Bridging the Trad/Prog Divide in Education - A Conversation with Professor Daniel T. Willingham

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

What makes these methods effective or ineffective are really moment-to-moment decisions that the teacher is making based on, you know, very rapid assessments of what does this child know, what do I know about this child, what is my connection with this child, and so on. And of course, they're doing that usually with large groups of children.

Hi everybody, welcome back to the Future Learning Design Podcast with me, Tim Logan, in partnership with Intrepid Ed News. This week it was a huge pleasure to speak with Professor Dan Willingham, who is the Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia, where he's taught since 1992. Until about 2000, his research focused solely on the brain basis of learning, but today all of his research concerns the application of cognitive psychology to education. Dan writes the "Ask the Cognitive Scientist" column for the American Educator magazine, in which he has translated relevant cognitive science research for educators since 2003. He is also a prolific author whose writing on education has appeared in 17 languages. His classic book, "Why Don't Students Like School?" has recently been republished in its second edition with additional material. He's also written "When Can You Trust the Experts?" "Raising Kids Who Read" and "The Reading Mind." His forthcoming work, set for release in August 2022, is entitled Outsmart Your Brain: Why Learning Is Hard and How You Can Make It Easy, this time directed at students themselves to support them to develop their self-management and study skills. In 2017, Professor Willingham was appointed by President Obama to serve as a member of the National Board for Education Sciences. You can follow Dan on Twitter, where he's very active, @dtwillingham.

Hi there.

Hi, Dan.

How are you?

We're very fine. How are you?

Good, thank you.

Uh, nice to meet you. Thank you very much for doing this. I appreciate it.

Yeah, happy to be here.

Brilliant. Well, thank you, Dan. It's an absolute pleasure to have you here with me on the podcast. I've been loving your work for a long time, Why Students Don't Like School, and all of your amazing research, but particularly the way that you've supported the insights from cognitive science and educational research into the classroom and made that accessible to teachers. And one particular way that that's come to my attention, certainly at the beginning, was through the ResearchEd network in the UK. And I think there has been, again, that's been brilliant to bring that research to teachers, but sometimes that's been positioned in a way that can be somewhat antagonistic about that the research supports a particular pedagogy in a particular way of teaching. And that's ended up in this kind of trad Prague culture war and all this teacher-centered approaches versus student-centered approaches. I'm quite keen to cut through that with you just to talk about some of those things and the way that actually, I think the line between those two things is much more blurry and fuzzy than, than many people like to make out. So the first thing I would love to ask you is, do you think there is a particular reality to that debate or is there a way that we can have a more nuanced debate about some of those those aspects of teaching and learning?

I guess the— to comment, the first thing I would need to do is talk through with you in more detail what you meant by the debate. And that I think is probably relevant to your question. When people talk about traditional versus progressive methods, they figure they— everybody knows what we're talking about. Everyone means the same thing by this. I think there's probably overlap in what people mean, but they're probably not using those words in the same way. So I don't know how much time we really wanna spend on this, candidly, because I think debates frequently aren't very useful. You know, from a cognitive point of view, there, the, you know, we tend to focus on what's happening in the child's mind and then move from there to the, or what might be happening in the child's mind and what would be fruitful to happen in the child's mind given the particular goals in the classroom. And then from the child's mind to things that can happen in the environment that are most likely to make those desirable things happen in the child's mind.

Mm-hmm.

Already we got like a couple of links, right?

Yeah.

And it's, so it's not surprising that that mapping is almost certainly, uh, many-to-one. If you have one thing in mind that you want, you're hoping will happen in the child's mind, there are many ways to make that happen. Then Added to that is you need to be considering the teacher's mind as well. There are different, different classroom goals and methods put greater or lesser demands on teachers. That's been one of the more important and less frequently discussed aspects of the traditional versus progressive, again, just sort of pretending for a minute that we know exactly what that means distinction. I think that to me, one of the most important aspects when I look at most of the progressive, what comes under the progressive banner, it looks great for kids, extremely difficult for teachers to engage with. And somewhere I've argued, I can't remember where, that when you look in class, so the big divide is that when you look at schools of education, most of what they're telling you to do looks more progressive. Professional. There's not, you know, there's not a lot of esteem given to put them in rows and do a lot of teacher talk. When you look in classrooms, that's what you see, a lot of kids in rows and a lot of teacher talk. And so, and I don't, in my own anecdotes, when I talk with professors at schools of education, you know, why is that? Their ready response is, well, you know, that's what they experienced. And that makes sense to them. And also they kind of blame administrators and they kind of blame parents as well. And so there's the solution I most often hear from people who teach at schools of education is you kind of have to give them momentum and just, you know, the, the future teachers and like really emphasize that this is good, really show them how to do it. And so that then when they get in the classroom, Despite the— that's where they're going to encounter all these that are antagonistic to the methods, but they'll still have— they'll feel like they've got the wherewithal. They'll understand the importance, and they'll do it. And my take on it is a lot simpler, which is being a first-year teacher is terrifying. And there are data on this bit. The thing that terrifies first-year teachers most is losing control of the classroom. I've never met a teacher who didn't, who didn't say like their first day of teaching was basically, "Oh my God, you're gonna leave me alone with this?" Exactly. Right? I mean, like, I can't possibly be responsible. This isn't gonna work. I have no idea how terrible this is gonna be. And so the, you know, putting them in rows and talking to them, you not only know I am teaching right now, like I'm doing it, there's no doubt about that, but classroom management is so much easier.

Yeah.

Everyone's eyes are supposed to be. You're confident that you know who's doing what they're supposed to and who's—

yeah.

And then like, if it works pretty well, it's very demanding to change your practice once you're pretty good at it.

Yeah.

There are data showing that when you look at who uses progressive methods, it is much more experienced teachers, uh, you know, feel like they've got their classroom management really down and they're to explore a bit more. So I don't know if that was really what you asked me.

Yeah, I totally understand and recognize that it was a big question that I asked you, but in a way I think you've got right to the heart of it for me. And that is that there is this dichotomy in a way in some people's minds, and yes, it's confused and not— there's no consensus around what that is, but there is a sense around traditional equals bad and progressive equals good in some people's minds. And we're trying to move things towards a more student-centered progressive approach.

And Andy, I'm going to break into him, and the opposite as well. I mean, I think I definitely know people who feel like traditional is good and progressive is bad.

Sure, sure.

I think it goes both ways.

Sure. No, I recognize that. But I think what's interesting about what you've done and your research is that, that you've really brought to light the clear evidence base for certain aspects of the traditional kind of pedagogy toolkit, and in terms of why that is important and why it works for particular purposes, I recognize. But then for me, it's about what's, what works in a particular context for a particular purpose. And, and that's where there are in, in a way more things going on in the progressive student-centered kind of methods in, in the way that they're looking for perhaps character development, values development, whole child kind of development, not just about development of knowledge through cognitive architecture that in, in those senses we have this relatively useful data set that tells us what works and what doesn't work for that part, but we kind of, we don't maybe acknowledge all the other things that the more progressive teachers will be looking for. I don't know, is that, would you agree with that analysis?

Maybe. I mean, I, I don't, I don't remember having addressed it in those terms. I mean, I think that You know, taking— yeah, I mean, roughly, I think I mostly agree with that. And so in one sense, it's like, look, if your goal here is knowledge acquisition, what's the easiest way to be certain that children are going to learn X, Y, and Z? And likewise, what's the easiest way for children to understand X, Y, and Z is what I'm to learn? That's the goal here. Yeah, then, you know, it seems kind of straightforward, like, well, why don't you just tell tell them, like maybe that's a good idea. And then on the flip side, as you said, like there are other things that the traditional, you know, lots of teacher talk is not very well suited for. So if you ask someone, do you think it's important that kids learn autonomy in school? Do you think it's important that they feel like they have the ability and the resourcefulness to learn what they want to learn? And to strike out on their own. You know, do you have any interest in your kids being curious outside of school and knowing what to do with their curiosity? Or do you feel like, no, they don't need any training in that. Like they don't need any experience with that. That'll come naturally. They'll just know what to do. Well, most people would say, no, they probably won't. And so like that needs to be, they need practice with that and they need holding support as they're doing it.

Yeah, yeah. The thing that you're perhaps most known for is your 'Memory is the residue of thought' cognitive principle in the 'Why Don't Students Like School' book, and I think that gets quoted a lot and sometimes perhaps misunderstood in the sense of how complex that actually is in practice. And it's not just about, you know, tell the kids something and then they'll just memorize, memorize, memorize, and that will be that. As you, I think in a very nuanced way in the book, talk through different aspects. It's 3 things I wanted to specifically ask about related to that: meaning, emotion, and story. I wanted to ask about— so if we start with meaning, where, where do you see the role of meaning in that process of laying down those strong long-term memories, which in both, in, in all aspects is probably agreed that that's a pretty good thing to do?

I mean, if you— well, setting aside whether or not like children understanding the meaning of something is good for memory. It's like, if you're a teacher, like, why would you want them to memorize something that they do not understand? Unless it's going to be, you know, very soon, you know, you sort of tell them, I'm asking you to memorize this. I recognize this doesn't mean anything to you, but like, hang in there because, you know, soon it's going to get really interesting. Other than that, like, why would you— why would How would that not be your goal every single time? It seems really strange. Now, that said, it's absolutely, uh, and I think this is what you're really getting at, meaning is very good for memory. Things are much easier to commit to memory and they're, they're much more likely to stick with you if you understand them. And, uh, particularly if they're organized, if they're the, the bits are connected to one another and you connect them to things that are already in memory, that's, that's gonna be a whole lot easier. Now, emotion to me is a lot trickier. Emotion can give memory a lift. That's certainly true. I actually saw someone, I think on Twitter, and naturally there were zillions of retweets saying something to the effect of, you can't remember anything unless it's emotional. No, I know what it was, a YouTube video with like 14 million views. Character was up on some stage with, of course, like the little microphone that could be hands-free, right? Because— and that's how you know, like a really good haircut and that microphone and those are the tip-offs that like you're in the hands of someone who knows what they're doing when it comes to presentation. And this guy was saying like, there's no memory at all without emotion. That's just not— and of course, you know, I could have typed in a comment, one of 6,000 comments or whatever, but I let that go. But anyway, sorry, I digress. Sure, emotion can help memory. And you know, sometimes I think emotion is very much an appropriate goal on its own, right? Like, it's lovely when, you know, the children feel passionate about something and they're excited about something. And, you know, not— we always think of it in English language arts, but I mean, you know, it can be math or whatever it is. But I think the idea that like school should be an emotional roller coaster, like it's, you know, you'll laugh, you'll cry. I mean, first of all, that's a lot of pressure on a teacher. Yeah. Second of all, I have some questions about the ethics of that. Like, I'm going to send my child to a school and like, the teacher says they're going to feel lots of passions today, I'm like, okay, like, this needs to be a longer conversation, you know.

Come away exhausted at the end of the day.

Yeah, I mean, maybe I would like that actually if my kids came home exhausted. But yeah, I mean, and the truth is, yes, emotion can be a powerful booster of memory, but it's not a prerequisite for memory. Something like, you know, meaning really is pretty close to a prerequisite. Now you can't memorize stuff that's meaningless to you, but it's extremely laborious.

Can I ask, is there— do you know Mary Helen Immodino-Yang's work on meaning? And like, with the level of meaning that we're talking about, it seems to me that there's different ways that we could— that idea of meaning, some associated with just immediate concrete signification, and then others something deeper. She talks about kind of transcendent meaning or abstract meaning, whether you can contextualize as you said, maybe it's about making connections and, and that, I mean, from her research, it seems to be showing that that's a really strong predictor of, of life success. I mean, she's making some quite significant claims there, I would say, very interesting about how the ability to construct that meaning is then predictive later on. What would you say there about the kind of different levels of meaning?

Well, I think that the, you know, the deeper levels of meaning are of course what we're all shooting for, what we're— what we aim towards, that for most of the content that children are going to encounter, that's going to remain aspirational because that type of very deep understanding is the product of a lot of study and, you know, exposure to a lot of content, memory for a lot of content, a lot of thought, you know, this sort of marinating in context and thinking about it and then learning, probably learning domain-specific strategies of how we put this together and come to these deeper understandings. And for most of us, you know, I was, of course, studied English for many years, studied literature for many years. I feel like I mostly didn't reach that kind of an understanding for, you know, most of what I read. And for, you know, I never reached that level in history. Now, all that said, like, you know, I, I still got something out of that type of study. I don't think I really got a transcendent understanding of anything except certain areas of cognitive psychology, honestly. I mean, I think that absolutely exists, but I— and I, I think that kids can, you know, as they move through school, kids will sometimes glimpse it and they'll, they'll bits and pieces of it that they, you know, they understand really deeply. I'm not, I don't want to imply like you need a PhD to really reach that level. That's not what I mean. Uh, but I think it is, you know, hard fought, candidly. I mean, it takes work and it's going to feel, a lot of it's going to feel like work as you're doing it.

Yeah.

It's that kind of payoff as well.

Deliberate practice and just, you know, overlearning and content mastery as the root to that higher level or transcendent meaning or whatever.

And in particular, like a lot of abstract ideas are just hard to understand.

Yeah.

You just don't get it. You know, when you're looking at it, you know, you had to seek out different people to give you a different explanation to try and wrap your head around it and so on.

Is that something that could be supported by particular ways of approaching it through, you know, through questioning, through those kind of, reflective questioning, I don't know, habit development that you— that yes, there's clearly a knowledge component to it, but there's also a, I don't know, is there a dispositional component that you're, as a reflective questioner, you might be more likely to make those larger, more abstract connections?

I think so. I mean, that makes sense to me, but I mean, again, we're talking about a level of understanding that is You know, it's years in the making, I think. Not— and again, like, you can get flashes of it and reflective questions seem like a great, a great way to do it. But more generally, I think it's, it's gonna take lots of techniques and, and, you know, you're, you're gonna invite children to think about this content area in many different ways. And predictably for different kids, you know, one thing's gonna set off a spark and for another, you know, it just doesn't. And so, right, it's pretty standard practice. You're trying lots of different things to see what, what sticks with whom.

Yeah, interesting. Because one of the curriculum frameworks I work with a lot is the IB, the International Baccalaureate, and the particularly the MYP, the Middle Years Programme. And that's concept-based curriculum, and I think one of the things about that is by using the concepts as a vehicle within that, you can— you're trying— I mean, the idea is you would then encourage more deeper connection, perhaps, that trying to get to that deeper structure more quickly by with these large, more abstract concepts. I don't know, have you seen that work well?

I've seen everything work well, everything flop, and I'm sure you have too, right? This is This is what's so difficult about characterizing methods in general. I mean, you know, we started off talking about traditional and progressive. Like, have you ever seen a really good example of both? Of course you have. Of course you have, right? Of course you can be a terrible traditional teacher and of course you can be a wonderful one, right? And so the, you know, what makes these methods effective or ineffective are really moment to moment decisions that the teacher is making based on, you know, very rapid assessments of what does this child know, what do I know about this child, what is my connection with this child, and so on. And of course they're doing that with usually with large groups of children. And so that's why it's, it's so, you know, it's my job's much easier, which is to talk about an abstract mind and say like when you do this, like generally this is going to happen.

Yeah.

As opposed to, you as a teacher ought to be doing this.

Yeah.

And this is, this is why occasionally I'll, you know, try and make as clear as possible. Like anybody who says science says you should be doing this. And there are very few instances where we know that. I mean, even like some of the best data is on the effectiveness of phonics instruction and being very clear with kids about the relationship between letters and sounds. Even there, it's like, it's a little, truthfully, it's less about exactly what the teacher does. What we can say confidently is most kids need to understand this to read.

Yeah.

I mean, all the kids need to understand this to read. Now, how are you going to generate that understanding? Well, here's something that's been tried a whole lot. It sort of has face validity because what, again, it's that you want them to know this, maybe you should just tell them the thing that you want them to know. Yeah, but in the end, it's really, you know, the— our, our greatest confidence is about what the kids need to know. Is there some other way you can get them to that understanding? Well, you know, good for you. But, you know, again, in, in the case of phonics, it's— we also have a lot, you know, the idea you're going to come up with of an alternative way other than telling them, probably that's been tried before and shown that it didn't work very well. Right? That's the absolute best case scenario. When it's something like, I want kids to be passionate about the history of Africa and I want them to understand that deeply, what does science tell me about how to do that? I'd be like, I don't freaking know. You know? Yeah, I can tell you some things about how kids learn, but like what to do in the classroom, no.

Yeah, no, it's, I mean, it's good to hear you say it actually, because I think there is a tendency amongst some educational leaders or different people to say, well, this is what research says, so now go do this. It's like it becomes the stick with which you beat the teachers to get them to do the thing you're saying. And actually it's much more nuanced than that. And I mean, it's just great to hear you as one of the people producing that great research saying that you just got to be really clear and focused on what are we saying. As you say, some things can be done beautifully and work, but equally the same thing could be tried by somebody else and it completely flops. So, no, interesting. Can I just bring it back to just the story, just briefly? Because I found that really interesting about causality and conflict. You talk about stories as a way to strengthen—

Structure lesson plans.

Yeah, to strengthen memory, you know, memory development. And I just think that kind of narrative structure was a really interesting idea.

And not just memory, I think it's very good. Stories are very good for memory, but stories are also very good for motivation. To keep the interest of the listener. So I originally had that idea actually for an article for American Educator, and I did write something for American Educator about the power of stories, and my editor— I wanted to make it much more abstract and say this isn't just about telling stories in the classroom. This is really about structuring lesson plans using a story structure, but you're not necessarily telling stories, like this idea that you know, the idea of character can be much more abstract. So in Why Don't Students Like School, like, the characters are historical actors. And then I also give an example of a statistics class where, you know, the character is something much more abstract. But yeah, it's sort of the, the basic idea. And I think the— I think probably the most important idea that I return to a lot of my own teaching, I always try and think, do my students understand what the question is here? I'm, I'm really eager to tell them about all this fun, exciting research. And all of the research is answering a question. Do my students even know what the question is? Most of the time they don't. And frequently the question is fairly subtle. So this comes with sort of story structure because the way stories generally work is the, the front end of the story is sort of setting you up for the main conflict of the story. And the conflict gets started, you know, 20% of the way into the story or 15% of the way into the story or something. So that I said in the book, this is very much, very, very consistently used in Hollywood. And I just saw the movie Die Hard for the first time. I was on the elliptical and I was like, oh, you know, you're desperate, like anything to distract yourself. And I said, I never watched Die Hard. So I was watching and like what the time when the terrorists becomes clear to you, oh, these are terrorists, they're taking over the building. Oh my God. McLean's in there. What's this guy going to do? How's he going to stop him? I looked, it's 18 minutes into the movie. And I said in the book, it's like, it's usually about 20 minutes in. So there you go. So same thing applies to the classroom. You're not going to spend 20 minutes to sort of set up your, the main conflict, but paying some attention to that, I think can be very, very powerful. And the memory benefit that you alluded to comes in part because you pay attention into causal structure. Like, you know, I'm talking about this now because it's, it's a logical consequence of what we just finished talking about. And frequently, if you're telling it in story structure, you solve one little subproblem, and then that does solve the problem you just had, but it creates a new problem. And now you need to talk about that. Uh, teaching science this way is, is wonderful.

No, it's really interesting. I mean, it strikes me also that there's there's a timelessness to that as well. I mean, human beings always told stories, I suppose, but also, yeah, it kind of leads people through a journey in a way. I mean, cliché, but you know, that's kind of the idea, right? And picking things up and making connections along the way. Yeah, no, super interesting. And just then, one of the other things that I think is a key concept in all of this stuff is transfer. And again, I was talking about the MYP there, but you know, that's a big part of that. And you using statements of inquiry to encourage students to be able to transfer their understandings from one domain to another, to a new problem, etc. But you, you've said a lot in the book and, and a lot in general about the fact that it's actually a really difficult thing to do. Transfer is a really difficult thing, and I just would love to ask you just maybe say a little bit about why specifically is it so difficult. Why is it, why is it hard to do that?

Yeah, when we say, when we talk about transfer, we don't mean contextual transfer. People talk about like It's got to be, you know, the kids have got to be able to do it outside of the classroom, right? Or what's the point? Classroom's not the problem because very few memories become glued to the particular context. So if you, you know, if the child goes home or the child's, you know, in a McDonald's or something and you show them a worksheet that's exactly like the worksheet that they worked in class, they're not going to, you know, be stumped. What's going to stump them is a problem that has the same underlying structure, but a different surface structure. So in math, it's most obvious in math because the underlying structure is sort of, you know, it's the quadratic formula or it's multiplying fractions or something like that. And then the surface structure in class, they work problems that involve restaurants and napkins, and now later they're out in the world and there's something that they're doing in the garden. The same thing applies. But they just don't see it. So the reason that happens is that underlying structure is underlying. It's hidden. You don't know what the— it's usually called deep structure. You don't know what the deep structure is and you don't know whether it's multiplying fractions or quadratic formula or Newton's third law or, you know, modus tollens. You just have no idea what it is. It's very obvious that it's something to do with napkins and dinner guests. That's what this is about. And so where memory goes is, what do I know about napkins and what do I know about giving supper parties, right? It doesn't go directly to this knowledge that you have. So that's why transfer is so hard.

But is that a different—

There's a lot of interest in environmental context. People are fascinated by the idea that you learn something in one, you know, spatial and temporal context. And there's some evidence that there's some effects, but they're really small.

That's a little bit like the conversation about, should I listen to music when I'm revising for my exam? Because in the exam hall, when I'm recalling, it will be a quiet environment. And should I therefore lay down the memory in a quiet environment to mimic that? Right.

Yeah. Well, you shouldn't be listening to music while you study, but not, not because of content, not because it's going to be quiet in the exam hall, but because music will probably distract you.

Yeah, yeah.

But is that—

going back to the transfer thing— is that the difference between the novice and the expert? Because as you were talking about the expert, you know, they immediately recognize the deep structure, right? I mean, that, that is part of the definition of being an expert in a domain.

Yeah, I mean, it doesn't even— you don't even need to be an expert the way expert is traditionally defined. You just need to be experienced, right? So I can't remember whether it was in that book or somewhere else, I use rate-time-distance problems because this, this actually happened. I was talking with my middle daughter, who is now 16 and at the time was in 4th grade or something. She was 10 or 9 or 10. And she said, how long is it going to take us to get to Grandma's house in Florida? And I said, about 900 miles. And she said, okay, well, how long will it take us? I said, well, how fast does Dad usually drive on the highway? She said, I don't know, like 65 or 70. I said, yeah, well, how long is it going to take? So now I absolutely know that she was very successful at the right time, distance, problems because at the time she was in my wife's class. I know very well exactly what was happening in that classroom. Yeah. Now, when I tell this story to adults, of course, they see the humor because they have no problem at all with rate, time, distance problems, right? So would you call yourself an expert in those problems? No, you've just seen a hell of a lot of them. Yeah. That you immediately recognize what's relevant here. And it's that kind of experience. And there's actually some evidence that it's crucial that you not just see the same deep structure a lot, but you see structure with different surface structures. That's what teaches you. This is what's— these are the core features. It's a little bit like categorization. Like, how do you know what a dog is? Dogs have lots of incidental properties that vary, and then a few core properties that are essential. If you grew up only seeing corgis, and then I said, showed you something else and said, is this a dog too? You would, you would be stumped. You'd say, well, it has some of what I know is a dog, but I don't know if that's the crucial difference or not. Right? So same thing for seeing deep structure. Brilliant.

So then if we move on, because I would listen to you speaking about the work that you're doing currently, and I, this was maybe 6 months ago on a different podcast, but particularly about developing a skills-based curriculum around, and, and you were talking about some of the, the randomized control trials you were doing around that. And I would love to ask you if that's still ongoing. Obviously the pandemic's been disruptive in many ways, but is that still ongoing research and where is that? That is ongoing.

I'm super excited about this. Work. I'm not the lead on this. I'm a happy participant. So this is mostly being led by Ethan Cross at University of Michigan, and then Angela Duckworth as well at University of Pennsylvania. John, uh, Janice and I are participating, as is Ben Katz and Ariana Orville. And so there are two curricula that we're working on. One we're calling Learn to Learn, which is teaching middle school students study strategies. And the other is Self-Control, which is teaching them emotional and also to some extent thought regulation strategies. This project's been, you know, years in the making and it's— the starting point was this group came up with scientific principles, like things that were in the literature that were— that we thought were pretty solid and we would feel good about teaching to middle schoolers. And the first phase, we recruited expert teachers to develop lesson plans. And then in the next phase, we started pilot testing it. It's gone through a couple of rounds of pilot tests now with very encouraging results. Kids do seem to understand the principles. To some extent, they say they're actually, you know, trying to make use of the principles. So we're now— this has been disrupted by the pandemic, but the, the next stage we hope will be a large-scale RCT.

Nice.

And it actually was also the impetus for my next book. What happened was early on when we were doing this, Angela said to me, is there— there must be a book that like teaches this science of learning stuff to students. And I sort of looked around and like, there's some wonderful books, like, you know, Make It Stick has been very popular, but Make It Stick is a little more narrow than what we wanted to look at. It's mostly about you know, getting things into memory. So I— and I decided I was going to write one. So I've got a book coming out in— towards the end of next summer called Outsmart Your Brain that's, that's all about study strategies.

Amazing. Specifically targeted for a student reader, for young people?

Specifically targeted for students. Each chapter ends with a little section called— that's for instructors and sort of how they would I mean, I think for, I think instructors will be pretty interested in everything else that's in the book, but I wanted to talk a little bit about how you might think about this in your classroom. But this book is broader than others I've seen. So it talks about how when you're, so it really, it focuses on fairly narrow but decisive aspects of schooling. So really, because most schools do have lots of direct instruction, it focuses on how to listen to a lecture, how to, uh, read, and then how to take tests. The 3 things that students from high school onwards do a lot of. So there's a chapter on how you listen to a lecture and absorb it. There's a chapter on taking notes. There's a chapter on reorganizing notes. There's a chapter on how to, uh, do activities in a way you'll actually learn them from them, like you know, lab exercises, how to prepare for tests, how to do an autopsy on a test and figure out what went wrong so they do better the next time, procrastination, self-regulation in terms of scheduling study time, planning, a chapter on anxiety. So there's a lot in there. It's 14 topics, 14 chapters. As you can tell, I'm very excited about it.

Yeah, no, well, it's— I mean, so it's really interesting stuff. I mean, it's interesting to, to know, are you focusing on those particularly related to direct instruction because that's what you see happening in schools and that's what you think is most directly relevant for students right now.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this is what students spend most of their time doing. It's not a book about how to teach. It's a book about— for students about how to succeed in school. And most students in most circumstances, that's what they need to know how to do. And we know there's been terrific work in the last 10 years surveying college students and asking them how they do these things. And the upshot is they're, they're not using very effective strategies. And it's no great surprise really, because when you ask them, okay, that's what you do. Why do you do it that way? Did someone teach you to do it that way? 80% or more say, no, no one taught me how to do anything regarding, you know, preparation for school. I just sort of figured it out on my own or talk to friends or that kind of thing.

Yeah.

And YouTube is a disaster in terms of offering advice about studying and note-taking. It's basically just, you know, it's usually vloggers or someone else who's already popular talking about their study techniques, and they usually don't know what in the world they're talking about. They may not be successful in school, but the advice they give is terrible.

So, yeah, that's an interesting thing in itself, isn't it?

How did—

how does everybody, young people particularly, cut through that noise to find, you know, to find the real signal of where's the good stuff. Because, you know, YouTube, as you say, is a huge resource in some positive ways, but also there's a lot of noise there, you know, may actually send you off in the wrong direction.

And when it comes to studying, I mean, the reason it's called Outsmart Your Brain is students don't get instruction in how to study, but they tend to land on the same study habits, which are not very— or study strategies, which are not very good ones. And the reason is there's lots of research showing like you're not always so good at telling whether or not you're really learning. You can actually be deceived about it. That's why there, you know, there's a whole chapter on knowing whether or not you are ready for an exam, which it should be a really easy problem. But every teacher of course knows students coming in saying, I can't understand this. Like I studied so hard. I know I knew this. And then they do terribly on the examination. Well, whatever they're doing to judge their own learning is obviously not very effective.

Yeah, the overconfidence that comes with rereading your notes and thinking, yeah, I know that, right? I mean, that's part of it, right? And then more—

that's part of it, absolutely. Familiarity, absolutely.

Yeah, active deliberate practice and all of that stuff again. But yeah, interesting. Can I ask you one, a slightly personal question? Because I've heard you speak about— feel free to say no— but I've heard you speak about Montessori education and the fact that your wife is a Montessori teacher and your children have gone to Montessori. Can I ask you about that?

Of course, sure.

Just to say, why is it, given everything that you do related to education, what was it about Montessori education that you particularly appreciated and wanted to, you know, give that to your children to experience?

There were, I mean, it's hard to pin it down to one thing, but I'll tell you highlights as they occur. Me. One is that there's a very strong curriculum. People tend not to know that about Montessori, but it's, it's a pretty rigid curriculum. It is definitely what you would call a knowledge-rich curriculum.

Interesting.

And that's something that, you know, I've written about extensively, is I think is really important for all children. So obviously I wanted my own kids to have it. Uh, second thing is that certain very difficult concepts in the early years, I I think are taught exceptionally effectively in the Montessori curriculum. Math in particular, the materials that kids use in Montessori classrooms to help them understand mathematical concepts, I think are very good. So that I—

you mean like manipulatives and, and physical things to, to help them?

Yes, but manipulatives are essential, but also again, it's the way that they're used. And again, this is something that a lot of people are not familiar with Montessori, don't understand they think that kids go in and they just kind of, you know, they play with the manipulatives and that's not it at all. I mean, there are particular ways that kids are— you're talking about Direct Instruction— kids are shown this is what you do with this manipulative and they're not, you know, given free rein to do whatever they want. That's not the way it works. There's a right way and a wrong way to use the manipulative because it's supposed to show you something and if you, you know, blow into it or see what happens, like you're exploring, but like that's not really what you're supposed wants to get out of it, right? So there's a, there's a right way to do it. So I appreciated that. And then like many parents, I, I appreciated the autonomy, the idea that from a very early age, kids are given responsibility. It's sort of freedom and boundaries, which lots of parents have, have heard that mantra, don't always have a great idea of how to implement it in their own home. And in Montessori classrooms, that's very much what Montessori teachers are taught to do. So yeah, I mean, kids get to pick what they want to do, but, you know, try doing absolutely no math for a couple of months, you know, in a good Montessori classroom, and you're gonna end up doing math. Like, there's not freedom to the point that, you know, you just do whatever the hell you want every day forever. But I also— because it's a 3-year cycle, the same teacher is going to be with the same classroom you may, you know, you, if a kid's really on a run with something and suppose it is math and they're super excited about the math and they're just racing ahead, the teacher is much more likely to feel like, you know what, even if not everything gets caught up, you know, because this child's so excited about math now, maybe we should run with this. Like that's, you know, the teacher's judgment and they've got the flexibility to do that because they know I'm not leaving it in the lap of the next year teacher, there is this flexibility that different kids can be doing different things. And so they can catch up a little bit more on some of these other subjects. So again, this is all off the top of my head. A lot of aspects of this class, uh, the way these classrooms are run that, uh, that I really appreciated.

That's— firstly, thank you for being so open to talk about it. Cause I know it's not necessarily work-related, but I think what it does for me is it gives in a way right back to where we started with that kind of trad, prog thing, whatever that is, but actually it just, that's a perfect description what you've just given of Montessori, that actually there is no clear boundary between, you know, 'cause Montessori is seen as a progressive, you know, pedagogy and educational framework. Actually there's huge amounts of structure, there's huge amounts of direct instruction in there and fascinating. And I think that's a really interesting example to just kind of blow apart that. So I know I really appreciate it. And then just so very quickly, lastly, you've got the second edition of Why Students Don't Like School, which has recently been released, right? And then when, when is Outsmart Your Brain coming out? Just so that I can—

I think the pub date is like August 9th or something, 2022. Good.

So no, I just absolutely encourage everybody to check out, you know, because you've added more material into the second edition of Why Students Don't Like School, as I understand.

Yeah, there's a, there's a— so, you know, it is this, it is the second edition of a book, so like, you know, you can't change too much. It's— they said something like, you know, Dan, try and like 20% new content, 25%, something like that. So basically there's— everything's been updated a little bit, but of course, part of the premise of the book was like, I think all this stuff is really right. I don't anticipate I'm gonna have to change it. That mostly turned out to be true. I think the area in which there was the most exciting new research was intelligence and that if anything, what that really did was sort of strengthen the case I'd made in the first edition that the environment's very important. So that part's been updated. And then I added a chapter on technology and I did, I did some other things that people asked me to do. There's a glossary and there's discussion questions at the end of every chapter. So a number of people had said they thought that would be useful.

Fantastic. No, thank you. I'd absolutely recommend it to everybody. I do as much as I can, because I just think—

Me too.

I recommend you buy multiple copies. You're going to want more than one copy.

You don't have to read them all, just buy them. And you'll— it's terrific.

Yeah. Good. Thank you, Dan. I mean, such an interesting conversation. Pretty expansive. We've taken lots of different areas, but no, amazing. Thank you very much for your time. I really appreciate it.

It was a pleasure.

Perfect. All right. Thank you, Dan.

Thanks. Take care.

All the best.

We hope you've enjoyed this episode. Please feel free To continue the dialogues with us on social media with the hashtag #futurelearningdesign and on the Intrepid Ed News website intrepidednews.com.