More videos from Sarah Cottingham
Video transcript
okay sarah what’s tip number four please uh so tip number four is something i’ve kind of come to and through the uh ma in educational neuroscience and i’ve been thinking about how does how can we use neuroscience to help teachers and this is this tip is that we want to use research on learning not as a prescription but as a compass so what do i mean by that well i mean that you know your classroom is incredibly complex so uh research in psychology particularly in neuroscience you know it quietens all of those conditions it’s not taking place in the in the classroom it’s taking place in the lab often not always um and it’s you know done on materials like word pairs which are very different to the kind of materials often that we use in classrooms and there are lots of different things that make it kind of not as ecologically valid to kind of just translate it to transport it i suppose and just plop it into the classroom so um i think that whilst that’s kind of demoralizing sometimes that we can’t just like get what we need out of the out of this research i think it’s also really empowering and because we are the experts as teachers and teacher educators in our classrooms we are the professionals and the experts and we do the translation into the classroom so research doesn’t prescribe to us exactly what we should do it can give us these kind of principles these ideas these heuristics that we can take and use in our classroom but they’re unlikely to be exactly how the researcher used it in the particular study and they can kind of give us ideas how about how it might work but when we take it into classroom level and it acts as a kind of compass for us it directs us to doing something but it doesn’t tell us exactly how to do it i thought super super smart advice that sarah i’ve certainly been guilty of this i spoke about this before how i never read research for 12 years then i started reading it first thing i read i thought this is the best thing i’ve ever read in my life just apply that left right and center and then the more you read the more you realize things contradict each other a bit and as you say if you dig into the experimental design you think well this isn’t the same as teaching quadratic equations to a year nine on a friday afternoon and so on and so forth and just well two kind of follow-up questions really one is do you have any examples of this sarah either that you’ve seen when you’ve been working with teachers or so on of where a teacher has taken essentially a research finding but then adapted it to make it work for better for their class anything spring to mind with that um yeah i’ve seen it kind of um so the the what one example is is routines so we we have this like general sense that routines are important like they’re they’re in a lot of the assessment frameworks for teachers are that you need to have these routines and i think like if we understand what sits behind the benefit of routines or lots of things sit behind the benefit routines but one thing in particular is if you’ve got good routines in your lessons then it decreases the the people’s kind of cognitive load of like all of that kind of stuff so that they can focus on the hard stuff in your lessons which is learning the content so we’re almost like quietening all the like you know the stuff that’s like handing things out and sitting down and what the task structure is going to be but then we actually kind of can put in some some harder stuff for them to focus on and and that means that when you go into lessons you might see different routines kind of playing out differently for different teachers there might be a bit of personality injected into you know different ways of doing the routines but the teachers they don’t stray from the fact that routines are important need to be in there wherever they should be there they’re there and that they are kept the same every lesson so i think that’s a really easy one that you that you see and another one which which has kind of been taken to the extreme a little bit is is retrieval practice so i did my dissertation retrieval practice i’m a bit obsessed with it but it’s everybody quite rightly thinks it’s it’s a great thing to do there’s lots of benefits of retrieval so we’ve kind of mandated these these sort of retrieval practice starter activities at the beginning of lessons and like one of the things we need to recognize i suppose about retrieval practice is it it does matter what you retrieve you know it’s not just five random questions but what is the important knowledge in your subject takes a lot of understanding of your subject to set good retrieval practice questions and i feel like that’s got slightly lost under the idea that we should just do retrieval practice starter activities so we want to really understand there and some of the stuff on research that can act as a compass for us so one of those is like it matters what you retrieve one of them is like retrieval should be reasonably effortful we need to balance effort and success so we don’t want to be getting them to retrieve stuff that’s too easy um and we want to be using feedback so if we’ve got these five retrieval practice uh things but we we’re only spending five minutes on it and craig i don’t really have time to feedback to them uh but i need to do retrieval practice ticket off the list and move on then then what we’re doing is we’re we’re kind of we’re using it as a you know we’re using it not even really as a prescription we’re just kind of we’re sort of throwing it in there but we need to use it as a as we need to use the um research as a compass so understand the research in order to do the technique kind of properly oh this is fascinating i’m going to ask you a terrible question i’m going to put you on the spot here um sarah so um this is really bad i’ll just go for it anyway the i really like there that you’ve got kind of retrieval and you’ve got a few kind of best bets is a phrase i often use the kind of guiding principles that you think you know i’m pretty sure that this is solid and now it’s up to the teacher to think what they can do to make that work in their lesson so the fact do retrieval first make retrieval effortful give feedback they feel like pretty you know best bets and then it’s up to the teacher to try and make them work same with the routines pretty pretty good bet that having routines is a good thing now it’s about how we’re trying to translate that into the classroom my terrible question is do you have any more of these kind of things that you would consider to be pretty pretty good bets that you would say to teachers all right over to you now this is what the research says over to you how can you make this work in your classroom yeah so another one which we know is is really robust is spacing and spacing stuff out rather rather than blocking um so um we’re not we’re not 100 sure on the on the perfect schedule yeah um we never will be though because it will depend on what your learners know and how quickly they forget it which would depend on how you taught it which depend on what they know and then it’s all just a big mess isn’t it but um spacing is it does seem like a good bet combining spacing and retrieval seems like a good bet spacing to the point where you think your learners are just going to be about to forget completely um but that’s really hard to do um but yeah spacing seems like a good one i was just having a really great conversation with an expert on interleaving and i think that that is a really misunderstood or certainly by me strategy um so he was fascinating on this craig so he was saying you know it’s if you want to teach someone a concept and teach them at the boundaries of the concept interleaving can be really good for saying like it’s like this but it’s not quite like this sort of that discrimination um but um he made the point that like if we try to interleave a macro level like on a monday we teach this topic on a tuesday we teach this topic we’re not getting that discrimination because they’re on different days so we’ve sort of we’ve taken the research and we’ve gone you know perhaps lethal mutation with it rather than treating it as a compass to kind of guide us and so it seems like interleaving useful for discrimination and forgetting i’m sure you use this in maths for getting um during the practice stage where they have to apply different strategies to different questions and but at that macro level he’s not sure that there’s that research that shows that it’s gonna it’s gonna do the job that’s fascinating my last question all right again this is this is this isn’t great either the you mentioned lethal mutation there i was having a conversation um it’ll come out the episode before this with bradley bush who i think might have even been on your interleaving call because he was telling me he was going to be speaking speaking to you as well and bradley we were talking about research and bradley made a really interesting point that i never considered before and he said that sometimes what we consider to be lethal mutations can actually turn out to be really positive things because somebody may take the research and all right like if you completely misinterpret the research it’s probably not going to be great but if you take the research and perhaps think it’s saying something and you then try and apply that and then it changes and stuff in your classroom actually the result can be something that works you know particularly well so maybe these because there’s a danger you hear the phrase lethal mutation and that says to me okay best practice is to stick to exactly what the research suggests i could do so trying you know create the conditions and it never works whereas if we say okay you know what exactly to say your phrase let’s use it as a compass then maybe we get some of these mutations which aren’t lethal but which actually work really well for your either your classroom context or maybe even better your school context and so on and so forth so all not all mutations are lethal i guess is what i’m trying to say here i love that i love that i think that’s great yeah i need a snappy phrase for it though i don’t know what the opposite of a lethal mutation because that’s what i mean one lethal mutation yeah i need the brokerage i need the brand then i need the branding on this all right