Descriptions of effective teaching often depict an idealized form of "perfect" instruction. Yet, pursuing perfection in teaching, which depends on children's behavior, is ultimately futile. To be effective, lessons and educators need to operate with about 75% efficiency. The remaining 25% can be impactful, but expecting it in every lesson, every day, is unrealistic. Perfection in teaching may be unattainable, but progress is not. Whether you are aiming for the 75% effectiveness mark or striving for continuous improvement, this podcast will guide you in that endeavor.
Carl Hendricks
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[00:00:06] Gene Tavernetti: Welcome to Better Teaching, Only Stuff That Works, a podcast for teachers, instructional coaches, administrators, and anyone else who supports teachers in the classroom. This show is a proud member of the BE Podcast Network shows that help you go beyond education. Find all our shows@bepodcastnetwork.com. I Am Gene Tavernetti the host for this podcast. And my goal for this episode, like all episodes, is that you laugh at least once and that you leave with an actionable idea for better teaching. A quick reminder, no cliches, no buzzwords. Only stuff that
[00:00:42] Gene Tavernetti: works. I'm very excited about my guest today. My guest is Dr. Carl Hendrick. He is a professor of learning science at Academica University of Applied Sciences in Amsterdam. He's the author of several books, including How Learning Happens with Paul Kirschner. He holds a PhD in education from Kings College London, and taught English for several years in both the state and independent sectors in the uk.
[00:01:10] Gene Tavernetti: I think you're gonna like this one.
[00:01:13] Gene Tavernetti: Paul, it is wonderful to have you as a guest on better teaching only stuff that works
[00:01:20] Carl Hendricks: It's my great honor, Jean, thank you for inviting me.
[00:01:23] Gene Tavernetti: well. You are a very esteemed in our community of science, of learning. Not only what we talked about in your bio, but you have some new projects that, that you've started recently.
[00:01:34] Carl Hendricks: Yeah. So, yeah. So, one of the things that happened, I think post Covid and there was some research in the UK to support this, is that teachers are thinking differently now about professional development. In fact they're thinking differently about the profession as a whole. A lot of teachers I think were.
[00:01:50] Carl Hendricks: Sat at home during lockdown and seeing their friends and family working one or two days a week. And then when everyone back to work, they had to go, well, this is one of the few jobs where I have to do five days a week. I can't, you know, work from home. So one of the things that teachers want is more flexible professional development.
[00:02:07] Carl Hendricks: So, the idea we had was how can we get the science of learning to teachers? How can we get the best evidence on how learning happens in a way that will be less one and done, you know, let's do an inset CPD session, come and talk. Everyone's on a hi for a few days and then it just fades out. What's, how can we kind of build in a consistent thing?
[00:02:27] Carl Hendricks: So we have this course based on the two books we wrote. I wrote a book called How Learning Happens with Paul Kushner. And our teaching happens then with Paul and Jim Hill. And we just kind of created this online course. And then we have a platform where teachers can take it, they can do retrieval, practice, quizzes, sessions to work with in their faculties or departments.
[00:02:48] Carl Hendricks: And we are just have so many schools, I've signed up for it now we're kind of in Australia, we're in the uk, we're in the us And it's just, you know, my, my whole thing is there's stuff that I wish I knew in my first five years of teaching that I've just never encountered. And I'm just driven by let me get to that guy.
[00:03:10] Carl Hendricks: Let me get to that teacher in the first five years who knew nothing about working memory, nothing about cognitive load theory, nothing about instructional design or curriculum or assessment. You know, what are the tools that would've made my job better hopefully would've improved outcomes for students, but also would've.
[00:03:27] Carl Hendricks: Meant that I wasn't wasting my time doing things that had no effect. So we created this course how teaching learning happens and so, so, so check it out anyone who's interested and we're very proud of it. And and we hope, you know, again, there seems to be a, you know, along with the great work that you are doing, Jean a kind of a resurgence of evidence and the science of learning.
[00:03:47] Carl Hendricks: And if we're in any way, you know, in any small way, a part of that, then we're very honored.
[00:03:52] Gene Tavernetti: Okay, great. And then I saw also that you just started some sort of partnership with Step Lab.
[00:03:58] Carl Hendricks: Yeah. We're doing some events with Step Lab. We're working with them on a fairly big event in June in London, and we're doing myself PEPs, Sarah cutting hats, and Josh. And we're gonna do a day on the science of learning in the morning and then kinda instructional coaching in the afternoon.
[00:04:17] Carl Hendricks: And we may do that also in the US and in Australia. And yeah, they're, you know, Pepsi is a really good friend of mine for a long time, and we are just kind of thinking about ways convergences and overlaps. And they have a fantastic platform and a lot of great examples of coaching and great examples of, you know, just classroom practice.
[00:04:35] Carl Hendricks: So, yeah, it's great to work with those guys.
[00:04:38] Gene Tavernetti: Well, great. That's exciting that some of your work hopefully will make it over here and we'll be able to take advantage of that. You know, I have to tell you, Carl, I've been looking forward to talking to you for quite a while, and one of the things that was exciting to me when I heard you tell a story about when you were in your band and you came to America and your, and you had a manager who, who kinda let you know, you weren't thinking about things properly, about your music.
[00:05:09] Gene Tavernetti: Can you tell that story?
[00:05:11] Carl Hendricks: yeah, sure. So we you know, in another life I kind of left school at eight, you know, I left my home at 18 and moved to the city center of Dublin where I grew up, started a band, and then after about five years we managed to sign a record deal with Atlantic Records in the us Amazingly.
[00:05:28] Carl Hendricks: They put us, they got a producer, a guy called Michael Dehorn, who had produced one of my favorite albums super Unknown by Sound Guard, and he produced Red Chili Peppers and Ozzy and I think Soul Asylum and you know, stuff like that. And so I was the singer songwriter and he started working with us.
[00:05:47] Carl Hendricks: And he was he's just a very kind of no nonsense guy. Very, I remember he told me this story about Chris Cornell from Sound Garden. He said that he had been brought into work on their album and he got a demo. And in his words, it was literally just like Led Zeppelin riffs for Chris Kne to kind of scream over.
[00:06:08] Carl Hendricks: And he kind of said to them, come back to me when you got some songs. I. They were, you know, really annoyed and really unhappy. And he said a few months later, he got a cassette and the first demo, the first song was Black Hole Sun. He went, okay, now we've got, you know, so he, when I worked with him, he was like, nothing matters.
[00:06:25] Carl Hendricks: Just sit there, play a guitar and a song, and just, and he was introducing me to all this music like that I didn't know of. So, Motown stuff he introduced me to a band called Noy, a German band. He introduced me to a huge range of stuff, but it really gave me a sense of the creativity is really a case of how much, you know, knowledge you have in that domain.
[00:06:50] Carl Hendricks: And to the extent to which you can be really creative and make connections and do something original is really dependent upon your understanding and what you can manipulate and remix and change within that domain. So. That was a learning curve. We weren't good enough as a band. We got dropped and then I moved to to London.
[00:07:09] Carl Hendricks: And then my, no, my idea was to be a novelist, so I wanted to be the next Soul Bello or the next Philip Roth.
[00:07:14] Gene Tavernetti: Yeah.
[00:07:15] Carl Hendricks: And you know, I wasn't good at that either. So I I did a a degree in American literature and then I did a postgrad in teaching. And then I thought, okay, I'll just earn money teaching while I'm writing the Great Amer, you know, great next American novel.
[00:07:27] Carl Hendricks: And actually the teaching thing, I just thought, wow, this is great. I'm really enjoying, you know, this is a, an amazing thing. So yeah, that started me as a teacher.
[00:07:36] Gene Tavernetti: So one, one of the things that really grabbed me as I've heard you tell that story before and your, the producer was telling you there are no new songs, there are no new stories.
[00:07:48] Carl Hendricks: Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Well, yeah, I mean, I dunno if you ever read. It's a book by Joseph Campbell called it's about myths.
[00:07:58] Gene Tavernetti: Yes
[00:07:59] Carl Hendricks: you know, the one I'm talking about,
[00:08:00] Gene Tavernetti: I know. I know the one you're talking about. Yeah. With the Hero's journey.
[00:08:03] Carl Hendricks: The Hero's Journey. Yeah. So there's, there, there's really, you know, there's no new stories. There's these templates that we have.
[00:08:09] Carl Hendricks: And I think the same is true of most domains of knowledge. And, you know, most, you know, Dan willing about, has that wonderful phrase, understanding is remembering in disguise, and it's that thing of drawing together strands and things. So disparate elements that you can bring into something or forge something new.
[00:08:30] Carl Hendricks: And yeah I even in like, like most men in, in hitting middle age gene we all end up listening to history podcasts and I, I'm listening to. Just kind of obsessed with different historical periods. And it's just amazing how I dunno who said it, it might've been it might've been twain 'cause he said most great things, but it was history doesn't repeat itself, but it certainly rhymes.
[00:08:53] Carl Hendricks: And you see those cycles play out again and again in history. And I think the same is true certainly of music and art, but also as we'll talk about in teaching you know, ideas come around, but actually there's not really any new ones
[00:09:03] Gene Tavernetti: and that's why I brought it up. And we I don't know about the UK and other places, but the of the memories in US schools could be three to five years, if we're lucky. It's 10 to 15 years. And I think about, and I think about that there are no new songs, no new stories when we're working with teachers.
[00:09:28] Gene Tavernetti: You know, these things that we're talking about are not new. You know, I was thumbing through your book how learning happens today and noting all the research that you quoted that was between a hundred years old, you know, and so, so it's not new, but it needs to be remembered.
[00:09:48] Gene Tavernetti: Otherwise we seem to be spinning our, we seem to be spinning our wheels so much that teachers think, oh, I need to be creative. Well, I like the way you just talked about being creative. It's knowing what I'm gonna paraphrase, but knowing the parameters.
[00:10:04] Carl Hendricks: Yeah. And also having constraints. You know, one thing we know about creativity is having constraints is actually something that. Leads to creativity. I think that's something I'm missing from a lot of young people today, is boredom. I, I started playing music because I was bored. It was nothing to do.
[00:10:22] Carl Hendricks: There was no, it was four channels on tv. There was no internet. We were, you know, you know, we would play football when we were younger, but when we became teenagers, then we were, there was nothing for us to do. So I, you know, I learned to play guitar and learned to, you know, even, you know, I have this vivid memory of getting in a, an album, you know, vinyl album.
[00:10:43] Carl Hendricks: And when you know, when you get a new album and, you read every cover, every lyric. You know, the side matters the the set list matters. What's the first song on side two? And, you know, and I think we're just in an age of constant distraction. There's no gaps for you to get bored or to have constraints.
[00:11:01] Carl Hendricks: You know, great writing as well is I'm kind of glad in a way that I wrote stuff before ai, because I think that's now a massive, I feel like I've crossed a threshold from people who were able to write stuff before AI and where it's going now. The I I'm glad that I struggled over a book a few books and university and essays and stuff where every word was my own and every sentence was crafted and rewritten and redrafted, you know?
[00:11:29] Carl Hendricks: Because I think that that's gonna be a lost art, sadly.
[00:11:34] Gene Tavernetti: it's a major temptation. You know, to do it to take that time. Because one of the things I learned is that writing that first draft, that's easy. Okay. That it, okay now let's go, let's do the work and let's take a look at every word now. And
[00:11:50] Carl Hendricks: yeah
[00:11:50] Gene Tavernetti: it's a major temptation.
[00:11:53] Gene Tavernetti: You know, one of the things that also noticed in your background, you talked about being in a band playing football. You were also, you coached football as well, right? Or soccer as we call it. And, you know, one of the things that, that I've noticed is that so many folks who are advocates of explicit instruction.
[00:12:12] Gene Tavernetti: Have either an athletic background or some sort of performance background. You know, and that's kind of their schema for understanding the whole thing. It all kind of makes sense. Have you, you found that as well?
[00:12:25] Carl Hendricks: Yeah, I mean that, that's a brilliant point you make, gene, because it's it's amazing to me how we accept truths in other fields, but then in education, we somehow think that kids, if they discover stuff for themselves that's the best way of doing it. And yeah I coached football you know, at a very low level, at a schoolboy level for a public school in, in, in the uk.
[00:12:45] Carl Hendricks: And we had, you know, a professional coach come in who was a professional player and he was just brilliant at, all the things that we advocate, you know, breaking up larger skill groups into their constituent parts retrieval practice, interleaving varying the conditions of practice. So it's a little bit different each time.
[00:13:08] Carl Hendricks: And you know, he also had you know, I think everybody who's a sports fan thinks that they're a bringing coach. You know, they're an armchair coach and they think, you know, they're screaming at the manager or they, why are you doing this? But I learned a, i, you know, got a lot of humility. I thought I knew a lot about football.
[00:13:23] Carl Hendricks: I'm obsessed with it. I watch it every, you know, every week. But my word when I saw him in action, I, he was you know, just he could see stuff. And I really learned that, wow, this is really a question of knowledge. He just has this incredible schema. Of a football pitch and scenarios and different things and how to make, you know, there's such a depth of knowledge that he's able to see stuff that I just could just had no knowledge of.
[00:13:48] Carl Hendricks: So that was a you know, and we also know that in, you know, dieting or exercise, you know, if you want to get in shape, there's gonna be a bit of short term pain, but you know that you're gonna get long-term gain. And I think that's something that is, is you know, in education we've, for whatever reason we've, you know, that's disputed, which is strange.
[00:14:08] Carl Hendricks: Yeah.
[00:14:09] Gene Tavernetti: You know, I know so many people will say yeah, they, they believe in explicit instruction. They, you know, but I don't think they emotionally believe it. You know, it's, it is like, oh, yeah. Oh, tell me the research. Oh, that sounds good. Okay. I can go along with that. I, I was, we were doing some walkthroughs the other day in, in a high school with a principal.
[00:14:30] Gene Tavernetti: And we got out of the classroom and we were kind of discussing what we had seen. And in this classroom the teacher, was the show. I mean, the kids, you know, every once in a while she would ask such a very low level question that the kids, it didn't matter whether they answered it or not. And so we got out and the the principal was, you know, pretty favorable.
[00:14:55] Gene Tavernetti: You know, you could tell that the teacher had done a lot of prep and, you know, the kids were compliant. At least whether they were engaged, we don't know. But she's fairly fairly okay with the lesson. And we started talking about it. And she kinda looked at me and then finally I asked her, were you an athlete?
[00:15:11] Gene Tavernetti: You know, and she just got, she just beamed. She said oh, yeah. I said, what was your sport? And she said, basketball. I said, okay. Imagine I'm gonna teach you how to do a crossover dribble. Okay? How many times am I gonna show you? Maybe twice. And then what's gonna happen? I'm gonna practice. Yeah. Well, you know what?
[00:15:31] Gene Tavernetti: It's the same thing. It's the same thing. And you know what, it was like the, you could just see the light bulbs go off. Not because I'm smart, because, but that's just the way I got it as well. I could see that. And that now she had, that she owned it and she had now she would now be able to generalize when she went into a classroom.
[00:15:53] Gene Tavernetti: Does the teacher allow them to practice? She's giving, are they giving any feedback to them? So, so I just think it's so powerful. I mean, it's just like teaching, right? There has to be some sort of schema that we attach our new knowledge to and I think it's so powerful. And so a again I really harp on this because most teachers have some sort of performance in their background.
[00:16:17] Carl Hendricks: Sure. Yeah. Absolutely. And and again, it's one of those things where I think with teaching the feedback loops are so long that in sport, you know, you have Robin Hogarth's distinction between a wicked environment and a kind environment. So a kind learning environment is a tennis court, or as you said, a basketball court because it's kind because if you make a mistake, you get instant feedback and the loops are really short.
[00:16:40] Carl Hendricks: Ah, I see what I did. So you know, you hit a serve. Oh, okay. The racket is, I haven't got the right angle on that. And chess is the same. You get punished quickly. You see what you did wrong. Teaching, it's what Hogarth calls a wicked learning environment. You mightn't find out that you did something wrong for six months or even longer or ever.
[00:17:01] Carl Hendricks: So you don't get that, you know. Initial kind of feedback that, you know, you can actually, as I did for many years, you know, thought I was teaching great lessons and actually, you know, I look back at them now and I think it's amazing they learned anything. So, so I, you know, sport is and performance, as you say, is really, you know, from that point of view, people understand instinctively, okay, this stuff is important.
[00:17:24] Carl Hendricks: Retrieval practice. Deliberate practice, purposeful practice, identifying things to, to focus on. But, you know, you know, as we said, direct instruction for whatever reason as a methodology in the US was you know, you had follow through in the sixties. You had a very big experiment for 10 years and then it hasn't been adopted for whatever reason I.
[00:17:45] Gene Tavernetti: Well, it gets you know, we have the wars, you know, we had math wars in the sixties and then we had the reading wars. And then, you know, now just following folks on social media, now we've got the you know, well, are you an explicit direction person or are you a a project based? And I think that's the other thing that's so wonderful about being an athlete or a coach.
[00:18:08] Gene Tavernetti: You realize, you know, Hey, I'm a project based person every Friday night. You know, we're gonna go out there, but guess what? Everything we worked on, we broke down and we were working on specific skills. So, yeah.
[00:18:22] Carl Hendricks: That's it. And I, you know, I think with, everybody wants kids to be discovery learners, but we all have different ways of getting there. So we would say, well, you know, if you wanna get expert at something, you've gotta, you gotta do deliberate practice. You need a lot of upfront instruction, explicit instruction.
[00:18:36] Carl Hendricks: You need constant checking for understanding. You need constant pointing towards feedback and thinking can improve. And then, you know, when you get to that kind of 75% stage, by all means discover, you know, you've got the knowledge, you've got the routines, then you gotta practice it. So, we as Paul and I said in the book discovery learning is a bad way to become to do discovery learning or independent learning is a bad way to become an independent learner.
[00:19:02] Gene Tavernetti: Yeah. Yeah. Well, and just look at you, your story about being a, the football coach and having an expert come in. You were ready. You were ready for him.
[00:19:11] Carl Hendricks: Yeah.
[00:19:12] Gene Tavernetti: He'd have been a waste of time for you had he showed up, you know, several years earlier. 'cause you just weren't ready.
[00:19:17] Carl Hendricks: Yeah, for sure.
[00:19:19] Gene Tavernetti: Well, let's back up a little bit.
[00:19:20] Gene Tavernetti: You talked about some things that you guys are working on for professional development PD over here, CPD over there. And so what do you I'm really all about getting this stuff into the classroom, getting the teachers to do it. What do you think the gap is, you know, from even the best PD to getting a teacher to do it?
[00:19:43] Gene Tavernetti: To try something? I'm gonna say, to try something.
[00:19:47] Carl Hendricks: So I think there's kind of three levels to this. The first one is that we have you know, maybe 70 years of really solid evidence about how learning happens, but in laboratory conditions. We have a lot of evidence about learning, about memory, about processing, encoding, retrieval. We have a lot of solid evidence on that.
[00:20:08] Carl Hendricks: We have not much of how to operationalize that in a classroom. So, now it's highly unlikely that memory's gonna work in a lab one way and then not work in a classroom in a similar way. In the same way that when when people discover the germ theory of disease, you know, it, it made sense to kind of, follow that through to hospitals and with clinical staff.
[00:20:34] Carl Hendricks: So I think the first thing is that we need a lot better understanding of how, say, for example, retrieval practice. You can say to teachers here's the principles behind it. Here's how it works. But, it's amazing to me how those lethal mutations develop. So, you know, retrieval practice, you would think how can you get that wrong?
[00:20:55] Carl Hendricks: But we constantly see teachers trying to do it. And you know, an example I saw recently, a teacher who kids come in five questions. The kids are copying down the questions in the book. So if, and if you didn't know, if you were just standing at the back, it looked like they were answering the questions.
[00:21:18] Carl Hendricks: But when you look closely, they're just writing down the question. They're just writing the questions, not the answers. So they're doing no thinking, there's no wheels turning, and then they're just waiting and the teacher's not doing anything. He's kind of stood behind the desk going, okay, everyone seems to be working great.
[00:21:35] Carl Hendricks: Then he goes, right here are the answers, check yourself. And as he's giving the answers, half the kids are just riding them the answers underneath the question. And then, you know, and I'm thinking, okay, so this is just. You know, busy work. This is, there's no retrieval going on here. So another common example is teachers who will say, give a class a quiz spelling test every Monday.
[00:21:57] Carl Hendricks: Great. You got six outta six, 10 outta 10. And then they never encounter those words again other than just randomly by chance. So you've done, you've learned the word. Now we'll move on. No, there's no kinda reen encountering or how that's structured in. So that research is the first thing. The second thing I think is there isn't a culture in schools of like.
[00:22:18] Carl Hendricks: What you have in other fields and other professions where there's a kind of a professional practice and instructional coaching is that, I think, because that gives you a, there's a focus on rehearsal, there's a focus on identifying things to improve upon very kind of targeted practice. But for the longest time in education, that was just not a part of you know, the adoption of research, thinking about research, thinking about applied research was just not a part of being a teacher.
[00:22:42] Carl Hendricks: It was kind of, you know, here's your degree, now you know what to do. You stand in front of kids, you know, how hard can it be? So that's the second thing. And then I think the third thing is that you see with a lot of teachers that the workload that they have now, and this seems to be a pro, a global problem of recruitment and retention.
[00:23:05] Carl Hendricks: So teachers are just leaving the profession, you know, whereas it used to be the case where, you know, both my uncles were teachers. They had a, an amazing life as a teacher. They were able to afford a home, a comfortable home, and a nice area, a nice life. That's not so true anymore. You know, if you are a young person now in your twenties and you're starting out that's not really on the table now.
[00:23:27] Carl Hendricks: So you can't get a mortgage on a teacher's salary. You it's, the cost of living is such now that you probably need to do something else. So the deal is bad. So even where schools put a lot of time and effort into pd, there's that maybe 20, even 30% turnover of staff. So every year you've got a quarter to third of the staff who didn't have the training from last year.
[00:23:51] Carl Hendricks: So they, you know, they don't know what the system is. They don't know, you know, so you have to kind of constantly retrain staff. So there's a kind of systemic problem. But my belief is that there's kind of fundamentals of how learning happens. There's fundamentals of how we attend to focus on and process knowledge, and how do we remember stuff?
[00:24:14] Carl Hendricks: How do we create that change in long-term memory? And really what good teachers do is they internalize that. And when they make decisions, you know, you were talking there about the game. When you play the game on the Friday night, you are, you're making decisions, but hopefully you're making smart ones.
[00:24:30] Carl Hendricks: I remember talking to when I was coaching football, there was, one of the coaches was a, he was actually a player in the Premier league. He played for Chelsea. And I remember going, gee, oh, you know who? And he goes yeah. You know, and I was like, wow. And I was asking him all these stories about, you know, like, tell me about, you know, being a professional.
[00:24:49] Carl Hendricks: And he said, honestly, the difference when you get to the elite level, most players are, they're kind of at the same. So all those guys who were the best in their neighborhood, when they get to the pro level, they're much of a muchness. You know, you, yes, you have the mess, you have the Messies and the Madonnas who are complete outliers or the Michael Jordans, you know, they're just one in a million.
[00:25:11] Carl Hendricks: Most of them are kind of at a similar level. And he said the big difference is the ones who just make better decisions. It comes down to decision making. And those really effective players, they have a, this mental schema or model of, okay, I'm in this situation, I can, I have five different options. I just instinctively not to choose this one 'cause I have this, you know, developed schema.
[00:25:36] Carl Hendricks: And I think that's what effective teachers do. But they do it based upon knowledge of the limitations of working memory. They know that, okay, if I do this thing now, that's gonna overload them. And if I do this thing now, they're gonna be really busy, but they're probably not gonna learn anything if I do this thing.
[00:25:53] Carl Hendricks: Now they're gonna not like it in the short term, but they're absolutely gonna know it in the long term. So I think if you can give furnished teachers with that knowledge of how learning happens of you know, the basic what Sweller calls cognitive architecture, you're putting them in a position where they're you know, they're making decisions in the moment that hopefully is gonna lead to better long-term learning outcomes.
[00:26:19] Gene Tavernetti: Well, you know, I, my, my metaphor for the last few months has been your statement about no new songs, no new stories. And again, it gets back to what this premier player said. You might have, I might have five options. Well, if you're not a premier player, your options are unlimited. You don't know what to do.
[00:26:38] Gene Tavernetti: And I think that, you know, it gets back to what you're saying is this research provides the constraints. It doesn't provide the answers to your problems, but it gives you some constraints to make better decisions.
[00:26:49] Carl Hendricks: yeah, that's exactly right, gene. And that's the hard thing because there's a sort of a paradox there where you're kind of saying you are free to make decisions, but here you also have these constraints and those constraints in the same way as I don't know, you know, when Lenon and McCartney all, they had, what, you know, as Bob Dylan said, you know, three chords and the truth, he actually nicked it from a country singer who, whose name escapes me.
[00:27:15] Carl Hendricks: But you know, when you just have this to work with, you've gotta even be more creative. And that's, I think the, this is, I think where we're in a kind of desert of I mean, maybe I'm just old gene, but I don't see any music today that is, I feel like I. We're, and you know, 50 years on from the sixties that we'll be saying.
[00:27:33] Carl Hendricks: Yeah, though, you know, even when I was a kid, you know, Nirvana, I remember that coming out or I remember the, and that's certainly no new stories. That's just a rehash of other stuff. But it was, had this energy, it had, you know, a vitality to it. I don't see much around today that I think is I just think everything is atomized.
[00:27:52] Carl Hendricks: Everything's too easy. It's too easy to make music now. It's too easy to, there's no constraint on it. There's no cost to it. You know, you had to learn the chords, you had to learn the technique. You had to be able to write the songs. You had to be able to you know, communicate meaning through lyrics in a song.
[00:28:09] Carl Hendricks: It is a real that's why bands were so prized. 'cause it was such a rare talent. And now you it doesn't cost you anything really to do that now. So you didn't earn it. You didn't have to, you didn't have to struggle to get there. So therefore there's no you know, there's no prize on it.
[00:28:26] Carl Hendricks: And yeah, it's a brilliant point you make that tension between constraints and freedom is probably where, you know, great practice is.
[00:28:35] Gene Tavernetti: You know, maybe when we. Are hiring teachers who are musicians, we wanna ask, you know, were you just a cover band? Because now they could go in and they could imitate, because I think that's one of the another paradox, you know, when we talk about teachers here in the us, we need to teach 'em, as, you know, we treat 'em as professionals and we need to, you know, yes, we need to treat 'em as professionals, but we need to realize that they are on a learning curve and they don't know everything yet.
[00:29:04] Gene Tavernetti: And I can tell you, I don't know how you were as an individual, but for me, if somebody said, here's your script, now go teach I'd have choked on it a little bit. And then, you know, you know what I put in my books, some scripts, you know, you do this, but but that allows you to learn it.
[00:29:21] Gene Tavernetti: You know, that, that allows you to learn it.
[00:29:24] Carl Hendricks: So that's the challenge, isn't it, Jane? Because that's one of the things that teachers will just, you know, that and planning their own lessons. And I'm now Robert Pio. I. I saw him, he gave a talk at the event I was at, and he was basically making a claim that, you know, banging the drum, that teachers shouldn't really be planning their own curriculum or planning their own lessons.
[00:29:45] Carl Hendricks: And I think for any teacher out there you hear that and you go, oh, I don't like that. But actually when you see really brilliantly designed curricula and properly sequenced and, you know, it's an art and it's a very specific skill and I don't think, you know, most teachers have that.
[00:30:03] Carl Hendricks: But to go back to your analogy of music as well, like, I think there's an element to it where you can say, here's a song, here's a standard. Do your own improvised version of it. But you've got something to kind of base yourself on. And what we're asking te you know, so if you give teachers, well today you have five lessons.
[00:30:22] Carl Hendricks: So here's here's, here comes the sun. Here is strawberry Fields forever. Here's, well, I won't make them all Beatles song, but here's painted black. Here's you know, and feel free to, to, you know, go off script, but you want to hit that course and you want to, you know, this is the riff you know, that's you wanna hit.
[00:30:40] Carl Hendricks: Whereas what we're asking teachers to do is for the go into their classrooms every day and write those songs themselves. And that's an impossibility.
[00:30:48] Gene Tavernetti: Yeah. Yeah. I think, you know, my work over the last you know, couple decades has been helping teachers design lessons that, you know, design lessons and deliver lessons with tips on both. But now I've realized that you know, you can have AI write you a lesson. And so now what I wanna do, and I've been looking for somebody, you know, with the knowledge you know of how to use ai.
[00:31:11] Gene Tavernetti: I've sent them PDFs of my book and said, okay, now let's create something and or treat let teachers know you don't have to create this. Take a look at your AI created lesson, but here's a checklist you need to go through. You know, do they have, you know, are these principles embedded? Where are you gonna ask your questions?
[00:31:31] Gene Tavernetti: Where are you know, what are the questions you're gonna ask that, et cetera, et cetera. It doesn't eliminate it but it doesn't kill 'em, you know? 'cause they gotta do, you know, all these lessons all the time.
[00:31:41] Carl Hendricks: Have you read Daisy Kris wrote a brilliant blog on justice about this idea of human in the loop. You know, where and I was thinking a good metaphor for this is, you know, like a cleaning solution. I. If it's a hundred percent alcohol, it's no good 'cause the alcohol evaporates. But if it's 80%, so you have this weird paradox where 80% is more effective than a hundred percent.
[00:32:05] Carl Hendricks: And so the similar with ai, where a hundred percent AI is really not good, but if you have exactly what you just said, maybe 80% and then the 20% is what the human does where they may be filter it through an algorithm or checklist or you know, and that's, you know, the phrase is human in the loop. And I think, yeah, that's gonna be you know, you can certainly see an algorithm where you can feed in a hundred papers on retrieval and you know, your book and other books and then go, okay, make me a sequence of five lessons on the causes of World War I give me retrieval into leaving, you know, deliberate practice opportunities.
[00:32:45] Carl Hendricks: And then you can. You've got the basic you know, you've got the chords, you've got the melody, you've got the lyrics, you know, speed it up or slow it down if you want to, you know, maybe have a little saxophone solo in there if you want, but, you know, keep the, you got the basic song there.
[00:33:02] Carl Hendricks: And I think we'll see that Gene, because I think you know it's just gonna be a question of efficiency and effectiveness. And it's just not a, I mean, writing curricula and designing instruction is a really, you know, really hard thing to do. And if you can, you know, let's say teaching is curriculum instruction and assessment.
[00:33:21] Carl Hendricks: If you could cut out the admin and the planning and the marking and just say to teachers, okay the promise we're gonna give you is. Just do what you love doing. You know, interacting with kids, seeing them learn, helping them along the socio-emotional aspect of it. You know, we don't want you to waste all your energy market books that they never even look at anyway or planning lessons where they don't even they don't look at the learning objective that you've carefully crafted or the or the, you know, the long lesson plans that you keep writing, which are, you know, a waste of time.
[00:33:52] Carl Hendricks: So, yeah I could definitely see us in five, 10 years time being in, in a different world. (Ad Section)
[00:34:00] Gene Tavernetti: With respect to writing lessons. You know, one of, one of the things that I found when I started doing this consulting and going to various schools is that teachers are not trained in teacher directed instruction or explicit instruction. And but there's a huge assumption as they can do it.
[00:34:22] Gene Tavernetti: You know, you'll have textbooks that will give them a lesson and then they'll say if the students can't do it at this point, teach it explicit lesson as your last resort. And with the assumption that they're going to do it well. And I don't know I haven't been everywhere, but everywhere that I've worked, there's an assumption.
[00:34:44] Gene Tavernetti: I know how to do explicit instruction. I know, I do. We do. You do. And then you know what it's not done effectively at all. And we can even leave out all the things that you've talked about so far with regards to working memory, cognitive load. I mean, n none of that is in there, but there's no place to put it because there's no dare there.
[00:35:07] Gene Tavernetti: The lessons are so in, in ineffective. Is that is that an issue in the uk? Are they taught how to do explicit lessons?
[00:35:17] Carl Hendricks: No, and this is I mean, it's definitely changed in the last 10 years in the uk. There's been a a lot more, awareness, I think maybe of the science of learning and phonics and different things. But it certainly, it's certainly not you know, it's a universal thing that most teachers are trained at ed departments universities.
[00:35:37] Carl Hendricks: And there's a lot of research that shows that cognitive science is really not a feature of education departments. It's taught in many other departments ahead of education, which is a bizarre thing. You know, that you have one department who trains teachers and then another department in the same university studying memory, learning, retrieval, you know, instruction and they never cross over.
[00:36:02] Carl Hendricks: There's no, you know, and the guys training, the teachers are often, you know, philosophers or, you know, and kind of third rate philosophers at that. You know, advocating, which would, you know, in, in a lot of cases, just like sociology, you know, and kind of, thinly veiled activism. And I think that teachers should have a basics on on, you know, the functions of the brain, how learning happens, and also just the hard fought victories in instructional design.
[00:36:33] Carl Hendricks: You know, certainly for, you know, you mentioned the reading wars. I mean, I think that's a fairly, there's a broad consensus now even from the whole language advocates that it it's not all systematic synthetic phonics, but phonics is a huge part of it. And that wasn't the case for a long time. So, you know, it's, you know, why has that not been a part of teacher training? And. Even like say, take the Dunsky work on study skills from, you know, 10, you know, 10, 15 years ago. Like that, rereading and highlighting stuff's not a good way to study. You want to test yourself in the short term.
[00:37:08] Carl Hendricks: You want those desirable difficulties. It's just not known, you know, it's not known by students. It's not known by teaching staff. I'm, you know, and I'm constantly shocked at you just assume people know stuff, and particularly if they're a teacher, if they're, you know, if their job is to get kids to remember stuff and there's no knowledge of memory or how it functions and it's you know, again, it's one of those things where we'll be a profession, truly when we are thinking about those things at a much deeper level.
[00:37:42] Gene Tavernetti: You know, you mentioned I think continuing on with that thought you mentioned desirable difficulties. Another thing that we encounter in training people, like say we're working with a new district right now, and I think the administration we're starting our training with the administration, but I think, excuse me, very wisely, they invited the teacher's union in to hear everything that, that we're talking about.
[00:38:11] Gene Tavernetti: So after a couple sessions I talked to the head of the teacher's union and I said, what do you think about this? You know, our training? And he goes, oh man, this is, you know, this is really good stuff. I said, great. What do you think? How's the, how's your folks going to like it? How are the teachers gonna take it?
[00:38:30] Gene Tavernetti: And he said, the big problem is you're using a lot of terms. That they're familiar with, and they will say, we already do that. And I, and when you said desirable difficulties, boy, there's another term that is, you know, we think we know what somebody else is talking about, but no, that there's not desirable difficulties.
[00:38:52] Gene Tavernetti: It's like we're not telling the kids,
[00:38:54] Carl Hendricks: Yeah.
[00:38:55] Gene Tavernetti: We're not doing any teaching. We're
[00:38:56] Carl Hendricks: Just difficulties. Not the desirable bit, but just difficulties.
[00:39:00] Gene Tavernetti: Yeah. Yeah. It's just difficulties. Well, let me ask you something that is you've been, you've kind of been around the world talking to people
[00:39:09] Gene Tavernetti: And we know that students are the same.
[00:39:13] Gene Tavernetti: But when we take a look at you know, systems, at the classroom level, is the classroom level different? Are there qualitatively different things going on at that level? Because, you know, and because I know that I've talked to people from the uk, man you have a standardized curriculum. We can't get a district to agree on what we're gonna do.
[00:39:34] Gene Tavernetti: But so, so at the classroom level is, does everything kind of even out.
[00:39:39] Carl Hendricks: that's a really great question, Jane. I think that there are cultural, like within a school there, there's a culture within a school that's the first thing you notice. Where if the culture in the school is. Respectful is, you know, you don't need to have silent corridors or, you know, scripted lessons and all that stuff.
[00:39:59] Carl Hendricks: But if there's a general sense of decorum of you know, kind of, purpose towards learning you can be pretty much sure that there's learning happening. When you go to a school where there's, you just sense it when you get in the door that it's kind of, yeah, this is like, this is this boat is rocking.
[00:40:21] Carl Hendricks: It's not steady. Then, so there's the cultural things. But I would say that in, in you know, we, to, to your point that. We're more similar than different in how we learn. And if that were not true, then we would not be unable to teach a class of 30 kids if we were so unique and different, which we are, of course, every child is different and unique and special.
[00:40:45] Carl Hendricks: But there's a convergence and the vast majority of kids process information, store information, retrieve it, encoded in the same way, like nutrition. Everyone has preferences. Everyone, you know, kids like pizza, some like mushroom, you know, blah, blah, blah. But at a, kind of, at a general level, if you eat a lot of sugar, 99% of people are the, there's something that's gonna happen to you if you eat a lot of salad, a different thing's gonna happen to you on average over a long period of time.
[00:41:22] Carl Hendricks: Yes, there are people with allergies. We should meet their needs and we should, likewise with the curriculum in schools, we should attend to kids with special needs. Absolutely. And by the way, I think we are talking about direct instruction. In my experience, that works even better with kids who have special education needs.
[00:41:41] Carl Hendricks: The clarity of it, the boundaries you know, often work. So I think that the conditions of most classrooms are pretty similar other than, you know, behavior. But if a school doesn't have a grip on, on the culture, the wider culture of learning, then I think for teachers, they're often fighting a, an uphill battle before they even get in the classroom.
[00:42:03] Gene Tavernetti: So if you're gonna make teachers' lives better, you're, if you are making teachers' lives better. So what what would you tell them to stop doing? What would you tell them to start doing? That they would be not easy maybe, but simple.
[00:42:19] Carl Hendricks: Number one you shouldn't be working harder than the kids. So, Dylan, William, who's really I think an authority on everything, but particularly he's, he has an uncanny ability to phrase things in a way that's Dan William is like that too. And he has this wonderful phrase, feedback should be more work for the recipient than the donor.
[00:42:42] Carl Hendricks: And I think that's, that'd be the first thing. So if you're gonna give any kind of feedback to students, you better be sure that they're acting upon it, that your effort wasn't wasted. And that means actually even building in time for them to do it. So if you mark a set of 30 books and you've written down.
[00:42:59] Carl Hendricks: Please improve this, or please rewrite this paragraph, or please redo this. You wanna absolutely make sure that they're gonna do it maybe even in front of you. Okay, here's your books back. You've got 30 minutes to go over the mistakes and or rewrite this paragraph or improve it in some way.
[00:43:15] Carl Hendricks: Whereas what most teachers do is they spend an hour, two hours marking books. They give it back to the kids. The kids just glance at the grade and then they move on. And then two weeks later, the teacher says to the kid, I just told you that two weeks ago, why didn't you? Well, they didn't look at the feedback or they didn't act upon it.
[00:43:31] Carl Hendricks: I think number two, I would say you don't need to plan three lessons for every lesson like I did when I started out where well, I was told that each learner has different learning styles. You should really think about the kind of misconceptions that kids could. So if you're teaching a concept.
[00:43:46] Carl Hendricks: Don't just think about getting it right. Think about how kids can get it wrong and have a really, you know, that's a hallmark of really effective teachers. Don't just as Lee Mann says, they don't just know the content. They know it in several ways. So they know this scene that they're about to teach.
[00:44:00] Carl Hendricks: They know about the, you know, this scene in Macbeth, but they have in their head five or six mis misconceptions that a 14-year-old will have. That's something that a, that an actor doesn't have. That's something that a, an academic doesn't have. That's a really a teacher specific skill. You know, Schumann calls it pedagogical content knowledge.
[00:44:18] Carl Hendricks: You really understand how kids can get it wrong and have those misconceptions going into your teaching where you can identify them and change them. I would say if they're, if there, you know, if there's one lever that you can pull and get good at, and I've been talking a lot about this recently, it's probably checking for understanding.
[00:44:34] Carl Hendricks: There's one thing you can do in a classroom. You want to. Get that data often, get it early, consistently throughout a lesson. So let's say you're teaching for an hour. You don't wanna find out on 45 minutes that they've completely misunderstood the thing you've been working on for 45 minutes. You want to get snapshots of that as you're going along.
[00:44:56] Carl Hendricks: And you want to get some you know, start off the lesson. What did we talk about last lesson and how does that link to this? What's the concept we wanna bring forward into this lesson? Write down three things. Then you want to do some, you know, basic fact checking as you're going along. What did I just say?
[00:45:16] Carl Hendricks: Explain it to your partner. Explain it to yourself. Explain it to me. And then leading up to much more richer analytical questions where they're taking the knowledge you've taught them and kind of using and mixing it. But that thing of just constantly getting kids. To think about their thinking and think about, okay, do I know this?
[00:45:33] Carl Hendricks: Do I get this? And if you imagine, you know, you know, one thing I've been thinking about recently, Jean, is this idea of like, in sport, like coaches talk about phases. I notice this a lot, that they don't talk about the game as, you know, one thing they talk about, there's a certain phase in the game and it might be an offensive phase, it might be a defensive phase, it might be the phase after the opposition.
[00:45:58] Carl Hendricks: They've just scored a goal and there's a different set of objectives there. But if you think about a 20 minute phase in lesson, I've been trying to model this for teachers where go, okay, here's what I used to do. Here's the lesson, kids, this is the topic. I'd explain it for five minutes and then I go, right, take out your notebook.
[00:46:16] Carl Hendricks: They start making notes. Everyone busy me talking, explaining stuff. Great. 50 minutes into the lesson. Okay, now I'm gonna show you how to write this paragraph. So watch the board. You do this first, and then you do this and you know, you know the answer. Then you do this, you know, everyone okay with that?
[00:46:29] Carl Hendricks: Yeah. Yeah. I can do it. And then maybe, you know, 40 minutes ago, right now, you have to do it yourself. Okay? Do it yourself. I told you what to do, you do it yourself. And then maybe I just at that point, I'm going, okay, everyone happy with that? Everyone? Okay. Any questions? If you think about that phase of a 20 minute, 30 minute phase in a lesson versus the guy who's or the girl who's doing, or the teacher who's doing.
[00:46:53] Carl Hendricks: Maybe 20 snapshots of getting really rich data from the students. What do you know? How do you know it? What do you not know? What do you, what are your misconceptions that teacher is, they're able to adapt. They have the agility to go, okay. Right. Well, it's clear to me that you don't quite get this thing.
[00:47:11] Carl Hendricks: So we're gonna come back to that. I've just, I've scanned the room. I've asked you a question. You've shown me on many whiteboards. You've shown me on finger voting. I'm gonna come back to that point. 'cause I don't feel that we, you know, we cover that. So get good at checking for understanding.
[00:47:24] Carl Hendricks: Have an understanding of how the brain learns. Make sure the kids are working, that they're thinking hard in your lesson and get a culture going of, we have a go at things. The right answer doesn't matter. Grades don't matter. What matters is effort and I. Genuinely having a go and having your the ability to be wrong, the ability to contribute.
[00:47:51] Carl Hendricks: And again, that's a kind of cultural thing. So I would say those things initially.
[00:47:57] Gene Tavernetti: That's good advice that, that's good advice. And at this point, Carl, I'm gonna have, I'm gonna ask you, do you have a question for me?
[00:48:07] Carl Hendricks: Yeah. I do have a question for you, Jean. I was wondering, you know, you were talking there about di direct instruction and this idea of no new stories. What would you say, you know, when you first started teaching, what are the things that you noticed or what are the things that you notice now that you would say are the big changes?
[00:48:24] Carl Hendricks: And I, and let split the question to two parts. So what are the things that you would say in 2025, these things are better? Than when I was teaching. And then secondly, which things now would you say are worse
[00:48:38] Gene Tavernetti: not for me personally, but as I see it, as I'm working with
[00:48:41] Carl Hendricks: as you.
[00:48:41] Gene Tavernetti: Okay. Okay. So, so what I see that is worse and is that what I mentioned earlier, the idea of what explicit instruction looks like. And again, and I'll give you an example of where that manifests in, in, in in the United States.
[00:49:00] Gene Tavernetti: Well, a couple administrations ago, a couple presidential administrations ago, we were working to develop a common set of standards across the country. And they weren't, you know, it wasn't really prescriptive, but just the idea that, you know, what, if you get, if you graduate from high school in Oklahoma, you learn the same stuff as if you'd have been in California or Florida or wherever.
[00:49:26] Gene Tavernetti: And so, but with that, also with that was some commentary that we want kids to be doing more thinking on the, you know, more critical thinking. And do you know what the message came out of that is that we're not teaching anymore. We had special ed teachers saying, oh, we've got these new standards. We're not even supposed to teach the kids anymore. So, that has we recovered a little bit from that because they realized, well, you know what, you gotta teach these kids. But it has gotten worse because of lessons that you can get AI generated lessons. You can get you know, we have a multitude of technology platforms that, you know, digital platforms for the teachers to use that after Covid, many classrooms never went back to teacher directed instruction.
[00:50:23] Gene Tavernetti: You know, so much is driven by the digital platforms and the companies that sell them, that say, you know what, if you're gonna, if this is gonna be effective for you, your third graders have to be on this for 30 minutes a day. You know, but not only in English, in math as well and so, or I think that's, you know, where things have gotten worse.
[00:50:45] Gene Tavernetti: The idea of instruction it in retrospect, it was never really that great as I said, people said, oh, we're doing explicit instruction. Yeah, you are, but not well, I. so I think it's just deteriorated. I think I know that the the licensing programs in the universities are still, they're not training people per se, but they're educating them in the manner in which you said, we learn about the sociology, we learn about second language learners.
[00:51:18] Gene Tavernetti: We learn about all of these things, but we don't learn how to implement programs that will impact those things. So, so we're fighting that and we'll see where we're going now as we're recording this today. We just eliminated our department of education, which for us meant so much so many supplemental funds to those impoverished schools.
[00:51:46] Gene Tavernetti: That, that hired support teachers, support staff to try to mitigate some of those, some of the issues, you know, brought on with poverty. So I don't know. I don't know where we're going. But having said that, I think the biggest thing that we can do is that every teacher as a baseline is proficient in explicit instruction.
[00:52:10] Gene Tavernetti: Before we, you know, I, I joke about, you know, I don't know if you're a golfer, but okay, so you'll understand this. So I went into a secondhand sporting goods store, and the sign on the door said, you don't need thousand dollar clubs if you have a $200 swing. And that's what I think about.
[00:52:31] Gene Tavernetti: You know, we have kids that aren't doing well. What's the first thing we do? Well, let's assess 'em for intervention. Oh, we, oh okay. Well, they're not doing well in intervention. Maybe we need a new program for inter, you know, so, but wait a second. Let's take a look at, you know, what we call tier one, just that initial instruction.
[00:52:47] Gene Tavernetti: So, so I think that's where we've been, that's where we are. And a lot of people have to die before I'm in charge, Carl. But that's what I would that's what I would want for everybody,
[00:52:59] Carl Hendricks: That's a great phrase. You don't need a thousand dollars Club one, two. $200 swing. Yeah, it's
[00:53:05] Gene Tavernetti: you know?
[00:53:07] Carl Hendricks: Yeah. Yeah. That's, that, that's that's the title of your next book, gene.
[00:53:11] Gene Tavernetti: No, you know what the title of my next book is? N of one. N of one. Because I'm gonna satisfy me. You know? This is and I don't know how you are Carl, but I am a, I'm a staff member that I'm in a pd. When I was on staff, I'd be in the back with my arms folded. I.
[00:53:31] Gene Tavernetti: You're not gonna teach me anything. So if I can get me, if I can turn me, then I can turn anybody.
[00:53:38] Carl Hendricks: Always the same. Yeah, for sure. And, you know, not, I sat through some truly awful stuff, so sometimes it was warranted, but yeah.
[00:53:47] Gene Tavernetti: Yeah.
[00:53:48] Carl Hendricks: sometimes not
[00:53:50] Gene Tavernetti: Carl, it has been a pleasure and and hang on for one second. I'm gonna say goodbye. But you know what, been looking forward to this for a long time. So thank you very much.
[00:54:00] Carl Hendricks: A real joy to talk to you Jean. Really interesting conversation.
[00:54:07] Gene Tavernetti: If you're enjoying these podcasts, tell a friend. Also, please leave a 5 star rating on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. You can follow me on BlueSky at gTabernetti, on Twitter, x at gTabernetti, and you can learn more about me and the work I do at my website, BlueSky. Tesscg. com, that's T E S S C G dot com, where you will also find information about ordering my books, Teach Fast, Focus Adaptable Structure Teaching, and Maximizing the Impact of Coaching Cycles.
[00:54:44] Gene Tavernetti: Talk to you soon