Ep 56. Unmasking instructional illusions with Paul Kirschner, Carl Hendrick and Jim Heal

This transcript was created with speech-to-text software. It was reviewed before posting but may contain errors. Credit to Canadian Podcasting Productions.

In this episode, Anna Stokke welcomes three leading experts in education, Dr. Paul Kirschner, Dr. Carl Hendrick, and Dr. Jim Heal for a fascinating discussion about their new book, Instructional Illusions. Drawing on decades of experience and research, they explore key ideas from the book, including how to bridge the gap between educational research and classroom practice. Together, they discuss the science of learning, evidence-informed teaching, and how educators can apply research insights to improve instruction. This engaging conversation is a must-listen for anyone passionate about effective teaching and student learning.

Read the book, Instructional Illusions, here: https://tinyurl.com/instructional-illusions

TIMESTAMPS

[00:00:22] Introductions

[00:05:15] What are Instructional Illusions?

[00:07:30] The difference between illusions and myths

[00:11:13] The discovery illusion

[00:12:50] Why do people believe in discovery learning?

[00:19:50] The curse of knowledge

[00:24:29] The innovation illusion

[00:30:01] Unmasking the innovation illusion

[00:32:59] The expertise Illusion

[00:38:04] The Dunning-Kruger effect

[00:43:48] Unmasking the expertise illusion

[00:47:50] The uniqueness illusion

[00:50:52] The engagement illusion

[00:57:10] Shifting the focus to cognitive engagement

[01:01:28] The student-centred illusion

[01:05:00] Unmasking the student-centred illusion

[01:06:23] Is the science of learning a fad?

[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 great episode of Chalk & Talk.

I've got an extra special episode today because I'm joined by three leading voices in education. Dr. Paul Kirschner, Dr. Carl Hendrick, and Dr. Jim Heal. And they are co-authors of the fantastic new book, Instructional Illusions. We unpack some of the most persistent instructional illusions. These sound great in theory, but don't actually hold up when we look at the evidence. We talk about discovery learning, innovation for innovation's sake, student-centred approaches, illusions about expertise, and more.

You'll hear what the evidence actually says and how you can avoid falling for these traps in your own teaching. If you're passionate about improving education, this episode is for you.

Before we get started, I want to let you know that I will be co-delivering a master class on evidence-informed math teaching through La Trobe University this fall. It can be taken by any teacher or pre-service teacher anywhere in the world. It will be on Monday, October 20th in Australia. That's October 19th here in North America. And I'm going to include a link on how to register in the show notes. I hope to see you there.

If you're enjoying Chalk & Talk, you might want to check out another podcast I've been listening to lately. It's called Teacher's Talk Radio. They've got a network of around 30 teacher hosts, and they publish episodes daily on all the usual platforms like Spotify, Apple, and YouTube. They cover anything that's teacher related, like behaviour, assessment, instructional techniques, even AI. So, give them a follow wherever you get your podcasts or visit them at ttradio.org. That's Teacher's Talk Radio. Now without further ado, let's get started.

I'm really excited today because I'm joined by three leading experts in education, Dr. Paul Kirschner, Dr. Carl Hendrick, and Dr. Jim Heal.

They are co-authors of the new book Instructional Illusions, which I was fortunate enough to get an advanced copy of. And it's a great book, and I know it's going to be really popular. And we're going to talk a lot about it today.

Dr. Paul Kirschner is a professor emeritus of educational psychology at the Open University in the Netherlands and a guest professor at the Thomas More University of Applied Science in Belgium. He's published over 450 scientific articles, plus 14 books, and he is internationally recognized for his work on cognitive psychology and its applications on education. He's joining us from the Netherlands, and he's been on the podcast before.

In fact, you were my second guest. So, I'm so happy to have your back. So welcome back, Paul.

[00:03:19] Paul Kirschner: Anna, thank you. It's great being here. As I've tweeted, that was one of the finest podcasts I've ever done working with you.

So, you have the bar is kind of high for this one, although my two colleagues could lower it in a very easy way. But we'll see about that.

[00:03:37] Anna Stokke: I don't think so.

Okay, great. Okay, so Dr. Carl Hendrick is a professor of education at Academica University and holds a PhD from King's College London. A former teacher and school leader, Carl is well known for his books on teaching and learning and for helping bridge the gap between research and classroom practice. And he is joining us from London, and he's also been on the podcast before. We did a fantastic episode, which I think was kind of on engagement and learning and the direction for that.

So welcome back, Carl.

[00:04:13] Carl Hendrick: Great to see you, Anna.

[00:04:14] Anna Stokke: And finally, we have Dr. Jim Heal. He is a professor of evidence-informed education leadership at Academica University and holds a doctorate in educational leadership from Harvard.

Prior to that, he worked with Deans for Impact, where he integrated the science of learning into teacher preparation programs. A former teacher and school leader, he is a leading advocate for bridging research and practice in the applied science of learning. Jim is in Boston, and he hasn't been on the podcast before, and I'm really excited to have you on today. So welcome, Jim.

[00:04:50] Jim Heal: Pleasure to be here, Anna. Thanks for having me.

[00:04:52] Anna Stokke: So, I'm really looking forward to talking to you about your book today. It's a great book, as I mentioned. And I thought we'd go through a few of the instructional illusions that you write about.

But first, let's just do an overview question. And Jim, I thought you could take this one. So why is your book titled Instructional Illusions? So, what are instructional illusions?

[00:05:17] Jim Heal: Yeah, so the best way to answer that is to go back to the origination of the idea of the book.

The three of us had started discussing this idea that teaching is essentially a counterintuitive exercise. That's to say that oftentimes the thing that we think works can often be different or even diametrically different to the reality. And this got us subsequently thinking about how teaching is in and of itself illusory.

Not that it intends to be so, it's not like it sets out to deceive us, but rather it’s subject to so many interpretations, misconceptions, and kind of surface understanding that what really works is often kind of masked or lives beyond the veil. It's important, however, to note that we see illusions as different than myths. I think there's been a lot of talk and many things written about the scourge of edgy myths.

But if myths are more about how teaching and learning aspects thereof are just plain wrong, illusions are more this idea that aspects of teaching and learning flatter to deceive. They appear to make perfect sense on the surface, but when you subject them to scrutiny in the form of an evidence-informed lens, then that's when we see their true nature, thus revealing the illusion in our title.

So the book itself is an attempt not to bust myths per se, but to sort of peel away the surface of what we think works and to use our best understanding of cognitive science, educational psychology, instructional design, and generally evidence-informed approaches to see what's really going on and how the magician is kind of fooling us into thinking one thing when in fact the reality is quite another.

[00:07:07] Anna Stokke: Okay. It's a great idea. Okay.

So, you're saying illusions are slightly different than myths, so myths are something that are just plain wrong, something we think about teaching or learning that's just plain wrong, whereas an illusion is something that's a little more deceptive. It looks like it could be correct, it feels correct, and your idea then is to sort of peel this away and reveal how these are deceptions, right? Do you want to add something, Paul?

[00:07:36] Paul Kirschner: Yeah. A myth also looks and feels correct.

In fact, the subtle difference between a myth and illusion is that if you look at something that an illusionist does, you as a layperson, you're completely amazed by what happens. You have this temptation to believe your eyes and your ears as to what's going on. You have this idea, it can't be, but he does it or she does it.

If you yourself are an illusionist and you look at what another illusionist is doing, you understand what that illusionist is doing, how you're being misdirected, misguided, those types of things. Something that when a layperson looks at teaching and learning and a not very well-trained teacher looks at teaching and learning or a school leader looks at it, they're looking at it through the lens of the same thing that you and I or Carl or Jim would look at an illusionist working. The difference is the four of us have so much knowledge of what teaching and learning is that we see beyond what our eyes and our ears are perceiving.

That subtle difference that makes it and some of the things aren't a myth, but what we think we're seeing is not what we're seeing.

[00:07:07] Anna Stokke: Right. Exactly.

Okay. So, on that topic though, so your kind of mentioned illusionists, right? So, are there these illusionists in the background that are in your mind intending to be deceptive? Is that always what's going on?

[00:09:20] Paul Kirschner: Well, I was going to say, yeah, no, I think I mentioned this idea that I don't think that teaching or teachers set out to deceive.

I think oftentimes I often say no teacher gets out of bed in the morning trying to be a bad teacher, nor does any teacher get out of bed in the morning trying to engage in some kind of sort of clandestine activity where they're masking their true intent either from students or from other professionals.

I think what Paul was saying is part and parcel of this, which is what we bring to bear on what we see when we see teaching and learning is often the tricky part. We will see and hear certain things and as Paul said, it's only when you are in the know that you can begin to see that there is a difference between what appears on the surface versus the sort of underlying architecture. And so, in that regard, it certainly doesn't set out to be, but that doesn't mean to say that structurally and in terms of how it goes about quote unquote deceiving us can still very much be true.

[00:10:23] Paul Kirschner: We made the conscious decision, Anna, to only discuss the illusions and not the illusionists. It wasn't the idea of naming and shaming, and you'll find nowhere in the book that we talk about Jean-Jacques Rousseau, but he's dead and we know about him. But we made the conscious decision of only discussing the illusions and not discussing any illusionists.

00:10:50] Anna Stokke: That's probably a good idea. And I also don't think that this is necessarily always intentional. In fact, most times it's not.

So, I'm with you on that. Okay, so let's go through some of these illusions. All right. So, Paul, let's start with the discovery illusion. So, let's go through that. So, what is the discovery illusion?

[00:11:13] Paul Kirschner: Well, the discovery illusion, and I started talking about this at the beginning of the 21st century, the discovery illusion is the idea that you learn better, learn more, learn deep, more deeply if you discover it yourself.

A lot of people think that that's the case. It's kind of like the typical normal gut feeling of parents, teachers, other educators. It doesn't really matter.

The idea that discovery works, but that's only an illusion because it actually doesn’t really work. As a matter of fact, it is possibly the least efficient, least effective, and least satisfying way of trying to learn anything.

[00:12:03] Anna Stokke: Yes.

And I mean, you've written a lot about this. You have the wonderful paper. What is it called? Minimally Guided.

[00:12:12] Paul Kirschner: Minimally Guided. Well, actually, the original title was Discovery Learning, isn't? But my co-authors, Dick Clark and John Sweller, thought it was too playful, and it had to be something else. So, it became this gigantic, long thing title in which we also handled 16 different types of discovery, inquiry, those types of things.

That was 2006.

[00:12:40] Anna Stokke: It's a great paper. So, Paul, why is the discovery thinking, like, why is that so common? Why do people believe that this is the best way to learn?

[00:12:50] Paul Kirschner: Number one, it sounds good.

If you discover it yourself, you'll appreciate it more. You'll understand it better. That type of thing.

It's kind of like a folk wisdom, maybe. And it just sounds and feels good. It also is fitting in the timeframe that it arrived.

And my generation is the generation that's responsible for that. I mean, you can't see it here, but it used to have hair that went down to past my shoulders and things like that. So, there's this hippie idea of, you don't teach that didactic approach.

You let people discover it themselves. That's a way that they develop themselves, they become a better person, those types of things. So that's kind of like the basis of it.

But within that, there's this idea that discovery, when you're doing that, you're delivering a certain amount of effort. And you have this idea, well, if I've put in this effort to do this discovery, it must be good. It must have worked.

Otherwise, you have this cognitive dissonance in your head from, I put in all of this work, and nothing came of it. And you have this idea that it worked, but there's nothing to prove that it worked. I mean, if you're playing tennis or football and you try to discover yourself how to bend it like Beckham, you have this feedback immediately that it goes into the defenders in front of you or it goes completely around the goal.

But you don't have that when you're learning. So, you have this idea of, okay, there's something in my head, I did something, it led to something, so I must have learned it. I must have learned it well.

So that's like the first thing is called the effort fallacy. But I see that Carl has something to say about this. So, before I give a complete lecture, maybe Carl, what would you like to add?

[00:14:44] Carl Hendrick: I was just going to say that the illusion functions because we're essentially sort of prediction machines.

And when, if you take a period of learning, maybe the last 5% of it for a lot of people 10, 20% probably looks like discovery learning. In other words, if you have learned something either through explicit instruction or through reading, there comes a point where you gain mastery within a particular domain of knowledge. And then you move towards a much more kind of independent working with the knowledge.

And that probably looks more like discovery. So, people who are outside of, as Paul said, it feels right. It feels nice.

So, the illusion is when we look at, for example, optical illusions, a lot of it is just filling in blanks that we think are there. So, people, when they think about when I learned to ride a bike, I just did it myself. I learned how to do it myself or when I did this, I did it myself.

So, it feels intuitively correct, but they forget about the hard yards at the beginning. And what we are, would probably emphasize in our work is that we're really good at sharing very complex information with each other. And we do that in very sophisticated ways.

And that is normally explicitly, and that instruction is a very kind of complex design feature, very complex, almost an art form. And so, to bypass all of that in favour of minimally guided instruction, it doesn't sit with what we know about cognitive architecture. And also, I think it's, as Paul said, it's just, it's fundamentally illusory.

And then just one very quick last thing is there's a kind of a moral component to this. A lot of people feel that discovery learning is somehow morally better than telling someone something. We often see this in ed departments, anything that's explicit or anything that's direct construction is kind of often aligned with an oppressive form of learning, whereas discovery learning is seen in much more as the kind of the morally superior form of learning, when actually in many cases, when we look at kids who can't read, the opposite is true.

[00:17:02] Paul Kirschner: Going back exactly to what Carl just said about the last five or 10% or what we remember, there's kind of like a confirmation bias. If we look at what we learned, it's often the case that we remember the salient aha moments that we really felt good. And those are things we remember.

But if you think of how much of your learning in 12 or 16 years of school were actually based upon that, and that over the 99.9% of what you learned and what you can now do things with, weren't the result of this discovery aha moment. What sticks in your mind is that one moment. And you tend to generalize that into saying, oh, that's the way to do it.

And then we reach a certain point, Carl was talking about it very well, achieving that you begin to achieve mastery. At a certain point, you do discover. And at a certain point, that's the only way to learn more.

That's the epistemology of the scientist. That's how a scientist gains new knowledge is by experimenting and discovering, but a child who is learning. Isn't an expert.

I wrote about this years ago, actually what I got and got my PhD in the early nineties, and that was Derek Hodgson's treaties. That would you have to remember is that scientists do science and students are learning science. And there's a fundamental difference between the two of them.

And there's a fundamental difference in how they do it. And one is the epistemology of the expert. And the other is the pedagogy or the didactics of the learner and those experts who then look back and say that we should allow children to discovery.

I once wrote a blog, and it was a variation on a title of a blemish. Book or poem. And it was called the butterfly who forgot it was once a caterpillar.

And I think that describes it perfectly. You have these experts. I won't mention any names who have turned into butterflies, but think that they can do all of those things they've done, not thanks to the good education that they had, but almost in spite of it, and they forget that they were once caterpillars and learning and that they can do what they do thanks to that good, solid education that they received.

[00:19:50] Anna Stokke: So, the other thing, some people also refer to that as the curse of knowledge, right? It's really hard when you know something to understand or remember how hard it was to actually learn that in the first place. And Carl, you said something interesting that I just want to back up on that.

Some people are positioning discovery learning as being morally superior to teaching by telling or explicit instruction.

I mean, who gets to decide that one form of instruction is morally superior to another form of instruction? It's just kind of an odd take, but I kind of feel that sort of thinking and saying that this is a morally superior or making people feel bad if they use explicit instruction, it's really intended just to shame people into not using it. I mean, I don't know, what are your thoughts on that?

[00:20:43] Carl Hendrick: Yeah. I mean, the reality is that many education departments are stocked with sociologists, anthropologists, philosophers, a lot of them Marxist philosophers.

So, there's a tendency to look at the world in those terms and divide things up into oppressor and oppressed. So, it's a kind of a lazy reading of explicit instruction. It's an oppressive form of instruction.

And as Paul said, it's like the band who work hard for 10 years, playing small clubs, and then when they finally get famous, they're described as an overnight success, that final kind of 5% is illusory. So, what really what's happened is that really only in the recent past, we’re seeing this kind of movement towards a focus on cognitive science and evidence that’s not what I'm going to call speculative in nature. It's not that philosophy and sociology are not important, but a lot of teachers want things that are practically useful.

Our work really is focused on how we can distill hard fought knowledge into things that teachers can use in their classrooms. So, morality really doesn't come into it other than what could be more morally admirable than harnessing the best available methods to help kids learn important knowledge.

[00:22:06] Paul Kirschner: And what can be more immoral than not doing that?

[00:22:10] Anna Stokke: Precisely.

And we could talk about the discovery illusion for the entire podcast. I'm aware of that, but you have a lot of illusion. But actually, we should say one more thing because we talked about what it is and why it exists, why it's so prevalent.

We should talk about how you unmask it. That’s the last step there.

[00:22:32] Paul Kirschner: I mean, I can go also talk for hours on that.

The fact is it's been unmasked. There has been loads and loads and loads, actually bookshelves full of research on both sides of the question. And there has been very little, I won't say no, because very little good verifiable, valid research that has shown that for a typically normal student, that discovery is more effective, more efficient, or more satisfying than good explicit instruction.

It's been the veil has been lifted. And what impressed me the most is a few people that I know who are, were hardcore discovery learning people have begun rethinking and saying, well, it’s not really discovery. It's guided discovery.

And we first teach them this, and then we let them, and then we give them feedback. And I say, tell me how that's different from Rosenshine's principles, in which at a certain point in time, after having gained the necessary knowledge, getting the feedback, being in discussion about it, you get the opportunity to do it in an unguided way. How is that any different? So, all they're doing to me is saying, yeah, well, actually we were wrong, but we’re trying to save face and we're still calling it discovery, but it’s explicit and it's guided and it's supported.

And I say, well, that's what's called good teaching.

[00:24:21] Anna Stokke: Yes, exactly. Okay.

Let's move on to another illusion. So, Carl, can you talk about the innovation illusion? So, what is that?

[00:24:29] Carl Hendrick: Well, the innovation illusion is the idea that innovation leads to improvement. The idea that new equals better.

And this is something that I think is particularly prevalent in education where, I mean, it's hard to think of another field that is more prone or attracted to fads than education. We are in this perpetual cycle of grabbing at shiny, glittery things all the time. I suppose the clearest example of this, which I spoke about is technology.

And particularly, I think maybe 15, probably 20 years ago, there became this accepted wisdom that anything that's ed tech is by definition superior to other methods because it's new. I was always suspicious as well of this phrase of, oh, we should avoid, we should avoid phrases like we've always done it this way, well, there's kind of a lot of reasons why we've always done certain things that way. We have very, very kind of sad examples of this, particularly in my own country, we had this rollout of interactive whiteboards with the flimsiest of evidence and another thing we'll talk about later on.

And now we'll, we'll touch on is the idea of engagement, but as a measure for research or for quantifiable evidence, engagement is often used in educational studies. And it really is, I think one of the flimsiest measures we have. It's one of the easiest things to set up an experiment and show that it shows engagement.

The hardest thing to measure or to show or to demonstrate is changes in long term memory over a period of time. And the kind of least bad way we have of doing that is through some form of standardized testing. And so, what you see in a lot of studies on things like technology as well, the kids were really engaged.

We spent all this money on getting Xboxes in the classroom. To teach kids narratives, so we got them playing video games to teach them narrative. And we weren't able to show that it had any demonstrable effect on their learning, but my God, those kids were engaged.

They really love playing video games in the classroom. So, we have interactive whiteboards were bought in the UK and these were very expensive boards where you had, you could touch the screen with a pen, and it would show up. And within a very short space of time, I can remember teachers were demanding that basic whiteboards were put back into their classrooms because it was all these issues with not syncing and they couldn't just write, they just wanted to write things on the board.

We also then have this innovation illusion in terms of instruction and pedagogy where something like growth mindset comes along. And if you have kind of senior leaders who are, shall we say ill-informed or they get to about August in the school year and they think I really need something to talk about in the September inset, so I'll just kind of have us quit, look around and see what's going on growth mindset. That's what we'll focus on.

Then you get this kind of quite flimsy, poor implementation of evidence in that way. And something like growth mindset, I think has very good evidence to recommend it as a kind of a philosophy or an approach to learning. But when you get down to the nuts and bolts of how we teach kids phonics or maths or science or into read, it's really not that useful, I don't think.

And it's not even useful, I think, in changing people's growth mindset. I think it's often, it is a philosophy, not an intervention for me. So, we have it in terms of those areas as well.

You just end up with this kind of seduction of novelty that anything that’s new and shiny is going to be innovative and that's something again, that’s very prevalent in education and very hard to change. So, it's very costly, it's very expensive and yeah, we wanted to dedicate a chapter to that in the book.

[00:28:19] Anna Stokke: Jim, do you want to add anything?

[00:28:21] Jim Heal: No, I was just going to say that picking up from what Carl was naming, newness sells, and the language of newness sells. And I think this sort of braids onto another sort of phenomenon that we’ve seen in education, which is almost the sort of the blending of education with kind of marketing and advertising speak.

The idea that even the thing that we call it in large part has the ability to sell the concept at scale. So, Carl's already mentioned growth mindset, irrespective of what we know about what really works in relation to growth mindset and what doesn't. It's a heck of a phrase.

It's a heck of a term and it provides teachers and parents and caregivers alike, something to hang their hat on. I also think about phrases like 21st century skills, the idea that particularly at the turn of the 21st century, who's started to seek something that would ground us in the face of a kind of society wide fears of an uncertainty of what the new century would bring. And so, everything became about preparing oneself for a world that we do not yet know exists, but we need to future-proof our young people for that.

For me, within even that conception is a lot of fancy sounding, alluring ways of talking about what's best for kids that doesn't actually have any substance at its heart. And so, I think this is both about innovation and newness and the promise thereof, but it also has this kind of sheen that leaves me feeling somewhat cold and concerned.

[00:30:01] Anna Stokke: And, you know, I would add that people in education, they get rewarded for being innovative, right? So, I'll just kind of talk at the post-secondary for a moment. So, I get sent tenure applications to review and to write the letter about recommendation letter. And so, the university will send along the criteria for getting promoted or tenure.

And inevitably on teaching, they'll be looking for innovative, implemented, innovative teaching techniques. So, people are expected to do this, but I'm going to tell you one other funny story that sometimes old things become innovative things. And so, my colleague teaches using chalk and talk, like literal chalk and talk, like writing on the chalkboard, there's interaction, whatever, but essentially that's what he does.

He just writes on the chalkboard and that's how he teaches math. And on one of his student evaluations, the student wrote, this professor has a very unique way of teaching that works really well, and it's nice to see this really different way of teaching. And I thought that was really funny.

And I think actually a lot of students are kind of longing for a return to more analog methods, like less technology. So maybe things will turn around. So how do you unmask this illusion, Carl?

[00:31:34] Carl Hendrick: I think for me, there's a very simple question to ask, which is what problems does this solve? And one way of unmasking the innovation illusion is to expose what really is a form of solutionism, in other words, a solution looking for a problem.

And so, there's also the idea of Chesterton's Fence, which is this idea that very often when we remove something, we forget the reason why it was put there in the first place. I seem to remember something on Scott Alexander's blog about the cassava and why for generations it was washed seemingly too many times, and it turns out that you'd wash a cassava because it has toxins in it that can make you really, really ill, but you don't know that until you've eaten it for an extended period of time.

So, when people were trying to get rid of that process, they threw out things that were quite useful.

So, I think when schools can really challenge this problem and this illusion by asking a simple question, which is what is this replacing?

[32:33 - 32:36] Paul Kirschner: And what is this, if I can add, what is this improving?

[32:37 - 32:46] Carl Hendrick: What is it improving? What is it replacing? What problem does this solve?And very often that's a really rapid way of unmasking that particular illusion.

[00:32:53] Anna Stokke: All right. So, let's move on to another one. So, Jim, can you talk about the expertise illusion?

[00:32:59] Jim Heal: Yeah. So, I think at the heart of this illusion is this idea that we think we know how novices and experts work and how novicehood and expertise interact, but the reality is, is not what it might first seem. One sort of misconception here lives in this notion that to move from novice to expert is just the kind of linear progression where you simply have to become a better novice until such time as you kind of transubstantiate into a coming an expert.

In fact, what we know is that experts don't just know more than novices. They organize information in an entirely different way. For instance, while novices, you could argue a range information as something like a grocery list.

You know, the idea of a kind of singularities that are being encoded, but not necessarily in a way that looks at how those items of information interact rather when it comes to experts, they arrange information a little bit more like a family tree. The idea that knowledge items, as we build expertise, become more intricately connected, more like webs of ideas, and we call this interconnected network of ideas schema. And in this regard, growing one's schema is not just about knowing more.

It is about knowing how things fit together. And so, this idea also that we think that expertise is necessarily, you reach the mountaintop. And once you are in a place of expertise, that means that you can rest easy.

And all that is required is to bestow your knowledge on the less expert, but there’s actually really serious concerns or sort of considerations to bear in mind, which in the book, we kind of call the curse of knowing too much. And the curse of knowing too little in this regard, the, the curse of knowing too little has come to be known. And is a well-known as the Dunning-Kruger effect.

What they found was that particularly those in the bottom quartile in a particular domain ended up dramatically overestimating how much they knew about something. There's also this idea that novices think they already have what they need. And even when they learn new things about a particular domain, it can often be the case that they still hold on to their originally held beliefs.

And so, novice hood is stubborn.

I'm reminded of, there's a great tweet that is probably a parody, but nevertheless is quite entertaining, which is that it goes something like the flat earth society has members all around the globe. And this idea that being a novice, holding onto some notion that the earth is flat, even when confronted with the idea that it is indeed a globe, you just hold belligerently onto those originally held beliefs.

By contrast, expertise isn't without its complications either. And this in part, we already touched upon this notion that if you become expert, you in a sense, forget what it's like to be a novice and what's more, the more expert you become, the wider this gap becomes between what you now know and how you have forgotten you used to think. And Paul used the great analogy, cited the great analogy of the caterpillar and the butterfly.

And so, this idea of positionality is a great illusion from our perspective. The notion that novices aren't just mini experts but rather arrange and organize and use information differently. Experts can see patterns; they can make different and better predictions and what we sometimes think of as sort of a gut feeling about something.

You know, we think of the television depiction of the detective that walks into a crime scene, and we would be led to believe that it's their gut telling them who was involved and how it played out. There is no such thing. It's that those detectives have walked into hundreds of crime scenes and have been able to assimilate their understanding thereof in connected ways that allow them to be more expansive and precise in the way that they make sense of what they’re seeing.

So, for us, that felt like a right place to think about this as an illusion of expertise and its relationship to being a novice.

[00:37:44] Anna Stokke: Okay. That was a great description.

So, you talked first of all about sometimes people that don't have as much knowledge think they know more than they do, right? So, I've seen that a lot, by the way. What's that effect called again? I'm sorry. I can't remember.

[00:38:00] Jim Heal: The Dunning-Kruger effect.

[00:38:02] Anna Stokke: That one. Okay.

Do you think though that that is sometimes why these myths or illusions exist? Like the one that comes to my mind is homework or like drill and kill. This is bad for students. I mean, literally, like if you know a lot of math, if you've learned a lot of math, you know how you get there.

And that is a lot of practice. And so sometimes the people I hear saying this type of thing, like drill and kill, I kind of look at their background and I think, did you ever get to like a really high level of math? Because this just doesn't make sense. Like, I don't know anyone who would think that who actually learned a lot of math.

Paul, do you have something to say?

[00:38:49] Paul Kirschner: Yeah. I'd like to take it out of the realm of math or something like that. This is abstract area.

And let's talk about drill and kill in learning to swim. Is there anyone who will actually say, if you want to learn to swim, you don’t have to practice a certain stroke. Is there anyone who would say, if you want to be a good golfer, going to the word stroke again, you have to constantly practice a certain stroke.

There's a drilling and killing that's gaining expertise and that’s the normal way to do it. For me, one of the major problems is as soon as we go away from sports or other fields, a doctor, you really want a doctor, if you're going to be operated on, and I had a neurosurgeon working on my back, one of the first things I asked was who does the most operations on hernias here, because I want that man or woman to do it. I want that drilled and killed, that person who has done all of it so many times to do it.

Now, in all of those fields, we don't feel that the doctor operating and operating and operating, that that's the wrong thing to do. But as soon as we're talking about math or history or English or whatever, all of a sudden, we get this completely different mindset and all of a sudden practice isn't important, and drilling isn't important and gaining an ultimatums isn't important. Every other field, it doesn't matter if it's a brick layer, you want that person to have that automatism of how to do it so that the wall is straight and doesn't fall down.

But when it comes to math, it's not necessary. I don't understand how people can have that disconnect when it comes to learning at school.

[00:40:52] Anna Stokke: Yeah, I agree with you, Carl.

[00:40:55] Carl Hendrick: Yeah. You don't see a lot of discovery learning in the bricklaying industry. So let me give you two very quick examples of this.

We have three small kids. I taught my oldest kid how to ride a bike. We have twins.

My wife and I decided that to keep them safe, we would do it with a teacher and take them to like a car park. And then, yeah, and I'm watching this teacher teaching my twins how to learn to ride a bike. And it is Engelman 101, capital D, capital I. Here's a curriculum.

I have scripted run-throughs that I do. I'm not going to differentiate, like it's literally, this is how you have to hold it this way. You have to do this.

You have to do that. And then they start to ride the bike. They start to learn how to do it.

I also watched them learn how to swim exactly the same. The teacher brilliantly, here's how you do it. Here's where your hands go.

This is where you have to breathe. But yet you apply that in, and drill and kill. Okay, do it again. Great. Well done. Great. Now do it again. Do it this way. Yeah. But then we apply it to a classroom and it's some kind of carceral pedagogy. It's oppressive. So that's the challenge.

[00:42:06] Anna Stokke: So, what's the difference though, Carl? I mean, with the bike, at the end of the day, you expected that your children were going to be able to ride a bike, and you knew that they'd be able to. And the teacher had to ensure that that happened.

Yeah. So, what's happening in schools that we're allowed to be in a position w

here we don't do the drill and we're not doing all the practice, right?

[00:42:35] Carl Hendrick: Because the kid wants to have the stabilizers. It'd be, it's the equivalent of giving my daughters a little tiny pedal bike with stabilizers on it and them going, I don't want to do that. And the teacher going, okay, so you just use those stabilizers.

And then me coming back after an hour and going, so can they ride a bike? Well, no, but they were really engaged. They really were engaged for the full hour. They were on the stabilizers.

They had a great time.

[00:43:01] Anna Stokke: So, it's that we're aiming for the wrong outcomes, maybe.

[00:43:05] Carl Hendrick: Well, yeah. I mean, look, let's be honest. We're all of the view. We're all in the school of really learning is, can I coin the phrase Kirschnerian in the sense that we believe that learning is a change in long-term memory, that there is a, and the best measure of that is some kind of demonstration of learning, not demonstration of wellbeing or engage or any other of these things.

Don't tell us that you understand it, show us in some way. And so, all you can do is, is trying to shine a light on it and try and hope that evidence will triumph over superstition and illusion.

[00:43:48] Anna Stokke: The other thing that I just want to really stress is I really like how you talked about Jim, that grocery list, like the novice that has learned a fair amount, they kind of have items in their mind, like discreet in a discreet way.

They're not all interconnected, but then the expert has this way of putting everything together and that's when you get to the stage where you can kind of do advanced problem solving, for example, in math, you can pull these things out and you kind of know where to look at them. And I just want to stress that that transition comes through exposure and practice, right? So, a lot of good instruction and a lot of good practice gets you to that point where you have all those interconnected webs.

[00:44:33] Jim Heal: And indeed, Anna, the idea of unmasking the illusion, because you got me thinking there in terms of how you unify that sense of, I may have different schema than you, but how can I bring you into a place where your schema is becoming increasingly advanced as well? And I think that's where the means and the ends start to get confused.

So, there is no reason why we cannot teach and ought not to teach with a kind of schematic consideration of how knowledge is organized. This is, there are easy and practical ways to do that. A couple that I've seen that are to great effect.

One is thought again of our grocery list versus a family tree. Let's say you were looking at exploring with a group of learners, the causes of the First World War. And you could ask them to simply list every single one of those causes.

And for that to be the fullest extent of what they're expected to do. The reward and incentive could even be organized around those that can come up with the most causes will have done the best in this activity. And in this regard, like volume does not equal success.

Instead, what would it look like to have students write down on cue cards, all of the different causes of the first world war, and then to organize them by virtue of how they relate to one another. You might have economic reasons and philosophical reasons and so on and so forth, so that's one way another. And I'll be quick here is there's a great colleague of ours, Helen Reynolds, who is an English educator, but works out of Arizona.

And when she builds a curriculum and internalizes a curriculum, she actually presents it as in the form of a curriculum map, she's a physics teacher. And she will present information that says, well, we're going to learn about forces so that we can better understand. This other concept, we're going to understand that other concept because we’ve already understood forces.

And so, this notion that in order to understand, see, we must first gain a grasp of A and B, and then understand how A, B, and C interact. So, there are ways to shape the experience in ways that make schema explicit that I think go a long way to unmasking this illusion about how experts and novice’s work.

[00:47:11] Paul Kirschner: I don't want to blow my own horn, but I just wrote with eight other experts, a book on the curriculum revival, which is about a knowledge-rich curriculum.

And one of the statements that I really like about that is that a curriculum is a promise that you make to the next set of teachers by having a knowledge-rich curriculum, you're promising you're the second grade teacher, that the first grade teacher, that the children coming there have learned this in the first grade and the third grade teacher, you're making the promise that they've learned within the first and second, which is exactly what you're talking about here. It's making a promise as to what the kids will know.

[00:47:50] Anna Stokke: So maybe Paul, you can tell us a bit about the uniqueness illusion.

[00:47:55] Paul Kirschner: Yeah, it was born, one of the ideas behind this, I'm constantly asked because I talk about cognitive load theory, and I talk about cognitive architecture and how we all process information in the same way.

And so, you mean that all kids have to be taught in the exact same way. There's no difference between children. And I can look at people in this disbelief because yes, we're all unique.

You and I, Carl and Jim, we're all unique. We're all different. We all have different backgrounds.

We've learned different things. Constructivism as a philosophy is great. I'm the product of what I've learned, and it's happened, but we can't disavow the fact that in our bodies that we all have the exact same digestive system.

Although some people can eat almost nothing and gain weight and other people can munch down a bowl of spaghetti three times a day and not gain a pound, but we all chew the food coming in, have the same enzymes, have the same acids in our stomach, have the same bowels that remove the nutrients. We're all the same, but we're all different. And that's the fact that we are unique, but we learn in exactly the same way.

We all have a sensory memory, a short term, a working memory, a long-term memory. They all work in the same way, the same way our muscles and our digestive systems and all work in the same way. But that doesn't mean that for child A or child B, the idea of setting things in small steps, that a small step for child A is the same size step as for child B. But the principle of breaking down what they have to learn into smaller steps, that’s a truism, that's a principle that's there based upon our cognitive load and what we can handle.

That's the idea behind it. So, we all do it in the same way. Rosenshein’s principles work for all children.

And I'm talking about all children because there have been studies with children who were learning disabilities, and it works better for them also. But that doesn't mean that the teaching is exactly the same for all of the children. And that's the idea.

We are all unique, but we are all different, but we have to, it's not to be in teaching is interesting because students are so different, but it's only possible because they are so similar. That's the whole idea behind it. And we discussed that in the book, different aspects, what it means and unmasking it and how Rosenshein works in different ways for different age levels.

[00:50:45] Anna Stokke: Okay. So, I think what I hear you saying is that the principles of instruction, so if you’re looking at the best instructional techniques, which are going to have the highest probability of working for the most students are really, they're the same for every student. But that doesn't mean, it actually does take some students longer to learn things than others, right? We're not saying that all students are exactly the same, but the principles of instruction, like teaching people things, breaking things down into component parts, making sure students get a lot of feedback and practice.

Those things work for all students.

[00:51:25] Paul Kirschner: Those things work for just like in our digestive system, we all need proteins to build muscles, but a weightlifter needs more protein and different proteins than well, Jim is a champion weightlifter that people don't know that, but for people like you and Carl and I, mere mortals, we need different amounts of proteins and it's just, it's so, that's the thing that sometimes eludes me, it's so simple.

Yes. But maybe that's the expertise illusion taking hold here. Something like that

[00:52:02] Anna Stokke: Carl, would you like to add anything?

[00:52:04] Carl Hendrick: Yeah, that's a great point. There's also a difference between something not working and the length of time it takes for something to work. We're very often when we say, well, this person finds it more difficult. The answer, if you're working out and you're not making any progress, the answer isn't less of the thing that works, it's more of it, it's not that if you're working out and you're like, there's a way to get fit and get in shape, but to try something completely different, you just need to create the conditions on the, whether the thing that demonstrably works will work better.

And that's the thing I think that we, we often lose sight of.

[00:50:44] Anna Stokke: Carl, can you tell us about the engagement illusion?

[00:52:47] Carl Hendrick: Yeah, so I think it's the first chapter in the book, but it certainly is one of the first chapters that we wrote. It's essentially this distinction between short-term performance and long-term learning.

And it's for me, one of the ones that I encountered, I actually first encountered it through the oft-cited Rob Coe famous slide on poor proxies for learning, which showed that, and this was really to do with lesson observations and the kind of performance indicators you can use to determine whether learning's happening in a room. One of those was engagement and kids being busy and which caused a lot of consternation at the time. But around the same time, I encountered Robert and Elizabeth Bjork's work on performance and learning and Nick Soderstrom, and that really was a kind of Damascene conversion for me.

That was a point where I had just taken it as read that if kids were having fun, if they were engaged and that's obviously a good thing, if they're being busy, that’s a sign of learning happening.

Their work showed that very often, paradoxically, things that appear to be effective in the short term are often very poor indicators of long-term learning. So, they came up with this term desirable difficulties, which refers to stuff that’s, that you don't want to do in the short term when we had that analogy there about the weightlifting, when you go out for a run on a cold morning, your body is screaming at you to stop doing what you're doing.

When you start to lift weight to do these things, everything about it is telling you to stop doing what you're doing, but we know then that those lead to kind of longer-term gains. We know, for example, everybody knows that if we don't spend a bit of money in the short term, we'll have a little bit of extra to spend at Christmas or whatever it is. Again, that principle holds for learning.

So, for example, retrieval, generative learning, spaced practice, interleaving, things where you're having some kind of variation on the learning process tends to lead to greater long-term gains and things that often look like really effective lessons. And I come back to this term of why engagement is such a problem I think in education. A great analogy of this is from my friend and yours, Mr. Craig Barton, who told me the story.

I think it's in one of his books. It's such a great example. He, in an effort to teach fractions, he thought, well, to get the kids really engaged, I'll, I'll get some Swiss roll cakes, I'll give the kids these Swiss roll cakes and a plastic knife, they'll cut them up and they'll see that that's the whole can become parts and so on and so forth.

He taught the lesson. The kids had a wonderful time. They were fully engaged, nobody disengaged.

And then a year later, one of the students in the class, he met them in the corridor, and they said, oh, sir, I'm in so-and-so's class now. And he went, oh, how's that going? And they said, yeah, it's not as good. You know, we don't, the lessons are not as fun.

We don't have lessons with cake. And he went, oh, that's great to hear. By the way, what do you remember about that lesson? And the student said, cake.

It remembered nothing about what the teacher had wanted them to learn, but they were fully engaged. So, the engagement delusion is really, I think, one of the sharper illusions in the book. Because it's something that every teacher is aware of.

And it's one of those things that you really need evidence to see through it.

[00:56:16] Anna Stokke: Yeah, it is a tricky one, right? Because you can easily be tricked, I think, into thinking that the lesson’s going really well, right? Because everyone seems to be having fun. There's a buzz in the room, right? The principal walks past and it's, oh, things are great in that classroom, you know, because it's really loud and that sort of thing.

And honestly, like math is just plagued with this, like programs that are being sold because it's, the students seem like they're having fun because, you know, everybody hates math, and we have to make sure students like math.

But at the end of the day, you actually have to learn math, right? Like you're not going to like math unless you learn it, right? That's actually the thing that we have to be looking for is our students learning. The engagement on its own is just, it might mean absolutely nothing, right?

[00:57:09] Paul Kirschner: I'd like to nuance that a little.

[00:57:10 Anna Stokke: Yes.

[00:57:10] Paul Kirschner: And nuance is not my strongest point, as Carl and Jim know very, very well. Engagement is incredibly important, but cognitive engagement, not physical, not social, not emotional, or whatever other type of engagement you can think about.

Being cognitively engaged is what's really important. And when you're cognitively engaged and learning, and you see for yourself that you can do things that you couldn't do earlier, that success causes you to become more cognitively engaged and more motivated in the future. So, motivation, engagement, those are two really important things, but motivation doesn't lead to learning.

It's the other way of success. It's the other way around. And engagement is really important as long as it's cognitive engagement, and that can be very silent.

You don't have to do any, you don't hear anything. You don't see anything. People don't have these bubbles, like in comics coming out of their heads on what they're thinking that's going on in there.

And maybe a quiet room where people are all just looking at the book is the most engaging lesson you've ever experienced.

[00:58:29] Anna Stokke: Yeah, for sure. And I mean, back to his Swiss cake example, you can motivate things, right, at the beginning of your class by maybe using the Swiss cake, and you do it yourself.

Right? So, we do something like this in calculus. We teach something called volumes by slicing. And so, if you have a complicated object and you want to figure out its volume, the technique really involves slicing it up into small pieces.

So, you might, at the beginning of the class, take a cucumber and slice it up. And that takes you five minutes. And the student’s kind of remember that, oh, that's what's behind this approach.

But you don't get them all slicing up the cucumbers and taking up the whole class doing this sort of thing. Right? So, I think it's a matter of just putting the focus in the right place. At the end of the day, you want the students actually doing the practice with the technique.

[00:59:22] Carl Hendrick: Yeah. And it's also, I think it's a form of condescension that kids can only be conned into learning. Or that they can't read Shakespeare because it's too boring.

So, you've got to do it in text message, or you've got to turn Shakespeare into a soap opera or rewrite Shakespeare as a rap song. It's patronizing to kids. What you're ostensibly saying is you're not clever enough to learn this thing.

So, I'm going to trick you into learning it. And sure, the oft quoted line in education, a noisy classroom is a thinking classroom. Very often the absolute opposite is true.

And of course, a noisy classroom may well be a thinking classroom, but once we shift our lens to engage with what, then the conversation becomes a different one. And I'm probably pre-empting your next question now is that's really how you unmask the illusion in terms of, you just asked that question. What are you engaged with? And is it something, and also kind of sort of testing the invisible.

So take it as read is that we're really trying to get out on the scene agents here that we're, we're not interested in what you know, now we're interested in what you know, in a week, in two weeks, in three weeks, and what are the steps that we would need to take now in order to facilitate that learning? Not that you would perform now, but I'm going to cue you up to show that performance now, and obviously in a drama classroom, in field of sports and other fields, for sure, you know, people need to be active and learning and all the rest of it, that's taken as read, but when we talk about engagement, what most people take that to be is superficial, physical engagement rather than cognitive.

[01:01:08] Anna Stokke: Yes. Got it.

Okay, perfect. So, let's do the last one that we're going to talk about, and then you’ve got to get the book. You've got to get the book.

You've got to read about the illusions yourself. Is there more of them? And the book goes into a lot of depth. It's very nicely written.

So, Jim, what is the student-centred illusion?

[01:01:28] Jim Heal: The illusion in this case is, is one of something of a false binary that I think a lot of educators and people writ large in terms of observers of educational practices fall into. And that is this idea that on the one hand you have student-centred learning, and on the other, you have kind of teacher led instruction. And that these are in a sense, a zero-sum game.

You, you, as an educator, you have to kind of pick a side. And when picking a side that says something about your pedagogical philosophy of sorts, and dare I say it, even perhaps your politics. And a lot of what we've explored thus far, when we talked about the discovery of illusion and others, is this idea.

There is something kind of seemingly more progressive about student-centred learning in which students are kind of put in groups and given agency over their own learning and the teacher sets them to their task and they discover their way to new understanding. Meanwhile, the teacher is in the corner checking his or her emails. The teacher led kind of vision is that of the teacher standing at the front with kids in rows while the teacher drones on and the students are passive recipients of knowledge.

And I think that both of these are in a sense, kind of lazy caricatures. They present learning as one or the other and never the twain shall meet. And yet what we know and what we've tried to do when I'm asking this illusion is to say, there is a way to square that circle.

And in part, it goes back to what I was saying earlier about the schema and what it means to understand something well versus less well, in order to do that, you have to, as a teacher, be able to acknowledge and activate the prior knowledge of your students. They are coming in, not without experience, without their own backgrounds, heritages, histories, views of the world, what's come to be known as sort of their funds of knowledge. But if that lays dormant and remains kind of untapped, then you're leaving a lot to chance in terms of whether or not those students would be able to connect what they already know to what they're coming to understand.

At the same time, not all of that knowledge is accurate and certainly not all of that knowledge is relevant, at least not relevant to the objectives of the learning in this, whatever the instance might be. It's part of the teacher's job to be able to say, I can tap into what you already know, I can even build a sense of foundational knowledge, and from that, we can come to understand what this thing is that we're trying to learn together. In that sense, I would argue that the teacher is both leading the learning but also leading the learning in a way that places the student and what they know at the centre.

So, this is a binary that need not be the case. It just comes from being able to understand as a teacher how knowledge is built, how we make sense of things, and the role that prior knowledge plays in new understanding.

[01:04:43] Anna Stokke: Okay, it almost kind of ties into the discovery illusion, don't you think? They're sort of similar, right? In any case, we need to actually feel comfortable teaching students because that’s how they're going to learn.

So how do you unmask this illusion?

[01:05:00] Jim Heal: Well, again, I think it's this idea of, in part, you can make the schema that you are engaging students in explicit. I think also you can make it knowable to students, exactly what I've just named. You are bringing things into this environment that may or may not be relevant or accurate to what we're trying to understand.

We also know, you could say to your students, that we make sense of the world via what we already know. So, there are going to be ways in which what you see is shaped by what you know. Lay that out.

Make it something that is a known and habitual understanding of the way we do things around here. And then of course, you have to, as I mentioned earlier, be able to sort between the different types of misconceptions, inaccuracies, or underdeveloped thinking that a learner might have. Sometimes learners know just enough to be dangerous.

Other times learners have these wonderful nuggets of relevant information that kind of are there hiding in plain sight. Part of the craft of teaching is to be able to sort of have the radar that senses where those pieces are and to be able to sort of fold them into the experience of learning. To leave prior knowledge off the table is almost certainly to stymie any potential learning that could take place.

[01:06:23] Anna Stokke: So, I want to close off with this final question and maybe each of you kind of tell me what you think and maybe we'll do this full circle because we talked about innovation and the illusion of innovation and fads. And so, what about the science of learning? Is this just another innovation, another fad? Because you talk about this in your book, the science of learning is not an initiative, and it can play an important role in exposing the truth about instructional illusions. So, can you elaborate on that? Maybe we can start with Paul.

[01:06:58] Paul Kirschner: I have no idea. The only thing I can say is I have the feeling that it's becoming such a hackneyed term that everybody fills in what everybody wants to see or would like to see in it, that it becomes eventually meaningless. A science of learning.

I've seen too many different ways of filling that term in. That for me, it has no meaning. For me, I speak about cognitive psychology and educational psychology, and a cognitive psychology is the studies that we do about how we learn, and educational psychology is a study of how we implement that in it.

I find that to be more than enough, and I don't need a science of this or a science of that or a science of whatever. We do things based upon science and we don't have a science of gravity and a science of, no, within physics, we know that there are gravitational forces and how things work, and we don't need specific sciences of A, B or C. So, I'm very wary of the introduction of a new term, but that's a personal feeling, this wariness, because I know it's going to get bastardized and as Carl, as we wrote about, it has the chance of lethally mutating in a lot of different directions and that scares me.

[01:08:27] Jim Heal: And to offer maybe, and I completely agree with what Paul just named, is that part of my concern, particularly here in the U.S., as these practices become more commonplace and sort of evidence-informed practices come more to the fore, is that it will be subject to issues of fidelity and coherence.

Nevertheless, I do think that the evidentiary basis for what we kind of term as this umbrella term of science of learning, your question was about whether or not it's faddy. I think the simple fact that it rests on decades upon decades of research would suggest that this doesn't have the qualities of a fad. And I'd also argue that the reason why we wrote that it's not an initiative is that it is everywhere all at once.

You don't get very far without your brain and to consider what teaching and learning ought to be without a consideration of the mind and how we learn and how we remember seems to me to be a largely futile exercise. Instead, what if we saw an understanding of cognition as a lens through which we see our practice. It's not something we try on temporarily.

It becomes how we see ourselves in the work. It becomes how we see our students, and it becomes how we understand how we and they grow. For me, there is an absolute good in that, but it does leave the challenge of how to make that growth kind of true and sort of honest and remaining on track in terms of veering away from its intent.

And there are many parts of the world where that is true. You know, I do think that in the U S learning science, if it was a person is, is probably a teenager and it's trying to work out what it is, what it is and what it could be. And so, it's, I feel in part, some degree of responsibility to try and have it grow up to be a rounded individual.

[01:10:26] Anna Stokke: Okay. Well, we're counting on you.

Okay. Carl, you're up next.

[01:10:30] Carl Hendrick: For me, the science of learning is sort of the grammar of how the mind works and it's a language that we can learn. And if we don't learn that language, then we're not going to be able to communicate in that realm.

Let's be clear. The science of learning is an umbrella term for cognitive psychology, education, psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and is it a concern with concept creep, but I'm not so concerned with the term. Like what are the zones of tolerance for this? Like, what can the thing withstand before you get it wrong? I'm more than happy with teachers trying to do retrieval practice and getting it slightly wrong than trying to do discovery learning and getting that completely wrong.

So, there's always this problem with concept creep, but our contention really is that there are things that are extremely useful in terms of instructional design. All of this isn't about turning teachers into psychology students. It's about what you, what decisions do you make in your classroom? And so, if you have a really solid understanding of how do we, and the model that the three of us are interested in, and probably the broader movement of where we're at really comes down to this very unsexy idea of information processing.

How do we attend to information? How do we make sense of it? How do we retrieve it? How do we store it? And so those things are crudely mechanistic. They don't sit well with people when we talk about the wonder of learning, which is again, a really important thing as well, but that's where the rubber meets the road. So, for us, and for me, the term instruction was an important term in the title. I think instruction is, I'd almost rather see that than the term teaching. Teaching encompasses too many things. It's the dead poet's hero teacher.

Whereas instructional design is a much tighter domain where teachers can do something with it. So really what we're trying to do is we're trying to help teachers make better decisions and more informed decisions in their own classrooms.

[01:12:43] Anna Stokke: Yeah. Well, you've done a great job of it, and I know your book is going to be a hit, and I recommend that people definitely check it out. There's a lot in there and it's very nicely written. I have to say, like I found it to be a really easy read and it's just, yeah, the analogies are really great.

So, I think people will get a lot out of it. And thank you for writing it. And thank you for coming on my podcast today.

[01:13:10] Carl Hendrick: It's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you, Anna.

[01:13:12] Paul Kirschner: Thank you for inviting us.

[01:13:14] Jim Heal: Thank you, Anna. Thank you.

[01:13:14] Anna Stokke: If you enjoy this podcast, please consider showing your support by leaving a five-star review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

Subscribe on your favourite podcast app to get new episodes delivered as they become available. Chalk & Talk is produced by me, Anna Stokke. You can follow me on X or LinkedIn for notifications or check out my website annastokke.com for more information.

This podcast received funding through University of Winnipeg Knowledge Mobilization and Community Impact Grant, funded through the Anthony Swaity Knowledge Impact Fund.