FLD Shorts - Episode 2 - Jo Boaler

Welcome to Future Learning Design Shorts. Join me, Euan McIntosh, and him, Tim Logan, as we don our intellectual scuba gear, plunge into the educational abyss, and resurface with treasures from the minds of education's finest.

We're going to draw on over 200 hours of archives from the weekly 60-minute conversations I have with educational makers and shakers.

These shorts, for our time-poor friends, will distil and dissect all that wisdom for you before the last sip of your coffee break. So one of the amazing podcasts from last year in 2023 was with Jo Bowler. She's a math professor. She's one of the 5 co-authors of a new math program in California and infamously has made headlines for trying to do things differently in maths. And the podcast, Tim, that you hosted was just phenomenal for understanding the backstory to that. But even more importantly, helping people to think differently about maths. When you hung up the call with Jo, what was the biggest takeaway in the back of your mind or the front of your mind?

Yeah, no, absolutely. And it was, I was a bit nervous at the beginning because, you know, she's a bit of a hero and alongside other guests I've had like Dylan William and John Hattie and, you know, the top people in education. So I was a bit nervous, but it was such an interesting conversation because you can really feel the emotion of the things that she's experienced and what she's you know, what she's put into the development of things like the California Math Framework and all the work she does on YouCubed and really passionate about this, but has really received a great deal of pushback and, you know, really quite aggressively from some parties.

Yeah, I have to say for all that she likewise mutually a hero, she's incredibly humble as well about what she's trying to do. It's not, in a way, not rocket science. There's tons of logical reasons why some of what she's talking about is a good thing. As you say, it seems, for me, the takeaway was just how, whether it's maths, whether it's history, modern languages, or the way we teach phonics or the way we do reading in primary school, it's just a reminder of all these false dichotomies that people have. I don't get it. I don't understand why in education we have to have this almost religious belief system in a particular way of teaching and learning. And, you know, to hell with anything that doesn't fit that particular rubric. And I've been, putting up with similar kind of disengagement or kind of disbelief of educators when you propose something that's not the way they've always done it. I don't know if you get, by doing that interview, did you get any further along the road in understanding first of all why those dichotomies exist and second of all what on earth we can do to not have them in the future?

I mean, I hate to disappoint, but I think, I don't think they're ever really going away. I think there's like, there are some really fundamental disagreements about what we should be doing with young people and how our brains work, how we process information, what knowledge is, you know, all of those big kinds of questions, right? That as a philosopher, I want to be thinking about, but in the classroom, I mean, yeah, there, there, there are, it is partly about the way people have always done it, but I actually don't think, I don't think that's quite fair to many people. I think a lot of people have thought long and hard about these things and they, they are just, they do just have really passionate disagreements about the way we should do things and, you know, the types of the ways that young people need to learn these types of things like big concepts in maths. But with Jo, I think she's, one of the things that really comes across with her is just how important the process of learning is in order to invite everybody into the opportunity to be able to learn. So like, for example, I loved it when she's talking about her PhD student that she was involved in where PhD defence and there were no numbers in sight, right? There was nothing. It was all visual maths, but to certain people with certain ideas about what rigorous abstract maths should be for the top level mathematicians, it somehow, it wasn't that.

That was the point that got me that somehow to be rigorous, I hate the word and it keeps appearing, but you know, to be rigorous means that you have to get abstract. And it actually got me thinking a little bit, you touched on it, The abstraction, being abstract and thinking up there, is not the same thing as conceptual learning, which is where we're trying to understand how something new that we're learning fits into the bigger world around us. That's not abstract at all, it's really concrete. Absolutely. And what she was saying is that actually the more concrete learning is, the stronger those roots of learning are. Which means more kids are going to be successful in maths and enjoy it. And that seems to be the thing that people are afraid of, the idea that being more equitable, well, maybe not equitable, being more accessible is something to be afraid of.

Exactly. It's like she says, you know, if you don't have the opportunity to learn it, you're not going to learn it. But also to your point, I completely agree that kind of somehow learning through your body by like, you know, interacting with some of the ideas in, manipulatives or in different ways, not just trying to think abstractly in your prefrontal cortex about how these things— it's so— and I would point out people to another podcast I did with Dor Abrahamson, who— which is exactly about that. How do we learn maths through our bodies? And there's something really important, I think, in that that would really, you know—

I think the problem is it sounds a bit hippie, if I'm honest, but it's also the fact that the marketing of big ideas is important. I'm still surprised that a decade It's probably a decade since the recording, or more, a decade of a recording on the YouCubed platform that Joe has co-created. It's a brilliant one using those manipulatives. It's like cubes and the kids have to work out a formula that describes why, an equation that shows why the cube is such a strong shape or something like that. I'm clearly not a mathematician, but I've shown this video to math teachers and to primary school teachers, elementary school teachers, And it's been around for such a long time and yet so many people have not seen it and they've not seen the ideas in it that you can actually learn really complex ideas and learn about maths and do the maths in a, to a very high level without someone having to stand at the front of the class for a long time explaining the concept and then giving you practice on it. And I think that, that how do, how do those ideas are made more palatable to allow access to educators is important. If they feel that it's a big deal, a massive shift in practice, then the usual fight or flight kicks in. It's kind of like, well, I've invested so much of my personal time learning how to teach like this, and now you're saying it's all wrong. That feels like an affront. I'm going to either batten down or I'm going to fight against you.

Yeah, but, but the important phrase there is that it's all wrong. Like nobody is saying that. Jo Bola's not saying it's all wrong, right? She's saying there are different ways that are roots into these really important concepts that we want all young people to have access to. And that's rigorous, whether you like, you know, whether we like the word or not. Like it goes deep when you have these different ways of coming at it and you learn it in a, in a deeper and more kind of intuitive embodied way.

There was another interesting thing I thought where towards the end, and you were talking about the need for consensus on these things, and I actually wondered whether we do need consensus in education when we're trying to do these changes. That actually, my experience working with a high school, for example, you'll find always in, particularly in maths and sciences, you generally get a pretty quick agreement from 50% of the team that they're gonna try something different, and then the other 50% kind of dig in and wait and see how it turns out. And then over time you might get another 20% buying into the idea, but it's very rare to get consensus. It's very rare to get everyone saying, yeah, I agree that pedagogy, I'm gonna make the shift. And so we've been looking at this idea of consent instead, which is kind of agreeing that that change in practice is not gonna break maths, it's not gonna break the whole curriculum. Go do it, and if it works for you and your students, great. And you know what, if it works so much better that I begin to look a bit stupid because my students are not enjoying it and they're not doing as well, then of course I'll change. That idea of consent might be one way to, I don't know, to resolve, to start resolving those discussions and make them a little bit less like these dichotomies where people do assume that there's a judgment that new must mean that what I'm doing isn't very good. New ideas must be better than what I'm doing, which implies that what I'm doing is substandard. And I think that that's maybe part of the challenge of creating change in these stalwart areas of school.

It is true, but I'd also say that there's a baby with the bathwater problem as well, because, you know, again, just why can't we have different teachers within a maths department doing, using different approaches at different times for different students in a way that is responsive to their needs, right?

So the bit that, that idea of responding to needs is actually the bit that I think I would love to share in the last 5 minutes of this is her story about really one of the world's top mathematicians, Steven Strogatz, who in his own words said he bungled his way through his math degree. And it got me thinking about all the kind of almost the trope of tech startup founders who drop out of their degree or drop out of their PhD and then go on to have massive success because they've got something more important to get on with. But, you know, we don't tend— there's a romanticism about the idea of failure that never quite makes it into the reality of the classroom. So people say, oh, you know, it's good to fail, but I think in their head they have a 6-year-old, not a 16-year-old who's about to be you know, sitting their exams and, you know, we've got mom and dad and you've got the head teacher and the head of department or whatever, all looking on for your exam results. Yeah, there's actually very little room for failure there. But her point was, you know, even middle school students struggle with the idea of struggle. And it got me thinking like, when was the last time you witnessed someone who genuinely struggled? When was the last time you saw a high achiever struggling in a, in a transparent way, and it just doesn't happen. You know, people do kind of hide that, maybe until they've had a massive success, and then they talk about it romantically. But it's very rare to hear someone failing, saying to the world, yeah, this just sucks, this is not going the way it meant to. And I wondered how, you know, when you listen to it again, the segment, I'm interested in people thinking about how they allow people to fail up until what age or stage do they really let failure be quite transparent? And then what's the school's attitude to adults failing as well? What opportunities there are for correcting failures as they happen and getting better? And it's something that, I mean, I think it's such an important concept that you and Joe talked about. It's not talked about enough, but I also don't see enough of it in the real world, as it were, out in schools.

Yeah, absolutely. Just also bring us back around to where we started about transcending the false dichotomies. Because if you think about productive struggle and the phrase desirable difficulties from the Bjorks, actually there's pretty broad agreement across all pedagogical positions that that's a pretty good thing to do, but it's much easier to talk about doing than, as you say, actually do it and allow people to really struggle and potentially fail. In a classroom, particularly when it becomes more high stakes when you get further up the age range. 100%.

So let's listen to this little excerpt. And of course, if people like it, they can go and listen to the whole hog. There's so much goodness in there, some really practical things as well that people can try out, think about doing themselves, and lots of ideas around formative assessment. But this little kind of 5-6 minute segment is a gem and will hopefully send people off to think more deeply about maths, sure, but about every school subject and every age and stage at school and how we can do better every day.

I mean, I'm a big fan of Steve Strogatz. He has a beautiful book called Infinite Powers about all the ways calculus is used in the world. We have a video on our website where he talks about doing a really hard maths problem in a room full of mathematicians and how he was stuck and he couldn't do it.. And he shared that with this group of mathematicians and said, you know, I'm stuck, can't do it. And he said it was embarrassing, they were sitting next to these mathematical people. And then other people in the room started saying they were also stuck and they also couldn't do it. And they had this great conversation. But I have this video in one of my online courses, and the overwhelming response to this video is teachers saying they are completely shocked that a high-level mathematician struggled.

Yeah.

And this is the problem we have about this idea of struggle. People think it's bad. People think that high-level people don't struggle, and it's become this something we avoid when it's really the most important part of learning. And I find that when I teach students, which we regularly teach middle school students and high school students in summer camps, and we share with them, we want you to struggle. We're giving you difficult work because we want you to struggle. And that's our goal. And it shifts them in their thinking about it. They're more willing to persist and keep going because they know it's what a good time— we show them how good struggle is for their brains. I think that's an important piece.

Definitely fascinating. And for me, there's a kind of a humanity and a humility to that as well. I mean, just that idea that watching somebody you admire who, and you, you know, you admire them intellectually and all, you know, in all sorts of ways, but watching them admit that they're struggling. There's something really connecting and important about that, I think.

I think it's really powerful. And Steve, I'm talking a lot about Steve now, but he was in a podcast recently with Steve Levitt, who we just talked about, economist. So great conversation the two of them are having in which Steve Strogatz, the mathematician, says he bungled his way through his math degree in college, getting the lowest grades in in his math courses of any courses he took. And I just love hearing top mathematicians talk about this because it's not what people think.

It's true.

And it really helps.

Yeah, absolutely.

I think there's also a really interesting connection as well with the, let's say broadly, the other side of the argument about, you know, more traditional didactic pedagogies. Because there's, you know, Robert Bjork's idea about desirable difficulties.

Yeah.

And I think there's also something really connecting and interesting there that there's a mutual recognition that productive struggle is important, but maybe some of the divergence is what kind of struggle, because obviously you've got all the cognitive load theory argument that, you know, you, right, young people can't solve real life problems because there's too much cognitive kind of noise going on and they can't get to the heart of what's actually the focus of what they should be learning. But there's a general agreement that productive struggle, desirable difficulty, that's, that's a good thing to get young people to be doing.

Yeah. And where I think again, the sort of traditional pedagogy for, for sure thought is if you read Björk and other of these cognitive psychologists, they will talk about testing is good. You want to keep being tested on what you know so you can make mistakes. And but what the very best form of testing is self-testing.

Yeah.

And the critical part of students learning from that is a feedback loop where they're getting information on their what they're doing right and wrong. So most traditional tests and the grading that happens in classrooms give kids no information. They get back a test score, they get back a grade. So that feedback loop is missing. So again, that's where people say, oh, this is what we're doing. We're testing students. We're giving them lots of practice, but the practice is not meaningful practice. And the testing does not give students any information on ways to improve.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it has to be low stakes or no stakes testing, right? I mean, otherwise it just ruins the impact.

Or not even testing at all, you know, or self-testing, as you said. Just, I mean, a lot of students prepare for exams and tests by reading through the notes they have. And the effective way to prepare for an exam or test is to keep giving yourself questions to try.

Yeah.

That does not have to be in a test. Not at all.

That sounds like you're advocating for retrieval practice, which would be a, you know, a core tool of the traditional didactic pedagogy, right? Oh my goodness.

There is, I mean, I've never said, nor do I believe that kids don't need to practice, but it has to be meaningful. So one of the schools that I studied that did this so well was they gave kids opportunities to practice, but all of their practice was done through applying, through applications. So they would learn something and then they would need to apply it in different situations. So if you think about that practice, it's much more demanding than just repeating the same thing in the same kind of situation.

Yeah, absolutely.

It's really about the type of practice, not whether we do it or not.

Thanks for joining us, and you can check out the full conversation with Jo in episode 99.

And don't forget to dive into the show notes and get your free weekly email of inspiration from The Provocation, joining thousands of education leaders, innovators, and creative people who want to start their week thinking differently.