Teacher Ollie’s Takeaways is starting to include more reflections prompted from articles than just headlines and the articles themselves! Thus, this one is more of a collection of mini-blogs than anything else.

Hope that’s ok!?!

And I hope you enjoy these musings!

Ollie.

If you'd like to support Teacher Ollie's Takeaways and the Education Research Reading Room podcast, please check out the ERRR Patreon page to explore this option. Any donation, even $1 per month, is greatly appreciated. 

(all past TOTs here), sign up to get these articles emailed to you each week here.

Quote of the Week: Focus your energy where it’s going to multiply, not where it’s going to dissipate – @Rethinking_Kate

For more of Kate’s work, check out her discussion with James Mannion, or her chat with me.

Why is theory important in education?

Sometimes education theory is balked at, regarded as only for academics with the idea that teachers should focus on practical strategies. Through the ERRR podcast and my readings into education research in recent years, I have come to the conclusion that theory is crucial, for teachers and researchers alike.

Why is this? In this brief takeaway I share two key reasons why theory is important. Firstly, because it facilitates effective adaptation of instruction, and secondly because it allows us to see reality more clearly and with greater insight.

Theory is powerful because it allows practitioners to develop adaptive expertise*. Adaptive expertise is just what it sounds, expertise that allows an individual to take what they know and adapt it to a new circumstance. Have you ever had a teaching ‘technique’ that worked for one class but not another? A teacher with only routine expertise would keep on implementing the same technique, even though the context was different, and wondering why they weren’t getting their desired result. An adaptive expert would modify their approach to effectively match the circumstances.

Graham Nuthall writes on the necessity of this type of adaptation in his excellent book, The Hidden Lives of Learners, ‘In my experience, teaching is about sensitivity and adaptation. It is about adjusting to the here-and-now circumstances of particular students.’ (pg. 15)

That’s the first reason why theory is important, it enables effective adaptation (which I speak about with Michael Pershan, @mpershan, in the forthcoming ERRR podcast, out March 1, 2021).

The second reason why theory is important is because it allows us to see reality more clearly and with greater insight. In my ERRR discussion with the incredible Viviane Robinson, I asked Viviane how she came up with the framework that’s communicated through her book, Reduce Change to Increase Improvement. Viviane replied:

these ideas that sound like the innovations or inspirations, do not pop up, out of the blue at all. It's an evolution out of 40 years of thinking about theories of action. And then applying those, building those ideas. Building a conceptual and theoretical platform, which provides a lens from which I then see what is going wrong with the attempt to reform schools with what's going wrong with innovation, and why people are so overwhelmed with constant change that is  not improving things in a sustained and scalable manner. So there wasn't a catalyst, there was a context. Both my own context of conceptual development over 40 years, and the constant working with practitioners, and then the crystallizing of the fact that bringing together the problem with a potential solution that I've talked about in the book.

I love how Viviane puts this, she describes theory as a ‘lens from which I then see what is going wrong’. Theory provides insight and provides us with tools to see more deeply into a given situation.

But this isn’t just relevant in education. Clayton Christiansen, the American academic and business consultant who coined the term, ‘Disruptive Innovation’, has the following to say about the importance of theory in this book, Competing Against Luck:

As an academic, I’m asked hundreds of times a year to offer opinions on specific business challenges in industries or organizations in which I have no special knowledge. Yet I’m able to provide insight because there is a toolbox full of theories that teach me not what to think but rather how to think. Good theory is the best way I know to frame problems in such a way that we ask the right questions to get us to the most useful answers.

…Embracing theory is not to mire ourselves in academic minutiae but, quite the opposite, to focus on the supremely practical question of what causes what.

Theory matters. It allows us to adapt our practice to the given circumstances, and it allows us to see reality more clearly and with greater insight. To ask the right questions to get to the most useful answers.

*Hatano, G. & Inagaki, K. (1984) Two courses of expertise. 乳幼児発達臨床センター年報= RESEARCH AND CLINICAL CENTER FOR CHILD DEVELOPMENT Annual Report. 627–36.

The role of curiosity in academic success? Prompted by @HungryMindLab

Here’s a very simple set of ideas that I’ve been pondering a bit recently:

  • The key to academic success in early schooling is intellect
  • The key to academic success in later schooling and university is conscientiousness
  • The key to academic success over a lifetime is curiosity

The above is, of course, a sweeping generalisation, exclusionary to some, and not wholly correct at all. But the idea of sharing it is to stimulate our collective curiosity!

This set of ideas, which I formulated whilst incrementally digesting Sophie Von Stumm’s article, The Hungry Mind, emphasises the value of curiosity, a trait that I would have longtime placed behind both intellect, and conscientiousness, in terms of determinants of academic success.

Some interesting ideas from the paper are as follows:

  1. As we get to higher and higher levels of education, those remaining are already of high intellect, so conscientiousness and other personality traits start to be a more important distinguishing factors.

The association between cognitive ability and academic performance persists across educational levels, although it tends to decrease in more advanced academic settings due to differential range restrictions. For instance, candidates in graduate school have been selected already on the basis of their intellectual capacity, which increases the relative variability and importance of non-ability factors (cf. Jensen, 1980). In line with this, recent research has assessed the degree to which individual differences in academic performance can be explained by personality factors.

  1. Intelligence and conscientiousness are largely independent, or even negatively correlated. Many teachers will be familiar with this, often the brightest students are the ones who struggle the most to get themselves organised and get the work done.

Intelligence and Conscientiousness have been found to be largely independent, although some studies reported modest negative correlations between Conscientiousness and ability measures (e.g., Ackerman & Heggestad, 1997; Moutafi, Furnham, & Crump, 2006). To explain this negative association, it has been argued that “less” able individuals may become increasingly more conscientious to compensate for their lower levels of cognitive ability, whereas more intelligent people rely to a greater extent on their intelligence and can “afford” to be less dutiful and organized and nevertheless excel (Chamorro-Premuzic & Furnham, 2005). According to this theory, the effects of intelligence on academic performance would be mediated by Conscientiousness in an inconsistent mediation model (MacKinnon & Fairchild, 2009). That is, intelligence would have a direct positive effect on academic performance, as well as an indirect negative effect, mediated by Conscientiousness. Therefore, direct and indirect effects would be of opposite signs or inconsistent. It is not clear yet if intelligence and Conscientiousness are independent predictors of academic performance or if one mediates the effects of the other.

  1. I liked this bit. The distinction between epistemic and perceptual curiosity.

Berlyne (1954) proceeded to introduce the conceptual distinction between epistemic and perceptual curiosity. Epistemic curiosity refers to individual differences in seeking out opportunities for intellectual engagement, acquiring facts and knowledge, or simply the “drive to know” (Berlyne, 1954, p. 187), whereas perceptual curiosity is evoked by visual, auditory, and tactile stimulation and refers to a “drive to experience and feel” (Berlyne, 1954).

The formulation with which we began this section does not suggest that only one factor is key at each level of education, rather, certain factors dominate at different levels, and as one moves deeper into an academic pursuit, the characteristics at earlier levels become insufficient for success in later stages.

For schools, one key lesson out of all of this is that preparing students for the future doesn’t just mean helping them know stuff (intellect and knowledge), or helping them to develop grit or perseverance (conscientiousness), but also helping to stimulate curiosity:

The association of intellectual curiosity with academic performance, has two important practical implications for higher education. For one, academic performance may be further enhanced if students’ intellectual curiosity is continuously stimulated and nurtured. Dewey (1910) observed: In a few people, intellectual curiosity is so insatiable that nothing will discourage it, but in most its edge is easily dulled and blunted… Some lose it in indifference or carelessness; others in a frivolous flippancy; many escape these evils only to become encased in a hard dogmatism which is equally fatal to the spirit of wonder. (p. 33) Schools and universities must early on encourage intellectual hunger and not exclusively reward the acquiescent application of intelligence and effort (Charlton, 2009). It is not only the diligent class winner who writes an excellent term paper but also the one who asks annoyingly challenging questions during the seminar (a habit that is, unfortunately, not appreciated by all teachers). Also, intellectually stimulated students are likely to be more satisfied with their university experience and to enjoy their studies to a greater extent than students who fell victim to Dewey’s hard dogmatism. It is worth noting here that curiosity may be as much a trait as a state (Berlyne, 1960; Loewenstein, 1994), suggesting that educational settings should fully exploit their plentiful opportunities to induce and inspire curiosity.

Moving forward, intellectual curiosity is a factor that we may like to start to consider in our talent selection processes also! Often the teachers who continue to get better over the long run are simply those who are intrigued by their practice, their students' misconceptions, and what it might take to do what they do better:

For the other, selection methods for university admissions and professional recruitment should pay greater attention to intellectual curiosity as an important indicator of potential and ability. In fact, intellectual curiosity incorporates intelligence, zeal, and the hunger for information and novelty in one. To this effect, it seems imperative to expand current research efforts in this field and to investigate effects of intellectual curiosity on job performance and cognitive development throughout the lifespan.

…

Curiosity is, in great and generous minds, the first passion and the last. – Samuel Johnson (1750) [from Von Stumm’s paper The Hungry Mind]

Hear me talk about Cognitive Load Theory with @MrBartonMaths

Just an FYI that I was recently on Craig Barton’s podcast talking all things Cognitive Load Theory. You can check it out here 🙂

The impact of pressure on performance, via Peter Gray

The following excerpt is from Peter Gray’s book, Free to Learn, which I discussed with Peter on the ERRR podcast.

What is the impact of pressure on performance? The answer is, ‘it depends.’ And what it depends upon is how expert the person is when placed under pressure. Consider the following:

ABOUT THIRTY YEARS AGO, a team of research psychologists headed by James Michaels at Virginia Polytechnic and State University conducted a simple experiment in a real-world setting. They hung around the pool hall in a university student center and watched friendly games of eight ball. At first they observed unobtrusively and counted the percentage of successful shots that each player made, in order to categorize players as experts or novices. They then moved in closer and began watching in a way that made it obvious to the players that they were evaluating their performances. They did this for multiple players over multiple games. Here’s what they found: close observation caused the experts to perform even better than they did without observation, but it had the opposite effect on the novices. All in all, the average success rate of the experts rose from 71 percent up to 80 percent under observation, while that for novices fell from 36 percent to 25 percent.

For me, one of the applications of this is to high-stakes exams. Will the pressure of an exam help students rise to the occasion? Or, is it likely to make them do worse than they could in a lower stress environment? This excerpt suggests that, at least for some, which of these outcomes eventuates depends to a large extent upon the lever of expertise they manage to attain prior to entering the examination room! The goal is to get to the level of automation prior to the big day! (see the takeaway below!)

(Of course, there are other ways that pressure interacts with performance, but this is one interesting study worth keeping in mind).

Three levels of expertise

This week I put together a one-pager for students detailing three levels of expertise on the path to mastery. In hindsight, it’s probably a bit dense, but it’s a work in process that I hope to continue to refine and work out how best to use in future. If you have any ideas, please do share!

Promoting transfer through comparison problems, via @DTWillingham

One of the great challenges of teaching is promoting transfer: supporting students to take the skills that we’ve taught them in one context, and apply them to a new, novel context in future. This is a key goal of schooling – to teach students things in school, that they can then apply in their lives more broadly.

But promoting transfer is notoriously challenging, and skills and knowledge often become fixed to the context in which they’re learnt.

In his article on how to teach Critical Thinking, Dan Willingham offers a simple tool to support the transfer of students’ knowledge to new scenarios. As follows:

One technique is problem comparison; show students two solved problems that have the same structure but appear to be about different things, and ask students to compare them.* In one experiment testing this method, business school students were asked to compare two stories, one involving international companies coping with a shipping problem, and the other concerning two college students planning a spring break trip. In each, a difficult negotiation problem was resolved through the use of a particular type of contract. Two weeks later, students were more likely to use the solution on a novel problem if they had contrasted the stories compared to other students who simply read them.**

* K. J. Kurtz, O. Boukrina, and D. Gentner, “Comparison Promotes Learning and Transfer of Relational Categories,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning Memory and Cognition 39, no. 4 (2013): 1303–1310.

** J. Loewenstein, L. Thompson, and D. Gentner, “Analogical Encoding Facilitates Knowledge Transfer in Negotiation,” Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 6, no. 4 (1999): 586–597.

Self-explanation prompts from EDI, via @DataworksEd

The ability to self-explain is a key factor separating more from less successful learners. This is just a quick takeaway detailing some of the self-explanation prompts from Hollingsworth and Ybarra’s book, Explicit Direct Instruction. These prompts were shared as part of the summary that went out to ERRR Patrons following my podcast with John Hollingsworth.

Useful self-explanation questions for dissecting worked examples.

In EDI, guided practice is achieved via ‘The rule of two’, also known as example-problem pairs. The teacher works a problem, then students do the same.

Something that EDI emphasises is the importance of ensuring that students are on board with every step that they are taking in the solution. So, after the teacher has modelled the solution, the following questions can be used to deepen student understanding:

  • What was I thinking when I . . . ?
  • How did I remember . . . ?
  • How did I decide to . . . ?
  • Why did I . . . ?
  • How did I know . . . ?  (Pg. 133 of Explicit Direct Instruction)

For more on this, see my forthcoming ERRR episode with Michale Pershan (out March 1, 2021) or the self-explanation chapter in Cognitive Load Theory in Action.

Who uses phones in class, it isn’t just phone addicts! ht @DTWillingham

Related