience itself - had been completely washed over and ignored. This made me mad at the "heartless scientists" (my feelings at the time) who were proposing such a definition.

Eventually I realised that this definition is reductive in a "good way". So much in discussions of education ends up bloated with wordiness - finally, this is something succinct. And rather than being reductive in the sense of denying the aspects I mentioned above, it actually incorporates them. It turns out that long-term memory is so much more important than I, or almost anyone else, had previously realised.

In this episode I discuss this idea and some of its implications. In the episodes that follow, I will go into this idea in great depth. There is a lot to say about it, and as I said, it may be the most important idea in education overall.

Enjoy the episode.

In this episode, I have the great privilege to invite Dr James Comer, the creator of the Comer School Development Program (SDP), onto the show. Dr Comer is the Maurice Falk Professor of Child Psychiatry at the Yale Child Study Centre, and has been since 1976, as well as associate dean at the Yale School of Medicine. His School Development Program has been used in more than 600 schools, and he has been awarded 47 honorary degrees.

I was a bit nervous during the interview, and it shows. I had great respect for Dr Comer even before I spoke to him, as you can see from a brief overview of his bio. I don't get nervous recording episodes on my own anymore, but rarely do I have a chance to interview such a distinguished guest who I truly admire.

During the interview my respect for Dr Comer only grew. Unlike so many people who I have heard speak in the education space, he stuck only to that which he knew about (which is not to say that he doesn't have great knowledge, only that he was willing to admit where he didn't know about something), and he answered questions in a way that demonstrated a connection to reality and a subtlety of understanding that went beyond partisanship. His answers just all seemed so reasonable. I realised that I was talking to somebody very wise.

I learned a lot from speaking to Dr Comer. I hope you do from listening to our conversation.

Enjoy the episode.

In this part of the two-part episode about Linda Darling-Hammond's book With the Whole Child in Mind, we will look at one of the two case studies mentioned in the book, that of Norman S. Weir Elementary School in New Jersey.

The Comer SDP was implemented there starting in 1997 with the appointment of Ruth Baskerville as the school principal. At this time, the school was described as "characterised by student disaffection with the learning process, frequent fights, and low staff morale in a building that was in disrepair". By the end of the 2003-04 school year, the outlook was very different: 100% of Weir 4th-graders achieved full or advanced proficiency on both maths and language arts exams. (Unfortunately I couldn't find data for 1997, but as a comparison, the equivalent averages for the district and the state were 52.4% and 77.6% respectively.)

As for the school environment, in a school questionnaire, faculty and staff reported the school climate as "relaxed", "very good", and "terrific." Others described the collegiality among staff as "excellent," with "fantastic" relationships where "every student and parent is valued."

This close-up description of a success story gives some sense of what it would be like to be in a school operating the Comer process, and helps to add some concreteness to the otherwise abstract and general description from the previous part of my discussion of this book.

Enjoy the episode.

Last episode, we saw a meta-analysis of comprehensive school reform (CSR) programmes. The best-performing programmes are Success for All, Direct Instruction, and the Comer School Development Program.

The episode in this book concerns the Comer School Development Program (SDP), covering its philosophy and implementation. The focus of the SDP is on two main themes: improving relationships within the school; and thinking of all the ways in which child development can be fostered at school, known as the six developmental pathways (physical, language, ethical, social, psychological, and cognitive).

The SDP is based on nine elements, split into three groups. There is the "who", which are the teams that are formed to guide the school and make sure all stakeholders are represented; the "what", which describes the operations that make change and solve problems in the school; and the "how", which are principles that govern the school culture and climate as a whole.

The "who" are the School Planning and Management Team (SPMT), the Student Staff Support Team (SSST), and the Parent Team (PT). The "what" are the Comprehensive School Plan, professional development, and assessment & modification. The "how" is consensus, collaboration, and no-fault problem solving. The above nine principles are complex enough for me not to want to describe them in detail in this blurb, but numerous enough for me to want to put them here for reference for those who have already listened to the audio.

I would like to thank Linda Darling-Hammond for contacting me to ask me to cover her book (and alerting me to the existence of the Comer SDP in the process), and for providing me with a free copy of her book for me to read.

Enjoy the episode.

Comprehensive school reform (CSR) is a name for any set of policies that are simultaneously enacted in (usually a single) school for the purposes of school improvement. There are many different branded types of CSR program, including Core Knowledge, Direct Instruction, Montessori, Roots & Wings, School Development Program, and Success for All.

This article is entitled Comprehensive School Reform and Achievement: A Meta-Analysis by Borman et al. It goes through all of the different types of comprehensive school reform programs that have been studied and identifies which ones are the most effective. Spoiler alert! It's the Comer School Development Program, Direct Instruction, and Success for All. For more details, take a listen.

Enjoy the episode.

In the past three episodes, we have looked at three great teachers: basketball coach John Wooden, mathematics teacher Jaime Escalante, and primary school teacher Marva Collins. Each has their own domain of expertise (basketball, mathematics, and literature) and age of students (university, high school, and primary school). Are there any ways in which we can generalise about them?

A list of features that tend to make teachers likely to be nominated as "favourite" teachers are given in You Haven't Taught Until They've Learned (the book about John Wooden), and they are mostly true of the above three that we've looked at in detail. Here is the list:

They make learning engaging;
They have a passion for the material;
They have deep subject knowledge;
They are extremely organised;
They are intense;
They know students need to be recognised for even small progress;
They treat everyone with respect;
They are fair;
They believe that all students are natural learners;
They make it implicitly known that they like being with their students;
They place priority on individualised teaching.

There are also some notable absences from this list, such as giving students autonomy, focusing on learning styles, teaching generalisable skills rather than content knowledge, and having a student-centred approach.

I also made my own list of features that they have in common, as follows:

They use drills;
They focus on fundamentals;
They are highly didactic (rather than using e.g. group work or problem-based learning);
They hold power/authority, and lead the class;
They show warmth/love to their students;
They take responsibility for the students' learning;
They are very dedicated;
Unfortunately, they are poorly paid;
They have long-term effects on their students.

Enjoy the episode.

In this final part of the series on legendary teacher Marva Collins, we look at her educational philosophy, i.e. things that she believed and that impacted her decisions and actions in and around the classroom, but that are hard to perceive directly and that are best understood by listening to what she said rather than looking at what she did. The key points concern the idea of relevance, the impact of progressive education, creativity, and the effect and prevalence of labelling children.

I hope you've drawn as much inspiration and as many lessons from Marva Collins as I have. She was truly an exceptional teacher who forged her own path, shattered limiting expectations, and changed lives.

Enjoy the episode.

In this part of the series on Marva Collins, we look at her curriculum and some elements of the way that she taught. The most surprising thing is the kind of literature that she was presenting to such young children - authors such as Dostoyevsky, Plato, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Dante, Tolstoy, Emerson, and Poe.

Also, I managed to find a documentary about Marva Collins which shows how some of her students turned out over a decade later. It's on YouTube, here is the link:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8b1Behi9FM.

Enjoy the episode.

When she was working at Delano Elementary School in Chicago, Marva would often be given the "worst", most disruptive students, and in her 14 years there she developed a way of dealing with them. By the time she set up her own school, she was a master of helping them get out of their destructive cycle and working to achieve their academic and social potential, which was way beyond what anybody had expected.

In this episode, we look at several examples of Marva Collins dealing with particularly recalcitrant children. She is the expert here, so it's best to leave the talking to her.

Enjoy the episode.

In one chapter of the book Marva Collins' Way, we are treated to a fly-on-the-wall view of Marva Collins' first day with a new class in a new school year. This is such a valuable resource that I've devoted one full part of this episode on Marva Collins to it. It demonstrates how she builds trust, sets the tone, motivates children, and gets them to believe in themselves. It is her school year and her educational philosophy in a nutshell, and therefore very much worth spending some time on.

Enjoy the episode.

Marva Collins is the best teacher I have ever seen or heard of. Working in a poor black neighbourhood in Chicago in the 1970s, she took on the worst of the worst - kids described as "unteachable", either actively defiant towards school or considered so learning-disabled as to never be able to learn to read - and within a space of one to two years had them reading and enjoying Shakespeare, Chaucer, Plato, and Dostoyevsky; exhibiting an insatiable thirst for knowledge; and reading ten books each over the summer break. These children were on average around eight years old. Talking about Marva Collins forms the capstone of our biographies of great teachers.

I've mentioned Marva Collins many times on the podcast before. The first mention was way back in episode 1, as she appears in the book Mindset. Now I'm finally going into her work in detail. Part of the reason it took me so long to get around to this was that I was simply intimidated by the amount of work that I knew this would take - I've split up this episode into five parts, totalling around four hours of audio. There is just so much to say.

In this part, I talk about her background and look at some of her achievements to whet your appetite for a more in-depth look at how she did what she did.

Enjoy the episode.

After the events of summer 1982, when Jaime Escalante's Advanced Placement Calculus students were accused of cheating and then vindicated on a re-test, Escalante had become famous first in local and then national news. The original story about an American institution, ETS, allegedly discriminating based on race to accuse the latino students of cheating, turned into a story of surprise and applause as an "academic sinkhole" like Garfield High managed to have such a large number of students taking AP Calculus.

The events of 1982 inspired a film about Jaime Escalante, Stand and Deliver, which spread his fame to an even wider audience. But the film came too early. In the years following 1982, calculus at Garfield High continuedto grow with the same momentum, reaching ever greater heights. After the 18 students taking the exam in 1982, there were 33 in 1983, a whopping 68 in 1984 (more than double the previous year!), and two years later, in 1986, a staggering 151 students took the test, more than eight times as many as in the year that brought Escalante fame.

While AP Calculus was in overdrive, other AP programs also began to thrive. Garfield High now offered Advanced Placement courses in History, English, Biology, Physics, French, Government, and Computer Science, with a growing number of students taking these year on year.

Within twelve years, Garfield High had transformed from a gang-ridden hole on the brink of being shut down, to an academic beacon with a waiting list of 400 students. It is truly a story worth telling.

Enjoy the episode.

After a short time working at Garfield High School, Jaime Escalante was asked to take over Advanced Placement calculus. Advanced Placement is a type of examination which offers "college credit", meaning that those who pass have a reduced number of courses that they need to take to get a degree. It's a hard exam, basically.

Escalante wasn't sure about the programme at first, but soon became keen to take it over and expand it. He felt that it gives an objective view of his work and that of his students, and gives them something to strive towards and be competitive about.

Escalante worked hard to push his students. He used every tactic he could think of, from bribes to threats to guilt trips; and he extended study time to before school, after school, lunchtime, and summer break. He worked so hard that one day he had a heart attack, and worked right through it. This story did much to add to his mystique.

The calculus classes expanded: first 5, then 8, then 15, and in 1982 there were 18. That was a fateful year, when his students would be accused of cheating by the Educational Testing Service (ETS). The accusation would draw attention to this burgeoning calculus programme in what all had assumed to be an academic backwater, and national fame followed. But Escalante would not rest on his laurels.

Enjoy the episode.

In 1974, Garfield High School got a new principal (headmaster) in the form of Alex Avilez. The school was in turmoil, with a major gang presence, and a police presence to help combat the gang presence. It was noisy, with music blaring from "dozens" of radios; fights broke out often; truancy was rampant; and the dropout rate was 50%.

Avilez's core belief was in people's fundamental goodness. He was excited about young people and about human potential, and wanted to aim for a peaceful Garfield High in which everyone loved one another. The way to achieve this, he decided, was to treat the students as the adults they were about to become. He registered the gangs with the school, placed their insignia in prominent locations, and negotiated with gang leaders to preserve decorum and reduce violence.

Possemato was principal after Avilez. Together with Gradillas, he had a very different approach to discipline at the school. Although Gradillas believed that every child knows the difference between right and wrong, he felt that this sense was often deeply buried, and the way to get the best out of adolescents often involved pushing their buttons and riling them up emotionally. He would physically take down students being a danger to others, accuse liars of being cowards, and tell parents that they were sorry that their children had no respect for them.

The difference in the effectiveness of these two approaches was stark. One almost plunged the school into an abyss, while the other saved it from closing. It is an important part of the Garfield High story that doesn't get told as much as Escalante's calculus teaching, and yet was essential to its success.

Enjoy the episode.

One of the main lessons from the story of Jaime Escalante's career at East LA's Garfeild High School was that it was ultimately a team effort to reach the academic level that the school eventually did. Apart from Escalante himself, there are two figures who stand out as central to the story: Henry Gradillas and Benjamin Jimenez.

Gradillas joined Garfield High as a biology teacher after six years in the US army and a short stint as an orchard manager. He saw clear similarities between the young people in his classroom and those who he had been training as an army captain - they were only slightly younger, and they had similar needs, desires, and problems. He would later be promoted to Dean of Discipline and finally Principal (Headmaster) of Garfield High, positions in which he would help deal with Escalante's problem students, and provide him with the resources he needed to make the Advanced Placement Calculus courses a success.

Jimenez was one of the other mathematics teachers at Garfield. Impressed with Escalante's classes, he became an apprentice and later collaborator and ally to Escalante. He would go on to run many of the courses preparing students for a the rigours of calculus, and would run some of the calculus classes themselves when the program grew above 100 students. Without Jimenez, Escalante would be left with only uninterested teachers and active enemies in his department, and too much work for one individual to carry out.

Escalante himself needs much less introduction, famous as he is. The title of the book is Escalante: The Greatest Teacher in America after all. The book goes into more detail about his background than those of the others. The most interesting thing we hear about his background is how he struggled as a beginning teacher, and the teachers that he admired as he went through his training. It is enlightening to see what his early influences were in terms of his approach to teaching.

Enjoy the episode.

Jaime Escalante was a Bolivian teacher who came to Los Angeles in the 1960s. After joining the chaotic failing school Garfield High as a mathematics teacher in 1974, he soon began an Advanced Placement Calculus program that grew to an unheard of size for such a disadvantaged community.

In 1982, the Educational Testing Service (ETS), which wrote and marked the tests, suspected Garfield High students of cheating. This led to interest from the media and later fame for Escalante as people started to take notice of what was happening at the school. Soon after, the film Stand and Deliver was produced based on Escalante's success up to that point, starring Edward James Olmos in the leading role.

However, even this film did not capture the scale of the success at Garfield High, as it came too early. After 1982, the number of students at the school taking AP Calculus continued to climb to stratospheric heights, from 18 in 1982 - already unbelievable to most, hence the media attention - to 33 in 1983, 68 in 1984, and an eye-watering 151 in 1986. Other AP programs also took off, including History, Government, English, Physics, and Computer Science.

How did all this happen? What is Escalante's secret? These are pressing questions, as they could lead to a better understanding of how to motivate and teach students, as well as how to turn a failing school around.

This book is written as a story, and so the themes and key lessons from it have to be disentangled from the narrative. We will be looking at it in four parts:

Introducing the main characters (Jaime Escalante, Henry Gradillas, and Benjamin Jimenez);
Considering the two very different approaches to discipline applied at the school, one with disastrous consequences and one that saved the school from closing;
Examining how Escalante and his "team" managed to raise standards and achievement; and
Admiring the "glory years", after 1982, when the whole school was on the academic upsurge.

There are several lessons to take from the story of Escalante and Garfield High. I hope you enjoy learning from this exceptional case study as much as I have.

Enjoy the episode.

I first read You Haven't Taught Until They Have Learned almost five years ago. In that time, I have learned much about how people learn. Re-reading the book now, I am struck by how much of what John Wooden did in his teaching is well supported by modern cognitive science. This is what I try to convey in this short addendum to the notes on John Wooden's pedagogy.

Enjoy the episode.

John Wooden was a basketball coach for UCLA and an English teacher. He is renowned as one of the greatest coaches of all time, winning 10 out of 12 NCAA championships, including seven in a row, and has been named Coach of the Century by ESPN among others.

You Haven't Taught Until They've Learned is a book about his pedagogy, written by one of his former players (Swen Nater) and by an education researcher who had the rare privilege to observe his basketball practices and ask him detailed questions about his teaching (Ronald Gallimore). The dual authorship gives it a valuable two-pronged perspective, that of student as well as that of researcher.

As one reads the book, one is struck by the sense that Coach Wooden was not only exceptional in terms of what he did - his approach to teaching - but also who he was - a man of such strong moral character that it is daunting even to use him as a role model. He taught by example as well as teaching explicitly, and his students remember him for that.

In his retirement, barely a day went by without one of John Wooden's former students calling him to talk. He pushed his students hard, but he also cared for them deeply. It is surely valuable to examine some of his practices and principles from his exceptional career.

Enjoy the episode.

John Hattie is an education researcher from New Zealand with a very ambitious goal: to synthesise the myriad quantitative research studies on education in a single publication. The number of articles affecting his book Visible Learning numbers in the region of 80 thousand (!). The results of his analysis have been hailed as the "Holy Grail" of education by such prestigious authorities as the Times Education Supplement. So, how did he and his team do it?

Hattie uses an approach known as meta-analysis. Meta-analyses take numerous research articles trying to measure an effect and compare them in order to ultimately determine the size of the effect. They are common in medicine, where they are often used to elucidate whether a drug is truly effective or not, as a single study may incorrectly show a drug to be effective simply by chance.

However, Hattie goes one step further and carries out a meta-analysis on other meta-analyses, forming a sort of "meta-meta-analysis". With this approach, his team only directly work with 400 articles, as each of these is a meta-analysis of tens or hundreds of other articles, which is how we reach the gargantuan number 80 thousand.

You would have thought that such an ambitious, influential, and widely praised work would have come under much careful scrutiny. And you would have thought that since it is so statistical, numerous other researchers in the field of education would have performed at least a surface-level plausibility check.

However, you may be disappointed. It took two years for anybody to even begin to notice the glaring statistical errors behind this work, and even when they were noticed, Hattie's team didn't treat them with the gravity they deserved. Methodological criticism gradually increased in number, and by now it is clear that the "Holy Grail" has numerous leaky holes.

In this episode, after introducing Visible Learning, I go on to take some highlights from one such criticism, entitled How to engage in pseudoscience with real data: A criticism of John Hattie’s arguments in Visible Learning from the perspective of a statistician, written by Canadian statistician Pierre-Jerome Bergeron. I aim to explain the most accessible points, and leave the more complex parts of the article for those with the interest and mathematical acumen to look up.

This sort of thing seems to happen a lot in education. It's one of the reasons why it's so hard to figure out how things work and what's actually true in the field. At least I can warn people about the problems with this still widely cited work.

Enjoy the episode.

Graham Nuthall was an education researcher from New Zealand who spent most of his career on classroom observation, both by directly sitting in on lessons and by recording them by the hundred, watching them back, and analysing them with his team. He also made extensive use of interviews with students to clarify their thought processes. This short book communicates his most important findings to other researchers and to teachers.

His most impressive achievement is being able to predict, with some accuracy, what concepts or facts children have learned based solely on classroom observation. His team would analyse what different students were doing at key moments in lessons, noting whether they were paying attention to the information being taught or discussed. They found that if a student had been paying attention at least three times when the full information necessary to understand a concept was being stated, then they would almost always have formed the concept and be able to articulate it after the end of the unit. If they had paid attention only two or fewer times, they had not learnt the concept.

His work emphasises the individual lives of students, and particularly peer interactions. It's not only "distraction" either - for some students, over half of what they learned had been from peers. He goes over detailed examples of classroom conversations, both the public and the clandestine, showing how these affect both student learning and broader behaviour and culture.

Although the main points of the book concern peers and the number of exposures required to learn something, given that the book is a summary of the most important things that Nuthall has to say, it touches on many other points and ideas in education.

Although I was hoping to make this a short episode, as per my Public Service Announcement (last "episode"), it ended up having to be around 50 minutes long to cover the most important things that he had to say, even briefly. Maybe 50 minutes is still short for me.

Enjoy the episode.

It's been three years since the start of Education Bookcast. I will be attempting to change the format to make episodes shorter. I also mention some successes of the past year.

I've spent a total of seven episodes up till now on Edward de Bono's work on creativity, lateral thinking, and the workings of the mind. While reading his books, a number of criticisms arose in my mind which I never felt I had the chance to fully express. In the name of balance, I also looked for any criticisms of de Bono online, and I found some quite damning allegations. My criticisms from his books and these allegations are topics I would like to spend one episode talking about.

The main problems with de Bono's books are two: (1) they are too repetitive (they all seem to say the same thing, with occasional novelties); and (2) they provide no references (ever! in 67 books by an Oxford- and Cambridge-educated author with a PhD!!). Each of these is concerning for different reasons. If de Bono kept "writing the same book" 67 times, why did he feel the need to publish so many books? And if he's supposed to be an authority on creativity, why couldn't he have come up with new ideas to fill those 67 books with?

The problem of references appears even more concerning after reading allegations from de Bono's former associates that his work is practically all plagiarised. This would certainly explain his unwillingness to write references, since he would be trying to claim all those other people's work as his own.

There is a real 此地无银三百两 moment at the start of one of his later books. (The Chinese reads "in this place there are not three hundred caddies of silver". There is a story that somebody tried to hide their money by burying it and, for good measure, putting up a sign with the above words just next to where it was buried. The saying means to deny something in such a way as to incriminate oneself, or reveal the very thing that was supposed to be hidden by denial.) He leaves an Author's Note to the effect that he is sorry for not referencing anybody, because he forgot, and he really wants to give the right people credit, honest!, he just can't remember any of the conversations he's had or things that he's read for the past, oh, fifty years. It's somewhat ridiculous and really adds fuel to the suspicion that he hasn't been intellectually honest in his works.

This episode may not be rich in insights into creativity, other than perhaps that which Einstein bequeathed to us: "The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources." Although I really think that there is value to the ideas that de Bono came up with / stole during his career, the possibility of plagiarism, and the lack of his own creativity in writing books with something genuinely new to say over a more than fifty-year-long career, detract from the strength of his arguments.

The jury is out on where de Bono's ideas come from (although he is definitely guilty of being repetitive in his writing). We must also be aware that those who allege that de Bono has stolen the ideas of others are not necessarily trustworthy themselves. While the story weaved together by these threads is plausible, it is not known for certain to be the truth. This episode seeks only to be fair in highlighting suspicions, although nothing is proven definitively.

Enjoy the episode.

Stress is broadly understood to be a serious health risk and a destructive factor in many people's lives. It has been advertised as such for several decades. In The Upside of Stress, Kelly McGonigal explains how new research shows that stress may actually be something positive and life-enhancing rather than ruinous.

The most central concept is that of "stress mindsets". Similar to fixed vs. growth mindset as described in Carol Dweck's book (covered in the first episode of this podcast), stress mindsets concern one's beliefs about the effects of stress. People with a "positive stress mindset" believe that there can be benefits to stress, whereas those with a "negative stress mindset" - encouraged by ideas promulgated in the past few decades - believe that stress is uniformly bad for you. It turns out that merely believing something different about stress is enough to change its effects radically for the better.

The evidence on the so-called "upside of stress" takes many forms, but perhaps the most convincing evidence is endocrinological. McGonigal cites studies showing that people who have higher stress hormone concentrations following a car accident are less likely to develop post-traumatic stress disorder; that the stress hormone dehydroepiandrosterone, or DHEA, is a brain steroid (as in, it literally makes your brain grow); and that the ratio of DHEA to cortisol (another stress hormone, but not a steroid) is dependent on your beliefs about stress. (My overuse of asterisks hints at how excited I am.)

On of the most surprising findings is that stress and happiness are internationally positively correlated. (In case you're interested, the most stressed out country in the world is the Philippines. It's also one of the happiest.) How could this be? McGonigal explains that this relates to what stress is, psychologically speaking. Stress is a state we experience when something we value is at stake. In other words, a meaningful life cannot help being stressful, since in order to be meaningful, one must be working towards or fighting for something that one cares for. Low levels of stress are actually correlated with increased depression risk, and the explanation for this is likely to be similar.

Overall, then, a big change in the way we see stress is possible, and it carries great benefits.

Enjoy the episode.

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Edward de Bono has written a lot of books. Although they often contain small novelties, overall his bibliography is quite repetitive, meaning that it's not worth making an episode about every one of his books individually. In this episode, we'll look at six of his books in quick succession. It's the audio summary equivalent of "skimming" these books, which deserve little more if you're already familiar with the books of his we've considered so far on the podcast.

First we look at the "six series": Six Thinking Hats, Six Action Shoes, Six Value Medals and Six Frames for Thinking about Information. The first of these we already saw in the first episode about Edward de Bono, and so there is no need to go into it again in depth, but it is clearly the ancestor of the rest. They all tend to say the same sort of thing, but in slightly different contexts. It's worth quickly skimming through this and then moving on, as there doesn't appear to be much novelty here, just the ability to produce too many sequels, like the Saw movies.

Next we look at Teaching Thinking and Teach Your Child to Think. These are surprisingly underwhelming and not particularly useful. There is some "evidence" provided of the effectiveness of direct teaching of thinking which is completely unreferenced and not peer reviewed, and so, unless you consider the author unusually worthy of blind trust, you are forced to ignore this "evidence". The thinking methods taught in a typical Cognitive Research Trust class (CoRT, de Bono's organisation for teaching thinking) are presented, which is interesting, but also a bit of an anticlimax, as they don't seem to amount to anything particularly novel or special.

Finally, we look at Simplicity, which is ironically more complicated a book than it need be. We can extract a long list of thinking techniques from it, with the occasional pearl, but the book as a whole is not worth diving into too deeply.

Overall, this makes for an unusually fast-moving episode. This is simply because there isn't much to say per book, and I have no reason to waffle and waste your time. It should round out your knowledge of some of the rest of the author's work, and you might have a few useful takeaways here and there as well.

Enjoy the episode.

Teachers are leaving the profession in droves in Britain - over half have left before having worked for five years. New and experienced teachers alike leave, making the government consider other options for recruitment - generous stipends for training, or bringing in teachers from overseas. This is the UK teacher crisis.

In this episode, I recount a conversation I had with a former teacher and current co-worker of mine which elucidated the root of the problem. The core issues were three: time, energy, and Ofsted (the UK schools inspectorate). The effects are complex and wide-ranging. What I particularly appreciated about our conversation was how it showed what it is like to be a teacher in this situation, which makes it clear why so many are leaving.

For teachers in the UK, what I say in this episode may be obvious and familiar, though they might take heart in realising that they are not alone in their problems. For others, this episode might be as enlightening as the conversation I had was for me.

Enjoy the episode.

Sugata Mitra gained widespread acclaim after his TED talk on the Hole in the Wall experiment. In the experiment, he put a computer in a wall of a New Dehli slum, and found that children learned to use it all by themselves. His explorations continued, trying out whether such self-organising learning environments or SOLEs could perform as well as traditional classrooms in terms of children's learning. He since received funding from the World Bank to expand his project to a range of developing countries.

However, independent researchers who have visited Hole in the Wall sites have been disappointed, or even disillusioned, with what they found. The sites where vandalised and abandoned, to the point where two years after they were first installed, few could remember what they were there for. When they were operational, they were mostly used by older boys to play games, and girls and younger children were excluded.

In this episode, I aim to make the audience aware of the imperfections of Sugata Mitra's work, and of the possibility that it has been over-hyped.

Enjoy the episode.

A while back, I listened to an interview with Bruce Lee*. There were two things that I took away from it, neither of which I understood at the time: Bruce Lee's insistence that martial arts are first and foremost about self-expression; and the concept of "acting un-acting" or "un-acting acting" (elsewhere I have heard him talk about "fighting un-fighting"). Recently I was reminded of this interview, but this time it made sense to me, because of what I had learned in the meantime about the nature of learning.

Perhaps surprisingly, another look at what he had said got me to think of A Mathematician's Lament, an article by Paul Lockhart about maths education that had I previously covered on the podcast. I feel as though, armed with my new insights, I have a feeling as to what Paul Lockhart may have gotten wrong in his controversial piece.

Overall, then, I am able to extract some ideas from what Bruce Lee says in a rather more coded or mysterious way, and generalise them so that they can apply to any field, while showing how they apply to maths in particular.

Enjoy the episode.

*Full interview available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jfQSCbkA940, entitled "Bruce Lee Interview HQ".

We've already seen a number of books by Edward de Bono. I am Right, You are Wrong is (was?) probably my favourite book of his, but since it is such a synthesis of his ideas I wanted to save it for after books that discuss his "core" ideas in detail. Now, having done that, it turns out that there is little to say about this book, for the very same reason - as a synthesis, it doesn't provide very many new ideas.

That said, there are 7 ideas from this book that I would like to share, as they provide perspectives not offered by other books of his covered on the podcast so far. Since these ideas all exist within the de Bono "system" or "worldview", it doesn't take very long to introduce them to people already familiar with his work, which, by now, you should be.

So this is really a quick episode to talk about one or two more ideas from an already familiar author and to introduce what I think is his best book.

Enjoy the episode.

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I've recently been doing a series on creativity on the podcast. Edward de Bono has featured heavily, but there are other creativity-related topics and authors who I also want to talk about. In this episode, we look at the research on brainstorming, the technique for coming up with new ideas.

The provocative title of this episode needs a little clarification. The most strongly supported finding in the research is that brainstorming in a group is not as effective as coming up with ideas individually, and then pooling them. Since brainstorming almost always refers to a group activity, I took the liberty of naming the episode this way. Strictly speaking, brainstorming on your own may not have such terrible effects, though less is known about this.

Research on brainstorming is surprisingly abundant and has been continuously going on for over 50 years. (Sometimes researchers baffle me with what they find important to study - it seems that there is very little research on other, broader topics that also interest me from an educational standpoint, such as interest or prestige.) As a result, there are a lot of other interesting findings to talk about, some of which extend in their relevance beyond brainstorming itself.

As a widely-used and rarely challenged technique for idea generation, I think many will find it useful to hear what we actually know about brainstorming, including how to make the most of it.

Enjoy the episode.

Articles referred to in this episode:

Alex Osborn (1957). Applied Imagination. [Book]

Charles H. Clark (1958). Brainstorming: The Dynamic New Way to Create Succesful Ideas. [Book]

Taylor et al. (1958). Does Group Participation When Using Brainstorming Facilitate or Inhibit Creative Thinking?

Bouchard and Hare (1970). Size, performance and potential in brainstorming groups.

Lamm and Tromsdorff (1973). Group versus individual performance on tasks requiring ideation proficiency (brainstorming): A review.

Diehl and Stroeber (1987). Productivity Loss in Brainstorming Groups: Toward the Solution of a Riddle.

Paulus and Dzindolet (1993). Social Influence Processes in Group Brainstorming.

Paulus et al. (1993). Perception of Performance in Group Brainstorming: The Illusion of Group Productivity.

Sutton and Hargadon (1996). Brainstorming Groups in Context: Effectiveness in a Product Design Firm.

Camacho and Paulus (1995). The Role of Social Anxiousness in Group Brainstorming.

Shepherd et al. (1996). Invoking Social Comparison to Improve Electronic Brainstorming: Beyond Anonymity.

Michinov and Primois (2005). Improving productivity and creativity in online groups through social comparison process: New evidence for asynchronous electronic brainstorming.

Dennis (2015). A meta-analysis of group size effects in electronic brainstorming: more heads are better than one.

Larey and Paulus (1999). Group Preference and Convergent Tendencies in Small Groups: A Content Analysis of Group Brainstorming Performance.

Dennis et al. (2012). Sparking Creativity: Improving Electronic Brainstorming with Individual Cognitive Priming.

Feinberg and Nemeth (2008). The "Rules" of Brainstorming: An Impediment to Creativity?

Rossiter and Lilien (1994). New "Brainstorming" Principles.

Isaksen et al. (1998). A Review of Brainstorming Research: Six Critical Issues for Inquiry.

Isaksen and Gaulin (2005). A Reexamination of Brainstorming Research: Implications for Research and Practice.

Hender et al. (2001). Improving Group Creativity: Brainstorming vs Non-Brainstorming Techniques in a GSS Environment.

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Edward de Bono has long stressed the need to be open to the creation of new words in order to support the development of new concepts and ideas, even in areas not considered "cutting edge". For example, in his book Simplicity, he makes the case (not too convincingly) that the words "simple" and "simplify" are too long and complicated, and they should themselves be simplified to the word "simp", as in "We should simp this so it will be more simp." (Understandably, de Bono has his detractors when it comes to these neologisms.)

"Po" is a new word. (To be fair, it was actually new in 1969 when he first mentioned it in The Mechanism of Mind, but every time de Bono refers to it he calls it "new"). It is somewhat unusual in that it is not a noun or a verb, as most neologisms are, but a grammatical particle, like "yes", "no", "and", "but" or "should". The form of the word comes from the initials of the phrase "provocation operation", but also happens to be the first two letters of a convenient list of words in English, such as poetry, possible, and ponder.

Po is used in order to introduce a phrase or word that is not be be taken seriously, but merely to be used as an input to lateral thinking. Consider the following examples: "Po politicians should be encouraged to be tyrants." "Po children should be given sharp objects to play with." "Po the sky is red." Each of these ideas appears either crazy or non-sensical, but we can use them to gain new perspectives or think of new ideas.

What if encouraging politicians to be as bad as possible would uncover the untrustworthy ones quickly so that they could be removed before they do too much damage? What if children were trusted with things we usually don't trust them with, so they learn more responsibility and get a taste of the real world? What if we could wear glasses that would invert all the colours that we see? I'm not saying that the above are necessarily all good ideas, just that they are outgrowths from the silly provocations deliberately presented to make me think in new ways, which I otherwise wouldn't have thought of.

For most of this episode, I cover de Bono's general thoughts and the argument presented for why Po is important, rather than talking about the application of Po itself. This is discussed near the end, and doesn't take long to introduce. De Bono's arguments are worth engaging with, though, as they give us an unusual perspective on thinking, and let us realise why a word like po may be useful to creative thinking.

Enjoy the episode.

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In the previous episode, we looked at a range of articles concerning the effectiveness of so-called "brain training" in general, with a particular focus on Lumosity, one of the big players in the market. In this episode, we home in on perhaps the most promising type of "brain training": dual n-back.

Dual n-back has more evidence than most other forms of "brain training" that it can increase working memory. This is a big deal, since working memory has otherwise not been found to change due to any intervention, but it is strongly implicated in higher reasoning and generally in intelligence. To paraphrase cognitive scientist Dan Willingham, if a genie were to suddenly appear and offer to increase your cognitive capacity in any way, your best choice would be to ask for more working memory. And dual n-back might just be the granting of that wish.

One further advantage of dual n-back is that it is an unpatented technique, rather than software from one company in particular. You can find and use free dual N-back applications for the computer or mobile device. This also means that the waters are less muddied by the advertising / propaganda of people trying to make money from it.

One thing we must keep in mind is that investing time and energy into any sort of "brain training" brings up an opportunity cost. Could that time and energy have been better used by learning something new - a new sport, craft, language, or field of study? Might not a change in diet, improved sleep, or increased exercise do more for the day-to-day working of one's brain than such specialised computer games? While none of the above are proven to permanently increase working memory, their effect on thinking is well-documented, and considerably less controversial than any brain-training, including dual n-back.

If dual n-back works, we should probably have all pupils and students use it; if it doesn't, then we must not be distracted by it. Which will it be? Listen to the episode to find out more.

Enjoy the episode.

Articles referred to in this episode:

Jaeggi et al. (2008). Improving fluid intelligence with training on working memory.

Jaeggi et al. (2010). The relationship between n-back performance and matrix reasoning - implications for training and transfer.

Morrison and Chein (2011). Does working memory training work? The promise and challenges of enhancing cognition by training working memory.

St Claire-Thompson et al. (2010). Improving children's working memory and classroom performance.

Kroesbergen et al. (2014). Training working memory in kindergarten children: Effects on working memory and early numeracy.

Shipstead et al. (2012). Is Working Memory Training Effective?

Reddick et al. (2013). No Evidence of Intelligence Improvement after Working Memory Training: A Randomized, Placebo-Controlled Study.

Lervag and Holme (2013). Is Working Memory Training Effective? A Meta-Analytic Review.

Lilienthal et al. (2013). Dual n-back training increases the capacity of the focus of attention.

Colom et al. (2013). Adaptive n-back training does not improve fluid intelligence at the construct level: Gains on individual tests suggest that training may enhance visuospatial processing.

Lebedev et al. (2017). Working memory and reasoning tasks are associated with different modes of large-scale dynamics in healthy older adults.

Could specially designed exercises on your computer or mobile phone make you smarter? "Brain-training" is now a multi-billion pound industry, and that money comes from people hoping to get a boost in their mental faculties from spending time playing the various games in the apps in question. Do these apps work as they are supposed to? And if they are, shouldn't we have all children (and maybe adults too) make use of them?

In this episode, I go through the research on this topic, with a particular focus on Lumosity, one of the biggest players in this market. I start from the scientific articles provided on Lumosity's website, and continue with articles found from elsewhere on the same topic.

Of course, there are many more brain-training apps out there other than Lumosity, including Peak, Elevate, Cognito, Left vs. Right, Brain It On!, and Fit Brains Trainer. But they are generally similar enough that the research literature probably applies to basically all of them. Lumosity is a particularly interesting case to analyse since its marketing is so insistent that the app is "scientifically designed". What is the substance behind this claim?

I won't spoil it for you! Have a listen to see what I found out.

Enjoy the episode.

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In this episode, we will look closely at Edward de Bono's idea of lateral thinking by considering two of his books, The Use of Lateral Thinking (1971) and Lateral Thinking: A Textbook of Creativity (1977).

Lateral thinking is the central idea behind all of de Bono's work. It grows out of the models of mind that de Bono presented in his first book The Mechanism of Mind (1969), and was initially introduced in the second part of that book. De Bono coined the term himself, but now it is a commonly used word in the English language.

De Bono argues that, although logical thinking is a powerful and important approach, it is not enough. Logical thinking cannot generate new ideas. Like a car with an accelerator but no steering wheel, pure logical thinking can only have us move down existing well-trodden paths, or keep moving forward in the direction we are already going.

Lateral thinking, on the other hand, like a steering wheel, allows us to change direction. The very word "lateral" means "sideways", so lateral thinking is about moving "sideways" out of existing patterns to generate new perspectives.

The author explains that lateral thinking is closely related to both insight and humour, something that was also explained in The Mechanism of Mind. It is all about perception and perspective. Although computers can do logical operations very well, computers cannot (at least for the forseeable future) laugh. This uniquely human trait is one facet of the human capability for change of perspective - the basic idea behind lateral thinking, and a latent human strength.

Enjoy the episode.

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Although ostensibly about economics, this book is in fact about the effect of poverty of various kinds on the mind.

Poverty is a shortage of resources. It could be money, time (busy people are "time-poor"), or some other resource. When people experience scarcity, their minds automatically, subconsciously devote mental resources to the issue. The results of this are two.

They are more rational in their approach to the use of the resource, and use it more prudently. For example, usually supermarkets will have more than one size of packs of things, with the idea that if you buy a six-pack, it is cheaper per can than buying six individual cans of drink. However, sometimes supermarkets will play a trick, making the larger pack more expensive per item than the individual item. Poor people get caught out by this kind of trick much less often, as they are paying attention to prices, and reasoning about what is the best use of their money.
More importantly, the automatic assignment of mental resources to deal with the scarcity reduces the remaining free mental resources. This means that they have lower self-control, and - rather shockingly - have lower effective intelligence (i.e. they behave as if they were less intelligent than they "really" are, since some of their mental energy is constantly being consigned to worrying about money).

This has important consequences for thinking about the way the mind operates, as well as, on a social level, the effect of poverty on people's mental abilities. I hope you can see how, despite appearances, this book is in fact very relevant to education.

Enjoy the episode.

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Edward de Bono's work can mostly be divided into two parts: models of how the mind works; and applications of principles extracted from those models to improve thinking, particularly creative thinking. The Mechanism of Mind is his first book, and it primarily deals with the first of these two parts.

De Bono wrote The Mechanism of Mind in 1969, at a time when not much was known about the brain, nor about complex adaptive systems (the types of physical objects and situations studied by the fields of mathematics and physics known as chaos theory, complexity theory, and dynamical systems). De Bono's key insight was to realise that the brain is a complex adaptive system, and to run with this insight to produce new insights into how human thinking works, how it differs from the working of computers, and how to make the most of it.

The Mechanism of Mind introduces the reader to how de Bono thought that the brain probably worked when he was writing in 1969, by providing a series of analogies or "models" - the polythene-and-pins model, the jelly-and-ink model, and the thousand-bulb model. These aim to clarify the behaviour of the brain both in terms of what kinds of things the brain does, and how this behaviour arises from the brain's structure. His expectations from 1969 were surprisingly close to the overall understood behaviour of the brain (or, at least, small collections of neurons) according to modern neuroscience.

Overall, the book serves as a stimulus to thought, and need not be believed in its entirety. It is, after all, one man's guess at how the brain worked based on what was known to science half a century ago. Nevertheless, his explanations do support a number of interesting propositions about thinking, with important consequences for the nature of creativity, which he explains in detail in his other books.

Enjoy the episode.

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Cal Newport is a computer scientist at Georgetown University who writes a blog called Study Hacks about effective study methods. We have covered one of his books already, So Good They Can't Ignore You, when I wanted to discuss career advice.

Before writing How to Become a Straight-A Student, Newport visited a number of university campuses in the USA and looked for students who got the best grades. Curiously, he found that these usually came in two types - those who were constantly grinding away in their studies, as one might expect from a top student; and those who seemed to their peers never to be overworked, and led full extra-curricular and social lives, but always seemed to do the best in their courses. Newport interviewed these, and their approaches to study make the basis of this book.

It's interesting to see some of the cognitive science ideas like those put forward by Benedict Carey's How We Learn being put into action by these students, generally without any of them being aware that they are doing so, as they apparently happened upon their study techniques by themselves. It is particularly enlightening to see how they prioritise certain important cognitive features - for example, considering coloured pens for notes to be superfluous (despite scientific evidence that this would improve memory). It would appear that these successful students have figured out the relative importance of various techniques or insights into learning without having to carry out any scientific experiments or read the cognitive science literature.

This is the first study guide that I am covering on the podcast, and I don't intend to cover very many. I'm more interested in talking about fundamentals on this podcast than in sharing tips and tricks. The fact that I like the author (due to his other books), and that his approach seems more empirical than other study guides, but less clinically divorced from the real world than scientific books and articles, led me to want to share it with you. I hope it helps you in your studies, or in your teaching.

Enjoy the episode.

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Edward de Bono is an expert on creativity, author of over 40 books on the subject. He invented the term "lateral thinking" in the 1960s, which is now a part of common parlance. Over his long career, he has worked with numerous large corporations such as Microsoft, Apple, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Siemens, Bose, HP, LinkedIn, and Texas Instruments, as well as schools, charities, and governments. His basic premise is that creativity can be taught by direct teaching of thinking skills and techniques, and that this kind of thinking is not a normal part of culture, but that it should be.

Controversially, although highly scientifically and mathematically trained, he does not work on scientifically validating his own ideas, only on trying to develop them and promote them, and on making them accessible to a general audience. However, his ideas are nothing if not interesting and original, and I am persuaded enough by much of what he writes that I find it sensible to share it on this podcast.

He is also rather topical because of recent interest in the idea of direct teaching of thinking, which is often combined with the idea of imparting so-called "21st century skills" to schoolchildren. Cognitive scientists often insist that general thinking skills cannot be improved, and that we may only improve at thinking within some particular domain (though some skills are important within many domains, such as reading). For some reason, Edward de Bono never seems to be mentioned during these discussions - neither by those who are in favour of teaching thinking (who, you would think, would be fans of his), nor by those who claim that teaching general thinking directly is a fool's errand. This strange silence, as I perceive it, is something I would like to go some way to fixing.

In this episode, I want to introduce Edward de Bono himself, as well as talk about one of his most famous and commonly applied ideas, the Six Thinking Hats, popularised by a book of the same name. In future episodes we will have a chance to dig more deeply into his work on lateral thinking, creativity, the nature of the mind, and direct teaching of thinking skills, among other things.

Enjoy the episode.

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This is the second part of the episode about Brain-Based Learning. In the previous part, I discussed the chapters concerning relative lateralisation (left/right hemispheres), rhythms (such as circadian rhythms), gender, physical activity, stress and threat, and the senses (vision, touch, taste, smell, and sound). In this episode we look at the chapters on emotions, teacher communication, motivation, attention, teaching how to think, memory, meaning making, and enriching the brain.

Enjoy the episode.

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Eric Jensen is a former teacher with a PhD in Human Development from Fielding Graduate University. In 1981, he co-founded "the United States' first and largest brain-compatible learning program"[1], and he has been the head of Jensen Learning, a company that trains teachers what he calls "brain-friendly" or "brain-compatible" teaching and learning principles, since 1995. Brain-Based Learning is one of the first books that I read as I was getting into finding out more about education research several years ago.

I am quite disappointed with this book. It's not very good. The problems with it are numerous.

Firstly, it does not appear to have any central guiding principles. Generally, a good book will give you ideas in the form of kernels which will be applicable in many situations, and it will show you how those central ideas operate so that you can understand their power and generality. In Brain-Based Learning, Jensen sets out what he wants to tell the reader as essentially a list. This makes it difficult to make head or tail of the book as a whole.

Secondly, there is a pervasive lack of references. This means that most of his assertions are stated just as bare-faced facts (with occasional "research has shown..." + random fact, which no reference), meaning that we are supposed to just take him on his word. In some cases, his references are highly dubious, such as when he cites a video produced by Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) inventor Richard Bandler as the only source for over a page of information and suggestions. NLP is generally understood by psychologists to have little scientific support (what science there is on it tends to show that it doesn't work), so this is obviously somewhat dubious.

Thirdly, most of his suggestions are obvious in the first place. When he suggests that children need good nutrition or that people need to be hydrated, who is he arguing against? Who didn't think that, or was unaware of that, in the first place? There is a sense in which he is using the idea that his approaches are "brain-based" to lend extra authority to his statements, but the statements themselves were often already well-known and widely accepted approaches prior to his advocacy for them.

There are many more criticisms that can be made of this book, and I do make them in the audio. I end up doing a mixture of pulling out the occasional interesting idea, enriching what he writes with context that actually makes it make sense, and pointing out the many places where his work is not useful, or is just confusing. I hope that, despite the rather negative nature of this episode, you will still find it worth listening to.

Enjoy the episode.

[1] Quoted from http://www.ascd.org/Publications/ascd-authors/eric-jensen.aspx on 9th January 2018.

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This is an episode which requires little justification for its relevance to education - the title says it all. How We Learn presents a selection of cognitive science's more recent findings, some of which are rather counterintuitive, and gives several "tips" for how one might study more effectively based on these.

Topics covered include the importance of forgetting (!) for learning; the effect of context on learning, and the idea that varied context provides for better learning by enhancing the number of cues for memory retrieval; the power of spaced repetition; test-taking as a study method; and incubation and percolation, two ways of enhancing creativity and problem-solving by making use of downtime and the subconscious mind.

The idea that seems to run through everything most strongly is desirable difficulty, not a phrase that the author himself uses, but one that he explains in his own way. If there's one key take-away, it's "make learning hard".

Personally, most of the topics covered make me think of my approach to learning languages, which seems to jibe well with many of the ideas, although in some cases I clearly could do things better. There are a number of things here that I could have used either in my own learning or in my teaching, but somehow forgot about them all in the time (more than two years) between reading this book and recording this episode. Hopefully the audience will make better use of these ideas than I have so far!

Enjoy the episode.

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I've spent some time thinking about the past 50 episodes of the podcast, and I've identified a number of themes - why people do things; how people get good at things; inner states and beliefs; mathematics education; and educational myth-busting, to name a few. But I decided that this episode would be more interesting and helpful if it linked as many ideas as possible under a single umbrella.

So, what's the most important idea that I talked about these past (almost) two years? To my mind, many episodes focused on the interaction between the subconscious and the conscious in learning. This led to considering the optimal interaction between the two - flow - and the best known conditions for encouraging flow, both externally (games) and internally (process orientation).

In this episode, I remind the audience of these ideas and their connections to try to produce an overview of much of the past 80 or so hours of audio. Hopefully it will be a good review for those who have been listening thus far, and it might be a good jumping point for those who are new to the podcast.

Enjoy the episode.

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Explanations can broadly be categorised according to two adjectives: nomological and mechanistic. Mechanistic explanations are to do with cause and effect, and focus on events and causes that immediately precede the fact that we desire to explain. Nomological explanations are based on general principles. The following is the definition of the word "nomological":

nomological. adj. Relating to or denoting principles that resemble laws, especially those laws of nature which are neither logically necessary nor theoretically explicable, but just are so.

Here are some word pairs that I came up with that are near-synonymous to the above two terms, and help to clarify their meaning:

NOMOLOGICAL vs MECHANISTIC. Why vs How. Simplifying explanations vs Causal explanations. Morals of stories vs Stories themselves. General laws vs Causal systems. Strategy vs Tactics. Atemporal vs Temporal. Essence vs Origin. Solution vs Process. Intuition vs Calculation. Cutting the knot vs Untying the knot. Whole vs Parts. "Abstract" vs "Concrete". Art vs Accountancy. Taking the lift vs Walking up the stairs. Market inevitabilities vs Specific catalysts.

Firstly, I think that this is a fascinating topic, and one that is rarely talked about. When was the last time you talked about what kinds or styles of explanations you think are convincing? Did you even realise that there is such a thing as a style of explanation?

Secondly, I think that this can be important when we think about how we are teaching and learning. The best kinds of explanation are both nomological and mechanistic - like Yin and Yang, the two complete each other to provide "thorough" explanations. There are also certain kinds of explanations that are more appropriate for beginners.

Apparently, there is some research showing that cognitive styles (as the above are called) vary by discipline, so that, for example, linguists tend to think much more nomologically than psychologists. There is also evidence demonstrating that people's tastes in this regard don't tend to change much over time, partly because of natural disposition, but partly due to the self-reinforcing nature of holding a certain kind of taste and then mixing with your own kind.

This episode is inspired by the article Cognitive Styles in Two Cognitive Sciences by James Myers, but most of the content is my own thinking around this issue.

Enjoy the episode.

Josh Waitzkin was the international under-18 chess champion at age 18, only to quit chess at age 22 and pursue Tai-chi Push Hands, the martial application of Tai Chi. He became world champion in this martial art at age 28, and won the title several more times since then.

As an accomplished competitor in two fields - one mental, one mostly physical - a book written by him about how he learns is obviously going to contain some interesting ideas. The main themes of what he writes about are two: learning by focusing on principles and deeply understanding the fundamentals; and how to increase concentration and overcome distraction.

Interestingly, many of the things that Waitzkin writes in his own personal way square with a lot of findings of cognitive science, many of which we already talked about in other episodes of the podcast. Ideas such as the role of the subconscious, chunking, and expert blindness all appear in his writing, but he usually refers to these by other names.

Two quotes from the book didn't make it into the recording, but are worth sharing, and so I will share them below.

On losing: "There is something particularly painful about being beaten in a chess game. In the course of a battle, each player puts every ounce of his or her tactical, strategical, emotional, physical, and spiritual being into the struggle. The brain is pushed through terrible trials; we stretch every fibre of our mental capacity; the whole body aches from exhaustion after hours of rapt concentration. In the course of a dynamic chess fight, there will be shifts in momentum, near misses, narrow escapes, innovative creations, and precise refutations. When your position teeters on the brink of disaster, it feels like your life is on the line. When you win, you survive another day. When you lose, it is as if someone has torn out your heart and stepped on it. No exaggeration. Losing is brutal."

On competition: "From one perspective the opponent is the enemy. On the other hand there is no one who knows you more intimately, no one who challenges you so profoundly or pushes you to excellence and growth so relentlessly."

Enjoy the episode.

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This book is about shame.

Shame is a taboo emotion in our culture. It is not talked about, which is part of what makes it so powerful, and part of its essence - it is an emotion of disconnection, or feeling rejected or not worthy of the group. It can affect students as well as teachers, almost always negatively. Students can experience it coming from teachers (often with good intentions), or coming from other students as a form of bullying.

In an educational or work setting, shame is often used as a motivator. It doesn't work, though. Guilt can be a motivator, because guilt is about regretting something that you have done; but shame is about regretting who you are, which does not spur one on to action. Guilt and shame can be seen as the growth- and fixed-mindset versions of the same psychological mechanism (this last is my conclusion, not Dr Brown's).

Shame is also distinct from humiliation. Humiliation is when you don't believe that you deserve the undermining of your dignity that has occurred; whereas shame is when you believe that you do deserve it.

Whether shame is deliberately meted out or happens upon someone with nobody else's intention, it is a terrible feeling, often described as "the worst feeling in the world". It paralyses people and makes it difficult for them to make progress, or even function normally.

Dr Brené Brown has made a career of studying shame, and this book is based on the results of hundreds of interviews that she conducted for her research. She discusses what shame is, how it works, and how to build "shame resilience" - the ability to pass through shame in the fastest and most constructive way, and to feel less suffering than one otherwise would.

Enjoy the episode.

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In this episode, we will look at the article Seeing the Glass Half Full: A Review of the Causes and Consequences of Optimism by Mary Forgeard and Martin Seligman. (The name of the article was so long that I thought it might be better to give the episode a to-the-point, minimalistic title.)

Since we just looked at self-esteem and at self-compassion, I thought it might be good to take a look at another concept within the same general psychological area: optimism. Is optimism good for you? What causes it? And how does it affect academic performance?

This episode is a very short one, the reason being that the answers to many important questions about optimism remain unanswered. Optimism does appear to be good for you, but there is no clear answer on whether it is good for academic achievement; and the article's answer to "what causes it?" is the academic writing equivalent of saying "y'know, stuff".

Having a look through Google Scholar also didn't bring up many papers that were answering my questions. So, in short: it's good for you in many ways, but nobody knows much else about it.

Enjoy the episode.

We've seen in the previous episode how trying to increase one's self-esteem is a dangerous proposition, and how having high self-esteem is not necessarily a good thing. Now it's time to look at another approach to the self which is a lot more promising.

Self-compassion is an idea taken originally from traditional buddhist psychology, but now studied fairly extensively with the scientific method. In a word, it's being nice to yourself. It is trying to be your own "best friend" by thinking about how a good friend would relate to you in moments of difficulty, and adopting that behaviour towards yourself. This is in sharp opposition with self-criticism, which is most people's response when something is going wrong in their lives.

There are three main components of self-compassion: mindfulness, common humanity, and kindness. Mindfulness is about being aware of what is happening in the present moment, rather than getting lost in thoughts about the past, the future, or hypothetical events. Common humanity is the idea that you aren't the only one who is suffering this way, and that pain and disappointment are a normal part of life for everyone. Kindness is about just being nice to yourself, making your inner talk of the kind that a good friend might use when comforting you.

The benefits of self-compassion are numerous and well-documented. They include:

reduced risk of anxiety and depression;
experiencing fewer negative emotions, such as fear, irritability, hostility, or distress;
the ability to persevere in the face of failure;
reduced procrastination; and
greater motivation and a higher likelihood of achieving goals.

Self-compassion is distinct from self-pity and self-indulgence. In self-pity, we see our own lives as the worst, and that we alone are having a hard time, whereas in self-compassion we focus on how we are similar to others through our common humanity.
Self-compassion does not lead us to eat a barrel of ice-cream a day as self-indulgence would, but asks the question: "What would be the kindest thing I could do for myself right now?" Sometimes this is having a break, and sometimes it could be indulging in some ice-cream. But often it is working or studying. The aim isn't to indulge, but to do what is honestly good for you at the time.

This may be a difficult topic for some, as dropping the internal critic and instead adopting a kind, supportive voice seems so counter-intuitive and against our culture. It also might seem a bit of a "flowery" thing to be saying, and might therefore sound "unscientific" by the standards of this podcast. Kristin Neff's work is well backed-up by scientific studies, though, so I hope that you can be open-minded towards this new way of relating to oneself.

Enjoy the episode.

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Self-esteem is a psychological concept that has penetrated everyday language. In many Western countries, it is generally understood that high self-esteem is essential to health, happiness, and success. Is this really the case? And how did this idea spread?

So much was the excitement about self-esteem in the early 90's that the California state legislature set up a Task Force to Promote Self Esteem and Personal and Social Responsibility, with an annual budget of over $700,000. All it took was some politicians with unusual metaphysical beliefs and flexible interpretations of the words of scientist ("The news most consistently reported is that the association between self-esteem and its expected consequences are mixed, insignificant or absent" was somehow re-interpreted to mean "self-esteem is the social vaccine" and "a giant step for mankind"). Add a media frenzy and the drowned-out voices of dissenters and you have the beginnings of a highly misleading movement.

High self-esteem does not cause what it was expected to, and in fact has some potentially rather nasty side effects, notably narcissism and a fixed mindset. It is not recommended.

Enjoy the episode.

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I spent a month in summer in Lithuania on a language course. Some events while I was there prompted me to realise something about education that I had heard before, but never quite understood.

The music played in this episode is Lietuvos istorijos repas by Šventinis bunkuchenas.

Enjoy the episode.

It reduces productivity, prevents learning, reduces effective IQ, disrupts relationships, undermines creative thinking, and saps self-control. It increases the risk of depression, heart disease, diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure, and ADHD.

What is it? Lack of sleep.

Sleep is essential for learning. We spend around a third of our lives in this state, and yet we take up much less than one third of our time thinking about how to make it better. In Night School, not only can we learn all about how sleep works, but also we can find out how to get better at sleeping.

The "sleep problem" around the world is quite serious. Over 30% of British and American adults and around 80% of American teenagers do not get the sleep they need. 1 in 10 British adults takes some form of medication to help them sleep. Lack of sleep is responsible for $150 billion of lost productivity per year, and about 100,000 road deaths per year, not to mention the increased rates of heart disease and other ailments mentioned above.

But this book is not only for those who have problems sleeping. Just as it is possible to improve your fitness at any level, so it is possible to improve your sleep even if it is already good. You can become a "super-sleeper" - someone who always has a good night's sleep and wakes up refreshed. Super-sleepers have been shown to have better health, greater happiness, and more wealth, on average, than the rest of the population.

Enjoy the episode.

Sir Ken Robinson's TED talk Do Schools Kill Creativity is the most popular TED talk ever given, with just under 45 million views at the time of my writing this. It is so influential that Robinson has a page on his website devoted to feedback forms about how the talk changed people's lives.

It is also nonsense. And yet, somehow, I was also convinced by it when I first heard it. The weakness of Robinson's arguments combined with the powerful effect he seems to have on people are testament to his incredible skill as a public speaker. The talk demands closer scrutiny even if only to take notes on how to give persuasive presentations.

Almost all of Robinson's claims given in the talk are either given without any supporting evidence or argumentation, or are demonstrably wrong. A large portion of his statements are of the "I strongly believe that..." form, reminiscent a church pastor or of George W. Bush. The remaining time is padded out with well-chosen jokes and anecdotes, which appear to support his case, but, more importantly, build rapport with his audience.

In this episode of the podcast, I provide a critique of Do Schools Kill Creativity, highlighting both the speaker's rhetorical devices and the failings of his argument.

Enjoy the episode.

Music by podcastthemes.com. Audio samples from TED.com.

I thought it was about time to cover something about books on this book-related podcast!

Keith Stanovich and Annie Cunningham are two researchers who have spent their careers working together to understand the effects of reading on knowledge. Their research aims to answer a few questions in particular:

How much does reading matter in increasing people's knowledge? Is amount of reading irrelevant, since amount of information absorbed depends so much more strongly on innate intelligence than it does on exposure to more information?
How does reading compare to other sources of knowledge? Is reading particularly important or special in some way, or do people tend to gain as much and as high-quality information from other sources?

The answers to these two sets of questions are very clear from Stanovich and Cunningham's research:

Reading is a much more important factor than innate intelligence, as far as knowledge is concerned. Extent of exposure to print even in literate societies varies greatly between individuals, and general knowledge, as well as applied knowledge, correlate strongly with measures of reading volume, but only weakly with measures of intelligence.
Reading completely outstrips other sources of information in terms of effect on knowledge. For example, when comparing old people to young people, the greater knowledge of the older people could be completely statistically explained by the amount of reading that they had done in their lives. All that matters is that the older people had read more!

Over multiple studies, the two researchers hammer home these points again and again. It reminds us of how high-quality text can be as a medium, and of how exposure and practice tend to go underrated in favour of natural talent in Western cultures. (This last point is a common theme on this podcast which I have talked about extensively, with episodes such as Mindset; my series on high performers including Bounce, Genius Explained, The Talent Code, and Outliers; and most recently in The Geography of Thought.)

Enjoy the episode. And get reading!

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11% of children and 4% of adults in the US are said to have Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).

Dr Richard Saul has been a specialist in attention and learning problems in children and adults since the 1970's. He says that there is no such thing as ADHD.

What, then, are all these children and adults suffering from? Dr Saul answers this question very thoroughly. It could be any of the following:

Vision problems
Sleep disturbance
Substance abuse
Mood disorders (bipolar disorder, depression)
Hearing problems
Learning disabilities
Sensory processing disorder
Giftedness
Seizure disorders
Obsessive-compulsive disorder
Tourette's syndrome
Asperger's syndrome
Neurochemical distractibility/impulsivity
Schizophrenia
Fetal alcohol syndrome
Fragile X syndrome
Poor diet
Iron deficiency
Allergies
Hyperthyroidism
Pituitary tumour
Prematurity
Heavy metal poisoning

If you or someone you know has been suspected to have ADHD or been diagnosed with it, then you might be interested to find out what is at the root of the problem from this book.

Enjoy the episode.

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This continues the episode about The Geography of Thought, looking at more ways in which the cultural differences manifest themselves in differing psychologies of people from different parts of the world. Themes include:

Visual perception;
Descriptions and understandings of the self;
Attitudes to choice;
"Fitting in" versus uniqueness;
Attitudes to the law and contractual agreements;
Factors affecting motivation;
Preference for different types of reasoning; and
Approaches to blame and causality.

I also answer some questions posed at the beginning of last episode, namely:

Why do modern Asians excel at science and maths, and yet have few Nobel prizewinners?
Why were the ancient Chinese good at algebra and arithmetic, but bad at geometry, which the ancient Greeks excelled in?
Why did the West outpace the East in science and technology, given how far ahead China was in the fourteenth century?

The big idea here, as before, is that our thinking about psychology and education may be less universal than we realised. Many things that we thought were fundamental parts of human nature turn out to vary from culture to culture. It's a sobering thought, and has led me to have to rethink a range of conclusions about education, psychology, and human nature that I was previously quite confident about.

Enjoy the episode.

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Unlike many books that I cover, this is one that I read recently and felt an urgent need to share its contents even before I got to the appropriate theme in a series of episodes. It hit me right where it hurts - in my fundamental assumptions about human nature.

As I research the field of education and produce this podcast, I have been generally assuming that people are more or less the same everywhere in their fundamental modes of thinking and feeling. I presumed that the topic of motivation, for example, or that of cognitive biases, can be covered in a more or less general way. However, this book has had me realise that different people from different places think in very, very different ways... and that I (and the majority of my listeners) are among the people on the extreme end of a spectrum that runs from East to West.

People in the East and West think differently from each other in fundamental ways. Consider the following:

Which two of these three would you consider to form a natural group: monkey, cow, banana? Westerners almost always group the monkey with the cow, as they are both animals (categorisation focus). Easterners group the monkey with the banana (relationship focus).
There are 24 pens. 18 are blue, 5 are green, and 1 is purple. You can have one. Which one would you like? Westerners tend to choose the purple pen (scarcity makes it seem more valuable, plus they like to feel unique). Easterners ask for a blue pen (they want to fit in).
Which task would you be more motivated to do: one you choose yourself, or one that your mother chooses for you? Westerners prefer to choose their own (autonomy as a motivational driver); Easterner are more motivated when their mother chose the task (what the hell?!).

I hope you can see that this totally changes how I have to think about things. I now have to contextualise not only everything I think about, but everything I read, since so many psychologists say things as if they were universal, but then they are overturned once you test these things on people from a different culture! This even includes apparently "universal" traits such as cognitive biases, with Easterners usually avoiding the Fundamental Attribution Error where Westerners almost universally fall for it; and the principle of scarcity, an idea with strong ties to economics that rarer things are considered more valuable, which seems to not always be followed by people from the East.

Hopefully, you will find your mind broadened, and your assumptions annoyingly and uncomfortably challenged, just as mine were.

Enjoy the episode.

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I've received a lot of messages from listeners (as well as from an author!) in the past few days. Several of these messages are things that I would like to share, and there are two in particular that I would like to talk about since I imagine there may be many listeners who have the same questions.

Firstly, I talk about my interactions with the folks at Reacting to the Past, and in particular with Mark Carnes, who emailed me within a day of the release of the episode about his book (Minds on Fire).

I then talk about homeschooling, as I had a request from a listener for information on this topic, as she is considering homeschooling her children. Although I plan to cover homeschooling and unschooling in some detail on the podcast, I do not have plans to do this for some time as there are other topics to cover, and so I thought it would be good to have a quick summary for those who are bursting to hear about it.

Finally, I talk about social media, and in particular its use at university. A listener contacted me requesting that I advise him on this, and so I thought it would be helpful to more people if I discussed it on the podcast.

Please keep in mind that any opinions shared in this episode are my own, and that this is an unusually opinion-heavy episode of the podcast. I am usually quite insistent on proper evidence, but here I am relaxing that requirement to be able to talk about things more freely in terms of my feelings or conjectures on certain topics, rather than hard facts that I know to be true.

Enjoy the episode.

The words "theory" and "fun" in such close proximity may make you suspicious. Or, they may make you curious. "Fun" is one of those ideas that is so natural and intuitive, and yet for that very reason is so hard to pin down.

Raph Koster has a somewhat peculiar view of what fun is: "Fun is just another word for learning." As the head of Sony Online Entertainment, I'm inclined to believe him. If fun is learning, how do we ensure everyone in education gets more of it - and the right kind?

This book is a meditation on certain central themes in the theory of games and play, and provokes us to think about why games aren't used more in education. (Correction: I try to provoke you to think this, based on some concepts taken from the text.) The problem seems not to be whether games teach, as they always do. They problem is that they aren't teaching the right things.

We go in with questions. We come out with an understanding of the central problem of game design for education. Not a bad way to spend an hour.

Enjoy the episode.

In recent episodes, we have been discussing games and play, and their relevance to education, as well as to an improved understanding of human psychology. In this episode, I approach some central questions of the field: What is a game? What is a toy? What is play? What is fun?

It is by their very naturalness that play, fun, and games are hard to define. We can sense what they are, and that's exactly what makes them hard to put them into words. Jesse Schell surveys the literature and puts together the ideas and definitions of many thinkers to come up with his own favourite definitions.

Jesse Schell's book The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses is a thick, exhaustive tome on a complex subject. There's no way I could do his book justice in a single episode - it would need to be a quadruple-bill at least. But I wanted to introduce my audience to his book, and what better way to do it than through the fundamental questions of the field?

Enjoy the episode.

This is a continuation of the episode on Minds on Fire by Mark Carnes. The main idea of this part of the episode is the effects that Reacting to the Past, and role-play in general, have on the "self", i.e. the psychological construct of our selves.

Enjoy the episode.

Last episode, we looked at the various ways in which games can both improve our theoretical understanding of human psychology and of learning, and also at how they can be used practically to improve people's lives. In this episode, I want to discuss a particular practical application of games, and that is in so-called Reacting to the Past.

Reacting to the Past is a type of live role-playing game where each participant plays a character from a particular historical time and place. For example, the setting may be the French revolution, and players would take the roles of King Louis XVI, Lafayette, Robespierre, and others. Each player's (secret) objective is in line with what those personages wanted to happen historically - for example, Louis XVI's aim is to crush the revolution and preserve the monarchy, whereas Robespierre aims to overthrow the monarchy, institute universal male suffrage, and end slavery in French colonies.

On every conceivable measure, Reacting to the Past games have been shown scientifically to be superior to traditional classes. The effects are so numerous as to be hard to list. Students come out of Reacting to the Past games with:

improved public speaking;
greater resilience in the face of failure;
improved leadership and team-working skills;
greater acceptance of the role of fortune and randomness in life;
a stronger (actual) social network, and friends for life;
greater capacity for empathy;
a more positive attitude to their studies;
increased self-esteem, even while their narcissism reduces; and
much deeper and more solid knowledge of history than those taking part in traditional classes on the same material.

It's remarkable!

In the episode, I go through the way that the classes are run and the benefits that they bring, and I compare them to the ordinary student experience. I also share the ideas behind why this pedagogical approach seems to work so well. I hope you can join me in enthusiasm for this teaching method.

Enjoy the episode.

This episode serves two purposes. On the one hand, I want to go over some more ideas from Jane McGonigal's book, as it is so rich in fresh and original ideas (they're fresh to me, anyway).

On the other hand, I would like to go through a pointed criticism of the book entitled Jane McGonigal's Mind is Broken written by Edward Champion. Given how much I got from her book, I am surprised that there are people who are so strongly against it. I think it is good to go through it in the name of balance, though I can't pretend that I share Edward Champion's opinion, or believe that his piece is particularly well argued.

Enjoy the episode.

Jane McGonigal is a game designer who believes that, in many ways, games bring out the best in people. The reason for their popularity, she claims, is that they satisfy fundamental human needs. This leads, for example, to the highly insightful and completely counterintuitive notion that a big reason for people playing games is that it makes them feel productive.

She peppers her book with reality "fixes" - comparisons of games with reality, where games come out on top, and lead the way to a better future. Here is a full list of those fixes.

Unnecessary obstacles: Compared with games, reality is too easy. Games challenge us with voluntary obstacles and help us put our personal strengths to better use.
Emotional activation: Compared with games, reality is depressing. Games focus our energy, with relentless optimism, on something we're good at and enjoy.
More satisfying work: Compared with games, reality is unproductive. Games give us clearer missions and more satisfying, hands-on work.
Better hope of success: Compared with games, reality is hopeless. Games eliminate our fear of failure and improve our chances of success.
Stronger social connectivity: Compared with games, reality is disconnected. Games build stronger social bonds and lead to more active social networks. The more time we spend interacting within our social networks, the more likely we are to generate a subset of positive emotions known as "prosocial emotions."
Epic scale: Compared with games, reality is trivial. Games make us a part of something bigger and give epic meaning in our actions.
Wholehearted participation: Compared with games, reality is hard to get into. Games motivate us to participate more fully in whatever we're doing.
Meaningful rewards when we need them most: Compared with games, reality is pointless and unrewarding. Games help us feel more rewarded for making our best effort.
More fun with strangers: Compared with games, reality is lonely and isolating. Games help us band together and create powerful communities from scratch.
Happiness hacks: Compared with games, reality is hard to swallow. Games make it easier to take good advice and try out happier habits.
A sustainable engagement economy: Compared with games, reality is unsustainable. The gratifications we get from playing games are an infinitely renewable resource.
More epic wins: Compared with games, reality is unambitious. Games help us define awe-inspiring goals and tackle seemingly impossible social missions together.
Ten thousand hours collaborating: Compared with games, reality is disorganised and divided. Games help us make a more concerted effort - and over time, they give us collaboration superpowers.
Massively multiplayer foresight: Reality is stuck in the present. Games help us imagine the future together.

The book has many case studies and psychological experiments backing up the points that it makes. Overall it reads like a sort of manifesto, but for me, the most important thing was the way in which it explained things about people that I never realised before. It gave me a new perspective on human motivation, on learning, and on myself. I hope you will gain from it as I did.

Enjoy the episode.

Malke Rosenfeld is the creator of Math in your Feet, a program to teach students mathematical concepts through the medium of dance. (Really!) She does school workshops and teacher trainings, and now has a new book, Math on the Move, describing her approach and the theory behind it. We talk about interdisciplinary learning, embodied learning, liking vs. hating maths, and attitudes to "alternative" teaching methods.

Malke herself, like many people, never really "got" maths while she was at school. After getting involved in the percussive dance scene, she one day woke up to the possibility that "surely there's math in this". From there, she went on to develop her unusual, and potentially controversial, but certainly fun, pedagogy.

She draws on the ideas of Seymour Papert from his book Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas, and on modern neurological research showing the extent to which we think through our bodies, and have to understand things in many ways for them to really sink in.

Enjoy the episode.

Today we have an interview with Sargy Letuchy, a public school teacher from Chicago, who has produced some materials to help other teachers with standards-based learning. The Visual Edge is a workbook of graphic organisers for K-12 teachers in the United States. Along the way, we also discuss some other pertinent education topics.

Enjoy the episode.

Depending on what counts as knowing a language, I speak anything between 7 and 12 languages, namely:

English, Polish, Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, French, Russian, and Persian well;
Hungarian to a lesser extent; and
Georgian, Armenian, Lithuanian, and Tibetan in the past, now mostly forgotten.

Besides this, I have some knowledge of classical languages (Latin, classical Chinese, and ancient Greek); one constructed language (Esperanto); and there are a couple more languages that I've had a smaller amount of exposure to (Turkish and Maltese).

I think that my experiences may be worth sharing to a general audience interested in education, and in teaching and learning languages in particular.

First, I recount my story. How did I get from bilingual child to adult polyglot? Secondly, I talk about my methods for learning, Finally, I share some lessons learned from my experiences.

This episode does not make use of references or scientific studies, but just relates my personal experience. It is a case study that gives a sense of what it feels like and how it works to learn numerous languages. I hope that you can take something useful from it.

Enjoy the episode.

music by http://www.podcastthemes.com

In this episode, I review a paper from the Foreign Service Institute (FSI) about language learning and teaching. The key insights are eleven:

Mature adults can learn a foreign language well enough through intensive language study to do things in the language (almost) as well as native speakers.
"Language-learning aptitude" varies among individuals and affects their classroom learning success (but at least some aspects of aptitude can be learned).
There is no "one right way" to teach (or learn) languages, nor is there a single "right" syllabus.
Time on task and the intensity of the learning experience appear crucial.
Learners' existing knowledge about language affects their learning.
A learner's prior experience with learning (languages or other skills) also affects classroom learning.
The importance of "automaticity" in building learner skill and confidence in speaking and reading a language is more important than has been recognised by the second language acquisition field since the 1980s.
Learners may not learn a linguistic form until they are "ready", but FSI's experience indicates that teachers and a well-designed course can help learners become ready earlier.
A supportive, collaborative, responsive learning environment, with a rich variety of authentic and teacher-made resources, is very important in fostering effective learning.
Conversation, which on the surface appears to be one of the most basic forms of communication, is actually one of the hardest to master.
If a learner has passed a certain threshold of proficiency in a language, then attrition of their knowledge over time is very low. However, below that threshold, learners tend to forget their language relatively quickly with time.

During this episode, I discuss each of these points, and provide a personal point of view with reference to my own experience of learning multiple languages over the years.

Enjoy the episode.

I wanted to share some things I learned from my trip to the US this summer, and what my own experience of running maths circles has been like so far.

This episode includes:

Discussion of the Summer Math Circle Institute;
Tips and techniques learned from the Institute;
My own experiences of running maths circles;
Potatoes with added sugar;
What you should and shouldn't assume about students;
Why Math Circles (sometimes) work;
Why Bloom's Taxonomy is upside-down; and
The role of the teacher in having a vision for the students in his/her care.

Enjoy the episode.

Interview with Robert Kaplan, co-author of Out of the Labyrinth (the book we looked at in the previous episode), co-founder of The Math Circle, and the man behind the Summer Math Circle Institute course (which I attended this summer).

Robert Kaplan tells of his colourful background, his experiences starting and running The Math Circle, and the recent explosion of interest and growth in maths circles in the favelas of Brazil.

Enjoy the episode.

This is a book that I have more of a connection with than many of the others I cover on the podcast. I first bought a book by these authors when I was 17, and didn't read it until literally ten years later. It was a fascinating recreational maths book. I then discovered that they were involved in alternative maths education, and that they had even set up an organisation for this called The Math Circle. This book relates their experiences of running Math Circles, their philosophy and approach to maths and maths education, and some pointers as to how to set up a Math Circle of your own.

Two questions may come to mind. Firstly, what is a Math Circle? Robert Kaplan summarises it as "a conversation, among equals, about math". Secondly, has there been any education or psychology research on maths circles and their effectiveness? I have been looking for this for a long time, and have asked a lot of people deeply involved in the scene, but I am yet to find out about any studies done about them. So, short answer, apparently not.

The word on the street is that they tend to be highly beneficial to students, but that they are "risky" in the sense that, as with any conversation, you don't know what it will be like until you have it. There are maths circles that flop, and there are those that shine. More shine than flop, but there is always the risk of flop.

In this episode I discuss the book, and the following few episodes relate to the Math Circle Summer Institute, a weeklong course I attended in the US where Robert and Ellen Kaplan share their wisdom and help teachers to learn how to run maths circles for their own students.

Enjoy the episode.

Have a go at some of these:

An athlete's best time to run a mile is 4 minutes and 10 seconds. How long would it take him to run 5 miles?

It takes one orchestra one hour to play a symphony. How long would it take two orchestras to play a symphony?

On a ship, there are 13 goats and 12 sheep. How old is the captain?

Among schoolchildren, the most common answers to these questions are: 20 minutes and 50 seconds; half an hour; and 25 years old.

Hence the title: where are these thoughtless, silly answers coming from?

The bizarre and somewhat frightening thing is that this is a well-attested finding in many different countries and schools. School students predominantly seem to think that anything involving calculation, in the classroom at least, is a matter of doing a simple arithmetic operation on the numbers given, without any kind of sense-checking or thinking about the real situation behind the numbers.

This strange phenomenon demands explanation, not to mention fixing. In this episode, we look at several articles concerning this issue, why it's there, and what to do about it.

Enjoy the episode.

Dr Amanda Serenevy is a mathematician and mathematics educator, focussing on outreach through the medium of Math Circles, and on teacher training. This episode appears as number "27+" because the previous episode, Consider the Circle, was about how Amanda rescued a young girl from a terrible time with maths at school.

She is the founder and director of Riverbend Community Math Centre in South Bend, Indiana, which works to improve mathematics education within the local community. She runs teacher training courses throughout the year, both to help teachers with their pedagogy, and with their knowledge of maths itself. She also has many local children and young people come to her Math Centre to engage in mathematical activities, the most prominent of these being Math Circles.

In summer, she is the main organiser of the Summer Math Circle Institute at the University of Notre Dame, which is a course for learning how to run Math Circles, and is the place where I met her. She also finds time to spend almost two months a year in Navajo Nation helping to run maths outreach programs, including a three week long summer camp.

She did her undergraduate degree in mathematics at the University of Indiana at South Bend, and her PhD in dynamical systems at Boston University. Interestingly, she declined academic positions at university in favour of doing more maths outreach, and so her choice of career is very deliberate, and she is committed to her cause.

From getting to know Amanda personally, I can say that she is both very personable and very dedicated to her work. It is easy to see how much positive effect she is having on her community, particularly on the children who have clearly gained so much from her help, guidance, and activities. While she has a thorough understanding of the problems with maths education in her country, she somehow isn't completely disillusioned, which is a feat in itself. I was greatly privileged to be able to shadow her for a week while in the US and pick her brains about maths, education, and why America is such a strange place.

Enjoy the episode.

A very short episode about an article written by a young girl concerning her experiences with maths.

At school, she is faced daily with the same worksheet, always refusing to do it. Her teachers continue to give her the sheet every day for months, keeping her out of the normal classroom. She becomes resentful and angry at maths and at school, and continues her protest of inaction.

When she discovers Math Circles, a different approach to maths education, then she stops feeling neglected and starts, gradually, to engage. With time she not only gains confidence in the maths she is "supposed" to know, but also discovers mathematics as a field full of things to explore - and things she is capable of exploring.

Having gained confidence and understanding from Math Circles, she eventually graduates from high school and enrols in university. (A happy ending, one presumes.)

We will be talking a good deal about Math Circles, so this little story makes a good anecdotal introduction to their potential benefits. It sounds a bit like an advert, but Eliza Vanett is a real person who really underwent these experiences and volunteered to write this herself. You'll hardly see adverts for Math Circles on television.

Enjoy the episode.

What do you think of mathematics? Is it:

a sterile tool for accounting?
boring, mindless, and annoying stuff your teacher makes you do?
an anarchic, psychedelic adventure?

If you answered 1., mathematician and teacher Paul Lockhart vehemently disagrees with you. If you answered 2., then Lockhart understands your plight. If you answered 3., then you really know what maths is.

A Mathematician's Lament is a short book all about misconceptions, and how the system propagates them into an insurmountable monster hiding the true nature of a cherished art form. Kids in school hate maths lessons. Why? Because they're not really doing maths! They're engaging in a hollow imitation of it (if they're engaged at all), where memorising formulae takes the place of imagination and reasoning.

He starts us off with a parable about a musician, and another about a painter. Imagine if everyone thought that music was those little marks made on the page of music books, or that painting a fence is the epitome of what it means to be a painter. This is the situation that mathematics finds itself in today. Very few people know about the true nature of doing mathematics, and there is no cultural corrective for the mistaken view propagated by the bulk of the education system. This is why Paul Lockhart laments.

This book was originally published in abbreviated form as an article of the same title, which is very close to my heart. I've read it about six times so far if not more, which is more times, I think, than I've read any other publication. I have a lot to say about it. I hope that it will reach a wide audience.

Enjoy the episode.

Over the past century, women have been gaining rights and prejudice against women has declined. Although many would argue that there's still a way to go, the progress is undeniable. Why, then, do men still outperform women in a number of intellectual domains?

In this episode, we look at several articles that try to answer this question for one cognitive domain in particular: chess. Chess is a good domain to test for a number of reasons:

There is little subjectivity or ambiguity in deciding who is a better chess player. In chess, you either win or you lose (or draw), and there's no arguing about it. This isn't the same in most other domains, such as art, literature, music, or scientific research.
In chess, it's what you know, not who you know. You don't need to have a professional network or be well-liked to win chess tournaments. You just have to play the game. This is different to other domains, where your career can depend on the judgements of others, and women or other groups may suffer from the effects of a "glass ceiling".
There is a lot of data on chess. For the top few hundred male and female chess players, we know who played who; when; at what event; what the exact moves were; and what the result was. This helps our analysis greatly.

So, why do women tend to worse in chess? Are women less interested in chess? Is there some hidden psychological bias or prejudice that is holding women back? Is it just some sort of statistical artefact? Or are men simply cleverer than women? All these theories and more are discussed in detail.

Enjoy the episode.

I write a little blurb like this for every episode, but I feel that some books hardly need any introduction. This is one such example. Malcolm Gladwell is one of the most celebrated journalists and writers of the early 21st century, and his book Outliers caused a splash in people's thinking about success.

Why? One answer is that it popularised the idea of the so-called "10,000 hour rule", initially discovered by K. Anders Ericsson, concerning how much "deliberate practice" it takes to become a world-class expert in any field. "Popularised" is the key word here, as several others were writing the same thing, but when Gladwell writes, everybody reads. And, for the most part, everybody believes. (So another answer to "why did the book cause a splash?" would be "because it's Gladwell, and he's famous, and everybody likes him.")

The strange thing is, the 10,000 hour rule makes up a minority of what he writes about in his book, but people seem to often forget the rest of the ideas. Since we've already seen the power of extended deliberate practice described in other books (Bounce, Genius Explained, and The Talent Code), it's actually these remaining ideas where we find Gladwell's unique contribution to our knowledge of the development of expertise. And it has a message with is quite at odds with the spirit of the 10,000 hour rule.

Gladwell's unique yet oft-forgotten contribution, then, is the idea of success as being a gift. He's not talking about talent, which he more or less rejects by reference to the aforementioned 10,000 hour rule, but about life circumstances. You don't choose where or when you are born, or the culture you are born into, or the state of the job market or of national demographics or of technology as you are growing up, and yet these very factors have a profound effect on whether somebody is successful. Would Bill Gates have become so rich were he born in Burma instead? Or in the 1920s? Or in fourth century Phrygia?

Although some of Gladwell's historico-cultural musings can be somewhat open to doubt, in several places he gives evidence strong enough to convince even the careful reader that something funny is indeed going on. In this episode, I hope to help you see where he might be onto something, and where we need to be wary of the potential of his masterful storytelling to obscure his shaky arguments.

Enjoy the episode.

"Follow your passion" is bad advice.

It seems an almost blasphemous thing to say. And yet in this book, Cal Newport argues that it is, indeed, generally a bad idea to try to base a career on a pre-existing passion.

Firstly, as blunt and uninspiring as it may sound, most people don't have a passion to begin with. Hence the need to "find yourself" or figure out what you want to do with your life. People who do have a passion are usually passionate about something that can't provide them with a career, such as supporting a local sports team.

Secondly, passions are usually the result of a successful career due to the build-up of skills that allow for more interesting jobs, rather than something that people start with. Having higher quality skills that are in high demand means that you can "trade them in" for a job which is in high demand. To think that you can go in to a field and get an exciting job right away is rather naive, and the entry-level positions don't tend to be the sorts of things that inspire people.

This book was written by the author as he was contemplating where he would go with his career after finishing his PhD, as he confronted the fascinating question: what makes for a career that people love? Through a combination of personal stories and broader research, the author argues his perhaps unorthodox position to us in very convincing style.

Enjoy the episode.

With The Talent Code, we have another perspective on the development of expertise. Daniel Coyle looks at "talent hotbeds" in music, sport, and academics in order to piece together a theory of how people get good at things. In the process, he discovers different types of teachers, necessary for different stages in the process of achieving mastery.

In Genius Explained, we saw how people considered "geniuses" build up their skills over many years prior to their production of great works. Although this training usually happens in childhood and adolescence, we saw at least one case - that of George Stephenson - where the key knowledge and expertise were built up in early adulthood. This prompts me to cover a book about adult development to supplement our series on expertise.

Meg Jay writes not just about adolescents, but directly for them. She is a therapist specialising in the twenty-something years, and her experience in therapy combined with her knowledge of the background scientific literature contributes to the value of this book.

Her main thesis is that many people today appear to believe that the twenties should be a period of unrestrained fun and thrill-seeking, and that "grown-up" concerns such as building a career, finding a partner, choosing a place to live, or raising a family can be left to the thirties, since "everything happens later now". Her response to this is that the twenties are not a time that can be wasted, since they are of such great developmental importance. Various biological and particularly neurophysiological changes during the twenties make it a time of great learning and of building habits for a lifetime.

Her interviews and case studies with clients show that the twenties can be a rather harrowing time, with young people unsure of what they are supposed to be doing with their lives, and often not doing anything at all with them. Often paralysed by a combination of apparently limitless choice, endless time, and the day-to-day banality of doing anything in particular, many twenty-somethings end up doing the rough equivalent of nothing at all, unemployed or underemployed in an eternal "Starbucks phase".

This book should interest both those who are interested in psychology and adult development in general, and those who are in their twenties or know people who are and would like some practical advice from an expert.

Enjoy the episode.

Last episode, we got to see the lives of three exceptional individuals in depth: Charles Darwin, George Stephenson, and Michael Faraday. In today's episode, we take a look at how people have tried to bring up children to be prodigies, and to what extent they succeeded. We also look at genius writers so as to get a view of a more "artistic" kind of high achievement. Finally, Michael Howe explains explicitly why he thinks that the idea of inborn talent being necessary for genius doesn't have any real evidence behind it, and what he thinks the secret to genius really is.

In Genius Explained, Michael Howe takes us through biographies of many people with great achievements, who we might consider to be "geniuses". It is an investigation into what makes geniuses so great, chiefly through looking at their upbringing. I'll refrain from sharing his conclusions in this brief description to keep up the suspense :).

In this first part, we will look at Charles Darwin, George Stephenson, and Michael Faraday in depth.

A continuation of last week's episode about Daisy Christodoulou's book.

This should be a controversial episode!

I cover this book in the interests of looking at the cognitive science it refers to. However, this is also the sort of book that tries to undermine, or even overthrow, what might be interpreted as a failing ideology among many educators. It is therefore not possible for me to talk about it without at least paying some heed to a long-standing debate in education circles: progressivism versus traditionalism.

Progressivism is hard to pin down exactly, because it's used as a catch-all term for many ideas in education. Some people who would call themselves educational progressives would have completely different ideas from other self-described progressives. Ideas huddled under the progressive umbrella include character education; "whole-child" learning/development; using more "authentic" assessments (i.e. not paper-and-pencil tests); experiential learning; and discovery learning, to name but a few. You have to say though, they did a good PR job naming their ideas "progressive" - who doesn't like progress, after all?

Daisy Christodoulou is one of the relatively un-trendy educators who rails against progressivist ideas rather than campaigning for them. A former teacher in the English state school system, after several years she left her job to study cognitive science. As a teacher, she followed all the advice and guidance of her superiors and training bodies and institutes, but found that, despite this, her students weren't learning much. During her subsequent degree, she feels that she found out why - because the progressive ideas that she was being taught as a teacher in training are completely out of line with the actual science of how people think and learn.

Although it's a slim little volume, I've had to split it into two parts to cover it in enough depth. I try my hardest not to be biased and to be fair to all sides of this debate, and any failings on this point are my own. It's hard remaining neutral on such a hot topic, I have to say! I hope that the ideas in this book help to enrich your own understanding of this controversy in education, whatever your views.

Enjoy the episode.

We are now moving on to a series of episodes answering the question: How do people get good at things? In Bounce, Commonwealth champion and Olympian table-tennis player Matthew Syed shares his research into this topic.

The funny thing about Malcolm Gladwell is that everyone seems to enjoy reading him, but few remember many details of what he actually wrote. I had a conversation with a parent of one of my students not long ago about the overestimation of the importance of IQ, referencing some studies done by Lewis Terman. She listened with rapt attention and deep in thought. The information seemed new, original, and surprising to her. I mentioned that Malcolm Gladwell wrote about this in his book Outliers, to which she responded, "I read that book!" Apparently these things don't stick!

Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking is one of Gladwell's many bestsellers. He seems to have an enduring interest in both psychology and in education, which means that he'll make several appearances on the podcast, even though he's "just a journalist". He seems to draw people in with his combination of Viking-quality storytelling and modern statistical and scientific thinking. It seems to me that his later books are more knowledge- and idea-rich, and his earlier ones are a bit more take-one-idea-as-far-as-you-can.

The idea in Blink is that some apparent thinking is done without conscious processing (although Gladwell puts it in much sexier terms). For example, art critics know whether something is a genuine Greek sculpture or not because they can feel it, and they often can't explain why. Their intuitions can be - tend to be, in fact - more accurate than careful and detailed analysis and background investigations. What's going on here?

If you've been paying attention to the podcast so far, you should see where this fits in with the themes we've been exploring. Several books so far have been concerned with something similar. Thinking, Fast and Slow is about cognitive biases, which are subconscious "wrong" thinking. The Power of Habit looked at how people can learn even when they can't form any long-term memories. "Picture yourself as a stereotypical male" dealt with stereotype threat, i.e. how people subconsciously fulfil stereotypes about groups they belong to.

Apart from the idea of subconscious thinking, Gladwell also discusses some cases where this thinking is accurate, and others where it is wrong, or even disastrous. Surprise surprise, experts tend to have valid intuitions, whereas novices shouldn't trust their gut feeling. This idea of the differences between experts and novices is one reason why we're covering this book now, as our next theme for the coming weeks will be the question "how do people get good at things?".

Enjoy the episode.

A natural continuation from last week. Habit formation, and breaking habits, takes willpower. So how does willpower work?

Like a muscle.

Willpower gets tired. You have a limited "store" of it, and it gets drained over the course of a day. So, if you had a stressful day at work, then you are much more likely to cave in and have that chocolate cake / cigarette. (Sound familiar?)
Willpower gets stronger with use. People who adopt strict exercise regimes, for example, start eating healthier, studying more (if they're students), and drinking and smoking less. This is also true when people take up some other willpower-heavy scheme, such as trying to improve their study habits.
This is the weirdest one - willpower is more or less directly related to blood glucose levels. If you've just eaten, you'll have more willpower; if you're hungry, you'll have less.

The book gives numerous examples of people who have demonstrated vast amounts of willpower, and shares strategies from those people. Like a typical Gladwell, it blends scientific research with individual cases into a sort of easily digestible yet nutritious risotto.

And then it spends a chapter giving ill-advised parenting advice based on a lack of proper research on the subject. Well, you win some, you lose some.

Enjoy the episode.

Up till now, we've had several episodes looking at the question of "why do people do what they do?". Most recently, we asked and answered that question from the perspective of persuasion, in a sense addressing the sub-question "why are people persuaded to do what they do?". Now we get a chance to look at it with the lens of habit: "why do people do the same things so often? How do these habits form? And how can we get rid of them?"

In case you think that habit is unimportant, my first priority would be to disabuse you of that notion.

Psychologists estimate that around 40% of people's day-to-day behaviours are based on habit. To put that more strikingly, almost half of our day-to-day decisions are not decisions, but things that we do automatically.
Doing things according to habit requires little or no willpower, whereas going against it quickly depletes that limited mental resource. People who appear to have strong willpower usually just have deeply ingrained good habits.
Habits never really go away. (What?) It is possible to "break" an old habit, but only by replacing it with a new one.

Now that you're convinced about the importance of the topic, it's time for me to persuade you to listen to the episode.

You're a smart, curious person. You're just the kind of person who would listen to this. And you've listened to other episodes of the podcast, and other podcasts about psychology and learning. (commitment & consistency)
Thousands of people just like you have listened to it already... (social proof)
...and if you delay, the server will be overloaded and there will be none left! So hurry, while stocks last! (scarcity)
I've spent all this time making it just for you, won't you do me the kindness of listening to it? (reciprocity)
Professor Carol Dweck says you must listen to it. (authority)
Nice phone, by the way. (liking)

If you're confused about what just happened, try going back and listening to episode 14 again. If you need any more reasons, here are some episode 11-style attempts...

Give me 10 reasons why you shouldn't listen to it. (cognitive difficulty)
Listen to the Bookcast, it'll have you hooked fast! (cognitive ease)
You have to admit, it has a nice logo. (halo effect / judgement by basic assessment)
I know you. You pride yourself as an independent thinker, and do not accept others' statements without satisfactory proof. However, you have a great need for other people to like and admire you, and you tend to be critical of yourself. Luckily, you have a lot of unused capacity, which you are yet to turn to your advantage. This episode can help you with that. (Barnum effect)
You've already spent so much time reading this, do you want all that time to go to waste? (sunk cost fallacy)
Ok, ok, if you don't have time, just listen to the first hour. Oh alright, jeez! The first 20 minutes then! (anchoring) (contrast effect)

Enjoy the episode.

So far in the podcast, among other things, we've looked at the topic of motivation. In the last few episodes, we've also started to look at human irrationalities and their consequences. In this episode, we look at a topic that combines "why people do things" with human irrationality: persuasion.

Robert Cialdini spent most of his working life searching for the answer to one question: what is it that persuades people to do things that they wouldn't otherwise do? In this classic book, Cialdini summarises his findings over the length of his career as a psychologist.

He focuses on the six key "weapons" of influence, as well as a number of specific techniques that "compliance professionals" (salespeople, negotiators, and the like) use to get better results. In particular, he also explains how some of these methods have been used by educators to great effect. And in explaining these methods to us, he gives us an insight into how people's minds work, and a more detailed look at people's irrationalities.

Enjoy the episode.

Last week, we saw the destructive effects of a psychological phenomenon not many people would have heard of known as "stereotype threat". This week, we look at some ways of mitigating the effects of stereotype threat. How can we stop children and students from stereotyped groups from underperforming in exams because of their knowledge of their own backgrounds? David Sherman and Geoffrey Cohen summarise the results of recent research showing that a technique called "self-affirmation" can be used to stop not only stereotype threat, but a host of other irrational behaviours, and gives us a new, different, and somewhat more optimistic view of people's irrationalities.

Based on self-affirmation theory, people's irrationalities more often than not don't stem from a "lazy controller" as described by Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow (see episode 11), but rather from a need to protect one's ego. For example, people will ignore evidence against what they currently believe not because of some in-built, immovable bias, but because the evidence is threatening to their sense of self. All that it takes for them to approach the new evidence rationally is to remind them that their sense of self is strong and multi-faceted enough that changing this one opinion won't lead to an identity crisis.

So, were the self-esteem and self-help pioneers right in suggesting that we look at ourselves in the mirror and say how much we love ourselves? It turns out that the "self-affirmation" that Sherman and Cohen refer to is very different - indeed, almost diametrically opposed - to that which has been advocated by numerous self-help gurus. Self-affirmation works when it is subconscious and in a different field to the one in which one's ego is threatened; the gurus, meanwhile, suggest that we actively face difficulties in learning, for example, by saying "I am intelligent" to ourselves. In short, make sure you understand self-affirmation theory by looking at the evidence first, rather than jumping in with whatever sounds like it might work.

An absolute gem that seems not to be much talked about, self-affirmation theory gives us both practical approaches to dealing with problems, and a fresh and surprising theoretical viewpoint on various issues in cognitive science. I hope you find it as fascinating as I do.

Enjoy the episode.

Ethnic minorities and women are disadvantaged enough as it is. When considering why members of some ethnic groups tend to do badly in school, and why girls tend to do worse than boys in mathematics, people present all kinds of arguments, including economic, cultural, and sometimes even (very controversially) genetic reasons. A contributing factor that one seldom hears about is the pernicious psychological effect known as stereotype threat.

Stereotype threat describes the unconscious tendency for people to worsen their performance in a task when they are reminded of a negative stereotype that a group to which they belong has. For example, when girls are made to put their gender on the front of a mathematics exam script, then they do worse than when they aren't so asked. This means that merely reminding girls of their gender is enough to make them be momentarily worse at maths, as if subconsciously trying to confirm the stereotype.

This kind of effect has been repeated with other stereotyped-against groups, such as african american and latino children in the United States. Interestingly, the positive side of the effect seems to be very small - white children don't benefit from being reminded that they are white, for instance.

The "reminding" mentioned here can be very subtle. The students don't need to be aware of what is going on - it's a classic subconscious process, like priming. For instance, even getting people to write down what part of town they're from is enough to activate racial stereotype threat.

It should be obvious that there are serious practical implications. One in particular that is worth mentioning is that some examinations require students to write down their gender and/or their ethnicity before starting, which is shown to activate stereotype threat and thereby reduce performance. Apparently this is what happens in the USA with the SAT school-leaving test, although I have had trouble confirming this.

This article describes the phenomenon, and discusses some potential ways of mitigating the effect. Michelle Goffreda originally wrote it as a blog post on the MIT Admissions blog (http://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/picture-yourself-as-a-stereotypical-male). With her permission, in this episode I read it out and add my own comments.

A classic book on people's irrationalities.

Daniel Kahneman is a Nobel Prize-winning psychologist and cognitive scientist. Together with his late research partner Amos Tversky, he co-founded the field of cognitive heuristics and biases in psychology, and that of behavioural economics. This all stems from his investigations into the irrationalities of human thought.

In this book, he explains his findings from a lifetime of research.

NOTES

In the introduction to the episode, I mention some PISA reports with international perspectives on education. Here are links to all six volumes of the 2012 report:

Volume I: What Students Know and Can Do: Student Performance in Mathematics, Reading, and Science

Volume II: Excellence through Equity: Giving Every Student the Chance to Succeed

Volume III: Ready to Learn: Students' Engagement, Drive, and Self-Beliefs

Volume IV: What Makes Schools Successful? Resources, Policies and Practices

Volume V: Creative Problem Solving - Students' Skills in Tackling Real-Life Problems

Volume VI: Students and Money - Financial Literacy Skills for the 21st Century

The other figure I mention, who talks about education in international perspective with an anti-PISA stance, is Yong Zhao. His website is zhaolearning.com.

What's the best kind of experience you have? When do you feel happiest? Mihály Csíkszentmihályi (pronounced me-HIGH CHEEK-sent-me-HIGH) shows us that the conditions for optimal experience are also those of when we have our greatest learning.

Flow, a psychology term coined by the author, refers to the feeling of utter concentration and complete absorption in what one is doing, when it feels as though the world has melted away and all that there is is this moment. Rock climbers often experience flow - they are completely in the present, and the only thing that they can think of is what to do next on the rock face, their time horizon of thought narrowing to less than five minutes from now. Experienced chess players also get the feeling that the chess board is its own universe, and that nothing else exists during a game, claiming things like "the ceiling could have caved in while we were playing, and if it didn't hit us, we wouldn't have even noticed".

Csíkszentmihályi developed his own psychological research method known as experience sampling in order to study the topic of optimal experience. With the help of a pager, participants were asked to record what they were doing and how they felt at random times in the day. This is how he discovered that many leisure activities, such as watching TV and "chilling out", actually made people feel worse, and that people felt best when they were concentrating on doing something challenging.

What kind of activities can produce flow? It seems that, in principle, any activity can do, but the author refers us to some that seem to do so more than others. Cooking, farming, surgery, yoga, and reading are some of the examples given, but a large class of activities seem designed specifically to create flow, and those are sports and games. An important reason why we enjoy these is that they demand our concentration on a clear goal.

The author also considers what kinds of people are more likely to experience flow. Although, by the time of the publication of this book, not much research had been done on this question, it seems that there are certain factors in upbringing that can affect a person's propensity to experience flow, and a related tendency to seek out activities that require effort can feel like hard work. The most important factors appear to be (1) the stability and consistency of the home environment, and (2) the level of intellectual stimulation at home (those who have more of this are more likely to become inclined to intellectual pursuits throughout their life, in work and in leisure).

As mentioned above, an interesting feature of the conditions that create flow is that they are also very good conditions for learning. A clear goal, with quality feedback, in a challenging situation that puts you at the edge of your capabilities, are likely to produce both high levels of flow and of learning. As a result, we can look to Flow for ideas both on how to live happier, and on how to learn better.

Enjoy the episode.

Writing in the 1970s, Timothy Gallwey comes eerily close in The Inner Game of Tennis to what modern cognitive scientists have discovered about the nature of the mind. He reminds me of medieval Buddhists whose descriptions of certain mental processes, particularly those to do with meditation, have been confirmed to be highly accurate by modern neuroscience*. Forty years isn't a thousand years, but it's still a long time in cognitive and brain sciences.

Gallwey's basic point is that, when we reflect on our "selves", we are actually made up of (at least) two parts. "Self 1" is the voice in your head that actively decides to do things - call it "I". "Self 2" is that part of you that does things without you thinking about it - call it "myself". An example of the actions of Self 2 is when you are holding a pen and a sandwich, and try to eat the pen and write with the sandwich; or (if you're English) when you say sorry for something automatically even though it wasn't your fault; or when you drive all the way to work even though you were engrossed in thought about something completely different, and so, in a sense, weren't concentrating on the road.

The relevance of this observation to tennis is that Self 2 should be doing all the work, and Self 1 should shut up. In reality, your bossy, self-obsessed Self 1 tends to try to dominate Self 2 and tell it what to do, which only leads to stress, wasted energy, and worsening outcomes. In other words, people both tend to overthink tennis and to try to "tell themselves" how to correct their problems, which mostly just stresses them out and doesn't produce improved results. What they should really do is just shut up and trust their body (i.e. their Self 2) to do what it needs to do. It might be uncomfortable to not feel "in control" at first, but ultimately greater improvements and a better experience await those who can manage this. Easier said than done, mind you.

Of course, The Inner Game of Tennis has application far beyond tennis alone. The book has been popular and influential enough to spawn a veritable tribe of Inner Game books, including that of golf, music, work, and even stress.

The book serves as an experiential, non-technical look at things that we will have to look at the types of issues that we will have to look at in a more evidence-based, nuanced way in future. As well as having more than its fair share of applicable wisdom, it also introduces us to the important idea of our minds being modular, which is very important in looking at learning in general, and is a theme that we will return to.

Enjoy the episode.

*Take a look at Daniel Goleman's Destructive Emotions for a more detailed discussion.

Psychological "urban myths" come in a few flavours. Some, such as the idea that high self-esteem leads to less violent behaviour, are so completely, hilariously, overwhelmingly, unambiguously wrong that you'd be hard-pressed to make up something so deliciously ironic. Others, such as the idea of "motivating" people with contingent external rewards, are deeply flawed, though not utterly wrong under all circumstances*. Then there are the cases where the popular thinking may be more or less right, but the benefits have been overstated and costs overlooked. This article targets one such case.

The power of a clear goal is regularly extolled by people from fields as disparate as game design and life coaching, and has a significant body of scientific evidence going for it. In particular, specific and challenging goals are thought to be the best kind. Specific goals allow for clear feedback, another powerful feature of good learning and work environments. For example, "go to the gym three times a week" is something that you can be clear about whether you're achieving, in a way in which "exercise more" doesn't allow you to be. Challenging goals encourage you to stretch yourself, to get the most out of yourself while not being so difficult that you abandon hope of achieving them.

What could possibly be wrong with this? Lisa Ordóñez and her co-authors consider a number of problems. I counted seven, which neatly fits in with Snow White's seven dwarves, except that I had to give them different, rather more unfortunate names. Specific, challenging goals [dwarves] can do the following:

Degrade performance ['underachiever'];
Shift of focus away from other important goals ['absent-minded'];
Harm personal relationships ['tactless'];
Corrode organisational culture ['antisocial'];
Motivate risky and unethical behaviours ['thoughtless'];
Inhibit learning ['rigid']; and
Harm intrinsic motivation ['ennui'].

In reading the paper one thing in particular struck me: there were no nasty side-effects of goals that were challenging but not specific. It was the specificity of goals that was causing all the above problems. Challenge could cause specific goals to "go wild" even more, but on its own, challenge doesn't seem to be causing these ill effects.

So how do we square the above side-effects with the known benefits of specific, challenging goals? The authors give us the following analogy: although a strong medicine may be very good at curing a disease, giving it to a healthy person would only make them feel worse due to the side effects. Similarly, specific and challenging goals should be given out carefully, only in situations where they are needed and can fix a problem, rather than willy-nilly to everyone, even those who are already performing well.

Enjoy the episode.

Relation of Threatened Egotism to Violence and Aggression: The Dark Side of High Self-Esteem. Roy Baumeister, Laura Smart, and Joseph Boden, Psychological Review*, 1996.

**See Drive (episode 2 of this podcast) and Punished by Rewards (episodes 5a and 5b).

So far, we have seen a several books with messages relating to the psychology of motivation, particularly to the conditions under which people have greater motivations to do difficult tasks (Drive, Punished by Rewards), as well as what kinds of attitudes lead to greater learning and improvement (Mindset). In The Practicing Mind, we get a look at the phenomenology of these conditions, i.e. what does it feel like to be intrinsically motivated and have a growth mindset?

Thomas Sterner is a jazz pianist and piano restorer. As a child he found practice to be boring and frustrating, but with time he came to both enjoy it and see greater progress, which he puts down to an originally mostly subconscious understanding of how practice should be carried out. He was particularly struck by the need for a greater public understanding of practice when he took up golf in his mid-thirties.

On the golf course, he would see people who had been playing golf for ten or twenty years who still didn't look much better than beginners. They would be terrible at the game, and yet not know why, or how to change their game. He compares them to musicians who have been playing the piano for twenty years and yet still didn't know that they were supposed to play with their fingers, not their elbows.

Sterner shows us his philosophy of the power and meaning of discipline, focus, and the quieting of the mind. Laced with insights from eastern philosophies, the author shows us the futility of expecting perfection, and the contentment we can gain from an honest relationship with what we are doing. His ideas are applicable in almost any domain of life, if we are to believe, as he does, that "all of life is practice".

The Practicing Mind is something of an unusual book for this podcast in that it proposes ways of practicing better without any evidence other than the author's own experiences to back up its claims. In a bookshop, it would quite possibly be filed under "self-help" rather than "education". And yet, I find this first-person account to be refreshing after speaking about these issues at length from a detached, scientific standpoint. I hope that taking the personal perspective of this individual expert will be something that benefits you as much as it has me.

Enjoy the episode.

Finally! An episode with the word "teacher" in the title. What kind of teacher is Andrei Toom? And what interesting comparisons does make between education in Soviet Russia and in the USA?

Andrei Toom is a mathematician, and "teacher" here refers to his teaching of undergraduates. The fact that he self-identifies as a teacher should already strike many as strange. In the US, and to some extent in the UK as well, university research staff generally see undergraduate teaching as a burden that is best minimised or gotten rid of, rather than a duty to be fulfilled, a chance to inspire the next generation, or a central part of their job description. Toom not only doesn't see things this way, but is rather disappointed that American professors do, which is one of the things that he communicates to us through his essay.

Starting us off with a description of the difficulties of being an intellectual in the highly censored, dictatorial environment that was Soviet Russia, he then discusses the strange paradoxes of being a professor or a student in a country held up as a paragon of freedom. US students and professors find themselves in an odd situation, he tells us, whereby "the market" seems to play a similar autocratic role to the one that "the system" played in the USSR.

For example, American undergraduates are usually only interested in gaining a piece of paper to certify that they have gained knowledge, not in actually gaining the knowledge - the kind of bureaucratic absurdity that he thought could only exist in a communist state, and yet in Russia students were actually interested in learning something. Not only this, American students seem to frame learning as a loss, in the sense that if they can get all their grades without learning anything, then they would much rather do so. It is as if they are "buying" their degree certificates with learning, rather than thinking of the learning itself as intrinsically valuable. And as with any transaction, the less they have to "pay", the better.

The knowledge that the students do get is brittle. It is only considered to be applicable within the context of exam questions, and ones structured exactly the same as the ones they had seen before. Any, even minor, deviation from what they have seen before is considered irrelevant or too difficult. Toom found that he needed to shore up students' basic mathematics to get them to be able to take the course they were enrolled in, but the students were mostly unwilling to cooperate. Their reaction of defiance rather than shame at not knowing basic maths leads him to question their apparent "right to ignorance".

And yet, the strange power dynamics of American universities mean that the situation stays this way. The students who only want the grades complain, but those who want knowledge don't. There have been cases where students have sued universities for better grades, but no cases where they sued them for more or better knowledge.

I felt that this would be a good time to have an episode on something a bit different to what we've had so far. The focus has been on psychology, and will continue to be for some time, as I feel that it's important to have a good grounding in psychology before going on to such topics as teaching methods and international comparisons. Here we can at least have a flavour of some interesting topics in higher education, international comparison, and the effect of the nature of society, to broaden our perspective and give us a little break from the subject of psychology and cognitive science. It should hopefully also convince you that we will be talking about teaching in this podcast, not just animals and management!

Enjoy the episode.

Well well, the grand finale. We've seen in the previous episode how laboratory studies have shown that extrinsic rewards lead to reduced motivation and lower-quality work, as well as a priori arguments for why it's a bad idea to incentivise behaviours with rewards. For those of you who are still unconvinced, I'm losing hope a bit since I've spent a total of about 3 hours so far over two episodes (last episode and episode 2) talking about why rewards are a really bad idea. Here goes my last chance at convincing you, and your last chance to see the light.

With one more chance, what will I talk about? I imagine that those people still saying "yeah, but..." might be most convinced by research based on real-life situations, rather than on laboratory studies. Well, as luck would have it, this is exactly what Alfie Kohn covers next in his book. Picture a group of company directors from various industries talking to one another about their observations that incentive plans have caused damage to their organisations. Picture teachers, "incentivised" by controlling external accountability measures, becoming more authoritarian to the kids in their classrooms in turn - and children learning less as a result (research* has shown this, no kidding). Picture children becoming less cooperative and generous as they are given rewards for good behaviour.

For those of you who are convinced by now (hopefully most of you!), you might still be saying something like "I can see the importance of these findings, but what realistic alternatives are there to using punishments and rewards?" Thankfully, Alfie Kohn spends Part 3 of the book tackling just this issue. I don't want to spoil it for you too much, but let's just say, it can be done.

Even if just one teacher reduces or eliminates the use of contingent sweets or stickers, class rankings, inappropriate praise, or grades as a result of having listened to these past two episodes, then they will have been worth producing. Aiming a bit higher, wouldn't it be great if we could turn our society, and our world, into one that realises the value and the potential of intrinsic motivation, and the dangers of extrinsic motivators?

Enjoy the episode.

"Controlling Teacher Strategies: Undermining Children's Self-Determination and Performance" by Cheryl Flint, Ann K. Boggiano, and Marty Barrett; Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1990.

You'll remember from Daniel Pink's Drive (episode 2) that common assumptions about how rewards affect motivation and behaviour have it all wrong. Common sense tells us that to motivate somebody to do a better job, we should offer them a material reward, but scientific experiments show us that this is one of the best ways to demotivate people.

Perhaps you weren't so easily convinced. Well, good news! Alfie Kohn has written a book which argues in the finest detail and with the most colossal empirical support that rewards are bad for you and for everyone else. Starting off with an argument from principle, that there's something sinister and potentially immoral about offering rewards in the first place, he continues with a book-length exposition of all the terrible things that rewards can do, according to experimental psychology.

Why should you care? Because, if you're a teacher giving out grades for assignments, then the evidence strongly suggests that you are undermining your students' motivation. If you're a parent and you reward your child for studying, then you are reinforcing the idea that learning is a useless chore with no intrinsic benefits, done only for the goodie at the end. And if you offer praise when somebody does a good deed, scientific evidence shows that you are making them less ethical and less likely to do a good deed in the future in the absence of an external reward.

The really great thing about Alfie Kohn is his reliance on evidence as opposed to common sense or rhetoric to get his points across. Although he does use the latter where appropriate, it is clear throughout all of his books, no less this one, that his conclusions are well-supported by scientific enquiry. This book is a shining example of well-grounded argumentation (and of myth-busting). At the risk of not sounding impartial anymore, I'm willing to say that, as far as his approach to evidence is concerned, I personally consider Alfie Kohn to be a kind of professional role model.

So much is said in this book, that I can barely even attempt to fit it into a blog post. I've had to split up the episode into two parts to fit it all in. I hope this week's episode leaves you hungry for more.

Enjoy the episode.

Last week's episode served as an introduction to behaviourism. This week, in the name of balance, we are looking at another theory of animal training, the so-called dominance approach.

Cesar Millan is a Mexican dog trainer who emigrated to the US in his youth. He now has a TV show called The Dog Whisperer. Unlike Karen Pryor, he taught himself his approach to dogs through experience and exposure from an early age. He is said to have "a magical way with dogs", which is something that comes across, at least to the layman, in his show.

Millan's approach to dogs concerns thinking about the dog's needs. Perhaps that should read the Dog's needs, as he believes that all dogs have the same psychology, "dog psychology", which is different to human psychology and necessary to understand in order to solve "dog problems". His famous motto, "I rehabilitate dogs, I train people", is a reflection of the philosophy that the reason that dogs have problems is that humans aren't meeting their needs.

If it seems presumptuous to you that Millan claims to have a theory of psychology for all dogs, bear in mind what we heard last week: that behaviourists claim to have a theory of psychology for all animals. Everything! Dogs, cats, moles, crabs, bears, whales, elephants, prawns, beetles, fish ... and humans. Millan's theories are infinitely more modest in breadth than those of behaviourists.

However, Millan is more ambitious in terms of depth. What I call "fundamentalist" behaviourists - those who adhere to the original philosophy of behaviourism, that internal states either don't exist or don't matter - score a 0 in terms of depth (unless you agree with their assumptions, in which case they score 100%). Cesar Millan making the kinds of claims about what a dog is, and what a dog is like, that fundamentalist behaviourists would never care - or dare - to talk about.

This gives us a new dimension for looking at theories of psychology and elsewhere: depth. A "deep" theory is one that relies strongly on internal structures and systems; a "shallow" theory focuses on only those things that can be directly observed or measured. For example, the explanation "the bus came late because the 1pm bus always comes late" is a relatively shallow theory, whereas "the bus came late because promptness isn't very highly valued in our culture" is a relatively deep theory.

A deep theory has the disadvantage that it is hard to test. How do you check whether your culture values promptness or not? And how do you check the connection between this and the tardiness of the bus? This is relatively hard to do. On the other hand, a shallow theory, although easier to test, may be missing something. Although it may be true that the 1pm bus is always late, and it is relatively easy to test this, it doesn't tell us very much about buses, and there may be more to the story than that.

So this most recent pair of books also serves as a case study in epistemology, prompting us to ask that most important of scientific questions, "how do we know if something is true?". I studied chemical engineering at university, took up linguistics as a hobby, and now spend my time on education, and I can tell you that this question gets only more important the more "fuzzy" the subject matter is. And boy oh boy, education can be real fuzzy.

From dogs to philosophy of science. Funny where The Dog Whisperer can take you.

Enjoy the episode.

NOTES

Links to some articles that I refer to in the episode which criticise Millan are here and here.

You may also enjoy South Park episode 7 season 10 entitled Tsst, in which Cesar Millan "rehabilitates" Cartman. It's one of my favourite episodes. Apparently Millan himself thought that the episode was "fantastic".

Why should somebody who is interested in education be interested in behaviourism?

Because it's had a huge impact on educational theory and practice over the past more than 100 years. When I started reading books on education, the I was astounded at the frequency with which behaviourist arguments were put forward to support ideas. I felt like I could hardly budge without bumping into another reference to it. And it's no surprise - behaviourist educationalists include figures such as Edward Thorndike, sometimes referred to as "the father of educational psychology". The first book I read about educational psychology said that there were three chief paradigms of teaching, one of which was "behavioural". Understanding behaviourism helped me to better understand what these books were talking about, and to know when they didn't know what they were talking about.
Because it says some pretty crazy stuff, which is nonetheless hard to refute. Burrhus Frederic Skinner, the behaviourist who made the greatest contribution to the field, had some pretty scary ideas. He denied the existence of choice, will, or freedom. He considered dignity to be an empty and worthless idea. (Hence the title of one of his books, Beyond Freedom and Dignity.) He thought that people could be perfectly controlled with the right external conditioning, and he even hoped that the future would be this way, as expounded in his apparently utopian novel Walden Two. The non-existence or at least unimportance of internal states (thoughts, emotions) is at the very core of the philosophy of behaviourism. Outraged yet? And yet the theory has a lot of evidence going for it.
Because, a lot of the time, it works. Behaviourist principles have proven very effective in a range of situations and applications. Their greatest successes have been in animal training, but they've also been effective in various human domains, including making games and gambling machines more addictive. (Hooray?) There have also been some applications in sports coaching (more on this in another of Karen Pryor's books, Reaching the Animal Mind).

Don't Shoot the Dog! serves as an introduction to behaviourism. Karen Pryor takes us through both the basic theory and applications in behaviour modification. She uses a combination of examples from both animal and human subjects in everyday situations. Want your dog to stop barking all night? Need your roommate to start doing the laundry for once? Can't wait to teach your cat to give you a high-five? Karen Pryor tackles all these tricky situations and more.

Behaviourism claims to be a complete model of learning and behaviour - a very ambitious claim indeed. How does it do on this score? Without giving the game away too much, let's just say that the results are mixed. In some situations, behaviourist approaches and ideas work incredibly well. In certain cases, however, particularly to do with motivation, it is clear that it hasn't got all the answers. The fact that it's partially true and partially false makes it all the more intriguing - why does it sometimes work, but sometimes not? This is a question that will take a lot longer than one episode to answer, but it is worth thinking on.

Even if you're not behaviourism's biggest fan, or you don't think you'll be using it much, it is an important thing to have a grasp of to provide context for other theories and ideas. It's like Newtonian physics, which does a good job prior to the arrival of other theories (relativity theory and quantum mechanics), and we can then ask why Newtonian physics works so well in most situations even though it's "wrong" as it has been superseded by other theories.

Enjoy the episode.

Common sense tells us that in order to get someone to do something, or to get them to do it better (faster, more thoroughly, more carefully), you might offer them a reward - or if the offer is already there, increase its size. All kinds of clever-sounding people hold this view - principally economists and management consultants, but more or less anyone else too, as it seems to be so basic and so widespread an idea as to not merit further inspection.

Daniel Pink's book Drive introduces us to the research that seems to turn much of this "common sense" on its head. It turns out the rewards such as financial incentives usually make people perform worse. It's not limited to financial incentives (although Pink focuses on these), and not even limited to people - the initial example given is of how giving contingent food rewards to monkeys makes them worse at learning how to open latches than literally just leaving the monkeys alone.

In place of the carrots-and-sticks theory, Pink introduces us to a new theory, which is about 40 years old and yet still isn't all that well known. According to MAP theory (not the only name), the most important components of motivation are mastery, autonomy, and purpose. The author explains to us in more detail quite what each of these mean, but in short, people are motivated to do things when they can apply their existing expertise and develop it further; choose what they get to do, when, how, and with whom; and do something that they think is important, and/or connects them to other people.

One of the reasons that it's taken so long for the ideas to catch on is the prevalence not only of the "rational agent model" of economics, but also of the psychological field of behaviourism. Behaviourism, along with psychoanalysis (a very different and mostly incompatible worldview), was the leading theory in psychology in the first half of the 20th century, and remains influential today. It turns out that behaviourists aren't completely wrong that rewards can motivate behaviour, but it also turns out that rats pushing buttons isn't the same as humans doing creative work. Separating out when using rewards is a good idea and when it isn't is an important question, and one that Daniel Pink also addresses.

Behaviourism is a huge topic in its own right, and we will have to tackle it in a separate episode (or three). For now, though, Daniel Pink's book gives us a fascinating and, to be honest, heartening new way of looking at human motivation and behaviour.

Enjoy the episode.

The ideas from Carol Dweck's research, explained in her book Mindset, seem to be very popular nowadays. They are even part of the curriculum of the Postgraduate Certificate of Education (PGCE) for new teachers being trained in the UK.

And, I believe, with good reason. The ideas here are very powerful. They almost read like self-help, but (thank goodness) they are grounded in many years of research by her, her colleagues, and other researchers.

In brief, "mindset" here refers to what somebody believes about their own (and other people's) traits, skills, and abilities: are they an unchangeable part of who you are, written in to your genes, so to speak; or are they mutable, flexible things which change and develop with effort and experience? Those with the former belief have a "fixed mindset", while those with the latter have a "growth mindset". Dr Dweck spends most of the book explaining what effects each of these have, and makes it abundantly clear that it's better to have a growth mindset than a fixed mindset - and that it's possible to develop a growth mindset even if you don't have one at the moment.

Written for a general audience, Mindset has more examples of famous people with one or the other mindset and the resulting effect this had on their lives than references to research and experiments. On the one hand, I find this to be a bit of a shame, as her examples are mostly personal interpretations of life stories of people she hasn't met rather than anything more epistemologically sound; but it does have the advantage, if you believe what she is telling you (and I do - the research is sufficiently convincing), of getting you to more fully understand the workings of the mindsets, and to see the huge influence they have in many real-world situations.

It's a somewhat repetitive book in the sense that after she introduces the central idea, she spends the remaining 200 or so pages mostly just going over example after example after example, but I don't mind that myself - in fact I find it useful as it helps me learn the concept more thoroughly. I don't believe that it's very controversial that repetition is good for learning. I remember how excited I was when I was learning Armenian (as you do - typical summer holiday for me) and discovered that the word for "education", կրթություն krt'ut'yun, was the same as the word for "repetition". (This turns out to be wrong - the word for repetition is կրկնությւն krknut'yun. Silly me.)

What's more, she actually covers a range of different fields with examples of cases where the idea of mindset applies. In the UK edition, there is a bullet point list on the front cover of the areas she focusses on: business, parenting, school, and relationships. She also spends a fair bit of space writing about sports. After reading this, you might come away with a feeling that there's nothing that the idea of mindset doesn't touch - that there's no field of human endeavour where it doesn't apply. I often get this feeling when I read a good, trendy non-fiction book. There should be a word for this feeling. Gladwell syndrome? I'm sure the Germans have a word for it, they have a word for everything.

Overall it's a good book to start from - accessible, fascinating, broadly applicable, and (to my mind) fundamental. It's one of those books which, after you read it, makes you start looking at things all around you differently. You might find yourself saying "That's what's wrong with X person!" or "That's why Y person is so amazing!".

I'd rate this book as "totally awesome, you should read it". But then that's why you're here, right? To listen to me talk about it so that you don't have to read it? ;)

Enjoy the episode.

This is the very first episode of Education Bookcast, in which I introduce myself and the podcast. I will leave a brief introduction here in the description also.

Brief introduction to the podcast

Education Bookcast is a podcast in which I talk about one book or article relating to education per episode. The intended audience is mainly teachers and parents who would like to know more about education, but do not have the time and energy to read stacks of books or chase up references. Topics covered are very broad, and include:

various aspects of educational psychology (such as motivation, intelligence, exam anxiety, and self-esteem);
cognitive science (including memory research, expertise research, flow and optimal experience);
neurology;
cognitive, social, and character development;
history, philosophy, and economics of education;
teaching techniques and approaches;
studies of great teachers;
types of educational institutions and experiences (such as Waldorf-Steiner schools, Montessori schools, Bell-Lancaster schools, homeschooling and unschooling);
international comparisons between education systems and outcomes;
fields of work related to education, however tangentially (e.g. sports coaching, life coaching, mentoring, management, therapy, animal training);

...and many more.

Some of the materials I will be covering are not available in English, as I speak seven languages and sometimes read books about education in a language other than English.

Questions I answer in this episode:

Who is this podcast for?
What topics will the podcast be covering?
How is the podcast structured?
Why did I decide to make this podcast?
Who am I?
What's my ideology? Who's side am I on? [hint: nobody's, hopefully - I'm trying to be as objective as possible]
Who's paying me? What am I advertising? [hint: nobody]
Where can I be found? How can you contact me?

I'm super excited about getting this podcast off the ground! I'm looking forward to our journey together.

Credits: Music by www.podcastthemes.com