Ep 51. Rocking the times tables with Brunno Reddy
This transcript was created with speech-to-text software. It was reviewed before posting but may contain errors. Credit to Jazmin Boisclair.
You can listen to the episode here: Chalk & Talk Podcast.
Ep 51. Rocking the times tables with Bruno Reddy
Timestamps:
[00:00:00] Introduction
[00:04:50] The origin story of Times Tables Rock Stars
[00:14:20] Global times tables competitions
[00:15:38] The impact of TTRS on math outcomes
[00:18:20] How to motivate students to practice
[00:22:56] The importance of positive math experiences
[00:28:25] Choral chants and community building
[00:30:54] Lessons learned from the Shanghai teacher exchange program
[00:34:50] Variation theory
[00:43:37] Implementing mastery learning
[00:50:28] Fluency: What most math programs get wrong
[00:52:29] The importance of times tables
[00:56:05] Finding common ground in educational debates
[00:00:00] Anna Stokke: Welcome to Chalk & Talk, a podcast about education and math. I'm Anna Stokke, a math professor and your host.
Welcome back to another episode of Chalk & Talk. My guest in this episode is Bruno Reddy, CEO and founder of Maths Circle, best known for creating Times Tables Rock Stars and NumBots. We talked about his journey from founding a school to creating Times Tables Rock Stars, which grew out of a need to boost students' basic math skills.
Bruno shares some great ideas on how to generate excitement in the math classroom and to motivate students to practice those foundational math skills that are so essential for future success. We also discussed the importance of math fluency, his observations from a teacher exchange in Shanghai, and effective teaching practices like mastery learning and variation theory.
If you've never heard of variation theory, you'll want to stick around for that. It's a great way to structure practice so that students experience success at every step. Bruno's approach to teaching strikes a powerful balance between structured practice and making math feel fun and accessible. It's an energizing conversation full of practical ideas for anyone passionate about improving math outcomes.
I hope you enjoy the episode. Times Tables Rock Stars will be running national and regional competitions in New Zealand and Australia in August, September and October. It's a great way to get students excited about practicing times tables. Follow their socials on Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. I'll provide a link in the show notes.
If you're enjoying Chalk & Talk, you might want to check out another podcast I've been enjoying lately. It's called Teachers Talk Radio. They've got a network of around 30 teacher hosts, and they publish shows daily on all the usual platforms like Spotify, Apple, and YouTube. They cover anything you could imagine that's teacher-related.
Recently I listened to Tom Rogers interview Daisy Christodoulou about AI and assessment. It was a great episode, and I learned a lot from it. So give them a follow wherever you get your podcast or visit them at ttradio.org, that's Teachers Talk Radio.
Now, without further ado, let's get started.
I am really excited because I have a Times Table Rock Star joining me today, I've got Bruno Reddy joining me from England and he is CEO and founder of Maths Circle, and that's known for Times Table Rock Stars and NumBots. He co-founded King Solomon Academy, which is a secondary school in London where he was head of maths.
He has an MSc and A BSc in psychology from the University of Sheffield, and he has an honorary doctorate in education from the University of Bedfordshire. He is also an Officer of the Order of the British Empire. Congratulations. So I'm excited to hear all about your work today and to get some great tips for teaching math.
Welcome, Bruno. Welcome to the podcast.
[00:03:37] Bruno Reddy: Thank you so much, Anna. This is a real, real privilege. I remember when we met at researchED Toronto last year, we talked about this, but you and I have known each other for a while. I've been listening to your podcast for even longer. So yeah, this is just like a crazy, happy turn of events for me.
I'm really chuffed to be here today.
[00:03:55] Anna Stokke: And I bet I've known about your work longer than you've known about mine because we actually use Times Tables Rock Stars in the afterschool program that I run, and we've been using it actually for quite a few years. And so I came across it, I think, on social media and I was looking for something that, particularly, we could send the kids home with to practice their times tables, and it was perfect.
I actually wanna tell the listeners, I don't normally wish we had video, but today I kind of do because you've gotta see the background of the room Bruno's in because he's got rock stars and robots and all sorts of cool murals in the background.
And I just thought of some great ideas for painting my own office. So anyway, let's start from the beginning. So what led you to create Times Tables Rock Stars? Is it Times Tables Rock Stars, or Times Table Rock Stars?
[00:04:50] Bruno Reddy: Plural of times, tables, Times Tables Rock Stars, yeah. So this all started in my classroom as a high school, as a secondary school math teacher. I was in charge of maths in the school because I was head of department. It was a school that I create from ground up. It was a school that we based largely on the charter model of schools in the US and before we opened up this school in London, we visited schools in Houston, New York, Boston, and so on, and some of the high-achieving, high-performing schools that were in educationally disadvantaged areas.
And we figured, well look, they've created a playbook for success and turnaround schools. Schools that defy the zip code statistics, and we thought, we were compelled after our own experience in the classroom to do something in London.
So we created this school and taught maths for a year as the head of maths, realized that the students were not on track at that point for college, and we might come on to talk about one of the other reasons why they turned out not to be on track, but one of the fundamental reasons was that I was continuing in vain to teach them things like simplifying fractions, simplifying ratios, solving basic algebraic equations without the requisite skills, without the kind of the recall of the tables.
Without the tables at the tip of their tongue, it just meant that basic instruction at the whiteboard, at their table, helping them out. A lot of their minds and their thought processes were caught up in the calculations and it really struck home when I looked at the syllabus that I still had to teach them for another four years and sort of started doing like a root analysis of tracking back to the, kind of the most basic maths in all of these things that I've gotta teach them.
How many of those had to root back in multiplication, division? That is to say like there's a lot of what we're teaching in England in maths up to the age of 16 and beyond that fundamentally, you're gonna really benefit from knowing your times tables in order to do well at, in order to not struggle to kind of take on what sits on top, as I call it. So it was at this point when I was thinking, right, “What am I gonna do with the next cohort of year seven?” So this would be grade six.
And it was when we had a colleague of mine from America, from New York, she used to teach at a Knowledge is Power Program school, it was a KIPP school in New York. And she called me a rock star for washing up the mugs in the staff room when I wasn't on the rotor, it was simple as that, and I felt so warm inside when she called me a rock star. No one's ever called me a rock star, right? And it was like, “Oh, that's a really cool feeling.” It was really basic. Sorry, I'm a simple person.
And I thought, right, maybe my students could feel like that too. And I used this idea of being a rock star as a metaphor for being great at something, trying hard, excelling, success in some way, you know, however you wanna define success, a feeling at least. And so I went home, uh, and I thought, right, I'm gonna have to look for something to fill this gap.
And I looked around, and all the other programs for times tables and multiplication division practice, they just seem to be trying to do it with a really brute force approach. And I kind of tried to call on my years of doing psychology and knowing children a bit and knowing maths a bit to see if there wasn't like a more pedagogically sound way, like a more structured way to approach the tables.
A way that was gonna come in maybe fit in with my implicit, my intuitive understanding of cognitive science. No one was really talking about cognitive load, particularly, 15 years ago. Fortunately, I'd come across it in my degree and I couldn't really find anything that really fit the bill. So I put these two things together, multiple things together, being called a rockstar, having a times tables problem, not being able to find a solution and just thought, right, “I'm gonna just have to make this myself.”
And so I sat down with Microsoft Excel and programmed out a set of workbooks that would take the students on a structured, careful, pedagogical journey through the tables, layered on with a rockstar theme. So rockstar status according to how accurate and, rapid they were being a sort of system of like putting posters and certificates up on the walls to kind of acknowledge how well they were doing, just like make them feel great about it essentially, and get 'em to feel great about it quite soon.
And then just keep reinforcing that greatness. It kind of went from there. Like I was not expecting to be where I am today, like literally recording a podcast with you when I was back then in the classroom. That was none of what I'm doing now is necessarily planned out. It's all very like organic and spontaneous, and that's kind of how it was back 15 years ago when I made it.
You know, it wasn't, I wasn't anticipating this, but it's become something because I think a lot of other educators share the same problem, experience the same problem with their students, not knowing the tables, and they kind of think, “well, we need something. We've gotta crack this nut. We can't just keep going on like this.”
And so I'm grateful to all the educators, you included Anna, who have tried it out and are using it with their students to great effects.
[00:09:49] Anna Stokke: It started off with, it's a common refrain, you're teaching a later grade and you're trying to teach someone something and they don't have the prerequisite skills, and this often does boil down to multiplication and division.
As you said, you started the program and it, like, it was kind of like a worksheet program to begin with. Am I right?
[00:10:10] Bruno Reddy: Mm-hmm. Yes.
[00:10:10] Anna Stokke: And you still have the worksheets, like we use those worksheets, you know, for the, the timed practice portion, but now it's also like there's an online version.
[00:10:20] Bruno Reddy: Now there's an online version. So, the offline versions, the worksheets, I think they do a great job of building up a routine at the start of every math lesson. Teachers love it, I love it for that consistency. It gets that buzz going right at the beginning. And I was playing rock music at the time, and it's all just about being fun and a bit silly.
But then three years into doing this with successive groups of grade sixes, year sevens, one of them said to me while he was on another math website on the Chromebooks, “Hey, sir this would be, you know, we like rock stars. We do it on paper at the moment, it'd be fun to do it online.” And I thought, “You know what, Sonny,” and that was his actual name, Sonny, “That's a really good idea.”
So I spent the summer, I hired, I found and paid for with my teacher salary, a couple of people, one who could do the drawing, one who could do the coding, and we got an online version out there. And that's when I started offering it to other schools, and then that's when it started becoming something.
[00:11:15] Anna Stokke: I remember watching like a little video that came with the program and you were wearing a wig, you maybe even had a guitar, but now, like in the online program, the kids get an avatar and they can purchase things for the avatar, clothing and musical instruments and things like that, right?
[00:11:34] Bruno Reddy: That's it. And it was that rockstar theme that started off strong at the beginning and continues to be like at the center part of it. So that night, when I said I went home and I tried to figure this thing out in Excel, I also went on to Amazon and bought myself a purple and black wig. That became like my look.
And in fact, you know, if video was switched on for the viewers or the listeners, what you would see is this character painted on the wall who's my rock alter ego. This character on the wall is called Bass Winter, he's, that's me, that's my rock persona with the purple and, never more than two meters away from my wig.
It's literally just like within arm's reach so that at a moment's notice, I'm ready to turn, you know, transform into Bass Winter. And the students have their own rock alter ego themselves. The first time they log in, they choose a rock name that often can take a bit of time to land on a rock name that you really identify with, and then you've got your avatar and your avatar, it's kind of your character.
It also kind of anonymizes you so that when you're in these multiplayer races, your real name doesn't come up, your location and everything doesn't come up. There's no photo, whatever. It's your little caricature and your rock name that gets displayed.
So that just provides a sort of a safety level, not just in terms of digital safety, but just sometimes in terms like emotional safety. The students don't necessarily want to be out there, even within their own class or their own school, known for how they're doing at the times tables.
[00:12:58] Anna Stokke: Absolutely, but some kids actually do really like competition.
[00:13:02] Bruno Reddy: Love it. Absolutely thrive on it.
[00:13:04] Anna Stokke: So you can set it up so that your students are just practicing specific tables, you can set it up so, and, and they can go into, I can't remember now, it's like the garage, right? Where they're practicing and then there's the arena.
[00:13:17] Bruno Reddy: So the garage is where we use the tech to do what tech should do, which is to personalize the questions. So almost in real time, it's choosing the right questions for each student based on their prior knowledge and what it can see where the weaknesses are. So we programmed it with kind of like the order of the tables, what's more important, the waiting and so on. And it only works with the six questions at a time.
Six multiplication questions and their twin division questions. So we always do multiplication and division in tandem. We're trying to do just a few facts at a time to kind of keep within cognitive limits, and that seems to go well. And that's where we get that early success of students thinking, “Oh wow, okay, I could do those questions.”
And then it just naturally releases into the pool. The next couple of questions, almost, pretty much without them noticing. So the difficulty level just always feels very natural to them. It never really gets out beyond their reach. And again, I think that's maybe what tech should be being used for and doing, doing it well.
So teachers don't really have to set anything because our system is actually gonna do it much better than a human can.
[00:14:20] Anna Stokke: And I remember trying this and competing in the arena myself because it's kind of addictive, especially if you know your times tables, you kinda wanna compete. It's fun.
[00:14:31] Bruno Reddy: So we've got the arena games for students to compete against their own classmates, which just adds a bit of local excitement. Then we've got the global ones where they can race against anybody who's online around the world. And in fact, we've just finished a few hours ago competitions in five states of Australia, New South Wales and Victoria and so on. So they've been competing for statewide glory. And then we've got national competitions coming up in New Zealand, in Australia, Wales and Ireland and so on.
[00:15:00] Anna Stokke: Wow. So you actually have competitions that you set up.
[00:15:05] Bruno Reddy: They add a different element. So, it's less about your own personal success in those and more about joint success with your class. So students are kind of almost collaborating. For the, for the greater good and seeing that as their goal, that is their mission today or this week, is to support my class in being the best class in the school, the best class in the state, the best class in the country.
Hopefully, something for everyone. The ones who are more apprehensive about their skillset, doesn't really matter because as long as they're trying, they're working towards that common goal, which, which they love.
[00:15:38] Anna Stokke: So do you have any data or evidence of long-term improvements in math outcomes for students using TTRS?
[00:15:46] Bruno Reddy: I can definitely point to the school where I was at, where Rock Stars was created, King Solomon Academy, where the first cohort students didn't have Rock Stars and the second cohort onwards did. And there, there are noticeable differences in their outcomes when they got to 16 in terms of the the GCSE math scores, we were seventh in the country in terms of those outcomes as a school with our first cohort, but we were first in the country with our second cohort.
There's a correlation, not can't say fully, that it's causation, there many other elements, but there was a stark difference in outcomes. And of course we've got over a million students using Rock Stars every week. One million different students a week using Rock Stars. All those students are on there for a reason, which is to support their greater math confidence and math understanding.
And schools wouldn't be using it in such numbers if they weren't seeing it, right, if they weren't noticing the results not only in those raw skills, but I'm really happy to say in confidence too. That is the underlying math confidence that we can really build that up, that resilience, that when, so that when the math gets tougher, they stick with it.
You know, so they understand that actually, “I can get knocked down, but I can also get back up again.” That, for me, is part of the win of any intervention or any program is to build the maths confidence.
[00:17:01] Anna Stokke: Oh, absolutely. That, that's a huge part of being able to succeed in math. I think a lot of times, just those sort of basic skills, actually, when you don't have them, it really can hold you back, and actually hurt your confidence. So what you're doing is awesome.
[00:17:20] Bruno Reddy: Thank you. I mean, I liken it to learning a sport or a musical instrument. If you were getting frustrated that you weren't picking up a skill that your coach was trying to show you, it would get a little bit tough and demoralizing. He'd be like, “I'm not really enjoying this 'cause I just can't quite get it.” And so I'm sure it's got a bit, someone will tell me that, “no, that's not a valid parallel.”
But you know, I have, I think it's a perfectly valid parallel. Like just that feeling of you're being shown something, you're not quite getting it, well that's because we haven't learned or figured out the underlying skill. And I think it's just a matter of time, I think everybody can learn the tables.
For me, it's, it's not a question if they can or can't it. Of course they can. It's gonna be time and maybe it's gonna be about how they do it. We might have to have one or two different approaches at the extreme ends. I think by and large, everyone kind of falls within a group where they're going to be able to learn them in more or less the same way and get on with them.
At extreme ends, we're gonna have to maybe think about how we do something different for those cases.
[00:18:20] Anna Stokke: So, we've talked a lot on the podcast about methods for building fluency with times tables. That's come up a lot because I do realize that it's a big problem, and I think it's an important problem that has to be addressed, but something I'd like to talk about with you, because I think this is something you're really good at and that's motivation.
So I'm hoping we can talk about motivation and, you know, strategies maybe that you've used to motivate kids to practice times tables or do math in general. I mean, I even heard you talk about hiring a limo and picking up the kids or something like this. So, I'd really love it if you could talk about this, like if you're using rewards-based strategies or that sort of thing.
[00:19:08] Bruno Reddy: Look, I don't dangle limo rides in front of kids to get them to practice, just so I can be on the record, but I can tell you how that came about. I, what I'm trying to do is make the reward system based on their own success and their ability to acknowledge their own success and have this self-concept that it's like, “Yeah, actually I'm good at math.”
That's the reward. So I'm trying to plant that idea in their heads. Fundamentally not, “Hey, I can do this and I'm doing it because I get some like digital coin for it or a limo ride.” So it's gotta be about making the penny drop for them. It's gotta be about that feeling. They're gonna “Oh,” that, “Oh, that's what's going on. Okay, I've got it now. This makes sense. I'm fine now. I got it.”
That's the reward system that I'm really interested in trying to tap into, the intrinsic reward system. And so it's about finding the right route in, making it probably relatively straightforward at the beginning, probably doing, attempting a whole lot less than other programs might try to do, like not going too big too quickly, because that first step is fundamental to then coming back and giving another go.
What we're trying to do with any basic skill that you need to do over and over again is make it not so much of a headache that you wanna come back to it. So, like my simple suggestion for any intervention is just go low-key to start with. And sometimes when parents are coming to me saying my child is really struggling is because they're spending like five to 10 minutes at the kitchen table trying to sweat their child on whatever it is, like flashcards or times tables or addition, subtraction, whatever, and that's too much.
They're metaphorically melting these, the kids. If their goodwill was like a candle, they're melting that candle too quickly. We just need to give them a little bit, a dosage that they are content with move on. So I'm just kind of like trying to use some psychology there, I suppose, some sense of the emotional state of the child and their goodwill. I've got a couple of boys of my own. Across all the kids that I've taught, just trying to pick up on reading the room, reading their emotions, and not going beyond.
Because what will happen is if I stress them out, next time I want to sit down with them and do some one-to-one maths, you know what they're gonna do? “No way.” They're gonna check out very quickly. So I've gotta get in there just like the right temperament, the right amount of time, and really get that success level high.
So look, with Rock Stars, it's this theme that I didn't realize that just keeps on giving. And at the end of the first year of the program, in my own school, I hired taxis for these students who had made the most progress. And these taxis, all they had to do was pick them up and bring the children to school to arrive all at the same time so we could give them a big, like paparazzi kind of glorified welcome. And I had to explain to the taxi dispatcher, look, “Yes, I know the student lives 50 meters from the school gates, but can you just do a lap of the block? Just make them feel like a VIP.”
And so they would all arrive, the head teacher was there with his camera. We had a great time. Did that for two or three years, and then thought the idea occurred to me, “Well, how can we go bigger and better next time?” And this time I thought, well, let's make this a multi-school competition. We'll get a whole load of schools in one place. Shout out to Bloomberg for hosting that first ever Rock Wrangle in 2014 in London and for giving us their offices and the winner of that Rock Wrangle from across 50 different schools would get to write in a limo across London to a heliport on the River Thames where they would then have a joy ride in a helicopter. Like I wanted them to have the Rock VIP treatment. Okay. I like, I don't see boundaries or barriers, you know, I don't distinguish. I just like, if I have the idea, like I'm going for it. Sometimes the bigger the better.
You've just gotta do what you've gotta do. So I thought limo plus helicopter equals VIP treatment. Not everybody got the chance to do that, obviously. Why not? Let's have a, life’s short. Like sometimes you gotta be silly, a little bit crazy, put a smile on people’s faces, whatever it takes.
[00:22:56] Anna Stokke: Sounds fun. I wish you'd been my teacher. Do you ever think, by the way though, that sometimes things like, do kids really wanna practice? This is sort of an adult-imposed thinking that adults think sometimes that practicing times tables and things like that seem boring and that it's gonna turn people off math. And maybe it's just the way the adult thinks.
Like something I really like about kids, well, I like a lot of things about kids, but I teach adults, and when you teach adults, they come in with ideas in mind about math, and a lot of times, they just don't like math. But the great thing I find about kids, like the kids that we have in our afterschool program say in grade four, is they all come in and they're just like, “Oh yeah, this is great. Math is fun, and you can do the most basic things.” And, and you've got, you know, you've got sort of this, this clean slate in front of you.
So I'm just curious your thoughts on that.
[00:23:51] Bruno Reddy: Well I mean, you're absolutely right about that, and that energy is infectious. That's why I love being a teacher. It's why right now I'm missing the classroom so badly. And it's also why, like right now, my mission is that is to address this issue that we have of kids leaving school saying, “I'm not good at maths.”
And that's why you end up with adults who don't buy into maths, who don't feel great about themselves, who have poor self-concepts, as we might say in psychology. So what we've gotta do is, while they're young, while they're forming that impression of themselves, kind of like between the age of five and 11, they're forming an impression of themselves in maths.
“Am I competent at maths?” And the trouble is, they're gonna be comparing themselves to their peers. That's how they work out if they're or they're not. So I've got this opportunity to capture them before the cement sets, right, before the concrete sets. And that's what we're doing with, with Rock Stars and with NumBots is them feeling good about themselves have a positive self-concept, so that, like I've said before, when the maths gets harder, they stick with it.
And we, we build them into kind of resilient young mathematicians. Now, to those adults who will say, “well, I didn't need to learn times, tables or times tables aren't that important,” that's a bit of a protection mechanism that they're using there to be like, okay, if I can say to myself times tables aren't important, then I can protect myself from not feeling great about my own times tables performance.”
And where I think that might come from is that, what I like to think is that we're doing times tables practice relatively well with Rock Stars and I'm looking for all the ways we can improve it constantly. That's my day job is to make it better. But I know that there's, unfortunately, there's a lot of really bad practice when it comes to doing times tables learning, right?
And that is potentially putting kids right off maths, stressing them out, not giving them a good experience and going completely in the wrong direction. And so, yeah, those surprise, surprise, they're gonna grow up to be adults who don't feel great about times tables don't feel great about maths, don't, “I'm not a math person.”
All that kind of jazz, rubbish. Like all we've gotta do is appreciate that there's best practice and bad practice even when it comes to times tables, I worry that in many classrooms it's making the problem worse, not better. And so I hope that anybody listening is kind of will find the joy factor in the times tables practice we'll try to make it easier, smaller, more contained, run with a program that's easier for, easier for them to manage, show the children their progress and their success, smile, right?
But not do the things where we're putting, like calling individual names of children out in class and say, putting them on the spot and asking them a times table question. That's paralyzing to a number of children. And the ratio of people who are asking question, like one to 29, 1 child thinking about the answer, 29 not. And it's also low frequency. You need to get each individual child doing their own private practice and be interested in today's score versus their score yesterday, knowing that what they're trying to do is be better than they were yesterday, but not better than the person sat next to them.
So yeah, not calling kids out, not putting stuff up on the board which is difficult to read and putting a clock. I'm not saying we shouldn't, you know, have timed exercises and low stakes quizzes and whatnot, you shouldn't be trying to get as many correct in, say, three minutes as you can. But make it easy for them to do well, like, and don't make it kind of public when, when they might not, because there's a whole load of other emotions going in there.
And that happens time and time again. You're gonna, you know, harden that cement much quicker that, you know, that math, negative math cement much, much quicker.
[00:27:13] Anna Stokke: So you're not a fan of cold calling?
[00:27:15] Bruno Reddy: Oh no, I'm not saying that I'm, I would have them primed to be relatively successful. I wouldn't, you gotta, with times table facts in individual children, you run the risk of catching a child out, of course, I developed the culture in my classroom, like from day one, we're about positivity, we're about supporting mistakes. We're about being able to put our hand up or take a cold call question.
We've got the right environment, the right culture, but it's still very isolating. It's like someone's just suddenly shone a spotlight on you, like the, like a police interrogation, “What is seven times nine?” And it feels like it's the kind of question that you have to be able to answer really quickly. And if you don't, then everyone, like in slow motion is kind of like time stops and everybody's looking at you like, I would use cold calling to kind of assess the classroom's level of understanding on something, or maybe use mini whiteboards and not take the risk that I might put someone on the spot.
You know, and I, what I also don't wanna do is ask the fast children for the question because then everybody's gonna, you know, the ones who are not so fast are gonna look at that child and like, “Oh, I'm never gonna be that person.” And so we're also sending subliminal messages depending on who we ask which questions to, so I'm just again, leaning into that psychology.
Both my parents are psychologists too, my sister also studies psychology at Sheffield. So like thinking about thinking is something I think about a lot.
[00:28:25] Anna Stokke: I take your point and I agree with you about being very careful about putting people on the spot. And the other thing you mentioned quite a bit, and I think this is really important and the way that I think some other people describe it is the set size, like keep your set size small. If you're trying to get someone to learn something and you're trying to build confidence, you wanna keep your set size small.
In other words, don't give too many problems for them to work on at once because you do want them to experience success and not overwhelm them.
You know, I watched your video with the child doing the pencil pledge, and you know, so I'm gonna play it.
[00:29:11] Pencil pledge: This is my pencil. This is my pencil. There are many like it. There are many like it. But this is my pencil. But this is my pencil. And I use it to do… math. So today is our day. So today is our day. To do more and be more. To do more and be more. 1, 2, 3, go, go, go.
[00:29:43] Anna Stokke: So what's that all about?
[00:29:45] Bruno Reddy: I like sometimes to change the energy in the room, and before we're about to set off on an independent task, you know, something on a worksheet, piece of paper or whatever it might be, I just want the kids to feel like, “Okay, I'm ready for this. Let's do this,” like “I'm super pumped.”
And so this pencil pledge actually comes from, I think it's from Full Metal Jacket originally. It's more like, “This is my rifle.” And so it's just really like a battle cry to kind of get kids pumped for the thing that they're about to do. I don't use it every lesson, but I, you know, I do like to do a whole bunch of, you know, different chants for different things.
And it's a bit silly, it's a bit daft. The kids lead it, the kids are excited. I'm kind of excited, and off they go. We'll have chant for knowledge, we'll have chant for learning all sorts of chants. Just sometimes a bit of noise and a bit of all togetherness is what these kind of choral chants sometimes do for us.
Bit of community building, a bit of culture. I would like to pay my respects, if you like, to all the charter schools that we visited, right? Kind we're standing on the shoulders of giants who, who kind of, for me, led that way, that enthusiasm really modelled that. And continue to do so. So we're just kind of borrowing their great ideas, sometimes flexing on them.
[00:30:54] Anna Stokke: So let's talk about Shanghai. I had Nick Gibb on the podcast and he mentioned that there were these programs, these teacher exchanges with teachers in England and teachers in Shanghai. And I understand that you maybe took part in that.
[00:31:08] Bruno Reddy: Yes.
[00:31:09] Anna Stokke: So, can you tell us a bit about how that worked?
[00:31:11] Bruno Reddy: Credit to Nick Gibb. He was one of those ministers who took the time to look overseas, check out other jurisdictions, physically go there and find out what they were doing, speak to the right people, and came up with, he and his team and his advisors came up with this idea of a Shanghai Teacher Exchange because they saw and understood there to be very effective practice that was leading to great outcomes on international education assessments, right?
So I had the chance to go there, just over a week. And then some of their teachers would come over to our schools and be kind of, it was a bit like a pen pal exchange kind of thing. They would drop into different schools and they would spend two weeks there. First of all, observing some lessons, but then also teaching a lot of lessons.
They would kind of take over the lessons back in England. In terms of what I saw while I was there, it was pretty incredible in a number of different ways. The consistency across the city was quite remarkable, as in not just from one classroom to the next would you see the same thing being taught in largely the same way, if not identical, but you could go from one school to the next and they would be at the same point in the textbook or the same point in the curriculum teaching it in the same way. Like they really respected as sort of a body of knowledge about this is what to teach. Not only that, but this is how you teach it.
And they had learned those methods and internalized those methods and were being watched, uh, in a good way, like observed, like they had a really collaborative way of going over to visit each other's teaching and then convening afterwards as a sort of a mini group and discussing, you know, they were looking maybe for ways to refine the way that had been taught.
So they're just kind of constantly just like, you know, if the teaching was like some kind of a renaissance marble statue, they were just kind of constantly like polishing it and finding for little ways that they could just smoothen an edge and make an even more refined practice. So the consistency across the city was incredible.
But then mathematically what changed my practice and improved my understanding of what I think is now better math teaching is they had very short sets of questions, of exercise, well exercises. I thought they would be doing copious, like large volume sets of exercises just kind of lots of practice, but that just shows my ignorance of what I thought it was gonna be like more than anything else.
Instead, the sets were quite short, but the questions were super carefully sequenced. It didn't change much from one to the other. So what that meant was that there was, what it was teasing out was the underlying construct, not just can you kind of keep repeating this process, this procedure, this algorithm over and over again. But each time you do it, if we just change an element of it, we will then be able to discuss what's different or unique about each one and how it's led to a deeper understanding.
So they're transmitting not only the kind of the practice, but also building up the conceptual understanding. I know you have a sort of bit of a difficulty with the idea of conceptual understanding, like what is it, but an appreciation, let's say, of the underlying constructs. So it wasn't just blind repetition of an algorithm or of a set of steps.
It's what in England we started to call intelligent practice, like it was practice that went deeper than just repetition. So to give you an example, one thing that really stood out was the number of times they got zero or one or a fraction or a negative number into the permutation of questions. If they could get something to somehow cancel out and, you know, add up to zero, or if they could somehow make two things combined to make a one, or if they could put in a fraction to show how this was gonna be, this was gonna influence the process or a negative number to show how it was gonna influence the outcome than they would.
Like they thought, whoever wrote those questions thought very, very carefully about the journey through the set of questions. And that's what I found quite fascinating. And that has just, that's something I really care passionately about is what I talk about. You'll always hear me banging that drum, whether it's on podcasts or at conferences, is that idea of a question set, being able to really pull out the underlying constructs and shine a light on them and to give it, at the time I then came, sort of was terming it minimally different questions, barely changing one thing from one question to the next.
Then it turns out that there's, there's sort of a name for it, which is variation theory. Variation theory is more sophisticated than minimally different questions, but it, minimally different questions definitely play on what is known as variation theory. And what's happening with variation theory is that if you want students to attend to something, you keep as many things constant and only change the one thing that you want them to attend to.
So they call it about having an invariant background, a background that doesn't change, but the thing you want them to focus on is just the one thing that's changing. Let's say we're expanding brackets. Multiplying out brackets, I dunno what you call it in North America, but 6 (x –2).
What do you call that? Do you call that expanding brackets?
[00:36:04] Anna Stokke: Mathematically, we call that the distributive property.
[00:36:06] Bruno Reddy: This is true, yeah. Mathematically, we call it that. But as an instruction to our students, we would say, expand the brackets or..
[00:36:13] Anna Stokke: Expand and simplify.
[00:36:14] Bruno Reddy: Let's take 6(x – 2). Some workbooks, some sheets that you can get from like teachers pay teachers or wherever. They then might go onto the next question and change the number on the outside of the brackets, the letter, the variable inside, whether we're adding or taking away and then the number, they might mix up the order and the way they're basing their worksheet is, “Well, if I maximize the variation, the variability from one question to the next, then they're gonna get maximumi exposure to all these different things.”
So what we can say is, yes, they're gonna get exposure to all these things, but what they'll never have the chance to do is to really deepen their understanding. Because what our brains are trying to do is to look for, look for patterns, look for meaning to make sense of it. Otherwise, it just does become blind regurgitation, repetition of an algorithm.
We can do so much better. If we go from, carefully, from one question to the next, so let's take 6(x – 2). What could we do to just change one thing? Well, we could check what happens if we change it to a five on the outside of the brackets. Just does that change much? What happens there?
What about if we did X minus a sixth in the bracket. This is something that you've probably come up in Shanghai to my point about anything to make a one. So when you course you multiply the six by the sixth, you get a one. It's just showing the students that even if we've got a fraction inside the brackets, we're still multiplying across all the terms inside the brackets.
And it just so happens that sometimes it's gonna make a, it's gonna make a whole number. Um, what happens if we put a negative six on the outside of the bracket? We've got to multiply a negative by a negative, and so we've gotta show that, you know, that works too by changing one thing at a time. We're really broadening the limits of the children's or the students' understanding, uh, because they're able to see those patterns.
We're able to talk about those patterns. We're able to talk about what's important, what isn't, what wouldn't change it. The process is identical every time, but just sometimes there are just little nuances. We're gonna have to think about, and then we can start to do two brackets and we can start to change the order inside the brackets, you know?
But let's take one thing at a time and work with that and then move on. So this is where a skilled teacher would do in their planning what I used to call atomizing, like breaking this thing, this learning intention, this objective down into all the constituent atoms the pieces that that we'll then combine together to make a really robust understanding of that topic or that learning objective.
And we're gonna have to approach them sequentially. We're gonna have to work out like what's the easiest? And then how do we get to the ultimate one? How do we package it all back together? And often that doesn't fit inside one lesson. We wanna teach expanding brackets, we're gonna need to plan because the lesson length is kind of arbitrary.
We're gonna have to plan whatever it takes, the number of lessons it's gonna take to cover that. It might take two lessons or three lessons to really go into the depth that we need.
[00:39:00] Anna Stokke: And by the way, that's precisely how I would try to teach a new skill, start with something and I would just change it slightly and keep going and you build it up. You mentioned conceptual understanding, I just wanna make something very clear because it's not, I'm not against conceptual understanding. I just think nobody has a good definition for what it means. And so you're talking about this and you mentioned building understanding.
And so from what I'm taking, what you're, you're thinking it means is that the student understands that you can use, you can use this skill in many different ways that it works in, in these different situations, that there's sort of like this flexibility of thinking, but lots of times that's not what people mean by conceptual understanding.
They might mean something like, can you solve a problem in five different ways? They might mean, can you represent this using pictures? My issue with it is that there isn't a fixed definition. So I just wanna make that clear. Of course I want kids to understand math. I just think we're often not clear about what it means.
[00:40:00] Bruno Reddy: You are spot on and I knew that about you and I should, that was me not articulating better. I know that it's more about how people interpret it and the different ways that people interpret it that you're picking up on, not that you don't believe in it in itself. Of course not.
[00:40:12] Anna Stokke: I love what you're talking about, the variation theory and I have never seen a textbook do that well. Have you?
[00:40:20] Bruno Reddy: Back in the day, yeah. Pretty sure the textbooks I was using when I was at school in the eighties and nineties, and I know there are some educators who have been around a long time as well who will point back to some of those textbooks and say, “I wish we could bring those back.”
I think anybody who wants to scrutinize a modern textbook will find, actually, authors are not using those strategies these days.
[00:40:40] Anna Stokke: Well, Bruno, I think a lot of people would consider that rote. I mean, it's like the problems don't seem to look very different even though they actually are, but like, let's think about the gift that we're giving the student when we do that though. We're doing that thing where they experience success. We're just changing one small thing.
[00:40:59] Bruno Reddy: That's it. Lightens the cognitive load.
[00:41:01] Anna Stokke: Exactly. And it brings them, we're gonna get them to the point where they can solve a really difficult problem. We're gonna get them to the point where, you know, you're talking about, you actually just had the distributive law with a constant outside, but we're gonna get them to the point where they can actually multiply, you know, two polynomials of any size.
[00:41:24] Bruno Reddy: Right, exactly. That's it.
[00:41:25] Anna Stokke: You know, but you do it incrementally and then before you know it, the students can do this and they're like, “Wow, I can do this.” Whereas when you just start giving these really difficult problems from the get-go and you're not building them up, it's really confusing for students.
[00:41:39] Bruno Reddy: Precisely. And that consistency from one question to the next also means that their brain is still keeping some of it in its buffer, you know. And all they've gotta do is deal with the one thing that's changed kind of thing. You know, if they've done the heavy lifting on four times seven or something, they're not gonna need to redo that if four and seven are still in the next question, they just need to do the bit that's changed. Does that make sense?
Like it's still hanging around in the ram or whatever the, you know, in the cache.
[00:42:04] Anna Stokke: Unfortunately, it takes a lot of time to plan those kinds of problems.
[00:42:09] Bruno Reddy: But now with the likes of generative MLMs, there's nothing to stop anybody who's kind of making their own stuff to say, “Hey, look chat,” or whoever you're using, “make sure that, you know, there's kind of minimal difference between them or use variation theory to help.” We're in a great place now to be able to use generative AI to do kind of better jobs of worksheets and stuff.
[00:42:30] Anna Stokke: That's something you noticed they were doing in Shanghai then?
[00:42:34] Bruno Reddy: Yes. The zero, one fractions and negatives because they provide the, some of the most interesting curve balls and edge cases when we start, when we work with them. Sometimes zero was in the question or one was in the question. Sometimes one or zero was in the solution, but it just kind of changed something like where you ended up with X squared minus two plus two, the minus two and plus two kind of cancel each other out in the end.
And so you're left with X squared just to show that there's another case where sometimes the two constants add up to zero kind of thing. So just little things like that they would always try to do.
[00:43:06] Anna Stokke: Were they using textbooks?
[00:43:08] Bruno Reddy: Yes, definitely. A hundred percent, yeah.
[00:43:10] Anna Stokke: Those textbooks that are used in Shanghai could you bring them to England, translate and…
[00:43:17] Bruno Reddy: And we did try, there was a whole project to try and translate them. I think it would involve expert use of them. It would involve changing the curriculum. There were a number of other things that would need to change, but there was an ambition to just simply translate them.
And it's not that straightforward.
[00:43:37] Anna Stokke: And I think the other thing I've heard you talk a bit about quite a bit is mastery learning. Is that something that they were doing in Shanghai as well?
[00:43:46] Bruno Reddy: I think so. Like again, mastery to me is a bit like how people talk about understanding concepts to you, as in lots of people describe it in lots of different ways.
I just sort of paraphrase it as properly learning because there was a time before we started using mastery learning. I don't think we were getting kids to properly learn the maths. We were skating over it. We were like just going through lesson by lesson pretty quickly, hastily just getting them to reperform the algorithms, the procedures or whatever.
And we were saying that that was enough. It was very performance driven. I don't think that's proper learning. And I think proper learning is what people would call mastery learning, as in they can do the thing that we've shown them to do and be successful in it, but they, they also kind of have a greater route, more rounded picture of the maths that they're doing, why that algorithm maybe works, when to use it, how to use it in a novel problem.
They, yeah, just a greater depth level of appreciation, understanding, greater flexibility. More time has been spent on it, more care has been put into the lessons, the crafting of the lessons and the sequence of things and the breaking up of things in order to achieve that level of proper learning. To me, that's mastery learning, like getting it for life, like properly understanding, like, “Oh, I get it, I get it, I get it, I get it.”
That's mastery learning.
[00:45:01] Anna Stokke: How did you implement mastery learning in your school when you were at King Solomon?
[00:45:06] Bruno Reddy: First year, I didn't, and it was from the second year onwards that people would start to sort of label what I was doing as mastery learning, and it simply came from slowing the curriculum down.
In the first year, I took a curriculum off the shelf. I didn't know any better. I'd only done two years of teaching when we founded King Solomon Academy, so I knew absolutely nothing about writing a curriculum, so I just took one off the shelf essentially, and it just moved the children on too quickly.
Like every two weeks we'd be doing a new topic, and that's not enough to really move them forward if they were already starting from behind, then maybe over the course of those two weeks, I'd bring them back up to a baseline level of knowledge for their age group, and then come Monday I'd be starting them on a brand new topic.
So they're back to square one again on this new topic. So instead I thought, look, there's gotta be another way to do this. And I remembered programs like Saved by the Bell and other high school math, you know, like programs at US high schools where kids would say, “Right, I'm going off to algebra class,” “I'm going off to geometry class,” which made me think, oh, so in America, they do like a whole year of algebra and they just go to this class that's dedicated to algebra.
It's like, hmm, maybe we could do something like that because they must have gone into a lot of depth in those classes. So I thought, okay, well look, England's not gonna, isn't ready for an entire year of calling this algebra class. No one will ever stomach that. How about if I just do like a half term? So we'll have a whole six or seven weeks dedicated to algebra. We’ll have six or seven weeks dedicated to geometry, we’ll have six or seven weeks dedicated to fractions, and I think we're probably gonna need 14 weeks dedicated to like number skills at the start of grade six.
And so I did that. I just went slower, and that just meant that we could build up the skills, go so much deeper, like really work on understanding, revisit stuff, do some more tangential off piece stuff, stuff that we'd never get the chance to, but now we're really kind of getting to grips within and just kind of getting excited about it. I would lay out the half term, so, which is like six or seven weeks, usually in England as follows. First five weeks predominantly would be, well, what I would now call explicit instruction. I didn't, at the time, I didn't have a name for it.
I was just like, hey, I'm gonna teach for five weeks. I'm gonna teach these objectives that I've carefully mapped out based on the days that I've got available, and in the last week of the term, we're going to be a lot more, we're gonna go to do some problem solving, some much richer stuff. We're just gonna slow right down. We're not gonna be going through something brand new. We're gonna be kind of really using what we've been learning. We're gonna lean into group activities.
[00:47:28] Anna Stokke: Just to recap on that, so around five or six weeks. Well, it's gotta depend on the topic, how much time you need on the explicit instruction and mastery.
I really think it's best to think of it in terms of the instructional hierarchy. Have the students achieve fluency, which it sounds to me like that's what you were doing. So on average, let's say about five or six weeks on the explicit instruction, achieving mastery, and then you're doing one week on the upper part of the instructional hierarchy, the generalization, adaptation stage, that's when you're bringing in the things like the group work and problem solving.
[00:48:05] Bruno Reddy: But not until then. And if you're gonna do group work, you can't just do group work with any activity. Like it has to be a group worthy problem. That's actually quite important. There are some activities that lend themselves well to being done together as a group, and there are some that don’t. So you've gotta figure that out. And each student in the group should have a particular role, and those roles should change.
And we did a whole lot of work just on group work.I would have students sat on highchairs around groups, observing the groups. We've talked already about what it means to do group work well, and then we would feedback on how well we're doing the group work.
[00:48:36] Anna Stokke: So we're not eliminating the generalization, adaptation stage. But the other piece can be fun too. That's the other thing. I think people think that the buildup, the mastery piece is like boring, but I don't think that's the case.
[00:48:51] Bruno Reddy: Oh no. That is the kind of the bit that I miss the most because that's like the electrifying bit for me in the lessons is just the penny dropping when they're like, “yes, I get it.”
Like for me, that's just the biggest reward in life is to hear that. My lessons were relatively high paced in the sense that there were lots of questions kind of going back and forth, quite dynamic, you know, and I got a real kick outta that because it was a real chance for their thoughts and their questions and to bounce ideas, and for that learning to be really intensified.
So, no, to me, explicit instruction is quite high-octane. You know, you're not doing it if the pace feels slow in a sense that it should be. like routinely checking for understanding. Now we're gonna do a little bit of a demo and now I'm gonna get you to, I wanna make sure that you've understood that demo.
Now you're gonna do in different ways. Now you're gonna practice. Have a go at that and then we're gonna check that we've got it all and then we're gonna move on and uptempo. Lot of fun.
[00:49:45] Anna Stokke: I guess there was one other thing I actually wanted to ask about Shanghai. Were those kids doing a lot of after school work, like a lot of afterschool tutoring and things like that?
[00:49:55] Bruno Reddy: I'll never know for sure, you know, because I didn't, I didn't obviously see them or witness them, but, you know, that's what I, that's what I'm told is that they will make up if they haven't understood it, that the families feel, I'm not gonna let my child fall behind.
These weren't necessarily well to do families, but education is put on, you know, it is held in such high standing in China in general, that families of all standings and all levels of their own individual educational backgrounds would find the resources to make sure their child had the, the input that they needed to get to, to higher levels of education.
[00:50:28] Anna Stokke: That happens here in Canada as well, but it's just the families that can afford it. So that's why we have to make sure we get it right in school. So that's why we're having all these conversations.
What do you think most math programs get wrong when it comes to helping students achieve fluency?
[00:50:52] Bruno Reddy: I think they might be, that the problem set might be too big. So let's start with something smaller. Let's think about how the kids are gonna feel and how are they're gonna have fun. Is there a bit of like, colour, it doesn't have to be literally colour, but is there just something that's just gonna bring a bit of a smile?
Is it clear to the student that they are improving? Is it low stakes like or does it feel high stakes? It should feel low-stakes is what we want. It should feel normal. It should be, “This is what we’re doing, and we’re doing it every day.” It's kind of completely normal. It's just the way we do things and I think what would be, in my min, ideal is that all the students are doing the same thing, not different students doing different things. Because at least in my classroom, the culture that I want, particularly at the start of the lesson, you know, that's generally when we're doing that fact practice, is for them to feel at the start of the lesson that we're all on the same page, no matter, whether later on different students end up getting different questions somehow, or get further than me, whatever.
What I don't wanna do is start my lesson with every, with different children thinking, “Oh, well that table or that individual, they've got a different sheet for me. What does that say about me and my maths?” We don't need to start any lesson feeling like that. That's just not a fun way to start. And then it just comes back to kind of drying that cement more quickly.
So I think about, think about that, like are you asking the teachers to do different things with different children? Because if you are, you're also creating extra workload for teachers. You're asking them to mark and assess different outputs. And that's time consuming for teachers, and we know that teachers are time poor and it might not be necessary.
It might not be necessary for that level of personalization unless they're doing it online, unless the online system is doing that personalization for them.
[00:52:29] Anna Stokke: On that topic, fluency, you have a times table test in England. How's that going in your mind? It's nine year olds?
[00:52:37] Bruno Reddy: Yeah. Year, I think grade three. Does that sound like, yeah, age nine to you? Yeah, it could be nine, it could be 10, I believe. And they have 25 questions. They have a six second time limit to answer each question, they're all multiplication, there's no division questions, and they're taken from a subset or like weighted across the different tables.
So fewer questions from the, like the twos and the tens, more questions slightly from the six, seven, and it's, no assessment ever is, it's an assessment. It has mobilized the entire teaching workforce in primary schools around times tables and fact fluency. So it's had huge ripple effects, not just in multiplication division, not just in the recall, it spilled over into that understanding piece and the conceptual piece, bringing out arrays, bringing out diagrams, bar models, physical blocks, whatever it takes to help children really piece together, understand commutativity or distributive properties and things like that.
Teachers haven't just stopped short and done what the test is gonna test the children on, they've gone way beyond, which is awesome. So the children are coming up with much more rounded knowledge of the tables because it's really put times tables back on the map. It's also then had a spillover into addition and subtraction and number bonds, which it was never designed to do.
And we don't have a test for addition, subtraction, number bonds. But it means that with the success that they've seen from doing great work in times tables, teachers are now applying those same strategies to addition, subtraction, number bonds, and realizing the importance of those. What they not then doing yet, but a number of teachers are kind of realizing, but after the test, the years after the test, at the moment, not enough schools are maintaining that skill level.
They're letting it drop off again. And unsurprisingly, the times table recall then fades away and you try and get some students in year five and year six to do some mental arithmetic and they can't recall the tables the way they could in year four.
So there's a, they need to be better at entering a maintenance mode, if you like, in year five and year six to kinda keep those backgrounds factual recall ticking along.
[00:54:46] Anna Stokke: They shouldn't really disappear. Like, if you know it, it should be maintained. Like most of the skills we use in math are gonna require recall of times tables.
I find that a little bit odd.
[00:54:58] Bruno Reddy: Like the frequency just massively drops off right when they're doing the maths. You know, they're just not gonna come across six times seven half as frequently as they would when they were practicing every day. And so just one or two facts will kind of, it's not, they've forgotten them completely.
It's just gonna take them like five or six seconds to record instead of two or three. You know, they'll get it, but they're not using them. But that's not fair on all the schools who have realized that maintenance mode is necessary. There are thousands of those schools who are doing that, which is great.
It's here to stay for a while. If the government came knocking and said, “How would you amend the test?” You know, I've got some ideas, but they haven't come knocking yet, so, we'll wait. I would say that we've, the biggest mock test outside of the official one, we've just finished today. 200,000 students, that's a quarter of the students who are gonna do the real thing, have been through our mock assessment.
They've been able to compare that with a national average and a local authority average. So they've got a very good sense going into June with the real thing of where their students are at. And I've got a very, I've looked at that data and I can see how well they're doing. And I can say that each year it's going up, which means that teachers are getting more savvy about what needs to be done each year.
[00:56:05] Anna Stokke: I'll sort of end with this question. These can be complicated issues. And you say you think a lot about psychology and how people think because both your parents were psychologists, your sister's a psychologist, you have two psychology degrees. What are some ways that you try to convince people about the importance of things like learning times tables?
[00:56:26] Bruno Reddy: I think just pausing to understand like what the other side of the argument is and where it's maybe really coming from. Sometimes some things are projected, like, “Well, not everybody needs to learn the tables,” like, “I'm great at maths,” or “I'm a professor of maths” or whatever, and “I didn't need to learn the tables,” or “Can't kids just use calculators?”
If I just took that question at its surface level, I would think I would miss really where they were coming from and how they'd got in their mind to asking that question. So I really tried to unpick that, see the other side. Sometimes the differences between us might be as fundamental as a difference in what we view education as being for and that's why different people come up with different ways of going about instruction and what's important because they think, well, education, it serves this purpose. And I might think that education serves that purpose.
We're gonna probably have to agree to disagree or respect one another's ideologies and move forward. What I do find very distracting on the social media, and I think all the other teachers kind of listening in on these conversations are when they're made to be very polarized. Actually, what we can do is do a greater job, for the greater good of the education sector and make it easier to find a joint way forward. It's just listening to the other side and kind of be quite respectful and be like, “okay,I see you there. I'll meet you on that point.” That kind of makes a lot of sense.
Just let's just be reasonable with each other, but quite often these things on social media can be, can be played out in such an unreasonable way. And that's not helpful and it's time consuming and it's been going on for decades and like, come on guys, like it's 2025. We don't need to be like full on arguing about this still and rehashing these things and trading myths.
We should be able to agree and we should probably respect the fact that we agree on more than we disagree on and, you know, move forward together diplomatically. Life is short.
[00:58:16] Anna Stokke: Okay, Bruno, thank you so much for coming on today and talking to me. It's been a real pleasure. I've followed your work for quite a while, so it's been a pleasure to talk to you and for you to share your work with us.
So thank you.
[00:58:28] Bruno Reddy: Thanks, Anna. Let's catch up soon.
[00:58:39] Anna Stokke: As always, we've included a resource page that has links to articles and books mentioned in the episode. If you enjoy this podcast, please consider showing your support by leaving a five star review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Chalk & Talk is produced by me, Anna Stokke, transcript and resource page by Jazmin Boisclair and Deepika Tung.
Subscribe on your favourite podcast app to get new episodes delivered as they become available. You can follow me on X, Blue Sky or LinkedIn for notifications, or check out my website, annastokke.com. for more information. This podcast received funding through a University of Winnipeg Knowledge Mobilization and Community Impact grant funded through the Anthony Swaity Knowledge Impact Fund.