How Learning Happens: Principles Every Teacher Should Know with Carl Hendrick

Episode 242

In this episode, Carl Hendrick emphasizes the critical role of timely feedback in the educational process, highlighting how immediate responses to misconceptions can significantly enhance student learning. He discusses the challenges teachers face in providing effective feedback and the importance of checking for understanding, interleaving, and retrieval practice to ensure that students grasp the material being taught.

Check out this resource we made just for you to accompany the content in this episode! Evidence-Based Practices to Make Learning Stick One-Pager 

Key Takeaways

• Timely feedback is crucial for effective learning.
• The closer the feedback loop, the more powerful the learning.
• Checking for understanding can significantly improve teaching effectiveness.
• Understanding checks guide instructional decisions.

We answer your questions about teaching reading in The Literacy 50-A Q&A Handbook for Teachers: Real-World Answers to Questions About Reading That Keep You Up at Night.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Why The Science Of Learning
• 1:17 Defining The Science And Its Value
• 3:36 Probabilities Not Prescriptions
• 5:16 Working Memory Limits And Design
• 8:18 Empathy, Ethics, And Expertise
• 11:28 Knowledge As The Stuff Of Thought
• 15:12 Misconceptions And Fast Feedback Loops
• 19:05 Independence Comes From Guidance
• 22:00 Engagement Versus Learning
• 26:01 Retrieval, Interleaving, And CFU
• 31:10 Early Reading As A Masterclass
• 35:20 Calibrating Interleaving And Discrimination
• 39:10 One Big Takeaway And Closing

Transcript

Lori: 0:00

Do you ever feel like you're doing all the right things, but you're not sure what's actually helping your students learn? You're not alone. So many teachers are trying to make sense of what research says about how learning happens.

Melissa: 0:12

That's what the science of learning is about. Understanding how students learn best. And in this episode, we're joined by professor and author Carl Hendrick to explore what it is, why it matters, and how it can make your teaching even more effective.

Lori: 0:29

Hi, teacher friends. I'm Lori. And I'm Melissa. We are two educators who want the best for all kids, and we know you do too.

Melissa: 0:38

We worked together in Baltimore when the district adopted a new literacy curriculum.

Lori: 0:43

We realized there was so much more to learn about how to teach reading and writing. Lori and I can't wait to keep learning with you today. Hi, Carl. Welcome to the podcast. We are so happy to have you today. We've both been following your work around how learning happens and the science of learning. And we know that teachers are so eager for practical ways to bring this research to life in the classroom. And we know you're the guy to talk to about it. So welcome to the podcast.

Carl Hendrick: 1:14

Thanks so much for having me.

Melissa: 1:16

Yeah. So we wanted to talk to you about, of course, the science of learning. And I know that it's a pretty common term in the UK where you are, but it's kind of just starting to gain some momentum here in the US. And untotally understandably, I know for teachers, they can hear a phrase like science of learning. And it can sound like, here's another thing that we have to do. And, you know, we're we've just gotten on board with the science of reading, and that's been such a big focus. And now we have another science. Um, but Carl, I'm wondering if you can help us understand what is the science of learning and how can it really support teachers in the work they're already doing and not feel like this burden of another thing to think about?

Carl Hendrick: 1:58

Yeah, so it's a sort of an umbrella term that refers to a branch of different disciplines. And you're talking about cognitive psychology, uh, neuroscience, education psychology, but I guess probably the one that is most useful to teachers is the branch of cognitive science that really zooms in on how do we encounter, store, encode, retrieve knowledge and information. And so, you know, for me, I think teaching is almost an unhelpful term because it's a kind of an impossible task. When you talk about teaching, you're not just you're talking about curriculum design, instruction, assessment, and then there's the whole socio-emotional aspect of how do you deal with kids. It's almost so big as to be very difficult to define. So the science of learning for me is isolating variables that can be measured in some capacity and then can provide um teachers with very real guidance on you know what they can do or or to help them to be better decision makers in in their classrooms. And I think where the science of learning is uh, I suppose empowering for teachers is that it's really not a sort of set of stone tablets that you know this has to work here and that has to work there. For me, there's a sort of paradox with it, which is that you kind of know all this stuff, and then in that moment, you're making decisions based upon a range of factors. But you're gonna make five decisions this way, five decisions that way. All of these are probably good decisions, and all of these are bad ones. And really, it's about enabling teachers to sort of have some kind of clarity on what they should do. John Swiller said without understanding cognitive architecture, instruction is blind. In other words, if you're a doctor and you don't understand human biology, then how are you gonna A diagnose what's wrong with a person and then B help them or prescribe medicine or or you know perform surgery? So it's this idea that um, of course, there's no assurances, but there are things that we can kind of hang our hats on.

Lori: 4:24

I can't wait to talk to you more about those things we can hang our hats on today. Um, but I do want to talk about one quote you've said that it stood stood out to us, and I think it applies here. You said the science of learning is about probabilities, not prescriptions. And I think that's what you're talking about. It's not, you know, a set of rules on these, you know, stones and it's like check, check, check. Um, it's not a checklist for, you know, teachers or educators to follow, or even, I mean, dare I say it, leaders to walk in and have a checklist and be like, oh, okay, they're doing the science of learning. Like that's not what we're talking about here. So can you talk a little bit about what that means?

Carl Hendrick: 5:03

So I think teaching is really a um probabilistic enterprise in the sense that stuff that works, I mean, let's let's take it all the way back. So, where does the science come from? Most of it is done in a laboratory with postgraduate students. And so when we when we want to define, well, how how many things can you hold in your working memory? Now we've known that since the 1950s with the work of George Miller. That's probably the George Miller, this is like the first thing that you need to know about learning, I think. Like how many items or elements? If you if you How many? Yeah, well, his magical number was seven.

Lori: 5:41

But we now think Okay, that's what I was gonna say. I just had some academic number, right? Yeah, I just like looked at some academic testing statistics, and I they said between seven and eight.

Carl Hendrick: 5:50

Well, we now think it's near four. So Cowan's work in around 2000. Oh yeah, because he looked at those studies, and it's slightly complicated because when we say things or stuff or items or elements, they're not neutral. So sure, if you're giving someone like how many plates can you hold, the plates are equal things. But if you're giving someone, you know, items of knowledge, well, did you know them before? Are they totally brand new? Are they totally, you know? But I would say in general, we are asking kids every day, here's something new. You got it? Yes. Okay, here's another new thing. Have you got that too? Yep. Here's a third new thing. How are you doing with that? Uh yeah, okay. Uh you know, here's another one. Uh, what was the first one again? So that's like the what kind of the sort of like one-on-one of instructional design for me. Like without really thinking about that, we're not kind of taking into account how the brain kind of functions or operates. So they're the nearest thing we have to a set of laws. Like there, it's you can't hold 15 items, you know, unless, and here's the other thing, it's really dependent on what's your lot in your long-term memory. And I'm doing it right now. As I'm talking to you, I'm thinking about all these concepts and terms, but if I had to speak in Spanish, that would slow right down, and I'd have to, you know, what I'd be trying to wrestle with new things. So those those kind of things are important because it means you're, and for me, that's where the science of learning becomes an empathetic thing. You're taking into account the the limitations of kids, and you're saying, look, and what I love about really good instructional design, it says, is that it says, if the kid that hasn't learned it, it's not their fault, it's our fault because we didn't design it properly. And we know that we can design things. And you know, you guys are really in the weeds working, really thinking hard about reading instruction, phonemic awareness. Like we have, I'm in awe of that field because it's so systematic. It's so kind of like we have a pretty good sense now of like if you want to get a five-year-old to read, these steps are, you know, this is where the probability comes in. If you do these things, the chances are, like most kids, they're gonna learn how to read. And the ones that don't, we will meet their needs, we'll find the support. If you are getting kids to guess words by pictures or um uh you know, three queuing, you're you're you're giving the impression of learning, and it's it's the probability is they're not going to be able to independently decode words and meaning in kind of you know down the line. So what what what gives us the answers there? Well, it's the science. It's stuff that's true whether you like it or not. It doesn't care about your feelings, it's like this is just how things work. And for me, there's a an ethical imperative that we should all be across this stuff if we're lucky enough to be in a classroom with kids. And and and likewise in other fields, like we have, you know, there are very few certainties, but there are probabilities. And again, it comes back to the you know, this idea of empowerment, like where you're saying to teachers, um, we trust you to make decisions in your own classroom, but we sort of expect that you're gonna kind of know how the kids in your classroom learn. And the problem there is that you can it can very easily turn into a lethal mutation of the research, where a great example you gave where let's say you have something like Rosenschein's principles, where he had like seven or eight principles of learning. I've seen examples where senior leaders go into class and going, okay, here's seven principles of learning. We're gonna tick the list every time we see them in your class. That's a sort of a complete misappropriation of the science of learning. There's nothing scientific about that at all. That's just um, you know, a debased kind of understanding of science. So um it the teacher who understands those limitations of working memory, who understands checking for understanding, who understands all these things, can deploy them where they see fit because they know, well, I'm looking at little Natalie here, and by the look in her eyes, I can tell she's having a bad day. So I'm gonna use, I'm gonna choose this out of the drawer, this decision. I'm not gonna stick with this kind of predefined thing. I'm gonna be um a kind of a reflective practitioner in the moment. So I think that takes a little bit of refining, but it means that when we when we're dealing with a school district, when we're dealing with, you know, a group of people, we need that shared understanding of how learning happens from which we can all draw upon.

Melissa: 11:00

Yeah, that makes so much sense. The checklist just resonates. Every teacher I think can can um empathize with that and feel like they have had someone come in with a checklist for something. And, you know, yeah, I don't do all those things in the 10 minutes that you came into my room. There's no way, but I do use them when they're appropriate. So yeah, thank you for saying that.

Lori: 11:22

Yeah. Well, and helping, I think also helping educators have a deeper understanding of the tools in the toolbox and like kind of like you said, Carl, like when to employ them. I think that that is really helpful for teachers to know.

Carl Hendrick: 11:35

Yeah, for sure. And uh I think it's also why, you know, when I first started teaching, I was going into classroom with uh ideas like learning styles, um, the idea that kids learn best when they discover things for themselves. So in that situation, almost every decision I was making was a bad one from an instructional design point of view. You know, and the kids are learning in spite of their teacher, not be you know, because of them. Um so you know, it's like imagine going to see, you know, taking your kid to see uh uh their doctor and and and the doctor pulling out healing crystals and going, well, you know, yeah, I I know what the science says, but this works for me, you know. I'm gonna, this is what I think is the way to do it. That's kind of what happens, or that's what's been happening in teaching. So what is encouraging, I think, which is happening, you know, as you guys are are working on and working with teachers and schools on this, is that kind of shared understanding is a as a starting point. You know, no classroom is gonna look identical. But if we're all kind of singing from the same hymn sheet, then we can um at least make decisions that are gonna probably lead to better learning.

Melissa: 12:51

So we wanted to talk about some of these non-negotiable things that you write about that every teacher should know. Um so we're getting into some of those. What did you say? You can hang your hat on it.

Carl Hendrick: 13:01

Yeah, yeah, stuff you can hang your hat on.

Melissa: 13:03

So we're gonna get into some of those. Um the first thing we wanted to talk about was how we understand new things based on what we already know. And you kind of touched on this already, but I know this is something that you know, Lori and I talk about a lot when it comes to reading comprehension, and you know that what you already know really impacts whether or not you understand what you're reading. Um but I we want to hear from you, like how does this apply to learning even more generally?

Carl Hendrick: 13:27

Yeah. I think there's a misconception that knowledge is stuff that you accumulate, that you kind of build up. Um but really it's stuff that you use to think with. It's like you can't you can't connect the dots if you haven't got any and uh this is something that I think is you know, I I keep hearing phrases like critical thinking and the latest one that uh sort of triggering me is AI literacy, where there's these kind of vague, nebulous things. But you know, how how does memory function? How does thinking occur? Well, it occurs with sort of uh real constituent kind of parts of knowledge. And so, as you were saying, reading comprehension is it's really determined by obviously by at a basic level decoding uh words and letters, but the meaning, the semantic nature of it is key. This is something that uh I really encountered with the work of um David Auserbel. He said the most important thing is what the learner already knows. Find out what that is, and then teach them accordingly. In other words, knowledge is the stuff you think with. It's the kind of rocks grinding against it, generating something new rather than this accumulation of knowledge. Another weird thing about human memory is that it's reconstructive, not reproductive. In other words, we're we don't store n stuff in our in our brains like a file drawer or like a tape recorder. We're constantly shaping it based upon our experience. So when you which this is why retrieval practice is so powerful, because when you when you have to work to get it out of your memory, you're kind of relaying it down. It's not this kind of passive thing. And really good instructional design is takes that into account and will create sort of cognitive traps where kids can they'll learn stuff in spite of um their own limitations. They'll kind of harness the limitations of what's happening. So there is in in in the science, there there is what's called schemas, which is a which is a sort of a problematic term in the sense that it's not scientific. It's not it's a model, it's an estimate of something. And so it's these schemas is like a group of knowledge or elements for a particular domain. Like you'll have a schema for driving to work. And the extent to which you're successful at that is based upon the richness of your schema. It allows you, it frees you up to kind of listen to the radio, sing songs. If you're um, you know, driving in a uh a new area, um, you know, the classic example is we all do that thing where like we'll turn the radio down to kind of, you know, because we're concentrating, we're trying to trying to think. So schemas are kind of represent representational models of facts, routines, um interconnected knowledge that allows us to sort of think critically about particular domains. So really um knowledge is the thing that we use to think with.

Lori: 16:40

I love that. I think I like thinking about it in this way. And you're really affirming a lot of things that Melissa and I talk about and think about on this podcast. Um, but um one thing I do want to get into is this idea about you've written about this, about knowing what students don't know and how that can actually be more important than what they do know. I I think it's so relevant in many scenarios. Um, one of them being like a classic sports example, right? Like a kid who is um coming up to bat and he's he's swinging his bat and he's just kind of doing and maybe he's hitting some or maybe he's hitting a lot. But over time, he's gonna create some bad habits if he's not explicitly and directly taught the correct way that's going to last him if he wants to play ball all the way through college or through life, right? To have that stance and to have the swinging. I don't know all the ins and outs of baseball. So I'm really going out on a ledge here talking about that one in particular. But I have a friend who plays baseball. So he was explaining it to me. Um, but I think that might be be helpful, like knowing what you don't know, right? So if I'm like this little guy swinging and I don't know, I'm doing it wrong, I'm just gonna keep doing it wrong. But I think that really transfers over into, you know, literacy instruction and just instructional strategies in general about learning things. So I'm gonna hand it over to you to say more about that.

Carl Hendrick: 18:05

Yeah, great question. Um So I think it's based upon this idea that um that misconceptions are they're recursive, they're not linear. In other words, or or learning is recursive. In other words, misconceptions can emerge after something has been learned. Like you can feel that you've learned it, you can be teaching a class, and all the signs are that they've learned this thing. You're even checking for understanding. But the misconceptions can emerge after much kind of you know, a week, two weeks, three weeks later. And these misconceptions, they're sort of like you know, cognitive antibodies in that they reject anything that doesn't fit in with what they already know. And trying to kind of get at those and trying to sort of unearth those for the student, as you say, that student who's who's got his kind of form wrong in in uh sport or golf or whatever it is, they don't know. They're why isn't this working? You know, that's where the expert comes in and they're able to sort of show them, break it down into constituent parts, and okay, now you practice it, you know, which is why again, why you know practice makes perfect. Well, not really if it's the kind of wrong thing.

Lori: 19:23

Yeah, perfect practice makes perfect, right?

Carl Hendrick: 19:25

Exactly. Uh and that's where I think in the area of reading instruction, like there's such a there's such a rich uh journey of like if you want to go from here to here, there's a you know, here's a there's a pretty good way of doing that. I think in in education we have less clear pathways. So for example, um if you're uh you know, if you're if your early reading instruction is is a very strong one, maths is another strong one where you have you know clear knowledge is hierarchical in maths. If you if you don't understand something, you can kind of go back two steps. With say something like high school English, it's what Sweller calls an ill-defined domain. It's not clear what makes someone really good at that level. Like you you can, if if if uh a five, six year old can't read particular words, you can go, okay, we're gonna go back, we're gonna revisit this sound and how that, you know, this is a tricky word or whatever. If you're kind of 15 and you don't understand the passage, well, it's not evident immediately. Well, there may be misconceptions, words, a whole range of things that's not understood. But the misconception part is key because I think a teacher could go for days, weeks, even months without finding out what a kid doesn't know. The the closer the feedback loop is to the moment of misconception, the more powerful the learning is gonna be. If you're finding out that a student doesn't know something two weeks after the fact when you're marking their work, they're not gonna know either. And and most kids at any all of us have been in this position where you spend the whole Sunday marking books, you give it back to the kid with all this feedback. They look at the grade and they go, huh. And then, and you know, you want to kind of that's where I think checking fund and standing is such a powerful lever because you're in real time, you're saying, ah, you know that thing that you think? Well, actually it's this. You kind of get that hypercorrection effect of, oh, I thought it was that, but now you're telling me it's this. That's interesting. So that I think is where, again, really good curriculum design is key because, and Lee Schuman is a wonderful phrase for this that really great teachers, they don't just know their content one way, they know it in several ways. This to me is like the superpower of teachers. They don't like a brilliant teacher, doesn't just know photosynthesis. They know how a seven-year-old can misunderstand elements of photosynthesis. They have this whole complex schema of they're gonna make this mistake and I'm gonna be right in there to go, yeah, you think in this, aren't you? No, well, it's not that. You would think so. And again, that's why you know someone with a PhD in science is a terrible teacher for seven, eight-year-olds, because they have got this very vertical, deep. Why don't you get it? Well, there you go. But then if you know, they don't, they can't understand why a seven-year-old doesn't understand something they like, well, why don't you you know, I don't get this. Whereas teachers, they have this innate skill to go, well, I've seen that mistake over 10 years, so I'm gonna preempt that and I'm gonna have a little secret weapon to really help that kid understand that thing.

Melissa: 22:33

Yeah, I'm so glad you said that about like the difference between um like teaching phonics, right? You can have a student read aloud and you can hear those mistakes and misconceptions very quickly and get right in there and fix it. But you know, I was always I was a sixth grade teacher, so you know, I taught like 10, 11-year-olds, and you know, you'd have them read, you know, take a test that was reading alone silently. And then I would get multiple choice answers, or even writing would help a little bit more to see their thinking. But my multiple choice answers, I don't know why they got that wrong. There could be so many reasons that it was, and it's hard to pinpoint those misconceptions and really help them with what they need.

Carl Hendrick: 23:12

Yeah. And then, you know, that's why I think great curriculum design looks at those hinge questions or those threshold concepts. What are the sort of really big ideas or words or uh sort of uh those kind of transformative uh conceptual ideas that we really need to zoom in on?

Lori: 23:32

Such a good point. And I love connecting, I love connecting these big ideas to reading and writing instruction. I think it's really helpful. Um, Carl, I want to dive into something that you've we we've kind of we haven't talked about it yet, but Melissa and I talk about this all the time. That independent learning isn't how we create independent learners. You've said that. I would love for you to share what you mean by that. And then hopefully Melissa and I can jump in with a couple of contextualizations for reading and writing instruction.

Carl Hendrick: 24:04

This is something that uh Paul Kirschhn and I wrote in uh our first book, How Learning Happens. And really it's based upon this idea that the constituent parts to get to a desired outcome often look different than the outcome itself. In other words, if you want to learn to read, you're doing things that almost look the opposite of reading initially. So you're doing things like phonemic awareness or the stuff that's like not at all like, you know, reading.

Lori: 24:33

Sure, you're not reading a word or a sentence. You're just you're looking at individual letter sounds.

Carl Hendrick: 24:37

So if you were to sort of get, and that's where I think in in many fields of education we go wrong, we think, okay, we want to get them to read, so we want to get them to do something that looks like reading. I know, we'll get into here's some pictures, and you can guess from the picture what the word is, and that look kind of gives the performance of reading, but actually it's not reading. So there's a kind of counterintuitive thing there. It's a little bit like there's a thing with sports coaches, like where a lot of the really successful ones, they have this thing where they go, we don't mention winning the league or the title. Uh our aim is to win the title, but we never talk about it. We only focus on the next game and the details that we need for the next game. So by winning the league, we're doing, we're thinking about fitness, we're thinking about formation, we're thinking about we're not lift, we're not literally lifting a trophy. So I think that's a that's something where you're kind of reverse engineering what success looks like. So you're starting from the end point and going, well, you know, what were the steps that you took to get there? Oh, isn't it interesting that actually the early stages of that were like they looked nothing like the end, but they were a really necessary part to get there. And so for me, that's where we would have an issue with things like what we would call minimally guided instruction. So pure discovery learning or some aspects of inquiry learning. I think inquiry learning is for me, it's a disposition or a kind of a disposition towards asking questions about things. And it, you know, it can be done well, but anything where the kids are too much left to discover knowledge for themselves that they don't have, um, I think that's just not an efficient way of becoming an expert in a in a particular domain. We we're evolved to be expert sharers of knowledge and expertise. Like we're that's our kind of superpower as humans. And so with the independent learning thing, I think it let's say you want to get um. I mean, the example I always give on this is like a couple of years ago, I decided I would learn, I I try to learn how to run. And I'd just never been able to run in my life. I just I just can't stand it. Like it just like every time I do it, I'm like, I'm not, I'm not this is not good. Like everything I'm with you, Carl.

Melissa: 26:53

Lori's not a little bit.

Carl Hendrick: 26:54

Everything in my well, I I I would like to like to run. I would love if I could like it. And so during lockdown, I did everything that kind of middle-aged men do is yeah, I'm gonna, you know, get start running.

Lori: 27:08

Do you buy your running shoes?

Carl Hendrick: 27:09

The running shoes, got like new earphones, yeah, the whole thing. Sure. Yeah, the whole the whole thing. Um so how do you run 5K? Well, just get out and run, it can't be that hard. So I'm gonna, you know, got my Apple Watch, got everything ready to go, put on the earphones, I'm gonna run 5k by running 5K. Within five minutes, I'm bent over, like almost vomiting. And I and and and I thought, well, that's that's not good, is it?

Lori: 27:36

And then You try to independently learn this, didn't you?

Carl Hendrick: 27:39

Yeah, yeah. Like, like if you want to run 5K, you run 5K. What's the problem? And then I read, or someone tipped me on to couch to 5k. Week one, you run for 30 seconds, walk for 90 seconds, run for 30. And I thought, well, this is this is this is running for me. If I don't have to run for 30 seconds, I can I can definitely do that. Week one, did that three times. So I'm half an hour running for 30 seconds. Week two, I think it's run 60 seconds. And I'm improving and I'm not even noticing. Like it's doesn't even feel effortful. Like, I can't believe that like after three, four weeks, I'm like, I've just run for 15 minutes without you know having some sort of fit or a stroke.

Lori: 28:28

A heart, yeah, a heart attack. That's great.

Carl Hendrick: 28:29

You're just um and then after you know, six weeks, I'm I'm running for 30 minutes. Like I and I thought, well, that's a brilliant analogy for instruction. That to run 5K, the worst thing you can do is run 5K. You need to break it down into constituent parts that will get you towards 5K. So that's really what I mean by conflating or mixing the desired endpoint with the steps that get you there.

Lori: 28:58

Yeah, that I mean, I feel like this is the in the US we call it project-based learning. I'm sure you probably call it that too at some point. Like, I feel like it's the like the it's becoming, I think, bigger, or maybe it is like a bigger thing to do in the upper grades, right? Where middle and high school, where it's like, okay, we're gonna assign students a task. There's much less direct instruction happening. You know what? We're not even gonna give them a text. We're just gonna let them find some texts that support what they are doing. And what I'm hearing you say is that's probably like a running a blind 5K, right? They're just, we're just setting them on the path to run a 5K without any structure, without any instruction. And I, you know, I always think like if we're the educators, we're the experts here in helping our students learn, then we need to bring that to the table. And can we do projects? Sure. Like, but how do we guide them through that? Like I was exactly kind of what you're saying like, what's the end goal? And then how can I back map it for my students? Some are going to need more support. Some are going to need less. But I know that I want to provide direct instruction enough to have them get to a certain point to be able to go ahead and continue down the practice path on their 5K journey so that it they're practicing effectively or they're working effectively.

Carl Hendrick: 30:16

That's it, exactly. And we all want independent learners. Nobody wants, you know, 60 minutes of explicit instruction. That's not the aim. The aim is to get kids towards independence, to be working independently. We just think there's a more efficient way, a better way to get there.

Lori: 30:34

Yeah, I love that. Efficiency is key. Teachers everywhere love that word.

Melissa: 30:39

Well, one more word that we wanted to talk about was engagement. And I know this is something that Lori and I get asked a lot to talk about. Well, what about student engagement? You all talk about student engagement a lot. And I love that one of the things you said was engaging lessons don't necessarily mean students are learning. And I think this is just something that really struck me because I know that I feel like a lot of times you, you know, you get labeled as like the good teacher in a school, and it really means like your students are really engaged, but it doesn't necessarily mean that they're learning. They could be, but it doesn't necessarily mean that. And so yeah, can you just talk to us a little bit about this idea of engagement and learning?

Carl Hendrick: 31:17

Yeah. And again, this is one of those things that's sort of, again, you know, counterintuitive in the sense that um learners can be the most engaged with material that either they already know how to do or that isn't really building those kind of schemas or those kind of long-term structures of knowledge. And again, it's the kind of low-hanging fruit. If you walk into a classroom, you're inferring that learning's happening. You know, learning is is obviously an invisible thing. But what are the proxy indicators that you would use for that? And this was brought to my attention by Rob Coe maybe 10 years ago. Rob Coe is a professor um out of Durham in England, and he gave at his um inauguration, he had this slide which was simply poor proxy indicators of learning. And I remember the second one was engagement, which was a real for many of us the time I was thinking, hang on a second, what how is that not good? How you know and he just making the point that it's a kind of necessary but not sufficient condition, and actually in in the worst cases, it can be it can actually get in the way of learning, where you know you think, well, I really want to get the kids engaged on this topic, so I'll kind of con them into learning, or I'll trick them into learning by getting into these fun activities, or you know, and it's you know, the like learning another great quote from Rob Coe is learning happens when you think hard, when you sort of merge together new knowledge with old knowledge, and you you do a little bit of wrestling, you know, but in an exciting way, you know, not in a way that's uh you know, and you have the sense of achievement and accomplishment when you when you kind of stretch that that stuff together. So I think certainly when I started teaching 15, 20 years ago in London, there was a there was a um a kind of a uh a premium on engagement, as in learning can happen when the kids are really kind of engaged with the material. And so that then leads to stuff like, well, why should we teach Shakespeare? Because it's really not engaging and it's not, you know, the kids are interested in it. So, you know, one way to engage the kids might be to get them to rewrite the plays in in the form of a text message because that's you know, kids are that's what they love, you know. Um, so you know, there was books like to be or not to be, like the the the number two and then an emotic emoji of a bee or not to be, right? And that we can get kids engaged. Well, they're they're super engaged. You know, you walk into the class and the kids are loving it, they're you know, but they're not really learning anything, or they're at least not.

Lori: 34:01

But do they really understand Shakespeare and the the play?

Carl Hendrick: 34:05

I mean the classic one is is you know, that guy in the school who who uh you know would get all the kids into the the IT suite or the computer room and go, oh the kids look, they're making PowerPoint presentations on uh Henry VIII or you know on the you know um the Declaration of Independence. And all the kids are like, you know, copy and pasting paragraphs on Wikipedia, they're like looking up Google images, they're like like none of it, nothing is helping them understand history or democracy or anything like that. Then they do presentations and the click teachers going, this is amazing. I haven't taught them anything. They're literally learning it. You that's right, you haven't taught them anything. And then they're doing presentations, which are copy and pasted Wikipedia paragraphs that they're reading out like you know, like it's a hostage statement or something in front of the class. And then like they're and then they're going, Wow, it's just you know, independent learning, it's incredible. So, you know, it's amazing. They've given these presentations, it's been amazing. Look at the they've they've learned digital literacy, you know, they're learning how to so all of that stuff I think is really again low expectations, you know. It's it's and how patronizing is it to kids, like a a 40-year-old man's version of what a teenager thinks is cool, like text messages or you know, oh hear all you kids like their rap music, you know, like let's did that guy, you know, with the wacky tie and the cap on backwards going, you know, I'm a I'm a maverick.

Lori: 35:32

I'm cracking up. I'm I'm cracking up because I honestly I think the only person who's fooled here is the the teacher in that scenario. Because dare I say, I think the kids know what they're getting away with. They're like, all I have to do is copy and paste and maybe put it in, you know, AI these days and be like, pair like rephrase this. And then it goes into the PowerPoint, and then they're presenting and they were like, cool, done, right? Like, I didn't actually have to think. And I don't think we're fooling our kids into thinking that they have to think either. They know. Like they know when they're working hard.

Carl Hendrick: 36:03

100%, yeah. And someone said to me the other day that they had seen kids on a bus in London here, and they were using Chat GPT. They were they were on the bus and they had worksheets, science worksheets, and they were taking photographs of the science worksheets. Chat GPT was answering the whole thing, and they were going, this is great. AI is great, we love it. We're learning so much. Look what we're learning. And and then, and then you know, like, and then and then and then in schools we're going, well, we need to now teach AI literacy. So let's teach kids how to take photographs. You know, they can do this with ChatGPT. I mean, that's where we're at.

Lori: 36:41

Yeah, let's teach thinking instead. So one thing though, I do want to pull, like one thing we should be teaching, right? And should be doing in our teaching is some well, not one thing, three things actually. These are evidence-based practices, right? So if we want our kids to be thinking critically, not um, you know, use engagement as a buzzword here, um, and not likely not use AI for their science worksheets. Um, I think we want to talk about three evidence-based practices that I know teachers listening to this podcast probably have heard a lot. Um, it's retrieval practice, interleaving, and checking for understanding. To be totally honest, Carl, Melissa and I are struggling a bit with a clear delineation between these three because not to cue it up too much for you, I I want to hear what you have to say, but we kind of think one is an umbrella term and the others fit underneath. But I I would love first, before we even dive in, just to hear you like I was gonna say at the very least, Lori, I feel like there's some overlap.

Melissa: 37:38

We we Lori and I feel like there's overlap among them. Yeah, with lots in the middle.

Carl Hendrick: 37:44

So retrieval practice, I guess probably begins with Herming Ebbinghouse, uh, Ebbinghaus in the late 19th century. So he did some experiments on himself uh to find out like how long does it take to forget stuff.

Lori: 37:59

And that's where we get the famous forgetting curve, you know, where Oh, I can tell him when I walk into the other room, Carl, I totally forget why I went in there. So it takes like a second.

Carl Hendrick: 38:09

Yeah.

Lori: 38:11

No, I'm just kidding.

Carl Hendrick: 38:13

So that that day so he was testing.

Lori: 38:15

We get the forgetting curve, right? That's what you I didn't just want to cue you up. Okay, forgetting curve.

Carl Hendrick: 38:19

Uh so he he tested himself on that, and he did it with nonsense syllables. So he did he made up these three-letter words. So my problem with that is that that's not how memory works. Memory works semantically. We're we you know, we don't remember things like non-no one needs to ever remember, you know, nonsense. Uh, but but it was the beginning of you know, how does memory work? How does testing you know, uh retrieval work? Then retrieval then becomes probably in the last sort of 20, 30 years, there's been a huge amount of research that shows that the active recalling of knowledge and information strengthens that knowledge almost better than anything else, anything else. This is the testing effect. Um checking for understanding is a term, it actually begins with someone called Madeline Hunter in the 60s who wrote she wasn't an academic, she just wrote books about instruction that are fantastic books. They're so readable, they're written in a very straightforward, clear style. Um, but she actually originated the term checking for understanding. And checking for understanding is this idea of in a lesson, and I suppose it's most formalized within the DI framework, the direct instruction framework. So you are constantly checking the students that you're teaching for understanding, but you're not checking in a passive way. So you're not saying, okay, everyone understand that? Everyone happy with that? Any questions? Thumbs up. That's not checking for understanding. That's silence. Or probably what you're gonna get is all the kids going, when they really don't.

Melissa: 39:56

Yeah, got it.

Carl Hendrick: 39:57

So checking for understanding the art of it, and I would say that if there was one lever to pull in a classroom, there's one thing to get good at for me, it's checking for understanding. Because you are, again, shorting the feedback loops between the misconception and where the kid's going to get that corrective feedback. What does it look like? It looks like, you know, one of the best ones I ever saw was a teacher who, as the kids are walking into the room, she she had, she was, she had a question on the board and she was saying, you know, simple things like, um, oh hi Natalie, great to see you. Can you just think about that question on the board there? And the question was like a hinge concept from the previous thing. And then within two minutes in the lesson, she's gotten them all using mini whiteboards and going, which which of the four things, finger voting, which of the four things is the best definition of the thing that I've just told you, the thing that I've literally just said to you and all the kids. And then she's she's getting like 90% correct, going, Oh, great, I'm gonna move on. And then I'm uh, you know, John, I'm gonna I'll come to you in a minute. And then she had like it was every three minutes, all these different ways of checking for understanding. You know, uh, if it was a more complex kind of thing, like an opinion on something, it would be like, here's a question, turn to your partner, 30 seconds go. And she's walking around the room, kind of listening in for the kids who don't want to, you know, say anything. 30 seconds go. Okay, how did we get on with that? I'm gonna ask, and then she's cold calling students, going, okay, here's a question. You've got 30 seconds to think about it, and I'm gonna call someone at random, and then she's choosing people. She's getting this like phenomenal rich data stream all the time. And the checking for understanding is not so much to check whether the kids know it, it's to inform her what to do next. So she can be adaptive, she can be responsive in real time to what those kids need. And again, that's where if you have a lesson where the kids are kind of in groups for 30 minutes, 40 minutes, they're not going to know what they don't know. And if you don't know what they don't know, then it's just a kind of pedagogical theater. There's not like there's just this kind of nothing being addressed at the conceptual level. So if you think about an hour lesson and the EDI framework, so the explicit direct instruction, and I and I would I should say that direct instruction, people think this is lecturing. Nothing could be further from the truth. Direct instruction is saying we're gonna have a really clear curriculum. We're gonna kind of script what we're gonna say because everyone has a script and there's actually good ways of saying things and explaining things. And then it says we're gonna check in on the kids' understanding every couple of minutes. And in the EDI framework, the explicit direct instruction model by Hollingsworth and Yibara, which is just a great sort of plug and play, you know, without the kind of dense theory, they advocate that teachers should check for understanding every two minutes. In other words, they're not talking for any longer than two minutes. They are checking in, they're saying, you know, they're using kind of like tools to sort of um uncover, you know, little kind of tin can openers to uncover like what's going on in these kids' heads. And so if you're, you know, like for me as a teacher, I would be kind of it took me years to to figure this out. And that actually it looks like that, you know, I'd get them to do tasks at a table for half an hour, and then at the end of it, they'd go, Well, okay, guys, what did you think about this poem? We think it's sad. It is sad, isn't it? Sad. Very good. This table, what what do you think about, you know, and like, you know, they've just spent half an hour just kind of moving around, shuffling their ignorance around without really sort of, you know. And so the the checking for understanding becomes this, I think, this really powerful lever. And again, to go back to our point about the science of learning, that teacher, she's using her uh professionalism, her knowledge, her, her, her relationship with these students to know this technique of checking forstanding is really gonna work with this kid. I don't want to cold call her because she's a little bit uncomfortable speaking. So, what I'll do is I'll do a pair share and I'll just kind of I'll just kind of stand next to her. And that way I can get, I can check her understanding, I can hear. Like it becomes this masterful kind of dance of practice. Uh so then retrieval is the the the generating of answers, and you know, mostly looks like um questions, but actually retrieval can be a whole range of things. It can be discussion, it can be uh a generative activity, it can be drawing something, it can be, you know, as long as there's that kind of like, I'm gonna bring work hard to get it out of my long-term memory. Interleaving is probably the most complex of the three, and that means varying the conditions of practice. In other words, if you have a set of maths problems, you're instead of doing 10 of the exact same in a row, you're gonna mix up the type of problems they're doing. Not the subject. So they're not gonna do 10 minutes in English, 10 minutes in geography. You're gonna kind of vary the types of problems. In sport, they do this really well. So they mix up like the the things you've got to do. So um I used to coach football in a school and wait, what kind of football are we talking? Football that you play with your feet, not with your hands.

unknown: 45:34

Okay.

Lori: 45:34

Just wanted to be clear.

Carl Hendrick: 45:36

Yeah, yeah. So like football where you know you use your foot with the ball. Yeah, not throwing the ball.

Lori: 45:43

I'm with you. That's my favorite sport too.

Carl Hendrick: 45:45

Okay. So, but I I did that thing that like a lot of you know men do, which is, well, I've been watching football a lot, I know exactly what to do here. And then I was coaching kids and and and I just had no clue what I was doing at all. And then they brought in a real coach. And I and and like he was unbelievable. Like he had been trained, he had done his badges, training, all that. And I was, I was, I was like, God, Jesus, you know, how how is he he's getting to he's seeing all these things that I've never seen, I I could never seen. But he he did this one thing where we which was like passing back to to one another with the ball kicking back to four, and then he would like they'd do that, and then they they'd get comfortable and he would switch it up immediately. He'd go, right, turn and do this now. And the boys were like, Oh, I don't really like that. I was really happy doing that one.

Lori: 46:33

So that's because you're on autopilot, right? Right? It's like those, you know, 10, 10 of the same math problems in a row. You're like, I know exactly what to do here, right? And your brain just kind of goes on autopilot, but then if you interrupt that, you really have to stop and think. I mean, I I assume it's the same idea, right? The same thing.

Carl Hendrick: 46:49

This is what Robert Burr calls, uh Robert and Elizabeth Burr call desirable difficulties. So they're desirable because they lead to an outcome, better long-term learning, but they're difficult in the short term. And again, we know this from, you know, if you want to um get in shape, you know, you've got to do stuff in the short term that's kind of uncomfortable. So interleaving is one of those things where you're varying the conditions of practice, you're making it slightly more trickier and a bit more difficult to do, but it leads to greater long-term gains in terms of learning.

Melissa: 47:21

So, Carl, could you potentially be doing all three of those at the same time? Like, could you be checking for understanding by having them retrieve information, recall information, and also do it in different ways. So you're also interleaving. Like, could you do that like all three within a lesson?

Carl Hendrick: 47:37

100%. And I would say that where you see that is in a lot of the early reading programs, and uh, and not just like with phonics instruction, but some of those things are works of art. You know, you like I I remember looking at some of my daughters, um there's a uh a book by Engelman called Teaching Your Kid to Read in a Hundred Easy Lessons, which is not a it's not an easy book to read. Um but I remember getting into the weeds on it and thinking, man, like whoever's come up with this, like you know, and if you see and I and I, you know, so I was a secondary English teacher and didn't really have any dealings at all with early reading, didn't really think about it, didn't really just thought it was nothing to do with me. And then when I saw my my daughter seven now and she was learning how to read, I was like, This is the most magical, like nothing I have ever done in my teaching career compares to what her kindergarten reception teacher is doing in terms of teaching her how to read. And I was like fangirling her. Every time I was picking up my daughter, I was like, So yeah, uh, you know, are you doing um grapheme, you know, like what are you doing now? She was like, Can you just take your daughter and leave, please? Because it was just such from a learning point of view, I was like, God, this is so like all the things I'm learning about, like interleaving, retrieval, checking for understanding, like it's so you, it's just brilliantly. And I I've seen so many, there's some people on uh social media um who you you watch them teaching you know lessons, uh early reading, and you just go, This is like the the sophistication, the complexity. Like you say, that Venn diagram, so many stuff, like into you know, the the kids are retrieving knowledge, they're check the teachers checking for understanding. She's um they're they're generating an answer. Um, there's a response, you know, it's just just incredible. Whereas, you know, um for me it was kind of like okay, boys, we're gonna read chapter five, open up your books on page 10, you know, like that kind of thing. Um so yeah, and and I think that's where um we can a lot could be learned, I think, from uh like almost to the point now where if I was retraining as a teacher, I'd probably go back and do you know, I I like that that like there's nothing that explosion of learning from like five to you know five to six, four to five with my daughter, where she just went from you know walking around the world kind of like to suddenly like she's reading books, she's reading science, she's she's she's reading something, and there's an image in her head from someone who who died 50 years ago, like it's a phenomenal magical thing. Um yeah. So I'm I'm I'm just obsessed with that um that field, yeah.

Lori: 50:42

Yeah. So okay, so we are too, obviously. That's why we're here and have this podcast. Is there a magical like iteration for interleaving? Like, how do you know how often to bring it back? I mean, I think of it in my head, the image like when you were like, you know, uh talking about your daughter, she's reading something, she's an image in her head. The image in my head when I think about interleaving is like a slinky or a tornado, just some sort of spiraling forward and back. Um that's just kind of never-ending.

Carl Hendrick: 51:17

Yeah, that's a really good visual analogy for that. I think it's really dependent upon um like a calibration to it, where if you can if you can make the exercise difficult enough that they're not just like ripping through it where they're doing it for the sake of doing it. They're having to really like, and this is one thing I learned from reading a book called Theory of Instruction by Engelman and Carnine that we often learn things not by what they are, but by what they're not. And learning is often this process of discrimination between two things that are like kind of similar. And again, the genius of early reading instruction is that all the boundary conditions are applied. In other words, the difference between the letter D and B, kids really they don't get that, they can't see what that is. So the design of showing them what it is by showing them what it isn't, and what what where does that rule hold? Where does it stick? Where does it come apart? That's where you want a whole set of carefully calibrated examples that are around the thing that you're trying to teach them, um, so that they can then distinguish and think critically about that thing. Um, so you know, if you're teaching, I don't know, democracy or something like that, or um the kids can have a very basic understanding of what that is, but they need a whole range of boundary conditions of what it is, what it isn't, what it is in certain contexts, where this rule applies and that rule doesn't apply. So interleaving is really a kind of a this process of discriminating between things all the time, and you're seeing, oh, right, I get it now because it's not that thing.

Lori: 53:04

It's similar to that, but would it be fair to say interleaving helps build schema?

Carl Hendrick: 53:09

Yeah, I mean that's that's the theory. It's it's it's it's not something you're ever going to observe. So you're inferring that there's no physical schema in the brain. Although neuroscience can sort of there is a there is a fit physical component to it, but you're you're explicitly talking about models. And you know, as the saying goes, all models are wrong, but some are more useful than others. And I think that's a particularly useful model in the sense that um you're gonna remember stuff better. So if we go with Paul's definition that learning is a change in long-term memory, then what are the levers you can pull to help kids remember that stuff? And interleaving is definitely one of them.

Lori: 53:54

This is so great. And I and as you said, check for understanding and retrieval practice, all of these are. So, Carl, we're down to the end here. Um, if I want teachers to remember one thing about the science of learning. And I think it would be helpful if you chose just one thing to share and just bring this podcast to a close so that teachers can head off into their day, into their evening, thinking about this one thing.

Carl Hendrick: 54:19

I would say um that it's really about the empowerment of teachers. And I think teachers have been typically given answers to questions they never asked. And there are things like learning styles, there are things like, oh, you must use an iPad. There are a whole range of stuff that's been imposed upon, you know, we're gonna do triple marking, double marking, we're gonna do book scrutiny, we're gonna do, you know, hundred-minute lessons, we're gonna do, you know, all this kind of stuff. And none of it has emanated from teachers themselves. And so what the science of learning does, kind of for me, is it empowers teachers to make informed decisions in their classrooms and to be, you know, like a professional in the sense that an engineer or a doctor or whatever is a professional, where they're using their judgment from an agreed body of knowledge where there's a broad consensus around certain ideas, and then that they are providing enough care for their kids that they teach, that they go, I care about you enough that I'm gonna show up with the best knowledge that I can bring to help you learn stuff, as opposed to kind of just myths and fads and gimmicks. I'm gonna show up with stuff that is there's no guarantee you're gonna learn anything, but we're gonna attack this with the best set of tools that we have. And for me, we we kind of know what they are. We don't always know how they work in practice, but as I said, there are a series of sort of best bets and probabilities. And you know, I want my teachers, uh my daughter's teachers to be using those. I I think every teacher should use those. And also it allows teachers to push back against nonsense. It allows teachers to say, you know what, and that's a like there's a great thing I think happening in in the States with the Sold the Story podcast, and where actually a lot of the change came from a kind of bottom-up movement where it was teachers and parents, and and you know, thanks also to podcasts like yours, where you're really getting the kind of word out about the science of reading that is having an impact. And the beneficiaries of that are kids, and that's the most important thing.

Melissa: 56:40

So, Carl, thank you so much for joining us today and for making sense of this topic that can feel really daunting to teachers, but and sharing some of those like things they can do, pull those levers to really make sure that their students are learning. Um, I know that Lori and I we follow your Substack and we learn so much from it. So I would encourage teachers to to also follow your Substack. Um, and you have tons of great books that they can dig into too when you know when they have time. Um, but your Substack's a nice, easy one to read quickly every week. So thank you so much for for taking this time with us and sharing all this great information. We really appreciate it.

Carl Hendrick: 57:19

Thanks so much. It's been such an honor to be on your show.

Melissa: 57:26

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Lori: 57:36

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Melissa: 57:46

Just a quick reminder that the views and opinions expressed by the hosts and guests of the Melissa and Laurie Love Literacy Podcast are not necessarily the opinions of Great Minds PBC or its employees.

Lori: 57:57

We appreciate you so much, and we're so glad you're here to learn with us.