Episodes
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In order to understand learning, we need to understand the result of learning - expertise. This is much easier to approach in so-called "kind" domains, such as chess, where the rules are fixed and all information is available. However, there exist more "wicked" domains than this, such as tennis (where your opponent changes each match) or stock market investment (where the world is different each time). How do we study the development of expertise in fields such as these?
Chapter 22 of The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance, entitled Toward Deliberate Practice in the Development of Entrepreneurial Expertise: The Anatomy of the Effectual Ask, concerns expertise in the art of entrepreneurship. This is a wicked domain par excellence, so much so as to throw into doubt the applicability or at least the generalisability of ideas about expertise from other domains, and yet the Handbook has a chapter approaching this topic, which is commendable.
In this episode, you will hear about two key concepts that have arisen out of research on expert entrepreneurship - the Effectual vs. Predictive Frame; and the Entrepreneurial Ask. In other words, we will look at what research has to say about successful entrepreneurs' true attitudes vs. the popular conception in the media, and how they develop their skills.
Enjoy the episode.
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RELATED EPISODES
125. Entrepreneurship education and conspicuous consumption
125+. Interview with Rasmus Koss Hartman
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There has been a ton of research on how experts see things differently than novices. (Like, with their eyes.) Everything from where they look, how long they focus for, and their use of peripheral vision, to their ability to anticipate what is going to happen through picking up subtle visual patterns.
In this episode, I summarise and discuss this research.
Enjoy the episode.
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Missing episodes?
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Mindset was the first thing I spoke about on this podcast. I even did a separate episode going into the controversies surrounding replication of Carol Dweck's original work. Then there were stress mindsets, introduced by Kelly McGonigal in her book The Upside of Stress. (I happen to have also covered a book by her twin sister Jane, Reality is Broken, about applying the motivational principles learned by game designers in wider life situations).
But now I've encountered another kind of mindset: self-motivation mindset. Although the authors of Self-Regulation of Motivation: A Renewable Resource for Learning (2019) didn't name it that, it clearly is a type of mindset, in that it is a belief about oneself and one's potential. So now that we have not one, not two, but three mindsets to think about, I think it's time we tried to generalise as much as we can, and simply admit: mindsets matter. What other beliefs could there be that are affecting people's learning?
Enjoy the episode.
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RELATED EPISODES
1. Mindset by Carol Dweck
68. The Upside of Stress by Kelly McGonigal
131. Mindset: Does it Replicate?
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I haven't spoken on the podcast yet about my personal experience learning dancing. At university, I took part in dancesport, which is competitive ballroom and latin dancing; and in the last few years I have been learning to dance tango. I am struck by the differences in philosophies, skill sets, values, and learning cultures between these dance styles, so I wanted to share my experience with you.
Enjoy the episode.
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Music used in this episode:
Uno by Anibal Troilo https://open.spotify.com/track/5TFzKLS8tjVMikVaOllr8L?si=69d0c8fbee934d2e
Orgullo Criollo by Osvaldo Pugliese https://open.spotify.com/track/74CjrywI50qOpaLrXo02ik?si=91b1644591a74407
Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go by Wham! https://open.spotify.com/track/0ikz6tENMONtK6qGkOrU3c?si=76304e73b1b04754
Dear Future Husband by Meghan Trainor https://open.spotify.com/track/3cU2wBxuV6nFiuf6PJZNlC?si=0dd4a5e2a23c46bc
...plus one surprise I won't spoil.
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This is my first ever attempt at a VIDEO podcast. If you just listen to the audio, you should be fine.
This was a video produced for the STEM MAD conference in Melbourne in October 2023. Unfortunately I couldn't attend the conference, so I made this video to introduce the panel discussion on the role of generative AI in education.
Enjoy the episode.
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This is a quick review of where I am now after 150 episodes and just short of 8 years of Education Bookcast.
Thanks for all of your support! Feel free to leave a review of the podcast, or, if you wish, support me on https://www.buymeacoffee.com/edubookcast .
Enjoy the episode.
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Since I've now reached episode 150, I've decided to do something I've never done before - discuss a fiction book. (This episode contains spoilers.)
A Wizard of Earthsea is a fantasy novel from 1968, a time when the genre was still not very well-developed. Ursula Le Guin deliberately wanted to contravene some trends she saw in the existing genre, including the main characters being fair-skinned, and war as a moral analogy. In this book, the key issues are internal to a character, a fact that becomes increasingly clear as we read further.
The main character Ged (a.k.a. Sparrowhawk) goes through several educational regimes - a local witch who wants to take advantage of him; a regional wizard, Ogion, who hopes to provide him with the wisdom not to abuse his precocious powers; and a school, on the island of Roke, which teaches him all the knowledge he wants. Ged learns through bitter experience the value of Ogion's wisdom, though he spurns it as a child hungry for knowledge, power, and other people's approval.
I've read this book at least four times, and in three languages - English, Polish, and Spanish. Although its relevance to education is tenuous, I wanted to take advantage of episode 150 to talk about the book I've read the greatest number of times in my life.
Enjoy the episode.
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A lot of the classic expertise research, especially the research about deliberate practice and the "10,000 hour rule", is inspired by K. Anders Ericcson's study of violinists at the Berlin Conservatory. However, we have seen before how misleading sampling a particular culture and generalising the findings over the whole of humanity can be. Thankfully, Lucy Green's How Popular Musicians Learn gives us something of an antidote to this classical music bias.
Green's book is based on interviews with 14 musicians in south-east England, of which 13 were instrumentalists and one, a singer. Their musical genres were all "guitar-based popular music" which includes rock and folk music. In her book, a number of findings undermine standard narratives about learning, including the inevitability of practice being unpleasant (the musicians enjoy their practice, unline classical musicains); the need for sheet music in order to learn (they all worked from recordings, and most couldn't read music); and the need for instruction (none of these musicians had been extensively formally trained, and those who had been had found it unhelpful).
Enjoy the episode.
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RELATED EPISODES
Check out other episodes on anthropology and culture, and how they help provide wider samples for our understanding of psychology:
144. Developing Talent in Young People by Benjamin Bloom
121. Attachment Theory as Cultural Ideology
116. Cultural Foundations of Learning, East and West by Jin Li
106. The Anthroplogy of Childhood by David Lancy
89. The World Until Yesterday by Jared Diamond
39. The Geography of Thought by Richard NIsbett
SUPPORT
You can support Education Bookcast and join the community forum via Buy Me a Coffee using the following link: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/edubookcast .
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Any teacher in a Western cultural context knows that classroom behaviour is the most challenging part of the job. A lot of the time, it seems like crowd control is the main issue, and "teaching" is secondary. Unfortunately, teacher training courses don't do a good job of preparing teachers for this reality, with behaviour management rarely instructed at all.
Bill Rogers has been helping teachers develop their classroom behaviour management and discipline skills for decades. He has brought his calm and relationship-focused approach to innumerable schools, often including those with very challenging behaviour, or those in "special measures". His practical insights into what to do in the classroom, and the principles behind his approach, offer a valuable guide for teachers struggling with this aspect of their jobs.
I intend this to be one of several behaviour management books that I will cover on the podcast. Hopefully, in this way I can direct some teachers and school leaders to some useful resources, share some practical advice, and draw some general conclusions about school discipline and learning.
Enjoy the episode.
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SUPPORT
You can support Education Bookcast and join the community forum via Buy Me a Coffee using the following link: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/edubookcast .
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Dr Guy Emerson (a.k.a Guy Karavengleman) is a computational linguist working at the Cambridge University Computer Laboratory. In this episode, we discuss issues surrounding LLMs such as ChatGPT, GPT-3, GPT-4, and Google Bard.
Guy is concerned about misinterpretations of what the technology does and is capable of. As a computational linguist, he works on language models with a focus on semantics and human language acquisition, and thus questions of linguistic meaning and understanding are particularly relevant to his work. While LLMs are an impressive technology with startling capabilities, we need to be aware of when we may be fooling ourselves about their potential.
In this episode, we discuss what LLMs are; ways in which they have been misrepresented and misinterpreted; ethical questions about the companies developing this technology; and what they might be used for.
Enjoy the episode.
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SUPPORT
You can support the podcast and join the community forum by visiting https://www.buymeacoffee.com/edubookcast .
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In the second part of this two-part episode about lessons learned from my time working in the education technology sector, I wanted to share a very significant quantitative finding to improve learning: what I call the "90% rule".
Desirable difficulties is a concept that many know about and try to apply to teaching situations, but there is a question of how difficult one should make things. Surely there is a level at which things are too difficult? In which case, what is the perfect level of difficulty that we should aim for? The secret is this 90% number.
Enjoy the episode.
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REFERENCES
Eglington, L.G., Pavlik Jr, P.I. Optimizing practice scheduling requires quantitative tracking of individual item performance. npj Sci. Learn. 5, 15 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41539-020-00074-4
See also the SuperMemo Guru wiki: https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Optimum_interval.
SUPPORT
If you would like to support Education Bookcast and join the community forum, you can do so at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/edubookcast.
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I've now been working as a data scientist in educational technology for over four years. In that time I've thought a lot about various educational concepts within edtech, and I want to share some of what I've learnt.
In the first part of this two-part episode, I want to talk about what I call the Fundamental Duality of Educational Materials. The Fundamental Duality is that we use our content to measure our students / users (e.g. what they know), but we also use our users to measure our content (e.g. how difficult it is). This leads to a sort of chicken-and-egg problem, where all we see is the interaction of the users with the content, but from that single fact we have to somehow extract information about the two different interacting entities.
For example, suppose that a user gets a question wrong. This could mean one of a number of things:
Is the question difficult? Does the user not know this area very well?There is also a third possibility: Is this question faulty? i.e. did the user actually answer the question correctly, but it was marked as incorrect due to a bug in the system, or in the way the content was created?
Answering these questions is difficult because they are apparently all possible in this situation. This is an illustration of the Fundamental Duality.
In the episode, I make some mention of Item Response Theory (IRT), which is a method used in computerised adaptive testing (CAT) to handle this very issue. But IRT is quite difficult to explain to a lay audience, especially without the use of images, so I will focus on Elo and Glicko rating systems as examples of handling this duality.
Enjoy the episode.
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You can support Education Bookcast and join the community forum by visiting https://www.buymeacoffee.com/edubookcast.
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This is the second part of the message for my friend Guy about becoming a better lecturer. In this part, I go over 27 practical techniques and tips for improving lecturing (as well as improving the way homework exercises are designed), referring to the principles and theory outlined in the previous part to explain how and why these work. To be completely honest some of the suggestions are more general pedagogical suggestions rather than being specific to lecturing, but I decided to throw them in as well for completeness.
Enjoy the episode.
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You can support Education Bookcast and join the community forum by visiting https://www.buymeacoffee.com/edubookcast.
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Another in the series of "really long voice notes from Staś". My friend Guy is a lecturer in natural language processing. He asked me if I could give him some tips about how to lecture better, so I told him I would record a podcast episode about it.
I've divided the episode into two parts. In this first part, before we speak about practical things to do, I will discuss what the basic aims are, and some important preliminary framing questions - what are we trying to achieve? How does learning work? And when can I stop punching the ground with my fist?
There is some extra pressure when talking about how to be a good lecturer, as in effect I might ironically give a bad lecture about how to lecture well. I think I did ok.
Enjoy the episode.
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You can support Education Bookcast and join the community forum by going to https://www.buymeacoffee.com/edubookcast.
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Benjamin Bloom is best known for Bloom's Taxonomy, a scheme for categorising ways of thinking about or interacting with learning content on a scale from less to more sophisticated. However, the project he led investigating the lifelong development of expertise should be much more famous.
The book's full title makes it feel as though it was published in 1685 rather than 1985: The dramatic findings of a ground-breaking study of 120 immensely talented individuals reveal astonishing new information on Developing Talent in Young People. Bloom's team looked at extraordinary achievers in six domains: pianists, sculptors, swimmers, tennis players, mathematicians, and neurologists, so that he had two each from artistic, athletic, and academic pursuits. He was trying to understand the life circumstances during childhood and adolescense - particularly the practice routines and social milieu - which led to the development of the subjects' expertise.
Their research methods were unusual. Rather than using a large sample and taking quantitative data (which would have been difficult anyway due to the lack of a large number of exceptional people, by definition) or presenting qualitative interviews of individual case studies, Bloom's team interviewed around 20-30 people from each domain and then summarised the findings of these interviews. It leaves us with a sense of the qualitative experience of going through their learning processes, while also reducing the chances of over-generalising from a single case.
Pianists were the main focus of discussion where Bloom and his colleauges tried to generalised the findings, although all six categories had a full exposition as to the findings for their domain in particular. The pianists followed an especially clear pattern which is worth starting from, and subsequently comparing with the others.
In the context of an abundance of information about how people think and learn on shorter timescales (from seconds to weeks), having information about how people develop over the lifespan is invaluable. I will definitely be referring to this book a lot in future.
Enjoy the episode.
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RELATED EPISODES
This book is related to the development of expertise, which I talk about on a lot of episodes, but the one specific one I mentioned in the recording was:
22. The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle
SUPPORT
You can support Education Bookcast and join the community forum via Buy Me a Coffee using the following link: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/edubookcast.
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Cover image: horse and rider by Nadia, age 5.
The nature of talent is something that I dealt with near the beginning of the existence of Education Bookcast, reviewing books like Genius Explained, Outliers, The Talent Code, and Bounce. The general consensus was that talent is an illusion - people simply get better at things through exposure and practice.
My confidence in this assertion was shaken when reading the IQ literature, but now, in the book The Road to Excellence edited by K. Anders Ericsson, the article The Rage to Master: the Decisive Role of Talent in the Visual Arts by Ellen Winner. She points out how some exceptional children are obsessed with drawing, and draw in a way that is qualitatively different to ordinary children. She argues that the aforementioned orthodoxy of talent apparently not really existing is in fact incorrect, in light of these prodigies and their extraordinary output.
In the recording, I discuss these findings and try to find a way to put it all together. Benjamin Bloom's book Developing Talent in Young People also comes in handy, as not only does Ellen Winner cite it (incorrectly, in my view), but he also provides a valuable insight into his forty years of research into learning in schools which helps us make sense of the conundrum of talent's apparent non-existence while we have well-documented examples of extraordinarily talented individuals, in the visual arts at least.
Enjoy the episode.
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RELATED EPISODES
18. Bounce by Matthew Syed
20. Genius Explained by Michael Howe
22. The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle
24. Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
SUPPORT
You can support the podcast and join the community forum by visiting https://buymeacoffee.com/edubookcast.
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Season 2 of the Pedagogue-Cast is here!
The Pedagogue-Cast is a separate podcast project I share with Justin Matthys, founder of Maths Pathway. We discuss the kinds of questions that teachers might have about good practice which touch on cognitive science, making sure both to make the most of the research findings while also making it practical for use in the classroom.
In this new season, Justin and I are going to discuss music, flow, focus, student choice, social & emotional learning interventions, and how motivation develops over time.
Some places where you can find the Pedagogue-Cast:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-pedagogue-cast/id1637019084 - Apple podcasts
https://open.spotify.com/show/437GYDF4jkkFxfkGR4cknc - Spotify
https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5idXp6c3Byb3V0LmNvbS8xOTg0NDY3LnJzcw?hl=en - Google podcasts
You can also try searching for the Pedagogue-Cast in your favourite podcast app.
Enjoy!
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After my last episode on behaviourism, cognitivism, and constructivism ("A Message for Zoë"), I heard back from Zoë herself, and also heard from Malin Tväråna, an education researcher in Sweden. I decided that it was worth recording an episode relating what I heard from them, and my thoughts about it.
Enjoy the episode.
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REFERENCES
Miłosz, Czesław (1953): The Captive Mind.
Radford, Luis (2016): The Theory of Objectification and its Place among Sociocultural Research in Mathematics Education.
Radford, Luis (2018): Teaching and learning (algebra or something else): Working together to make sense of similarities and differences between theories (and understanding oneself).
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My friend Zoë (hi Zoë!) is taking a course on learning design. In it, she heard about Behaviourism, Cognitivism, and Constructivism, and while she said that she found it confusing, her main takeaway is that "you need a bit of each". I recorded this episode to help her have a clearer sense of what these three words really mean, and that "a bit of each" is emphatically not the right message.
I thought that others might benefit from the same summary. This is a frequent topic in education courses, and I think it generally gets a pretty poor treatment. Hopefully this will clear things up for a lot of people.
Enjoy the episode.
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RELATED EPISODES
Note how the distribution of episodes reflects the importance of topics. Behaviourism is important to know about but it really isn't current as a way of thinking about learning, it's more of a historical relic with some lasting applicability to animal training. Constructivism is a mistaken and misleading theory that keeps negatively affecting educational practice and never seems to go away, so I keep having to talk about it. Cognitivism is a really effective approach which deserves to be known more widely - it took me a long time to find out about it, hence why the episodes about it tend to be more recent.
Behaviourism: 3. Don't Shoot the Dog! The New Art of Teaching and Training by Karen Pryor
Constructivism: 42. Do Schools Kill Creativity? by Ken Robinson; 65. Beyond the Hole in the Wall by Sugata Mitra; 87. Experiential Learning by Colin Beard and John Wilson; 88. The Failure of Constructivist, Discovery, Problem-based, Experiential, and Inquiry-based Teaching; 90. Discovery learning: the idea that won't die; 124. The Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences
Cognitivism: 79. What learning is; 80. The Chimp Paradox by Prof Steve Peters; 82. Memorable Teaching by Pepps McCrea; 85. Why Don't Students Like School? by Daniel Willingham; 95. The Reading Mind by Dan Willingham; 132a. Direct Instruction and Project Follow Through; 132b. Direct Instruction: the evidence; 135. Professional writing expertise; 136. Congitive architecture and ACT-R; 136+. Interview with Prof. Christian Lebiere on ACT-R and Cognitive Architecture
REFERENCES
I mention the following article as one where the authors (eminent figures in cognitive architecture, one of whom is a Nobel Prize winner) ask Constructivists to stop misrepresenting their work and saying things in direct contradiction to the evidence.
Anderson, Reder, & Simon (1999). Applications and Misapplacations of Cognitive Psychology to Mathematics Education.
SUPPORT
You can support the podcast and join the community forum by visiting https://www.buymeacoffee.com/edubookcast.
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In the previous recording, I was speaking about political economy using the example of prison gangs, taken from David Skarbek's book Social Order of the Underworld. In this recording, I give the example of 18th-century Atlantic pirates, as discussed in Peter Leeson's The Invisible Hook. (It's a pun on Adam Smith's "invisible hand of the market".)
We may have an image of pirates as fearsome, but this is at least somewhat deliberately manufactured by the pirates themselves. They wanted to have such a reputation so that their victims wouldn't resist as they looted their ships. There are parts of the pirate lifestyle, such as democracy and voluntarism, that we don't tend to discuss because they were part of life on a pirate ship but not something that they felt the need to advertise widely.
What is most notable is that pirates' way of life seemed to be significantly preferable, and their governance significantly more "progressive", than that on merchant ships, which tended to be highly autocratic and abusive. It also provides a different perspective when we realise that sailors went into piracy at a time of labour market oversupply due to the ending of the War of Spanish Succession, when the British Navy didn't have the funds to keep on so many sailors, and yet this was the career of tens of thousands of young men who now had to find a job elsewhere.
Overall, in these two recordings, I hope to have shown you that thinking about people's motivations and situations from the perspective of political economy makes a lot more sense, and builds a much richer picture, than merely psychological or sociological explanations (such as childhood trauma, psychopathy, or people's fundamental evil or violent nature). With this in mind, I hope that in future we can use more of this thinking when considering education, so that we can understand better how it works and how to improve it.
Enjoy the episode.
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