High Impact Instruction Conversations with Dr Greg Ashman

This episode was recorded on both the lands of the water-rung people and the land of the Nunnabal people. Welcome to Teach Insights from Catalyst, the podcast that explores the science of learning and its practical implementation in the classrooms of Catholic education camp for Galban. I'm your host, Luke Mooney, and in each episode we'll hear from teachers and leaders who are leading the way in implementing evidence-based teaching practice. Today, I chat with Greg Ashman. Greg is Deputy Principal at Ballarat Claren in College, Victoria. He also writes a Substak newsletter at feelingdepale.substak.com and has written three books. The truth about teaching add evidence-informed guide for new teachers, the power of explicit teaching and direct instruction, and cognitive-node theory, a little guide for teachers. He has a PhD in Instructional Design, focused on cognitive-lowed theory, and prior to moving to Australia, Greg worked at several comprehensive schools in London. In our conversation, we talk about Ballarat Claren in College's high academic achievement, and we touch on insights from Greg's books and Substak newsletter with topics such as cognitive-lowed theory and instructional design, explicit teaching, direct instruction, and inquiry learning to name a few. It is an insightful conversation with many takeaways, so I hope you enjoy the conversation. Hi, Greg, welcome to Teacher Insights. Thank you for having me. Thank you for your time today. I'm looking forward to our conversation. Greg, to begin, can you tell us about your role as Deputy Principal at Claren in College? Yeah, so Ballarat Claren in College is an independent school in Ballarat, obviously. It goes from ELC all the way through to Year 12, and I'm Deputy Principal. So prior to that, I was Head of Maths, and Head of Research. I'm not long ahead of Maths, but sort of the research bit of what I do is still quite important. So I'm in charge of the curriculum. I'm involved in teaching and learning, and how we do that. I don't have a teaching load, except I do end up teaching often, picking up pieces here and there at the moment. I've got a Year 9 chemistry class, which I quite enjoy. Yes, so that's me. The principal is Jen Burke. We've both been here for a while. She's been here since 2006. I've been here since 2010. She actually started as a graduate here, so we grow our own at Claren. That sounds really interesting. I'm just interested to touch on some of the curriculum things bit later on. You'd be aware of Catalyst and what has been happening at Catholic Education, Cambridge, or Melbourne. What do you think about what is happening at CECG and also across the educational landscape nationally? Oh, I think it's brilliant. I think it's no coincidence. I think that it was called Catalyst. I don't know whether people are thinking of that at the time, but I think it's been a wider Catalyst than people imagine, because certainly we get a lot of visitors at Claren. We recently hosted research here and we coincided our term on "Visits Day" for the day before that. We have a day at a term when people come. We've had visitors now from a number of Catholic systems, often inspired by the work of Cambergolben Catholic system, and trying to get on board with that and trying to learn a little bit about explicit teaching and knowledge, which curriculum and that sort of thing. I think it's had an outsize impact. I think it's been really powerful. Nationally, I think it's been influential. I don't know, but I would imagine it's been influential with the State Education Minister, people like Ben Carroll here in Victoria. I think it's had an outsized impact, and it's just a thoroughly good thing. I've never been to a Catalyst event, but I understand that it does great work. I'm sure you'd be very welcome with love to touch base. I'd like to talk a little bit about Claren to itself. According to the age Balorac Claren and College has finished first in the State at VCE for the third year in a row. In terms of its ATAR scores, 90 students, more than half of the cohort, achieved over 90, placing them in the top 10% of the state. 129 students, that's 74% of the 2024 cohort, achieved an ATAR of AT placing them in the top 20% of the state. How does Claren didn't maintain such consistently high academic achievement? It's a good question. We're not focused on that. It's easy to say, isn't it? We've got that accolade three years in a row. It's not a brilliant measure, either. The one that goes in the paper, the ATAR one is that you've mentioned is actually slightly better because it takes into account scale scores. If anyone wanted to gain the one that goes in the paper, you would just put loads of kids into subjects that get scaled down in Victoria. We don't do that. We've actually got a flow in the opposite direction. We've got more kids doing subjects like mass methods, which get scaled up than ever before. But I'm probably talking a foreign language to most people. No, you keep. I'm not familiar with the... It's good to get the detail. The Victorian system. But we don't focus on, we don't focus on that. One of our, we have a number of mantras at Clarenter, and one of those is trust the process. That's what we do. We're not sitting in a darkened room trying to war game ATARs and median study scores and things like that. What we're focusing on is getting the kids to do their homework, getting them to class, making sure all those little things run well. It's a mantra, trust the process that we use with the kids too. They know, they haven't got to worry about what they're going to get at the end of the year. Well, they probably will. Of course, they will, to some extent. But we ask them to focus not on that, but in getting themselves to school, doing the homework, doing what the teachers ask them to do, using the study methods that the teachers have taught them. Because that's within their locus of control. And you get less anxious when you're given something to do that's within your locus of control. If you're told your goal is to get a 40 study score, and you're not really sure how to do that, that can generate anxiety. But if you say what you need to do today is get yourself to class on time and complete this number of questions. Those are things that within a student's control. So one thing I would say is as students of course, year 12 students are anxious about year 12, but I think relatively speaking, they're quite relaxed. Because they're used to it. They know what they've got to focus on. They've had assessments before. They know what that looks like. So we try and run them through that. And you might say, well, that's a silly answer to getting this high performance. That must be something else to it. And really there isn't. It's just lots of little details. So we focus on those little details. We don't think there's a big magic thing that you can do that will just raise performance. One initiative we introduced in January, bang off we go and it's going to raise our performance. It's lots of little little details. So explicit teaching helps because explicit teaching is extremely efficient compared to the alternative. So you can teach more content more quickly, but crucially, and I think a lot of people don't really appreciate this. It means you can return to it because you've got time. You've gained time by teaching efficiently. You can keep returning to the content over and over and you can use this thing called retrieval practice, which the cognitive science supports extremely well. And you also have time to move into the space where students are doing complex solving problems solving and creating complex products like essays and things like that. So towards the back end of a VCE course at Clareden, you wouldn't necessarily see that much explicit teaching because that's done. And the kids are practicing solving problems, are practicing writing essays and things like that. So the efficiency of explicit teaching is a facilitator that enables you to focus on all these little details. And then the little details are things like what's the best way to teach this particular concept. So I had a meeting with the other year, nine chemistry teacher the other day, which is a fairly typical meeting that we would have here in Clareden. And because the students in your nine cycle through biology, chemistry and physics. So you do the same course four times during the year, during the different terms. And we looked at the unit that we just taught and we made some decisions about how we would improve it for next term. So simple things like I've got written on the whiteboard in Marfus, writing out with the empirical formula is CH. Then we've decided what we're going to do next time is going to write out CH and then C2H2 and then C3H3 and then C4H4 and so on. Because we think that that from the evidence of what we collected from the assessment that when you do that, the kids sort of appreciate how to get from an empirical formula to a molecular formula easier. Now if you're not a chemist, you might not know what I'm on about. But the key point there is it's just a little detail about literally what you would write on the board and how you would explain something that we would worry about, that we would make sure is clear in our curriculum documentation. And it's the sum of all those little things taught explicitly, taught efficiently with the ability to review and use retrieval practice that adds up to these outcomes in Naplan or VC or whatever. Sorry, I gabbled a bit there. I can go on and on. But that's great. So and that detail came from some formative type of assessment or someative assessment. Didn't is that correct? Yeah, so we looked at the assessment. So we're teaching the same lesson plan. This is important because if we're doing completely different things in the classroom, you can't draw the sorts of inferences we draw because you don't know what of those many different things cause the difference. But if you're teaching the same lesson plan and one teacher writes these things out and another teacher doesn't and then on the relevant question in the assessment, the teacher wrote the things out their kids did better, particularly if over the assessment generally, the kids have done similarly on the different questions. But on this particular question that what one teacher's kids did better and that teacher did this thing, then we can draw the inference that the thing that they did is probably the reason why those kids answered that question better. So we're writing it into the curriculum materials next time. Okay, that's really interesting. I'm do you find that happening often? Yes, quite a lot, but it's a simple plan but it's a very difficult one to get going. So it's seductively simple. It's taken us many years to get to the point where we can run through it because the first thing that happens when you put up data on a class is teachers will say things like I've got more kids with IEPs in my class. So I've got some kids, I've got a kid who struggles to get to school on time or they will talk about what they did at great length but they'll talk about it because their views on how you should teach it rather than on the basis of the evidence from the data. So they don't want to look at the data. They want to tell you how they think that thing should be taught, what their opinion is on how you should teach that concept. And so there's all these things that get you away from it. And we say to people, look, yeah, there probably are systematic differences between the classes. Yeah, there will be kids with more IEPs in one class or more kids in this block who do specialist maths or whatever it is you want to talk about. But let's just pretend, we can't do anything about those things. So let's just pretend and pretend because they do have an impact, but let's just pretend that they had no impact. If we were to assume it was just the teaching alone that had the impact on the difference on these two questions, then what might that be? And we never look at the average for the assessment as a whole because that's two bigger thing. We just look at individual questions. Now of course that works well in subjects where you have short answer questions and things like that. What does it look like when you're trying to improve kids' ability to write essays or something? Well, that's a completely different thing and you need a completely different process. And I think one of the things that I would suggest is it's really important to engage the subject specialists in any process like this because they will look different depending on the subject. The mistake I think that we sometimes make is we come out in January. We come out with an initiative that we in sort of insist has to be blanket applied everywhere. And it's inappropriate for some subjects or it's not quite right for others, but we're insisting everyone has to do this thing. Whereas you need to adapt it to the needs of the subject. The subject has to drive everything. So at Clarendon when we do professional learning we will have someone stand up and maybe I might talk about cognitive load theory or someone else might talk about how to check for understanding or something like that. But the bulk of the time we will spend in our subject teams because the bulk of that work is to what it looks like and how we can improve has to be decided by subject specialists. So I'm looking I'm in front of me. I've got the napland scores also for Clarendon and it's like a sea of green and that's compared to students with a similar background. And so if I click all Australian students it's completely green like dark green. So what steps can we take to get these results? Yeah, interestingly the short digression. There's a bit of tall poppy syndrome with us in Ballarat and one of the things that people will say in Ballarat about our school to kind of dismiss us is that the way that we get great results in year 12 is we kick kids out. So all the kids who aren't going to get good results we keep them out. And it's not true. It's actually quite a nasty falsehood to and you can see that it's not true like objectively you can demonstrate it because you can look at our year three napland results. It's all the way through the school like are we kicking kids out at the end of year two like when is this great exit of security. And but I would recognize we are like we are an independent school and so we quite privileged and I recognize that. And so what we do we can talk about what we do and if you said well how can my school improve I'd say well I don't know but I can talk about what we do and you can see if there's anything of that that you can take from it that might work in your country. I don't know I don't know your school and I don't know I wouldn't I think it would be presumptuous of me to tell you how you can improve your school. And what we do is a number of things we have a common curriculum so this idea that everyone's teaching them the same lesson plan and now that's hard for some people because they value so autonomy in teaching is is viewed in this very funny way like engineers are autonomous because they're a self-governing profession and they get to decide the the qualifications you need to be an engineer they're not autonomous because they all just design bridges in different ways that that's not that's not what autonomy means in engineering but in teaching autonomy has come to mean that you can go into the classroom and do what you like and sort of there's a loose thing that you've got to follow and maybe there's some resources that the department has but essentially go into the classroom and you can do what you like. At Clarence and you can't we have the units planned out of the lesson plan detail and we say we know we we have a system that we've developed our IT people have developed we've got a couple of programmers which which you can go into and it says on on this day on on Friday the 28th of March this class will be doing this lesson in this topic and that's what we would expect the teacher to teach and people will say to me yeah but how do you know like sometimes teachers get behind or sometimes things take longer to teach than you expect well no that's kind of designed into a system our lessons take that into account we've trolled them over many years we've iterated them over many years we know how long something's going to take and so we we program that in and everyone will teach the same lesson plan so when I teach my your nine chemistry class period for today I'll be teaching a lesson plan that someone else designed so for some people that's too much of a a loss of autonomy and they would rather have a bit more freedom around what they do but there are huge advantages to it that one we've already mentioned which is this ability to try and use the subtle differences that remain between classes to to find better ways of explaining things and things like that the other thing is the gratin institute visited us and they reckon that it saves teachers at about three hours a week I think that's that that's conservative because if you haven't got to write all your lesson plans and someone has written them for you yes you still got to prepare like I've gone through the lesson I'm teaching period four or I know what I want to focus on and I've made a few notes but I haven't had to plan it from scratch so that saves a lot of time and so that's one part of our our process and because those lesson plans exist and they're not just on some teachers laptop somewhere and when the teacher leaves the they go with them and we can iterate them over time and we can gradually improve them and so some of our maths lesson plans will be you know the original version would have been written I know 12 13 years ago so you can iterate them over time and that's really important because what we do often do in schools is we go okay you're 10 history oh let's try what we did last year I think we should do something on this right and everyone has to write everything from scratch again and everything gets thrown out and we start again from scratch and that's not that's not a very good plan and we use explicit teaching that's another key part of what we do Rosenstein's principles we have a lot of interaction in the classroom so one big misconception about explicit teaching is that the teacher stands at the front in lectures that's not true and we have a lot of interaction so if you walked along our McKinnon Wing you you go past classrooms you'd see kids holding up mini whiteboards every couple of minutes or doing a turn and talk or or maybe some cold calling or something like that but all the class has to pay attention because they're going to be asked to do something at any one time you can't opt out and and that's really powerful as I said before it's a really efficient teaching model now you do that in your high school too everywhere yes so this is the same plan every class has a seating plan so all our classrooms the kids are in rows facing the front and the teacher has a seating plan and that would include prep that would include year 12 we we design a seating plan to maximize the learning now there's loads of other things as well that we do now if you were to say to me okay well I think some of those things will work in my context but how on earth where do how do I go from not having those things to having those things like you do and I can only suggest what we did which is to just gradually grow it if you tried to go in January to a staff and say right now we're going to do all these things the whole initiative is going to fall over by June because it's just impossible and people won't do it some people will do it will pretend to do it so they'll generate documents that look like the documents you want us to see but then they won't actually use them in their teaching you'll have all those sorts of things so what I what we did is we gradually grew it so we started probably well in one sense some of this stuff started in maths but it didn't even start in the whole math department so I picked I like a year level where the when the teachers were quite keen for change they weren't sort of grumpy and cynical so I picked at a year level that was a teaching team that was open to this and we piloted this approach of teaching from common lesson plans but they then recognised the benefits fairly quickly and that grew quite quickly within maths like there were team I didn't have to say right now want the year 11 team to do this it just started to happen anyway because the people that were teaching nine that were in the year 11 team were saying but that really works in year nine and they sort of convinced their colleagues and the thing grew quite quickly and then once we sort of had it in maths initially five to twelve the primary school maths was following a slightly different system at that time once he had it in five to twelve maths we then sort of grew it out into different subject areas we would say the core academic subjects are the four great ways of knowing which is maths English science and history so we've tried to sort of expand it out in those subjects first and then continue so the key thing is to pilot make sure that the the people in the pilot can see the value in it if they can't maybe your initiative isn't that great and then gradually grow from there we use curriculum resources to build up to partnership with okis so we can understand what you mean by having people all on the same page when we're teaching together yeah so what sort of expectations do you have on student behaviour across the college that's an interesting question and again I would note that we're we are quite privileged in our situation being in independent school in Bailrite and we in our context you don't have to have a really kind of strict behaviour policy the sort that you might have say in the UK in an inner city school that the what the academies such as like Macaylor or places like that that they become quite famous for you don't have to have something like that because the kids generally will do the right thing they will misbehave but generally they'll do the right thing so you've got a sort of critical mass of students who who will tend to do the right thing so you don't actually need a policy that's quite as strict as that however that doesn't necessarily mean that you'll have optimal learning so the key thing about somewhere like Macaylor which I think a lot of people so Macaylor community school for anyone listening who isn't where is this academy in West London which gets phenomenal results with kids from quite a disadvantaged background and the key thing about Macaylor it has a very strict behaviour policy but that's you don't see that if you visit you don't see teachers giving out detentions or telling kids off or you just don't you don't see it because and that may have happened at some point but the the the the system has worked to build this culture where all the kids basically buy in so when I went around a guide said to me I said what do you think of this course just brilliant I said why was no bullying here there was bullying at my primary school is no bullying here it's brilliant and the kids sort of buy into it and and and they chat to the teachers in a friendly way that's what you see you see kids chat to teachers in a friendly way you don't see sanctions being applied or kids being told off now that's part of the system there's sanctions there that the you know kids know what they are but because they know what they are and they don't want them they they the culture is different and and the kids generally behave really well and so that sort of culture is what what we would we would try and build and I think sometimes when I look at some of our systems and processes they could be a bit tighter and they could be a bit clearer around how we would deal with certain behaviors so we have what we would call our classroom expectations document which is not student-facing teacher-facing but it tells teachers you know what the expectation is here what happens when kids come into the room well they they're supposed to independently come in and just start the starter activity without being asked to do so what happens if a kid wants to go to the the Lou or to fill up their water bowl what happens at the end of the lesson when the bell goes do the kids just to get up and go or does the teacher say no that's a signal for me not for you all these things are spelled out in our classroom expectations document but we don't have like a some of the sanctions and things that a school like McKaylet would have probably because to a certain extent we don't need them but you could also argue that if we had some of those things maybe things maybe in some of our classic things would run a bit more smoothly so it's the kind of thing that we're constantly reviewing and thinking about what I'm hearing also is that there's an emphasis on well-being across the school and fostering the nurturing the whole child yeah so it's again people always focus when you're talking about behavior people always focus on sanctions so there's a guy called Tom Bennett from the UK who will be out here later this year doing some of his behavior training and if you ever go and see him talk which I would recommend he'll talk about building a positive school culture and a positive school culture is about well-being because kids are not being bullied kids are not scared about coming to school kids can speak their mind they can speak their truth they can let the adults know something is bothering them that is a good positive school culture and that is mainly what Tom Bennett will talk about his critics will say this man is into zero tolerance he wants to put kids in detention he wants to exclude kids and things like that and really that's not the agenda at all yes if someone is arguing that that no child should be excluded from school ever then I would resist that because I think there are some circumstances where a child can be a danger and have a negative impact on the others around them for which an exclusion is necessary and some people do have quite romantic views about behavior where no child should ever be sanctioned for anything or no child should ever be excluded from school but that's a really really small part of the conversation most kids are not doing things that sit in that space at all most of our interactions between teachers and kids are in the corridor they're in class they're about the work and this project of building a really positive school culture that people can bind to where a kid just says oh that's just what we do here but what we do here is positive like so one of one of the things that we do here at Clarence is our homework that's just what we do here the kids just do their homework because they look around and the other kids do their homework so that's what just what we do here building that positive culture and and going from a negative culture to a more positive culture that is 80 85 percent of the work of that sits in this space we might call classroom management but people always want to focus on the sanctions because that's the bit that the people want to debate and argue about whether they they should exist whether that sort of thing but the bulk of the work lies elsewhere I've made a note and you've mentioned homework before is that something that the whole school's doing and there's an expectation that it gets done yes but it's phased so and yeah and I haven't memorized the homework policy off the top of my head which I now wish I had but it increases it expands out of English and maths at some point it gradually increases in length as you go through the school but it has to be kept under control so for instance if the homework is 20 minutes if it is in a year level where the homework is 20 minutes we will talk to the kids about the fact that they should do 20 minutes but they shouldn't do more than 20 minutes and if they do 20 minutes and they haven't finished everything that we've set well that's because it's actually quite hard sometimes for us as teachers to predict how long something will take students to do if they're a youngest student they just get their parents sign it off if they're an older student they send us an email saying I spent however long on the homework and we will accept that and move on but they will do they but they so they don't have to do more than 20 minutes but they have to do their 20 minutes because that's what we've decided and that is very clear I think and so that and we will check it we don't take up homework and you know tick it and write good job and all that sort of stuff on it and we will do so sometimes with specific tasks we will do so with assessments but we don't collect kids books up and tick them and cross them and write comments on them because that's not a good use of teacher time there's no evidence to support that that's an effective thing to do but we will check the students have done it so at the start of every lesson when they do the starter activity in my case I will go around and I'll just get them to get their homework out and I'll just check that they've all done it and if they haven't done it if they haven't done it we don't whack them in a detention or anything like that and we would record that they haven't done it depending on the year level different things might happen an older student has to bring it to you by 8/10 the next morning 8/30 the next morning if they do you change your mark goes from like a red cross to an orange cross very arcane stuff but a younger student that we don't do that there's it's a different system and then what would happen is we would monitor so kids who are missing lots of homeworks because we record it all on our system which we call hug the one also has worked all the lessons when all the lessons are on it and we would monitor that and then maybe depending on how what's going on it could be that we talked to parents could we talk to the student the house teacher might take it on so it's not you missed your homework so you've got a detention after school but we record it all the time and then we monitor it and then the bulk of us the kids are completing most of it most of the time what are the staff expectations at Clarenne College so when we recruit we're very clear about who we are and what we believe in so we're very clear that we use explicit in teaching because we don't want people to join us who are passionate and committed to inquiry learning because they'll be miserable here and we want people to be happy here we're very clear on the the the common planning so that if teachers do define themselves by their ability to go to the classroom and and do their own thing again they don't want to be here they're going to be miserable here and so we make this all very clear when we recruit and in terms of they are obviously expected to teach explicitly they're expected to follow our systems and they're expected to prepare lessons they haven't got to plan them although someone at some point what you will end up planning a series of lessons as a teacher here because obviously we'll always have to renew and rebuild them but generally you're not planning but you have to prepare and there'll be things like we we expect the teacher there's two bells that start the lesson we want the teacher to be there by the first bell so that the lesson is ready to start at the second in terms of professional development we do a lot of in-house when we started this there was no sort of catalyst for independent schools in Victoria type project that we could join there was a lot of traditional professional development that was often either a bit fatty so like when we're going to do growth mindset and now we can do mindfulness and now we're going to do whatever the next thing is there was there's quite a bit of that and there was quite a lot of sort of education progressivist stuff on inquiry learning and things like that and so as a result of that we've grown used to doing a lot of our professional learning in-house so we'd have professional learning days three two or three at the start of the year one at the start of term three three at the start of term four and then three at the end of the year and we will use those so we will do in-house presentations we'll do work in in subject teams but we do other things as well so if there is worthwhile professional development coming up we will send people to it there's more of that now because explicit teaching has become more of a thing and another thing we did and we're going to repeat in September we sent some staff over to the UK to do to look at some schools that had a similar approach to ours and asked the question well what are the differences is there anything these schools are doing that we're not doing that maybe we should be doing and that we can learn from and so we got quite a lot of interesting ideas from that what were some of those interesting ideas well i'll just give you an example so i told you about our mantras trust the process and a lot of our kids would know that but in some of these schools in the UK the schools values are really big so you could pop you could bump into a kid on the corridor and say what do you schools values and they'll just drop them off like this and they'll they'll be able to give examples and all that stuff and our values that we currently have wouldn't work in the same way so we're thinking is that something we need to look at and something to review why because it feeds into this bigger school culture piece like when when students have got a common frame of understanding what the school stands for and and a common way of talking about that then it's just easiest communication we can say oh yeah this is this value in action or this was a failure to demonstrate that value and it aids communication so aids that culture building so that's why we're thinking about that so you've written you've written three books including the power of explicit teaching and direct instruction the truth about teaching and a little guide for teachers cognitive low theory can you share some insights from some of these books starting with the power of explicit teaching and direct instruction yeah so there's lots of things that sit in that space that we call explicit instruction direct instruction explicit teaching I've you made so I tend to use the term explicit teaching and some of this gets a bit um it's a bit inside baseball kind of discussion but unfortunately it's one that people need to get their head around because not all things labeled explicit instruction are the same we've seen since and this is quite topical since Ben Carolyn Victoria really committed to explicit teaching we've seen people appear out of the woodwork and start running professional learning and using the word explicit teaching but using it to sell something that very much isn't and using it to sort of sell an inquiry learning approach because they've noticed that the politicians are saying these words so they should use those words but then pursue the agenda that they've always pursued so it's really important for people who are moving into this space to get some clarity about what those terms mean so one one insight from that book that I'm probably trying to share very briefly um direct instruction um direct instruction can have a number of meanings um and Rosenstein actually identified five and and it can mean um just a teacher lecturing sometimes when people say direct instruction I mean a teacher just lecturing uh it can it can mean it can be pejorative it can be used to criticise uh teaching styles uh as being too didactic but it can mean um with a capital D in a capital I it can mean a specific set of programs developed by Zieg Engelben and colleagues at the University of Oregon um based on the work they did in project follow through at the end of the 60s and the start of the 1970s those programs are scripted um and which is not necessarily a feature of all explicit teaching but those particular programs are because Engelben found when he tried to train the teachers um they they would keep adjusting things in ways that were unhelpful so he provided with with a script then um direct instruction with a lower case D and a lower case I often refers to a set of practices that emerge from a research um as a type of research that was really common in the 1960s where teachers went into classrooms with clipboards try to record the teachers behaviors and then the the student gains and then look for correlations between teacher behaviors and student gains and that is essentially what um is outlined in Rosenstein's Principles of Instruction that those things that teachers do that are associated with these gains um so it can mean all these it can mean all these different things and when people use the term they can mean different things but and it's particularly important if you're reading a piece of research that says something about direct instruction as a method compared to some other method of teaching so you might read a piece of research that says um that um inquiry learning in a particular context is better than direct instruction the first question you have to ask is what do they mean by direct instruction what did it look like in this research study and sometimes it looks like kids just sat down independently completing work sheets and then researchers will call that the direct instruction condition so understanding exactly what he is um is really important that's why Rosenstein's Principles are quite useful because they outline um these principles that the effective teachers in this research in the 60s used but they also emphasise the importance of interactivity the fact that the teacher is constantly testing the temperature with the students um formative assessment essentially that's a critical part of the kind of um short scale in the moment constant formative assessment is a critical part of the kind of explicit teaching that we would do here so understanding unpacking those different meanings of explicit teaching and direct instruction I think is important so after talking about explicit teaching is there a balance between explicit teaching and inquiry learning okay yeah um this is a good question so there's a whole series of papers um this is a little bit arcane um Lin Zhang wrote a paper with John Sweller and Paul Kurshin a whole load of other people in which she um and they outlined the idea that science education in um the United States has been informed by only really one kind of evidence so the initiatives that people want to introduce in science education in the US did I say UK I meant to say US has been informed by only one kind of research and this is what she called program based studies and so typically what happens is researchers come up with this sort of inquiry learning type um approach typically it's inquiry learning type right uh they introduce it in a school they compare it with business as usual so the teachers just carrying on doing their own thing and they'll see some sort of gains if they have a comparison group with all sometimes they don't even have a comparison group they just look at before and after now the problem with that is that the comparison isn't usually the the kind of explicit teaching that we would do here the kind that's supported by research as I said before before sometimes those conditions can just be worksheets but um the business as usual condition is just whatever the teachers normally do and we don't really know what that is and often it's not very well described and the other problem is that the the the program that's been introduced this new program everyone knows it's new and so you get a kind of placebo effect um or a Hawthorne effect depending on it these are expectation effects where basically you do a study and if you know that you're in the experimental group you know you're part of the study that can affect um how it goes so the teachers expect the program to be better the kids expect the program to be better maybe they'll work a bit harder as a result maybe they'll be a bit more enthusiastic about it because it's a bit different and maybe those are the things that cause the effect of the program that is measured in the paper now Lin was saying that basically all of this all all of the this body of research is one informs the initiatives that people um take into science classrooms in the US and they ignore two other key um bodies of research one which is your more basic cognitive science and say cognitive load theory experiments small scale worked example effect um you know students given worked examples to study do better than those are given the problems to solve a little bit more to it than that quite a bit more involved in fact both groups do get some work examples but we weren't going into that um and ignores correlation evidence so what do i mean by that things like pizza so when pizza do their studies they often ask kids the with the teaching methods that they were exposed to and it's a bit crude um and it's quite debatable but in a very sort of crude way pizza would say would suggest that the kids who are exposed to more inquiry learning tend to do less well in pizza there's an association there and the basic cognitive science would support explicit teaching but by ignoring these two kinds of research and only focusing on these program race studies um the initiatives that have been pursued in US science classrooms are uh deficient because they're not taking account of the research on explicit teaching so she wrote that paper then um time the young and the whole load of colleagues rebooted it and their rebuttal was there's a time for explicit teaching but there's also time for inquiry learning um which is I'm finally getting to the back to the point of the question that you asked apologies I do go on that's that's good good to get the background there's a time for explicit teaching a time from quarrel and and that's essentially what they said um they that I can't remember exactly what they said about this argument about the different kinds of research but then um they they said that Lin had defined explicit teaching in this particular way uh sorry Lin Zhang and co-authors had defined explicit in it and they didn't and um I got called in to write a rebuttal of the rebuttal with the whole team so Zhang and Sweller and um various other people and and our rebuttal of the rebuttal was okay you say there's a time for explicit teaching in a time from quarrel learning but you don't say what criteria you use to decide when we should do explicit teaching and when we should do quarrel learning you just say you should do a bit of both well how's a teacher supposed to work out when they should be doing which and what you said cognitive load theory is the framework if if you look at cognitive load theory it's very clear when we should do things that that are very explicit and when we should do things that maybe look a bit more like inquiry learning now the problem here is explicit teaching sort of exists on two levels one it it means the teacher in the classroom explaining things to students and the students responding like a little episode of teaching but if you look at Rosenstein's principles you can see it to whole program that gradually goes from the teacher doing that to the students doing it independently because we all eventually want students to be able to do things independently that's a whole point of teaching and often we'd be used to phrase I do we do you do to sort of indicate that we're gradually going from the teacher to students and cognitive load theory would say that when you've got novices learning new stuff that's complicated you need the teacher explaining it you need to break it down into small bits you need to get them to practice that but gradually over time as they become more expert they can do more complex problems having so if that's what you mean by is there's a time for explicit teaching and a time for inquiry learning if by that you mean when they're novices and they don't know anything we'll teach them explicitly when they've gained some expertise in this area and I don't mean when they become a PhD student you can have year fours who are experts in multiplication facts for instance it just it depends on the thing that we're teaching them when they've gained some expertise in this area then they can do things that look a little bit more like inquiry learning however if your definition of inquiry learning is that from the outset kids who don't who are novices are figuring something out new for themselves then it's never going to look like that but if your definition is that they're going to do problem solving activities open ended problems creating complex products then yes that might be a time for it so again it sort of depends on on what you mean by some of these terms and it all gets into definitions which is really very boring but yes and of course students need to solve complex problems on their own that's the goal that's what of what explicit teaching is trying to achieve but we just throw them straight into that at the start you don't get better at solving problems by developing some problem solving ability that you learn by solving lots of problems you get better at solving problems by being taught strategies to use to solve those problems that's really interesting you talked about cognitive load theory within your explanation there um a little guide for teachers and you've you've given us some some insight into what you've got in your book as well you've got one more book called the truth about teaching what is the truth about teaching okay so that's the first book I wrote um and that was a book I wanted to write for new teachers so that that book is it's a sort of it's a whistle stop guide of teaching for new teachers so the first chapter after the introduction is about classroom management um because I think that's one of the most important things for them to know about because if you have if you've got the kids jumping out the windows and not listening to what you're saying it doesn't really matter whether you're using inquiry learning or or explicit teaching type that that's far less important um and then it goes through some of these various models now why did I want to do that because um when I trained in 97 um I was never told about the evidence behind explicit teaching um we had some some good stuff on classroom management not much it was really interesting I enjoyed my time uh but we we weren't told that the evidence for explicit teaching so I go off into the wild in in London west London um government schools and I try teaching and the departments will have a sort of that they're trying to do inquiry learning because that's what they think they're supposed to do and that's what they think the evidence suggests but but you can't it doesn't really work so you sort of you swing between the two so I do things like I'd I'd try and get kids to um figure out for themselves the effective surface area on the rate of a chemical reaction um because I was teaching science back then uh they wouldn't they do the experiment they enjoyed doing the experiment but they'd be thinking about test tubes and how to weigh the calcium carbonate and all this sort of stuff they wouldn't occur to they just wouldn't figure out but they're supposed to figure out so I'd end up teaching it them afterwards and so you'd sort of resort I found myself resorting to a form of explicit teaching in about uh 2011 when I was so I came to Australia in 2010 came to this school this school had was interested in educational research and I started reading about it and I found so I read John Hattie's visible learning and I'm no longer sold on Hattie's methodology but that's that's for a different discussion but he talked about this paper by Paul Kirschner and John Sweller and Richard Clark who won why minimal guidance during instruction doesn't work and I read that paper and I realized that the evidence didn't support inquiry learning that the evidence is sported explicit teaching but the kind of explicit teaching that it supported was much more um broken down interactive had these features that the explicit teaching I'd resorted to when I couldn't get inquiry learning to work didn't have so I was quite annoyed by this I was frustrated by this I felt if I'd known this evidence back in 97 I could have done a better job for all those kids I've taught and I didn't know it and so that was annoying to me and frustrating to me and so I started blogging about this initially under a pseudonym which um you know I why well since I've not had a pseudonym I've had people complain to my employer about things I've written and to my university where I trained and stuff like that so it's often as a teacher there are lots of people who take great exception to teachers arguing for explicit teaching or for strong behavior policies or things like that and they they will do this stuff they'll complain to people's employers and things like that so that's why I was blogging under a pseudonym at the time but then people figured out who I was and so there was no point so that that's what motivated is it all really and so because of that I was left with this impression I don't want new teachers new to the profession to go through what I did of not realizing that there's all this evidence for this thing called explicit teaching because they're not going to be taught it um and and teacher training and I mean there are some good teacher training programs now that do teach that stuff but my sense is that the majority still think they're inquiry that explicit teaching is sort of a bad thing morally bad thing and so I wrote this book basically for the young me that the book I should have had that I could have read so I had well I wouldn't have had to make all those mistakes that I made and so that was the thinking behind that so it goes through all you know from a classroom management on the things that I felt and you teach and needed to know you've also completed a PhD Dr Greg Ashman what did you learn about instructional design when writing your PhD okay so my PhD was was testing this idea called productive failure productive failure has become a very fashionable idea which which is often a bad sign mind your people might say they're about cognitive loathe you that's become a fashionable man and productive failure is a more defined more um researchable version of what some people often call productive struggle so productive struggle is loosely oh the kids are struggling to solve a maths problem in class that's really good because that's productive now I think no they're probably going to get frustrated it might put them off maths but there is a different mindset that says that's really good it's great that they're struggling to solve maths problems and much struggle is productive well a guy called Manu Kapoor takes this idea but specifies it a lot more and he and he or it's concedes the need for explicit teaching so productive failure concedes it's no longer challenging the idea that explicit teaching is effective it concedes the need for explicit teaching but the idea is that some open ended up exploration before explicit teaching is better than explicit teaching from the outset because it sort of um primes you to to for the explicit teaching it helps you understand it better why you need it that sort of thing and he's done a number of experiments um that that seemed to show this effect however I would argue that some of these experiments the the the method used isn't great I won't bore you I've rambled a lot so I won't bore you with arcane reasons for why I think you haven't rambled so I just haven't rambled so I decided that I wanted to test this idea with what I considered to be a better experimental design and part of the problem is you know if you've got two episodes of explicit teaching how do you know the teacher is delivers the same thing in both and then the other thing about his design was that you know in in the exploratory phase the students were given one problem solved as many ways as they could but then the kids that were given explicit teaching and how to solve the problem were then asked to do the same solve one problem as many different ways as they could which isn't really realistic once you've touched kids how to solve a type of problem you usually get them to practice solving it that way not generating lots of other ways of solving it so these were some of the problems that I saw in his approach so what I did is I had kids in a lecture theatre here at Clarendon randomly assigned half of them read an article which was really a philatastic it was scientific but it wasn't really relevant to what we're doing well half of them did this problem solving but critically I gave them an excess of problems so I gave them more problems and they could solve in the amount of time so they could do as many or as few as they liked then I taught all of them together so there could be no difference in the explicit teaching that the two groups got then I flipped it so the ones that had done the reading now did the problem solving the same problem solving that the others had done at the start and the ones that had done the problem solving start now did the reading philatastic what I found was quite clearly well a couple of my a couple of them weren't statistically significant so I can't say that but you often get that when you're doing studies like this because you get you assessment initially you might get a ceiling effect or a floor effect but what I found ultimately was that I could never find an advantage for the problem solving first and it was either equivalent to explicit teaching first but in some cases and two of the experiments the explicit teaching first was clearly superior to the problem solving first and it was superior in terms of transfer problems so that was my way of trying to assess the deeper understanding of the principles by setting these problems slightly different to the ones that they'd learnt when we were doing the explicit teaching so that was what my PhD was in now and the whole field since since I did my experiments and had them published keeps generating some some evidence that productive failure works some evidence that it doesn't it's still generating these mixed results there was a big splash in the New York times few years ago sprucing productive failure they spoke to this guy Manu Kapoor who came up with the idea and it was a really breathless article going on about how wonderful it is and you know that we can learn from failing and things like that and I wrote to them and said look can I put the counterpoint because I'm not sure the evidence supports quite what you've done and of course they didn't let me put the counterpoint because it's not as romantic is it so that's the kind of the explicit teaching point of view it's not as surprising it's not as revolutionary and so people don't want to write stories about that so now I couldn't get that across the line but yeah that's the story of my PhD. Thanks Greg you've got a podcast called "Filling the Pale" and you interview a range of experts on that podcast you've also got a blog a substack at fillinthepale.substack.com and their meet heaps of interesting articles to read and if you don't mind I just wanted to touch on a couple of those articles one of those articles is differentiation or differentiated instruction are you able to elaborate on that topic yeah so one of the things visitors ask us when they come to our school they say how do you differentiate if you're going to teach all kids the same lesson surely you the teach ask the differentiate for the various needs of the kids in the classroom and this is a common theme and in fact it's in our teaching standards we have to be able to differentiate to meet the Australian teaching standards but it means all these different things the answer in terms of our school is I believe very firmly that kids shall get the same curriculum now we do groups of instructions so we'll have more advanced kids in maths in maths well I'm more advanced kids in one class and I at least advanced kids in one class but they still get the same curriculum because if they don't get the same curriculum how can the least advanced kids have a progress to a point where they just become self-affilling they get and I think some of our decisions like I've heard mass teachers say these kids can't do decimals because they're massive fractions but actually what's that based on how do you know they can't do decimals we could teach them and see how they go so they all have the same curriculum but what would vary is in the explicit teaching the kids would put up them any whiteboards we might spend more time in the I do we might do more the core questions we might go through them more slowly we might hold the kids closer to us doing each step of a problem rather than the whole problem in at least the advanced group with the more advanced group who might go through things a bit more quickly we might turn some of the I do tasks into you do tasks because the kids can just quickly do them and demonstrate and we might get into more extension activity so that answers a question of of our attempts to to deal with student difference but the problem with differentiation more generally is that it's this it's one of these words in education that everyone can agree with but they can mean completely different things by it one example is this imagine a student really struggles with writing that could be in a history class the task could be to write a paragraph we could give the kid who's struggling and the opportunity to just record them talking instead of writing or we could give them a scaffold or we could give them some intensive support with their writing the first of those is accommodating their needs so because they're struggling to write when I ask them to write we get asked them to do something else the second of those is addressing their needs so they're struggling to write so we'll help them write both of those things can be called differentiation so but they're opposite they're opposite to each other so if I say to you we're in a meeting we should go and differentiate for our classes you might think okay I'm going to go away and I'm going to accommodate this thing and I might go and so I'm going to address the thing we can mean different things by it so we can all agree and then go off and do completely different things the way the differentiation is often imagined is that you would group kids within a class and then you'd give the different groups different tasks to do based on where you think they're at now or you might just give them different tasks if they might not even be in groups I don't know problem with that is on basis are you making those decisions what evidence are you using to decide that these kids are the kidners and these kids are the wallabies or whatever and and these kids need this task and these these kids need a different task is it how you feel is it what you reckon have you done some rigorous assessment that tells you that this is what they need I'm suspicious of that I'm I'm not convinced that you've got the evidence that you think you have when you group the kids and it could be based on prejudice we know for instance that boys are more likely to end up in the the least advanced group often so it could be it could be based on your your views of of kids and then if you've got them grouped and now they're working in groups you've got the problem where you went from a class where you had one teacher talking to all the students say to 60 minute class you can do interactive explicit teaching with all the students for 60 minutes you have now put them in groups if you've got five groups and in the class it the teacher if they share their time out equally and they have to spend no time on managing the classroom and they will have to spend time managing the classroom if you group the kids they can now spend 12 minutes with each group so you've gone from 60 minutes with everyone to 12 minutes with each group now that 12 minutes might be more targeted to the kids needs but does that really better overall than a slightly less well targeted 60 minutes with everyone I'm not convinced that it is so there are all these issues with differentiation as it's commonly understood I prefer that we didn't use that term because it means these opposite things I'd prefer a term like responsive teaching or something like that to describe what we do and the the sorts of things where you group kids and give them different tasks I just don't think there's much evidence for that as an effective approach and one of the other articles you've got and you may have touched on this in our conversation already is called building thinking classrooms yes how do we build a thinking classroom okay so well building thinking classrooms is actually a program by a guy called Peter I don't know he says no no certainly little judo little judo he's a Canadian guy and his idea is that explicitly in teaching is essentially bad because it just ends up with kids mimicking the teacher and what you need to do is you need to get the kids solving problems on their own in groups preferably on the walls so you need to put whiteboards all around your room on the walls and then they'll be thinking and it's called building thinking classrooms and it's the the latest craze in maths teaching there's a building thinking classrooms a face group group for Australia and it's just it's a repackaged form of problem-based learning inquiry learning people don't realise it's repackaged they think it's a completely new thing but any it has got these new features it's got the walls which you often wouldn't have but it's basically just inquiry learning in groups but yeah his argument would be that if a teacher demonstrates something and the kids then do that that's mimicking and mimicking is not thinking so by his definition if you're mimicking you're not thinking so any kind of explicit teaching cannot lead to thinking by his definition so I've challenged this in a number of articles that I've written because I don't agree with it and I don't think the evidence supports it and that he doesn't even really provide any evidence to support it beyond some observations he's done in classrooms and what he thinks about those and so I'm a skeptic of building thinking classrooms for the program if you want to know how to build thinking classrooms well knowledge is what you think with so teach lots of knowledge by the way that phrase I first wrote knowledge is what you think with as the title of a blog post in 2014 when I was blogging pseudonymously I had reason to look this up the other day I actually posted that blog post on my sub-stack and I last night I wondered I'm not the first person to say this so I like missing around with AI as I think we all do it's good fun so I set the AI the task of trying to find whether where the people had said that phrase before me I feel like I made it up but it could be that I just it's a coincidence someone else had already said that and I hadn't heard that but I just thought the same thing and someone else had already said it and but the AI sort of did a search going back and and the AI is convinced that I'm the person that came up with the phrase and knowledge is what you think with back in 2014 but if you want if you want people to think build their knowledge so teach them explicitly give them things to think with once you've got things to think with tools to think with and you can think greater things and the the point that I often make is that it's it's a human superpower so when I give a talk I'll usually put up the algebraic expression 3x equals 18 and I'll say cognitive low theory says we can process about four items three or four items in working memory at a time so imagine teaching us some scratch how many items are there you got some one is complete novice doesn't know anything about algebra well first of all is 18 one item or two well let's assume and this is a this is a big thing to assume because it's a key focus of some early mass teaching let's assume they understand what the one and eight together mean that it's a number 18 and the one is the number of tens and eight so let's assume that's one item and you sort of get an idea already that once we have knowledge the items the number of items changed in 18 it goes from being two items one and an eight to one now because we know that it represents one thing so how many items we've got we've got the three the x the equals and the 18 so that's four so we're already at the limit of working memory but it gets worse because these items between the three and the x there's a multiplication sign that we haven't bothered to write down so that's another one and they're in a relationship with each other the equals sign means the same on both sides now that's a difficult principle to teach kids because kids sort sort of learn they infer that equals means put the answer there so teaching them that it actually means and the balance on both sides so they've got to have that appreciation then the i elements are in relationship to each other so you've got three x on one side 18 on the other if you whatever you do to the one side you've got to do that to the other side you've got to bear that in mind as well so quickly we can see that three x equals 18 would completely overwhelm the working memory capacity of a novice so we couldn't just take a kid who don't know anything about it and teach them how to solve that problem we'd have to build them up to that and in fact that's what we do that's what a mass education will do you'll gradually get to the point where kids will will will be able to solve something like that however i say to the the room the the minute i put the three x equals 18 not the minute the second i put three x equals 18 up on that screen any of you in the the audience who've done something like eighth grade algebra would have known that x is six yeah you wouldn't have tried to do anything you wouldn't have made any conventious effort at all you would have just returned x equals six it was just a popped into your head and yet that's not obvious we've just unpacked all of the elements and all the things you need to know to be able to do that yet once it's in long-term memory is a schema that schema operates sort of independently of you bang out it comes and this is what i mean when i say knowledge is what you think with once you've built those schemas in your long-term memory those complicated things you can think really complicated thoughts effortlessly thanks Greg i just wanted to ask a couple more questions i took a note before about study methods at Clarendon what are some of those study methods that you mentioned earlier well there's only one real well no the arts teachers sort of the history teachers the English teachers would have more i'm less familiar with them uh there are there are certain things that you would need to do um but a lot of them boil down to retrieval so what we know is that if you've got set of biology notes for instance what lots of kids will do to revise is they will read through their notes we know that that's not an effective way of studying and copying them out is also not effective re summarising them that that's slightly better okay so rather than just reading you notes summarising what they mean slightly better however what's most effective is retrieval practice so self-testing self-quizzing students don't spontaneously do that because it's hard and they don't like it it feels it feels annoying so they will read their notes instead so you have to teach kids that actually self-quizzing self-testing is going to be more effective for you than just reading through your notes so we might get kids using brain scape or quiz little just making basic paper flashcards and to test themselves on factual knowledge when it comes to something like maths um you wouldn't well if it's multiplication facts or something you might have a flashcard but it would be more like complete the loads of problems just do as many problems as you can you constantly be pulling stuff out of long-term memory manipulating it putting it back and that is the best way to revise so um it's so that's really what we're teaching it's not again nothing we do at clarinthen is particularly mysterious or um it it's quite transparent and often very simple and it's teaching them really about retrieval practice and a and a and mast versus space practice so we would teach them when they put together a revision schedule for an exam that they shouldn't do you know three hours of biology on the day of the biology exam they should space that in the in the days proceeding it do a little bit every day that sort of thing great thanks for your time today it's been incredibly insightful and I'm sure that elicitous are going to get gain a lot from our discussion oh thank you and thanks for having me and sorry I do feel like I've gone on a bit but I do tend to go on a bit of that these things so I apologise if that's okay not at all thank you so much Greg cheers thanks for joining us on teacher insights don't forget to subscribe to our podcast on your favourite platform so you never miss an episode if you're interested in learning more about catalyst check out the website catalyst.cg.catholic.edu.au until next time keep learning