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The Transform your Teaching podcast is a service of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Cedarville University in Cedarville, Ohio. Join Dr. Rob McDole and Dr. Jared Pyles as they seek to inspire higher education faculty to adopt innovative teaching and learning practices.
In this day and age of ChatGPT, it is all the more important that you really get knowledge inside you. You are actually a guardian of knowledge.
Narrator:This is the Transform Your Teaching podcast. The Transform Your Teaching podcast is a service of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Cedarville University in Cedarville, Ohio.
Ryan:Hello, and welcome to this episode of Transform Your Teaching. In today's episode, Dr. Rob McDole and Dr. Jared Pyles chat with Doctor. Barbara Oakley.
Ryan:Dr. Oakley is a professor at Oakland University in Michigan, and you may remember that we did a review of her book back in February 2025. Doctor Oakley was kind enough to take the time to chat with us today. Thanks for joining us.
Rob:Well, Jared, I'm super excited today because we have doctor Barbara Oakley. Yes. We do. In our parlance, the The. Doctor Barbara Oakley.
Jared:That's exactly right.
Rob:And this was kind of a a major I don't know if you wanna say coup for us because Well, we asked We did. Her to join us thinking all of us thinking there's no way.
Jared:Yeah. There's no way.
Rob:She is way too, you know Cool. Cool, important. She talks to so many people. She's not gonna wanna talk to us. We're not really that important.
Rob:Right? But she said yes.
Jared:Yeah. It's great.
Rob:And so we are glad to have you here today. We've done a review on one of your books, Uncommon Sense Teaching, doctor Oakley, and we were just impressed by it. I shared it with with Jared after I read it, and he's like, yeah. Yeah. I need to get to that.
Rob:And then coming back from a conference in Las Vegas, he reads it on the plane. And as soon as he gets off the plane, he's, like, texting me. He's like, this was amazing. Yeah. And we both, in our own teaching I teach business ethics.
Rob:Jared teaches literature. We we've been utilizing some of the things that that you put forward in that book and then other other areas as well. So we're just glad to have you on. Thank you for joining us. And, Jared, do you wanna start off with the first question?
Jared:Sure. I'd love to. So in your book, Uncommon Sense Teaching, you talk about well, you take the idea of abstract brain science and you make it immediately practical. That's something that's incredibly relevant because it was you know, Rob talked a lot about abstract brain science to me before I read your book, and it was always so incredibly you know, Rob, I love him to death, but he doesn't know how to bring it down to my stupid level. And so he would say things and I'm like, yeah, I can't grasp that.
Jared:But you were able to take something as complicated as that and break it down into immediately practical applications for teacher. So talk to me, how do you approach that balance? So a lot of our educators are probably have this high level abstract thinking, and they need to turn it into classroom ready strategies. So how what was your approach? How did how do you approach things like that?
Barbara Oakley:Well, first of all, Jared, Rob, thanks for having me. Please do call me Barb. The thing is, so the first book I wrote about learning was something called A Mind for Numbers. And I thought, Oh man, my publisher, Penguin Random House, picked the name of this book and I just thought, This book is gonna go nowhere, because like, Mind for Numbers is commonly found in obituaries, as in Fred had a real mind for numbers. But to my shock, the book is sold well over a million copies worldwide.
Barbara Oakley:And what it did was it broke down ideas about how we learn into easy to understand concepts and and and kinda fun too. But part of what I did when I was creating this book was and you might have heard of a website called ratemyprofessors.com.
Rob:No. We're not having of it. We refuse.
Barbara Oakley:There's a way so I went and I found the names of thousands and thousands of professors that were considered to be the top, you know, teaching professors in their profession, whether it's psychology, economics, mathematics, engineering, you name it. And I wrote, I found the emails of all these people and I emailed thousands of people and I asked them if they would be willing to take a look at the manuscript of or the the book of mine for numbers and give me any thoughts or advice. And shocking percentages of them said, yeah, I'd love to help out. And what I found from this was not only all sorts of little individual insights that were helpful for the book, but one thing they told me that really surprised me was that some of these top, top teaching professors, they would use metaphor and analogy. And this was their their secret tool for conveying information effectively.
Barbara Oakley:And they they often would not tell other professors that's what they did. And it wasn't because they were trying to keep it secret. It was because the other professors would laugh at them and say, oh, well, that's why you're so popular is you you just make everything so easy for your students. And I'm like, you know, isn't that our job as professors? It's hard to learn anything that helps make it more easily understandable.
Barbara Oakley:But if you look from a neuroscientific perspective, if you use a metaphor, what you're really doing is you are building off of a student's or a learner's prior knowledge and making that new information easily available to them in a format that they're familiar with, that they understand. So I naturally teach in terms of metaphor. But I should note is the book itself is just filled with these metaphors just because it's You know, uncommon sense teaching is I mean, teaching really is enhanced by the use of metaphor. And what's great is people used to ask me, they were like, Yeah, but how do you come up with these metaphors? How do I do this?
Barbara Oakley:And now I just say, Go to ChatGPT. You know, when you're trying to teach something that's really tough to teach and people can't grasp it, ask ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini, your favorite, for not just one metaphor, but several different metaphors. Tell them a little about your students. It will give you the best metaphors. Like, I was teaching in Mongolia, and the professors at the capital, Ulaanbaatar, were telling me, Our students come in off the Mongolian Steppe, and really you know, they have no interest whatsoever in Python programming.
Barbara Oakley:And they don't even know how to connect to it. So what do I do? And I'm like, go to ChatGPT, tell them about your students. And what it will do is things like it'll put Maingard and scope, which are concepts in Python programming, in terms of migratory patterns and yurts and the kinds of ideas that those students are familiar with. And that actually makes it really relatable and graspable.
Barbara Oakley:So that's what we did in the book on Common Sense Teaching, was to use a lot of metaphor. And I think a handy thing for me was as my co authors, I have a top neuroscientist and a very experienced professor of pedagogy. And what surprised me was, you know who the tough one to understand and translate was? It wasn't the neuroscientist. It was the professor of pedagogy because you don't really realize it.
Barbara Oakley:But a lot of times in education, we use these terms like formative assessment, summative assessment. What does that mean to an ordinary person? So my rule of thumb was, if I don't really understand it very well, whether it's coming from neuroscience or from pedagogy, just try to explain it in normal, everyday, understandable terms that I can get. And the result, I think, is a book that explains things pretty well for everybody.
Jared:Yeah. The octopus is that one comes back so often in my head.
Rob:I'm able to use it with him all the time.
Jared:The octopus juggling the balls and throwing it back and forth. It just it stuck, and it's I I now imagine my brain as an octopus that's just doing stuff like that all the time.
Rob:It's his focus animal. It's my spirit animal. Yeah.
Barbara Oakley:The thing is I had the luxury of being able to stand on the shoulder of giants. So George Miller at Harvard came up with this idea that working memory, you could hold, like, maybe seven pieces of information, plus or minus two, temporarily in mind. And often this was people found the easiest way to try to start explaining it was using this idea of you got seven slots that you can fit information in. But, again, because I have the luxury of seeing what they did and kind of being able to envision something perhaps even better, that idea of an octopus, of something that's reaching back into working memory, actually, it's a quadripleus, so it's got four arms instead of eight arms, reaching back and pulling things out, that is a little bit It's a metaphor that's physically closer to whatever is truly happening in the brain, Yet it's a metaphor that is pretty easy to grasp. Mhmm.
Barbara Oakley:So that's why I like you know, besides I I hate to say it, but I I love octopus in many ways, including as an appetizer.
Rob:Oh, yes. This idea of metaphor is just so true. One of the things that I've been working on and has helped me in learning personally, Somebody used the term mental models and constructing these like the four legged octopus in terms of understanding working memory. But I I don't think I've ever really thought about it from bringing that kind of perspective, like, with the memory champions. I've done some research on those folks as well and their utilization of visuals and hyperbole in the visuals that they create to basically encode things in their memory so they can quickly bring them back, like memory palaces or things of that nature.
Rob:But I can't say I've really brought that back in terms of utilizing utilizing those kinds of strategies or, you know, metaphor throughout my course material. But yet, I think based on what I'm you know, what we've read from Barb and then what we are hearing from
Barbara Oakley:her Mhmm.
Rob:That's something I really need to to do more of.
Barbara Oakley:I can have a little side comment that I can try to make very brief about mental models because that's such an important idea. When we're watching a movie, there's a scene in a movie. You you have a a certain length of time. And when that scene ends, there's, like, a cut usually. There's a cut and something new comes up.
Barbara Oakley:When we are teaching a concept, students are developing a mental model about that concept we're teaching. But if we teach in a way where it's like, okay, here's here's a your PowerPoint slide with a picture. Boom. Now we go to a new picture. Boom.
Barbara Oakley:Now a new picture. What you're doing it's like creating a movie where you're cutting every scene partway through. And it's harder. Every time you cut and go to a new image without bringing the learner along with you visually, you're you're making it more difficult for them to put that mental model together. So this is what I watched a graduate student recently put together She gave us a presentation at a top neuro AI workshop.
Barbara Oakley:And so they had her presenting. And I just was like, I adore her. Because she was very careful about, she didn't just cut, she brought along the most important part of an image so we could continue to follow the in-depth concepts she was explaining, but in a way that I could follow right along even though that wasn't my area of expertise. So it it's it's super easy when you're online for a good instructional designer to help with this process so that concepts are following through and you're not cutting, cutting, cutting. It's it's more difficult in class unless you've created some really good PowerPoints that can and that takes time to do.
Barbara Oakley:This is why online teaching can often be better because it takes you time to prepare really good materials that stick in your memory. But it's also why you can have the economy of scale such that people can watch this over many semesters, and you recoup the costs, so to speak, of of developing such top notch materials.
Rob:Awesome. Just wanna move on now. One of the metaphors that you use in your book on common sense teaching is the idea of race car learner versus hiker. And I wonder if you would just, you know, speak to that, especially for our listeners. One, explain what that is, if you would, briefly.
Rob:And then two, how could teachers quickly be able to identify the difference? I think they probably already do, maybe, you know, subconsciously if they've been teaching for a while, but are there really quick tells that that you've seen that you could hand out, you know, in a mental model, so to speak?
Barbara Oakley:I love how you phrase that. So the thing is, it's a little bit, I mean, we're using a rule of thumb that we've developed here. So it's kind of like we know there are race car learners, really fast learners, and there are people who learn much more slowly. But there's also sort of a spectrum in between, and some people can be really fast learners in one area and slow in another. So, for example, my husband is you know, you talk to him about the inner workings of what's going on in a car engine.
Barbara Oakley:This guy's a race car. He is super fast. Where I would I would be very slow for me. And part of this is just, you know, my own background with him. Know?
Barbara Oakley:I I He originally trained as a mechanic, so he's got that prior knowledge that's exceptional. And sometimes race car learners, they seem like they're naturally good, but then you look at it and they may have grown up in a family that treasured learning. And so they got a lot of extra guidance and so forth within their family environment that helped them appear super smart. But if others might have gotten that, they might have been a lot quicker too. But at the same time, I myself am a slow learner.
Barbara Oakley:When it comes to math and science, well, actually many things. I'm I'm quite slow. Because I'm slow, I have to check every step. I have to understand every step. There's an economist named Friedrich Hayek, and he rude the fact that he was such a slow learner, not like his colleagues who were geniuses.
Barbara Oakley:But he also admitted that because he was so slow, he would have to examine everything to accept it and understand it. Whereas his colleagues who were so brilliant would just say, oh, well, yeah, of course. They jump to conclusions. And then when they were wrong, it was hard for them to change their minds. It can be easier, much easier, for slower learners to you know, they're they're kinda used to, oh, I got this wrong.
Barbara Oakley:So they can change their minds about things. Sometimes we you know, in a class where we have fast learners and slow learners, we're like, how do we reach both kinds of learners? And the reality is you can't slow your class up too much. Mhmm. But what you can do is you can be and this is all great teachers of this.
Barbara Oakley:You can be a motivator. Your own facial expressions, your body, your enthusiasm can inspire slower learners to go off and take the time, the extra time it's gonna need for them to keep up and stay with the rest of the class. Jaime Escalante, the brilliant teacher featured in the movie Stand and Deliver, he was teaching the poor children who were the offspring of immigrant farm workers. And the administration in the school was like, oh, these kids, you know, they already have hard lives. Don't push them.
Barbara Oakley:Don't do anything else. But his own ability to motivate these kids and to teach, you know, so they can grasp it, he encouraged them. He said the one thing that was wrong about the movie was they didn't all pass the test for advanced placement in mathematics and calculus in one year of study. It took them three years. And these kids, they were off working on their own, really studying hard, spending a lot of extra time because the teacher, because Harmony had motivated them.
Barbara Oakley:So there's many, many high technology engineers throughout Southern California and the Western States who were the students of Jaime Escalante who would have been just, oh, they're slow learners. They can't get it. But they were motivated to really learn the materials. And so, you know, the the secret for reaching both fast and slow is is really enthusiastic, dynamic teaching that helps them develop the passion themselves because they're mirroring what you're teaching, but also good teaching. It's not just the guide on the side.
Barbara Oakley:Actually, your own direct instruction, your explicit lecture can really help them so that when they're doing it on their own, they can be successful.
Jared:So I have a follow-up. As you were talking about, the role of the teacher, as a motivator, I was thinking back to my pedagogical instruction when I was getting my master's. And one of the techniques they talked about with differentiation was to pair your advanced students with your students that like, intentional grouping, like taking them taking the ones that have seemed to have mastered the content with those who have yet reached that same level of mastery. Is there a difference in that versus, like, if it sounds like to me that pairing a race car learner with a hiker in that situation probably isn't the best idea. Like, we shouldn't rely on peer to peer instruction in that case.
Jared:You're saying correct me if I'm wrong. It seems like it should be more educator led, educator driven in that case.
Barbara Oakley:Bingo. There's there is great evidence that really good instruction is invaluable, and you mix. So people often don't understand what the definition of direct instruction is. Direct instruction is a mixture of lecture with active learning on the part of the student. And so what can happen when you pair students What I found eventually worked best for me was just let it happen randomly.
Barbara Oakley:Don't go through a whole bunch of trouble to pair a race car with a hiker, because you know what happens? A lot of hikers are just not all, but a number, or just sledding off of the thinking of someone else. So you pair that hiker with a race car, and they'll they'll just kind of let the race car do all the stuff because thinking is hard.
Jared:Uh-huh.
Barbara Oakley:If you put two hikers together, they, surprisingly enough, can often learn better because they suddenly don't have this race car they can rely on to do all their thinking for them. To my mind, it's a better bet to just let it happen randomly, how you pair people up, and let them you know, because sometimes they'll be paired a hiker with a race car, but sometimes there's little big, you know, two race cars, and that can be encouraging. And trust me, as a race car, I've seen so many of them can get turned off on learning because we're asking them to do all the teaching
Jared:for us.
Barbara Oakley:And teaching, good teaching, is really, really hard. And so we shouldn't be sitting there and saying, Oh, well, you, you don't have any training in teaching, but you've gotta do all the teaching of this student that I can't reach myself. And after a while, the risk card gets a little tired of it, and they can be turned off on school for precisely that reason. So just letting things happen, randomly to in my experience turns out to be a better approach.
Jared:And the key being the teacher has to be the motivator for those hikers because you put hikers together and they're going to say, well, neither of us can get this. Why are we putting there's no point in even trying to do this, but it's the teacher as motivator that helps with that.
Barbara Oakley:Right. And you go around and you're kinda like, okay. How how what what kind of progress have you made? Asking questions in front of other people so that they know they're gonna be put on the spot. But we in reality, you're you're tailoring your questions so you're not gonna make them look too bad.
Barbara Oakley:Sure. When I was first beginning to teach, they put me in charge of teaching electrical circuits to half the class was mechanical engineering students and half were electrical engineering. And the mechanicals did not even wanna be there. They just wanted to be out there, get their hands on the engines. You know, this all this electrical stuff is, you know, it's it's not physical.
Barbara Oakley:You can't get your hands on it. So so you could always tell the mechanicals because they would be sitting in the back of the class, and then the electrical engineering students in the front. And the mechanical engineering students are convincing. You know, they're throwing paper airplanes. Yeah.
Barbara Oakley:This isn't college. But what I did was I put it into your expectations as a teacher make an enormous difference. So the expectation I put into my head was that by the end of that semester, those mechanical engineering students would so love electrical engineering that they would switch their majors to become electrical engineering students. And do you know that after a couple semesters, I got called into the mechanical engineering department because they were losing so many students to electrical engineering that it was causing a problem for them? So it's your expectation of what the students are capable of and your kind of tacit You may not even be aware of what you're doing, but those expectations are communicated to the students, then that will make an enormous difference in how much they like what you're teaching and how successful they can be.
Rob:Wow. There's so much more we could go on with Yeah. On that. Seems you are saying that there has to be one passion and motivation from the professor or the teacher who's also sharing the reason why students would should want to learn this, why it matters to them. They are presenting key material, but also at the same time, they're getting reflection back from the students.
Rob:There's this conversation that should be taking place in direct instruction. Is that correct?
Barbara Oakley:Oh, absolutely. Now, you know and students, the last thing you wanna say is, now this is a safe space for learning. Because as soon as you say that, you have just declared it is not a safe space for learning. Because if you say the wrong thing, it's not safe anymore. And you've just put them on notice about this.
Barbara Oakley:So the way to make things truly be a safe space is like the first time you get a ridiculous question or a question that's asked in a snarky tone, there is always a way to find something really useful and really good in that question. So they may ask something kind of snarkly, and then when you come back and you take it seriously, you show how that student actually had some really interesting insights, they begin saying, Wow, she's not against us. She's actually kind of, Wow, this is Hey, you know, I think I kinda like this stuff. And then you just have fun with the material. I would do mesh analysis, which is kinda like you got electrons going this way and they wanna go this way, you know, and it's kind of like two games.
Barbara Oakley:They're attacking one another. Who wins? You know? And and, oh, you're you're suddenly having fun with the material. And they just I remember and I would do, you know, active learning in the sense that I would explain, but in ways they could understand.
Barbara Oakley:And then they tackle the problem. And people would come by and say, What are you doing in that classroom? There is so much laughter all the time. And there was actually one study that showed that the louder a classroom in general, the better students were learning. I'm not sure if I believe but certainly you can have a lot of fun even as you're going in-depth with what you're teaching.
Barbara Oakley:You have to be really careful because in the field of education, 0.13% of all educational research studies are replicated. That means like
Jared:nobody
Barbara Oakley:ever goes in checks. You can pretty much find somebody who's gonna publish something somewhere. Like the latest thing out is teach your students to mathematics while they're standing and writing on a vertical surface, and that will somehow magically help them learn math better.
Rob:And that's
Barbara Oakley:like, oh, beware, it is coming your way. That's why we have all these really weird fads in education. Education right now is like medicine was two hundred years ago, before it was evidence based. You know? And they do leeches and bleeding and all this kind of stuff.
Barbara Oakley:That's what we're getting now. And so what teachers of that 0.13% that actually is replicated, half of it is replicated by the grad students of the people who did the original study. So of course they're gonna find it. It's wonderful. But many of the other ones are simply surveys.
Barbara Oakley:And what they'll do is they'll say, Hey, I'm teaching guitar and my students love guitar. So I'm gonna you know, put forth a survey that shows that my students love guitar. But let's say what you're actually teaching is air guitar. So you have your students get up. You know, they're on the stage.
Barbara Oakley:They're they're prancing around. Everybody's clapping. They just love it. They feel really good. But you actually aren't teaching guitar.
Barbara Oakley:Your students think you are, and they'll love it. So they say the way I teach actually helps them so they really love this difficult discipline, like mathematics or whatever. But oftentimes, they're not really teaching mathematics. So you just have to be really, really careful, because it's so easy to get students really excited and make them happy, but not actually be teaching the material effectively so that it's really gonna help them in the long run, as with Jaime Escalante's wonderful work in teaching advanced mathematics to these indigent students who were felt to have no future.
Rob:Mhmm. Well, thank you. The last question that I have for you. Here at Cedarville, we've just started a campus wide chat GPT edu rollout. So our students have it, our faculty have it, and our staff have it.
Rob:So we're trying to explore more opportunities for its use in teaching and learning as a team here with the teaching transform your teaching podcast as well as CTL, which would that's the department in which we work. And, you know, one of the things we thought we'd ask you for is how are you seeing ChatGPT being used, and what would you say to us given what you know? How can we start implementing that from the teaching and learning side here at Cedarville University?
Barbara Oakley:So remember that dynamite is a super powerful tool for for construction. It's also quite dangerous. ChachiBT, if you don't know and don't understand how the brain really learns, it's kind of the equivalent of handing students a stick of dynamite. It is so easy for a student to just think because it's hard work mentally to understand and really remember an idea that they're learning and really understand how to use those ideas. So let's take the field of literature.
Barbara Oakley:I was friends with Cormac McCarthy, and what Cormac would tell me is that to be a great writer, you need to read, read, read, read all the time, really read. And so I have another friend who's a PhD, and he went to check GPT to help him write a sort of a neuro thriller about what happens with AI in the future and we're not learning as much. But he used ChatGPT to write this book. And he sent me a two sixty page book. He was all excited about it.
Barbara Oakley:And I read this book. I don't know. I must be a masochist because I didn't put it in ChatGPT until after I read it. It was the worst book I've ever read in my life. Flat characters, predictable plot.
Barbara Oakley:Just you know, the terminology was oh, it's just awful in every possible way. How could a superintelligent guy give me a book that was so horrible because he didn't have internal knowledge himself that he could critically think about what he was getting from chat GPT. In this day and age of ChatGPT, we need to know how the brain learns. And most importantly, you cannot think critically about what you're getting from ChatGPT unless you have internal knowledge yourself. He didn't have any knowledge of what a good book really involved.
Barbara Oakley:He hadn't read widely. So, you know, he gets something back. Looks good to him. In in Finland, they are having big problems because student centered constructivist approaches meant that, you know, if you understood the concept of multiplication, that was enough because you could always just look up the answers. Well, what they're finding now is, like, if I say to you 12 times 12 is two ninety nine, there's something inside you that kinda hopefully that says, that's not right.
Barbara Oakley:But because they didn't internalize those multiplication tables, when they can type 10 times 10, get mistype something, get 1,000 out, and feel like, Looks good to me. Nothing inside them can allow them to think critically about the answer they're getting. And they can end up giving a medication dosage that's 10 times larger than what it should have been. So if in this day and age of chat GPT, it is all the more important that you really get knowledge inside you. And we've got to get away from this idea that, oh, you know, teachers are the guide on the side, not the sage on the stage.
Barbara Oakley:No, you are actually You are a bit of guide on the side. You are still sage on the stage, but you are also a guardian of knowledge. You can't let people pass. You can't let students pass thinking they know just because they can put something into chatty bitty. It is a time now where we need to rethink what do we really want students to know by heart they have to have with them to be able to think critically about what they're getting from GPT.
Barbara Oakley:So that's my long rant on that topic.
Rob:There's so much more we'd love to talk to you about with this. I think the biggest challenge for us is gonna be able to find ways to use AI to do exactly that, to force the usage of it, but to force a usage that leads to what you just said, the guardian of knowledge of having the right facts in their head and not just ephemeral things. A lot of times, I've found that some of the things like we quiz on or we assess on really just are gotchas, right, where we're trying to make sure, well, they read everything in that text. You know what I mean? So there's this obscure this obscure thing that really doesn't have anything to do with the major points of a particular text.
Rob:But we put it in there as a quiz question just so we can try to have some sort of a normal scale. Right? A normal distribution. And it seems like the tail's wagging the dog to me at that point. But getting back to what central what students should know and how are we trying to accomplish that, especially with AI, I think, is is super key.
Jared:Thank you so much, Barb, for joining us. We really appreciate it. Thank you, ma'am. Yes.
Barbara Oakley:What a treat to speak with you. We're all kindred spirits. It's clear.
Ryan:I appreciate that. Thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for joining this episode of Transform Your Teaching. If you have any questions about our interaction with Doctor. Oakley, or if you just want to reach out to us, please feel free to do so by emailing us at CTLPodcastcederville dot edu.
Ryan:You can also connect with us on LinkedIn, and don't forget to check out our blog at cedarville.edu/focusblog. Thanks for listening.