Ep 60. Rebuilding teacher training through cognitive science with Jonas Linderoth
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 talks with Dr. Jonas Linderoth, a professor of education at the University of Gothenburg, about how influential educational ideas have shaped the teaching profession and why evidence from cognitive science and educational psychology still faces resistance in teacher education. They discuss how education reforms of the 1990s affected teacher status and student outcomes, and Jonas’ reflections on his own role during that period.
They also discuss why evidence-based pedagogy is so crucial and what it means when teachers encounter research-informed strategies and respond with a single word – “finally”. They also explore Sweden’s recent proposal to embed cognitive science in teacher preparation, why it’s controversial, and how implementation is unfolding.
This is an insightful episode for anyone interested in how research, policy, and classroom practice come together.
This episode is also available in video at www.youtube.com/@chalktalk-stokke
TIMESTAMPS
[00:00:22] Introduction [00:04:50] The Swedish school reforms [00:08:57] The prevalence of constructivist teaching [00:12:26] Realizing the evidence didn’t match the rhetoric [00:13:36] How Jonas’s call for reflection became the most read article in Sweden [00:17:13] Perceptions of the teaching profession in Sweden [00:20:01] A systematic approach to teaching art [00:22:40] PISA & TIMS scores in Sweden [00:24:34] Why education academics research the Science of Learning [00:26:35] The value of quantitative research [00:29:23] Sweden’s move to embed cognitive science in teacher preparation [00:32:37] Reaction to the government proposal to transform teacher preparation [00:34:34] How evidence-based practice caught the government’s attention [00:36:52] Jonas’s work with pre-service teachers [00:37:28] When teachers say “finally” about evidence-based techniques [00:42:37] Core content for preparing future teachers [00:44:41] Grass-roots science of learning movements [00:46:02] The future of education in Sweden [00:49:24] Final thoughts: Jonas’s advice for international audiences
[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.
In this episode, I'm joined by Professor Jonas Linderoth, who is a professor of education in Sweden. It's a fascinating conversation about how powerful educational ideas shape the teaching profession and why, in many countries, including Sweden, evidence from cognitive science and educational psychology still face resistance in teacher education. We talk about how education reforms in the 1990s reshaped teacher status and student outcomes, along with Jonas' own reflections on his role during that period.
We also talk about why providing teachers with evidence-based pedagogy is so critical and what it means when teachers encounter evidence-informed strategies and respond with a single word, “finally”. Listeners will be interested to hear that there is a recent government proposal in Sweden to embed cognitive science in teacher training. We talk about why that's controversial and how its implementation is unfolding.
I really enjoyed our discussion. It's thoughtful and honest and calls on us to reflect on how teacher education is shaped, whose ideas dominate, and what it will take to ensure teachers get the pedagogical knowledge they need to succeed in the classroom. I really hope you like it.
If you've been enjoying Chalk & Talk, please make sure to give the show a follow on your favourite podcast platform and share it with others. Please consider leaving a five-star rating on Spotify or Apple Podcasts and don't forget to follow the show on YouTube, where the show comes in both video and audio. Your support really helps others discover the show and benefit from these important conversations.
Now, without further ado, let's get started. I am delighted to welcome Dr. Jonas Linderoth, who is joining us today from Sweden. Jonas is a professor of education at the University of Gothenburg, originally trained as an art teacher, his early research focused on games and learning.
He later became known for his critical analyses of game-based learning, publishing numerous studies that challenged overly optimistic claims about the effectiveness of games in education. In 2016, he published the book titled The Return of the Teacher, which gives a strong critique of constructivist teaching ideals and calls to re-establish the importance of explicit instruction and teacher-led learning. His current work focusses on educational psychology and the science of learning, connecting cognitive research with the practical realities of classroom instruction.
He is also a strong advocate for ensuring that teacher-educators themselves model evidence-informed practises. Outside of his academic work, Dr. Linderoth is an avid dog trainer and devotes much of his free time to working with his dog, Goffman, who is named after the Canadian sociologist, Irving Goffman. And I wouldn't normally mention something like that in my intro, but there are a couple of reasons.
For one thing, you named your dog after a Canadian, and next time we want you to name it after a Canadian mathematician if you don't mind. And also, just because I watched the video of your dog and I was kind of blown away about what your dog can do. And I mean, you say you're interested in cognitive psychology.
I think maybe it's behavioural psychology that you might like as well. So anyway, I'm excited to talk to you.
[00:03:58] Jonas Linderoth: Thank you. Yeah, I'm quite passionate about operant conditioning and I know my skinner from dog training.
[00:04:05] Anna Stokke: Oh yeah, you sure do. So welcome, Jonas. Welcome to the podcast.
[00:04:09] Jonas Linderoth Thank you. Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure.
[00:04:12] Anna Stokke: Yeah. I'm so excited to hear about Sweden today. And I don't know if you know this, but we've kind of written a little bit about Sweden sometimes when we talk about the PISA scores, because Sweden also had a sharp decline in PISA scores.
And it seemed to me that the Swedish government was doing something about it or trying to do something about it. But I thought we'd kind of go back to the 1990s in Sweden so we can find out what was going on there. So, can you take us back to that time in Sweden?
So, what were the major school reforms and what kinds of educational ideas were driving them?
[00:04:50] Jonas Linderoth: Well, in the 1990s in Sweden, we had a decade of quite radical restructuring of the entire school system. And I think one has to be aware that these changes took place against the backdrop of a society that was beginning to become digitalised. There was prevailing sense that we were entering a new era.
And the idea was that we could no longer train students for the present society. We had to prepare them for the society of the future. At the same time, we had all these new ways of thinking about governance that were emerging through new public management.
And we also had quite a lot of educational research that was constructivist in its nature, growing critique of explicit and direct instructions. And against this backdrop, in Sweden, we did four rather large reforms. The first one was that we shift from rule-based to goal-based steering.
So, we had a new curriculum. Instead of the state prescribing what and how to teach, it formulated goals and outcomes that were quite general in how they were written. And teachers and schools were expected to take sort of local responsibility for how these goals were achieved.
And embedded in this was the idea that pedagogical methods should be a matter of local choice. Teachers, professionals should be free to select their own approaches. However, I think that choice was kind of illusory because explicit and direct instruction was not part of the choice, so to say.
Secondly, we had municipalisation of schools, meaning that the responsibility for schools moved from the states to the municipalities. Similar ideas, local governments would be closer to the citizens and better equipped to organise schooling. And we had a quite large independent school reform, and a school voucher system was introduced.
Parental choice, competition between schools were supposed to emerge. And the guiding idea was that this competition between schools would drive improvements. Schools would be needed to attract students and get their vouchers to their schools and therefore improve their quality.
And this was the start of quite a large marketisation of Swedish education, where we now actually allow independent schools to be run for profit, paid by these vouchers that every student receives from taxpayers and from the government. And fourth, we had a new grading system. It replaced the old relative grading scales, where student achievement was distributed according to a normal curve, where only a fixed percentage of students could receive the higher or lowest grades.
And we got this new system that was goal-related, where students were now assessed against quite explicit learning goals instead. So, these were kind of the reforms that took place. And within this, we had a lot of zeitgeists, or a sign of the times that were very much constructivist, very much this new area that we are entering needs these reforms.
[00:07:58] Anna Stokke: That's really interesting. So, a lot of what you're describing sounds really familiar to me. I don't know particularly about some of the governmental stuff, maybe not, but wanting to prepare students for the future.
We hear this was called 21st century learning, this goals-based curriculum, that sort of thing, all very similar sounding. So, was it just Sweden doing this or were the other Scandinavian countries doing this too?
[00:08:26] Jonas Linderoth: Oh, it happened in Norway, especially. We can see similar results than like Norway and Sweden has followed each other when it comes to sort of the fallout of these reforms in a way.
[00:08:37] Anna Stokke: Okay, interesting. So, at the time, I guess these ideas were presented as modern and progressive, as they would still be today, right? They're always presented as modern and progressive.
So, what was being presented as good teaching? And how did it differ from the original view, the traditional view?
[00:08:57] Jonas Linderoth: I went through teacher education during this time, and what I think is striking is that it was really hard to get an idea what constructivist teaching was trying to get us to do. But it was very clear what it was helping us not to do. And that was to explicitly instruct, I would say.
That is what I think is sort of one thing that is the common core for all these ideas that are called constructivist, progressive, enquiry learning, and so on and so forth. It goes by different names, but it's basically the same idea. Of course, there is this idea of the student being a little researcher who is guided.
We have this idea of the teacher being a guide to the side and set of the sage on the stage and all of these well-known, I don't know, I would almost call them tropes in this narrative.
[00:09:48] Anna Stokke: So, you went through teacher preparation at that time, and so you were taught these things, and you went through, you got a PhD in education, right? And so, were you embracing those pedagogical ideas yourself?
[00:10:04] Jonas Linderoth: Yeah, I was. Not after my PhD, but during my PhD, I would say. In my defence, I think that many of us who eventually have found our way to the science of learning has gone through a period of more constructivist ideals.
We have been sold various stories, so to speak. And since I was trained in the 90s, I had fully embraced what was then this prevailing narrative. I never thought of asking for evidence to my professors.
After all, these were professors at the Faculty of Education presenting the ideas. I thought that they knew what was going on, and who was I to question them? But in my case, when I started to work as an art teacher, I soon began to doubt at least the idea of general skills, that general skills were more important than core knowledge.
I had personally gained quite a great deal of cultural capital from my grandmother, who read stories to me and taught me many things. So, there was always something unsettling about this rhetoric that in the future we can find everything on the internet, so we don't need to bore ourselves with basic knowledge. But still at that point, I held this notion of the teacher as a guide on the side, someone who facilitates rather than explicitly instruct.
The real shift came during my last years as a PhD student. During my first year as a PhD student, I had promoted some of these ideas. But I was working in a field called game-based learning.
And this is a field with these popular claims about how a new medium shall revolutionise education. Children are said that they should be more motivated to games, more deeply immersed in the content through their interaction. And this rhetoric was upheld both by what I would call these ed-tech snake-old salesmen eager to promote their own products, but also by some educational academics in the field of IT and learning, or ICT and learning, we called it back in the days.
But in my observations, in my own research, it became quite clear that most of these claims couldn't be true, at least not on a general level. The children were exploring games and virtual worlds, and they did not behave like these little researchers investigating the game's content. Instead, they mainly learned how to play the game.
[00:12:26] Anna Stokke: So, was that kind of the turning point? That you were doing this games-based research, and you actually saw that what was being promised maybe wasn't delivering?
[00:12:37] Jonas Linderoth: Yeah, I saw that. And at the time, I didn't know anything about cognitive load theory or David Geary's distinction between biologically primary and secondary knowledge. Had I known, I think I would have realised that the rhetoric surrounding this idea of exploring games rested on this misunderstanding that I now would frame as the idea that you can teach secondary culturally transmitted knowledge in the same way that we acquire primary biologically adapted knowledge.
I think that is how I would phrase it today. That was the misunderstanding that was in that rhetoric. So, when I finished my PhD, I abandoned these constructivist ideas, and I went more into game studies, humanities, more drawn to question about culture and representation in games.
So, I lived for many years as a professor in education, but I was mainly publishing in other fields than education.
[00:13:36] Anna Stokke: So, you wrote this piece that I read. It's quite a remarkable piece. I'm going to post it.
We'll put up a resource page for this episode. And you titled the piece; One Reason for the Low Status of the Teaching Profession is the Educational Ideas of the 90s. And in that piece, you actually apologised to Swedish teachers for previously promoting some of these progressive ideas.
I'm wondering, you know, how did your academic colleagues react to this public apology and this call for reflection among education academics?
[00:14:13] Jonas Linderoth: That was the suggested title that you read. The title that the editor put there was I Apologise for the Educational Ideas of the 90s, which made it sound like I was one of the architects between these ideas while I was way too young to have been the architect of these ideas. And it stirred up quite a fuss.
It was actually the most read debate article in Sweden that year. And I think I would say like a minority of my colleagues, my friends thought that I was brave, called me a whistleblower. Someone said that they were glad that I had this game studies field that I could fall back on.
They didn't see how I could have a career in education from now on. And they were sort of right. Like the majority of educational researchers, at least the one that I got in touch with, they saw my article.
It made me like an unwitting advocate for politically very conservative ideas. And they were criticizing me. I would say that some even tried to gaslight a debate, insisting that no, no, no, there has never been a constructivist movement in education.
There were many semantic discussions saying, no, it wasn't constructivism. It was a Bil dung ideal together with sociocultural theory. You can't put these ideas together and so on.
So, it was quite harsh times for me personally to be an academic after that debate, the article and the book that followed.
[00:15:43] Anna Stokke: So, you mentioned like the low status of the teaching profession. So, what did that mean? Are teachers not well respected in Sweden?
[00:15:52] Jonas Linderoth: You can say that at the time, like compared to how it historically used to be, we used to, teacher training used to attract the absolute best students. And interestingly, they still do in our neighbour country, Finland. It's a high status to be a teacher.
And you could see that in teacher training, we were receiving students that were less and less prepared. There wasn’t really any competition to enter teacher training at all. So that was the argument I was trying to make there.
And this idea then, that if you are only supposed to be a guide to decide and not an instructional designer, where you take away the craft of teaching, actually, that I would say, it's the core of teaching to do instructional design and then carry out or perform or whatever you would call it, the instruction. You take away the actual heart and the skill of it. And then you simply become an exaggerating bit, but you become administrator of tasks.
That's what you do. And that, I think, is very important in relation to the status of the teachers. So that was the argument I was trying to convey at the time.
[00:17:13] Anna Stokke: I've even heard arguments like, the students can learn along with the teacher, the teacher can learn along with the students, which I found really shocking. You know, like no one would ever hire someone to teach mathematics at the university level who didn't have a really high level of knowledge of mathematics. And you'd be expected to be wise and know what you're talking about and be able to convey those ideas to the students.
We're okay with this in the schools, you know, when we have these young people, whose futures are impacted by it. But yeah, it kind of belittles the profession in some sense.
[00:17:50] Jonas Linderoth: And also, in all areas where safety is an issue, like a driving instructor who doesn't know how to drive, you wouldn't use constructivist teaching for driving instructions, would you? It's so obvious and self-evident that if we want someone to go out and drive in traffic, it's obvious that we can't just let them see if they can get this to this knowledge by themselves. But then necessary conditions that we are to teach in schools, necessary, really, really important stuff, for some reason, it's okay there.
So yeah, I totally agree.
[00:18:26] Anna Stokke: Yeah. And then the other thing you mentioned about the gaslighting, that people were saying, oh, no, we've never really had a discovery learning movement or constructivist movement. So definitely that is a common thing that I hear as well.
Or the other thing I'll hear is that the reason it didn't work is because the teachers weren't doing it correctly. So, another form of gaslighting. But was it embedded in the curriculum?
Like, were teachers sort of required to use constructivist or discovery approaches?
[00:19:02] Jonas Linderoth: First of all, it followed with the goals, how they were settled. So, the goals had this character of, I wouldn't call them 21st century skills, but they had the character of being very general in its nature and also extremely advanced. If you were trying to turn Bloom's Taxonomy upside down, at a very young age, children were supposed to do really hard analytical stuff.
And from that followed discourse surrounding the curriculum, that together these two movements created the perfect storm that created it. So, it was more like, it's important that children should learn advanced stuff. We don't need to learn basic facts anymore, and so on.
There are some sayings in the curriculum saying stuff like, it's not only important to learn things, but also to learn the processes that leads to knowledge, very Deweyan, very enquiry learning, very much in the future. Things will go so fast, everything will change. The knowledge you teach today will become obsolete.
So, we need to prepare learners to know how to learn themselves. So, classical rhetorics.
[00:20:21] Anna Stokke: I think of art as like a really creative field. So, does this type of approach not work in art, teaching art?
[00:20:28] Jonas Linderoth: I was in art, and I also were in social sciences, so I had two subjects, but I mostly taught in art. Well, I'm kind of the art teacher that thinks that everybody can learn how to draw if you have the correct and right methods. I think already then, I was understanding that there is something wrong with this.
There is something fishy in this rhetoric.
[00:20:21] Anna Stokke: So, you're like the art version of me. I always say that everybody should be able to learn math to a certain level if they're given the right foundation. So, you have that view when it comes to art.
[00:21:03] Jonas Linderoth: Yeah, absolutely. And also, I think to give someone the capability of being able of conducting a craft is very important. But at the time, the goals of art education in Sweden were extremely abstract.
They should learn how to communicate in a different format. They should learn how to express themselves. And all of these things that they were almost expected to be full-blown artists, not only sort of being able to do a reasonable image in different materials and different techniques.
I think it's so interesting. Music teaching was in the same way. And I don't know.
Personally, when I went to music teaching in the 80s in Sweden, I can't remember anything I learned. And then I met some British friends, and they had learned how to play an instrument. They had sort of selected instruments that they were taught.
And they still knew this. And I thought, that's very rich. They still have some knowledge from their musical teaching back in schools.
And I have nothing.
[00:22:08] Anna Stokke: So, I'd like to shift a bit to the PISA and TIMS scores. So just a reminder for listeners, PISA is an international test written by 15-year-olds. It generally tests reading, math, and science.
And TIMS tests math and science, and it's written by grade 4 and grade 8 students. So, what do PISA and TIMS data reveal about how Sweden's educational outcomes actually changed after the reforms you told us about in the 90s?
[00:22:40] Jonas Linderoth: They show that Swedish students, their performance declined sharply from the early 2000s to around 2012. And I would say that this follows the 90s reforms. Decentralised school system, market schools, competition, constructivist ideas.
After 2015, the results have sort of stabilised and improved slightly, though they remain below pre-reform levels. It's important to note that the data also reveals a decline in equity. Students' results have become very much more dependent on socioeconomic background.
And there is an increasing grade inflation with rising school grades not matched by improved performance in international assessments. So that's where we are today.
[00:23:30] Anna Stokke: So, was there public outcry about this?
[00:23:32] Jonas Linderoth: To some degree, I would say. Among academics, there is this critical discourse arguing that we shouldn't worry about PISA and similar tests because such assessments are seen as destructive and narrowing the curriculum, reducing learning to what can be measured. You shift the attention away from broad values, creativity, democracy, personal growth.
So, they think that sort of the PISA makes educational, becomes technical, just serving economical goals rather than humic and civic ones. So, a public outcry on a political level, not so much among academics.
[00:24:13] Anna Stokke: On that point, there is a lot of science of learning or cognitive science research that contradicts a lot of these things you're talking about, the minimal teaching, the guide on the side model. So why does it seem that this kind of research maybe hasn't really been embraced by a lot of education academics?
[00:24:34] Jonas Linderoth: I think I've thought a lot about this, and I think there are three reasons, at least when it comes to Sweden. First of all, education as an academic field has drifted so far from psychology that many scholars in education simply aren't familiar with its tradition or educational psychology as a body of research. So as a result, I think that the science of learning is perceived as a field coming from the outside, trying to attempt almost a hostile takeover, when in fact, for me, it represents a 120-year-old tradition that goes back to William James and his essay called Talk to Teachers About Psychology.
So, we have this even before that, I would say, maybe Ebbinghaus. Secondly, it has to do with epistemology. I was trained, even in Ph.D. students, to be sceptical of quantitative research methods, especially experimental studies. Such methods were in the educational research field portrayed often as belonging to an outdated positivist era that we were supposed to have moved beyond in favour of more enlightened ways of understanding educational phenomena. So, I think that any research that seeks to make predictions in education has the potential of, from this other perspective, being seen as being naive, unable to grasp the nuances and complexities. And hence, science of learning, I think, is often dismissed as being merely about how we teach without raising the philosophical questions of what is worth knowing.
So that is one kind of critique. And finally, I think there is a lot of self-interest here. A desire to simply protect the flow of research funding within existing academic tradition.
Like, you feel threatened by the science of learning because now the stuff that I am doing might not get funded.
[00:26:35] Anna Stokke: Okay, a couple of interesting things there. So, the first one I've heard from other guests that maybe quantitative research isn't valued in that field so much, which I just find absolutely shocking. I will say that, like, as someone who comes from a math background, like, math and statistics can help us analyse data, make predictions.
It allows us to study the world and make things better, right? So, it's kind of surprising to me that people wouldn't embrace that kind of research. Because to me, that's really the highest standard for research.
[00:27:15] Jonas Linderoth: Yeah, I agree. And I think one argument you hear is that education isn't like the medical sciences. Education is more complex.
So that comparisons with other fields won't work. So, there is this whole body of prefabricated arguments that people always can take into. And I always find it striking that if you're not interested in predictions, if you don't interest in real evidence, what's left then?
Well, then it's what's the difference? Not evidence-based, eminence-based. Am I just supposed to believe this because of the high status of you as an academic?
Or it's impossible to go anywhere productive from that kind of discussion?
[00:27:59] Anna Stokke: Yeah, I mean, you're left with opinion, right? That's what you're left with. So, whose opinion do you believe?
I mean, it's really interesting. And then the other thing you mentioned about self-interest. So, I'm not surprised by that, right?
So, academics get rewarded for publishing papers and getting grants and that sort of thing. So, if people feel threatened that maybe they're not going to be able to publish papers or get grants, or maybe they're not going to be trusted by the governments to certify the teachers, this is going to cause a lot of issues. But I mean, to me, the solution to that is start working with people in educational psychology. I mean, that's what you're doing, right? You shifted.
[00:28:40] Jonas Linderoth: Yeah, I shifted.
[00:28:42] Anna Stokke: I mean, it's very interesting. So now back to the PISA and TIMSS data. So, you mentioned that the Swedish government has proposed basing pre-service teacher training on cognitive science principles.
At least you mentioned this in an email to me. So, things like retrieval practise and working memory limits. So, is that in response to the decline in PISA scores?
[00:29:06] Jonas Linderoth: I would say so, yes. Along with other indications from other national policy or national evaluations, and especially when it comes to results showing a decline in basic reading proficiency.
[00:29:20] Anna Stokke: So, what does the proposal entail? What do they have planned?
[00:29:23] Jonas Linderoth: Well, there are a couple of things. In order to enter initial teacher training, applicants should now at least have a grade of C in the Swedish language subject. And the Swedish grading scale runs from A to F with A as the highest and E as the lowest passing grade.
So, C represents a solid and satisfactory level of achievement. And previously, there have been no such entry requirements for initial teacher training in Sweden. So, everyone could enter.
Another part and more important part, I would say, of the proposal is to place great emphasis on the science of learning and cognitive science, making room for this shift by reducing focus on subjects like history of schooling, curriculum theory, but also the study of education and research traditions, perspectives for their own sake. So, say for currently, for example, when I teach cognitive science, I have to teach it under the label of cognitivism and neuroscientific perspectives on learning. And I had to teach it alongside with other perspectives, such as behaviourism, pragmatism, sociocultural theory, situated learning, and for some reason, phenomenology.
And what they are suggesting now, that instead of this kind of, I would call it, it's almost like a buffet, a Swedish smorgasbord of educational ideas, we should focus more on empirical evidence and move in the direction towards experimental research. So, the suggestion here is, it specially mentions concepts such as retrieval practise, cognitive load, desirable difficulties. All of these, I guess, to your listeners are very familiar concepts.
[00:31:06] Anna Stokke: Okay, so would it be that the schools of education would have to offer such a course? So, the government's actually requiring this?
[00:31:15] Jonas Linderoth: This is the proposal that is on the table. So, it's currently under debate.
[00:31:19] Anna Stokke: And are there people that will teach these classes?
[00:31:23] Jonas Linderoth: You mean if we have competence to teach the science of learning?
[00:31:26] Anna Stokke: That's what I mean, yeah.
[00:31:28] Jonas Linderoth: I know in the proposal it says that teacher trainers need to be trained in the science of learning.
The proposal is very harsh. They're actually saying, I don't know the exact wording, but it's saying something like teacher trainers who aren't prepared to teach cognitive science might have to look for another round of work. So, it's very explicit in that.
No, that is one huge problem that will lack a lot of competence in educational psychology in Sweden.
[00:31:56] Anna Stokke: Okay, so I find this really interesting, I have to say. So, it would be one course that they have to take?
[00:32:04] Jonas Linderoth: It's actually more than that. It's like it's suggested; it's not prescribed exactly that it has to be a specific course, specific module, but it might be that you should spread it out over different courses. But it's quite a lot, like of the whole teacher education, the cognitive science, science of learning part should be, it's quite a large part actually.
[00:32:29] Anna Stokke: And how is that going over there? So are the education academics unhappy about this in general, or what has been the response?
[00:32:37] Jonas Linderoth: Oh yes, very much so. The proposal has been out for consultation and universities have their opportunity to respond to it. Generally, when you read the university's responses, they are very sceptical.
There have also been several opinion pieces in the newspapers. And it's these familiar arguments, the science of learning is said to promote rote learning rather than higher order skills, kill creativity and motivation, make teachers less autonomous, reduce teaching to oversimplified recipes for something inherently complex. And since I am an advocate of this proposal, I have to say I'm not that worried about the public pushback.
That is and should be part of an academic conversation. What worries me more is how higher education institutions seem to be preparing for the reform through strategies that I think are mutating these ideas, like adapting them in ways that would make it able to preserve as much as possible of the current system. I know this is anecdotal so far, but I've seen some indications of these processes.
It becomes a kind of conceptual creep where, okay, but we have always done the science of learning. Isn't the thing I am doing the science of learning? We see sort of these negotiations.
And since so few people in the system actually knows what this is about, it becomes very, very strange conversations.
[00:34:13] Anna Stokke: Right. So, what people can do in universities, right, is they can say that they're going to teach that in their class and then not actually teach that in the class, right?
[00:34:24] Jonas Linderoth: Yeah, they brand it as something, yeah.
[00:34:26] Anna Stokke: I know this very well. So that might be what happens. So, my other question, I'm just very curious about this.
How did your government, like, who became aware that there was sort of this more evidence-based field for how students learn?
[00:34:44] Jonas Linderoth: Oh, I think that has been quite a long time in the process that there has been. But I think there are a couple of interesting things that happened. We had one very engaged student.
He was a teacher student who became a teacher for a short period. And then, after being very outspoken in many debate articles, he actually became an advisor for one of the centre liberal parties in Sweden. His name is Lex Kogstad.
And I know that he met Paul Kirchner a couple of times and had a couple of discussions with him. This is speculation. But I think that these meetings might have played an influential role.
At the same time, we have had teachers who have been starting research ed. We have a research ed in Stockholm, in Honing. And I think that there has been people from the government who have been looking in that direction more and more.
But this is guesswork.
[00:35:46] Anna Stokke: I mean, that's what policymakers should do, right? They should actually find out about these things, right? If the scores aren't good, we've seen a decline in scores.
What was going on in the schools? And what are people saying? People who know about these things, what are they saying about what might have caused these things?
So, I do see that as responsible policymaking to just inform yourself and find out what's going on.
[00:36:13] Jonas Linderoth: I also think that the politicians have listened to Solar Story, the podcast. I think that has had an enormous influence on the discourse on teaching reading strategies.
[00:36:22] Anna Stokke: Okay, great. So, you can send them my podcast for the math stuff, okay? Always, when I have the opportunity.
So, let's talk about your work with pre-service teachers. So, you've written about teaching a course on cognitive science, and also, you've delivered professional development to teachers about retrieval practise and cognitive load theory and other effective instructional techniques. Can you say something about the reaction you get from teachers when they encounter these instructional principles for the first time?
[00:36:52] Jonas Linderoth: While higher education tends to resist these ideas, teachers and schools are asking for more. So, when you show them really hands-on strategies that are based in evidence, for instance, I teach how to manage different cognitive load effects, their reaction is often they go, finally, finally someone is giving us useful tools and the language to talk about instruction and teaching.
[00:37:18] Anna Stokke: So, when they say finally, that finally they have something they can put into practise, what does that reveal about the shortcomings of the education system?
[00:37:28] Jonas Linderoth: I think it really says something we who teach in initial teacher training should take to heart. It says a lot about how student teachers perceive the usefulness of the education that I have gotten so far. I think these practical evidence-based strategies for becoming better teachers are exactly what they were expecting from academia.
And I think that when they entered teacher training in Sweden, they expected to be taught things like this. I did. I remember I did.
These overarching strategies, retrieval practise, using the modality effect. But as your training goes on, it just never happens. And in the end, many students are left wondering, why didn't I get the most obvious things that I was expecting?
[00:38:13] Anna Stokke: Okay, then what are they taught? If they're not taught some of these things like retrieval practise, effective techniques?
[00:38:21] Jonas Linderoth: Well, when it comes to, you're expected to learn the craft when you are doing in-service trainings, you are out in schools, and then you go alongside with a teacher already in the field. That's where you're supposed to teach the actual craft, most of it. When it comes to some form of model that they are taught, and of course, many individual variations between.
There are many universities having teacher training, but I think they are learned something called the didactical triangle. That is when you design your lessons, you should ask yourself, what shall I teach them? Why shall I teach them this?
And how shall I teach them this? So very blunt tools. I personally think it's basically an instructional design model, like Addy or something like that, but way blunter, dressed in some philosophical ideas.
So that is one thing that I think all of them are taught. Then they have subject didactics, and in subject didactics, there they are taught hands-on tips for how to teach things but generally based on practical knowledge and not on evidence, I would say, or qualitative research as well.
[00:39:37] Anna Stokke: I mean, it's too bad, because it wouldn't be that hard to give someone techniques like retrieval practise, right, or coral response, any of these explicit instructional techniques, scaffolding, things like that. It wouldn't be that hard to give people these techniques, and I don't really understand why they're even fighting against this, why they're pushing back against this. It could just be one course that does that.
Is this really going to damage the students if they learn some of these techniques?
[00:40:11] Jonas Linderoth: No, I agree. That's the paradox, because it's really not that hard to teach these things and show them and illustrate them. Once you know them, it sort of becomes kind of, why on earth haven't we been told this earlier?
Many of my professional development courses that I have the opportunity to teach, that is often the reaction among the teachers. They're saying, why am I hearing of this so far into my career? Why now?
They become almost angry about it. And I think it's interesting that some of these teachers have developed these strategies on their own accord, but now they get a language for it. Now they get the research papers.
I think since these strategies are based on evidence, it's not that surprising that a teacher with a long career and a lot of experience comes to similar conclusions as the evidence.
[00:41:02] Anna Stokke: You actually have a course in place though, right? So, you already have a course in place at your university. You teach it.
[00:41:09] Jonas Linderoth: I did it not in initial teacher training. For professional development, I teach it.
[00:41:13] Anna Stokke: Oh, I see. Okay, so then you'll get to teach a course in pre-service teaching though.
[00:41:19] Jonas Linderoth: Hopefully if the proposal goes through and everything falls in place.
[00:41:23] Anna Stokke: When is it going to go through?
[00:41:25] Jonas Linderoth: I think this spring something. I think we will get the results of all these negotiations around it.
[00:41:32] Anna Stokke: And are they doing this in Norway or Denmark or anything like that? Or is it just Sweden right now?
[00:41:39] Jonas Linderoth: I can't say about Denmark. I don't think similar things are happening in Norway. I'm basing it on soft data here.
When you go to research ed in Stockholm, Honinge, then there are some Norwegians coming and they told me they need to go to Sweden to see this. So it might be that they are even further behind. But we have to ask someone who's Norwegian about that.
[00:42:07] Anna Stokke: Well, I have relatives in Norway. Actually, it's interesting because someone contacted me from the NRK, which is like, I guess, it's the Norway's version of RCBC, just a couple of weeks ago to talk to me about some of the things that were going on in math. And it's exactly the same as what's going on in Canada.
It's remarkable. It's everywhere. If cognitive science were genuinely embedded in teacher education, what would a programme look like that in practise, in your mind?
[00:42:37] Jonas Linderoth: I think I would start with a module on evidence and what it means to use evidence in practise, really making sure that the concept of prediction was understood. And I would emphasise that even though cognitive science models are models, we can't view the working memory. It's a model.
It's a concept. The theorists still have predictive power. Next, I would probably have a module called something like memory and cognitive architecture, because I think it's important that teachers need to understand the theories behind the studies.
Otherwise, we risk what Kirchner and others often call these lethal mutations, when ideas are taken out of context and distorted in practise. I also think that I will have two modules about the strategies. I would separate between encoding strategies and strategies for consolidation.
So, one module would focus on encoding. Optimising cognitive load using worked examples. And then I think it would be fruitful to have another module that would cover strategies aimed at anchoring and consolidating what has already been taught.
Elaboration, retrieval practise, distributed learning. Then I guess, as you hinted, I want to have something more than cognitive science in there. I would probably need to have some modules actually connected to behavioural psychology, focussing on leadership, classroom management, what Tom Bennett would call running the room, as well as modules on motivation, self-determination theory, and, of course, module on special educational needs.
I'm probably forgetting something, but this would be the core building blocks of my initial teacher training.
[00:44:14] Anna Stokke: OK, it sounds great. I would add the instructional hierarchy. OK, yeah.
I really like the instructional hierarchy for explaining when to use which method for teaching, because it kind of depends on where students are at in the hierarchy. I guess the cognitive science version of that would be the expertise reversal effect in some ways.
[00:44:35] Jonas Linderoth:
Yeah.
[00:44:36] Anna Stokke: Yeah, that sounds great. And so how long would that take?
[00:44:38] Jonas Linderoth: You could do that in a year, a little more, maybe.
[00:44:41] Anna Stokke: Now, the teachers in Sweden, you've mentioned research ed a couple of times. So I'm just wondering, there seems to be a movement that's kind of well-developed in the UK, for instance, where there are a lot of teachers that have really embraced the science of learning and retrieval practise, and they know about cognitive load theory, and there are lots of blogs and conferences and that sort of thing. So, is there something similar going on in Sweden?
[00:45:09] Jonas Linderoth: Not in the scale like that it is in Britain, but I think I often use the word grassroots movement. Many colleagues get really annoyed because it doesn't fit their narrative of this being mainly a political movement, but it really is a grassroots movement. And every year that I teach this professional development course, it's completely overfilled.
I have more applicants than I can handle. And they come back after some time, the students. So, I'll say, oh, can we borrow your material?
Can I link them? Can I take that PDF of the manuscript you have written and use it? And I say, sure.
So, they are sort of spreading it to their schools. I think it's going really well in that respect, actually. And I'm really positive about it.
[00:45:56] Anna Stokke: Yeah, that's wonderful. So, are you hopeful in general for the future of education in Sweden?
[00:46:02] Jonas Linderoth: Exactly, because of these teachers who go finally. They seem to be short-circuiting their way to the science of learning. If we don't get an initial teacher training or sort of our professional development, we can find it ourselves.
We can listen to all these great podcasts. Also, I think I'm hopeful because the things that we... And then we have to trust that the usefulness of this will be obvious when you encounter it, if it is grounded in evidence.
So, I think that even though some critical academics try to discredit it as being this political movement, it really is a grassroots movement. And that makes me hopeful. I just have a grandson, he's seven weeks old, and I need to be hopeful.
[00:45:51] Anna Stokke: You need to be hopeful. And if not, you're going to teach him yourself. So, he'll probably be okay.
I know. It's the other kids we have to worry about, right? So just one last thing, because you've mentioned a couple of times that people are saying that this is a political movement.
Where's that coming from? I mean, what's the logic there?
[00:47:11] Jonas Linderoth: That is because, of course, we have a right-wing government now, and these ideas are being put forth by the right-wing government. I think it was similar during Nick Gibbs' time in Britain. You had the same narrative.
It goes back, you could see, when the science of reading had Bush administration in the back and so on, that it gets stigmatised almost with certain political view. And then people stop looking at what's actually the evidence or what's actually in the argument, and they just refrain from investigating because they just see it as sort of a political movement. And it's really, really sad to see that happening.
[00:47:50] Anna Stokke: I think that happens everywhere. It's actually quite unfortunate. Of all things, education should not be political.
I don't know what would be political about it. We just want kids to learn, right? Cognitive load theory, what are you talking about?
There's no politics there, right? It just makes a lot of sense.
[00:48:09] Jonas Linderoth: I totally agree with you. I can hear the voices of so many of my colleagues that would disagree with that. They would say that education is always politics.
Who has the power to suggest what should be taught and so on?
[00:48:23] Anna Stokke: And so, what I would say to your colleagues is that is a lazy argument. Okay, do better. You want to have a debate.
You want to have an argument. Argue with logic, right? That is emotion.
That's trying to shame people. That's just laziness. So, let's close off with this.
And we've gone through a lot today. We started with the 90s in Sweden. We moved through your trajectory as an educator.
We've talked about the declining scores in Sweden and what your government is now doing, which actually I really support what they're doing. And I think they're really doing the right thing. And I think the Swedish children are going to be better off for it.
So, let's close off with this. So many countries, including Canada, the U.S. and Australia have experienced similar pedagogical shifts to what you described and also that same resistance to the science of learning. So, what broader lessons should international audiences take from Sweden's story?
[00:49:24] Jonas Linderoth: I think that, and this will tap into some things that we haven't talked that much about, but I think that if you look at Sweden as the particular case, internationally, I would give advice, be careful with the incentive structures that you create because we have allowed for-profit schools in Sweden without having any real final examinations that directly affect grades. So, we have created incentives for schools to compete in ways other than through giving children the best knowledge. And this issue is now also being reviewed in several government enquiries, but this serves as kind of a warning about how you design systems for independent schools.
In our current system, it actually is profitable to attract the highest performing students, ensure that they meet minimum knowledge standards, and then boost the school's performance by awarding higher grades than they actually deserve. That's why we have this grade inflation. And the schools can then skim off the profits from governmentally founded voucher systems by keeping staff salaries low, reducing resources.
And with such a flawed system, I don't think the science of learning will even help. So that is the main takeaway.
[00:50:43] Anna Stokke: So, you have to have all the factors in place for things to work out, right? Like you can't just say, okay, we're going to have this course on the science of learning for teachers. Everything else has to be in place too.
So yeah, that's a great cautionary. Do you have anything else to add?
[00:50:59] Jonas Linderoth: Oh, it's been a pleasure. Thank you for having me. I think we've gone through quite a lot here.
[00:51:04] Anna Stokke: Yes. Well, thank you so much for coming on. It was really interesting to talk to you and to hear about what's going on in Sweden, another part of the world.
So, it was really interesting. And I've enjoyed hearing about your story and your work, and it's been a real pleasure. So, thank you.
Thank you so much for listening. If you enjoy this podcast, please consider showing your support by leaving a five-star rating on Spotify or Apple podcasts. Don't forget to subscribe on your favourite podcast app or on YouTube so you never miss an episode.
You can stay connected with me on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, X, Blue Sky, or LinkedIn. All links are in the show notes and check out my website annastokke.com for more information.
This podcast is funded by a grant from La Trobe University and from the Trottier Family Foundation through a grant to the University of Winnipeg to fund the Chalk & Talk podcast.