Season 6 | Episode 14 | 5 Things Every Educator Should Know About Effective Instruction with Brendan Lee

[Music] Hello everyone and welcome back to the Teacher Takeaway Podcast. You are joining me for season 6, episode 14, where we're going to be discussing today five things every educator should know about effective instruction. My name is James Graham, I'm joined by my lovely co-host, Alice. How are you, Alice? Thanks James, how are you? Good, thank you and we are excited to welcome Brendan Lee back to the Teacher Takeaway Podcast. Brendan, how are you? Yeah, awesome. Lovely to have you back with us for this episode and for some of our new listeners who might know some information about Brendan. He's a primary school leader and an educational consultant from New South Wales dedicated to bridging the gap between research and classroom practice. Realising how difficult it was for teachers to access clear, actionable insights, he sets out to uncover what truly works. Brendan has collaborated with organisations including Aero, the Grapman Institute, the Think Forward Education and serves on the board of Oka Education. Through his blog, Learned with Lee and the Knowledge for Teachers Podcast, he shares practical evidence informed strategies that transform teaching and learning. Brendan, it's been, we had you last on the podcast in season 3 since that time. What have you been up to? Yeah, a fair bit as we all know, education moves quite quickly and so I've definitely been in the thick of things learning as much as possible and sharing as I go along. So, yeah, been quite busy. I think the last time I was in, yeah, I would have been talking about the things that were happening at schools that I was working at and working with. Since that time, I've just gone full time into consulting and for me, it's all about how can I make the most impact in what I'm doing and the time that I've got and I just found that there were so many schools out there, so many systems out there that are wanting to know more about how they can improve their teaching and learning practice and I've been more than happy to kind of share what I've been learning as well. And I'm sorry, fantastic. You have been very busy, Brendan, since we last saw you, which was three years ago, can I just say? That's just crazy. That season three was that long ago and that was the last time we had you on the podcast. I think you spoke to us about maths the last time that you were on. But you've been doing some great work with, you know, in your consulting but also with the other organisations that you're working with, which is really exciting to see the direction that your journey is taking. We're going to have a look at effective instruction in this episode. Lots of teachers when you say effective instruction, they're like, yeah, I do that and I know what that means. But they quite often have different ideas about what effective instruction, you know, looks like or actually is. Before we dive into those the five key things that we wanted to focus on, can you tell us something that has shaped how you teach and what you believe makes teaching effective. Yeah, really, really good question. I think it's important as well. Just to, I guess, make sure that everyone understands that when people, myself, are talking about effective instruction or look, I'll probably just talk to myself because some people might have a different perspective. But for me, I'm someone who I wasn't nailing it in the classroom. And if I look back on all of the lessons that I've ever taught in my career, I've probably got a higher percentage of lessons that have failed than lessons that have actually gone well. But it's actually because of that as to why I've actually chosen to really dive deep into wanting to know more. I know the feeling when a lesson doesn't go well and you know, you finish up at the end of the day or even just at the end of that lesson and you're reflecting back on how things went. And sometimes it can feel really confusing other times. It can feel quite frustrating. And those feelings come from the fact that you don't necessarily know all the reasons why that lesson didn't land the way that you had intended it to land. And the more that I've learnt about how learning happens and then what we can do is teach it to ensure that that is effective has led to me, I guess, moving to this point of wanting to know as much as possible so that when things do go wrong, I'm actually able to work out, or this is what I could have done instead and this is what I need to do in the future. And so, yeah, looking back at a lot of those lessons that I did struggle with. What I've learnt from that point is just how important it is to know how learning does happen. And for me, probably something which I've since I was last on the podcast, something which I've really delved into is a framework called the Instructional Hierarchy. And yeah, I'm lucky enough to currently be writing a book on the Instructional Hierarchy alongside Dr. Russ Spock and Karina Stokker, who are absolutely brilliant thinkers when it comes to all things that we're teaching and learning. And it's funny, like, before writing the book, I thought, "Oh, yeah, I'd be able to write a book on this thing." And then as I've dug deeper into it, I've learnt more and more about what it actually is and how it can look quite simple on the surface, but when you actually dig a bit deeper, it's a bit more like, send you initially thinking. And so, yeah, the Instructional Hierarchy, it was developed by Harring and Eton in 1978. And it looked at these four stages of learning initially, so we have acquisition, fluency, generalisation and adaptation. And so, you're learning about those four stages and I'll refer to them throughout today's conversation. Has really helped me, I guess, understand when I'm in the classroom and I'm seeing these different things happening. It actually tells me precisely where the students are at, so what stage of learning they're at, and then what I need to be doing as a teacher to ensure that the students get what they need at that point in time. And so, starting to move away from my lesson being guided by what's on the next slide, or the point that I've got in my lesson plan, like I've got these five points written down, I'm on point two right now, I'm now going to go to point three. So, rather than being guided by just what I've gotten written down, I'm actually being guided by the needs of my students, and I think that's probably the biggest shift in thinking, you know, that's I am probably advocating for teachers, is that yeah, we want to plan well, but you know, the magic in teaching and learning actually happens when the teacher is responsive to the things that are happening in the classroom, and then gives the students what they need based on what stage of learning they're at. So, yeah, that's probably the biggest thing that I've been thinking about and learning about, and the more that I've learned, the more I've realized, it's even more complex, and I initially thought. And right now, we're in this really great time in education in Australia where we have a whole lot of systems across the country who are really pushing for a strong evidence base, you know, we want evidence informed educators, you'll hear terms like the science of learning and explicit instruction or explicit teaching being thrown around a lot, and that's great, but we're also in this danger period now where we have a lot of teachers in school saying, yeah, we're already doing that, and if we tell ourselves that we're already doing that, then we're actually stopping ourselves from potentially learning the nuances that we really need to understand around how to do what we are doing, that little bit more effectively, and I'd probably agree with a lot of teachers that it's not necessarily about adding more things on, but it's just about having a stronger understanding about when to do what and why. There's a lot to unpack there, Brendan, and thank you for sharing your reflections there and starting off teaching, I'm sure for a lot of our listeners, they would have made a lot of connections to the feelings that you feel, and agree with the notion that we're always learning because if we ever have an end to our learning regardless of where we're up to, how we need to look in with some of what's going on, so thank you for sharing that with us. And I want to go back to the instructional hierarchy there and talking about acquisition, right? So we're talking about responsive teaching and knowing, you know, it's important to be planned, but we need to be responsive to the needs of our students. I've got a new concept, let's go with maths. So I'm coming into the classroom, I've got a new concept, and I want the students to be able to acquire the concept. What is the best approach to going about acquiring that concept of making sure that we're explicitly teaching but then getting the balance of knowing when to be responsive and that gradual release of independence there? So how do I go about that acquisition? Yeah, cool. And so firstly, what we need to know is that the look for us to understand when our students are actually in acquisition is we're going to see things like students struggling to start tasks. Okay, we're going to see things like students feeling frustrated. They like, you know, we're all in the primary system. Primary students, they cannot hide this. Like it's written all over their face. Like when they are looking frustrated, unfortunately sometimes that can actually end in tears. You know, they can be crying in front of you. And what's that is telling you is that the task that you're given them is too hard. It's above their current skill level. And so if we wanted to, you know, we could say to them or you just need to be resilient, you know, have you thought about doing these different things? We could ask them all these questions. And yeah, you know, for a couple of kids, they might be able to work it out. But for the majority, right, this is where we start to get that learned behavior of, you know, students who are just experiencing failure day in, day out. And so that learned failure then turns into what we might call disengaged learning behavior. All right, because the students soon work out very quickly. I don't know how to do this. The teacher's not really helping me. They're not telling me what to do. They're not showing me what to do. And so rather than just looking silly and failing every lesson, I'm going to start to, you know, talk to my friends, say that I can avoid doing the work or I'm going to call out or I'm going to be the class clown, whatever it is, just so that they can avoid actually having to do the work because they actually don't know how to do the work. And so coming back to what you're talking about there with explicit instruction, this is why explicit instruction is vital for students who are in the acquisition stage of learning. And again, I just want to reiterate, this is based on where students are at. So it's not based on what I had planned to teach, but when students are telling me, when they're showing me, when I'm seeing that they don't know things, that is telling me, or I need to use explicit instruction. And so what is explicit instruction? It's not just the teacher standing up the front and lecturing and talking. You know, it's not what I initially started as a high school teacher. And that's what I used to think it was. You know, I'll give you a big spill about today's lesson. I might write some notes up on the board and get the students to copy them down into their workbooks and their not learnings happened, right? But no, that's not explicit instruction. Expisting instruction is when as a teacher, you know really clearly what the purpose of your lesson is in a way where by the end of that lesson, you know precisely what success looks like. So what will students know and be able to do? How will they show you success? Like what is the observable learning objectives that you're aiming for for that lesson? And then you know, in your modeling phase, that I do phase, that's all about showing them where you're trying to get them to. And so that might be from a demonstration modeling, you know, using your think aloud. And when you're doing that, it is staying aligned with what your learning objective is. So everything needs to be like a straight line of sight between your learning objective all the way through to the end of that lesson. And so then, you know, once we've shown that, you know, really effectively, we're then going to go into that guided practice phase where we're now getting the students to practice the things that we want them to be able to do by the end of the lesson independently. So the goal of acquisition is actually for our students to be able to do things accurately and independently without assistance. Okay. And again, this is often a step that is missed is that we've all got those students in our classes who we feel are, you know, they just need more support. And so we actually end up keeping the scaffolds and the prompts up for the whole lesson. And they never get to independent practice. And because of that, the first time they actually have to do something independently and have to think without an adult support or, you know, some sort of learning aid is in a high-stakes assessment like napkin. Okay. And so that's why we get all of these students experiencing massive loads of anxiety when they hit napkin is because all of a sudden, we are now throwing them into this really complex situation. So napkin is actually generalization or an adaptation assessment. So and what that means is that it's not asking them questions that are exactly the same as what they've learnt in class. Okay. So if we wanted to assess acquisition, that means that we're asking them questions on things that we're directly taught them in our lessons. Okay. As we move through that gradual release of responsibility, we want to be fading away or prompting and scaffolding based on the responses of our students. So right at the start, okay, we've got that model. I'm then going to ask my students to do one little thing next. Okay. So that might be if I'm using the technique of Faded Guidance, I might have spoken about this last time Alice, but Faded Guidance is basically where, you know, as a teacher, I can either use forward fading or backwards fading. So forward fading is where I'll get the students to do the first step, backwards fading is where I would get them to do the last step. And then the teacher does the rest of the steps and then we're going to do another one. And then the students will do two steps. Okay. And then we're going to do another one. And the students will do three steps depending on the accuracy rate. So if I am, when I'm checking that first time, I'm looking for a pretty high accuracy rate, meaning that I want to see probably around 90% of my class being able to do what I've just asked them to do because I'm just asking them to do one small thing. And I've just shown them how to do that. Most of the time, I'll also have an example up on the board that they can actually refer to as well. So they're not having the whole things in their working memory. They can see, here's the question, this is what I need to do. I can use that model to guide me as to what I need to be thinking about. So it's just that one small thing. And by only asking students to do that one small thing, it means that the teacher is able to diagnose precisely where things are going right or wrong. Okay. At that point in time. Okay. So they're going to know like if the students can't do that one small thing, that's telling me my model wasn't right. I need to actually go back and remodel that. So maybe I might have been using slides and the animations on the slides were too abstract. I need to go back. Let's just go old school. Let's go whiteboard and pen or I might go under a document camera and I'm going to show them exactly what I want them to be able to do themselves. And then we're gradually going to fade away to the point where they are at independent practice, meaning that they're just practicing exactly what they've been learning how to do during that lesson. It's the exact same thing, but now they're doing it without any prompting and scaffolding. And so when you teach this way, when they get to independent practice, the students hardly even notice it. I describe it like you should you should feel like there's a silent buzz in the room. And the silence is that there's the students aren't talking and the buzz is coming from their pen or their pencil just going absolutely trying to nail as many questions as they can in that time period that you've given them. And so that's what it looks like. And they want to just get through it. They get annoyed at me when I say, oh, we've run out of time. I just need everyone to put their pens and pencils down now and we're just going to wrap up today's lesson because they have now gotten to that point where I've been holding them back, holding them back, holding them back. And now I'm going to release them and they just want to, yes, practice, practice, practice because they're experiencing success. And so by teaching this manner, it actually solves that real, really common problem of teachers trying to differentiate. And, and you know, I hear this all the time like, you know, I've got such a big range of abilities in my class. And, you know, what can I do? And so for me, I don't, I don't differentiate the curriculum. I differentiate the levels of support. And so when we get into that guided practice phase, first one, I'll start to differentiate. So there will be some students that will get released to independent practice a bit faster. But then there will be other students that do need a little bit more specific prompting specific feedback that will help them work out what they need to do next. And so when we, when we do this, it means that all of our students can engage with the same curriculum. It means that all of our students can experience success. And as a teacher, it means that I'm not having to plan, you know, four or five different lessons for the same class. And yeah, it's, it's really effective when done right. But I guess couple of the other key things that need to be considered here, knowing the purpose of your lesson, I'll come back to that. Because if you know precisely what you're trying to teach today, then you actually know what the prerequisite knowledge is. This is often where lessons go wrong is that we, as a teacher, we haven't actually clearly defined the purpose of our lesson. And so then as we're teaching, we end up being distracted by the prerequisites and we end up trying to teach that within our lesson. And so our lesson goes off on this tangent, trying to teach this prerequisite where some students know other students don't, whereas if we had actually come into that lesson prepared, we would either know, or well, if my students haven't got the prerequisites, then I'm gonna come in prepared with some sort of learning aid for today's lesson because I'll give you a bit more of a concrete example. If I'm trying to teach the standard algorithm for multiplication, and my students haven't got fluency in their times tables, I'm just gonna give them a hundreds chart for that lesson. Because the purpose of that lesson is influencing their times tables, it's trying to teach them the steps of the standard algorithm, right? So it's all about knowing what the purpose of that your lesson is and not getting distracted by the other things, 'cause what happens if I don't give those students their times tables, then that's where they get stuck. So they don't even get to learning the algorithm. And so all that happens, right, is that our gap widens. Those that can end up getting further ahead, those that can't, they fall further behind, all because they're stuck on this one point. Often, I'll probably actually stop it 'cause I'm probably going way too far. I could talk for hours on this stuff. (laughs) - You love it, granted. - I think it's a lot too to making sure that the, I wanna say deficit sounds really bad, but like that skill deficit that the kids, without that prerequisite knowledge might have, not allowing that to hold the kids back, kind of by passing that so that you can still develop the concept and the skill that you're wanting to get the students to, which goes back to your point around really knowing the purpose and that intent or learning. I wanna go back to a little point that you talked about in terms of instruction and engagement of the students in learning. And looking at, how do we transform our classrooms into spaces for genuine conversation and active engagement, as opposed to just that fan and galuba model that a lot of our classrooms have where it's death by PowerPoint and the teachers doing most of the talking. How do we build classrooms that actually involve the students and engage them purposefully in that learning? - Yeah, and this is really the point that a lot of teachers are missing right now around explicit instruction is just what it actually is. And so how do we move away from just that teacher talk and teacher leading the whole thing and thinking that's explicit instruction? Well, it's all about understanding yeah, firstly how learning happens, right? And so when it comes to student involvement, right? There's gonna be, for me, during that modeling phase that I do phase, it's gonna be minimal student involvement during that period. But that's probably the shortest phase of that graduate release of responsibility. And if I know that, like I've got a pretty complex concept that I'm trying to unpack in this lesson, then I don't wanna be talking for more than two or three minutes without some sort of student involvement, okay? And so what that then looks like is I'm gonna get them involved by getting them to do either core responses, I'm usually core responses for the I do phase and I'll get them involved by asking them questions on things that I already know they've mastered. And I'll keep talking about maths at the moment but feel free to ask me, you know, literacy questions as well. But yeah, so if we're looking at MathsRi and going back to that standard algorithm lesson, if I know that most of my students know what two times three is, then I'll ask them that. I'll say, all right, what's two times three? And then they'll give me that core response of six, beautiful, okay? So I'm now getting them involved in that I do phase but it's not on things that they don't know yet, okay? So if I'm trying to teach them the steps of the algorithm, I'm not gonna know, I'm not gonna ask them, okay, well, what steps should we do next? Or I'm not gonna ask them, should I regroup now, yes or no? I'm not gonna ask them those sorts of questions because that's the purpose of today's lesson. That's what I'm trying to teach them today. So during the I do phase, I do the heavy lifting for the hard thinking, but they can do the things that they can do easily, all right? And then once we move into that we do phase, we're now doubling or tripling the opportunities to respond that we're expecting from our students. So we're talking two opportunities to respond every minute. And like a task, I'll get teachers to do when they're observing me teach, is I'll get them to tally up how many opportunities to respond students get in my lessons and look when we'll break down the different parts of that lesson. And you can see this really clears shift in the amount of practice opportunities that students are getting in that we do phase. Because that's where I need to be really confident that students are able to do things independently by the end of that lesson. The only way I can be confident is not by assuming things but by actually checking. You know, so every 10, 20 seconds, I'm giving them something to do. And I'm going to then receive feedback from them about how they're going. And that will be through either mini-wildboards or co-responsors or calling your non-volunteers. But I'm getting this constant stream of information from my students that then informs me what I need to do next. So if I'm getting a really high percentage of students being successful, so again, that's sort of like 80, 90%. Then I'm going to keep beating away my prompts and scaffolds. OK, if I'm not getting that, so if I'm getting somewhere between like 50% or lower, then that's telling me I've either taken two big of a step. And so I need to go back. Maybe I've suffered from the curse of knowledge. And I thought that I had sequenced this lesson in small steps, but in actual fact, I've just skipped something that I've done in my head. Or maybe I need to remodel it and show them another way or explain something in a bit more detail. And so that's really what needs to be happening is a teacher needs to be having more of a conversation with their students around, all right, give this a go. Do you know how to do this? Show me. And then we're going to keep moving on. So you're rather than like showing students how to do things. And then I used to think guided practice was like, we'll do a question together. All right, great. Does everyone understand? And I'll ask that question. And I'll get smiles and head nods. And I'm like, awesome. All right, now can everyone now go back to their desk and complete this worksheet or complete these questions? And then they get back there and they're like, Mr Lee, what do we do? I don't know what to do. Because I haven't actually checked. I've just sent them off. And I haven't actually checked their understanding. I've just asked them, do you know? And when we ask questions like that, either it's too awkward for students to say they don't know or they can feel overconfident because they feel familiar with the idea because I've just shown them how to do it. But they haven't actually had a go at doing it themselves. So yeah, the conversation part of it comes in that back and forward aspect of it. It's more like a tennis match where we're hitting that ball back and forth rather than just a golf game where I'm just going to have a swing and a hit. And it's just all me. Yeah, it's interesting, Brendan, following on from Alice's point there of the misconceptions around that I'm just talking at my students opposed to educating my students when it comes to explicit to each and something that I've observed is obviously the increased use of slide decks and slide presentations for Google slide at this PowerPoint. Choose your thing there. And I see a lot of positives with it because it helps scaffold the learning and reduces that need from a teacher's perspective that creates a level of consistency and really helps for the delivery. But I think that there's been a lack of professional learning to go alongside that of knowing how to work the slides, knowing the purpose of what they are there for and still using your visualizer, the whiteboard drawing and everything there. So I think where the slides and the lecturing kind of comes with this misconception around explicit teaching is back to the slides. But there's a lack of understanding of the purpose and the reason and just understanding that is just a tool of supporting us within it. What have you found in your work within your consultancy at the moment to do with slides and the misconception around explicit teaching? Yeah, well, you hit the nail on the head there, Jane. It is just a tool. And slides is the current thing that's getting bashed. But previously it was textbooks, whatever it is, it works books. Their tools that can be misused or not understood properly by teachers how to use them. And so really that tool, whether it is a textbook or a slide deck, is just a holding spot of information for the teacher, right? So that they don't have to think about all these examples that they're going to go through in the lesson. But they've already got them there. Where the teacher needs to, I guess, really come into it and use that tool properly is understanding that I can go back or I can pivot. I can have that slide up there, but like I love it when teachers have another whiteboard right next to their interactive whiteboard, whether that's one on wheels or one that's right there, because then I can just quickly go off and show that, all right, here's another one. Have a go at this one, have a go at this one, or get under that document camera and show them some other ways that they can do things. But yeah, that's when it is used properly, is when the teacher is able to do that. But one thing that is probably underestimated a bit and I think why a lot of teachers maybe using the PowerPoints not as effectively as they could, is just that lack of content knowledge. And it's one of those things where there's no quick fix here. There's no simple way of just like, we're not computers, we can't just upload all of the content knowledge that we need to know. And at primary teachers, especially right, we need to have that content knowledge for every subject across multiple year groups often. And that's a lot of learning that we're not necessarily getting from initial teacher education. And so if you're not getting it there, that means you need to be learning on the job, which is really quite difficult. And so I think that's why we can see a lot of resources not being used as effectively as possible, because in order to know how to give effective feedback, in order to know what some of those common misconceptions are and how to get in front of them, or what they actually mean, you need to have yeah, that knowledge right. And if you haven't got that knowledge, then you can't actually teach responsibly. So I think that needs to be really clear, right? Is that it's all well and good for us to sit here and talk about responsive teaching and explicit instruction. But the fact of the matter is is that the teacher still does have to put in the hard yards of actually learning the content. And yeah, there's no kind of easy way around it. And I think, yeah, this is part of, if we want to be treated as a professional industry, then this is part of it, is making sure that we do take our job seriously and we do understand that well, it does require me to constantly be learning. As a school leader, I know that both of you are principals at the moment. I think where we can support staff is by giving them as many opportunities as possible to build that knowledge, giving them the right resources, giving them the time. And then also understanding that if we're going to ask teachers to change the year group or the stage level that they're teaching, that that's going to require them to learn a lot of new stuff. It's not as simple as, you know, I'm just, you know, I feel this teacher's getting a bit stale and we need to move them around a bit. Yeah, it's not that simple. I think, yeah, we probably often underestimate just how much of a steep learning curve it is when you are moved across different year groups because the other thing that gets us is, you know, teaching, teaching you one, you two, kindergarten is so different to teaching you five and you six, right? And so that pedagogical content knowledge as well and understanding of the developmental process of children is quite steep at that point as well. So, yeah, there's just so much that that teachers do need to know and, and yeah, I think as school leaders we just need to be mindful of it. Yeah, thank you for sharing your insights onto that. Brendan, as we continue to move through the instructional hierarchy and I want to talk about fluency now. Where does fluency set on the instructional hierarchy and how do we go in our instructional practice to support student fluency from our teaching? Yeah, great. And it's been, you know, also to see more school systems, teachers like starting to talk about fluency and the importance of it. But yeah, I'm also seeing a lot of people still not fully understanding what it is that we're talking about when we're talking about fluency because, you know, like a lot of things, we need to have a shared understanding as to what it is that we're actually talking about because fluency can mean many different things. So when I'm talking about fluency through the instructional hierarchy, it's accuracy plus speed. Okay, so we, if we're going to ask our students to build their fluency and, you know, to do that, we need time to practice, then they need to have accuracy first. And so where we have gone wrong in the past with fluency practice is that we have just, you know, given our students these fluency sheets and we've just said, all right, everyone needs to finish this sheet. Everyone's going to do the same worksheet. You've got 10 minutes to do. You need to finish all the questions on the sheet. Put your hand up or call out when you're done. And so all that has done, right? It's made those students who are already fluent, made them feel really good about themselves because they're done in like one or two minutes and they're like, I'm done. I'm done. You know, tell me what time is. And then we have these other students who they don't know what the first, the answer to the first question is, right? They don't know what the answer is. And so they're just sitting there staring at this sheet, knowing that they, they, they can't work out question one. They've still got another 99 questions to go after question one. And they're thinking, what am I going to do for the next 10 minutes? And if they don't know how to do it today and there's no intervention provided between today and tomorrow and they're asked to do it again tomorrow, how are they expected to get any better? So accuracy is needed first. When we're teaching our facts, it's actually slightly different to when we are teaching things like procedures and concepts and principles or rules. And, and so the fact is literally, they just need to have the model of like, this is, you know, when you see this letter A, it represents A. Can you say A? And that's it, right? They just need that, that literal model. If we're teaching the maths back, it's like, can you see this three plus four? It's seven. Right. What is three plus four? It's seven. That's it. They see it. They practice it. And it's, it is literally just getting a rep's in. And they need as much practice as they can get. We're talking daily, hopefully. And it needs to be time because otherwise we don't know if they're improving or not. And coming back to what the definition is is accuracy plus speed. So we're looking for that rate of improvement. If we're not getting some sort of rate of improvement, then we need to look at like the fact that our intervention isn't working. You know, what our practice isn't working right now. So why is that? Is it because we're asking them, we haven't actually got that accuracy yet. And so we just need to get, build that accuracy. So we're going to do that model in practice mode first. Is it because that they just need a higher dosage, you know? So we're doing one session a day for two minutes. Maybe they need two or three sessions a day in order to see that level of improvement that we should expect. But yeah, when this is done properly, like this is actually the missing piece for a lot of our students in being successful in learning is actually fluency. And so I know in New South Wales, we've had this really big push for high potential gifted and talented, right? Often those students that we label, you know, as being, you know, high potential or even gifted and talented are actually just fluent, okay? And they've developed fluency earlier than other their peers, their other students. And that early fluency has then given them the boost to learn other things a lot faster. Right? Because knowledge connects to knowledge, right? And so the more that we know, the faster access we have to that knowledge, the more that we're going to learn in the future as well. And so this is why fluency is so important. But yeah, most schools don't either have that regular fluency practice that we actually need. So again, daily, it can be done in, you know, five to ten minutes a session. Short sessions are better than, you know, big, big long blocks. But the other thing to understand here as well is that with the instructional hierarchy, we actually want to be looking at each of the stages separately. So it's not like I'm teaching something today by the end of the lesson, we're going to be doing fluency practice, you know, or, you know, today's lessons acquisition, tomorrow's going to be fluency the day after that's going to be generalization. That's not how it works, right? Learning's a lot messier than that. It's a lot more complex. So fluency actually has its own sequence. So we don't need to learn, build fluency in absolutely everything. We need to build fluency in our factual knowledge. Okay. So anything where other bits of knowledge are going to rely on knowing those things really quickly, right? We need to launch in those things. So facts aren't just your maths facts, but it's anything where there is a clear, right and wrong answer. Okay. So if, you know, if this is, well, you know, we can build fluency in reading, where we want to and see those words. When I see that word, the I know straightaway, it's the. That's what we're talking about with facts. We can look at history, you know, history facts, geography facts. So these are things that we just want them to know really fluently. We can also build fluency in procedures in steps that will help as well. But in terms of, yeah, other things we don't necessarily need to be building fluency in it purely because we just don't have the time to build fluency in everything. And so we're going to focus on those building blocks, those foundational skills. They need to be done every day. They need their own sequence and yeah, the routine around it can be super effective when it's embedded on a regular basis. And you know, kids as young as five and six, they're able to to do the practice. They can do it individually. They can do it in pairs. They're able to mark their work. They're able to track their progress. Yeah, so I've had kids literally charting their progress every day. So they'll go on a chart and they'll they'll plot, all right, this is how many I scored today. And then tomorrow, they'll look at yesterday's score and they'll see what they need to be today. So it's all about beating your own personal best. It's not about having some sort of leaderboard in your classroom where I'm comparing the students, but the students are trying to continually improve them for themselves, not against other students. Yeah, so it's a really interesting concept and a really important part of the work that we do in our classrooms. And it's a conversation that I've been having with colleagues at my school around, particularly in the math phase, around maths, law and C and the import and that. I want to kind of shift gears a little bit and look at, you know, when we get into that independent space, but looking at, didn't let discovery and you know, using the knowledge and the content skills that we have gained to be able to, sorry, to really dive deep into our learning and to explore that. What is to kind of take on, on, you know, student led discovery and learning and the importance of that being intentional and planned because then they're quite often, you know, we often hear being called inquiry and things like that. It gets about rap. It does have a place and it can be powerful, but what's your kind of take on on that and how it sits in this hierarchy? Yeah, it's all about timing, okay. And I think this is, this is where again, we've got it gotten it wrong in the past is we've kind of just hoped that it's going to work. You know, or I might be a teacher and I've seen a really great activity, you know, I might even label it, oh, this is like it's going to be really engaging activity, right? Without probably thinking about well, where are my students at? Like, what do they currently know? How will they be able to access this activity? So rather than being guided by the activity, again, coming back to what we need to be guided by is our students. And so rather than like your unit of work, it can end in some sort of adaptation task, okay. So adaptation is when we're asking students to pull from, you know, different bits of knowledge, pull them all together, okay. And then adapt them into a new context. So we can end our unit of work with some sort of task like that. It might be what we might label as like an inquiry task. So that can definitely happen, right? But I know the hecticness of schools and, you know, teacher life and often what happens right is that we run out of time, okay. And so I've gotten to the end of the term and I actually didn't get to that inquiry task at the end of the unit because it was like a, it was meant to only go for five weeks. But, you know, we lost some lessons to swing carnival and cross country and, you know, Easter had parade and all these things popping up. And so I ran out of time. We didn't quite get there and, you know, now it's the end of the term. And so that can happen. And so we actually don't get our students up to that point where they get to engage with that task or we can do it the other way around where we start with the task before they've actually got all of the skills and bits of knowledge that they need to have, okay. And then that, this is where it becomes a really big issue because now all of a sudden, again, we're getting that Matthew effect in full force because those at Ken, they're able to do it, those at Kent, they can't do it and so that gap just widens. And so what we need to do instead is, again, looking at generalization and adaptation as like separate parts of our curriculum. And we're starting to do this better in the literacy space, but we haven't really started to do this in the maths space at all. So in literacy, it can look like having, you know, separate units for writing and reading comprehension, okay. And so when we do that well, we're doing that based on things that our students already know, okay. And so if I have, you know, a highly engineered curriculum where I know that my students have fluency in this system, this, they've been taught these other concepts and principles, they know all of this stuff. Well, I can now get them to do these open-ended maths questions that I haven't shown them how to do before because they've got all the prerequisite skills. So in maths, what it should look like is actually having, again, your problem solving task separate to your main unit of work that you're teaching. And then this way, students are actually able to engage with problems more pretty much on a daily basis, particularly from, you know, say you two upwards, they can do, they can engage with more problems, but the problems need to be on things that they've already got fluency in. So if I'm teaching a year, five class and they haven't got fluency in their time tables, haven't got fluency in division yet, I'm not getting them to solve problems involving those things, right, but I am getting them to solve problems involving things like addition and subtraction, you know, there might be some geometry questions in there that, I know that they're really good with, but these are the questions that they're going to be engaging with on a daily basis, not things that they don't know yet. And same goes for, you know, reading activities. So rather than asking them questions on things that they don't have background knowledge on, we actually want to be asking them questions on things that look already know in our, you know, in our history unit, we've built up our background knowledge in this bit of knowledge. So we can now engage in these tasks where they're reading, you know, these new texts that haven't read before, and I can ask some questions on it because I know they've got the vocabulary and the background knowledge required to answer these questions. So now all of a sudden, we're actually getting them to do more of these complex activities, right, but it's we're just kind of shifting where we're flipping our world a little bit. So rather than waiting until the end of our unit of work, we're now doing it based on things that they already know. And they've shown us that they can do this because we're tracking our data through our fluency and other assessments. Yeah, so this is how it can work, but not many schools are thinking about organising their learning in this sort of manner. I think it's an interesting point, Brendan, I always use the examples because I enjoy sport and music and when it comes to that independent practice, discovering, whatever language you want to use and everyone always has their own motive in how they spin something, but I use the connection for a sport within a rugby league football team. Are you going to go and ask them to come up with a great play to score a try if they don't know how to pass the ball, if they don't know how to tackle, they need to know the skills and then they can go and apply them in those abstract ways, same with music. You know, a great piano player, are they going to be able to create a great piece of music if they do not know the simple keys of a piano? No, they don't. So give them the basic skills that they need to do the task and then allow them to apply that in abstract ways to demonstrate their understanding. It's, you know, I always find connecting to the sport and music in those examples just helps really make it so simple, but then we think when it comes to learning that, you know, just chucking a student in the deep end without giving them the skills, how is that going to be a successful task for them? So yeah, I really appreciate you sharing your insights into that. The next thing I would like to explore with you is around data. You know, I think it's important when we look at data, you know, we look at qualitative, quantitative, we look at various data sources to help get us a full picture. And often what I notice within schools is we sometimes go off our subjective bias. I just know, you know, I know best and this is the way it is opposed to really having those data protocols where we suspend those judgments, we suspend all those different things so that we can actually engage in authentic meaningful conversation to look at what it is for us to drive. But tell me your thoughts on, you know, using data meaningfully to drive improvement within the Tracey and University. Yeah, it's, it's really interesting and this is kind of why I find it so important that teachers actually have a shared understanding [BLANK_AUDIO] and how learning happens. 'Cause if I have two teachers who are assessing the same student, one teacher believes that learning means that when I have taught my student how to do something, they're able to show me that they can do it again. All right, and then I have another teacher who goes by the definition of learning is a change in long term memory, right? So now we have two teachers, same student. I've got one teacher who was saying that student has learnt it because they're able to do it in the moment. Then I have another teacher who was saying, oh, they haven't learnt it because when I asked them, you know, a couple of weeks later, and I said to them on that same question, they hadn't retained it. They weren't able to recall it at a point in time, okay? So that's one way to look at it. Another way to look at it is, you know, you have other teachers who are assessing learning based on, you know, we've got an end of unit assessment and we've got all these different questions in there. And, you know, whatever that overall mark is, it's going to tell me where that student is at. Or even, you know, they might be looking at NAPLIN and looking at the results there and thinking, okay, well, this is telling me, you know, the student is above where they should be or below where they should be or they're at that point. But yeah, when we properly understand how learning happens and then what we're actually seeing from those results, we can start to unpack it a lot more accurately. So if I understand that, you know, those NAPLIN assessments are actually not assessing the things that I've taught them in class, but requiring them to adapt what they know, it's not going to give me an accurate indication as to, you know, if I'm trying to work out the different outcomes in, you know, that students have learned or not learned, I'm not necessarily going to know from an assessment like NAPLIN, whether or not those outcomes have been achieved, because maybe the student hasn't received the result that we were looking for in NAPLIN because they actually haven't got reading fluency. So it's actually got nothing to do with that maths outcome that you're assessing them against. Or, you know, even, even it might be like, it might be a reading task and maybe you're looking at some reading outcomes, but it's not because they can't do that specific skill, but because they haven't got that background knowledge. Right, so it's now a knowledge thing, not necessarily a skilled thing. So we just need to be really aware of what it is that we're actually assessing. We need to be aware of like what the data is actually telling us, you know, we need to be aware of like a simple thing like a screener. So, you know, hopefully schools are using screeners to assess our students where they should be. But even that isn't always going to give us an accurate indication as to where students are truly at. And the reason behind that is a lot of those screeners are met there, they're what we call curriculum based measurements. And it's writing the word, you know, curriculum. If that assessment has been developed by a different curriculum, and often it has been, you know, here in Australia, we use the Australian curriculum or whatever state you're in, we'll use that state syllabus or curriculum. And a lot of these curriculum based measurements have actually been developed overseas, either in America or over in the UK. And so their curriculum doesn't actually necessarily align with our curriculum. And so we might be assessing students on things that haven't actually been taught yet. Or we might be assessing them on aspects that they're not expected to master yet for their age group. And so what that can mean is that it's not fully aligned. And so when you're looking at that screening data, it might be, you know, you might be getting all these red flags when in actual fact they're only popping up because students haven't been taught that stuff yet. Or because, you know, that assessment that you are assessing students on, you know, it's called kindergarten, but kindergarten over in America, they are, I'm just making up this number, but they're, you know, seven and eight year olds, whereas our kindergarten students are only five and six or whatever it is, okay. And so we just need to take all of that information into account when we are looking at data and understanding what it's actually telling us. - Yeah, it's a great point that you make. And I think it's important that, you know, we look at the data, particularly when you're looking at, you know, your system does, as I say, like an AppLand. With a really critical lens, the looking at, you know, often when my team's sitting, we analyse an AppLand data when it comes out in, you know, Term 3 or whatever. Quite often it's like, oh, you know, the kids can't still can't infer or they can't find the main idea or, you know, year on year, we hear the same statements being made. But looking at, you know, what is, what was it they were being asked to infer? Is it that they can't do that skill or is it because they didn't have the requisite background knowledge to be able to infer or, you know, to be able to find that main idea or whatever it is it might be, which I find really deepens that conversation around, you know, is it skill-based, is it knowledge-based? And being, you know, the school that I'm at is in a rural setting, quite often our conversation center around concepts that perhaps your metropolitan students would have, you know, see regularly or have access to or experience whereas, you know, your rural remote often, possibly your regional might not have that knowledge and so how is it that we build, build that in our students when that's not our, our every day. It's a very interesting space, the data space. Yeah, and essentially this is why we do need to try and calculate that data. It is also, like why, you know, there still needs to be improvement to our curriculums. You know, in an ideal world, right? We have a national curriculum that everyone follows and it is so specific that it tells everyone precisely what they need to be teaching and what the students need to be learning. And if we had that sort of curriculum, then all of a sudden we could align our assessments like NAPLAN to the curriculum. But now because we haven't got that, it means that, you know, we're kind of hoping that the students are all exposed to the same knowledge and skills across our schools and systems but they're not necessarily going to be because we haven't got that level of consistency that we probably need and yeah, look, I don't know where we're going to get it purely because it's probably more of a political thing of people wanting to make sure that they've got their say and things are kind of putting that they want but it's not necessarily going to be giving them enough information in terms of teachers and schools. Brendan, it's been a fascinating conversation to hear your insights around teaching and learning and going deep on some of the concepts. What's one of the main takeaways from our four-hour listeners from this episode that you want them to take away and on top of that, what's something that they could implement in their classroom tomorrow? Yeah, good question. So I think like, firstly, I want to say like, we've spoken a lot about a lot of different ideas today, a lot of pretty big ideas and as a teacher, like be kind to yourself and know that as a learner, as a teacher, learner, you're right back at acquisition whenever you're learning something new as well. And we've spoken about things like responsive teaching today. Responsive teaching requires you to be at the adaptation stage of learning. So it requires you to have acquired all this knowledge, to have the legacy in the facts and the procedures of the things that you need to do. And then you need to be able to adapt to that, to your setting, to your context. And so that's really quite difficult. And so rather than trying to get there straight away, trying to get there tomorrow, actually understanding that, yeah, you do need to take small incremental steps in order to get there. Choosing that one small thing that you can do is quite powerful. And probably the one thing I would encourage listeners to do is to listen to their students, and to make sure you know where they're at, rather than being guided so much by your slide deck, or what you had pre-prepared. Actually really, when you're checking, it's not just going through the motions and getting them to do it, but actually tuning into, if they're doing a core response, really listening, am I getting all of my students responding right now? Okay, if not, why not? Okay, are they just being lazy? Or do they not know it? I'm always going to, I'm going to go on the side of that, I'm going to assume they don't know it. I'm going to get them to hear it again, do it again. If it's like mini-wildboards, rather than just getting them to do questions, actually looking at their responses and making sure that you are getting that level of accuracy that is required, and if you're not, then you know what you need to do next. You're either going to remodel, you're either going to put the prompting and scaffolding back up. So that's really what we need to be doing. If you just make that slight shift, even if it's just one lesson a day, I'll go into you that lesson, it's going to be more effective than what it would have been if you were just clicking through the slides or sticking to what you had planned. Now, thank you for sharing, Brendan. The main things that I reflect upon from our conversation today is the importance of knowing our content and how to teach it and knowing our students in front of you and being responsive to their needs to help shape your practice as well. They're kind of the points that are resonating with me, Alice. Any takeaways from our conversation? Very similar to yours to James. I think for me, a lot of it, you know, my thoughts kept coming back to, you know, regardless of whether you've got your slide deck or you're using your systems, unit of learning that they've developed, you have to know the syllabus, you have to know your content, you know, in order to be able to effectively know where your kids have come from or should have come from and where you're wanting them to get to really having that deep knowledge of the purpose of the lesson that you're teaching and the requisite knowledge that's required or you'll learn it in order to be able to access that with something that really duck with me in today's conversation. Yeah. And the whole concept of adaptive or responsive teaching, if we're not knowing our content and the appropriate strategies to help our students acquire the knowledge, how can we be responsive because we might not know the appropriate strategy to go to be responsive to that specific need of our learner. So and I guess reflecting a school leader's Alice as well and the point that Brendan said is how can we ensure that we're creating time for us to engage authentically in the content because our syllabus is for New South Wales colleagues there online now. We don't get the hard copies of such, you know, where we can draw, we can write, we can look at what the prior learning is and where the next steps are. So the other point that I take is ensuring that we're freeing up time for our teams to engage within that, with competing demands and competing priorities. Brendan, any final remarks from you? No, look, yeah, I think just stick at it. Teaching is a extremely complex and exhausting job, but it can also be more rewarding than any job as well. And so when we do get those lessons, that's why I do believe so strongly in professional learning is because the more that you know, the more confident you are in what you do, the more lessons you're going to get right and then that has a really profound impact on not just your students, but also you as a teacher. I think like one of the reasons why we are having so many teachers leaving the profession is actually because of just that repeated lesson failure and you're not really feeling great about what you're doing. And so when we're getting that, we tend to look elsewhere. So yeah, let's start to kind of take a bit more control over what we can do, how effective we can be, and just really tune into your students and what they need from you. Thank you, Brendan. It's always a pleasure to have you on and to hear your knowledge and the work that you're doing and I look forward to the instructional hierarchy book that you're co-authoring when that will come out and reading that. But at least thank you as always. You are joining us for season six episode 14 of the Teacher Takeaway Podcast. Until next time, we'll see you then.