The Scientific Principles of Teaching: Bridging the Divide Between Educational Practice and Research

[00:01] Announcer:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, helping you build capacity for instructional leadership. Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center, Dr. Justin Bader. Welcome, everyone, to Principal Center Radio.

[00:13] SPEAKER_01:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to welcome to the program Nathaniel Hansford. Nate has taught every grade from pre-K to 12th in places as diverse as South Korea, the United Kingdom, the sub-Arctic of Quebec, and Ontario, Canada. In 2022, he won the Literacy Leader of the Year award from the Ontario International Dyslexia Association. Nate has written hundreds of articles on the science of teaching, and he's most interested in using meta-analysis research to help teachers implement methodologies that have been proven to work. And he is the author of the new book, The Scientific Principles of Teaching, Bridging the Divide Between Educational Practice and Research.

[00:52] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:54] SPEAKER_01:

Nate, welcome to Principal Center Radio.

[00:56] SPEAKER_00:

Hey, it's great to be on your podcast today.

[00:58] SPEAKER_01:

Well, I'm fascinated by the title, The Scientific Principles of Teaching, because I feel like that was a book that could have been written a hundred years ago, right? The idea of applying scientific principles to a profession is certainly not a new idea, and yet it's one that is perhaps under-realized in our profession. As you have been an educator for many years now, and have won some awards as an educator, what did you see happening in the field, or not happening in our field, that prompted you to write this book?

[01:26] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, in regards to the title, I just felt like so much of teaching, we just didn't have, like, professional standards that were really rooted in science. There was a lot of teacher autonomy, and I'm actually in favor of teacher autonomy. I'm not a huge rule follower if I'm being totally truthful myself. So, like, having, like, a strict set of rules to follow on how I'm going to teach in my classroom, that's sort of a daunting idea to me. But at the same time, you know, I look towards the medical model. And it's funny, people are in favor of, like, a scientific model.

[01:54]

I think we sort of lacked that in our field.

[02:13]

There aren't just basic understandings of, you know, what do we know about the science of teaching? There wasn't sort of laid out what are some basic expectations of how you should teach in your classroom. And I think that, you know, as much as, like, we want teacher autonomy and freedom so that teachers can be creative individuals, because there is an art to teaching. And I think if we restrain the creativity of teachers too much, we're going to take something magical out of the classroom, for lack of a better word. But at the same time, we don't want, like, complete chaos and randomness in our schools. I wouldn't want my doctor to be prescribing me acupuncture if I had cancer for the same reasons that I don't want every teacher to just randomly pick things from a hat when they're deciding what to teach and deciding what is evidence-based.

[02:55]

And to go deeper on that, I think it's not really just so much that there's not, um, you know, a set standards list. It's that when we go through Teachers College, I don't think we're teaching education as a profession in the sense that it is a profession. You know, when I did Teachers College, and this is an experience I heard a lot of people say, I was sort of, you know, the focus was on lesson planning. How do I plan an engaging lesson? What kind of activities could I do in a lesson? There wasn't really any focus on how do we read academic research about, um, instruction in the classroom.

[03:23]

There's no discussion of, is there a science of teaching? There was no reading of scientific literature on teaching. And then, you know, when we had papers to write, there were always reflections. They weren't essays. They weren't academically rigorous. It was just like, how do you feel about this topic?

[03:37]

And in retrospect, I think that's really weird that I was asked that, because I had... At the time, I had no teaching experience and no knowledge of scientific research on teaching, so who cared what I thought? You know what I mean? And that sounds a bit brash, but at the same time, like, I was full of all kinds of crazy, dumb ideas.

[03:53]

I thought, you know... The way I thought I was going to teach and the way I actually ended up teaching ended up being polar opposite. I...

[04:00]

My last professor said, asked us to write a philosophy education paper where we outlined how we were going to teach. And he criticized it as being a manifesto of inquiry-based learning. And it was. It was like, I thought every day in the classroom was going to be shock and awe, and I was going to be, you know, like, kind of Robin Williams and Patch Adams and pulling out a clown nose in one minute. And I think the reality is that's not actually conductive to good teaching. And I think it was just a reflection of that I didn't have any understanding of what would be a science teaching approach.

[04:30] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, and I think you set that tension up so well because certainly teachers need autonomy, right? This is not a job that you possibly can do without some autonomy to make some decisions about what needs to happen in the moment, about what your students need, about how to approach any particular thing on any particular day. And I think sometimes science of anything gets associated with micromanagement of that thing, and that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about having a profession that has an evidence base And it's interesting to read about how hard-won that realization was in medicine, right? Just the idea of getting doctors to wash their hands. I mean, people were, you know, kicking and screaming, dragged into that a century ago.

[05:14]

And I feel like we're kind of at the same moment today in our profession. What first came to mind for you as some of the areas of practice where science had a clear answer that we were broadly ignoring as a profession?

[05:30] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, one really simple one, I think, and I call this quality time under instruction. It's a little bit of a tongue-in-cheek reference to a concept from the fitness industry, but it was just this idea that I thought there was this element of magical thinking that if we just use the right teaching methods, that we wouldn't need as much instructional time for students. And I think the reality is that all students are capable of higher learning. Um, but the amount of exposure they need to content is going to be different. You know, I've had students where I can show them a formula for a math problem once and they have it memorized and they're ready to move on. But I've also had students who might need me to explain that to them 50, 60 times.

[06:09]

And I think when we adopt that magical thinking and we don't recognize that some students just need more repetition... Then we actually end up leaving behind those students who need that greater level of repetition. So, that was just one thing that always stuck out to me. It's just, we need to make sure that we come to that understanding that every kid's going to need a different number of repetition.

[06:28]

And that it's, if you have a student not getting something, they need more time spent on learning that thing. I think when, at least when I first started teaching, there was this resistance to this concept called deficit teaching, which was, you know, the idea of teaching to kids' weaknesses and struggles. And instead, I heard a lot of, let's focus on their strengths. While I was a kid, I was really bad at math. And truthfully, I don't think I'm bad at math anymore, although I'm definitely not a math genius. But I grew to be good at math after a lot of practice.

[06:57]

And if my teachers had just been like, ah, he sucks at math, we don't need to teach him math, we'll teach him art, it could have ended up completely changing, you know, my life in a negative way. So, I think, you know, the same especially goes to reading. You know, about a decade ago, I was in a completely different school board. I had a principal telling me I shouldn't teach a kid how to read because they had dyslexia, um, and that they couldn't learn how to read. I, like...

[07:20]

I think we need to make sure that we are using a deficit model. If students don't get something, they need extra time. It's not that we should be focusing just on their strengths. I get that that sounds like a rosy, nice image. You know, I think of the fish can't climb trees metaphor, and it has sort of magical thinking element to it. It's very constructivist, but I think there are some basic fundamental pieces of knowledge that we want all students to have as a right.

[07:47] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, and that's such a different take than we often hear. You know, we like to think, as a profession, that there's just some technique that we can use to make all students learn the same things at the same speed. And time really is a variable, right? Time really is a difference in how students learn. Even if, you know, all students are capable of learning the same concept, they're not necessarily going to learn it at the same speed. And that's very inconvenient for us as educators, right?

[08:15]

Like, we would like to believe that there's some magical technique we can use to get everybody to move at the same speed, right?

[08:21] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, and, you know, there was this 2009 study by Torgerson et al., and it was a replication of an even earlier study that showed that, um, in order to get the majority of students at grade level in reading, we need to give those biggest strugglers 80 hours of extra instruction in a year. 80 hours is a lot. That's 30 minutes a day, five days a week for an entire school year. I don't know too many schools that are providing that to all struggling readers. Like, that's very challenging.

[08:48]

And I think from even a policy standpoint, it's pretty inconvenient to be like, ah, we got to give a lot of extra instruction. And from a parent standpoint, sometimes I think that gets challenged, too, because then where does that time come from? You have to make the time. You can't just extend the school day or that very few people would be in favor of that. So it has to come out of somewhere else. So it has to come out of gym or art or another subject.

[09:09]

And sometimes people get upset about that too. They were like, well, I don't want my kid missing something. Or I don't want my kid having time out of recess to do extra instruction. It's like, well, in some cases, then you just have to decide what are your priorities. Getting this kid to a great level of reading or making sure they have all of their gym. If it was me as a parent and it was my kid, I would personally much rather they lose gym than lose language.

[09:30]

Unpopular concepts right here off the start.

[09:32] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, and we don't like to confront those trade-offs, right? I think so often we want to avoid the uncomfortable conversations, and we want to have it all, but we can't, right? We're working with limited time in the day, we're working with constraints, and, yeah, I think it's best to face some of those tough choices head-on. So, as you reviewed large amounts of research, what did you learn about education research itself that made its way into the book? What do we need to know and understand about education research in order to use it effectively to shape policy and practice?

[10:06] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, I mean, I learned a lot, because this was really a long journey for me. I just, I started off reading one book on education research, and then I was so confused, because everything that was in the book that I was told was evidence-based by this author, John Addy, shout out to him, seemed to completely lay odds at everything I'd ever learned from teacher training programs, or my own teacher training at a university. I was getting my specialist at the time, and it just seemed there was this huge disconnect. So, I think one of the first things I'd say I learned is just that just because something's popular doesn't mean it's actually of its base. There's lots of popular ideas out there that are not of its base. And then, as I was going through that, I started to read research more deeply myself, slowly over time.

[10:45]

Started off with just one book, and then I started reading a couple of studies that I thought might be relevant to conversations I was having to try and get a better understanding. I think my understanding of research itself changed over time. You know, one of the things I really came to realize is that we have to rely on what I call experimental research. And experimental research is what I would call true scientific research. And that's where we compare a group of students who receives a type of teaching method versus a group of students who doesn't. If you don't have that, I don't think you can prove that that actually effectively improves learning outcomes in the classroom.

[11:18]

You know, lots of times people want to reference brain research. And brain research is a really cool way of looking at possible mechanisms behind things. But it doesn't actually prove that learning outcomes increased. You know, I could have a scan of the brain while I'm learning something and show that this area of the brain activates, and then we can come up with hypotheses as to why that is and why that might change learning. But until we've actually tested that on a mass scale with, you know, actual classroom settings, I don't think it really means much. And that's a pretty unpopular opinion to get into.

[11:45]

So I would say that we have to rely on experimental research to understand what actually works in a classroom. And then, unfortunately, one of the things I've also learned is that There's a ton of positivity bias in educational research because a lot of the research is private, meaning it's done by private companies who have goals. They will only publish their research if it helps their goal, their alignment. You know, if I'm a phonics company, I'm not going to publish a study that says phonics doesn't work and vice versa. And then journals also have a bias in that they find, tend to find positive research more interesting. So if you have negative research, just disprove somebody else's theory.

[12:22]

Oftentimes, it's very hard to get that published in a journal. In part because it's kind of uncouth and unpopular. Nobody wants to be the bully in the room being like, ah, everybody's wrong. But that means that almost all peer-reviewed research suggests positive, nice things. And you can't... One of the things I've often heard, even in university, was if it's published in a peer-reviewed journal, it's science.

[12:44]

That couldn't be further from the truth, because everything that's published in a peer-reviewed journal tends to show positive results, even if those things are completely conflicting. So you have to have some kind of benchmark, some kind of methodology from sorting that out. And the simplest approach I've seen that I think makes the most sense for teachers is meta-analysis. And, you know, we could go into the weeds forever on this topic, but the basic concept is that we take all of the studies done on a topic that are experimental, and we say what was the average outcome across those studies, and we use that to determine what methods are the most effective. Um, and it, you know, a basic benchmark that Hattie has is that the intervention produced in effects as a .40 higher, which is just a standardized percentage, really roughly translates to the treatment group learned 40% more than the control group, but that's a really good benchmark for success.

[13:38]

And that's a huge generalization, and there's definitely caveats to that that can be made. But as a general rule for teachers, I think saying, this was shown to be ineffective with an effect size above .40 in a meta-analysis is a great, easy rule for teachers to use. If you're a researcher, you definitely have to dig deeper. And if you're, you know, really want to learn about a topic, you definitely have to dig deeper. But as your starting place of deciding, does this work...

[14:04]

I think that's a really basic, easy rule for teachers to use, because you can just get that from the abstract of the analysis if you look it up. If I were to, say, look up a teaching intervention that is popular, whether it's inquiry-based learning or direct instruction or whatever, just finding, is there a meta-analysis on it? Does it show an effect as a .40 or higher is a great starting place. Yeah.

[14:30] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

[14:48]

You know, and disparage a technique, even if it doesn't work, you know, we're not super willing as a profession to confront practices like that. So as you reviewed a wide range of research, and I know the book has a fairly broad number of topics, what were some of the surprising findings to you where the scientific evidence about what works really differed from what is standard practice, what is kind of the party line, and what is accepted as just fine to do that conflicts with the evidence?

[15:19] SPEAKER_00:

It's almost hard for me to answer the question, because I really, I wrote this book first in 2018, and then this is sort of a second edition of the book I published, although this one was published professionally with Solution True. So when I first did this research the first time, and most of the research has been updated immediately, I think what was most surprising to me versus what's most surprising to me today is a little different. I think at the time, one of the things that was a big surprise for me was multiple intelligence theory. I'd always been skeptical of the concept that teaching to learning styles would help students for a lot of reasons. But I had never looked into the research, and my professors at a university claimed that the research was rock solid and I shouldn't even bother to ask questions about it. But when I looked at the research on teaching to learning styles, I thought that there was quite a bit of mixed findings.

[16:07]

And to be fair, I think, and maybe I've been even guilty of this, I think we've been a bit harsh on the research on teaching to learning styles. It might not be as bad as it's painted out to be, but generally speaking, it seems to be a mostly disproven theory that if you use a questionnaire to discover your students' learning styles and then try and teach directed towards that, that their learning will improve. I think probably the biggest problem with that is just that it's just impractical. You know, like, for example, there's, um...

[16:35]

Some people claim to have, like, a musical intelligence. Am I going to make a song about everything I teach in my classroom? Or if someone has a dance, a dancing learning style, am I going to do a dance every time I teach? And then how am I going to teach that to everyone at the same time? I feel like you end up becoming a juggling entertainer in your classroom if you try and do that. I don't think it makes a lot of practical sense.

[16:53]

Yeah. And then probably some of the research on existence of individual learning styles has probably been quite debunked itself. I don't know that when Howard Gardner was first, you know, popularizing multiple intelligence theory, that one, he was particularly scientific in how he came up with that idea. And two, there was already a theory of learning styles and how that got applied. I don't know if that was particularly scientific either. Uh, in more of a modern day context, Um, I think probably the one that surprised me the most was actually spelling instruction.

[17:27]

I grew up being taught... Yeah, yeah, I grew up being taught to memorize giant lists of words. My teachers were really big into, like, the weekly spelling test, and my dad was obsessed with it. He would, like, make me, um, write out those words until I knew them cold, and I had to get perfect on every weekly spelling test.

[17:46]

Um, so I definitely had a bias towards that. And, um, I used to be a podcaster myself. I still occasionally do a podcast, but it's very rare. I talked about the value of, like, memorizing spelling word lists. And when I just updated this research, I had to just admit to myself, no, I was completely wrong on that. There's...

[18:02]

very, very weak evidence to suggest that kids memorizing long lists of words for spelling improves their learning outcomes, and that focusing on, you know, morphology and phonics to teach spelling is a far more effective way to teach spelling than to have kids memorize lists of words.

[18:21] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, it's been interesting to see new research come out and, you know, fairly quickly get validated. Like, I've heard a lot about UFLY, U-F-L-I, out of Florida, and, you know, just a number of different programs that have very quickly been proven effective, but only after we accept some of the valid criticism of... other ways of doing things, and I've been a big fan of the Soul to Story podcast from Emily Hanford, who I think took a lot of risks in going after some things that were popular, as you said earlier, but not necessarily backed by evidence. If I could ask your opinion on that popularity issue, Why do you think, you know, having reviewed all this research and, you know, found what makes research convincing or not, like, why do you think popularity holds such sway over us as a profession compared to evidence?

[19:15] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, I mean, first off, I think we're human beings. I think we're just, we're so... We're not different than any other field. I would imagine this is the same every field.

[19:25]

I think some fields have a little bit more of a bias towards science, like medicine, and I think that helps. But even, like, the Soul to Story podcast itself, like, it's a good microcosm, because... And I have a lot of respect for Emily Hanford, and I've been writing about that topic that she did that podcast on long before that podcast came out. And I felt like there were other people writing on it, but it was just a very isolated space.

[19:49]

And you could feel it sort of growing and bubbling up. Yeah.

[20:05]

And even when we look at the podcast, she opens by saying there is a science reading and it says X. But she doesn't have any, like, citations that she's using. She's not going in depth on the science. And I took a really opposite perspective to her. I tried to, like, not really, like, embroil myself too much into a narrative. And I tried to really focus on, like, well, what does the science say?

[20:25]

Here are my citations. Here are the statistics. This is my interpretation. I don't know if it's correct. This is my opinion. This is what I think is going on based on data.

[20:33]

And that was way less popular approach of hers. And I think what she really did is she used a marketing strategy, maybe not intentionally, but there's a lot of research in marketing that suggests that if you tell a story, it's more convincing than just giving people facts. And she told a story. She told a story about how these influencers rose to power and how it affected kids. And I think that's much more compelling. So, at the same time, too, I think, um, in schools, we don't teach people how to read research in Teachers College.

[21:07]

We don't even have them engage with reading research or writing research or math research or any of it. At least, no, that was not my experience, not the experience people have talked to.

[21:15] SPEAKER_01:

And you went to Teachers College in Ontario, which, honestly, is one of the best parts of the world for teacher education. You did not get a second-grade education.

[21:25] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, I don't think so, but you know what? This is a bit of an insider look on it, but, like, I have... I have, um, research assistants who I hire to help and support me with ongoing research projects I'm working on. And a couple years ago, I hired one who was in a PhD program.

[21:41]

And in our interview, I was talking about research, and he asked me, what is a meta-analysis? And I was just like, so this person's doing a PhD on education, and they've never heard the term meta-analysis before. To me, that kind of felt like, as an educationist, we'd failed this person. I'm like, how could you get so far into your academic career without even knowing, like, what the types of studies are? Um, so I think there's just been this huge un-emphasis on research in general, and I think that makes teachers really susceptible. Like, if you have no training on research, you have no idea what I'm saying or anybody else is saying is correct or not correct.

[22:15]

And sometimes I've had researchers push back against me for suggesting that, for one, being a teacher who engages in research, but two, for suggesting that teachers engage in research. And the criticism I get is that, well, teachers don't have the training to do that. Which is true, but I think that's why we need to provide that training. The answer cannot be that teachers walk out of their teacher training programs and know nothing about scientific research on education. I mean, imagine if your doctor couldn't evaluate a study for himself on whether or not a treatment worked, and he just had to trust the drug rep. I feel like that's the equivalent.

[22:49]

We're just expected to trust the curriculum rep on whether or not their approach works. And it really just ends up being this weird popularity contest. Even within the science of space, you know, there's this huge interest in the science of learning and science of math and science of reading now. People have favorite influencers, writers, scholars, researchers. And I think, for the most part, it's not based on which researcher is the most credible. People aren't, like, checking their, um, ResearchGate scores to be like, well, how many times has this person been cited?

[23:17]

They're just being, going with their gut and being like, do I like this person? Are they compelling? And I think there's a danger to that. So, part of what I was trying to do with the book wasn't just to review research with teachers and talk about principles of scientific teaching, but it was just to give an overview of how teachers could read research for themselves so that they could be their own judge of what is efficacious. And that was something that was really important to me. I wanted to build self-efficacy for teachers.

[23:43]

I think for too long, we've had this idea that teachers don't know what they're doing, and they're just supposed to be told what to do. And I think that's a dangerous concept.

[23:54] SPEAKER_01:

And especially if we're going to be in this profession for a couple of decades, the research is going to evolve, right? We're going to learn new things. And, you know, in my lifetime, during my career, and I've been in this profession for a little over two decades now, I mean, we have learned a lot of new things. New research has come out, and we can't just...

[24:13]

trust what we were told decades ago. We have to actually keep up just as professionals in any field need to. So, yeah, I love that, that emphasis on empowering teachers to actually read research, to understand it, and not just, you know, as you said earlier, do a reflection. How does this make you feel? You know, the kind of opinion stuff that we...

[24:34]

Over and over again, I mean, I've paid a lot of tuition in undergrad and graduate school for essentially writing reflection papers and opinions that really weren't grounded in a lot of that. And I agree completely. We've got to take a look at research and really be able to get our minds around it. So, I know you, uh, Nate, you cover a lot of ground in the book on, on different topics. We talked about several of those. Uh, but you also cover a lot of ground in terms of the, the scope of the field.

[25:02]

And often we think about public schools. Uh, some of our listeners may be in private schools. And you looked at a variety of different systems and, you know, places and, and different types of systems. What were some of your interesting findings that you talked about in chapters 16 and 17 from different corners of our profession?

[25:20] SPEAKER_00:

I think that my biggest takeaway was that the Asian countries are outperforming the non-Asian countries in education. You know, so many times I've seen someone say, Finland, Norway, Sweden, or Denmark have the best education system in the world. There's no objective evidence to justify that. And I'm going to go even further and say that it's a bit of, like, racial prejudice. Because we're picking the high-performing white countries and being like, these are the best education systems in the world. Meanwhile, we're ignoring, like, all the Asian countries, which, like, very consistently outperform us on standardized tests.

[25:51]

So, if we want to use an objective metric, I think using standardized tests makes sense. Because otherwise, how do you judge it? How do you judge what is the best education system in the world? Other than by based on math achievement. And, you know, that opens up a whole can of worms. Someone could be like, well, test scores aren't everything.

[26:06]

And they're right. But generally speaking, Asian countries are outperforming. And I think Asian countries are doing a couple of things different than the West. One, they tend to be very explicit and procedural in their instruction. Two, you know, going back to the very beginning of this conversation, they have more hours of school. Especially China, which consistently has, like, the highest education achievement in the world.

[26:28]

They have much longer school hours. Students typically also have much more homework. Yeah.

[26:49]

You know, definitely, it's become a political thing, whether you're pro or against public education. So, a lot of people who come up from a certain political perspective, they sort of, like, see teachers almost like the enemy or not as respected as once were. And I think that alone is damaging as a thing. My parents had that mentality, truthfully. They didn't like teachers when I was growing up, so they talked down about teachers. And I think that definitely affects how you behave in the classroom as a student.

[27:15]

You know, Chinese students talk about education as being an incredibly highly valued thing in their society. Parents talk about it as being an incredibly highly valued thing. So I think having a system or a society that culturally values education is obviously going to make an impact on learning outcomes because it'll affect the seriousness of your behavior in the classroom as a student. It'll affect how parents react to hearing their student is struggling. So those things, I think those things matter. Another thing that I think was a big takeaway for me was equity.

[27:41]

School wards or countries that focused on equity tended to have higher academic performance. In fact, school systems that banned private schools from existing in competition with the public school system tended to seem to outperform schools that did not, or countries that did not. And that's not talking about, like, after-school private schools. That's talking about, like, I'm going to completely, like, toot your education system where we have the public school system for everyone, and then we have the expense of wealthy private schools for wealthy students. Like, that seems to... Banning that seems to lower, uh, or, sorry, increase academic performance, which is probably a very unpopular thing to say in certain circles, but...

[28:20]

I think there's a logical reason. If everyone has to go to the same school, then the wealthiest people in society are directly incentivized to want that part of society well-funded. I think if billionaires know their kids are going to go to a public school, they're going to want to make sure that school is really well-funded. If they're sending their kids to a different school, why do they care about the state of public funding of education? But I think the biggest takeaway for me, though, was not even achievement-related. It was just about this concept of balance.

[28:48]

Because if we talk about Finland, for example, as an education system, it's not that high achievement compared to, say, Hong Kong or China. Yeah.

[29:19]

And I think we have a bit of magical thinking in Canada, at least. I don't know what... I can't say the United States, but in Canada, it definitely feels like we want to talk about all these ideas that make education more fun and say that they make learning improve. And it's probably the opposite.

[29:33]

It probably makes the day more fun, and it probably lowers academic achievement. And I would say that there's definitely ways we can make learning fun and high outcome at the same time, but oftentimes those goals are sort of against each other, you know? And I'll give, like, a really silly, over-the-top basic example. If you ask your students how to make the day the most, like, engaging possible, we'd play video games all day, we'd watch movies, we'd eat bonbons, and maybe we'd go outside and do some gym. That's not gonna be the day where they learn the most. Unless you're asking an unschooled.

[30:05]

But, uh, I think for the most part, we just have to be thinking in our head, logically and, like, rationally, like, how do we balance the goals of teaching our students critical thinking and values of freedom? Like, I don't know about you, but, like, to me, as, like, a Canadian, that's such a fundamental concept and value I want my students to be. I want them to be pushed back against authority. I sometimes joke with my kids, like, my students, like, hey, hey, I want you to resist authority, just not mine, okay? But, so, I definitely want to make free thinkers, but at the same time, I want to make sure that every kid in my class is leaving a grade level in reading, and that every kid in my class leaves knowing the basic section of the curriculum of math that year. And those goals aren't always aligning well, and I think we just have to be thinking about how do we balance that.

[30:49]

And that's why I think it's actually really harmful to have that magical thinking. I think it's totally fine to say, I like this teaching practice because it promotes critical thinking or open-mindedness or empathy, or I think this teaching practice makes the day more engaging for children, but I don't know that it improves learning. I think that's totally fine. It's okay to include that in your day and say that is your logic. But when we employ the magical thinking of being like, and therefore it also improves academic outcomes, then I think we can slip into this weird dichotomy where we're making our classrooms into kindergarten classrooms at all levels in the sake of things, goals that aren't really achievable. So I think we just have to have some honesty with ourselves.

[31:30]

And I hate to say this, too. I'm going to use a bit of a... A trope, and I don't know how, it can be definitely all overused, but sometimes we just gotta use our brains and think rationally. I think a lot of the things that we say are science.

[31:41]

If you asked your grandma, she would tell you, yeah, it just makes sense. Like, this is a question of why. You know, um... So I think we can just logic our way out sometimes and just be like, yeah, of course getting kids more education, more hours of school in the day, more instruction is gonna improve outcomes.

[31:57]

And when someone tells you that more instruction isn't going to improve outcomes, then I feel like you're not having a conversation with a rational actor.

[32:06] SPEAKER_01:

And better to be honest about those trade-offs, right? Like, if there's some sort of point of diminishing returns, or just as a statement of values, we say, you know what, I don't want my kid to be in school for 60 hours a week. I want them to have some free time. I don't want them to have homework all the time. That's a valid position to have. It's not a scientific argument about whether more homework is effective in increasing learning.

[32:26]

It's a different kind of... you know, a different kind of decision, a different basis for making decisions. And we can be clear about that while also respecting what the evidence says about, you know, additional practice, additional time on task, that kind of thing. So the book is The Scientific Principles of Teaching, Bridging the Divide Between Educational Practice and Research.

[32:44]

Nathaniel Hansford, if people want to follow you online or learn more about your work, where's the best place for them to go online?

[32:50] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, they could just follow me at Nate Joseph. I use a pseudonym so that my students don't find me. Truthfully, that stopped working, but I still use the pseudonym in the hopes that not all my students find me on social media. And Pedagogy Non Grata is our Facebook page and website.

[33:04] SPEAKER_01:

Well, Nate, thank you so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio. It's been a pleasure. Thanks for having me. Appreciate your time.

[33:09] Announcer:

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