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.
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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.
Hello, everyone.
It's just me again today, sharing some opinions about things that I have experienced in the past twenty-plus years training teachers in explicit instruction and coaching teachers in explicit instruction.
And the thing I wanna talk about today is how long things take to implement.
sometimes we think things are gonna take longer than they should to implement, and some things can be implemented much more quickly than we think.
So I want to identify a couple of those things, one in each, one in each area, one that we can do more quickly, and then one that takes a little bit longer than we think.
And one of the things that I wanna talk about today is just how much teachers need to know about the science of learning.
I think there are many people, and I agree with them, who say this is something, science of learning is something that should have been brought up during their teacher training program.
Teachers come out of their, their teacher prep never knowing about cognitive load, never knowing about working memory, never knowing about retrieval, never knowing on and on and on.
And I think it's true.
It would've been nice for them to know, but it's not only teachers coming out of the, out of the program, it's experienced teachers who will go to a training and say, "Gosh, I wish I'd have known this, when I started my career."
So I think it's important, you know, and people will say, "Teachers need to know why things are important. We can't just tell them to do things without telling them why." And I agree.
I agree.
The question is: How long does it take to get this information across to teachers, to deliver this content to teachers about science of learning that is critical to change practice in the classrooms?
Because it's not about learning the science of learning.
It's not about knowing why.
It's about doing.
It's about changing practices in the classroom, changing instructional practices that allow students to learn more content more quickly and to be able to move through that learning hierarchy, you know, from acquisition through fluency to, uh, actually generalizing an application and using this content that we wanna teach.
So having said that, one of the things that I've observed is, people will say, "Well, we need to know this. We need to present this to the teachers." And there will be, you know, some sort of proclamation about, you know, we're gonna implement science of learning, and in the first year, we are gonna train all the teachers in the science of learning.
And I'm thinking the first year.
So when do you expect, uh, impact in the classroom?
Now, do I think that teachers need to know about cognitive load and, and working memory?
Absolutely.
The question is, how much?
How much do they need to know before they are getting, some training, some tips, some techniques, some strategies, and how to use those in the classroom during a lesson?
Now, I know that knowing is important.
Again, I agree.
The question is, is knowing something gonna change behavior?
Now, I'm gonna use a couple, couple examples for this.
First one is, um, smoking.
Do you know that we still, in this country, around the world, there are many, many people who smoke?
And do you know that they kn- understand, they know that there's research that smoking is not good for you?
In fact, there's research that says smoking is very harmful to you.
There's not much, there's not much disputing that.
Is that what they need to stop smoking?
Is that what you do with a friend who's smoking?
You give them, uh, one more research paper?
I don't think that h- I don't think that helps.
what about, uh, research on weight loss?
You know that there's a lot of people who are overweight in this country, and I'm gonna raise my hand.
I'm in one of those.
But you know what?
I already know the research on eating well.
I already understand that I need to exercise more.
I know all that.
I don't need one more study.
What I need is to start implementing those things.
I don't need to know one more time about the limitations of working memory.
I need to know, what do I do with this information?
How do I get it into my lessons so that it's implemented in my lessons?
Now, when we think about this, the question becomes, how much does a teacher need to know before they go implement it?
Do they need, do we need to spend a year on all the studies?
I really don't think anybody is gonna dispute Sweller's methodologies.
Teachers understand when you tell them about cognitive load, when you tell them about limitations of working memory, they get it.
You know why they get it?
Because they have experienced it in their classroom.
So the question is- What do they need to know?
How much do they need to know?
And then what's the next thing that they need to know?
I say the next thing that they need to know is how to implement what's going on.
Because the implementation, the changing of how we provide instruction based on this evidence that we have in the science of learning, is where it really matters.
It's nice to know stuff.
It's great to know stuff.
But who do you think becomes the best artist?
The one that studies how to do art for years, or the one who does some studying about how to do art and then goes and makes art?
Who's the best teacher?
The one that studies how to be a teacher all the time, or the one that studies how to become a teacher and implements those things in the classroom?
So we need to consider how much is enough, how much is enough to get started.
And we need to remember when we're doing this, when we're doing these trainings is, w- what if we're talking about cognitive load?
What if we're talking about working memory?
What if we're talking about all these things, and then what do we do in a training?
We overload with all these concepts.
What did we learn from, from Rosenshine or other evidence-based strategies?
We learn a little, and then we practice.
And not just practice, practice with feedback.
So the first point I wanna make, do teachers need to know about the science of learning?
Yes Do they need to know it at the PhD level?
No.
They need to learn it at a practical level so that they can go into their classrooms and implement this content in their lesson plans.
So what I'm saying is, it doesn't take as long as you think it's gonna take to provide this information so that teachers can use it in a meaningful way.
In fact, when you think about how you are going to provide this content, think about how you're providing it in a meaningful way.
What's a meaningful way?
In context.
Not just theoretical knowledge, but in context.
And what's interesting to me a-about this, again, I'm, I'm arguing against folks, and some of you are gonna say, "How is this?
This is just a straw man.
You're putting straw men up." Well, in my conversations, I will hear people say, you know, before they go and implement things, they need to know a lot about this.
And two things that are interesting to, to me about that argument.
The first one is, it is totally contrary to what many would argue vehemently against about how we teach mathematics.
Hang on there with me.
You know, how did we get from-- how did we get to mathematics?
Well, there are people who say kids need to know concepts.
They need to understand the concepts before they do anything with regards to, calculations or anything.
That, that first comes concepts and then calculations.
There are many people who think that science of learning things are important, who think that all that whole concept before any type of procedural learning is important.
They would argue against that all day.
Yet how do they present the content of science and learning to teachers?
We have to give them it all first.
They have to understand why.
They have to understand this totally before they do it.
The other argument for taking so much time in doing, training in the science of learning for teachers is that we're afraid of lethal mutations.
you read about a, a teacher doing retrieval practice, and it's totally wrong, and it doesn't work, and it's a waste of time, and then we call it a lethal mutation
And I'm, and I'm thinking, "Really?" You know, here's what I know about classrooms.
Nothing fatal, nothing final.
There's no lethal.
There's no lethal about it.
It didn't work.
Gosh, there's so much that we, that we do in our classroom that we know work, but guess what?
We use that data, we use that formative data, and we change how we do it.
But what about a person who doesn't realize that it's a lethal mutation?
Let's go with that for a while, that terminology.
The reason they don't know it is because there's no follow-up in the information that was given during these PDs about the why So we know retrieval practice works.
Teacher goes in, does it in a way that's not effective with a lethal mutation, and what happens?
They walk away because they walk away and never try it again because it didn't work.
You told me it was gonna work.
It didn't work.
Well, guess what?
We need to follow up that training with some coaching, some observation, and feedback to let people know that they are doing it.
They're close.
They're doing it.
You're doing the retrieval practice, but if you change this, this is the piece that's gonna make it, that's gonna make it effective.
If we don't do that Everybody's going to leave a PD with another idea of what it's gonna look like in their classroom, and many times it doesn't work out.
Why?
Because we don't have any follow-up coaching.
We don't have any follow-up feedback, any way for the teachers to know that, first of all, congratulations for trying it, and second of all, we need to do that a little bit differently.
That's the other thing that I worry about when I hear a lethal mutation.
My goodness, when I hear about a teacher trying something that we talked about in, in a training, I wanna congratulate them.
I wanna hug them.
I wanna say, "Thank you for stepping out and trying something different." It shouldn't be, "Oh," you know, "oh, that's a lethal muta…" You know, let's, let's pat them on the back for trying, and then answer the questions about why it didn't work and, and how it can get better.
first point, we can move much more quickly from theory to practice if there is follow-up coaching on what we're asking teachers to do.
So that's something that we can do more quickly.
What about, uh, something that takes, longer than we thought it was gonna take?
And that is something I just described is doing things well.
I've worked with many administrators who have, uh, been with me as we have, uh, observed teachers who we've worked with.
And when I talk about administrators observing, administrators are in from the very beginning.
They're in from the training.
They're in, in coaching cycles when we're planning lessons.
They watch lessons.
They watch debriefings.
And so when I'm saying that a tea-- when an administrator who was with me walks out of a lesson and is just so disappointed and says, "Jiminy, they didn't do anything right.
They…" You know?
And what's interesting about this, three weeks ago, the administrator didn't know anything about what we were looking for because it was the first time they went through the training.
But now all of a sudden, the expectation is for that teacher to be perfect in every one of these components that we talk about, all the science of learning elements that we want to include in these lessons.
They're disappointed because the teacher isn't perfect.
That is what takes longer.
That's what practice is.
Deliberate practice, practice with feedback, practice about now that we have context for where to hang all these science of learning elements.
Now we can talk about the science of learning in a practical way, in an application sort of way.
So I think teachers can learn the content more quickly.
What takes time is to become expert in those things, and even becoming expert is a relative term because I, I, I t- I truly believe that there's no such thing as a, as a perfect lesson.
There's no such thing as, being perfect in the classroom.
We just get better, and we're dealing with 30 kids who we don't know what's gonna happen that day, and we do the best we can based on, based on what we know.
Perfection?
No.
Getting better?
Yes.
Using the evidence?
Yes That's where I think, you know, we beat ourselves and our teachers up a little bit.
So just to wrap up here Teachers don't need to know as much as we think they need to be able to get started to utilize many of the principles in the science of learning Once they are implementing though things from the science of learning, we need to be sure to give them some grace so that they can understand now why when they're doing something differently, it may or may not fit what the science of learning and that evidence base will direct us to the more effective type of instruction
I hope this was helpful I hope you this was a little bit interesting.
I hope you recognized yourself somewhere because when we recognize ourselves somewhere about something that we're doing then we realize I can do better and that's all we can expect, not perfection, just being better.
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