Science of Reading: The Podcast

The truth behind learning, with Nathaniel Swain, Ph.D.

• Amplify Education

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In this episode of Science of Reading: The Podcast, Susan Lambert is joined by Nathaniel Swain, Ph.D. He’s a teacher, instructional coach, and author of the recent book Harnessing the Science of Learning: Success Stories to Help Kickstart Your School Improvement.  Emphasizing the science of learning as an ever-growing resource for updating instruction practices, he provides a comprehensive look at how knowledge powers learning, how to identify knowledge-rich curricula, how cognitive load affects learning, and how to understand several common learning misconceptions. 

Show notes:

Quotes:

“The greatest thing about the science of learning is that it's never really gonna be finished. Much like the science of reading, it's constantly being updated and it's something that we should be constantly turning to.” –Nathaniel Swain, Ph.D.

“When we have knowledge at our fingertips—or in this case, in our synapses—ready to be used, we can overcome all these limitations that cognitive load theory talks about.” –Nathaniel Swain, Ph.D.

“We're kidding ourselves a little bit if we think that we can replace that rich content knowledge with generic skills and generic competencies.” –Nathaniel Swain, Ph.D.

Episode timestamps*
02:00 Introduction: Who is Nathaniel Swain?
03:00 Science of learning book
11:00 Knowledge powers all learning
15:00 Addressing common learning myths
18:00 Knowledge retrieval
21:00 Misconception: Productive struggle
22:00 Misconception: “Preparing students for the 21st century”
26:00 Enriching schema
29:00 Background knowledge and confirmation bias
30:00 Knowledge rich curriculum
32:00 Knowledge that is manageable and achievable
37:00 Skills AND knowledge
44:00 Chalk Dust podcast
45:00 Final thoughts and advice
*Timestamps are approximate, rounded to nearest minute


[00:00:00] Nathaniel Swain: Knowledge is actually the thing that allows students to see the connections between complicated and multifaceted problems or ideas within the curriculum. And if there is no foundation of knowledge, then the future learning can't really happen. It all stops right there.

[00:00:20] Susan Lambert: This is Susan Lambert and welcome to Science of Reading: The Podcast from Amplify. Today we're diving into a topic that I just can't get enough of—the Science of Learning and how it can be applied to literacy instruction. My guest is Dr. Nathaniel Swain, author of the recent book, Harnessing the Science of Learning: Success Stories to Help Kickstart Your School Improvement.

[00:00:45] Susan Lambert: Some of the topics we cover on this episode include retrieval practice, meaningful learning theory, effective practices for knowledge building, how knowledge powers learning, and more. Dr. Swain is a wonderful guide through these topics. A little bit more about him. He's a teacher, instructional coach, and writer. He works as a senior lecturer in learning sciences at Australia's La Trobe University School of Education and SOLAR [Science of Language and Reading] Lab. I'm now so thrilled to welcome him to the show. Dr. Nathaniel Swain, you are joining us on today's episode of the podcast. I am so excited to have you. 

[00:01:27] Nathaniel Swain: Thank you so much, Susan. It's an absolute joy—long-term fan of the podcast.

[00:01:31] Susan Lambert: Oh, thank you so much. And I am now a fan of your work and I can't wait to get into it a little bit. But before we do that, I would love if you could talk about your background a little bit so our listeners can get to know you. 

[00:01:44] Nathaniel Swain: Sure. So I have the great pleasure of teaching teachers at this point in my career.

[00:01:48] Nathaniel Swain: I work at the SOLAR Lab at the School of Education at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. And we work in undergraduate and postgraduate courses for teachers. And I also create short courses in that forum as well. So I have a great pleasure of teaching teachers about literacy, but also about general classroom instruction that's going to set them up for success.

[00:02:10] Nathaniel Swain: And I share that work also with practicing teachers when I work in the field, working with schools and systems to improve their work. And that thread that ties it all together is my focus on the Science of Learning and how it best informs those decisions that teachers make every single day. 

[00:02:26] Susan Lambert: We have friends at La Trobe, so that's really cool.

[00:02:31] Susan Lambert: It's great to highlight more of what's happening over there with the SOLAR lab, so thanks for that. Shout out to that. Well, the Science of Learning, first of all. Exclamation point. You wrote a book! That is so awesome. And we love to highlight books. I have it right here and our listeners can't see it, but you can see that I have a coffee stain on it.

[00:02:50] Susan Lambert: So it's already been well loved already. What was your motivation for writing a book? 

[00:02:58] Nathaniel Swain: So the biggest thing that I have been motivated by the last few years is the excitement that I share with educators, principals, teachers, who finally get their head around a big insight from the research.

[00:03:12] Nathaniel Swain: They might say, "Ah, this is what I've been looking for. To explain what I might be needing for my classroom or for my school." Or, "I never realized that this was such an important thing for teaching or for learning." And it's those light bulb moments that I've been excited about in my work at a charity that I have called Think Forward Educators, where we bring teachers and researchers together and get them to share insights from the classroom to the research lab and then back again.

[00:03:37] Nathaniel Swain: And what I really wanted was a book that you could recommend to someone who hadn't jumped into this discussion and hadn't made some of those connections from what would have to be 10, 15, maybe even 20 different research studies or different books, and tying it all together. So it's the book that I designed that you could throw on your principal's desk and say, "Hey. We really need to look at something about this stuff. This is what the other schools are excited about," or "This is why the school down the road is having that success." Or it's the book you could give to your colleague who has really strong views and, potentially has really lots of experience in the classroom, but hasn't had that exposure to some of the research discussions around effective instruction around how to structure curriculum and why knowledge is such a powerful thing for us to be thinking about in our curriculum planning and our classroom practice.

[00:04:27] Susan Lambert: That's great. And we're going to dive into a little bit about knowledge, but I realized I didn't actually say the title of the book, which is Harnessing the Science of Learning. And before we dig into the Science of Learning, a couple things I love about this book is: One, there are actual stories of people that have done the work, and the work has made such an impact in changing student learning outcomes, and so I love those little vignettes that you've added in there. Super helpful. The other thing that I love is that in the margins you have a "right-there" sort of glossary that you have the highlighted terms that you're talking about in a little definition right there. And so it's just really user friendly because there is a lot of information packed into this little book.

[00:05:19] Nathaniel Swain: I've always wanted for people to jump into a book like this and not feel overwhelmed and not feel like they have to proceed linearly through chapter after chapter. Like you should be able to pick it up and look for what you are looking for, find the information that you need, but then also have the pleasure of going back through and reading from the beginning if you want to. And I think that's one of the biggest pieces of feedback that I've been so pleased about is that people have found it an enjoyable read. They've found it accessible and those stories and examples have helped them understand things that probably have been plaguing them in their practice as well.

[00:05:53] Susan Lambert: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. The other thing I love about it is you connect people to deep dives. So if you want to learn more about this, there's the opportunity to learn more about that. 

[00:06:03] Nathaniel Swain: And I think if I had lots of space in those deep dive sections, there would be a lot of podcasts that I would put there as well, because we are in an era where there is so much beautiful content that you can consume, whether it's video or audio or otherwise.

[00:06:17] Nathaniel Swain: So we are in an era where there's so much that you could deep dive into. So I hope that those nudges, if you like, at the end of each chapter, let people know that this book literally is just a launchpad and that's how I've always framed it. Not a definitive guide, but something that really does start a conversation, which is what I was hoping for.

[00:06:35] Susan Lambert: Alright, so let's dive in a little bit. Help us understand, since it's called Harnessing the Science of Learning, what in the world is your definition of the Science of Learning? 

[00:06:45] Nathaniel Swain: So I draw upon the Deans for Impact definition because it's nice and broad and has been around for quite a while now. And if you haven't heard of that organization from the U.S., Deans for Impact has been doing this work with teacher-training providers and schools of education in the U.S. for quite a while now. Essentially the Science of Learning is a body of knowledge that has been accumulated through thousands and thousands of research studies and is not dissimilar to how we think about the Science of Reading perhaps.

[00:07:13] Nathaniel Swain: But really, instead of just talking about literacy and the proficiency in reading, it's talking about learning in general. So what things can we learn from how learners operate in any subject or in any learning that they're trying to do? So it's an accumulation of wisdom, of insights that scientists have found through those research studies and tried to crystallize it into accessible principles that you can use. The greatest thing about the Science of Learning as well is that it's never really going to be finished. Much like the Science of Reading, right? It's constantly being updated and it's something that we should be constantly turning to when new studies and new insights come through, big systematic reviews, and then they change the way that common wisdom is being talked about. Then you'll see a person who's looking and using the Science of Learning actually update their guidance and their recommendations, which is why it's so powerful, I think.

[00:08:01] Susan Lambert: Yeah, that's a great explanation and one thing that I like about—not to go back fangirling on this book or anything—but the other thing that I like about this book is the foundations. Because if you're just jumping into, we talk about this with the Science of Reading, the Science of Learning, whatever it is, there is a whole bunch of scientific evidence that has come before that sort of built this foundation and helps grow and grow and grow. And what you've done in this book is in some ways gone back to the foundations and built from those foundations up to help us see that trajectory. 

[00:08:38] Nathaniel Swain: I hope, yeah, exactly. Some of those principles that are just so core to how learning happens, but often missing from teacher training and from professional development that teachers might participate in. Really, like I've called them in some parts of the book, "unavoidable insights" that you just can't not be considering when you're planning your instruction or thinking about how you put your teaching and learning together.

[00:09:00] Nathaniel Swain: And yeah, I hope that it's accessible and it allows people to learn what some of those fundamental principles are, and I don't see those changing very quickly because the weight of the evidence for those are so strong. But, obviously we're ready for the next theory to come in and explain something that's previously been unexplainable.

[00:09:17] Nathaniel Swain: So I think we should be always open to new insights coming in and changing perspectives of how learning really does happen. 

[00:09:23] Susan Lambert: Yeah, absolutely. One of the things that you do talk quite a bit about is cognitive load theory in your book. And for those listeners that haven't listened to the Greg Ashman episode, we did a little episode with Greg Ashman where you unpacked some of that cognitive load theory. You introduce it in such a nice way that it helps take the thread all the way through what's happening in the classroom and things like that. So I think I have this right, but I think one insight from one of the chapters on cognitive load theory, it's called "Key Insights From the Science of Learning," right? So the cognitive load theory and beyond. One of the insights you have in here is, "Knowledge powers all learning." Can you talk a little bit about that? 

[00:10:08] Nathaniel Swain: I think, and Greg Ashman, I have to say, is one of those bloggers and writers and researchers that does this explanation really well, and I do draw heavily upon his work here. And essentially, knowledge has been historically seen as something that's pretty base. That's something that you can ignore. That's something that's in abundance. You don't really need to learn a whole lot of facts or concepts or ideas because you can just Google that later. And before that it was, you could just look that up in a book. You don't need to have that at your fingertips. But in a recent talk that Greg was doing at researchED in Ballarat in Australia, he really cleverly unpacked the fact that knowledge is really the stuff that makes learning happen in the brain. It's far from being something that you can go and visit a library in your brain and pull out something relevant and look it up. Knowledge is actually the thing that allows students to see the connections between complicated and multifaceted problems or ideas within the curriculum. And if there is no foundation of knowledge, then the future learning can't really happen. It all stops right there. So because of cognitive load theory and how it beautifully explains the limitations of working memory, we know that students get really overwhelmed when there's too much stuff coming at them. And that might be facts, it might be steps in a procedure, it might be environmental things that are happening in the classroom as well. All of that extraneous load can contribute to an overwhelm of working memory limitations, but it's also the intrinsic load of the task as well.

[00:11:36] Nathaniel Swain: And students get overwhelmed if they don't have adequate knowledge. If they're looking at a problem and thinking, "I don't know what that is, and I don't see where the pattern is and I don't know exactly what I'm meant to be doing here." It's because there's inadequate knowledge of this kind of problem or this aspect of the curriculum.

[00:11:50] Nathaniel Swain: And what's fascinating about cognitive load theory and John Sweller who invented it and is still talking about it today, also in Australia—look, we're all in Australia moment. He says he wish he'd called cognitive load theory something else. He wished he'd called it the power of long-term memory or the power of knowledge to overcome working memory limitations. So, something else that really talked about how, when we have knowledge in our long-term memory, all of these limitations suddenly disappear. We don't have any effort required to see something that is already in our long-term memory. So once we've learned it, once we've got it through that narrow passage of working memory, and it's in our long term, students aren't overwhelmed by those little bits and pieces. This is how experts automatically and efficiently and almost without conscious effort are able to solve really complicated and really interesting problems. If you see a group of really excited sixth graders attempt a maths problem and they really are confident in their algorithms and they can't wait to unpack what the next problem is—and I've seen this at some of the schools like Bentleigh West that I feature in the book—they are ravenous for more maths problems, if you like. So they get a list of problems, some of which the adults in the room who are visiting from other schools a lot of the time will look at and go, "Ooh, I don't know where to start there. I've forgotten how to do that kind of problem." They are just attacking it because it all comes from long-term memory and it's all built upon that knowledge that they have about that problem, about similar problems, about the maths facts that allows them to see the patterns before they even need to solve the problem.

[00:13:19] Nathaniel Swain: All of this essentially linked back to that idea that when we have knowledge at our fingertips, or in this case, in our synapses ready to be used, we can overcome all these limitations that cognitive load theory talks about. 

[00:13:32] Susan Lambert: That's really interesting. What a great explanation. And it reminded me that also in this book you talk about how long-term memory is really limitless. There's no limit to what you can learn and what you can store there. The limit is this sort of weird funnel called working memory... I wish I would've known that when I was a teacher. You know, I knew nothing about any of this and just this concept of working memory is, I think it would be earth shattering to a teacher that didn't know anything about the limitations there.

[00:14:06] Nathaniel Swain: Especially if you think that all learning is potentially accessible; you just have to make it engaging or you have to make it fun. Or you have to figure out exactly where your student is and what their, I'm not going to say this word lightly, but their learning style might be, is what you might have been taught to think about. When in fact a lot of those ideas or common sense views of how to get learning to happen probably are a little bit shonky now and learning style has been debunked in many different forums in the Science of Learning for many years, but still rears its head in different forms now. So it's not about styles that students have; it's about knowing what's already in their long-term memory and therefore what they can already do automatically versus things that are going to be completely new. And which things you should definitely chunk and you should break down so that you don't overwhelm working memory while they're still learning it. Once you've taught it though, yes, you can assume that they could do it and you can present that problem as if it's unconsciously attempted because it may well be once it's learned properly. It's that initial learning where the all of the working memory limitations come in.

[00:15:06] Nathaniel Swain: And we can all be turned into novices when we're having to hold arbitrary bits of information that currently aren't in our long-term memory. A classic one would be if you're having to put in one of those annoying authenticated codes that you get now instead of passwords. Or a really long bank account string. If someone interrupts you while you're trying to put in that 12 digit number, yes, you're going to experience what your working memory feels like when it's distracted or when it's refreshed because someone's grabbed your attention. Or when you can't hold more than seven or eight things in your head for a long period of time. But say you were doing that pin every day, and it was just part of opening your car, for example. If it was 12 digits, that would become automatic and you wouldn't even think about it. You'd just go boom, next thing. Hopefully not a 12 digit code, 'cause that's quite annoying to get your head around. But still possible...If you think about—my son's learning piano at the moment. And piano when you first learn it, just like learning to read, it's really complicated. There's so much going on. There's rhythm, there's melody, there's the timing of the different notes and what they mean. There's the time signature. And what's so clever about some of these new music books that they've got is they essentially function like explicit instruction for the teaching of reading. So they introduce one element at a time so as not to overwhelm his working memory. So I think the first thing he does is probably two notes involved and they all go for the same amount of time, no time signature needed. It's like Din-Din-Din-Din-Din-Din and that's it. That's the whole song. But now three weeks later, four weeks later, he's now doing "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious," which you know sounds complicated because of its name, but is actually a combination of four or five different notes with a few elements added in that week by week, he's then been exposed to. So it's the same with any learning. Once you begin, you can layer in that complexity because you go from working memory to long-term memory and then suddenly that limitation that was previously there when you were first learning something doesn't apply because you're just accessing it for free.

[00:17:03] Nathaniel Swain: It's, there's no storage limitation and also no retrieval effort when you're pulling down something that's ready to go from your long-term memory. 

[00:17:11] Susan Lambert: Yeah. And to get it secure in there. We forget about every time we pull it out of long term into that working memory, we'd strengthen that muscle, if you will.

[00:17:19] Nathaniel Swain: Definitely, that retrieval strength becomes—and the storage strength—becomes stronger every time you're forced to retrieve. So ideally you're teaching in a systematic way where you're introducing things, but then also giving students a little bit of time to forget stuff. Because as they start to forget, but then are asked to remember, that retrieval process does really strengthen. And that's that fourth principle in chapter four where we talk about how retrieval practice means that we can avoid the forgetting curve, which is a reality for all learners. And then this is applies to teachers so much. If you think about great PDs that you've gone to and you know, all these great insights. You remember all these fantastic things. You felt good about your practice, these amazing ideas you're going to implement in your classroom. If there was a big break between you doing that PD and then you going back to your classroom and trying to implement it—potentially too big a break—you might not remember much at all. And therefore, all of that learning was sort of lost and that's the reality. It's an occupational risk for all learners everywhere. One of the things I say in the book is forgetting is just part of it. 

[00:18:18] Susan Lambert: I forget really well these days. 

[00:18:20] Nathaniel Swain: I think we have to; you're pruning away so much stuff that's coming at you. It's a logical thing that our brains do, but we don't want the brains to prune away things that are going to be really helpful for our learning. So if it's important, we want to build in a retrieval schedule with anything that we teach our students so that they're exposed systematically to that before they forget all those great insights, facts, skills, procedures, whatever it might be.

[00:18:43] Susan Lambert: I remember when I was a classroom teacher, my teaching partner and I don't know where we heard this, but we decided we were going to try it. And this was for math. So every day we had six questions. Before we launched into our math lesson, it was two review questions, two questions about content we were covering today, and two questions about future content that we would be doing in the future. And we used those six questions for retrieval practice, to help kids remember, and then connect to today's learning. But then it was an opportunity for us to see, like you said, about long-term memory. What do they already know and how can I adjust or build on that? And it actually was a really cool process and helped us a lot.

[00:19:29] Nathaniel Swain: It fits the principles beautifully. And I'm not sure if you actually used the research to decide that or if that was just something intuited from your teaching and how you were working together. I'm not sure. 

[00:19:38] Susan Lambert: Yeah, I can't remember. I can't remember! [Laughter] There you go. I can't remember where that came from.

[00:19:44] Nathaniel Swain: And I think what's interesting, I think about any of the insights that I tried to cover in the book, and the stories that I tried to tell is that some of these things are intuitively things that teachers might have stumbled upon. They've said, "You know what? Instead of just throwing all my kids in the deep end and giving them a hard problem, I'm actually going to show them some basic steps step by step and allow them to do a little bit of practice on a mini whiteboard, for example, before I send them off." I think teachers who have found their way there have found that those explanations really mattered. And that when you did them as a whole class to begin with and then release them off to small group afterwards, that actually that has a greater impact than what's pretty popular now, which is productive struggle, where you withhold your instruction, force them into a task that is probably outside of their comfort zone or deliberately outside of their comfort zone and let them see if they can find the answer themselves. That flies in the face of how cognitive load theory and other learning science principles talk about what really works well for novices, which is you should probably provide some pretty clear instruction and worked examples and showing them step by step how to do something and then fading that guidance over time. Because experts, which we've been talking about in terms of, "Oh look, you can do all these amazing things automatically from your long-term memory"—experts will learn very differently from novices when they're first learning something. 

[00:20:57] Susan Lambert: Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. Okay, so in another chapter, you really highlight some misconceptions. First of all, I love that you dedicate an entire chapter to some common misconceptions, because I don't think we often talk about misconceptions. One of them is a classic: "Oh, knowledge and basic skills don't really prepare students for the 21st century." I hear this all the time. Tell us how you think about that.

[00:21:24] Nathaniel Swain: So this was a deliberate decision that one of my contributing authors Dr. Zach Groshell and I made in that chapter is we really wanted to address that elephant in the room about 21st century education. And I think for about 40 years, we've been talking about 21st century education and we're now two decades in, maybe even nearly three decades. And we're still talking about the same sorts of things that actually do pretty much conflict with the cognitive science about how learning happens in the brain. So I think one of the big takeaways is that you can't have these generic skills and work on them without reference to rich subject content knowledge. I think, as I was hinting at before, if you want to be critical or creative or collaborative about something, you actually have to know a lot about it. And if we really do a thought experiment here, if we think about any topic, the one that always pops into my head is, I give you an article and I ask you to work with a colleague who's also at the same level of understanding as you on say something from the medical field. Here's an article on rheumatoid arthritis. I want you to be critical of this article and tell me if this is a useful contribution to the field or not. If you are not a rheumatologist, you are not going to approach anywhere near an understanding or an ability to provide any sort of insight into that article. You'll barely be able to get through a page without wondering what actually this thing is even about.

[00:22:45] Nathaniel Swain: So obviously if we take that same principle and apply it to what we're trying to do with 21st century education principles—which is, I think a term that's obviously really well worn at this point in the century, but potentially not that helpful anymore—is we're thinking that you can avoid actually spending time teaching the rich knowledge that's within the academic disciplines, and instead focus on generic capabilities. Unfortunately you don't get generic capabilities for free. These things come because students have a lot of knowledge about the subject areas that they're looking at.

[00:23:16] Nathaniel Swain: So if you want them to be critical and creative, say with learning an instrument, here's another, going back to music for a moment. If you want them to be able to comment on a composition or being able to create their own version of a composition that's quite complicated and is novel, then they need to be at the top of their field regarding how music works, how instrumentation works, how composition... They need to know a lot. They need to be adept at multiple instruments potentially. They need to understand all of the knowledge that goes into different genres of music over the over centuries and centuries of musical history. Essentially, if they don't know any of that, they'll be stumbling on something that's probably been done very, very similarly before, and produce what we probably get in inquiry projects. A pretty generic, pretty banal PowerPoint presentation about something that they found on Google. I think we're kidding ourselves a little bit if we think that we can replace that rich subject content knowledge with generic sort of skills and generic competencies. But it has to be said at this day and age because the biggest catchcry might be we don't need to force students to sit there and learn these boring facts and boring concepts, which is how knowledge is sometimes portrayed, because we just need them to think about their thinking, and we need them to reflect and be critical about knowledge and teach them those things. Instead, what I'm saying is, "Yeah, there's a lot of things that you could probably teach students to do with that knowledge, but they've got to have the knowledge to begin with." And I think that's something that's unavoidable at this point in the debate. 

[00:24:43] Susan Lambert: Yeah. I don't know who said it. It might have been Dan Willingham or somebody else, but it's pretty hard to think critically about if there's no content there to think critically about, or something that you don't know.

[00:24:54] Nathaniel Swain: Exactly. 

[00:24:54] Susan Lambert: Rheumatoid arthritis was a great example. Mine is always my husband, who is a former chief financial officer. He's now retired, right? But if he reads an article in the finance section of the new[spaper] he can read that article, read it really quickly. He knows the vocabulary and he could say, "Whoever wrote this article was way off base for this reason. That reason. That reason." And because my knowledge—it's not like I can't read the article—I even know the vocabulary. But I would never be able to know if they were completely wrong or not, or even be able to say I have an opinion about that.

[00:25:31] Nathaniel Swain: Exactly. And yeah, and it all goes back to the idea of a schema. So I, think I hint at this in some of the chapters, and I think it's a really important point to make, is that when students know a lot about a topic, it means that they've got a really enriched schema in their long-term memory. And that means an organizing system for that sort of body of knowledge or for that concept or skill. And schemas don't just hold facts and boring things like dates and the stereotypified view of history teaching, for example; they hold rich understandings. And they, schemas, also hold nuances between one concept and how it blows into another concept because brains are a pretty amazing thing. And when you give them rich input and get students to listen to knowledgeable others, whether it's peers or reading books or listening to their teachers, they can do amazing things to enrich their schemas about many different topics and many different ideas. And this is what puts them in good stead to proceed through the academic disciplines, but also to have an interest in the world around them when they leave school and when they think about what profession they want to do. I think so many, and this is where it's a bit depressing, so many students go through their high school and middle school now without a reference to learning and remembering rich content knowledge that, essentially they've got more knowledge about what's happening on social media or what the latest TikTok person is doing. You can see, I'm sounding like an old person now with "TikTok person," but I don't know what the term is. They know about that and they've got rich knowledge about who's cool and who's not cool and why, and what the latest trends are. But are they interested in the world around them? The historical, the geographical, scientific understandings that belie—or everything in modern society, the, economic, the social, the cultural. If they don't have that knowledge, then the world seems like a pretty boring place. This is where knowledge is not only useful for learning, it's useful for an orientation to life and an orientation to having a role as a citizen in our societies. And that's something that's not guaranteed with schooling at the moment, because knowledge has been seen as this annoying thing that you have to do. But really the fun part is the application, or the experiment, or the project, or the inquiry that you're working on, and the knowledge is just in the background. I think it just needs to be flipped. 

[00:27:38] Susan Lambert: Yeah, that's really interesting. And it reminds me of—not like I'm trying to bring up all the podcasts from my Australian friends—but hey, we did one with Reid Smith about knowledge. And we had a great conversation about what happens when you have the wrong knowledge, when you get a misconception in your long-term memory. And that misconception sits there, right? So that's also not good either because it's a schema that you're building, but it's a misconception. It's like the wrong thing. 

[00:28:06] Nathaniel Swain: And it's actually really hard to shift it. You need to—because of things like the confirmation bias, which can explain a lot of our inability to hear and the tendency to talk past each other when we disagree in debates, is that we are always searching for things that will confirm our beliefs that we already have and essentially confirm the knowledge and the schemas that we have as well. So if some of those schemas are based on false information and because as that information was coming at us for the first time, it might've seemed appealing, might've seemed logical. And we didn't have a lot of other knowledge like your husband looking at a CFO-targeted article. If you didn't know that stuff, you'd be like, "Oh, that guy seems [to know] exactly what he's talking. I really like what he's saying." Because you didn't have enough to refute it. So you get into that thing where students who have less knowledge or citizens that have less knowledge are more prey to misleading or disinformation because they don't have enough in their schema to be able to question the knowledge that's coming in. So, far from just having a skeptical sort of approach to life, you actually need rich knowledge to be able to tell what to be be skeptical about and what to say that accords with the scientific or the anthropological or the cultural view on that sort of concept. So, yeah. That's great to plug Reid Smith as well, because we collaborated on the Knowledge-Rich Curriculum chapter, which we might be talking about soon, I think. 

[00:29:22] Susan Lambert: We'll make a segue to that in this particular book. 

[00:29:26] Nathaniel Swain: And he's an expert on this. Definitely. 

[00:29:27] Susan Lambert: Oh, I love that. Another plug for the book. What I love that you did is that you collaborated with different experts really to bring this information to life. Oh my gosh, I just love this book so much. 

[00:29:38] Nathaniel Swain: Thank you. 

[00:29:38] Susan Lambert: Okay. Let's make that segue to that chapter on knowledge-rich curriculum, and talk to us a little bit about what makes a curriculum knowledge rich. We've laid this groundwork now for why knowledge matters, but what makes a knowledge-rich curriculum? 

[00:29:53] Nathaniel Swain: I really like the principles that—it wasn't a researcher in this case. It was a teacher and educator and instructional coach, Tom Sherrington, and he's a prolific author and an amazing contributor to this field; he sits really in between the research and the practice and does a brilliant thing well, which is communicating complicated ideas to his audience brilliantly. So if you haven't seen his books and the walkthrough series... 

[00:30:17] Susan Lambert: Oh, they're so good. 

[00:30:17] Nathaniel Swain: ...which crystallizes. It's just so helpful to help people understand these new techniques or new teaching practices that are really not common knowledge or common practice, but getting them into the hands of teachers and into our classrooms. So have a look at those. But Tom Sherrington years ago talked about knowledge, which curriculum is having some underpinning principles. And one of them was that we really need knowledge to be taught to be remembered and not to be encountered. So knowledge shouldn't just be this optional extra that you do whilst looking at this really interesting theme about change or continuity, where you might use some case studies of something to come back to that sort of generic theme. Rather, the knowledge is taught because we want students to have it at their fingertips and ready to go. And, we want the knowledge to be something that provides—another principle is it provides an underpinning philosophy about how learning happens. Because—making that connection between the early parts of the book and this knowledge-rich curriculum chapter—because knowledge is so powerful for students to make connections, to understand how will the disciplines actually contrast and connect with each other, and how different knowledge is created in different disciplines. So historians will develop and critique and question knowledge in a different way to scientists because of the nature of their field of inquiry. And essentially what we're doing with students is bringing them into those big conversations about the world that different knowledge disciplines or knowledge traditions use them in slightly different ways. One of the other things is that knowledge should be something that students are given and given in a way that is manageable and is achievable.

[00:31:48] Nathaniel Swain: So actually breaking down big concepts so that you can piece together knowledge over time and to allow those smaller concepts to add up to larger ones. And, something that's been very old in curriculum thinking is the spiral curriculum idea. And this has been around for a long time, but to operationalize that in a way which does give students multiple chances to come back to big picture topics or big ideas within history, geography, science, the arts, and you name it. This actually does play really well because we're essentially laying the groundwork for those rich schemas to be created. So they might encounter the ancient world in one part of the curriculum in elementary school, but they actually return to these with more insight and more knowledge in middle school and then again in senior school in high school. And I think that's really what's missing at the moment is our curriculum in terms of what knowledge is being taught, is often quite reactive and quite skills-based. And we're thinking about which comprehension skill are we working on, or which kind of text are we getting them to practice writing, which is still important to talk about, but should also be underpinned by what connections can we help students make to what they've learned before and what can they use as an anchor to ensure that they remember as much as they can from this rich content that they're going to learn now. You know, which novel can they draw upon to really understand what this author in this new text that we're looking at is using? And, how does this novel also give them an insight into another part of the world or a different experience outside of the student's own experiences? One of the other things, I'll just finish with this, one of the other things that we tried to cover in that chapter on knowledge-rich curriculum is that we need to be really decisive about which knowledge we teach. And this is probably the most thorny and most tricky question that curriculum makers and curriculum actors have to consider, is whose knowledge is important enough to put it into the school curriculum. And of course there's endless reasons to go down different paths here, but one of the things that makes the task easier is thinking about which knowledge will set students up for success to enter the big conversations that are happening now, the knowledge that journalists and that writers and scientists assume of the general public so that they have a strong, general knowledge they can draw upon in order to enter that discourse. And the other consideration is to think about which knowledge has historically or chronologically been neglected and which we could bring to the fore and to give more prominence to.

[00:34:09] Nathaniel Swain: So deliberately trying to showcase and help students to connect with knowledge that hasn't been part of the Western canon, for example. And I think if you balance those two principles, which we've tried to cover in that chapter, and allow the curriculum to be both a mirror for the students to see themselves in the materials and the stories and the big ideas that you cover, as well as a window into worlds outside the students' experience. So that there's no reason for them to achieve anything or not to have maximum opportunities with the choices that they can make in their life. The curriculum, doing both of those roles of mirror and window, can essentially hedge your bets in that way and allow the students to feel connected to the curriculum, but also enriched and inspired by all the things that they get access to. This is why if knowledge isn't being talked about, what are we talking about? We're talking about pretty generic things and, pretty motherhood statements about critical thinking and creativity, which, unfortunately all come back to knowledge, because if you don't have knowledge, you can't do all those great things.

[00:35:08] Susan Lambert: Yeah. Yeah. I remember Natalie Wexler, when she wrote that book, The Knowledge Gap, she said she couldn't believe going into an elementary classroom that knowledge was essentially missing from what was happening in those early grades classrooms, and thinking that when parents send their kids to school, they're assuming they're sending their kids to school to learn stuff. And I'm not saying it as articulately as you did, but the stuff was missing from the classroom. 

[00:35:34] Nathaniel Swain: It really was. And Natalie Wexler's work has been really inspirational for a lot of educators in Australia, especially those who are using the Science of Learning to improve their schools as we've tried to capture in this book. And I think the knowledge gap for many people here in this context, and I hope in the U.S. as well too, to some extent—I know you're a big place, so not everyone has heard of Natalie Wexler's work across the states in general classrooms—but I think we're certainly getting some echo chambers happening here with lots of resonations of those voices and those messages in Australia, which is good. But that work is foundational because it is a missing piece. And in my own Ph.D. research, I was prey to choosing skills over knowledge when I had an opportunity to develop some of my participants in Youth Justice. I was working with young people in a juvenile detention center and helping them with their language and literacy skills. And one of the interventions I chose was comprehension skills, when I could have encouraged them to use some of those skills, but actually spend the whole time teaching them some knowledge and learning about a nonfiction or a fictional topic together—and that way actually building connections from session to session over those three or four week periods. And I think that was, in hindsight, such a missed opportunity because instead we were changing texts every single session, changing topics every single session, and the things that were staying the same was the skill or the strategy. And I think now reflecting on how I know that learning happens because of the insights that I've learned in my career from the Science of Learning, I know that I just had it slightly upside down or back to front, and it's possible to shift it, but it is questioning your thinking about how I should think about my planning. Because the skills do have to drive some of your decision making, but the knowledge has to be there at the forefront as well.

[00:37:16] Susan Lambert: Yeah, and I can almost guarantee that you can talk to any teacher, at least in the United States and say, "Is background knowledge important for kids to have?" And they will say, "Absolutely." That's the thing we do, is we activate their prior knowledge, but making that connection to how important knowledge is to our learning. But then, you also have to systematically help kids build that knowledge. 

[00:37:42] Nathaniel Swain: Build that knowledge. And that's the difference. We're not just activating it, we're closing these gaps between the students that have knowledge that's going to help them read complicated texts and write complicated texts and those that don't have that knowledge. So we, need to do that systematically. And I think, using rich curriculum resources which've tried to make knowledge and organizing structure within the English language arts curriculum. That way you do, you develop skills, you develop strategies around comprehension and writing, but you also allow students to keep coming back to those big picture ideas and those amazing stories that are out there in geography and history and science that they can connect with that help explain everyday things and essentially make the learning more memorable. Nothing scares me more than students sitting in classrooms trying to go through the motions of comprehension strategies and diligently trying to apply them to reading a text, but not really knowing what this text is about and not knowing what the next text will be about and not really having a thread that they connect all that great learning and all those hours of practice together. I think in the effort to improve test scores, as Natalie Wexler so carefully does in her journalistic and her writing sort of pursuits, we have gotten obsessed with just raising the bar by drilling and by focusing on those strategies and getting them in a time situation and teaching them how the tests work and essentially to the extreme, teaching to that test. When in fact the way to get students finding those tests rather easy or finding them a lot less challenging is to give them rich content knowledge so that, unlike a novice who would look at it, one of the texts that we've been talking today about, whether it's from the medical or the financial sort of disciplinary knowledge systems, they actually look at it and go, "Oh, I can see what that's about. I can see that. That's not new. That's not new. Oh, here's the new bit. And here's the bit I can focus on. And, oh, this author's missed something that I know that they've missed because it's already in my long-term memory." And that's the I think the missing puzzle at this juncture that we're at now is that we need to reorientate how we're thinking about teaching and how we're thinking about curriculum so that knowledge isn't something that's just backgrounded or activated. It's something that is given prominence and allowing students to make connections. And one final thought I have is that there's this amazing theory called meaningful learning theory that's been around for a long time, and it relates to that idea of building students' schemas.

[00:39:58] Nathaniel Swain: But essentially, Ausubel, who's the theorist behind that theory, basically says that the best predictor of what students will learn in a given lesson is what they already know. And if you actually take some control as a teacher or as a curriculum planner or as a district leader in thinking about how do I set up my students for success so that I know or have a better idea of what they will know before they attempt this particular lesson? That's the biggest lever that you can pull to make the equitable and effective outcomes happen in the classroom. 

[00:40:29] Susan Lambert: What a great connection. You have a really interesting quote in your last chapter. I'm going to read the quote. You wrote it so I know you know it, but we'll read it for our listeners and then I'd love for you to tell us a little bit about it. You say, "Learning can happen without our teaching, but teaching cannot happen without their learning." 

[00:40:52] Nathaniel Swain: Yeah, I'm inspired here and I do preface it in the book by the work of [Siegfried] Engelmann and his work in Direct Instruction and the common phrase is something along the lines of, "If they haven't learned it, then you haven't taught it." And I think I made a slight adjustment to that in this new quote around learning can happen without our teaching because I think we have to orientate ourselves to know that we want students to be actively searching for meaning and learning outside of the school sort of context. I think that's really important to say in that first part, but I think if we are really teaching, if we are doing our job as educators, then learning has to happen. Learning has to be the measure that we use often. So much "teaching" happens without a lot of learning occurring and learning that's not just temporary and not just cursory but learning that actually is made to stick and is made to make a lasting difference in the minds and the lives of the kids that we work for. So for me, I've penned that quotation. I put it on my door at La Trobe University and I look at it every time I go into my office. 

[00:41:53] Susan Lambert: I love that. 

[00:41:53] Nathaniel Swain: And it makes me remember that this is our role as educators is to make sure—to guarantee—that learning is happening as equitably and as effectively as possible. And I think if we lose sight of that and think, "I'm not going to teach in that way because it's not my preference," or "I don't want to change my curriculum because it's not how I like to do things," then that's the wrong orientation to start with. We should be always driven by what is going to make the biggest difference for our kids and for the students that we serve and what's going to make use of their time. Because the time is so precious and they can't go over and do year one or grade two again. They need us to use that time really well and make sure that every instructional minute does count. And to ensure that's the case, we should be using the best possible available evidence and best scientific knowledge we have about how learning happens so that those decisions that we make do lead to more learning, if not maximizing learning, in every opportunity.

[00:42:49] Nathaniel Swain: So I hope that quote helps crystallize, I think, what should be the philosophy of all teachers now in that we don't worry so much about personalities and about politics of whose view of learning is correct. And instead, be open-minded and ready to change our views based on that compelling evidence that's there saying if you want students to learn, then these are the principles that you need to follow in order to be the best possible teacher that you can be. 

[00:43:15] Susan Lambert: Word on the street is that you are bringing some of this evidence-based practice and things that teachers can learn about to a new podcast. Is that right? You have a new podcast coming up? 

[00:43:27] Nathaniel Swain: We do. And it's actually the first podcast I've ever really done. So I've always been a guest on podcasts, but always wanted to have one myself. So this is an idea called Chalk Dust, I should pronounce it correctly. So that's like the chalk that we used to use on the blackboard. Chalk Dust is a podcast I'm hosting with Rebecca Birch and it's a chance for us to unpack great teaching as it's happening in classrooms around the world. So we are looking like commentators on the sporting field. We're looking intricately at what teachers are doing, move by move in classroom footage that's featured on the podcast and you can watch it in real time on the YouTube channel or check it out just as an audio version wherever you do get your podcast.

[00:44:05] Susan Lambert: That is so exciting and an insider's view—that's really cool. Congratulations.

[00:44:12] Nathaniel Swain: Thank you. It's exciting. 

[00:44:14] Susan Lambert: I can't wait. I can't wait to watch the first one. As we close up here, do you have any closing thoughts, any advice for our listeners? Anything you wanna say here at the end?

[00:44:25] Nathaniel Swain: So I would say that I'm hoping the people listening to this very successful podcast, which has seen us through some really busy years as educators in 2020 and 2021 and so on, I want to say thank you for them, for the listeners and to yourself, Susan, for hosting such a brilliant forum for us to share knowledge and to learn together. And also to let people know that if anything is new that you've heard on this podcast, know that like these are big conversations that are happening around the world and that there's a whole lot of people also doing this cognitive work.

[00:44:55] Nathaniel Swain: And if it's throwing up any ideas or challenges for you, know that there are now some accessible guides that you can jump into that'll make it a little bit easier. And as I said, and you hinted at, the end of each chapter in this book, Harnessing the Science of Learning, there is an opportunity to see where to go next. And look, there's plenty of places to go. I've got this massive library of books behind me, which is not necessarily visible if you're listening to the podcast, but I'm still working through so many new titles that are coming out every year of great researchers and educators synthesizing the research for your work as educators. So that's why I've been calling it an "edu renaissance." Join the renaissance and have a great time learning about all the amazing things that we now know about teaching and learning and how it happens. 

[00:45:39] Susan Lambert: I love that. That sounds like a good ed[ucation] podcast, too. The Edu Renaissance podcast or something. 

[00:45:47] Nathaniel Swain: Exactly. Bring the artists and scientists all together, as the Renaissance did, and talk about the art and science of teaching. Because that's really how it works in the classroom. 

[00:45:56] Susan Lambert: Very true. Thank you so much for joining. This has been such a great conversation. I appreciate your work. Congratulations on the book. Congratulations on the new podcast, and it's been an honor. 

[00:46:07] Nathaniel Swain: Thank you so much, Susan. It has been a career highlight as a long-term fan of the show, so thank you so much. 

[00:46:13] Susan Lambert: Thank you.

[00:46:16] Susan Lambert: That was Dr. Nathaniel Swain, teacher, instructional coach, and writer. He works as a senior lecturer in learning sciences at La Trobe University School of Education and SOLAR Lab, and he produces a blog for teachers called Dr. Swain's Cognitorium. His new book is Harnessing the Science of Learning Success Stories to Help Kickstart Your School Improvement. We'll have a link in the show notes. That's where you'll also find a link to our new professional learning page, which is filled with high quality resources to help you on your literacy journey. You can also go directly to amplify.com/SORessentials. Also, on today's episode, we began exploring the question of which knowledge should be featured, and Dr. Swain used the analogy of the mirror and window. I'm thrilled to share that we'll be exploring that very topic in greater detail on our next episode, which will feature University of Virginia psychologist Daniel T. Willingham. 

[00:47:22] Daniel Willingham: Yes, there are going to be tough choices, but if you just avoid those choices then you just end up with a curriculum that's random. In other words, failing to make a choice is not—it's not like you're not choosing. You're just leaving things to chance. 

[00:47:37] Susan Lambert: That's next time. The best way to get new episodes is to subscribe to this podcast on the listening platform of your choice.

[00:47:46] Susan Lambert: Science of Reading: The Podcast is brought to you by Amplify. I'm Susan Lambert. Thank you so much for listening.