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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.
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
works.
My guest today is Dr. Jared Cooney Hoba.
Jared is a neuroscientist, educator and bestselling author who specializes in human learning and brain development.
He is the creator of the Learning Blueprint and International Award-Winning program, helping educators and students understand how learning actually works.
He is the author of six books, has published over 50 research articles.
His work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, the Economist, Harvard Business Review and ABC's Catalyst.
Jared currently serves as a director of LME Global, an organization dedicated to bringing cutting edge brain and behavioral science to educators, students, and communities.
To learn more about his international award-winning science of learning programs, visit lme global.com.
Jared and I talk about his new book, the Digital Delusion, as well as all and other things that relate to how we learn.
I think you're gonna like this one.
Gene Tavernetti: Hello, Jared.
Welcome to Better Teaching Only stuff that works.
Jared Horvath: Thanks Jean.
It's lovely to be here.
Gene Tavernetti: Oh, I am so excited to talk to you.
So many things to talk about with you.
The fact that you are, that you originally started in the US and now you're in Australia, and kind of interested in how some differences are in the two systems.
But before we talk about the differences, let's just kind of talk about what the work is that you do with schools.
Jared Horvath: Yeah, so I am a a teacher turned neuroscientist.
So teaching is all I ever wanted to do.
So my passion is teaching its students, it's working with them.
I became a neuroscientist strictly because that was, I was working during the decade of the brain and so there was just so much talk about the brain in books and population and publications and everyone's, ah, brain this.
So I thought, man, that sounds awesome.
I'd love to go learn that.
And I thought that would be like a year of my life.
I'll learn the brain, I'll bring.
Back to my classroom.
I'll say, Hey, here's how this all works.
But that has ballooned into a long time.
Almost two decades now.
I've been in academia doing neuroscience.
But I'm lucky enough all I do now is what's called basically the science of learning.
So any field that concerns learning, psych, neuro ai, behavioral economics, you name it.
My job has been to synthesize that and then I get to bring that back to teachers and students and say, here's what this all means.
Here's the useful stuff.
Here's the nonsense.
Here's what you can think.
Here's the stuff you can probably forget.
My job I call it a translator.
I'm lucky to be the bridge between academic research and practical practice on the ground in schools, which is best place.
I love it.
I love what I do.
Gene Tavernetti: Is there any difference in the translation you do between teachers of primary kids and elementary versus secondary?
Jared Horvath: Yeah, no believe it or not, once you get to the practicalities in terms of pedagogy, that's where things are gonna change, really, between ages.
But where I sit at the level of learning, all human beings learn exactly the same.
Once you're around five years old, your biology kind of shifts into what we're gonna call a patterned mode.
And from that point on, learning is learning for everyone.
I don't care if you're 80, I don't care if you're eight.
No one has a different memory system, no one has a different attention system.
Now, by all means.
How we play within each system might change, but the process of learning itself will never change.
So I always kinda say it the same as this.
We all digest the same way.
No one has a problem with that.
Why?
Because it's self-evident.
There's no human being who has three stomachs and chew cud like a cow.
There's no human being who spits acid and obs absorbs nutrients through their skin.
All human beings have the same digestive system.
It makes us human.
Now, by all means, what we can put in, it might change.
Some people can do gluten, some can't.
That's pedagogy.
Some people might need extra support.
Like if you lose your esophagus due to cancer, we might have to support food traveling through there.
That's called scaffolding, but the process by which digestion occurs the same for everyone.
So it's the same for learning.
So I'm lucky enough to be in that sweet spot where I say, if we're gonna talk, learning, doesn't matter if you're dealing with young kids, old adults, secondary, primary, tertiary, it's all gonna be the same.
Gene Tavernetti: Okay, let me make a, an inference.
Yeah.
So, adult learning theory.
Thoughts about
Jared Horvath: adult learning theory?
You see, an adult learning theory basically just says you have stronger self-regulated learning skills.
The difference between adult learning theory and student learning theory is largely more a theory on pedagogy on how do I have to teach you to do this stuff?
So it says learning theory, but I don't.
I've never really seen it align with learning so much as I've seen with teaching.
But realistically, you could say as you get older, you develop the ability to move yourself through the process a little bit easier.
But again, that doesn't change the process.
As you get older you develop the ability to drive your car a little bit better, doesn't mean your car is any bit different.
So it's just a skills based thing passed there.
Gene Tavernetti: Well, you said, you know, you, drive things a little bit differently.
I think one of the things that happens when you're an adult is you drive yourself out of the room, is that you're just, you just don't wanna put up with this anymore.
I think you, I think they vote with their feet a lot more than the students just vote.
Being passive.
So it's so, okay.
So, what's the most important thing?
The most important thing when you're working with teachers, if you leave them with one thing that you hammer on, it's a topic.
Every time, no matter why they brought you in, what's the one topic that you talk about every time with folks?
We
Jared Horvath: always end on EdTech.
Somehow.
You always end up in the hole.
That is EdTech.
Digital technology and learning because everyone assumes that these tools are the savior.
For education.
So it doesn't matter.
You bring me, you want to talk about surface learning somehow someone's gonna bring up a question on tech.
You wanna talk about creativity, someone is gonna bring up tech.
So that seems to be the one kind of, unfortunately thread that ties everything together these days,
Gene Tavernetti: people.
Okay, so, I wanna talk about your new book digital Delusion.
And I wanna talk about it quite a bit but be, but before we get there, before you wrote this book, were you in schools And just seeing like, wait a second, what the world's going on here.
Did you see a decline?
Did you see a deterioration or,
Jared Horvath: no?
So I, since I've been in schools, I just, when you understand how learning works.
It becomes painfully obvious why digital technology just isn't a learning tool.
It's a production tool.
It's there to help you do things.
It's not there to help you learn how to do things.
And so for me, it was just always obvious and I think it was right around 2015, I was still living in Australia.
Then it was just, you'd see it more and more, but people were starting to ask questions.
That was when the teachers, more than anything else, were starting to ask our principal makes us use computers, but I don't think my kids are learning as much.
Is that true?
And you'd be like, yeah, and here's why.
And here's what's going on.
And then realistically, it was COVID that just kind of broke the camel's back.
Where now everyone I assumed would've caught dawn, this ain't good for learning.
But then COVID ended, schools went back and instead of ditching the bandaid, remember tech during COVID was just supposed to be a salve.
It was there just to help us over this time.
Nope.
Schools kept it and they said, oh, let's keep doing that.
And so that's when I started to really.
Have to blow these theories up and say, all right, someone's gotta say something.
Someone's gotta do something here.
Gene Tavernetti: But, okay.
So it'll be interesting how this works.
Before we get into the tech.
I'm interested in your thoughts about why the bottleneck of, you said you're a translator.
Jared Horvath: Yeah.
Yeah.
Gene Tavernetti: What's the bottleneck of getting this research translated to folks at a massive scale?
It is,
Jared Horvath: I don't think most people in either field understand or care that the other field exists.
So if you're talking about researchers.
No researcher talks to teachers.
Why?
Because they think I've been to a classroom.
I know teaching, I'm good.
No teacher talks to a researcher.
Why?
Because they say I'm on the ground every day.
I do research all day every day with my students.
I don't need it.
It's just it.
There's a lack of recognition that we can actually learn from another field and make our own practice useful.
The few who recognize it, they love it and they try and spread the message, but realistically, it's.
I'm a teacher, I'm a researcher, near the two shall meet.
And I'm, I recognize and I understand, it doesn't phase me.
We just try our best to try and bridge it.
Gene Tavernetti: You have a trick.
You have a, you have a trick beyond humor.
That, that's one of the things that I've noticed when I've seen you on your YouTube and stuff, you don't shy away from
Jared Horvath: I'll say what needs to be said.
No, I think the number one trick is.
I have higher degrees in both fields, education and neuro.
So I speak jargon for both.
So it's just a matter of who's my audience.
Like when I'm talking to teachers, I know how to say things in a way that teachers understand it.
But when I'm talking to neuroscientists, I know how to say things in a way that they will understand it.
And that only came with experience.
That only came with taking the time to learn both fields and actually lock it.
Both of those fields down.
And so what most people will see, all, most of my YouTube and stuff that's gonna be towards teachers.
So everyone assumes you must be a apologies for the French, the shitty scientist.
It's like, no.
If you ever see me at a science conference, I can talk the ear off a scientist as well.
I just, you'll never see that 'cause you don't need to see that.
It's about being very clear on what an audience needs and just doing that basically.
Gene Tavernetti: to piggyback on that a little bit, I think what teachers want is from a, somebody presenting content is that they know you understand their world.
Jared Horvath: Yeah,
Gene Tavernetti: I mean, I always said, I, boy, I hope I'm not the best teacher
Jared Horvath: in this.
I hope y all can do, and that's why I say, whenever I work with teachers, the first thing I'll say is, do not let me tell you how to teach.
We are gonna talk about learning.
But believe it or not, knowing how people learn and knowing how to walk people through that process are two very different things.
You all are experts when it comes to teaching.
We are gonna talk learning today, but because we're talking, learning, do not let me talk teaching.
If I ever tell you, because the brain does this, you better teach like this.
Throw an egg at me, man.
Get me off the stage.
That's nonsense.
So long as we maintain and respect each other's expertise, and I know that's a, that's the other thing that kind of does my head in.
A lot of researchers really believe the idea that those who can't do teach that teaching is somehow some inborn skill that everyone has, but only the lesser need to really apply.
And it's like, dude, no it's skill like everything else.
And just like anything, the more you practice it, the better you're gonna get at it.
And so I like, there's a researcher when I was growing up.
Named John Medina and he wrote a book called Brain Rules, which is still interesting book.
I don't love it, but it's cute.
And one of his ideas was the brain.
He's a neuroscientist.
The brain gets good chemicals when you exercise.
And so his take home for teachers was, therefore, you should get rid of all the chairs in your class and give kids yoga exercise balls to sit on instead.
I am like dude spoken, like a man who has never been in a classroom with 30 young kids before.
You do not give young kids bouncy balls and expect them to somehow magically learn that's gonna disrupt the entire flow.
And that's what I think a lot of researchers just don't know what it's like to be in a classroom.
And when I was a teacher myself, I would've hated if somebody came in and told me how to teach who wasn't themselves a teacher.
So I try and draw a very hard line between those two.
Gene Tavernetti: That's funny.
The worst thing that I saw based on that that Medina anecdote Yeah.
Was somebody thought it would be a good idea to have the kids walk around the track at the same time.
As they were learning.
Because if a little movement was good, just think how much better this is.
This is gonna be So, it is interesting the things that, that we pick up on.
One of the things, again I wanna get to your book because I'm really interested in that, but one of the things I wanna ask you first is the differences that you found in the different school systems, the different countries.
Yeah, that you've worked in.
Jared Horvath: So I am, I'm back in the US now, which is good.
So I was in Australia for 12 years back here now.
So I get to see what's going on here now.
'cause it was different than when I left.
It was still a different system.
it's funny if I, the best way I can boil this down is here.
If you had to say, where do you wanna send your kid for a K through 12 education?
I say Australia, if you ask me where's the best place to send your kid to university, the United States.
I think we excel at higher ed here in Incre, like we do higher ed.
Right.
Basically.
Undergrad is discovery.
It doesn't really matter what you get your undergrad in, whatever, so long as you have an undergrad, you can apply to any grad school you want.
The idea being that from 18 to 22, you don't know yourself well enough to make big decisions.
So learn, figure it out.
And then when you're 25 and you say, time to go back, we assume you now have made a decision.
Australia.
If you go to university, you have to major at 18.
So I'd have kids who are 18 years old who are now on the track to becoming clinical psychologists.
And I'm like, you've never, you don't even know anything yet.
You've never even cried yet in your life.
What do you how can you make this decision now?
But that's how it works.
But flip it K through 12 in the us.
Is depending, I guess, on the system you're in, it's just very disjointed.
There is almost no unity whatsoever.
If you go to school in Oklahoma, you might be doing something totally different than someone who goes to school in New York or someone who goes to school in Texas.
Whereas in Australia there's national and state curriculum and most of 'em are very well aligned.
So you know, you're gonna get.
A general K through 12 education similar to everyone else, which is gonna help you build unity of vision, of understanding, which builds a culture.
That's how you build an Australian culture.
But here, it's, it is just so disjointed.
I, so I'll go into different schools and I'm like I thought you guys were doing this.
They're like, no, that's a school down the street.
We're doing this.
Okay.
It's just all so chop and change,
Gene Tavernetti: you know?
I'm just gonna imagine that I know something and then you can tell me that I'm absolutely wrong, but I have this vision of Australians being very independent folks.
And so here's what I'm gonna go with my question, and I'm gonna have Helen Reynolds back.
I don't know if you know Helen.
No.
She was from the, she was from the uk and she, came and she taught in the United States for seven years before she retired, seven or eight years.
And I asked her about the difference you know, coming to the US Yeah.
And she said, I always tell my friends imagine when you're talking to somebody from the US that they're just thinking.
You can't make me do that.
Yeah, that's probably And so is that doesn't happen in the Australian schools?
No.
If you want to
Jared Horvath: talk independence, the US is way more independent.
Australia is fiercely loyal to Australia.
But because of that, they have what's called tall poppy syndrome.
Basically anyone who jumps outside of the norm, they'll cut that poppy down.
They just like uniformity basically.
Okay.
But they do it from each other.
I was lucky enough, so like if you're in Australia, there's a reason why so many Australian, like if you're a famous Australian actor, you no longer work in Australia.
You go to the US to work because once you get too big in any field there they will cut you down.
They don't like you anymore.
So you're, but I'm lucky enough, if you're an outsider, you can.
So as an American coming in, if I was on a radio show, no one would make fun of me.
They'd be like, that was cool.
That's what an American does.
You go on the radio, but if you were local, you go on the radio, they're like, who do you think you are?
Special.
So that's, they're much more unified like that.
Oh,
Gene Tavernetti: okay.
so do you have any hope for us, or is it just gonna be who we are?
You know, I kind of described it this way.
You know, I think that we are never gonna have a school system, a uniform school system.
We will have a system of schools.
Jared Horvath: that's a great way to put it.
the way I see it is we're the same as everyone else.
Our average is the same.
We just have a much wider bell curve is we, some things are way over here, some things are way over here.
But averaged all together, we're no different than any other country.
We just have a lot more disparity in breadth in the kind of things like the fact that we have public systems, religious systems, private systems charter systems that can still get funded.
We just have more choices.
People can do what they want to do here and they're gonna do it their way.
And so it's so oddly enough, it doesn't phase me, I don't think.
I mean, I'm not gonna disparage where I'm at now.
I, some systems are just poor.
They're just not doing good work at all because they're focused on the wrong stuff.
Yeah.
And I think that's a holdover from COVID is, here's an interesting kind of data point.
I was talking to Dylan, William the other day and he said, did you know that?
COVID learning loss and mental problems and stuff.
They're basically done in every single country in the world.
It's over except for one.
Us because we have so many systems that still want to keep it alive.
I happen to live in the Pacific Northwest.
That's all they do.
They talk about wellbeing and childhood safety instead of learning.
And they still say, do you need a day off 'cause of COVID?
Dude, it's been five years.
No kid needs a, a mental day 'cause of COVID.
But you still have that option here in Portland because we're really gonna help you.
They're just focused on the wrong stuff.
So I think it's, you just, like I said, you got a lot more variability here into what you can really expect depending on where you're at.
Gene Tavernetti: Oh yeah, we mean, well, I don't think anyone is
Jared Horvath: being evil.
I just think, man, lock it back down.
There's a way education works.
There's a way it works well, and if you wanted to pick a time, the nineties, we were killing it.
Education was just absolutely killing it.
In the west, especially in the us.
If you can go back to that kind of time and think, what were we doing then?
You're probably gonna be doing better moves than what we're doing now.
Gene Tavernetti: Okay.
Jared, you gotta tell me.
So what were we doing now?
What were we doing in the nineties?
Jared Horvath: Teaching and learning incredibly well.
If you think we had structured class, we had a very clear curriculum.
We had teachers who were there and present and cared.
We knew how to differentiate without breaking down a classroom.
We knew how to let these kids do something and these kids without the use of technology mediating between all of us.
It was just everyone was present trying to do.
Their best.
And we were all doing really dang well.
And then we were just told so often that we're not good enough that education is broken.
That as a one teacher, how could you possibly hope to do all these things that we've been doing for thousands of years?
And that's when the tech, the tool stuff started to come in and we basically lost our ability to run a classroom.
Gene Tavernetti: It's interesting you talk about the nineties.
I was talking to somebody about, you know, how far ahead the UK was of the US in Science of Learning and when I was talking to this fellow who's doing this article, I said, well, you know what we were doing that.
I mean, we didn't call it science of learning, but a lot of stuff that, you know, this teaching and learning that you threw into a big general thing We were doing that I know we were doing it 'cause I was training folks in it.
Jared Horvath: Yeah.
Gene Tavernetti: And then something new came along and I don't know where the changes come from.
Do you have any idea where that happens?
I, you know, I'll give you an example.
We worked with lots of schools in California.
And we'd go into a principal's office and I would look at his bookshelf and they would have the same books as every other principal.
And I'm wondering.
Where'd this come from?
Who, whose idea was this?
Jared Horvath: It's the echo chamber that is this technology stuff.
If you think about it, that I, it's, there's a funny kind of, I don't know if it's an idea or a theory going around, but it works if you show anyone a piece of clothing or a movie or play a song from any decade through the 19 hundreds, after about 1920.
You can pick it out immediately.
That shirt comes from the seventies.
That movie was made in the eighties.
Oh, that's a nineties beat song.
Once you hit 2000, it's all been the same since then.
You cannot differentiate today's movies from 2000 movies.
You can't different, I'm still wearing literally the same clothes.
I wear a black t-shirt.
That's what I used to wear in college.
I have never changed my outfit.
It's we're all, everything is becoming uniform, and the only argument we have for that is that we're all on this same exact piece of tech, which forces us to think in the same exact way.
Now, all of a sudden, there is one.
Idea, which is, might be interesting.
That's a, that's not a bad thing, it's just now you're at the whim of when that idea shifts.
Do you like where that idea has shifted and I think that's where a lot of Ed, if you go into these kind of progressive movements, it became acceptable to say.
This is bad.
This is good.
Education is broken.
Kids aren't learning well enough.
We gotta change the whole system.
Even though there was no evidence to prove that, there was no reason to even think that.
But tech companies and Ted Talks started saying it.
Everyone started believing it.
And now I always tell teachers, you have kids who are really hard to engage with.
Like yeah, absolute.
I go, can you imagine growing up and being told from the day you can listen that school sucks and that you're gonna be bored and that it's pointless and that you should quit as soon as you can, and now somebody sits you in a classroom?
Do you think that kid is gonna want to, you know, where school isn't broken and.
Any third world country go to any developing country, education is working a charm because those kids are told from birth, that is your secret.
Go learn, go engage, go be a part of it.
Kids are there and it's, and they're growing and scores are going up, whereas here, scores are going down.
It's not magic, it's just what narrative are we telling our children and then we're shocked when they actually listened to that narrative.
Gene Tavernetti: On tech
on that optimistic note.
So your new book, digital Delusion.
So, when did you get the notion to start researching this and what are some of your major findings?
Jared Horvath: Oh, so I've, man, this is research over decades.
I just, I knew it all.
I just never thought I was gonna piece it together in my last book.
10 things schools did get wrong.
I had a chapter on computers and I thought that's as far as I would go.
But John, he the anxious generation, he has a substack and I wrote a piece for his substack called the Ed Tech Revolution has Failed.
And again, I thought that was just obvious.
I just put it out there.
Apparently that was the most read article on a substack.
For the entire year.
And that was the year he released the anxious generation.
So he's like, he said, dude, this matters.
People care about this.
So that's when I figured, all right, let's sit down and write the book.
And it only took four months to write the book.
'cause I've been doing this for, it's, it wasn't new, it wasn't an idea, it was just putting it all down.
All the stuff that I knew together.
And the data and the evidence is exactly what.
You'd expect it to be.
Are you looking at international tests?
Cool.
Those are going down based on how much kids use tech.
Are you looking at national tests?
Cool.
Those go down based on how much kids use tech, but of course that's all correlative.
So let's go to research.
Is tech good at research?
No, it falls under our threshold for effect size in nearly every field except for two.
The only two spots where tech seems to be beneficial are drilling kill training, which is totally fine, but I love how the tech people are like.
School is boring 'cause it's drill and kill.
Here's a tool that works so long as you drill and kill, but all right, whatever.
And the other is learning disorder, remediation.
So if you've got a kid with dyslexia, we can use tech to help remediate the dyslexia.
How do you do it through drill and kill?
It's the same.
It's just, it works in one way, just pump out questions, giving feedback but in everything else, one-to-one computing.
Working with disadvantaged kids.
Math, science reading, it just doesn't work.
Compared to analog methods from the past.
It underperforms nearly everything we've done before.
And so what I try to do with the book is let's lay that data out, but data doesn't matter.
That's one of the things I've learned being a scientist.
Nobody cares about data.
It's the mechanism.
If you have data without an explanation, it will not make it a lick a difference.
But if you have a mechanism, if you can explain exactly why the data is saying what it's saying, that's when you get traction.
So that's where the science of learning comes in and says, we have all this data about tech being bad.
I can tell you why.
I'm not just gonna tell you that.
It sucks.
I can tell you why.
Once you understand learning you'll understand it was never going to be good and we were making a big mistake thinking it ever would be.
Gene Tavernetti: So as you tell that story to the books out, and as you tell that story, share it with with educators.
What's going to be, what's gonna be the blowback
Jared Horvath: pushback from them?
Very little.
It's hilarious in my estimation.
70% of teachers that I work with, that's just a number I've kind of gleaned on.
So it's not scientific, it's just me.
I'd say 70% of teachers are so sick of tech that they're on board.
It's just they don't really have a voice.
20% of teachers I say, don't care one way or the other.
10% love it.
And typically they're not teachers, they're leaders.
So the blowback almost invariably comes from school leaders, not from practitioners.
The people who tell teachers what to do.
Love tech.
The people who actually have to use it hate it.
So the blowback has largely just been from superintendents, from principals, from CEOs saying, no but what about but what about, and I can answer all those, but what abouts?
They're fine.
It's not really been from teachers.
Teachers by and large have said, I've been in the classroom for 10 years.
I knew that it's just nobody cares to listen to me.
So they, it's, I'm not expecting massive blowback from the people who really need it.
I just expect blowback from the people who don't know better.
Gene Tavernetti: You know, I don't know if you said this, I'm just gonna imagine that you said it.
That you know, we are in we're in silos, educators are in silos, and we get hooked onto whatever.
Whatever the dogma is of that silo.
And it's hard to get out.
Yeah.
So, I know.
We've got a science of learning.
I know.
I always make fun of folks.
You know, that's, I said I'm cult adjacent to that one.
That's that's one cult, but another strong cult is your 10% of of the tech people.
Jared Horvath: Yeah.
Yeah.
And that is, yeah, come hell or high water, man, they think it's the bee's knees and the joke is for some of them it will be, there are gonna be some educators.
I and Neil Postman put this perfectly.
He said, I don't doubt that there are gonna be some teachers who can teach incredibly well using tech.
I also don't doubt.
Those same teachers would be able to teach with a pen and paper just as well.
He says, the people who tend to love these tools, it's the effort they put into them that makes 'em worthwhile.
What we gotta think about is the 90% of people who don't care about it, how are they going to use this stuff?
And in those instances, it's almost never going to be.
So what is the tool we can select that has the least room for error so that everyone can benefit from it, not just the 10% who really like it.
So I think, yeah, I if Science of Learning is a cult, ed tech is definitely a cult.
I go, but go back.
The Science of Learning cult always cracks me up.
I wrote a piece for TES last year that says, science of learning isn't what you think it is.
What people hate about the science of learning is the practical application of it, which isn't learning.
That's pedagogy.
The science of learning is a, I mean, we've been doing.
Stuff for Oh, of centuries.
We've been looking at human learning and no learning scientist ever talks pedagogy because we know it doesn't matter.
It's irrelevant to what we're talking about.
Think about Sal Salivation.
We have medicals and researchers who have been looking at salivation for years.
How do we produce spit?
What does it do?
How does it work?
The science of salivation does not tell you how to salivate.
That doesn't say what you need to put in your mouth to make it occur.
It just says, here's the process by which salivation.
It's the same with learning.
We're just figuring out learning.
But I think there's been a lot of people who have tried to bridge the gap, who have tried to be translators, who are actually just practitioners, and they say, the science of learning is retrieval practice.
The science of learning is spaced repetition.
May I teach a 30 hour course on the science of learning?
I don't even use those terms once.
That's not science of learning, that's application of science, of learning.
And that might be where you get some cult status.
But just know that the people who are studying learning just, we kind of giggle.
We're like, what are you talking about?
You all can use this anyway.
It doesn't speak to any one pedagogy.
Salivation doesn't say you have to eat bacon.
You can eat anything you want and it'll work.
Same thing here.
You just, so long as you know the process, it'll help you lock some ideas down.
Gene Tavernetti: Okay.
So.
Let's say I'm a principal.
Yeah.
I'm a principal.
I'm a superintendent.
I, and I wanna bring Jared in and that's fine about learning, you know, the fine, we know all of these things that you just mentioned were pedagogy.
They work, they weren't science of learning.
Is it better to implement those things from science of learning in some sort of pedagogy or how I can
Jared Horvath: there's nothing.
It's gonna blow your mind.
There's nothing to implement from the science of learning.
Knowing how a person learns does not tell you how to teach them.
But think about what you're gonna start doing is it's gonna give you bounds through which to think to start fill.
I always say filter learning through your expertise as a teacher, and it's gonna help you make better decisions.
But those decisions are still gonna be yours.
Like if you find out that every human being's memory works on recall, there's not a human being who has ever existed, who gets a better memory from input, we get better memory from output access and memory.
The memory gets deeper.
That's how memory works.
From that, now you have better constraints through which to think about your practice.
If I'm going for deeper memory, and we know memory relies on recall.
What are some pedagogies that might allow for recall, does this do it?
Does this do, it does this.
It just gives you a framework through which to think, but at the end of the day, it doesn't tell you what to do.
Most learning scientists have never taught a day in their life.
Why would we listen to them about pedagogy and teaching?
Gene Tavernetti: Okay, so, what about my explicit teaching cult?
Do I get should I continue to work with them?
Or like,
Jared Horvath: The biggest joke when it comes to pedagogy and learning is everything works.
Every single pedagogy works.
There is not a dang thing that doesn't work.
If you, this is a John Hattie finding a 350,000 effect sizes.
Over 95% of them were positive.
You not learn.
The only ways you cannot learn are if you beat a kid up or put him in a cage.
Don't teach 'em, they won't learn, teach 'em.
They're gonna learn.
The question becomes, what is my outcome I'm going for?
And what are the best tools aligned to that outcome?
So not everything is gonna work equally at every level.
So learning, this is a great.
Idea of science of learning.
Learning isn't a thing.
Learning isn't a moment.
When we talk about learning, we tend to talk about a long process of learning, surface learning.
Deep one, learning deep.
Two, learning deep.
Three, application, learning transfer, adaptive transfer.
That's the learning process.
It's not Wednesday.
I learned it's sweet for the last two years.
Here's the process I'm going through.
Now.
If we understand the process as teachers, we can say, give me every pedagogy you know of.
I'm putting them in my belt, I'm putting them in my toolkit and I'm gonna start pulling 'em out when they work.
I'm at surface.
Explicit pedagogy or explicit teaching works great at the surface.
I'm at Deep two.
Guess what?
Explicit learning doesn't work at Deep two.
There's nothing to do explicitly at deep two when it comes to teaching.
Put that away.
Now let's pull out discovery based learning.
Oh, I'm moving into deep three.
Discovery based learning ain't gonna work anymore.
Let's pull this.
Everything works.
It just needs to be aligned with what our outcome is, what we're trying to achieve at that moment in the learning process.
So explicit teaching works great.
For most early learning and most of what we do in K through 12 is early learning.
So I'd say absolutely.
That's great.
Is that the only thing?
Nope.
Does it work for experts?
Hell no.
Does it work for people trying to creatively apply an idea?
Nope.
Does it work for kids who are learning something new?
You betcha So, I mean, yes and no.
It all works.
It's just how do we align it all?
Gene Tavernetti: So can we take what you're talking about there in that description of.
The different levels of learning and now superimposed tech onto that, where tech would be most
Jared Horvath: applicable.
Go back to where we said the only place tech seems to be good is in drill and kill, which is really high level surface learning practice.
So that is, tech seems to the, it's one sweet spot is gonna be moving from surface into deep one, not starting surface, not starting deep one, but moving between
those two levels where it's, we're taking new ideas and we're just drilling them down into some sort of automaticity so that we can think and about them and with them.
Does that kinda make sense?
Gene Tavernetti: Yeah.
So when we think of the drill and kill though, it's not necessarily that clean for, for the developers because now we were going well, but the kids are still gonna get bored.
We better gamify this.
Jared Horvath: And that's where it goes.
So this is where you get to say, okay, tech can work, drill and kill.
Does it work as well as other methods we have?
And my argument is still going to be no.
If you had the chance to have an intelligent tutor here versus a hard copy worksheet with worked examples.
You will learn more from the worked examples worksheet than you will from the screen.
So it works, it crosses a threshold, but does it work best?
And my argument will simply be a 99% of the time, it will never work better than analog methods that we already know.
So if your outcome is learning bad news, there's gonna be a better choice.
But if your outcome is speed, maybe that's the choice you want.
If your outcome is ease of grading and feedback, maybe that's a better choice for you.
It's just what is, what outcome are you going for here?
Gene Tavernetti: I don't know if this fits into the drill and kill with the tech and the gamification, but what about novelty, the role of novelty and that by definition novelty will wear off?
Jared Horvath: Yeah.
So I could tell you the mechanism, novelty.
What's happening is novelty basically triggers.
What we're gonna call your top down thinking mode, it puts you in a mode where you can learn something new.
The problem is it is wickedly fleeting, and I'm talking less than a second novelty will grab your attention, but what you now do next becomes almost a conscious choice.
Do I stick with it or do I shut it down and go back to what I was doing?
So what a lot of tech developers have realized is most kids, if they bring in novelty, most kids won't select to stick with it.
So what do they do?
They bring in more novelty to jolt their attention again.
Then they bring in more novelty to jolt their attention.
Again, this is why modern tech, it's called the Attention Economy.
Most programs that are now designed to be no longer than two to 2.8 seconds per thing before you're onto the next thing because they're gonna continue to jolt that system to force your attention.
Before you can settle in and go, you know what?
This isn't meaningful for me.
Well, cool.
Too late.
We're on to the next thing.
You know what?
I already like the way I think about the world too late.
We're already onto the next thing that's in.
Once they start doing that in learning, which is exactly what a lot of ed tech developers are doing in learning goes.
Down.
You need sustain to learn this flitting and flawing is really good to hold attention, but holding attention is very different than learning something.
And that's where I think we're gonna have this disconnect.
And that's where tech serves two different masters, right?
On one hand it says, we're gonna teach kids how to learn, which requires a certain amount of things.
On the other hand, they say, but we need to make money, which requires us to play this game over here.
And in the end of the day, money will always trump learning.
And the best way to make money is keep eyes on a screen.
Best way to keep eyes on a screen.
Play the attention economy, which is the worst way to learn.
Gene Tavernetti: So, getting back to when to use tech.
So you talked about drill and kill or mm-hmm.
there are things we need to memorize that, that we just have to know these things.
Yeah.
At a surface level to get onto deeper learning.
And the other thing you said is that, you know, tech is good as a tool and.
Can you give some examples of where you see tech in the classroom working as a tool?
Jared Horvath: No rarely.
It's basically, a good rule of thumb is something is going to be better than nothing.
So if you have no other choice, of course you bring in tech as the effective tool.
If you've got a kid with a specific learning disability who cannot engage with material without a press button screen, of course we're gonna bring it in.
If you're trying to teach kids how to perform heart surgery and you don't want them killing actual patients, of course we're gonna bring in tech.
Let's use a haptic feedback machine.
If COVID comes along and we close schools and there's no way to learn besides going on Zoom of.
Course you use tech as a tool.
It works just like any other tool.
And so if you have no other option, it is still an option.
It absolutely, you can learn.
It'll be slower, shallow, or weaker, but that's okay.
You can still learn.
It's when you have the choice between two somethings, when now you get to choose the better, something based on your outcome.
And if your outcome is gonna be learning almost invariably, that better something will be analog use.
Hard copy books instead of a screen use pen and paper to write versus typing.
Use manipulatives to learn math rather than animals on a screen.
Anytime you can go analog, it just aligns better with how human biology works.
How we've developed 150,000 years to learn things will be a little bit better.
Gene Tavernetti: Jared I have a hard time remembering things as I've gotten older.
Not only things, but who,
Jared Horvath: yeah.
Gene Tavernetti: Yeah.
Now did you mention a human connection with respect to learning?
Was that you or?
Yeah,
Jared Horvath: absolutely.
That is me.
So one of the key drivers of learning is empathy.
We were talking about this yesterday with somebody else.
So there's a big move now called the alpha schools, which is like, ah, we're gonna give kids AI tutors.
Yeah, because there's a two Sigma problem.
The two Sigma problem was by bloom of Bloom's Taxonomy fame, who says if you have one-on-one tutoring, you can expect two standard deviations, higher performance than kids who don't.
And that's the gold standard of education.
Too bad, that's all nonsense.
That was disproven within three years of him saying that we now have.
Decades of data passed.
Him saying that say there is no two Sigma problem.
The impact of one-on-one tutoring was a statistical artifact of his students.
Not anything real.
Realistically, the impact of one-on-one tutoring is not two standard deviations.
It's 0.26, which is an order of magnitude lower than he said it was.
And it was because, but everyone jumps on that like, Hey, now we can use tech to do one-on-one tutoring.
Yay.
People are making a mistake.
The operative word in tutoring relationship was never tutoring.
It was always relationship.
The biggest determinant on whether or not you're gonna learn from a tutor or a teacher is the relationship you form with them.
So I always tell my kids, if you have the choice between a computer program that gives you the right idea at the right moment exactly when you need it, exactly how you need it.
Or liking the teacher you're working with.
Always pick liking the teacher you're working with.
'cause you're gonna learn more.
So the mechanism is empathy.
When human beings empathize, what happens is our biology start to synchronize.
Our heartbeat.
start to go.
In the same time, we start to breathe at the same rate.
We blink at the same time.
If I could image our brains would look almost identical in a very real sense.
When you empathize with another human being, you are no longer learning from them.
You are thinking like them.
Now understanding becomes easier because my brain is literally on your wavelength.
Now I'm following your arguments.
I'm making jumps before you are.
Now you can understand what I'm, when I get confused, you're like, I know why because you're thinking the exact same thing.
I'm thinking in order for empathy to occur.
And that's the biggest, one of the bigger drivers of learning the, an empathetic relationship has an effect size of 0.68, which is more than double one-to-one tutoring.
The problem is for empathy, you need at least two sets of biology.
Empathy occurs when biology synchronizes.
When you have digital technology, you do not have a second set of biology.
You can learn from a tool, but there's nothing to empathize with.
There's nothing to resonate with.
My heart cannot beat at the same time as a computer.
I cannot breathe at the same time as a computer.
So a huge mechanism of learning, an empathetic relationship simply gets dumped.
We try and move learning onto a screen and it makes sense, man, we, there's a reason why human beings are still here after 150,000 years of homo sapien.
'cause we're wickedly good learners, but we have developed a mechanism that says we will learn from each other.
We can learn from apes, but we won't as well.
We can learn from this cup, but we won't as well.
We have biological mechanisms that say we are here to learn from each other.
Put something between me and another person.
Learning invariably will go down because those mechanisms can't fire off.
Gene Tavernetti: Okay, so, so Dr.
Jar just told us about learning and empathy, and I'm a teacher and I'm worried about pedagogy.
How am I gonna confuse pedagogy, empathy.
Jared Horvath: Empathy comes whenever, man.
No one drives empathy.
So I always say as a teacher, just keep doing you some kids, you're gonna resonate with some kids you're not.
It's empathy is not a choice.
Empathy is not an emotion, it's not a feeling.
It's just two.
Biology every once in a while link up and when they do learning source, but we can't.
So far as I'm con like you can work on relationship building and there are lots of techniques to help the two teacher student relationship build, but once we get up to that empathetic moment.
You can't control that, unfortunately.
There's no one method to make that happen.
Gene Tavernetti: Okay.
Any and I know this might be out of your, any quick and dirty suggestions Yeah.
For those developing those racist relationships to get to that empathetic moment?
Jared Horvath: Absolutely.
There's a guy named gimme a second John.
Oh, geez.
Medina came back into my mind.
Not him.
It's the Gimme one sec. Hey everyone.
I know I'm looking up the internet.
Seven Secrets to a Relationship is by, oh, what the heck is his name?
It's not Maxwell.
Not Maxwell.
Okay.
Alright.
Gene Tavernetti: Well, I'm gonna tell, I'm gonna tell you, Jared, I have a lot of empathy in this situation, not remembering a name, so.
It's
Jared Horvath: the something Institute.
Oh, he even has his own, him and his wife do it anyway.
Well, I'll come up with this here in a second.
Sorry for anyone who had to sit there and listen to me waffle there.
But it's a guy he's been doing relationship work for 50 years and he came up with, he used to work with just couples and he came up with his seven Secrets of an Effective Relationship.
And then he started looking at other relationships, coaches, athletes, bosses, employees, teachers, students.
And he said it's the same seven.
Principles for every relationship.
So now it's his seven effective principles of an effective relationship.
If you look him up, look that concept up and I'm sorry, I can't think of the name right now.
There's your roadmap to building relationships with students.
And interestingly someone just came out with a meta-analysis last year that looked at 60, I think 60 some specific things you can do as a teacher to help build relationships with kids and what's more, more powerful, what's not.
And I always think a good.
Kind of activity is take the seven principles of an LEC effective relationship.
Take those 60 specific techniques, line the two up.
You'll find each technique lines up with one of those seven perfectly, and it's just a good way to kind of get a sense of, cool, here's what a good relationship means.
As an example, relationship secret number one is learn what makes them tick.
Basically your secret is like begets liking.
The more similar we are to another person, the more likely we are to start to like them and resonate with them.
So what's the technique for this?
Harvard recently did a study where at the beginning of the year, they asked teachers to give their kids a questionnaire.
Which was just like a bunch of random things.
What's your favorite sport?
What's your favorite color?
What's your favorite animal?
What's your favorite song?
Blah, blah, blah.
Teachers took that same survey a week later.
Every kid got a report that said, here are three things you share with your teacher and the.
Teacher got a report, said, here are three things you share with all of your kids.
All of a sudden, grades amongst the lowest performing kids jumped up almost a mark and a half over the next six months and the only thing different they could
chalk that up to was there like begets liking the very small act of, at the beginning of the year figuring out, hey, we both like the Pittsburgh Steelers.
Hey, you're a fan of the TH fighters, so am I. Whatever it is that gets them to wanna fight for you, that gets you to wanna fight for them.
Relationships build a little bit easier.
So they're not huge things.
They're very small things we can do that will have big consequences in the long run.
Gene Tavernetti: Sure.
I told you this earlier, Jared, but I also wear a black t-shirt all the time.
We got it for 25 years.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But the reason that I wanted to develop this empathetic relationship is one of the things that I worry about when I see a study and they tell me that grades increased.
Mm-hmm.
The first thing I would think of is not only the kid thinking the teacher.
Likes them, but vice versa.
And God, maybe I'm a little bit easier on my grading now because I like this kid.
Absolutely.
You know, so that's a,
Jared Horvath: there is, there's a real thing called grade inflation.
It got outta control.
So kids who are performing at the same exact level today as kids were 11 years ago are typically getting one grade higher.
It's massive.
It's easier to get good grades, but that's why we have standardized tests and stuff, so we can see what's actually going on there.
Gene Tavernetti: Yeah.
Okay.
Back to Australia.
Do they give grades in Australia?
Jared Horvath: Yeah.
Yeah, of course.
But we, as we get older too, they become more marks and numbers.
They won't use letters, but it's the same thing.
Okay.
Gene Tavernetti: I was just curious because again, back to Helen, who I'm gonna have on again, she was a hoot.
She said that was one of the biggest differences coming to, in, in the United States is everything was graded.
We do like a grade.
Yeah.
Nobody cares until the end.
Nobody cares until the end of the course.
Jared Horvath: And which is funny because grades, and this is in a second book, I have a whole chapter on grades.
And grades are really cool for higher order decision making.
If you're a superintendent of a dev of a district, cool.
Probably useful for you.
Grades mean nothing at the personal learning level, so this GR grades themselves don't really bother me at a higher level, but grades, when kids see what the grade is, what's the point?
It makes no sense.
Gene Tavernetti: Yeah, and it's funny the what I. God, we're off on a tangent here, but what I think is the funniest thing about grades is that people say, oh, we need to be tough with the grades.
So the kids will be motivated.
Well, I got news for you.
The kids that aren't motivated are the kids that are already getting bad grades, giving them more grades.
So it be curious to
Jared Horvath: see if grade inflation, well see, that's the trick grade inflation has gone up, but standardized.
Testing performance has gone down in the same period.
So kids are getting better grades, but they're learning less.
So maybe it's all just to show.
I have no idea.
Gene Tavernetti: Yeah.
I don't know.
I just have questions.
I don't have answers.
Jared Horvath: Well, that's good.
That's a good place to be.
I think that leads to a happy life.
A lot to ask.
Gene Tavernetti: Speaking of questions, do you have any questions for me?
Jared Horvath: Yeah.
Why?
So you interviewed Sarah recently, so is your kind of, and you were talking about kind of cult of.
Science of learning.
Yeah.
Is your kind of passion and interest then this intersection between research and practice, or are you more just strongest practices?
Let's just lock those down.
Gene Tavernetti: Well, it's funny you brought up Dr.
Sarah because read my book and I was very stru frustrated with the science of Learning folks.
Jared Horvath: Yeah.
Yeah.
Gene Tavernetti: And she read my book on instruction and she's the one that opened my eyes, why I was so frustrated.
She said, you don't talk about learning at all.
You talk about teaching.
And I said, that's right.
Now you might say that, well, you can't make that transfer, but I say.
You know, I've always worked with schools, the lowest performing schools.
Yeah.
You know, the schools that had to have somebody from the outside come in mandated, you know, at least initially, that's where we got started.
Yeah.
And guess what?
Those kids are aware they're acquisition phase.
They're learning these facts and guess what's gonna work best?
Explicit instruction and, and I say, well, you, is that all you think that works?
And I say, Hey, I'm a project based guy.
I'm a coach, I'm an athletic coach.
I gotta teach these skills.
But Friday night we gotta put it all together.
So, so through the week there's some acquisition and now we've gotta take a look at, well, you know what, they're not gonna line up like we said they were.
Every time we're gonna have to generalize a little bit here.
Yeah.
And now, you know, so, so.
That is my frustration.
That was my frustration with the science of learning folks.
Jared Horvath: Yeah.
Please
Gene Tavernetti: don't tell me one more time about retrieval practice.
Tell me how are you gonna implement?
To help your kids learn, you know, and
Jared Horvath: you nailed it.
Is you just talking about alignment?
Is that's it, is there is no one answer to learning because learning isn't a thing.
Learning is a process.
And I think that's what happened was I think there's a lot of battles going on in the science of learning crew that have nothing to do with learning.
They have everything to do with people getting behind one pedagogy and saying, this is the only way.
And it's like, well, it is a way, it is a key way, but Exactly.
I I'd like to hope on game day.
We're not still doing explicit instruction while my kids are out on the field.
We better have moved to something else by then.
Gene Tavernetti: Yeah.
No and that's what I say in my book.
You know it, and very early, we need to do this so we can move on to the things that we want the kids to be able to do.
it is to move on.
I want my kids to do wonderful things and to create things, but
Jared Horvath: and you can't skip it.
That's what I think a lot of tech people came out saying, we can just go right past that stage because the computer can just give them the information.
Let's be creative because the computer can give them what they need to know.
Let's be critical.
And it's like, yeah, well, you can't really shortcut.
The first step and jump right to the set.
you can't touch the bottom of the pool if you don't go through the surface of the pool.
So that's where I think tech got it kind of wrong.
They thought we could miss all of that and still make learning meaningful and it just doesn't work
Gene Tavernetti: well.
My theory about that is and everybody asked me well.
well, you're not the only person, but one of the few people that say, well, what?
What do all the teachers need to know?
And I said, they need to know explicit instruction because they don't.
We talk about it.
We talk about it as if we know it.
Jared Horvath: Yeah.
Gene Tavernetti: But if you know it, then you will be evaluating your use of tech differently.
Jared Horvath: Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely.
And now you have something to benchmark it against.
It's not just a tool that exists, pull it out, let's use it.
It's a tool.
You have specific reasons to use at a specific time.
Yeah.
And that's a, maybe that's the big trick is intentionality.
One of the things I tell schools when it comes to tech is I say, go back to having a tech lab or a tech cart.
When everyone has tech at their fingertips, that becomes the default.
But the second you add friction, and there has to be an actual decision.
Is it worth getting my kids up, walking them five minutes across campus to get them to the computer lab?
Is it worth signing out that cart and no other teacher can use it?
Now you have to think, am I being deliberate?
With what I'm trying to achieve.
And usually when you think you go, oh no I don't need it.
There's better ways to do it, but maybe we just, how do you add that friction back in that says, yeah if I use it, it's for this specific purpose and I know why.
Gene Tavernetti: You know, it's interesting.
We're a couple other folks we're writing a book about use of tech in schools and what schools should be doing.
And one of the things that we talk about is there being a filter for making decisions about what type of tech to bring in.
Jared Horvath: Yeah.
Gene Tavernetti: And one of my co-authors he's been interviewing superintendents and he said, we're really gonna have some tough decisions to make when this money runs out, because we've used the money to buy all this one-on-one.
Yeah.
Chromebooks and laptops, we're not gonna have that money anymore.
So we're gonna have some different criteria to make these decisions.
And it may be going back to you know, what you just talked about, that there will be some limits to access and yeah.
And really making some decisions about learning.
I wasn't a
Jared Horvath: school in the uk, they were spending a million pound, we did a tech audit, a million pounds a year.
Upkeeping tech and services and subscriptions and stuff that no one used ever.
Think of what you could do with a million pounds per year.
I don't even, I gimme a 10th of that.
I'm gonna make learning better, but that's just, it's, they're a black hole.
They just suck money in.
And then you go, oh, well we are, like you said, sunk cost.
I already spent this much.
Let's keep going.
Yeah.
Interesting.
Gene Tavernetti: Oh gosh.
Any final words of wisdom, Jared, for our folks here?
Jared Horvath: Yes.
If you're a teacher, you're already an expert at teaching, trust your gut.
If you've noticed that kids are performing worse now than before.
they reading less?
Yes.
Do they not know as much coming into your classroom?
They do not.
You're not crazy and a lot of this can be chalked up to us basically seeding out our expertise.
To tool makers who don't have any clue what it is we're trying to do.
So the more we can kind of recognize that and pull back the reins and say, you know what?
My classroom, my rules.
And if that means no tech in your classroom, sweet watch, your kids will adapt and they're gonna go back to learning like they were 10, 20 years ago.
We're gonna go back to what we want to see from them so we can make the move.
It's just gonna be very small.
Don't wait for A-A-A-C-E-O or a superintendent to make that move for you.
'cause they ain't gonna do it.
It's gonna have to happen by us.
Gene Tavernetti: Jared, it was wonderful to chat with you and hope to see you again soon
Jared Horvath: and
Gene Tavernetti: good luck on your book.
Thanks so much, Jean.
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