Ep 78. The Science and Craft of Great Teaching with Nidhi Sachdeva and Paul Kirschner
In this episode, Anna is joined by returning guests Dr. Nidhi Sachdeva and Dr. Paul Kirschner, authors of the upcoming book Becoming an Expert Teacher: Deliberate Practice for Effective Teaching. They explore what makes an expert teacher and how teaching expertise can be deliberately developed.
They discuss the importance of deep subject knowledge, mental models, deliberate practice, and reflection, while explaining the difference between the science and the craft of teaching. They also examine how teaching expertise can be measured and why striving to become an expert teacher is both a professional responsibility and an equity issue.
This episode is available in video at www.youtube.com/@chalktalk-stokke
TIMESTAMPS [00:00:22] Introduction [00:03:26] What makes an expert teacher? [00:12:09] Why teacher content knowledge matters [00:13:24] Why content knowledge isn’t enough [00:16:00] Schemas & pattern recognition explained [00:18:04] How expert teachers think [00:22:55] Deliberate practice to develop teaching expertise [00:30:31] The challenge and importance of deliberate practice [00:38:31] The importance of reflection in teaching [00:40:51] The science and craft of teaching [00:47:57] A reflection on teacher education preparedness [00:55:21] Can teaching expertise be measured? [00:01:07] The responsibility to become an expert teacher [01:11:40] Final thoughts
[00:00:04] 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. Today I'm joined by two returning guests, Nidhi Sachdeva and Paul Kirschner. They are the authors of an upcoming book, Becoming an Expert Teacher, Deliberate Practice for Effective Teaching.
In the episode, we discuss what makes someone an expert teacher and how teaching expertise can be developed. We talk about the importance of teacher subject knowledge, what it means for teachers to have schematas and mental models, and the importance of deliberate practice and reflection in the teaching profession. They also explain the difference between the science of teaching, that's knowing about evidence-informed teaching practices, and the craft of teaching, that's knowing how to apply that knowledge, and why both are important.
We also discuss how teaching expertise can be measured and why developing expert teachers is a moral responsibility and an equity issue. This is an important and inspiring conversation, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Also, if you've been enjoying Chalk & Talk, I'd like to let you know about another podcast I've been listening to.
It's called Teachers Talk Radio. They've got a network of around 30 teacher hosts, and they publish episodes daily on the usual platforms, including Spotify, Apple, and YouTube. They cover anything that's teacher-related, including behavior, assessment, instructional techniques, and even AI.
So, give them a follow wherever you get your podcasts, or visit them at ttradio.org. That's Teachers Talk Radio. Now, without further ado, let's get started.
I'm excited because I have two returning guests today. So, I have Dr. Nidhi Sachdeva. She has a PhD in education from OISE. That's the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education from the University of Toronto. Her research interests are microlearning, cognitive science, and evidence-informed instructional design. She co-authors with Jim Hewitt, a Substack called the Science of Learning, and she is chair of ResearchEd Canada.
Welcome, Nidhi.
[00:02:38] Nidhi Sachdeva: Oh, thank you, Anna. It's such an honour to be back and really looking forward to this conversation.
[00:02:43] Anna Stokke: Me too. And we have Dr. Paul Kirshner. He's 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 is internationally recognised for his work on cognitive psychology and its applications to education. And this is actually the third time you've been on the podcast, Paul. But of course, this is the first time with video for both of you.
So, people can watch the video. I'm happy to have you here and welcome to the podcast.
[00:03:24] Paul Kirschner: Does this mean three strikes and I'm out?
[00:03:26] Anna Stokke: No, no, no, no. On this podcast, you can have as many strikes as you want. Paul and Nidhi have written a book titled Becoming an Expert Teacher, Deliberate Practice for Effective Teaching, and it will be released in September.
You'll be able to pre-order the book on September 9th for delivery after September 30th. So, mark your calendars for that. And we will post a link and a code for 20% off in the show notes.
And I was lucky to get an advanced copy of your book. So, I've read it and I wrote a little endorsement and it's on a very important topic, teaching expertise, because we can't have successful classrooms if we don't have successful teachers. And we're going to talk a lot about your book today.
Let's start with this. So, you argue that teaching expertise is not an innate fixed trait, but that it's deliberately built over time and that a teacher's growth translates directly into student growth. That's really kind of the premise of your book.
So first off, how do you define an expert teacher?
[00:04:34] Nidhi Sachdeva: In the book we define, this is deeply worked on definition. So, we define an expert teacher as a highly skilled educator who demonstrates deep content knowledge, fundamental knowledge and understanding of how we learn, mastery of pedagogical and instructional strategies and the tools available to implement them.
They also have very strong classroom management skills and the ability to adapt effectively to diverse students. Expert teachers create explicit, engaging, equitable and successful learning environments and use evidence-informed practices to promote meaningful learning, understanding and growth. So that's how we define an expert teacher for ourselves and in the book as well for the readers.
[00:05:16] Anna Stokke:
Paul, did you want to add anything?
[00:05:18] Paul Kirschner: Couldn't have said it any better.
[00:05:20] Anna Stokke: So, you write that building teacher expertise requires focusing on five things and I'll list them and then let's go through those. So, the first is deep domain specific knowledge. The second is pattern recognition or schemata. The third is organized mental models. The fourth is deliberate practice and the fifth is reflection. So, let's go through each of those.
So, the first one, expert teachers have deep domain specific knowledge. So, can you explain that?
[00:05:55] Nidhi Sachdeva: Yes, and this is why we didn't unpack the definition any further when Paul said that I said it all because that is the unpacking of what we're about to do as well. So, in my definition or in our definition, these points were there. So, I think this is a really good moment to talk about them.
Expert teachers, we argue and we say that expert teachers have deep domain specific knowledge. What we mean by that is that knowing the subject matter, the one that they're going to be teaching and how students typically learn it so thoroughly, they need to know that, it's no longer effortful to access for the teachers. So expert teachers aren't just fluent in content.
They know it so well that the common misconceptions, the typical stumbling points before they happen and the sequence that make these ideas that they want students to learn click. They just know that sequence really well. And that depth is what really frees up their own mental bandwidth while teaching for everything that's happening in a classroom that's quite dynamic and quite often out of control.
So, knowing their own subject, but really deeply understanding it is extremely important. And we later in the book also unpacked that this idea of knowing the content is really important, but they need to know, of course, the pedagogical content as well, how to teach that. If I know something that doesn't automatically mean I also know how to teach it.
In fact, the more I feel I know something, the further away I'm moving to realize that there was a time when I didn't know how to do that. So, I need a specific support and training to understand how we teach that as well. And I speak from experience.
I learned to speak German fluently, but that wasn't enough for me to go inside a classroom and then start teaching. Then I had to do a German teacher training and really now start to deconstruct the language that I spent all these years constructing in my own head to how to actually teach it to my students. And I think that applies to everything.
[00:07:55] Paul Kirschner: An expert teacher can think on their feet. They can react to all different types of situations that were unexpected.
And the only way you can do that is if you really have a deep conceptual knowledge of the area that you're teaching that allows you to think of different examples, say things in a different way, as Nidhi said, recognize misconceptions, recognize system mistakes that may be made. It's not one-off mistakes, but type of thing that you expect to have them recur in other situations. And to do that, you have to have this deep conceptual knowledge.
I mean, to quote Lee Shulman twice, I think one is those who can do, those who understand, teach. And that idea of understanding is more than just knowing. And that's what an expert teacher can do.
Just putting what Nidhi said, but in a little bit different terminology, that's what's really important.
[00:09:09] Anna Stokke: I'm going to add a couple things just from a math perspective, because actually content knowledge is something that I've advocated a lot for. Some people will actually say it doesn't matter.
And it does, it deeply matters. So, I always say you can't teach what you don't know, but in a subject like math, which is really hierarchical, if you don't know your content and you don't know what's coming next, you actually don't know what the important things are to focus on. I've sometimes been surprised because I've given presentations to teachers and I'll say something like, you know, fractions are really important and they predict later success in math.
And then I'll get a comment afterwards. Oh, thank you for telling me that. But can you tell me what things do I need to teach about fractions?
That's not a good position for a teacher to be in. I think it's really awful that sometimes we're not ensuring that teachers have the content knowledge to teach the subject, particularly math.
[00:10:12] Paul Kirschner: I agree with you, especially with math, Anna, but also with just about everything else. Because in the Netherlands, we have two different words. We have math for elementary, that is rekenen, and math for high school, junior high school, high school, and that is wiskunde.
Those are two different things. And people think, well, maybe that's necessary for that higher level. But the fact is you really need it also for that, let's put it between air quotes, lower level, because you have to understand the concepts behind what you're teaching.
And not that dividing a fraction by a fraction is inverting and multiplying it. You have to understand why that's the case if you want to help children understand it and just not learn a trick. And that requires a very deep conceptual, even at the level of elementary school math, the teacher needs that conceptual understanding of what mathematics actually is.
[00:11:15] Anna Stokke: Oh, yes, you are quite correct. And a number of things happen. They might use incorrect terminology. They often have misconceptions themselves that get passed on to the students. They don't know the importance of some topics in math. So, we see these types of things.
The other thing I want to add, Nidhi, you mentioned about pedagogical knowledge. And just because you know a subject doesn't mean you can teach that. And that is absolutely correct.
But sometimes you'll hear people say things like people who know too much can't do a good job of teaching it. And that's just not true. It's sometimes correct.
But the prerequisite for being able to be a good teacher, for being able to get the pedagogy right, the prerequisite is actually knowing the content because you can't teach the content well if you don't understand it yourself.
[00:12:09] Nidhi Sachdeva: Just to clarify, and yes, you're right, I did say that, but I definitely want to clarify that I'm with you on that side, is that I don't mean it that pedagogical knowledge, content knowledge and content either or. It's like, no, you must know your domain. That's a given.
That's so, so important. And it is surprising to me also, and just like it is surprising to you quite often when people advocate sometimes even against that. And I would say then you can't teach it well.
How do you understand why, when, where a student is struggling? And then how can we actually help if we don't have a truly deconstructed version of the content, math, reading, for example. And when we know that really well, and then we've also received understanding of, developed understanding of how I can unpack it now and teach it.
So, both are really, really important. But just because I will have pedagogical content knowledge, but not a deep content knowledge or deep conceptual knowledge, that's not going to work. So, I'm 100% with you on that. Absolutely.
[00:13:09] Anna Stokke: I've seen absolutely brilliant mathematicians who are great teachers, and I've seen absolutely brilliant mathematicians who are not great teachers. But one thing I know is that if you have to teach a subject, you need to know it.
[00:13:24] Paul Kirschner: I agree with you because it's not enough. It's just an anecdote. So please don't see it as data.
But when I was studying in the United States at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, my math teacher in my sophomore year was a Nobel Prize winner with a specialization in math and he was apparently a brilliant mathematician, or else he wouldn't have gotten the Nobel Prize for physics with respect to math and physical relationships and things like that. But he could not teach the subject.
And I could say that's the happiest moment. At that point in time, it was the most frustrating moment of my life because I was always good in math. But I could say it was maybe the happiest moment of my life because at that moment, I decided no longer to study engineering, changed my major to psychology, became a teacher of math and science, and eventually a professor of educational psychology.
[00:14:25] Anna Stokke: And we don't mean that we want elementary school teachers to be mathematicians, but they need to know the content they're teaching and beyond that to some extent so that they know exactly what they're preparing students for.
[00:14:39] Paul Kirschner:
That's for everything, because people might narrow it down to mathematics. But if you don't understand the concept of condensation, evaporation, things like that, you can't teach children about the environment and the water cycle. If you don't understand different aspects of art and the transposition from one type of art to another, iconography, there's no depth of field.
And all of a sudden there's depth of field. If you don't understand that and know that, you can't teach children to have them understand and appreciate art. So, it's not just in the natural sciences, it's not just in the social sciences, it's in relation to everything.
And that's what makes it an elementary school teacher's job so hard because they have to know about physics and chemistry and biology and math and music and art and government and society. The elementary school teacher's job is the hardest job in the world. I could never be one.
And I always tip my imaginary hat to elementary school teachers who can do their job well. They're the most important people in the world.
[00:16:00] Anna Stokke: Let's move to the next thing that teacher expertise requires focusing on, and that is pattern recognition or schemata.
Paul, maybe you can tell us a bit about that.
[00:16:13] Paul Kirschner: I'll try to be as succinct as possible. A schemata or schemata are the connections that you have between different single elements that form concepts. We don't want people, teachers, but people in general, to only have specific, unitary, disconnected knowledge.
It's really important that that knowledge is connected to each other and forms a whole, forms a chunk. And that allows people, but also students, teachers, to actually really understand their area, know how things are connected to each other, because they have to help their students connect all of these loose facts, concepts, pieces of data, information to each other. And it means they need the schemata in their own heads as to how this all works.
But that also goes a step further, and they also have to have schemata over how we learn. I usually use five things, but a little bit different, where I say you have to begin with knowing your own area. And the second is you have to know how people learn, because if you don't have that, if you don't have a good understanding of how people learn, you're just flying blind.
Imagine a doctor that you go to and you say, I'm having gastrointestinal problems, and that person doesn't know how the digestive system works. Now, teachers have to know how our cognitive system works and what that means for their own schemata, but also for helping students form the necessary schemata to learn and understand new information.
[00:18:04] Anna Stokke: Okay, that makes good sense. What do you mean by organized mental models in the context of teacher expertise?
[00:18:13] Paul Kirschner: You don't only have to understand how things are connected to each other, but a mental model is often, you can see it as what happens now, what happens later, what's the order of things here? Having a mental model of what's going on. You can have a schema with relationship to going out to eat, but you could also have a mental model of what it means to go into a restaurant.
And that allows you to function effectively and efficiently within that area. So, if you don't have this thing in your head as to what comes first, when, and why, then you just can't continue.
[00:18:57] Nidhi Sachdeva:So, schemata or schemas or singular schema, that's this idea of having the raw pattern recognition, having deep, well-organized knowledge, but mental models are these internal representations of how things then work. So, if you think of a chef or a busy restaurant on a Friday night, it's the mental representation or it's their schemata that tells them that it's a busy night, right, but it's the mental model then that tells them how they're going to actually adapt in real time for that particular situation.
So, a teacher, for example, within the context of an expert teacher, they'll need to know, they need to have the mental frameworks, the schematas of what they're doing, how their domain, for example, how learning happens and other aspects of the classroom, but then what they need to do would be then their mental model. So, we separated the two in the sentence that we wrote that an expert teacher has deep pattern recognition or schemata relating to their teaching expertise and they also have really organized mental models. They know what to do.
Let's say, students talking too much and we know that that's going to happen, that's a schemata that the teacher has and the mental model is what do we do to now avoid that situation? Like how do we understand and address that seating arrangement so that learning can be brought to the focus again, right? So, within the classroom, that would be the context.
So, they work together, but it's, they're kind of like they're, one is the system of it and the other is how the system actually works with it. So, schemata and that's the mental models would be how they actually work together.
[00:20:35] Paul Kirschner: The mental model allows you to anticipate, allows you to not constantly be surprised. I mean, there are things happening that you'll be surprised by, but if you have this mental model, as Nidhi was talking about, about a very busy restaurant on a Friday evening, you know also and have experienced what might go right, but what might go wrong and where you're going to have to intervene and where you're going to have to pick up the slack and what could go wrong. It allows you to anticipate in your classroom what might happen without even thinking about it.
We use the term, which I think I stole from Jim Heal, is an expert teacher knows what to do when they don't know what to do. That mental model helps them to do that because they've experienced that so many times and they have such well-formed schemas in their head that even when they're confronted with a situation that they've never had before and don't know what to do, they know what to do.
[00:21:42] Nidhi Sachdeva: One of the things we wrote in the book is that schemata help you recognize what's happening and mental models help you reason what to do and sometimes what not to do. And the other part of the discussion I want to mention here is that schemata sometimes can be inaccurate or incomplete and then sometimes leads to inaccurate or incorrect mental models. So that impacts how we act in a situation.
But if we have the knowledge, the mental frameworks, really well-organized knowledge, then that frees up the space in our brain and this really matters in a dynamic classroom where I've seen it in observation, I've taught in a classroom, things are just so many times out of control. How do you deal with that? But if you have a well-functioning mental model and if you practice for that, we'll get to the deliberate practice piece.
That allows you, as Paul said, when you know what to do, but also when you don't know what to do. And Paul, I do want to say, I did check with Jim Heal and both Carl Hendrick. If you came up with that term, they both couldn't align.
They thought it might be from their back in the day football coaching days. They didn't take that on. So, you might be able to attribute it to yourself.
[00:22:55] Anna Stokke: Let's move on to deliberate practice. So, remind us, what is deliberate practice? And then if you can tell us, what does it mean when it comes to teaching expertise?
[00:23:07] Nidhi Sachdeva: Deliberate practice is different from just doing practice. So that's the first thing I'm going to say. You had Stephen Chu on your podcast, and he talked about the difference between naive practice and purposeful practice.
And then the third being the deliberate practice. So deliberate practice, the term developed in the field also to research developed by Anders Ericsson, incredible, incredible work that he did. And deliberate practice really means intentional, effortful practice.
It's not necessarily meant to be enjoyable because it demands extra work. You are focused at a specific thing that you want to improve. It's not just time at task.
And it's also not just even with a little bit of purpose that I'm going to do it, but it's really being specific that I want to improve this aspect of it. So, if I think about, for example, my daughter who's working on a specific piece on the piano, just playing it over and over and over and again, she is practicing, but she might be making a mistake and she's now only solidifying that mistake. And then it's much harder for her to get out of it.
When her teacher tells us, or tells her, that this particular note you are playing wrong. And then, so then she's breaking it up and just focusing on that particular piece. It is frustrating in the moment, but it is what you really need to be doing.
Within the context of teaching, we would say deliberate practice is not just, I'm going to teach extra. I'm going to teach a certain number of years, and I'll get better at that. It's being way more specific, purposeful, intentional and deliberate towards a certain task.
If you are working to improve checking for understanding within, say the first review period of the class. And then you're working on a very specific goal and then you're working towards that target. Then you assign and identify what are some of those very, very specific things you would do to bring that in.
So, we say that this is not just for teacher expertise. This is for all expertise development. If you want to become an expert or continue to become an expert, so to say, then you're working at very, very specific aspect of any task.
And you'll see that even with some of the greatest of all times I watch, or if you ever watch interviews with some of the world's Lionel Messi, they're always practicing a certain skill to get better at that. So, it's a very specific kind of practice.
[00:25:36] Paul Kirschner: What's important about deliberate practice, which you can use all different types of terminology for it, but it's almost self-inflicted pain to get there. It gets you constantly out of your own comfort zone, but it's something that someone else can't get you to do. You have to do it yourself.
You have to make the conscious effort. You have to be able to be made attend of the things you do wrong and the mistakes you made by someone else doing that. Having an expert coach to do it.
You're constantly being, you choose yourself to get out of your comfort zone because doing something over and over, you can get very fluent in something, but that won't make you an expert in that. It'll just make you fluent at doing something, but fluent at doing something is something completely different than being an expert at something. And for that, you have to go out of your comfort zone, and it's something that only you can do.
That's why I sometimes use the term, it's self-inflicted pain. It's almost masochism when you do this because you're constantly striving and making it harder for yourself so that you can get better at something, dealing with the frustration of trying to do something and not having it happen. That's the part of deliberate practice and doing that with feedback from someone who is an expert in that until you've mastered that part and then going again and inflicting more pain on yourself by going to something else that you can't do or can't do well.
And it's completely different from the other types of practice and also different from having someone telling you, okay, practice for half an hour or do this. Nidhi's daughter, if she wants to become a Jasha Heifetz, I don't even know if she knows who that is, will have to spend a lot of time inflicting pain on herself to reach that level. And just having the two people say, practice for half an hour or an hour a day is enough. It's not enough.
[00:27:57] Nidhi Sachdeva: And I want to add that very popular phrase, practice makes perfect. And I think there's a big issue with it. Practice is great.
I am not sitting here and saying practice is a bad thing. Anna, you know very well that we support practice, but I think we winna be very specific about that practice as well than how we're improving from that practice and what kind of practice are we doing. In this particular context of building expertise, deliberate practice is really, really the focus here.
You're identifying, say, a challenge, a specific weakness, and then you're working towards getting better at that. But it really requires someone, hopefully as Paul mentioned, a coach, a mentor, someone who is more expert than the other person who's working towards it is to say that, okay, this is what you're working at. And this is why some of the best sports folks, musicians, they all have coaches and they help them identify this was the missing part and this is what we need to work on.
This is what you can do. And immediate useful feedback is extremely, extremely important. And this is something we also cover in the book, this notion of just because you do something for 10,000 hours as very popularly identified by Malcolm Gladwell, then will become expert.
What's interesting, a lot of studies have shown that initially when you're working to become competent at a specific skill, you reach a point, but as you become more expert at it, we've seen that people spend a lot more time because now you're actually really uncovering and unpacking and disentangling and building further very specific aspects of that skill. So deliberate practice is again, as specific as you can be to work towards something and you can then see the results as well. Otherwise, it's just this general idea then you don't know what you're looking for also.
So, to be able to see growth, we have to be very deliberate and intentional for that as well.
[00:29:51] Anna Stokke: So, naive practice is just kind of practice that you do and you're not really thinking and you don't care if you make mistakes, you just kind of do it, blah, blah, blah. Then there's purposeful where you are more thoughtful about how you're practicing. You're trying not to make mistakes. You're trying to get better, et cetera.
My understanding with deliberate practice is it is more, you have a coach, you're getting more one-on-one feedback and that sort of thing. And I think that's what you're saying.
I just would like to bring it back to teaching because your book is about teaching. So how would deliberate practice be exercised by teachers?
[00:30:31] Paul Kirschner: Nidhi might need to answer that, but I want to make just one statement before she starts. And that teaching is a vocation that makes it more difficult to carry out deliberate practice. A concert pianist, we discuss it in the book, a concert pianist spends hours and hours doing deliberate practice before they are sitting in front or behind the grand piano during a concert and just doing it.
They have these built-in practice moments, but a teacher doesn't have that. Their major moment for practicing is also when they're performing. And that makes it different from most of the other areas that Anders Ericsson looked at, like golf and tennis, even a doctor, a surgeon.
They don't do their deliberate practice while doing open heart surgery. They do it on dummies, on cadavers and things like that where they can practice and make mistakes. And it's of no consequence.
The teacher's job in the book, you can make it sound as if it's easy, just do deliberate practice. But for a teacher, that's incredibly hard because you don't have those practice situations built in what you're doing. You're almost constantly performing.
You have to put in beyond what you're performing six or seven hours a day, also figure out how to build in deliberate practice. And now over to Nidhi.
[00:32:07] Nidhi Sachdeva: So yeah, I think that was a fascinating realization as we were working on it as well. And I remember when we put that in the book is this notion of the performance versus practice relationship is extremely inverted in teaching. So as Paul said, teachers actually perform a lot more most of the day and have very little time, if at all available to them to practice.
So, your question, Anna, how do teachers do deliberate practice? Well, first of all, we do want to acknowledge that it is extremely hard because the day-to-day of teaching the workload itself and so much that goes on managing a classroom and then before and after of it with lesson prep grading, it is already very time consuming. So, we do not want to make it sound like that.
Yes, just do deliberate practice and you're going to become an expert teacher. It is really hard. So, there are some things teachers can develop on their own.
And we share a couple of examples from a couple of teachers as well. What made them work towards it. So, in a part of it, it is a matter of attitude and working with that is that this idea of having maybe peer observation, identifying a coach and receiving that support from them.
I want to highlight again, it's not easy. How we really can make deliberate practice successful for teachers if we have systematic and systemic support from schools, from school districts that needs to be brought into that system. And I think it should begin in some ways during the teacher prep program as well, how we're doing the practicums at that time.
And then right after the teacher prep, how much support are teachers going to get in the initial two, three years of their life? How much mentorship they're getting and what is the quality of that coaching they're receiving? So, I think really, if we want to see deliberate practice works, we know that from experiments that Anders Ericsson has done.
We know that it's a very specific practice and it yields improvements. It yields growth. But for teaching, if we want to see that happen, then we really want to see the support coming in from the systems as well.
So be the school, be the teacher education programs, be the school districts. And once that happens, it can take many different forms like instructional coaching. It can take forms of peer observation, but teachers will then have the flexibility of having the time.
The ratio of performance to practice then won't be as inverted as it is currently right now. So, this is extremely challenging. And I think that is a validating feeling for teachers to hear who are listening to this conversation as well.
And because we don't want people to feel that, oh, I don't do enough deliberate practice, and I feel bad about that. It's like, you don't do it because it's genuinely challenging. There are things you can do at your own level, but I think more systematic and systemic support will actually make it so much more better.
And we have seen examples of wherever in certain schools, maybe some charter schools or independent schools, but even in certain school divisions where it is happening, we start to see the growth among teachers, right?
[00:35:03] Anna Stokke: It's interesting because, you know, in fields like medicine, they have residency. In law, they have articling, right? So, a year of articling where they're learning from experts and they're getting a lot of feedback.
And you almost wonder if there should be something like that for teachers, where they're getting something like articling, where they're working with a school and they're learning from experts and they're getting lots of expert coaching. What do you think about that?
[00:35:31] Nidhi Sachdeva: I think that would be really, really useful for teachers because if we'd been asking teachers right after the teacher education program, I teach in the teacher education program, myself at the University of Toronto. And quite often, teacher candidates just, or new graduates, recent graduates, feel that they're not feeling ready for the classroom. And so how could we do that then?
We could provide them with a solid induction program. We do advocate, we write about it in the book as well at length. And I'll let Paul mention about that as well.
But I would say in absence of that, we are letting it off and letting teachers figure it out for themselves and see how it is. And we know what we think about discovery learning for novices. It doesn't work and it really stresses them out and really pressurizes them.
And those are really difficult situations for teachers to be in. If we had something like that, I think that would be amazing.
[00:36:27] Paul Kirschner: Yeah, in England, what they've done is they've made this induction requirement for schools and for teachers and for mentors. So, beginning teachers the first year, 20% of their time is not on teaching, but on being mentored by an experienced expert teacher. In the second year, it's a little bit less, but it's the same situation.
But they're also investing in helping teachers become mentors. Just because you're a good biology teacher doesn't mean you're a good mentor of a beginning biology teacher. You also have there the curse of knowledge.
So, it means getting away from this freewheeling idea of, if we can find time, you'll be coached and trained into building it into the system itself. As you said, just like it's done in the medical profession, in which you come in as an intern, but actually in the Netherlands, you also have two or three shorter internships before you become an intern. And then you have a residency.
And in all of those situations, you're being coached, you're being scaffolded by a more experienced, more expert other. We don't have that in education. We also probably can't do it as well as we would like to in education, because I don't know, I assume you're having the same problems as we are, finding new teachers.
Most of the teachers are overextended in what they're doing. Many schools have a shortage of teachers. So, you're not in a luxury situation in which you can organize operations on a patient and say, we're going to use this intern in that situation.
We can bring them along. It's like running on a moving train. It's really, really hard.
[00:38:31] Anna Stokke: Okay. We should talk about the fifth thing, and that's reflection. So, can you tell us about reflection?
[00:38:37] Paul Kirschner: Reflection in, reflection on. What's very important for a teacher is once they've decided how they're going to teach and implement it, then they see the results of what they've done almost immediately. They thought it would work out in this way, and they see that it hasn't worked out in that way that they thought.
And what often is the case is that attribution theory takes over. If it went well, I did it well. If it didn't go well, the students weren't listening, they were lazy or whatever.
That reflection is important that after you've done it and you've seen the results, that you're capable, that you take the time, that you make the effort to think about what happened, what could have happened, what shouldn't happen, what didn't happen, and think about why that was the case. What did you do wrong? What did you choose wrong?
It might be even that you do wrong, but you may have chosen the wrong thing.
[00:39:38] Nidhi Sachdeva: I would say, yeah, the idea is that expertise can't be built by practice alone, even though practice is really important. It is built by practice plus an honest reflection on what worked, what didn't work.
And then really thinking about the why. So, Paul talked about reflection in action, those real adjustments that are made, let's say for a teacher, while the lesson is unfolding. And then we used Donald Schön’s notion of reflective practitioner.
And then reflection on action, it's like the after the effect analysis and reflection for action. But then after all of that, you return to practice and then you make those tweaks, make those adjustments. And this goes back to the notion of being as specific as we can be.
So just doing something and then we did it, we could be satisfied with the outcome, but reflection really allows us then to start to unpack it. And then it goes back to the loop of, well, how do I make it better? If in a classroom, I notice some students still continue to struggle, what do we do about that?
And that requires reflection and that requires in planning to integrate that into my own practice, within my own teaching. And that's what that teacher expertise is all about for us.
[00:40:51] Anna Stokke: You make a distinction between the science of teaching and the craft of teaching. So, what do you mean by each of those things?
[00:41:00] Paul Kirschner: The science of teaching is having conceptual and declarative knowledge of what you should and could do. If we look at it, the science of teaching is how we process information, the different possible instructional design approaches that we use to achieve that which we want to achieve, knowing how we process information, how our cognitive architecture works, knowing what tools we have to achieve that so that we can implement the tools that we need by the instructional techniques that we've chosen to have it aligned well with our cognitive architecture, knowing different aspects of how you run a class. Those are all part of the science of teaching. There's been quite a lot of research on that, both with teaching effectiveness research and cognitive and educational psychological research, which incredibly mesh together very, very well.
Nidhi's working on a chapter in a new book of mine, which is called Evidence-Informed Teaching Practices, in which we unwind both cognitive and educational psychology on the one hand and teaching effectiveness studies on the other side and teaching effectiveness in what do effective teachers do and what does that mean for learning. That's all part of the science of teaching, and it's very important to know, but I often use a very dumb analogy to let you know the difference, and Nidhi used the word wisdom there, which is something that an expert teacher also has. That's the craft.
It's the wisdom. In German, you'd call it Fingerspitzengefühl, feeling it in your fingers. That's the craft of teaching, and the absurdly dumb analogy that I use for that is the science of diet will tell you that a tomato is a fruit and not a vegetable.
The wisdom is not adding tomatoes to your fruit salad. There's something completely different that's developing the feeling of when, what, how, and why. If you don't know when, what, how, and why, you can't do it, but you also develop the feeling, the idea of what can I use, what should I use at this moment from that whole gigantic toolkit of instructional approaches, of cognitive theory, of tools that I can use.
When do I use what? And that's something you can't put into words. Like a master craftsman who's turning a table leg out of a lathe has to know the science of woodworking that thing, but also has the feeling and so sees, hey, there's a knot there in that, which means I have to approach it differently. Otherwise, the leg will break. That's the difference between the two.
[00:44:08] Nidhi Sachdeva: Yeah, and I would say science, as Paul said, is that evidence-based. It tells us reliably, especially in teaching, science of teaching, how memory functions, how cognitive load operates, what kinds of practice and feedback produce durable long-term learning. And then the craft is that artful, situational application of that very science.
You're reading your room, you're adjusting your tone, your speed, you're managing relationships and dynamic in the classroom, making those hundreds of live professional judgment calls that just happening for you. But together, they're really, really powerful. And that's what we say in the book. Teaching is both science and craft.
So, science gives teachers a solid, reliable foundation. So, they're not reinventing the wheel, and they're not relying on folklore, trends or facts or protected from those.
A craft, on the other hand, makes that foundation land with real classroom students, real people, real humans who are there to learn in that actual particular moment. Neither one alone produces expert teaching. We need both of them.
And we also say in the book that science and craft develop or in supporting, building teachers, developing teachers during teacher education program, they build at different phases, at different stages of their life. And I think initial teacher education has a very big responsibility towards supporting, building that science first. It's the foundation.
And if it's missing, then we can't have that craft building on its own. Then it's really, again, and this is why we would see teachers, for no fault of their own, getting influenced by popular beliefs or trends and fads. Because if they don't have the science, because they weren't provided with that foundation in the first place, then it's easy to get onto that very popular, slippery slope, so to say.
And then craft builds, ideally during induction, which we were saying that it would be amazing that teacher graduates, recent graduates, will have that opportunity to work with expert teachers who know their work, who know the science behind, who know the craft and have been managing classrooms for a while. And this continues to happen for initial few years of their induction program, post-graduation, post their teacher degree. And they build at different stages.
And I think they're both important so that they have then eventually that wisdom and action, right? They can make those professional judgment decisions that are sometimes, it seemed like magic. It seemed like, how does a teacher know?
But it is all built on that solid foundation and those tacit moments that they're just making those calls.
[00:46:47] Paul Kirschner: When induction stops, learning doesn't stop. Which means you have to create a climate within the school, starting top down, in which this idea of mentoring each other, helping each other, taking the time to do things like micro-teaching with each other, so that you can constantly continue to learn and develop.
Because it's not, learning doesn't stop at the end of teacher education and developing these skills doesn't stop at the end of induction. It has to continue. And that requires a climate within the school, which is non-threatening, which is psychologically safe, and which is also planned by the head of the school and appreciated by whatever they're called, the superintendent or the principal or the head teacher or whatever it is, to make sure that that's a part, not an add-on to what teachers are doing, but a part of the culture of the school and of teaching itself. And without that, all of this won't happen.
[00:47:57] Anna Stokke: Okay, so the way that I'm hearing this is, the science of teaching is really like the theoretical knowledge, having the theoretical knowledge of what is evidence-based in teaching. And you're correct that this is a way to prevent teachers being influenced by fads, because they'll be able to spot when things are not evidence-based. And then the craft of teaching is like the practical part of it, being able to practically apply that knowledge in a practical classroom setting.
So, backing up to the science of teaching, and you mentioned in your book that initial teacher training should primarily teach the science of teaching, while the craft would develop during practicum or mentoring and through classroom experience over time. But I'm curious, so do you think initial teacher education is doing a good job of equipping teachers with that knowledge, the science of teaching?
[00:49:02] Paul Kirschner: I can't say it on a global scale. I can't even say it for Canada or the United States. I can say it for the Netherlands, and that's that there are certain schools of education that are doing that very, very well, and other schools of education that aren't.
And in any event, in my country, one of the major problems is that there is a list of standards, but there's no way to check whether or not those standards are met with what is or isn't in the curriculum. In England, they've made a compulsory curriculum in which you know that certain things have to be covered. I think it's 70% of the curriculum has to be on this and this and this is.
You have eight pillars within that system. In the Netherlands, it's all due to our constitution. We can't do that.
We're not allowed to do that. So, if a school of education, a college, has set up an accredited initial teacher education program, from that point on, no one has any control of the quality of what the students are learning. And so that makes it very hard for me to make a blanket statement.
If we add to that, that our constitution doesn't allow the government to do certain things because that's the prerogative of the school, then we can say what you're examined on at the end, we can't have anything to say about how it's taught and what's taught.
[00:50:39] Nidhi Sachdeva: And I would say, based on what I'm seeing or experiencing, there is, of course, a lack of consistency, which is what makes it really hard to say it's happening or it's not. Because there's a lot of flexibility within the curriculum. Some teachers, some professors might be doing it.
In fact, Jim Hewitt and myself, we teach a course and we've talked about that on the podcast as well, at OISE, at Ontario Institute for Studies and Education. We do teach a course since 2021 called the Science and Learning. And in fact, our textbook is How Learning Happens, which is how I came to connect with Paul at the time as well.
But I would say in some other faculties of Ed, I don't know, but I would say there's two things with the research team that I've been doing, and Jim Hewitt is a part of that. We looked at six different jurisdictions and Jim put together kind of a program and we put in the curriculum documents of all these six jurisdictions. Ontario was one of them.
England was another one. Singapore was there as well and there's a few more. And we put it through the curriculum documents to this particular engine, coded engine, and it had wordings from tier one, tier two, tier three levels.
And looking at words from cognitive science or looking at words like cognitive load or explicit instruction and things like that. And what we found in that particular analysis is that only England really had that explicitly mentioned. Now, does that mean that it's not happening in another country, another jurisdiction we picked?
We don't know, but this is what the curriculum documents of the six jurisdictions we picked showed. So that's one piece. Another one, I'm literally as we speak conducting a study and I've shared the survey for the last little bit and we have about three, four hundred responses on it and I'm hoping to get more.
And it's a very simple anonymous survey and it asks practicing teachers about some of the practices or their teacher education program experiences. And it doesn't say good or bad about things. It just lists a bunch of things that did you learn about this frequently, occasionally, rarely, never, things like that.
And we're just asking teachers to pick it. And I don't want to right now share the answers to that because it would bias folks' responses if more people will listen to it and will be responding to that. But we're learning about this as we speak, because it is, as Paul said, hard to say no one's doing it or yes, everyone's doing it.
It is quite inconsistent. What would be nice is that if there were just the way England did it, for example, putting that explicitly in curriculum, having a very clear language that this is what our core curriculum framework would look like for developing teachers, then that would be quite incredible. Are we there yet?
I don't know. And I don't think so. And I think we need more work on that.
[00:53:18] Anna Stokke: Yeah, we're probably not there yet, but there are the cases like you and Jim Hewitt. You have that wonderful course that you teach at OISE. I've had Joanna Barbousas on from La Trobe University in Australia, and I've had Pamela Snow from the same university, and they're making big changes to teacher education there.
And we've had Jonas Linderoth on the podcast from Sweden, and he teaches in a faculty of education, and he certainly is teaching on cognitive science and things like that. In terms of how humans learn. And so, we are seeing some changes, and we hope that we'll see more.
[00:53:58] Nidhi Sachdeva: And I would like to add, you know, the incredible program at Mount St. Vincent University in Nova Scotia, for example. So, there are things happening under Jamie Metzel has also been on your podcast. So, there are things happening.
And it's great that you're bringing those voices out, Anna, so more folks can learn about that and understand it. And I think there is desire. It's just the clarity of how to do it.
What are we missing? More conversations and having these open discussions can really, really help that.
[00:54:25] Paul Kirschner: And my group in Flanders is doing the exact same thing. For Flanders, it's the Center for Education and Learning. Expertise Center, Education and Learning, under the guidance of Tim Surma, is setting up a core curriculum.
It's going in that direction. In Flanders, they said in Australia, in New South Wales, they've also set up a core curriculum. So slowly but surely, people are waking up to the fact that we need a common language and common understanding of what are the elements of good teaching.
That's something different than how do you teach well. That everyone does by themselves in their own idiosyncratic way. But what are the elements of good teaching and what are elements that don't belong by good teaching?
[00:55:21] Anna Stokke: So, you make the case that expert teaching can be developed and measured. And we certainly talked quite a bit about how it can be developed. But how would you measure expert teaching? Like how would you know someone is an expert teacher?
[00:55:34] Paul Kirschner: The results of their students. It's not about what we observe a teacher doing in the classroom, which is what people often do.
It's not on how enjoyable or warm or whatever the classroom is. The only way to judge an expert teacher is by the results they're getting from their students, what their students learn. And that doesn't make a teacher any different from any other expert or someone in a trade.
A good furniture maker, an expert is judged by the quality of the tables and chairs and chests that they make. An expert surgeon is judged by the quality of the surgery that they do. And hopefully, but not always, the survival rate of their patients, because often the best surgeons get the hardest cases.
But it's always what your craftsmanship achieves. That's the way you measure, for me, the quality of a teacher.
[00:56:45] Nidhi Sachdeva: I would add, before I add, how we mentioned in the book, what is the measure? What are some of the quantifiable metrics? I do want to say that it is actually really challenging.
When we were even unpacking that, so we started first tackling or addressing metrics that are quite often used or the way teacher expertise is described. So, one of the pieces that we unpack, for example, is talent. A lot of people would say, is teaching a matter of talent?
And I want to read this really powerful quote that actually is from How Teaching Happens. So, Paul, this is yours, the Carl Hendricks and Jim Heal quote. And this particular one unpacks that it is not a matter of talent.
And you started the podcast by saying that it is not this innate thing just we're born with and we could do it, but it's something else, right? And we can actually develop it. So, your quote is, good teaching isn't inborn.
It doesn't happen by accident. And seeing it as such fundamentally undervalues its richness, the challenge associated with doing it well and the effort that good teachers have put into becoming good. Worse still, when teaching is relegated to the status of a knack profession, in this way, decisions about how to fund the systems that prepare and develop teachers tend to adopt the same lack of seriousness.
And then you say, what does that say about the pursuit of such a powerful, important profession that teaching is? So how should we not first measure it is definitely not looking at through the lens of talent, because then we say that if it is not, if you don't have it, then you can't become a teacher, right? Then all of the work that we're doing doesn't work.
So that's one I want to talk about. The second one very frequently associated with expertise is experience. So, number of years at the job is, of course, useful.
It's a really, really powerful component of building, but it doesn't necessarily mean experience also leads to expertise, right? You may be an experienced non-expert. And I think one of the examples, if we're not talking about teaching, we say, I may, I could say I played tennis all my life, but I'm not a Grand Slam contestant.
Forget about a winner, right? So, experience alone doesn't necessarily lead to expertise, until we've brought in those five domains that we talked about. Having deep content knowledge and deliberate practice and reflection and having the mental models and how you build upon that.
So quite often, these are some of the themes that are used. And the other piece I would say is that the surface level observation, if you are looking at an expert teacher and you're observing a classroom, oftentimes it can be misunderstood for expertise. When you're looking at a busy classroom, happy kids, and I'm not saying we don't want happy kids.
We want happy kids. We want engaged kids, but we're really going for cognitively engaged classrooms, even if there's not much actual movement happening there. That's just one example, right?
So, some of those very obvious observable things that are frequently related to expertise, are they really? And that we know, we challenge that notion. We unpack that.
And we don't say that they're not important. We say that they don't, with reliability, provide us with an accurate measure of expert teaching. I would say, instead of saying, did I teach it well?
We're really looking for, did they learn it well, so we're looking for learning in the students. So that's what we talked about at length, about the teacher effectiveness research in our book as well.
And teacher effectiveness, longitudinal studies that have looked at a certain number of years a teacher has been, or even if the one school year, what is that shift, that growth, that movement for the learner that has happened with regards to what they needed to learn? Would they move past that? And this is what made teacher expertise research and writing this book as well, quite different than other areas of expertise.
So, the example I often use, and of course, I'm going to drop the name Lewis Hamilton. If Lewis Hamilton wins a race, then he's the expert and he wins the race. If Roger Federer wins the match, he does it.
How do you do that in the teacher? There are some observational sort of components we have in the teacher, but we are looking for the results in the learning, in the student learning. So that would be the biggest quantifiable metric.
[01:00:59] Paul Kirschner:
I will say what can be misunderstood here is that you can think this teacher's class had better scores and that makes this teacher a better teacher or an expert teacher. It's not that simple. Nidhi said it very well.
What is the learning that has occurred? How far has the teacher brought the student in their learning experience? That's the measure of an expert teacher.
And so, it's just very easy to misunderstand what Nidhi said and to think, okay, all we have to do is check out whose class had the best scores and they're the best teacher.
[01:01:44] Anna Stokke: I agree. You do have to be quite careful about that. I'll just give you an example.
You know, we might have several sections of a calculus course running and we have tiered registration. And so, students who are scholarship winners get to register first. That's the way it works at my university.
What sometimes happens is all of those students will go into one class because they want that particular professor, maybe because that professor has good ratings or Rate Your Professors or something like that. So, what inevitably happens at the end of the term is that particular prof, their students do much better than the other students because those students came in with high levels of prerequisite knowledge. They're really hardworking students.
They've been successful in the past. I agree that we have to be quite careful about that measure, that it has to be a measurement of growth.
[01:02:42] Nidhi Sachdeva: Yes, so long-term learning, how long they decide to stay, for example, in continuing to do math, right? Things like that as well. And that's what I was about to say when I passed on the word to Paul is that it's not just about a certain test, a certain score.
but it's that longitudinal impact. And I think some of the discussions that we have in the book and we caution folks that it's not what we mean, but it's this immediate progress report card of that year. It's a more longitudinal impact on student learning.
If, for example, I'm thinking from my own perspective, I chose to continue to learn German up until the C2 proficiency, which is the advanced native speaker level proficiency, as they would call it according to the European framework of the references. I chose to do that. And I think it's not just how well I did in my first semester or the first A1 level.
It's the fact that I stayed with it. And then, of course, I ended up becoming a German teacher. And some of the teachers in that journey that I've had, those really were expert teachers.
And I'm so grateful that I have an opportunity to say this on this podcast right now, because this is incredible. So, it's a longitudinal growth, learning, impact on learning. And some of the teacher effectiveness research has also even looked at, well, what has happened to the students when they've started working?
What kind of career? And people have looked at in many different longitudinal ways. We do not want to diminish to one particular test or one year's progress report card, of course.
But what the point is that teacher expertise best measure is in the student and their impact that teaching has had on their learning trajectory for their life, so to say. That's the point we want to make.
[01:04:25] Anna Stokke: And just to also back up on a couple of things you said is that things like busy classrooms, noisy classrooms, students who look engaged, teachers who are innovative, those are not measures of teaching expertise or great teachers, right? Sometimes we see those things, but it has to be some sort of quantitative measure.
And of course, the only way you can do that is go to student data to be measured in some fair way.
[01:04:55] Nidhi Sachdeva: I do want to say that because we talk about expert teaching and then you're looking at these things and observation is definitely an important tool for school leaders, for administrators to be doing that. And I think to your point, this kind of discussion then becomes even more important to be unpacking and bringing it out on the table is that, well, how do we actually observe a classroom where deeper learning is happening? And I love when we mentioned that in the book, I love one of the essays that Adam Boxer has written called The Radiologist.
It's like normal person's eye who's not a radiologist. A CT scan is just a bunch of shades of gray and black and a bit of white, but to an expert, they know what they're looking at and they are understanding that. So, the same goes for understanding and are we looking at expert teaching while the classroom, the lesson is happening or even the longitudinal impact of it?
I think those are skills that we also need to talk about and learn and help leaders develop that. And again, goes back to the system level work that needs to be done within our profession for the most part, which is what makes it really tricky. So, we naturally fall back on, I have taught for 20 years, but then I could have done the exact same thing.
And I'm not talking about other teachers, I'm talking about myself. I could have done the exact same thing every single year for 20 years, or did I really change it each year and grew with that, right? I think it's natural, it's easy to fall back to the relatively easy metrics, but what we really need to do is build that eye that the radiologist has for our own profession, our own version.
Do we have all the answers? Not yet, but that's why writing about this, exploring it was not to share all the answers, but also to unpack that this requires more discussion. This needs to be discussed because the impact goes directly to, what the teacher education programs can do, what induction can do, what school systems can do.
And hopefully we continue to work towards a profession that grows and that in service of student learning, right? At the end of the day, that's what we're really focusing on. And your podcast has been strongly about that.
[01:07:08] Anna Stokke: Let's close off with this final question. So, you write that striving for expertise is not just a personal ambition, it is a professional and moral responsibility. So that's a strong statement. Why did you write such a strong statement?
[01:07:26] Paul Kirschner: Because it's that important. We need as teachers to have, when I was a child, be the most you can be. And that's the job of a teacher and an expert teacher. It's to help a child become the best that they can be.
And the only way that they can do that is by becoming better or the best in what they are doing, which is teaching. And so, it's a moral obligation if you choose that profession, just like a doctor has a moral obligation to heal or make their patients better to remove suffering from their patients. It's the moral obligation of a teacher to help every student achieve what they can achieve.
And that means closing the gap between the haves and the have-nots. The best way to get rid of that yuck, that burden of, we say in the Netherlands, if you were born as a nickel, you'll never become a dime. To get rid of that and have every nickel become a dime or a quarter, that's our task.
That's our moral obligation. And now I sound like a preacher, but that's the reason I've now devoted 49 years of my life to studying how people learn and how we can design education to help them learn in an effective, efficient, and enjoyable way. So, this is your manic street preacher here telling you what's important.
[01:09:11] Nidhi Sachdeva: And I would say just what we said a few minutes ago, it's not about that one test. It's a moral imperative because teaching outcomes affect real children's life trajectories. If expertise can be deliberately developed, they're not pursuing that development.
It's not a neutral choice, right? We have to name it so we can develop it. If we can't name it, we can't develop it.
That's one piece of it. It's really important we're talking about real kids in their lives. And we talk about at length in one of the chapters about the teacher effectiveness research.
There's lots and lots of examples and lots of research studies, longitudinal studies that we talk about. Well, one I can remember, I won't go into the details, but when they compared high-performing students, it mattered a lot less to those students which teacher was teaching them. Was it a more effective teacher as identified by the board or less effective teacher?
But it mattered about two years’ worth of learning journey for low-performing students, which teacher they got. So that makes it a moral imperative, doesn't it, right? So that's really an important thing to remember.
Yes, it is a strong statement because the stakes are just simply too high. Setling for good enough, it has a real cost to those students in front of us, which makes ongoing growth a professional obligation to develop our own selves as teachers to becoming an expert teacher, really a moral imperative and not just a personal preference.
[01:10:37] Anna Stokke: You've both written a great book and I love how you kind of brought everything together. So, if you read it, you'll even learn about evidence-based teaching practices, which is really helpful and how to learn more about them. And Paul, I'm glad you dedicated 49 years to this and you've made a huge impact for a lot of people, particularly the paper you've written with John Sweller, Why Minimal Guidance During Instruction Does Not Work.
So many people will say that that paper changed how they thought about teaching. So, it's something to be really proud of. And Nidhi, you're also doing really great work here in Canada and everywhere else.
I was so happy to have you on today and thanks for coming on and telling us about your book.
[01:11:29] Nidhi Sachdeva: You said it about us. I will say back at you, you're doing incredible work and we're so grateful for everything that you do. And I, for one, I'm super proud that you're a fellow comedian. Thank you.
[01:11:40] Anna Stokke: Back at 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 favorite podcast app or on YouTube so you never miss an episode.
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