Learning to Learn - A Conversation with Dr. James Mannion

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

Teaching kids how to get better at learning stuff, it's a complicated matter. It's like simultaneously cognitive, it's also metacognitive, it's social, behavioral, it's very multilayered. But at the base of it all, I think, is emotion. And so if we don't go deep, if we don't deal with that fear of failure, then we're barely even scratching the surface.

It's great to have you back for another episode. This week I'm talking learning to learn with Dr. James Mannion, who is an education researcher and consultant who's worked for 20 years in UK schools as a science teacher and in school leadership roles. James has an MA in person-centered education from the University of Sussex and a PhD in learning to learn from the University of Cambridge. His doctoral thesis is an evaluation of learning skills as a whole school approach to teaching and learning that led to significant gains in subject learning, with accelerated gains in particular for students from disadvantaged backgrounds. James works as a bespoke programmes leader at the London Centre for Leadership in Learning at the Institute of Education, University College London. In this role, he works with teachers and schools throughout the UK to promote research-informed approaches to professional development and school improvement. He's also a member of Aura C Cambridge, a study centre and think tank dedicated to promoting effective speaking and listening skills in schools and in wider society. With Kate McAllister, James runs the research-informed training and consultancy Rethinking Education. And last year, together they published the book Fear is the Mind Killer: Why Learning to Learn Deserves Lesson Time and How to Make It Work for Your Pupils. James is very active on Twitter @RethinkingJames, and you can also connect with him on LinkedIn and on the email in the show notes.

Here we are. Hello.

Hey, James.

Hey, Tim. How you doing?

I'm good. How are you?

Yeah, I'm really well, thank you.

Cool.

Right.

So I'd love to just talk to you a bit about the book that you've written with Kate McAllister, because the title is very intriguing to me and not your average title that you would find for an education book.

The first part of the title, Fear is the Mind Killer, and then the subtitle is Why Learning to Learn Deserves Lesson Time and How to Make It Work for Your Pupils.

That's such an interesting way in. Perhaps we could start there, just thinking about what the significance behind that was in the story of the kind of why behind the whole book.

That's a great place to start. And thank you for having me on your podcast, by the way. I've been enjoying listening to back episodes, and it's really nice to be here with you. You're right, the book is a bold title, isn't it? Fear Is the Mind Killer. It sort of sounds like the title of a self-help book. And And to a sort of significant degree, it kind of is. My mum's reading the book at the moment and she's talking about how it's helping her to see things more clearly. And the ideas that we developed through this curriculum applied in all kinds of areas since then, in adults as well as with children. So the book tells the story of the learning skills curriculum, this learning to learn curriculum that I was involved in design teaching for the last 10 years. And I did a PhD in it. And I know we'll come on later to talk about the impact that it had, but just by way of a spoiler, listeners, it was really good. And the overarching idea behind this, this learning skills curriculum is that it's a complex intervention, right? So it's an intervention that's made out of lots of different little elements. And the idea is a bit like sort of marginal gains theory, that the benefits to accrue from each individual element will stack up and interact and you'll get this bigger effect size overall sort of thing. And so almost by definition, there was no sort of big overarching idea. We didn't want to call the book a complex intervention, but by its nature, it's an intervention that's made of lots of little things. So as me and Kate were writing it, we sort of thought, what is the big idea here? And we would sort of mull around a few ideas and we couldn't really come up with one. And then one of the interviews that I did with a teacher from the school, a teacher called Paul Meredith, brilliant science teacher, he used this phrase fear of the mankiller in a question where I asked him, to what extent has teaching Learning to Learn changed the way that you teach science? And he said it was massive. And in particular, it was about fear of failure, that he said that he often sees kids who will, for example, sit before for a blank sheet of graph paper for 20 minutes and they wouldn't want to put pencil to paper because as soon as they do, they introduce the possibility that they'll get something wrong and they're sort of so paralyzed by the potential that they're going to make a mistake that they just don't even do anything. And it's not just about drawing graphs, fear of speaking out in a lesson, fear of public speaking. You get lots of fear around exams. A teacher recently described this as the Resident Evil of fear of failure. It's like this endemic problem in schools. And if you notice all of those things, it stops you from speaking now, it stops you from trying to draw a graph, it stops you from volunteering to speak publicly and so on. And so fear sort of keeps you in your lane and it makes you afraid even there. And so to come back to this complex intervention idea, teaching kids how to get better at learning stuff, it's a complicated matter. It's like simultaneously cognitive, you know, it's about what they think. It's also metacognitive, it's helping them to reflect on that. It's also social, it's emotional, it's behavioral, like it's very multilayered, but at the base of it all, I think, is emotion. It's like the kid's emotional relationship to a particular subject or to a particular teacher or to school in general, say. And so if we don't go deep, if we don't deal with that fear of failure and we just focus on things like study skills and revision techniques and so on, then we're barely even scratching the surface of what's going on. And so that's why we went with a very self-helpy sounding title.

Yeah, that's brilliant. But also even perhaps the idea of learning itself is kind of stepping into the unknown in order to grow. And if you're so paralyzed by fear, you can't even learn, let alone understand how you learn. Right?

Exactly. Because the brain sort of shuts down, your nervous system shuts down when you're in sort of fight or flight mode, or more commonly in schools, it's like the other end of that scale is like freeze, freeze or faint. It's like they want to make themselves so small, they keep their eyes down. They don't want to make eye contact. They just try to sort of look invisible. They hide behind their hair sort of thing. And when they're in that state, you can't even access your memories and your knowledge of the subject, say, because it's just the way that the brain has evolved to sort of keep you safe over millions of years. But it's like this sort of irrational overcorrection where we're still getting this amygdala hijack happening in the brain to stop you from making— the kids who will tear out the whole page out of a book rather than cross a single word out because they don't want to acknowledge that they're fallible in any way.

Yeah. And I'd love to then perhaps think about a bit before that in a way, because when I was training as a teacher in the early 2000s, I had the pleasure of attending a talk by Guy Claxton talking about building learning power. And that was, you know, there was definitely a fashion, one might say, in the early 2000s of that idea of learning to learn. It was, you know, quite present in a lot of schools, but then it feels a bit like it's not been so visible in the more recent decade.

Yeah.

What, what was the the impetus then for you? I mean, perhaps it never went away for you in terms of the feeling of the need for it, but what was it that prompted you to write the book now in terms of seeing that now is a necessary time for some of these ideas?

Yeah, thank you. I mean, it's true, we never really lost the faith, as it were. Like, learning to learn, as you say, was very widespread in terms of the extent to which it was practiced in schools. I did a Twitter poll recently and I asked teachers, you know, if you were teaching in secondary in the 2000s, how many how many of you had taught learning to learn lessons? And it was like 70% or 80% or something. And then I asked the second question, how many of you have got them now? And it was like 10%. So the extent to which learning to learn is happening in schools has massively collapsed. But it goes back to further than that. People have been talking about these ideas for a very long time, and it really got going in the '70s, I think, following the work of John Flavell and Anne Brown and others around metacognition, and then later on Banjora's work around self-regulation. And around about the 2000s, you mentioned building learning power. And there's, there's about 4 sort of examples of large-scale attempts to implement learning to learn on a large scale. There was a thing called the Learning to Learn in Schools program. There's one called Learning How to Learn. There was Opening Minds, the RSA thing, and building learning power, as you say. And when you look at those 4 large-scale attempts to implement learning to learn, the results are mixed. They're neither positive or negative on average. It doesn't seem to give you a bump in the right direction. It doesn't seem to make things worse either. But if you look at the other research on learning, you know, we start the book by talking about the learning to learn paradox, where on the one hand, you know, if you look at the Education Endowment Foundation's league table of effective practices, you know, their teaching and learning toolkit, metacognition and self-regulation is like in second place. They describe it as giving high impact for very low cost based on extensive evidence, which sounds incredible. And that's, that's based on lots of meta-analyses that have been done over the years, which by their nature, meta-analyses are studies of lots of small smaller studies. And so when you implement these things on a small scale, they are absolutely massively effective. So the question then is, why did those large-scale attempts fail to replicate that impact? Is it because it's a bad idea? I think that that's clearly not the case because there's loads of evidence that this stuff is a good idea. It's much more likely that the problem is to do with the nature of scaling up itself, which is why I'm so obsessed with implementation science at the moment, because we need to really get our head around how to scale up effective practices, which is what this emerging field of implementation science is all about. And also, you mentioned Clexton. Clexton has done some really valuable work. He wrote this brilliant pamphlet in around 2006 called Learning to Learn: The Fourth Generation, and he talks about how the first generation of learning to learn was essentially about teachers learning about how learning happens, but it wasn't seen as something that was relevant for the, for the kids. It was just something that teachers would know about when they're designing curricula and so on. Then in the second generation, there was like people who were focusing on things like study skills and revision techniques and that sort of stuff, what I would refer to as a narrow conception of learning to learn. And then in the third generation was all that stuff that happened around about the start of the 2000s, much of which was sort of well-intentioned at the time, but which was subsequently found to be wanting in terms of evidence of impact. And that, you know, includes things like the widely derided, you know, learning styles, the idea that your kids are predominantly visual, auditory, or kinesthetic, and brain gym and neurolinguistic programming and multiple intelligence theory and all of these ideas that sort of looked quite sort of truthy at face value, but actually the evidence wasn't really there to back them up. But there was some value in this stuff as well. The third generation was about taking into account the emotional climate of the classroom, recognizing the importance of confidence, and self-esteem and stuff like that and social interactions. So the SEAL program, the social and emotional aspects of learning, was, was big around that time. But there was also all this really flaky stuff like the PLTS, the Personal Learning and Thinking Skills framework that was published by the government, which was seen as this sort of generic framework of thinking skills that was completely devoid of subject content. You know, it was like you can teach these skills in the absence of knowledge. And obviously that wasn't right. But there's a fourth generation of practice, which is take takes account of knowledge. It says, yes, knowledge is important, it's necessary, but it's not sufficient. We also need to teach kids how to be dispositionally oriented towards being able to learn stuff under their own steam so they're not helpless. And this is another Twitter poll I did recently: what kinds of helpless utterances do you hear in schools? And it was so— it was one of the most responded to things I've ever put on Twitter. People have their kids asking questions like, oh, it's not even asking a question, they just go like, my pencil is broken. And it just needs sharpening. It's like totally helpless. Or asking questions like, where should I put the rubbish? And kids sort of learn that in schools. There's this idea of— I know this isn't the technical definition of learned helplessness, but it's sort of— you could easily characterize it that they're learning how to be helpless because the teachers set the agenda for what needs to be learned and when and how and so on. And that makes for an efficient use of time. But the kids, can't learn to self-regulate in such top-down environment and they become very needy. And lots of teachers talk about this feeling weighed down by having to deal with all these inane questions all the time. And that hasn't gone away. When I work with teachers now, I ask them what's the one thing that they want to change often, and they often start with, I want the kids to be less needy. I don't want to spoon-feed them so much. I want them to be more independent, to be more resilient, to be more willing to take risks, to be less afraid of failure and so on. I don't think that there's anything particular— to come back to the question, I don't think that there's anything particularly nowy about this. This is a perennial concern. But as we were just talking about before, before the recording, there is something about this moment, isn't there, at the start of 2021, that it really feels like the world needs to, to learn how to navigate this world of fake news and propaganda and lies and misinformation with which the, the internet and, you know, certain elements of the mainstream media is absolutely a wash. And we can just see there's lots of evidence that people aren't able to think outside of their echo chamber. People are becoming incredibly polarized. The world is becoming very hostile. And super important that we teach kids and adults the skills and the knowledge and the dispositions. It's like it's a multi-layer problem to be able to navigate this world and to cut through the nonsense.

Yeah, you absolutely agree, and it's just great to hear. Again, I like hearing some of the history of these concepts and interventions that have, in most instances, not just with Learning to Learn but in all sorts of ways in education, have been around for a long time with different incarnations, and it's just great to hear that kind of continuity, I suppose. But also, just to come back to your point of the current moment, I would totally also agree that the flux and the change and the complexity of the current moment, which we kind of really see playing out with the pandemic, and that requires a whole other set of dispositions and responses from people in order to navigate that when it's just such a fluid situation that this kind of false certainty of structure and it's, you know, it's just not possible to be passive in your learning anymore because things are changing around you so much. And the complexity of the problems that we are all facing, you're also not going to be able to solve or understand by looking at textbook or asking the teacher. You've got to figure out some co-created solutions to that. And that might sound like jargon, but I think that's genuinely true. And that's what we're doing on a global scale right now is co-creating solutions to a fundamentally complex problem. And we've got to kind of manifest that in an educational environment, I think.

Absolutely. Like Guy Claxton refers to some people as sort of like certaholics, like they're addicted to certainty. And you can understand why, that you want to have a simple truth in a complicated world to cling to. But we need people to be able to embrace and to sit with uncertainty and to be comfortable with being uncomfortable, you know. And that's something that you can learn. And I think that, you know, the knowledge-rich curriculum is sort of all the rage at the moment, and you can see why I think that has come about because of the previous sort of emphasis on skills in the absence of knowledge that we talked about earlier. So I don't think that the knowledge-rich curriculum, important though it is, is going to help in helping kids to sit with uncertainty in this way. This is something that goes beyond knowledge. Knowledge is foundational, absolutely. But we need to be doing more than that. And I hear lots of stuff from traditionalist teachers about knowledge and memory and so on, and I'm not hearing much about But what we need to do on top of that, now we've cemented that in, let's agree that we need to embrace knowledge and take it really seriously, but what comes next? And I don't really see that coming from the people who are banging the drum for knowledge as loudly as they are.

And just then to shift back to the book, one of the things that's also interesting is the engagement with research. And I, you know, personally, I find that really important and useful. And there is a certain idea of to have a good, strong evidence base for what we're doing is absolutely important. In order to justify and, you know, to be genuine in the way that we spend our educational dollars, as it were, you know, on interventions. We want to know that they're going to have some impact. So there's a certain element of wanting some certainty about that, even though there is that tyranny of certainty, definitely. But that's why I was so interested in your book and your doctoral research, because you actually did look at this big multivariate and complex intervention and actually see some really significant and positive impacts of that, right, on the learners. So I'd love if you could just give a bit more detail on some of the specific interventions that happened in that and what were the, some of the specific outcomes or impacts that you saw on learners.

Sure. So it was an 8-year study because I followed 4 cohorts of children from Year 7 through to Year 11, 1 control cohort and 3 learning skills cohorts. And just to briefly explain that the learning skills curriculum did in the first year, we were given 5 lessons a week with the whole of Year 7. And then when that year group went into year 8, the curriculum time expanded with them for 3 lessons a week and then again into year 9. So over 3 years, throughout the whole of Key Stage 3, that first cohort took part in over 400 lessons of Learning to Learn. And the control cohort was the previous year group at the same school who had very similar data entry to the school. And so if you think about it, they had an advantage, right? Because they had therefore had 400+ more lessons of subject-based learning.. And so when we got to the end of Year 9, the first sort of big interim analysis where we looked at how well they were doing in terms of their subject learning across the curriculum, we found that the, the Learning to Learn group was significantly outperforming the previous year group. And in particular, it was especially beneficial for disadvantaged children. So non-disadvantaged children performed better than their non-disadvantaged counterparts in the control group, as it were. Yeah, but the disadvantage gap closed hugely. So like at the end of year 9, the disadvantage gap in the control cohort was around 25% when you combine all the subjects together.

Yeah.

And in the Learning to Learn cohort, it was just 2%. And we saw almost exactly the same pattern of results at GCSE. They got the best set of results of that school had ever seen. And again, the, the gap closed. I think it closed by over 65%. It was from one cohort to the next. And we did a lot of work as well on sort of like, that was just the headline figures. But you could argue, oh, well, school results go up from one year to the next or down. It might not have been down to this. So we did a lot of work to interview the teachers, interview the kids, to look in their books, to look at their attitude to learning scores. We had them doing questionnaires, we were observing them. And in particular, the teachers were able to say how Learning to Learn had helped their kids do better and how different these kids were to previous year groups. And the kids themselves were able to point to a number of different mechanisms by which learning skills had enabled them to perform more effectively and gain higher grades across the piece. And I'll just focus on one which I think is probably the most important, which was confidence. So we did a lot of work in the Learning to Learn curriculum on oracy, on speaking and listening, and that just changes kids like nothing else. You can see them walking an inch taller, it changes their perception of themselves. It changes how they interact with their peers, with their people at home as well, and also with their teachers in other subjects. And there's just a few quotes I'll share with you. There was one student, so this is from an interview, who said, "The thing I'm most proud of this year is the Who Am I project because I learned how to stand up in front of a big group of people confidently." Another one said that learning skills has taught me to stand up for myself and I have found my voice and I think harder than I ever have in using the right language. And so this curriculum, it helps them to find their voice physically, to literally, you know, to find theirs, but also they find their voice metaphorically. And where I talked earlier about a narrow conception of learning to learn, what I'm interested in is a broad conception which is very much about identity and like self-actualization, you know, and like becoming more fully yourself, growing into yourself. One of these students, she was putting a seating plan with her bully in maths, and now she, because she's sort of done this work on confidence and being able to help people and stuff, she helping him with his maths, something that she would never have been able to conceive of before. And it sort of put her into a position of power, you know, from a position of vulnerability. So this is really transformational stuff. And so I think that we can make a strong case for causality, and we go to some lengths in the book to make that case. Whether or not it's generalizable to other settings remains to be seen. I'm just starting to work with other schools now to see whether we can replicate. I strongly think that we can not only replicate but we can seriously improve on those findings because again, you know, we're so much better at implementation now. You know, we've really got it down. If I'd have known 10 years ago what I know now about implementation, those figures would have been even better. I'm absolutely convinced.

One question comes to mind because you mentioned about the idea of teaching skills out of context and, you know, particularly like with the personal learning and thinking skills, how much of the design of the learning skills interventions did you try to do in order to put them in context so they weren't kind of in everybody's minds, teachers and students, detached from the real work of school in the sense of, you know, the learning that happens in other discipline-focused classrooms?

I mean, it was really varied what we did. So like those 5 lessons a week, one lesson a week was philosophical inquiry, like P4C, philosophy for children, which is actually not that content dependent. You sort of just ask a big open-ended question. And if you ask an open-ended question for which there's no right or wrong answer, if you're asking, is there more future or more past? Or if you paint over a window, is it still a window? You can have some absolutely fascinating hour-long conversations about that stuff. And so it's not always dependent on content, I don't think. Other projects that we ran were incredibly content rich. So we ran one where we took them to the library and said, so you're going to do a group research project. You're only allowed to look at these shelves here so that it's going to be sort of fairly academic. We learned that the hard way because the first project we let them do anything they wanted and they just did like football players and fast cars. So we were like, just look at these shelves here. And it was sort of stuff that they could learn about at university, say, but not at school, like things like anthropology, an interest of yours, and human geography and politics and what have you, photography, stuff that they weren't doing in year 7, certainly. And they then had to negotiate and agree on a particular topic. And so this one girl, for example, one girl had found a book on feminism that she'd never heard of before, and she was like, right, this is happening. I totally resonate with where this is coming from. The second boy in her group had found this big book on Latin America. He'd never heard of this whole continent before. It was like a big coffee table book full of all these amazing photos. He was like, I want to do it about this. And the third kid wasn't in that day and they came back to the classroom and they had to negotiate and neither of them wanted to give up their topic. And then I overheard them. They were sitting at the front of the room and I overheard them as one of them suggested, maybe we should do it about the history of feminism in Latin America.

You got a PhD on your hands. Amazing.

Exactly. The third kid who was absent came back the next lesson. He was obsessed with China for some reason. He was constantly doodling Chinese calligraphy. Photography, right? He didn't want to let that go. So they did a comparative study of the history of feminism in Latin America and China, and it was absolutely phenomenal. And he took in so many interesting— like, so communism came up because obviously communism is common to many countries in Latin America and China. And feminism, you know, being about equality, the parallels between feminism and communism. And they were learning about, you know, things like the one-child policy and foot binding and dowries and stuff on the China side. It was just such a rich project. It was absolutely incredible. So this was in no way is this like an anti-subject knowledge or is this devoid of knowledge. It was always sort of contextualized. But we would essentially, for most of the time, we would set them a really challenging project. 3 lessons a week was project-based stuff and we set them a really challenging project and then take a massive step back and go, off you go. And some of them really just get on with it and they're cooking on gas and they're making to-do lists and ticking stuff off, and others just absolutely turn into a jellyfish on the beach, like floundering. I've got no idea where to start. They're totally overwhelmed. And it's quite a tough line then to go, I'm not going to throw you a lifeboat immediately. You need to know what it feels like to know when you're out of your depth. And then, because then you start to, you know, they start to build their own life raft, you know, they start to figure out. And what's great about that kind of work is that you as a teacher, you can spend a lot of time going around the classroom and having conversations, essentially coaching-type conversations, not leading them anywhere, but just asking them, oh, what kinds of problems do you notice? What might you try? What might somebody else try in this situation? And they just sort of figure their own way through it.

Absolutely. But also it makes you think they need to experience that struggle, which is really productive. But also then, were there specific interventions that you were doing to give them specific tools or frameworks that they might, for example, then use to manage their backlog of work or to work productively as a research team?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So lots of the inputs were around spoken language. So helping them to interact more productively, cuz that's often what it boils down to.

Yeah.

You know, with, with a boy, for example, who was really overwhelmed, he, he'd chosen a project. He wanted to find out how a TV worked. And I thought, oh wow, this kid's an electronics whiz and he's just gonna dismantle a TV and tell us all how it works. But actually he didn't. He just thought it would be interesting. And he didn't have any idea about how to go about that and he didn't know what to do. So we ended up having this conversation and we were like, why don't you go and talk to somebody else? Those kids over there are getting on with loads of stuff. Why don't you go and find out what they're doing? And so he sort of went away and had a chat with them and had a conversation and essentially came back and was like, they write a list of things and they tick these things off as they do them. This kid had never heard of a to-do list before. Oh, okay, why don't we try that? So maybe write a list of just like one or 2 things that you're going to do today, and then you'll get the satisfaction of ticking those off. And then that sort of evolved. The kid got the idea of the list, and then he started listing all the parts of a TV and finding out what each one looked like and what each one did, and then started to piece them all together. So that gave him an in to his project. But it was essentially a social fix, right? He just had to have a conversation with a kid in order to move him forward. So we did loads of work around how to have productive conversations. We were talking about how some prominent educationists are very anti-group work. And you can understand why, because if you don't teach kids how to speak effectively together, then they're going to struggle with that. And my PhD supervisor was Professor Neil Mercer, whose whole career pretty much has been based around how do we teach people how to interact in more productive ways. It's actually pretty simple how to do that. And when you teach kids these skills, they can learn a huge amount from one another. And there are other bits and bobs. We did some stuff around the study skills type stuff, and organising your resources was a big one that we talked about because kids are often quite scatty, aren't they? And they're not very good at that sort of thing. But if you have a weekly review where they're looking back at the week that's just gone and then they're looking ahead to the week that's coming, they start to— it's like monitoring and control. So through monitoring what's going on and monitoring what's happening in the previous week, they start to learn where the levers are and they're like, okay, so we didn't give them a whole suite of skills that they had to learn and then to be effective learners. We were very much sort of providing them with the space and the opportunities in which to figure this out for themselves.

That's amazing.

So then let's dig into this idea of implementation science, because obviously, as you said, it's a really complex intervention that has generated some really interesting and productive outcomes for these learners in this, in your your study, but the idea would obviously then be that we want to take the benefits from that and scale it or, you know, use it elsewhere.

Yeah.

So it's a relatively new term for me and, you know, for other people out there it might be a new thing. So maybe if you just give an idea of what that means and then how might that help you as you try to kind of roll this intervention out in other places.

Yeah. So in the summer of 2014, I went to a conference at Cambridge Uni called Implementing Implementation and I honestly can't remember why I went to this thing because I didn't know what it was and it's not a very appealing sounding name. I think I was just happened to be in the faculty on that day and it happened to be going on and so I popped my head in sort of thing and it was just mind-blowing. So the keynote was by Dr. Barbara Kelly who's based up at Strathclyde University, who's one of the leading lights in this very emerging field of implementation science. Like the first journal appeared about 2006, so it's less than 15 years old. So as academic disciplines go, it's like it's a newborn She said at the start of this keynote that implementation science is remarkable for two reasons. Number one, because everybody needs it immediately—scientists, teachers, psychologists—and secondly, nobody's heard of it. So she sort of had my attention from the outset. And at the time, so this was 2014, so I was about halfway through this PhD study, and it was when we were starting to think about whole school implementation, where it was going from a sort of a Year 7 taught thing to what eventually essentially became a sort of whole school approach to teaching and learning. It was much more sort of joined up. So we were wrestling with this question of how to roll this out across the piece. And I had been thinking I need to explain to my colleagues and to run inset sessions on, for example, you know, metacognition and self-regulation and oracy. And I was thinking about it in terms of those sort of quite abstract terms. There's this one line that really rang out at me from Barbara's keynote that day, which was the practitioner is the intervention.. And so she made me realize that implementation is a people problem. Like it's not a concept problem. So if you want people to start doing things, you need to look at it through that lens. And so it was sort of on my radar for a number of years, implementation science. It's not very school-facing. Like there's, there's this book that Barbara co-edited called the snappily titled Handbook of Implementation Science for Psychologists in Education, which is absolutely fascinating, but it's about as readable as it sounds. Yeah.

You know, it's not necessarily on every teacher's bookshelf.

No, it's a dense tome. And implementation science is more well-developed in the States than it is over here. And it's more, more developed in healthcare than it is in education. It's unheard of. I think there's pretty much— there's me and there's one guy at the EF, Jonathan Sharples. Oh yeah. But in healthcare, it's really widespread. And so I essentially have done this work in the last few years, which I'm just in the process of scaling up to put a program together for schools. And it's a process that you go through. Often with what we describe as a vertical slice team. So often like implementation is done by senior leaders, right? Like change happens, that's their job, but they're not taught how to do it. And so that everything gets done, like our go-to model is top-down, right? So like they, they sort of get everybody together in the hall, they tell everybody what needs to happen, and then they expect the thing to happen. And there's many ways in which that can fall down along the way. Did they understand what was meant to be understood from the session? We know as teachers that what is taught is not the same as what is learned. Are the systems in place to actually support them? Or is this a sort of make this happen, but there's no money and no time, just do it on top of everything else sort of thing, which is also very common. Are they actually walking the talk? Are you measuring the impact of what's happening and doing ongoing monitoring and evaluation work? Is there a clear communications plan in place? All of that stuff. And it's actually pretty sensible stuff. There's nothing rocket sciencey about this. It's just sort of like project management type stuff. Stuff. Yeah. So I put this program together for schools. We piloted it for the first time a couple of years ago, and the feedback has been absolutely phenomenal. Like, as a counter to the top-down approach, yeah, you get people from, from all different levels throughout the organization. So around the planning table, we have senior leaders, middle leaders, newly qualified teachers, very experienced teachers, the SENCO, teaching assistants, LSAs, you know, learning support assistants. Yeah. And, and around that table, you come up with a set of ground rules. So you're like, around this table, you are all equally responsible, A, for contributing to writing this plan and for sharing all relevant information, especially if it's inconvenient information, right? So you don't want people to just nod along because the senior leader's there and they don't want to contradict them because it would be, you know, career suicide. It's like, in this forum, we are going to have really robust conversations. We need to look at this problem, warts and all, from every angle to make sure that we're not going to make some bad decision here. And then there's a data collection exercise that we run. So the TA goes away and interviews other TAs, and the middle leader goes away and interviews other middle what the leaders say, so that there's this two-way process. So we get to find out what the school is really thinking, and the school gets to know that this implementation team is taking their thinking really seriously. And then they're also responsible for executing this plan over time, because one of the things about change is that it takes like 3 to 5 years for change to happen. And if you look at any senior leadership team, you know, there's— I think that there are probably very few that haven't had many changes in personnel or just in job role roles in a 3 to 5 year period. The behavior person becomes the curriculum person, becomes assessment, becomes the timetabler, and all of the expertise that they developed around them just sort of collapses behind them, or they move schools, you know. Yeah. And so when you've got this like hive mind approach, regardless of any sort of changes in personnel that will happen over a 3 to 5 year period, the integrity of this change team remains in place and they see it through. So we followed up this school where we first piloted this, and we went back and visited them a couple of years later, and it's absolutely incredible. Not only that, the thing that they wanted to implement was absolutely still the sort of the beating heart of conversations about what they're doing, and especially during lockdown, but they'd also taken on the implementation science bit as well. So they were training all of their middle leaders in how to use these tools to implement change in their departments. And the quotes from people— I've just been interviewing people recently— one teacher said, this has been the making of me as a leader. Wow. Another one said, I can't now see how you would implement some something without using these tools. And consistently people say, we should have been taught this years ago. Like people sort of seem to know that this is a gap that they have. And so it's really exciting. I think.

Wow. And it's so interesting because I've been doing a lot of work on Agile project management and there's something so resonant about what you're talking about in terms of cross-functional teams and clear, transparent, and collaborative approaches to that teaming and then, you know, the accountability that comes with that in rolling out across the whole organisation. Interesting. And then also if we join some other dots, potentially your, your role at UCL, University College London Institute of Education, is in the Centre for Educational Leadership, right? So, and I just would love to finish by asking you then, if we kind of look then outwards, we've kind of touched on some of that implication for leadership, but even if we go back to some of the that being comfortable with uncertainty and those types of dispositions and skills that we need in these complex, challenging times. How do you see, are there connections there then between the learning skills interventions that you did and then your other work with the leadership in the centre?

Yeah, thank you for asking that question. There's absolutely massive parallels. And this sort of dawned on me at some point as I was writing up my PhD and then and then I sort of fell into the orbit of the IOE and started working with them as an associate. And I've run a number of different programs. We do lesson study, we do lots of practitioner inquiry. There's one called research-informed peer review, which is sort of like lesson study, but it's like schools observing, like non-judgmental observations across different schools around a theme, like around feedback, say. And they're all sort of variations on a theme. If you sort of zoom out, it's all just teachers sitting around tables reflecting on stuff really hard and collaborating. And so the 3 sort of big ideas— I mentioned that the learning skills curriculum is this complex intervention, but it really boils down to these 3 ideas that interact in theory and in practice. Metacognition, which we define as monitoring and controlling your thought processes, or sort of operationally, it's sort of like reflecting on the how of learning, right? Yeah. As well as the what of learning. Self-regulation, Self-regulation, which is the sort of the mirror image of that, is that this is monitoring and controlling your feelings. And that could be physical feelings or emotions and behaviors. So if metacognition is like what's going on in your head, self-regulation is about monitoring and controlling how you interact with the external environment. And oracy is the third one, the third sort of leg of the stool, if you like, which is absolutely massive in helping both of those agendas move forward. And so individually, if you look at either metacognition, self-regulation, or oracy, they're all really good ideas. But when you take them together, they combine and become sort of greater than the sum of their parts. And it just dawned on me at some point that this is exactly what's happening in all of these programs that we're running at the IOE. It's this same stuff, like the metacognition takes the form of like reflecting on the— on your learning. And that could be observationally, or it could be, you know, writing a reflective journal or, you know, just paying attention. Or it could be collecting data like we do in the Practitioner Inquiry Programmes. Self-regulation, so they're taking ownership, the teachers are taking ownership over their own professional development and responsibility for their own professional development. They're not just sort of jumping through hoops and ticking boxes and, you know, dancing to the latest tune, but they're actually setting the agenda for what they need to do in order to move forward. And oracy, again, you know, teacher talk is huge, especially in the lesson study. And often, you know, teachers teachers are always lovely, aren't they? And they sort of, they turn up to a session and they're also really busy. They often turn up to a session and they go, "Oh, I'm really sorry. I'm so sorry. I've not done anything since the last time." You go, "Okay, let's sit down and talk about what's going on." And then they start saying all this stuff that they weren't saying 2 or 3 months ago. And it's the act of speech that brings this stuff to life. It just sort of starts sort of like stringing out of their face in some sense. And this is the stuff that professional learning is made of. And when this is happening in a group situation, there's a sort of like, they're like accountability partners for one another, you know. They sort of, they're holding one another to, to account in a really soft, supportive way. Yeah. Because they're saying this stuff out loud. I'm going to do this. This is something that I want to work on. They don't want to be the person who didn't do their homework, you know, for the next session. And so they are absolutely massively overlapping and interconnecting. And the work that Kate, the co-author of Fear Is the Mind Killer, has done since we've finished that project where she's taken this out into workplaces and especially into refugee camps all over Europe. She's trained up thousands of volunteers in how to use these methods, working with adults and children in refugee camps. Amazing. And, you know, we adapt what we do obviously to different contexts, but essentially this seems to be a recipe for how you can get anybody— adult, teen, or toddler— to get better at learning stuff and to sort of become more self-actualizing human being. Fascinating stuff, man.

Thank you very much. Very good. Well, thank you. I hugely appreciate taking the time to talk about this stuff with you. And it's just brilliant that there's so many dimensions to it in the sense of research and implementation science, but also just the real work of teachers on the ground. And as you say, hopefully allowing them, enabling them to become a bit more excited and passionate about the thing that they engage with every day, which is just phenomenal. Work.

Yeah, well, thank you so much for having me on. It's been really nice to get to know you. I feel like this is probably the first of many such conversations. Amazing. Cheers. Yeah, bye-bye. All the best. Take care.

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