Transfer and Conceptual Understanding - A Conversation with Julie Stern

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

Those discipline-specific concepts, those are, are the ones I think are where the magic happens. I think when students are able to point their attention to those, they transfer more easily to new situations, and they help students to grasp that deeper structural patterns of how the discipline is organized.

Hi everybody, thanks for joining me for another episode of the Future Learning Design Podcast. My name is Tim Logan and the podcast is brought to you with the support of Notosh. This week I'm really happy to be speaking about transfer and conceptual understanding with a real expert in this area. Julie Stern has nearly two decades of experience facilitating adult learning and partnering with educators to take their practice to the next level. She is passionate about synthesizing the best of education research into practical tools that support educators to move towards teaching and learning that promotes sustainability, equity, and well-being. She's a 4-time best-selling author of Learning That Transfers, Visible Learning for Social Studies, the On Your Feet! Guide to Learning Transfer, and Tools for Teaching Conceptual Understanding for Elementary and Secondary. Julie is a certified trainer in Visible Learning Plus and concept-based curriculum and instruction. She is a James Madison Constitutional Fellow and taught social studies for many years in Washington, D.C. And her native Louisiana.

You can find out more about Julie's work at her website, edtosavetheworld.com. Hey Julie.

Hello, how are you?

I'm good.

How are you?

Good, good.

Brilliant. All right, well, thank you for getting up so early. Thank you for joining me. It's an absolute pleasure to talk to you, Julie, and welcome to the podcast first.

Thank you so much. I'm really excited to be here.

Awesome. So Obviously the majority of your work focuses around learning transfer and concepts, which I particularly love to focus on in this conversation. As I say, I think they're a really important and under-discussed area. So we may get a bit technical, but we'll try, you know, try and keep it hopefully not too technical, but a lot of the people listening are educators in international schools around the world. So I think a lot of it will resonate deeply. So, so the first, I mean, the first question I'd love to ask you is why is it so important? Why is transfer so important? Prior to that, we might need to highlight what that means, what transfer we're talking about when we talk about learning transfer. But then, you know, why is that such a significant topic right now?

So to me, transfer simply means applying our learning to new situations. And, you know, there's a spectrum of transfer. In fact, we've got two axes of a spectrum for transfer from sort of similar to dissimilar, which is talked about more in the research. And then we've got from academic to more real-world application. And so, you know, simply applying our learning from one situation to another is transfer. And so people might not use the word transfer, but they'll say real-world application, or they'll say it's sometimes even retention of learning or memorization. Things like that can be almost seen as transfer in the sense that, like, you know, if, if you can remember something and then apply it to a new situation. And so one example that I like, I love to use really concrete examples so we don't get too technical, but one example that I love to use is If you're going to be working on a car, if you're going to work on the same car, on the engine of a car your whole life, the same exact make and model, well, then you probably don't need to, like, think about concepts. You probably don't need to think very hard about what you're doing and why you're doing what you're doing. But we all know that in today's world, nobody's going to be working on the same exact car their whole lives. They're going to be working on, you know, you might go from one year's make and model to another year's make and model, or from one type of car. You might go from a Toyota to a Nissan or, you know, something like that. And so the idea of transfer is simply taking what you know about one situation, one context, and applying it in another context or situation.

Yeah.

And I think that's really interesting. I hadn't thought about that really before, but actually at the kind of almost at the heart of what education is, is transfer, right? Because if you, if you're gonna learn something in a slightly artificial, let's face it, classroom in a school somewhere, if you're never gonna do anything with it, fine, there's nothing transferring. But really the whole point of education is for the young people to take that somewhere else and do something with it, right?

Yeah. I mean, it's, you know, it's why we study wars. We study wars in the hope that we won't do it again. And so, you know, people who love, for instance, history, you know, when they hear the word concept, they start to get nervous that I'm gonna take away their beloved sort of facts and details. And I would say, no, no, no, no. The beloved facts and details are what give sort of meaning to the concepts, because otherwise they're just these abstract esoteric ideas. Like, you know, for instance, allies or sovereignty. That's really hard for a kid. It's hard for adults to understand. So it's really hard for a kid to understand. And so really just helping them to understand, you know, allies and sovereignty in one war to be able to apply it to another war. And for me, I mean, this is where sometimes teachers are like, okay, this lady's maybe a little too crazy, but the vast majority of— the vast majority of teachers love it. But I'll say, why not, you know, start with the concept of allies among your friends with the students? And we're trying to understand how if your best friend gets in a fight with somebody else, suddenly you're involved. That's the idea of allies. And, you know, really bringing it down to the level that students understand and then connecting it to classroom content. And then as you said, the hope for all learning is that students will be able to use it in the future.

Yeah. And it's interesting though, if it's like, just to go for a second back to the, your car example. I think there's also an increasing awareness of context as well of learning right now. So actually, even let's say you live in on the prairies in Northern Canada and, you know, Winnipeg, wherever, and, you know, you've got a particular type of climate and you've got, you're dealing with some pretty harsh winters and you've got the same make and model of a car in that context compared to someone in, say, the West Coast California with completely different, you know, so Even the same make and model of a car put in different context would require some level of, well, how does my understanding of this make and model in that context apply and transfer across into a new context? So I think, I think that's an important feature as well. So it's not just that all of this stuff is kind of decontextualized from where and when and how and who they are being learned.

Right. And that's really the magic of concepts. And so sometimes people will use what you just said to say, nope, all transfer is context-specific. You know, the research tells us this. What you're saying, Julie, won't work. And so you have to go, I am, I'm a super nerd. And so I do read the actual research. I was laughing with one of my— I'm writing another book with one of my co-authors who says to me, you know, Julie, you got to take your words down, you know, a level because, you know, the average teacher— I love word choice and I love the precise word. So I often reread my writing to kind of take words down. But one of my longtime co-authors, Christopher Ferraro, said to me, Julie, If they think our writing is hard, they need to go read the science that we read in order to write what we wrote. But you know what the research says is things like if you learn a certain thing underwater, I mean, this is the type of research that's conducted, you know, like things that are so far removed from the classroom. But still, we know that our bodies sort of use the environment in order to process information, in order to make sense of information. And so you can even think, I like this, like if you learn something with a friend, sometimes thinking about that friend helps you to remember something, you know, an insight to whatever it was that you learned, certainly. And at the same time, there hasn't been really rigorous research around transfer and conceptual learning. I'm kind of one of the few people who's really bringing those two things together. It's often I read about transfer and research and actual, you know, empirical evidence around transfer. Those people don't typically talk about concepts, but they will say things like, if you abstract one level up. When I hear, if you abstract one level up, that to me speaks concepts, you know? And so they'll say, or they'll say, we found that if we asked, you know, study participants to generalize about the broader principles in this one situation and ask them, can you apply the general principles to this other situation, then they're able to transfer. And it's not context specific. So I'll say, yeah, generalizing broader principles to me is conceptual relationships, you know, how do allies and sovereignty interact. And so, you know, one of the things that I like to point out is sometimes we see a study, or we hear some studies, and then it turns into this, okay, well, concepts won't transfer. And I'm like, no, no, that's not what the research is telling us. Actually, the research is really supporting that if we train students to recognize concepts in new situations and we point their attention to those general principles, they're better able to transfer.

Yeah, that's fascinating because I think, as you say, there's kind of a lot of different noise going on around that conversation. And so just as I expected, the questions will interrelate. But my second question was, why is it so hard? Why is transfer so hard? And as you've already started talking, there is a perception among some educators and educational academics that it is an incredibly difficult thing to do. It's incredibly difficult to support young people to, to take the knowledge they've learned in one context and apply it to a new context. But as you said, one of the vehicles for that is concepts. And I'd love to get onto that in a minute. But for example, one of the conversations around this is generic skills like critical thinking, for example. So if you read someone like Dan Willingham's work, on critical thinking and why that's so difficult. Some of that is almost similar kinds of discussion because essentially he's saying you can't teach generic critical thinking skills. You know, people have tried it. Thorndike tried it. Lots of people have tried these different types of let's teach Latin and then Latin will help the students in all these other contexts. It doesn't work. Critical thinking, teaching them generically, and then that's going to increase their overall academic ability, overall literacy doesn't work. But then they start talking about things like, well, the deep structure of, of a problem is similar, you know, so that often the young people will focus on the superficial elements of like the numbers in a math problem or, you know, of course it's not gonna be the same, but if they start understanding the deep structure, which some people would argue that comes with mastery, right? Then you have an ability to then transfer. But as you were saying, that talk about deep structure takes us into a conversation about conceptual understanding, doesn't it?

For sure, for sure. For me as well. Yes, you're absolutely right. The term deep structure, schemas, all of those things to me speak volumes to conceptual learning. So, okay, there's a couple of things going on with your question. So I think, you know, the first one, let's kind of focus on critical thinking for a minute. I think in, in a lot of ways there's this false dichotomy between— there's one of my $5 words— your listeners probably, if they're, if they're sitting around listening to a podcast about education, maybe they understand false dichotomy, but, you know, it's not a forced choice. Should we teach really concrete, specific content and facts, or should we teach more sort of general generic skills such as critical thinking? They have— you can't think about nothing. You have to have something to think about. And so, you know, I'm trained by the Foundation for Critical Thinking, and so I've seen it done. I was director of curriculum at a network of charter schools in Washington, D.C. We taught critical thinking. We embedded critical thinking, but it was not in absence of literacy. It certainly wasn't an absence of mathematics. It was in tandem. And so, for instance, the Foundation for Critical Thinking has the 8 elements of thought, and it's something that points students' attention. So one of them is logic. Does the, the author of whatever text we're reading have consistent logic? Even if I agree with their opinions, I can recognize inconsistent, uh, sort of reasoning. I can recognize that. Another element of critical thinking is Evidence. Does the author use evidence? And do they use evidence that is consistent across the text? And so we're still reading text in order to analyze that, of course. And so, you know, I think a lot of the debates that I see happening, especially in EduTwitter and, you know, those types of spaces, they kind of make me sad because it's just, you know, I'm like, we're wasting precious time. You know, I think all of these conversations and all of the questions that teachers ask me make me a better facilitator. I love when teachers come up to me and say, I'm really having a hard time with what you're saying because I read this book, or I read this study, or in my own experience in my classroom. I love those types of conversations. And at the same time, I think some people make a career out of, out of being the naysayers in education and saying like, what everybody's saying is totally false. And it's not totally false. And so anyway, that's just, you know, my, my soapbox about a lot, a lot of the, the debates that are happening around there.

Don't worry, I'm with you on it for sure. I think I, I completely agree.

Back to your question about why is transfer so hard? I mean, gosh, I would just say it's because we teach students to focus on the details. We teach students that the details are superior to the sort of abstract. What I'm trying to say is that both are important and that we come to understand Concepts. I will overemphasize concepts in a training simply because they are underemphasized in schools. You know, sometimes some of the criticism that I'll get from my trainings occasionally will be, you know, especially from the mathematics world or something like that, is you're undervaluing procedural fluency. And I would say, oh no, no, no, you're already doing that. I know, I know you're not going to come to a 1-day talk from me or workshop from me and stop doing that. So I'll, I'll emphasize, like, can you pause and make sure students are understanding why they're doing what they're doing? And that's going to better facilitate transfer to new situations. And so, you know, Perkins and Salomon are two of the researchers that are, are strongest in the education world on transfer, and they, they call it the Little Bo Peep of transfer. There's a little poem, I don't know if your listeners know it, but it's Little Bo Peep has lost her sheep and doesn't know where to find them. Leave them alone, they'll come home wagging their tails behind them. And the idea is if you leave kids alone, you just teach them, you know, about World War II and then boom, Russia-Ukraine happens and there they should be able to take what they learned from, or, you know, some of the crazy stuff that's happened in the United States right now. You should be able to study the Holocaust. You should be able to study Nazism and you should be able to see that some of the same fascist elements are, are bubbling up in the United States right now. Mm-hmm. But not if you don't teach fascism and what are the critical attributes of fascism.

Yeah.

What is the critical attributes of authoritarianism and what is sovereignty? Sovereignty. And then you can, you know, for instance, go look and see that Russia is clearly violating the sovereignty of Ukraine. And so the idea really is to make sure that concepts are, to me, the heart of whatever it is we're teaching students, and they're pulling out those concepts each time they're studying specific context and situations.

Yeah, no, I think that's brilliant. And it, I mean, it ties up a lot of what we've said already. I mean, that, as you've just articulated, the deep structure that that underlies, you know, learning about World War II and then understanding Ukraine, Russia, Ukraine or whatever. And then even actually, you know, I completely with you on the false dichotomy thing. I think it's, it just fuels the education debate. Just, it's like rocket fuel and people love it. They kind of love it, but hate it.

Yes, absolutely.

So it's a really strange dynamic. And, you know, I'm not excluding myself from that. I get, you know, certainly get pulled into these debates, right? Knowledge, skills, et cetera. There was one recently on LinkedIn. But even what you've articulated there about evidence and logic, they're concepts. And if you use those concepts, right, to support the young people to, to take a concept and think about how does this concept as a lens help me understand and look at and critically think about the thing that I've just been learning. As you say, you're not doing it in a vacuum, you're doing it in the context of some specific examples, etc. So I'd love to get a bit more into the concept stuff if possible, but just one of the things I heard you say, which I thought was really interesting when you, you reflected on the way that your thinking had changed, you said hands-on learning. So I used to think hands-on learning will prepare my students for the future. And now I think conceptual organization and a culture of transfer to authentic settings will prepare my students for the future. And I just thought that was a really interesting kind of reflection on your part because I think so many people are having a discussion around hands-on learning will prepare my students for the future, like experiential learning, project-based learning, etc., like that's enough and it's not enough. I believe it's not enough.

Amen.

So it was so— I just found that really interesting for you to kind of publicly be saying, actually, in a way that was a little bit of a naive position And I've reflected on that and moved on. And actually, we need concepts and we need transfer, and this is where we go with it. So I don't know, was there anything else you wanted to say?

Yeah, no, I think, I think, you know, project-based learning is excellent. And a lot of times teachers will think, okay, we do this, Julie, already. We take the kids out, we clean up trash, we test the water in a river, and, you know, all of those things. And, you know, the question is, are students going to be able to transfer that to another pollution-oriented project? Are they able to take what they learned about the pollution in one river near, near the school and apply that to pollution in another river? Or are they able to transfer that to something like desertification, something like totally different, but it's still the concepts of human impact on the environment or changing environment or survival habitats, ecosystems. Those are all the concepts that we want students to explore. Through that hands-on learning. And I still think that, you know, hands-on is essential. And, you know, I still love even my young children to, to be able to use mathematics manipulatives. But, you know, that realization came out of my son in preschool being so excited about his quote unquote experiment. He came home with a little baggie of slime and, you know, he said basically he was so excited about this experiment and he thought he was doing something really sophisticated. So when I asked him what he learned, And he just looked around and said, "I don't, I don't know." And his face was kind of like, "Oh man, I don't know what I learned." And it, you know, I just thought, wow, what an opportunity to teach even a 4-year-old about solids and liquids and states of matter. And what happens when we combine solids and liquids? It creates something kind of in between this slimy stuff. You know, I just think we miss a lot of opportunities to use that hands-on learning to really make, make sure students are learning, as you say, the deeper structure of whatever it is they're exploring.

Yeah, no, that's great. And so if we step into the concepts specifically a bit more explicitly, maybe it's worth just unpacking a little bit what we mean, you know, what you mean by concepts and, and of course also what type of concept, because there's, there's a range of different concepts. It's not necessarily that they're one category, right?

Yeah, this was, this was the most of my latest book, Learning That Transfers. I have 3 co-authors, so there's 4 of us writing this book. And, you know, this was the thing we went round and round the most on and You know, I don't think all of us are super satisfied with what we settled on, but I think it's a cool thing for people to understand when you're writing a book, you know, at some point you just have to make a decision and move on because, but we have 4 types of concepts and they're really just a range of abstraction from really specific to really broad. So, you know, it starts with the really broad, which we would call transdisciplinary concepts. And those are often what people think about when they think about concepts. They think about change, system, pattern. Cycle, interdependence. The IB and the PYP have these, these sort of esoteric for little kids, like form, function, causation. And sometimes with the IB, they don't even really talk about those words necessarily with students. There's these questions that kind of go with it, like, what's it like? What's it made of? You know, those types of things. And so for me, those serve a role, but those are not my passion. The transdisciplinary concepts are not my passion. The next layer we call anchor concepts in our work, or disciplinary lenses. The ones that are really— and all the ones that I've used on this podcast so far, you know, ecosystems, habitat, survival, ally, even, you know, quantity, number, all of those things in mathematics— those are what, you know, the IB might call related concepts, those discipline-specific concepts. Those are, are the ones that I think are where the magic happens. I think when students are able to point their attention to those, they transfer more easily to new situations, and they help students to grasp that deeper structural patterns of how the discipline is organized. And then we have the next layer is sub-concepts. And, you know, we were sort of like, we don't know what to call these, or, or do we even make sense when we go transdisciplinary, disciplinary, anchor concepts? Because we want them to anchor a unit of study. We want those to be sort of the stars of the show. And then sub-concepts almost are so specific that they give a sharpness to the other concepts. And so like equality might sort of what we would call an anchor concept, equality. But then we think about what are like sub-concepts within equality. So we're thinking about equality or equal in mathematics. That's very different than equal if we're talking about the humanities or something like that. And so the sub-concepts sort of bring a sharpness to those concepts, but really just for your listeners, I probably went into too much detail for your listeners. I mean, for me, the magic happens. In those somewhat medium levels of concepts, those ones that are discipline-specific for the most part, but they transfer across the discipline from one situation in science or mathematics to another situation in science and mathematics. And those are the ones that I think teachers should be spending most of their time on.

Yeah, so you definitely didn't go into too much detail for me because I love it, and I want to— I'm desperate to ask you loads more questions to go into even more detail, but one question would be, where does the interdisciplinary work happen using concepts? Because obviously that's one of the things, again, also in the IB and in the Middle Years Programme, for example, taking concepts and using them to support two disciplines to come together and connect around the concept. So where does that— I mean, it might be equality, as you said, it might be ecosystems, as you— I mean, there's all sorts of ways that can happen. Is there a particular place where you think that happens in those 4 levels?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think, you know, there's a couple different ways that you can play with concepts to do interdisciplinary study. And I think that for young children, concepts such as interdependence are— you can't understand sustainability and the issues with our climate crisis if you don't understand the concepts of interdependence. And interdependence is such a great concept across all disciplines. If we're looking at word choice and, and things like that in, in literature or poems, it's really cool to kind of think about how if I change one part of this poem, it's going to impact the sort of overall mood of the poem or something like that. Or even music, arts. And so I think for young children— and this is something that I'm actually working on, it's probably going to be like a multi-year project— but I want to produce something akin to a conceptual framework for, you know, basically young children all the way up. And it's going to be broad enough to go because I work with schools all over the world with all kinds of different curricular frameworks. You know, I work with British schools that use more sort of Cambridge International. You know, I work with, of course, with schools in the United States. I work with a lot of IB schools. So I want it to be flexible enough. But I think that there are some concepts that are really essential for young kids to grasp. And they are more sort of transdisciplinary as well as those discipline-specific concepts. And so I think of things like equilibrium, interdependence, systems, you know, those types of— and of course I want my students to be recognizing pattern. That's the whole point. You know, what are the patterns? So the concept of pattern is almost like a starting point for kids. And so I think that, you know, those are really cool to kind of explore. How does interdependence play out in mathematics? How does equilibrium play out in health? How does equilibrium play out in science? Of course. How does equilibrium play out in mathematics? It's very interesting to think about the concept of equilibrium or balance or, you know, all of those sort of related words across disciplines and really applying those into the discipline. And so that's one way. A really exciting thing to think about, though, for me, especially in secondary, but probably also in primary or elementary as well, is if you take the concepts in one discipline and apply them to another discipline, even though it doesn't work. We know that like, this is where I think sometimes teachers are like, this woman. I actually recently had a director of teaching and learning say that a teacher went up to him, bless him, this is like a teacher who is, you know, super dedicated to the profession, but I think he probably also struggles from a little bit of anxiety. But he said, that woman is wild. And I actually took that as a compliment. That woman is wild. And so someone said, you need to put that on your business card. But I just, you know, I think when I look at innovation, so I'm constantly reading cognitive science, but I'm also thinking about the, that the fact that the world is literally and figuratively on fire. And so how do we get kids to solve problems that we currently don't know how to solve? And when I look at the sort of fields of innovation, there's a guy named Frans Johansson whom I love. He wrote a book called The Medici Effect, and he also wrote a book called The Click Moment. You know, why do sort of innovations just kind of click. And, you know, one of the things that he says is when you take the concepts from one field and you apply them to a radically different field, you get some pretty interesting innovation. And so, you know, I think that it's useful once you train students to think about concepts and to ask them how do they apply across wildly different situations. You know, I think it's actually also kind of fun.. And so, you know, there's so much potential for interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary.

Yeah.

Our book defines all, you know, defines 3 different ways you can think about what I call the umbrella term. I call this cross-disciplinary transfer. There's multiple ways you can play with it. And so I think all of those ways are interesting ways to play with. Your question was where does, you know, sort of interdisciplinary work lie? And I would say you could, it's so many different places. You could just look at a topic like water pollution, and everybody's looking at it, you know, from the lens of their own discipline. How does it— what is water pollution? Let's study it through the lens of mathematics. Let's study it, of course, through the lens of science. And I think that's only one way, and that's relatively basic, and that's how most schools do interdisciplinary. It's sort of not really interdisciplinary in the sense that they're not really having the disciplines talk to each other and learn from each other. You're sort of just in isolation, I would call that multidisciplinary, where each discipline is looking at one particular topic. But when the lines start to cross, to me, that's more interdisciplinary. And when the lines start to blur, that's more transdisciplinary. And I think there's a role in all of those in schools. I think, I think that it's fun. And, you know, sort of why not?

Yeah, no, I, I think you're absolutely right. And I love what you were saying about that kind of more radical repurposing and getting really radical concepts across into a, a space that doesn't, you know, it really doesn't seem like they fit. And it, it made me think of exaptation. There's, there's another concept for you, right?

Mm-hmm.

Um, new concept to me relatively recently, but Dave Snowden talks about it where, where human, like in evolution, we adapt from one— that's what biology does. It takes something that was designed for one purpose and uses it in a totally different purpose. Like, yeah, it gives the example of the number of different objects he's tried to use as a beer bottle opener in a hotel room.

That's a great example. Exactly.

So, but I think exactly that, right? You know, where they don't necessarily seem to initially fit, that's where some of the creativity comes.

Yeah.

But, but actually The concepts do, I mean, that's, that's kind of the point, isn't it? They are vehicles for creating connections between things sometimes that seem like they're far distant and sometimes they seem like they're definitely connected. That's right.

And if you know, you want it, you want to get real granular in, into the research. I've just read Figure It Out by Anderson and Fast and their book, their latest book is really about the use of visuals in the classroom because that's what my next book is going to be about. But they, they assert that all thinking is by analogy. Or, you know, you may hear like Elon Musk— you know, there's some interesting things about Elon Musk and some other innovators out there who's— who say there's two types of thinking. There's analogical thinking. Every single time we encounter something new, our brain is going, how is this similar to something I already know? And we learn by association. That's basically what analogy is saying, sort of by association. And something that I talk about in my workshops is a huge moment for me. A lot of this is through watching my my young children. I learned so many insights from them. But my 4-year-old, he's now, he's now 6, but at the time he said, Mom, in the, in the driveway with a hula hoop, he said, Mom, the moon is like the Earth's hula hoop because it orbits around it. And I was like, yep, exactly. I mean, that's an analogy, you know. So how is the moon like a hula hoop? And so that's kind of what we mean by applying principles from one situation to another situation. And orbit is the concept. And he He knew what that was at 4 years old. I was like, did you learn that from YouTube? Like, that's brilliant. But the other way of thinking is what, what a lot of sort of innovators will call first principles, which to me is also conceptual because they're like, let's get down to the essence of this particular discipline.

And that's first principles.

Distill it down. So to me, both of those, I see both of those as thinking about concepts, thinking about the deeper structure of any situation that you're looking at. And so I just think when we think about how we can train students to apply their learning from one situation to another, even situations that are not related, you know, I think that's really what we're doing every single time that we say, you know, love is like a rose, or, you know, whatever. Every time we say something is like something else that's really different, we're thinking through concepts.

Yeah.

And so one of the biggest studies done on transfers, it was replicated in, in the 1980s, were from Gick and Holyoake, and they do this whole study about transfer. Just to give your listeners a bit of research and an example of one field to another field. So I talked about my son with the moon in the orbit, but what they did was they told study participants of a few different stories, and a couple of them were of course distractor stories that had nothing to do with what they wanted them to do. But the one that was the one they wanted them to pay attention to was they told them about a fortress that a general needed to take over, but the paths to the fortress were booby-trapped such that if the weight of his entire troops passed on them, it would trip these booby traps and the military would be destroyed. So, you know, he could take these, a bunch of other paths to the fortress, but those paths couldn't fit the entire troop. And if they went on those paths, the weight was not such that it would, it wouldn't, you know, trip the booby traps. So what did he do? He figured out a way for the troops to be divided up and traverse these different paths and converge on the fortress at the exact same time. Well, the idea is basically divergence and convergence of force.

Yeah.

Right. And then they told the, the study participants a couple of distractor stories, and then they said, imagine there's a surgeon and the surgeon has to operate on a tumor, but the tumor has a bunch of healthy cells around it. And if they used a ray that was strong enough, it would destroy some of the healthy cells and tissue around it. So what should the surgeon do? Well, the answer is have a bunch of less, you know, powerful rays that sort of converge on the tumor at the same exact time. So it's not going to destroy the healthy tumors around there. And so that's what, you know, Gick and Holyoke found in this study, that if they told study participants— when you say transfer is so hard, this is one of the ways in which people say, oh, it's so hard, because most study participants couldn't do it. And so I would say, what if— and nobody's done this— what if we train kids to look for the concepts in new situations. Now let's do a study on that. But that study hasn't been conducted. When they told study participants, is there something from one of those other stories that you can apply to this surgeon problem? Then if they prompted students, then they could do it. And they sort of concluded from that. I always chuckle. They concluded like, we should like gesture to students, like we should draw things and be like, can you look at this problem and gesture to students? And so I would say, you know, that, okay, sure, that's a strategy and I'm writing a book about better use of visuals in the classroom. However, if the students were able to recognize, okay, this general use divergence and convergence, of course, then that's a way for them to apply it to a completely— and that's, that's what we mean by innovation. Like, can kids apply what their insights from one situation to a completely different situation?

Yeah. Do you know Mary Helen Imerdino Young's work? Because I mean, she's just, I think she's just incredible. But so I've had, I had an amazing conversation with her on the podcast as well. But one of the things I think just really connects with what you were saying there that she talks about is this kind of zooming in, zooming out.

Yeah.

That happens because it's like step back, big meaning. What's the big broad implications? What does this mean in the context of other, of other things? And then zooming in again to the detail and then out. And this kind of, these, these neural networks that do that, like tickling up, she kind of called it, or this like seesaw between these different, I mean, it's, it really. Resonates there with what you are saying about that ability to see the detail, step back from the detail and see the bigger picture or the big connecting organizing ideas, and then back into the— so it's almost toggling between the two. And I think there's a real, there's a real resonance there between the neuroscience research and then some of this practice-based insights. I think it's, I think it's really interesting.

Absolutely. And I think a lot of times when I, when, when people hear me speak, I'm speaking a lot about the zooming out because I think often we focus on the details. It's sort of like missing the forest for the trees. We almost teach in this checklist style of learning. And so that's still important. I'm not going to just hang out in the clouds looking at the forest. It's zooming in and zooming out. I think absolutely that really resonates with you.

Yeah, but that rebalancing that you talked about earlier, it's the same as the false dichotomies that you also referred to earlier because it's not We're not saying we don't need the detail, the really fine-grained, context-specific, rich detail examples. But if you only have that, and that is, that is often what education has really focused on. And then we ask the question, why aren't these young people transferring this detail to a new context? Like, because we've been so zoomed in.

That's right.

That it's like, in order to rebalance, yeah, we need to zoom out a bit, but it doesn't, it doesn't mean we stay there.

Exactly.

But it's this toggling between the two that I think is— that's where the magic happens. And I think 100% super interesting. Yeah.

Yeah. And I think a couple of things that you mentioned I'd love to touch on, if okay with you. One is the idea of mastery, which is also sort of that sort of somewhat false dichotomy and also negative transfer. How— what if kids apply their learning to a new situation and it's not correct? So those are two things that I see sort of out there that people get a little bit nervous about. A minority, a vast minority of people. The vast majority of teachers are like, amen, this totally works. I was kind of doing this, but you gave me much more specific tools and strategies where I can do it much more explicitly and not have this sort of Bo Peep theory of transfer where I'm like, why are my kids not transferring? And that's, that's kind of what I do with teachers is zooming in and zooming out. I'm like, look at this, how amazing this can happen. Okay, do a concept attainment in your classroom. Here's step 1, step 2, step 3. And so, you know, a lot of times I'm zooming out out with what's possible and then zooming in with really concrete instructional strategies that teachers can use. But let's go to— let's— if okay with you, can we talk about mastery? That's something that I'm just playing with, and I'm a little bit skeptical of the idea that you need a certain amount of expertise or, or background knowledge or a threshold amount of knowledge before you can think conceptually or before you can transfer. Sometimes people will say that to me, and, you know, I used to be a little more cautious about that, but I've been doing this now for 12 years. And so I just, I've seen it with my own eyes in so many schools around the world. And so I just think that when we focus student attention on the deeper structural patterns, I think it gives them faster insight into areas of expertise. And, you know, I, I also think that what we just talked about, about transferring from radically different situations, also suggests to me that there's not necessarily a, a students must acquire this basic knowledge before they can think conceptually. Like with my 4-year-old saying the moon is like the Earth's hula hoop, I mean, I think that the concept of orbit, he doesn't know that much about the solar system, but you know, he was able to sort of grasp that and make that connection right there in our driveway. And so I just think sometimes we have to be a little bit careful when sometimes teachers will say to me like, oh, their kids aren't ready to do that yet. And I would, I would push back on that. I say, you know, I used to think that. I used to teach in Southeast Washington, DC. I used to teach 10th and 11th graders who are among sort of the, the most disenfranchised humans on Earth. Because Washington, DC— your listeners probably don't know this, but Washington, DC is not a state in the United States. The US Congress, none of which are, are elected by these people, can override anything that the city of Washington, DC— any law that the city of Washington, DC passes. I mean, this is a group of kids who were coming to us several grade levels behind on math, literacy, etc., on content knowledge. And I was doing all of these strategies with those kids. And, you know, I used to think, oh gosh, they have to have like World War II, they have to know what is Europe, what are these countries. I used to think they have to acquire all this background knowledge. And then I started playing with Okay guys, do you know how sometimes if your best friend gets in a fight with somebody, suddenly you're involved? And they're like, yeah, yeah, Miss Stern, we totally know that, you know. And I'm like, that's the idea of allies. And that can— that idea can spawn world wars. And they know it because they know it in their neighborhoods. And so, you know, just the idea of you have to acquire a certain threshold of background knowledge about any situation before you can apply your prior learning to it is something that I'm skeptical of. And another, you know, piece of research around that, in addition to my own experience, is again Franz Johansson and also the author of Range, David Epstein, says that actually if it's a field that very rarely changes, and the examples they give are chess and tennis, you know, chess and tennis have been quote unquote innovated very little over time, but they're Pretty much everything else in today's world changes at a pace where you are gonna have to learn, you know, one model, make and model of a car and apply it to another make and model of a car, you know? And so they say basically if it's a field that never changes or that very slowly changes, yes, the sort of 10,000 hours and the practice and the mastery and all of that makes a lot of sense. But pretty much for everything else, it's economic, if not beneficial, it's efficient, I should say, to think about concepts and how your prior knowledge applies to this new situation. And so I think for both of those reasons, the idea of mastery is something that, or, you know, a threshold of facts before you think conceptually makes me a little bit skeptical.

I completely agree. And I think I did actually she asked that exact question, I think, to Mary Helen, because it's like, of course, we're always looking for things that will make the learning more efficient and these silver bullets in education. So we need to be careful of that. But at the same time, and chess is always there as the kind of the paradigm case, right? It's always chess. But exactly that, that example of the things that helped the chess masters to be, I mean, I can't remember the name of the person who did the famous research, but the masters were masters because they had so many iterations of the chessboard to draw on from their long-term memory. And this is the, you know, this is the kind of paradigmatic kind of example or argument for we need to teach kids loads of, loads of knowledge so that they can have really richly full long-term memories to draw on. And again, it's not a dichotomy, right? We're not saying they don't need that, but I think what What I hear you saying, and I, I completely agree, is that it would be beneficial to them while we are taking them through specific examples.

That's right.

To be helping them to see as efficiently as possible, what are the organizing ideas that underpin all of that? And I think the kind of, the hypothesis would be that that's gonna take them further faster in terms of identifying connections across and, and organizing and understanding kind of the deeper structure and the, the structuring principles and in, in terms of sense-making just generally in their lives. Right. And, but it, it's, I think that's one of the challenges that the, whatever you wanna call it, more progressive end of education struggles with is it's very easy to reach for the cognitive science research that shows the kind of X plus Y equals Z in the cases like, as you say, disciplines where things don't change very much, but things get very fuzzy very quickly when you start talking about industries that change rapidly or, you know, trying to do research in school contexts where there's multi-variables, you know, interacting all the time. But it's a conversation that needs to keep happening. And I think people like Mary Helen are actually bringing some of the research to bear on exactly that.

100%. And so, yeah, I think, you know, I do think that again, it comes down to this false dichotomy that sometimes people get nervous that we're going to— we're not going to zoom in or we're not going to, you know, have kids memorize certain things. There are certain things that kids do need to memorize, you know. So I started to weave that into my workshops more explicitly. So I started to say understanding first, memorization second. And so, you know, that's some— one teacher said, can I get that on a t-shirt? And I was like, yeah, because, you know, I think kids need to understand why they're doing what they're doing with their times tables by looking at arrays, by again the hands-on learning, looking at multiple different sort of math bricks and things like that. And then they need to just memorize their times tables. So my son is in 3rd grade and I'm like, dude, we've got to just sit down with some flashcards and you got to just do this quickly. It's just a way in which you don't have to second-guess yourself. You don't have to say, is this right? You just know that, you know, 5 times 6 equals 30. Like, that's just period, end of story. You don't have to like keep asking yourself over and over again, is that you know, counting on your fingers and all of those things. And at the same time, we do have to ask ourselves as educators, what are things that maybe we might want to let go that kids have sort of with automaticity and with memorization? And so, you know, one of the things for my husband and I talk about is coins. We had to like search around the house for— I mean, we're international families, we move all the time. So maybe this is simply because we move a lot, but we couldn't find— we're in the United States right now— we couldn't find a quarter and a penny and a nickel and a dime to sort of teach this to our kids.. And so we had to like go digging around like the couch cushions trying to find coins. And we, you know, those are one of those things where I'm like, if we never use these and we're digging in the couch, is it something that my 8-year-old really needs to know? And maybe it's just to quickly recognize them and their value, but do they need to know that it's Abraham Lincoln on the front and that it's the Lincoln Memorial on the back of the penny? Like, that's kind of what I mean by we have to really— I know that. Because I used coins growing up. But like, really, I'm not sure. No, it's, it's actually Thomas Jefferson who's on the nickel. You know, that level of detail. There's sometimes we have to just ask ourselves, is that something that our kids need to know automatically, or can they Google it? Like, if they really need to know who's on the penny.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, absolutely. The other thing that's going on there is probably a cultural transmission piece as well, that the education gets pulled into that space as well. And it's like understanding your history and these kind of, you know, so it's not actually about the money, it's not Actually about, you know, it's about actually the transmission of cultural values. These are our heroes. What is a hero? These are the people we value. This is our kind of shared history, shared— there's a whole load of stuff going on, isn't there? That, and this is why education gets, it gets, well, it is deeply complex because there's so many things happening all the time and we're not just teaching the thing we think we're teaching. But, but anyway, sorry, there was another point you wanted to make.

Well, I just think I wanted to make about negative transfer. So, you know, in our book and in all of my publications, I've been talking about concepts and conceptual learning. We talk about when you transfer, we have rubrics, we have success criteria, we have all the, you know, the buzzwords that people might need to use in their particular settings that says students need to transfer with caution. They need to say, how does my prior knowledge apply? How does my prior knowledge not apply? Or we use the phrases like contradict or complicate, you know, how does this new situation contradict what I understood about concepts? How does this new situation complicate what I understood about concepts? Does it confirm? There's many times it does confirm, but, you know, we sort of use those different Cs to say sometimes it contradicts what we thought we understood and we have to revise our conceptual understanding based on this new situation. And that's particularly true for the humanities, I think, especially you know, social studies, those types of disciplines. There's always an exception. Things are always changing. There's always, you know, one example where this didn't apply or any sort of human-centered disciplines, as we just talked about with education, are inherently very messy, very noisy. There's not a bunch of hard and fast rules that always apply. And so we do really want our students to ask themselves how, in light of this new situation, How might I need to revise my understanding? And that's a critical part of the journey. And to me, it's sort of risk analysis, like the fear that kids might negatively transfer, might apply their learning to a new situation that doesn't work quite how they think it does, is not in and of itself a reason to not teach conceptually.

Well, it's almost the reason to teach conceptually because, because they're going to do that anyway, right?

They're not going to not do it anyway.

They're not going to not transfer what they've learned to a new situation because that's what humans do, right? That's what we do.

That's right.

And how much of that do you want them to go out into the world with a sense of confidence and kind of shared understanding about how they might do that and a language around it? And how much do you want them to just fumble in blindly and just go, well, I'm going to do this anyway. Here goes. I'm out in the real world now. Here goes.

Yes.

Miss Stern's not telling me what to do anymore. I mean, it's like we need to have these conversations really.

100%.

Yeah. No, brilliant.

So, all right. One last piece then is if we could kind of zoom out, because I think what you do and the way you situate your work has this kind of big zoom out, right? You've got this kind of theory of change and your, you know, website's Ed to Save the World. There's something going on right now. Maybe, I mean, you know, we're not alone. It's not the first time in history this has happened, but there's some deep complexity going on right now, particularly for young people. How do they navigate all of this stuff that's happening with rapid climate change, with social media, with meaning crisis, with, with identity? It's incredibly complex, right? For all of us, not just young people, but particularly young people going into that and us as the adults who supposedly are supporting them and helping them to kind of step into that. I'd love, yeah, if you could just talk through what your kind of theory of change is that maybe gives you your energy and impetus for why you do this work? Because I think it's really profound.

Yeah.

I mean, if I could just share, just above my computer as we're speaking here is my— I put my life's purpose. I think that my purpose is I'm here on Earth to help people to recognize concepts and reconsider concepts and their connections in new situations. And I think that if we're able to do that, that is going to help us solve these big thorny challenges that are out there. And, you know, really, it's a sense sense-making tool. It's a way to say, I'd never seen this before, but have no fear. I know concepts. I can figure out what lies at the heart of this situation. I can ask an expert who's more experienced than I am some key questions that really will give me insight into this situation. And then I can sort of maybe even reconceptualize what's going on so that I can think of innovative solutions. I think that's why I'm here on earth and, and what I'm trying to do with all of my work.

No, that's brilliant. And that you talked about, I heard you talk about agency and adaptability and that, and it, so it gives that sense of, it's kind of implicit in what you've just said, gives that sense of agency and adaptability with that ability to even just have the language. If you need to go and ask for help, if you've got a conceptual language to use to ask, you're not afraid of going cuz you maybe don't know enough about this thing. And I, I think it's a critical piece of what's going on right now. And I, I agree that that's what the purpose of education generally needs to kind of reorient around. But that doesn't necessarily mean that's another false dichotomy that we stop doing everything we have done. It's just, it's a refocusing and a reprioritization around some deep things that really, that really have significance.

Yeah. Keep doing the hands-on and the other sort of zooming in pieces and, you know, more frequently zoom out and ask your students to really look for those deeper structural patterns that are making the situation make sense in the teacher's minds. You know, oftentimes I'll say to them, this is organized in your brain, it's just not in the kids' brains. And so how can we help sort of expedite that, that conceptual organization in their brains?

Yeah, the curse of knowing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely amazing. Thank you so much. I really appreciate your time, and this is a really inspiring for me conversation, but I hope for the listeners too.

So thank you. Yes, lovely to chat with you. Thank you so much, Tim.

Amazing.

Thanks, Tim. See you.

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