[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_00:
I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to welcome to the program Nidhi Satyadeva and Paul Kirchner. Nidhi is a scholar, educator, and international speaker recognized for her work in advancing evidence-informed education. Her scholarship spans educational technology, microlearning, and teacher education with a focus on translating cognitive science into practical, high-impact instructional design that foster equitable educational outcomes. With more than 20 years of teaching experience, she has taught German, Hindi, and English as a second language in diverse multilingual contexts, bringing a deep understanding of language, cognition, and culture to her academic work. Born and raised in India, she completed her early studies there before moving to Toronto, where she continued her academic journey and earned her PhD at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. She now teaches graduate courses at OISE on the Theoretical Foundations of Teaching and Learning in the Master of Education program.
[01:08]
Nidhi is also a professor at Academica University of Applied Sciences in Amsterdam and leads projects on developing teacher expertise. She is the chair of ResearchEd Canada and co-author of the globally-read Science of Learning publication. She's delivered keynotes and participated in international scholarly roundtables across North America, Europe, South America, and Australasia, contributing to global conversations on instructional clarity, equity, and professional standards in education. Yeah.
[01:53]
Paul is a professor emeritus at the Open University of the Netherlands, an honorary doctor at the University of Oulu in Finland, a visiting professor at the Thomas More University of Applied Sciences in Flanders, and the owner of the educational consultancy Kirchner Ed. He is regarded worldwide as a leading expert in his field and has published approximately 450 scientific articles, in addition to several hundred popular science contributions and blogs for teachers and school leaders. In addition, he is the first or co-author of several influential and widely read books, including Instructional Illusions, How Learning Happens, How Teaching Happens, Evidence-Informed Learning Design, 10 Steps to Complex Learning, Developing Curriculum for Deep Thinking, and Urban Legends About Learning and Education. Throughout his career, Kirchner has been an influential voice in the debate about education and learning. He's known as an advocate of evidence-informed education and as a critical thinker who sharply examines educational myths and unproven hype.
[02:47]
He is a champion of evidence-informed education and has responded critically to popular but unsubstantiated educational practices, including myths and eduquacks.
[02:57] Announcer:
And now, our feature presentation.
[02:59] SPEAKER_00:
Nidhi and Paul, welcome to Principal Center Radio. Thank you very much, Justin. It's a pleasure to be here.
[03:04] SPEAKER_02:
Thank you, Justin. It's so great to be here.
[03:07] SPEAKER_00:
Wonderful. Well, we're here to talk about your new book, Becoming an Expert Teacher, Deliberate Practice for Effective Teaching. I wonder if we could start by just talking about the need you saw for this book on becoming an expert teacher. We've seen a lot of books on, you know, new teachers, becoming a teacher, induction, you know, kind of the getting your feet under you process. But your book specifically tackles the task of deliberately practicing and becoming an effective teacher. What led you to write this book?
[03:36] SPEAKER_02:
So, you'll see, as you already mentioned, there's just a lot of books on focused... books focused on woodwork strategies or specific instructional approaches and really specific things. And they're really useful and they're needed. But we were looking at this idea of, well, what is an expert teacher and...
[03:58]
How do we know that we're looking at one? And then you start looking at the literature and there's a lot of vague definitions or incomplete definitions. And the thought that really starts to haunt you is that, well, if you can't name something, then how can you start developing? that thing, right? In this case, teaching expertise. So, for us, that became a big gap, and that gap then would be seen in our initial teacher education programs, the CPD, Continuous Professional Development, that is being organized.
[04:28]
If we are not... aiming for expertise than we're aiming for something else. And so it became that I think we had this big task ahead of us to understand what teaching expertise is, and how do we define it, how do you spot an expert teacher, and then start to work through these sort of lots and lots of confusing terms around it, and sometimes even inaccurate terms, and I'm sure we'll get to that.
[04:53] SPEAKER_01:
Nidhi talked about, uh, the initial teacher education and, uh, CPD. Um, those are really good things, really important to build up the basics and get the teacher, who has now just started, to get them further. But what it does is it, it, those two things are really good for making a beginning teacher a good teacher. But what we wanted to do is go that one step further, uh, and to help them become expert teachers. Uh, you can compare it to sports, which Nidhi always does, and I'm not going to use Formula One. Uh, for that.
[05:28]
But, um... Um, things like CPD and initial training and just practicing, um, get you routinely good at something. And, um, when you're routinely good at something, that's okay to a certain point. All of that practice can also lead to practicing the wrong things.
[05:49]
Yeah? Good practice makes perfect. Practice doesn't make perfect. And we decided that we needed to go that a step further and follow the work that was done primarily in sports by Anders Ericsson in Florida, and making use of deliberate practice, going that step further. That's what the chess player does to become a grand champion. That's what a tennis player does to go from being just a middle seed to being a top seed.
[06:22]
It's a special way of practicing and learning. And we wanted to apply that to the profession of teaching. So that's kind of like the basis of the book.
[06:35] SPEAKER_00:
So you say that, you know, typically the sources of growth for teaching are experience. You know, teachers get better over time, but, you know, often that takes more time than we would like and doesn't get people to where we would like them to be. Their teacher education and continuing professional development What do you see that is going on in teacher education and professional development that often fail to produce the kinds of expertise that you describe so that deliberate practice is necessary? Like, why are people not starting off with and getting on the job the kind of training that gets them to where they need to be?
[07:12] SPEAKER_02:
As you said, experience is a necessary thing towards developing expertise, but it's not sufficient. You need more than that, right? So experience and the initial years, I think, uh, the research that David Berliner did, whose work, uh, we heavily relied on in working on the book as well and continuing to push that further, he looked at, and I think the average amount of years where the growth continues to happen for new teachers was about five to seven years, and then it naturally plateaus. What happens is perhaps a variety of things, but it's that you get so comfortable in your own routines, right? You get so comfortable with your own habits, and comfort zone is a nice thing, right? So that's what we experience in continuous professional development also.
[07:56]
So we continue to work on things that we're naturally good at, and then we also like to practice those. Now, deliberate practice is not inherently enjoyable. As I think Paul has said multiple times, it is self-inflicted pain. Nobody wants that. So why would we, as a first line of a tent, put that in our initial teacher education program? I get that.
[08:18]
We get that, that it's not something that we want to do. Or similarly, in our continuous professional development, or even for our own personal self-growth, so to say. Um, I work a lot less harder when I'm working out by myself in the gym versus when I'm in a class. in presence of a coach. I push myself in a very different way further, right? So, there is that deliberate effort coming into it, and it's hard to do that.
[08:41]
So, I think because of its not inherently non-enjoyable nature, deliberate practice is not the first thing. But we have seen experiences and research that Anders Ericsson did on lots of sports fields and lots of, like, uh, fields where championships or being the better version of themselves each day, you know, going from good to great. There's lots of great evidence in that. And so we thought that why not look at that and apply that to the teaching practice. So it's not happening already, to answer your question, is because...
[09:18]
It hurts a little. It's hard to problematize the existing routines. It means that we have to come out of our comfort zone, all of us, and then to push beyond that natural boundary that we have found ourselves to be, okay, now I'm good here, right? But it's always about questioning...
[09:40]
What happened in the classroom? Did it work well? And then changing that. Did it not work well? Then what do I do? It's always being reflective of that.
[09:49]
And that's hard work. So that's all part of the deliberate practice. And I think that's one of the reasons that it's not already being implemented.
[09:57] SPEAKER_01:
Paul? Yeah, it's also something that you can't do from the beginning. You have to be able to perform sufficiently in order to make use of deliberate practice. It's kind of like different learning strategies in which you can't vary practice in carrying out a task until you can first carry out the task. Well, it's the same thing with deliberate practice. You can't get into deliberate practice until you have the basics, and ITE, initial teacher education, and the CPD that follows brings you to the stage In which you're capable of making use of deliberate practice.
[10:43]
But then at that point, you have to start inflicting pain on yourself. If you want to... But it's personal. If you want to become an expert teacher.
[10:52]
I have nothing against a teacher who just wants to be a good teacher. That's, I mean, that in itself is great. But there are people who strive to be a better... ...version of themselves and go from being good to great.
[11:11]
And if you want to do that, that's when deliberate practice comes in.
[11:17] SPEAKER_00:
I wonder what you think about the availability of the kind of feedback that's necessary for deliberate practice, because it seems that in a lot of endeavors, the feedback is built in, right? If you're in anything competitive, you know, one form of feedback is you lose, right? Somebody is faster than you, uh, you don't win the chess match, you know, there's that type of feedback, and it strikes me that teaching is a lot more ambiguous, and some of the feedback might send us in the wrong direction, right? Like, if especially...
[11:45]
If we have high expectations, it's ambiguous in more than one way.
[11:50] SPEAKER_01:
First, as you said, it's ambiguous. You don't really get to see whether or not it worked or not. You kind of get the impression that it did, but, or it didn't. And then you often have that you, um, uh, attribution theory If something didn't work, you attribute to that the students weren't listening, and if it did work, you attribute to, I did it good. That's the first part of my answer to your question. But the second part of my answer is that you see, in things like chess, in a tennis match, in a rap battle or whatever, you see the people who are at the top always have a coach.
[12:41]
to help them. And that's something we don't see in schools. Schools aren't set up in that way. You should close the door and your room is your castle. Um, you don't have professional coaches at school. You don't even have good teachers who have been taught how to coach or give feedback to others.
[13:05]
And they also don't get the time to do that because that takes time. And you see in places like in England, they've solved that by giving teachers, beginning teachers in any event, 20% time to coach and train others. So the second half of my answer is that schools aren't set up to do that. Your own room is your kingdom. The other teachers almost never see you. Um, it isn't set up to give feedback.
[13:42]
You aren't taught to receive feedback in that way. Um, you think if you ask for feedback from another, you're going to show them that you're dumb or you can't do it, you're showing your weakness. And if you look at other endeavors in which deliberate practice is used, you see that it's actually seen as something positive and a strength, that even the number one tennis player in the world will have one or two coaches to help them maintain that and get even better. Education, teaching doesn't have that.
[14:19] SPEAKER_02:
And I want to add to this, and I agree 100% with Paul, and thanks for raising that such an important question, that we wrote a book called Becoming an Expert Teacher, and then the subtitle is, or tagline is, Deliberate Practice for Effective Teaching, and it may sound like that now we want our teachers, all the teachers to do this, but we have... very consciously tried to clarify in the book that this is not something that they can do alone. Like, this is a systemic thing, a support is really needed. Feedback is a huge component of that.
[14:48]
When I receive feedback, good quality feedback, truthful feedback, that might even initiate my fight or flight reflex, but it is what I need to truly understand, well, what went wrong, what I did well, what I could change. And that's really hard for teachers to do themselves, right? And deliberate practice has the word practice in it. And teaching is a profession which, unlike many other performance-oriented professions, so think about a violin player, for example, they would practice hours and hours and hours, but their performance would probably last about, like, you know, really nice in a concert hall for about 40 minutes, which is long, or about an hour show. Similarly for soccer players, similarly for anyone else performing at a higher level, where that relationship between practice and performance is quite inversely related in teaching. Teachers are expected to perform, perform, perform all the time, and if at all, any practice, and barely any practice, or highly likely no practice available to them, right?
[15:47]
So, and that practice component does involve receiving feedback and refining that feedback into changing their practice. That's not there available to them. And that is something that I think at a system level, at leadership level, at policy level, we definitely need to bring that. And we do try, uh, our honest effort to bring that into the book as well, is that now it's not this expectation, this massive burden on the teachers that we want all teachers to now strive towards expertise. We know that...
[16:15]
They can't do this alone, right? But that is definitely a crucial and, um, sadly, a missing, missing link. So, to make that successful, I think multiple layers of support would be needed for us to continue becoming an expert teacher, I would say.
[16:31] SPEAKER_00:
I'm glad you made that clarification, because when we think of deliberate practice, as you mentioned, with somebody playing the violin, you know, often they are doing that on their own. They're kind of grinding away in isolation, trying to improve. And when we think about the element of deliberateness and difficulty and really, really honing in on... the areas where they have opportunity for improvement, it's difficult to map that to the difficulties of teaching, which is difficult for a variety of reasons, right?
[17:00]
Teaching is a hard job, but not just because the expertise demands are high. Right? There are a lot of things about teaching that are stressful. The workload is difficult. Um, you know, dealing with other people all day is its own set of challenges. Take us into the difficulty of improvement itself, around expertise itself.
[17:22]
Because I think that's the piece that we don't talk about very much. It's like, how do we actually hone in on expertise itself and find that difficulty there to do deliberate practice on? Like, what are we talking about when we talk about that difficulty?
[17:39] SPEAKER_01:
It's kind of like, the first thing you need to do, and it's what we tried to do in the book, is to define what an expert teacher is. Because if you don't know what it is, you have no way, idea how you can get there or how you should get there. So we defined it in, let's call it six bullet points, yeah? From someone with deep content knowledge, uh, someone with a fundamental knowledge of how we learn, because that's really important. If you don't know how we learn, if a doctor doesn't know how our digestive system works, it's kind of, like, hard to then deal with someone who has a problem in their digestive tract. Uh, it's mastery of a wide range of instructional strategies, mastery of tools to apply, um,
[18:33]
Classroom management skills and also the ability to adapt effectively when necessary. Those are six things that define an expert teacher. And the person going from good or routine teacher to becoming an expert needs help in all of those six areas and needs someone who can help them achieve that. And it's something that they can't see themselves. I often, when I'm talking about self-determination and self-guided instruction, what I often say is, if you don't know where you want to be, how in heaven's name are you going to set out a route to get there?
[19:31]
And that's the same case with the teacher. Um, you need someone else who does have the deep content knowledge, someone else who does have knowledge of how we learn that can help that person go that step further. And that's, yeah, what kind of makes it, you're completely right when you say, a teacher's job is difficult. It's one of the most difficult jobs that you can possibly think of. It's kind of like, I often compare it to a doctor, but a doctor has it easy because they get one patient at a time. A teacher has 30 at a time.
[20:08]
So, think of yourself as a doctor in a room with 30 people, all with different problems, who all want to get better. Now, that's just, you know, like, havoc. And so, you need someone to help you get there.
[20:23] SPEAKER_02:
And I would add to that is, you know, what Paul said, the six big bullet points, and then we actually also identified various and very, very specific dimensions of what expert teaching look like. So we unpacked that in the chapter, and we've looked at teacher effectiveness research and what master teachers, expert teachers have done that has produced these excellent learning outcomes for students and helped to reduce the equity gap. But what I wanna, in this particular moment, wanna say is that these six bullet points, or the other dimensions that we also talk about, is that you can develop it overnight, and it's not a one-time thing. It's...
[20:59]
It's a very long sort of journey, and this is sort of why, at the beginning of the book, we also defined that, well, teaching by itself is neither just science nor just craft. It's a combination of the two, right? So, and science entails a lot of things like your understanding of your deep domain subject knowledge. You need to know what you teach. You need to also understand the cognitive science and educational psychology, how learning happens. I mean, Paul's an expert at that.
[21:27]
He's, in fact, written a book with such an amazing title called How Learning Happens. You need to know that. You need to have a vast variety and understanding of... deep understanding of different kinds of tools.
[21:38]
So, we talk about the didactics, the instructional component to it. We talk about, um, instructional tools, as I said, and pedagogical approaches. So, that is the component of the science, and I think... Initial teacher education programs are truly well-suited and the right time for building that science in a teacher candidate, right?
[21:59]
And then once they have this foundational knowledge, that's not optional, that's Absolutely necessary to be able to walk into a classroom. You know your domain and you understand how humans learn and everything else sort of comes supporting all of it. Then you can start to work on your craft. And then craft, as we define, is this notion of all this knowledge turning into wisdom and then you're converting that wisdom into real action. With real humans, students...
[22:26]
who could be of all ages, of all moods on different days, and that's, as you said earlier, like, teaching is hard, teaching is difficult, and it's also extremely dynamic. So, how about we have, like, foundational knowledge really well built in, so we're not scrambling for that. That's there. And then we're building on that craft, and I think that's where, at a later stage, as Paul earlier said also, that we can't start with deliberate practice. You need to be at a certain level to even bring that. So I think Your induction, if we have it all in, you know, teacher education programs and before teachers start working, and the initial first two, three years, if we have a proper supportive environment for teachers to build that craft, then we're really building the science and craft of teaching and then adding the fuel of deliberate practice, then we're really on the path of deliberate practice and expertise, I would say.
[23:19] SPEAKER_01:
Paul, you want to say something? An extra problem in that teaching and teacher environments are impatient. You kind of, like, have to do everything all at once. Whereas if you're dealing with deliberate practice, you set specific goals. You have to be, um, let me say, content to do it one thing at a time. Like, how do I ask a good question?
[23:46]
Whereas the teacher has to That's only one minuscule part of being a teacher, but deliberate practice is very goal-specific, and you have to then practice with proper coaching, with failures, with, um, uh, doing it in a safe environment. You have to practice on that one small thing, and once you've mastered that, then you can go to the next one. It's just like, I mean, it's...
[24:17]
Tennis players don't try to get 17 things right at the first time, you know, all at once. They only practice a certain backhand move, and their coach sees that that's not going well, and then will spend a week, two weeks, a month just practicing that backhand move. Teachers don't have that luxury, nor do they have the, um, patience. To do that. And their environment also doesn't have the patience to let them do that.
[24:51] SPEAKER_00:
Right. And we have this constant press of content, right? Every week, we have new content that we're teaching, and that tends to move our attention on to the next thing. So, what are some of the practices that you talk about in the book that people can focus on and deliberately get better at? Because I think we've all seen various lists. You know, Doug Limov has his Teach Like a Champion strategies.
[25:15]
What do you see as some of the... the practices or the strategies that people can focus on and deliberately get better at.
[25:25] SPEAKER_01:
Nidhi?
[25:27] SPEAKER_02:
You want to take that? Okay, so I'm thinking about some of these important dimensions. Well, I think there's different ways to answer this question. So, a more wider answer would be to say that starting to understand how learning happens and truly gaining knowledge about cognitive science and how, you know, understanding cognitive load and stuff, but I want to go a little bit more specific, uh, than that. And I would say, I'm thinking about some of these dimensions that we've identified in the book. So, academic learning time.
[26:03]
So, one of the things that teachers should work on in building their expertise is, how can they maximize the academic learning time? And there are strategies, there are approaches they can take on where Minimum amount of academic learning time is being wasted and truly going towards instruction, right? And so teachers can do that by building and practicing some of the routines, for example. And, or another example would be truly understanding and knowing their domain so well that they can sequence it, they can scaffold it, in such a clear manner, be it reading instruction, teaching a specific concept in math, truly knowing it so well, and that will also then support them with not, um, wasting any of the academic learning time as well, and truly working towards those scaffolds and sequences.
[26:56]
What that allows them is to... know what the misconceptions might be ahead of time and then avoid for those, what those errors students might make and avoid for those. And so expert teachers work towards that. I'll pause and see if Paul wants to add a few things here.
[27:14] SPEAKER_01:
No, I'm really okay with that. It's just important that people understand the difference between time on task and academic learning time. Um, it's... we often hear that it's important to have students, um, On task and more time on task leads to better learning.
[27:35]
And up to a certain point, that's the case. But academic learning time is actually the effective and efficient use of that time to learn. Just not being just busy with it, but busy with it in a way that leads to more learning and better learning. And that's the thing that the teacher needs to anticipate. and work with the students on for how do I create conditions that make my teaching as effective and efficient as possible and makes the learning as effective and efficient as possible. And that's what should be strived for.
[28:20] SPEAKER_00:
I wanted to ask next about the dual challenge of figuring out what to focus on and how to assess it, which I suppose could also be considered part of figuring out what to focus on. So, you know, I have all these things that I know I'm supposed to do as a teacher. I might feel more successful in some areas than others. How do I assess that success and then identify an area where I want to apply deliberate practice and then further assess to see how that's going? Any advice for people on...
[28:56]
Uh, that, that kind of assessment question.
[29:00] SPEAKER_01:
That's a hard one because the easiest way to answer that is, um, success is achievement. Um, it's not, it's not covering the curriculum. It's not getting things done. It's not even having the idea that you're teaching it well, but it's the final results of the learners, what they've achieved. That determines whether or not your teaching was good. And that's different from what we normally see in checklists is, did the teacher do this?
[29:34]
Did the teacher do that? Did the teacher do that? And the teacher can do A, B, and C and get check marks for all of those things. But if the student didn't learn, learn deeply, learn more, retain it for a longer period of time, then the teacher hasn't taught well. And I'd prefer to talk about the teacher not teaching well than the student not learning well. Because the student's there and the teacher is there to help the student learn.
[30:11]
Once you've done that, then you have to start looking at what was it that they should have been able to do that they could have done if I had taught well. And then bring it back to, oh, they remembered it on Monday, but by Friday they didn't. What do I then need to do to make sure that they also remember it next Friday? It's looking at what are actually your goals? Have you specified them, not only for the students, but for yourself? And then to look for yourself, And have I achieved that?
[30:47]
Have I helped my students achieve that? And that's not a checklist or anything like that. It depends upon the course, the topic, the domain, the age, the year. Those are all things that are involved.
[31:06] SPEAKER_02:
what we've said quite often in the book, also, is that it's not that the teacher should be asking them the question, uh, themselves the question, how well I taught that, but the question should be, how well, or did they learn it well, right? And we know the answer. If they learn it well, then we see it, right, in, in our, Um, using tools like checking for understanding or approaches like checking for understanding, and there's a variety of great ways to do that. Did they learn it well? And when we start to truthfully answer that question, then I think
[31:41]
a certain level of reflection is truly necessary. So, in one of the chapters, we unpack, not just for teaching expertise, we say, what makes an expert? So, there's five dimensions, four dimensions we talk about, and we added the fifth one, and we used Donald Schoen's work in there, and we called it the reflective practitioner, right? It was his words. So, we use this notion of reflection on task, reflection during task, and reflection, sort of, on practice, so afterwards, when you analyze it. And I think that's necessary.
[32:11]
So, it would be easy, it would be nice for us all to have a checklist and just go through the checklist and say, did I do this? Did I do this? Did I do this? And to be honest with you, we do have a bunch of rubrics and checklists after every chapter for teachers to truly have the vocabulary for that. But a much wider, much bigger question truly is necessary to ask, did I teach it well? Did they learn it well?
[32:35]
And then reflecting on, I think, I think my sequencing was not enough, or I think some students got it because they had the prior knowledge, but the others did not, and I assumed prior knowledge. Those are difficult, self, you know, introspective conversations to have, but that fifth dimension, as I said, reflective practitioner, we need to bring that if we want to be an expert. Um, every, um... I've had a chat with, not chat, it was a fireside chat, so I was just an audience, an audience member sitting there, and Simone Biles, I've heard her say that, she's like, after every performance, I ask myself, or I'm having this conversation with myself, that didn't go well, that didn't go well, that didn't go well.
[33:20]
So I think that reflective conversation is much more necessary, and in our heart of hearts, then we know Okay, today, I think it was the way I explained it on the board or I removed the notes or the content of the board too soon and it became transient. It always is transient, but I made it even more transient and students didn't have time to capture it. Or... Attention was missing.
[33:42]
So, I think it's more than the checklist, as Paul was trying to say. It's a deeper question for us to regularly have. And, yeah, it is self-inflicted pain, because then we're going to, again, say, okay, this is not something that I did, and I need to work on that. So, that's where...
[34:03]
For everyone, their own version of what is that task will be for deliberate practice would be coming from. It would look different for everyone. It would look different for different times of their sort of teaching career as well. It's nice to have a list. We could say you could practice checking for understanding. You could practice more scaffolding.
[34:21]
You could practice giving more appropriate examples. But teaching is way more dynamic than just us having a list and then we just working off of that list. They do help.
[34:32] SPEAKER_00:
Well, I know the book is probably loaded with specifics. It's nearly a 300-page book, and certainly would encourage people to check that out for themselves. Now, I wanted to ask, though, because what is in the book is likely to... go against the grain of some of what people have been taught.
[34:51]
You know, I've read much of your work on science of learning. Paul, I've read your short book, Developing Curriculum for Deep Thinking. And it seems that there is some swimming against the current that would need to happen for people to engage in deliberate practice. And frankly, a lot of what people are taught in professional development on the job, as well as in their pre-service preparation, may directly conflict with the science of learning, with the research on effective teaching. How do you think about that issue, that there are just a lot of bad ideas out there, a lot of misconceptions, and we've got to deal with that, you know? So if I have a colleague who I want to help me improve, my colleague may have, frankly, completely opposite ideas about what good teaching looks like.
[35:38]
Any thoughts on that?
[35:39] SPEAKER_01:
Oh, yeah, I can go into that very long or very short. There are two aspects of it. Um, if you're assigned a mentor, a coach, it's the job of the school principal or headmaster to know that that person has the knowledge necessary, that's what I was talking about earlier, the deep content knowledge, fundamental knowledge of how we learn, that that person has it. That's number one. It's important, number two, that there's a school-wide idea about what good teaching is, about how we learn, so that you're not constantly swimming up against the stream. If you have that, then the teacher or the trainer can't tell you, well, you didn't look at their learning styles, because as a principal, you've chosen someone who doesn't believe in hocus-pocus,
[36:38]
learning styles. A third aspect is that we need to go back to the roots, and it's hard to undo 30 or 40 years of very bad initial teacher education. My generation, which is the children of the Sputnik generation, in which we went from, um, uh, expository teaching to things like problem-based learning, inquisitive inquiry learning, and things like that. Um, there's been too many years in which that as a philosophy, and as a wrong philosophy, has been the basis of a lot of the teaching in initial teacher education. So it's really, really hard, because number one, that has to change, and number two, you have 40 years of unlearning to do.
[37:36]
But I think it's possible, I mean, I think people are smart enough that if you do have the discussion with them, um, and if it's about learning styles, just a very dumb example, if I ask this whole room of people what is their preferred way of eating, I can tally it up and say it's either salty or fatty or sweet. But you'd never see that as a good eating style. That someone thinks that they learn better doesn't mean that they do learn better. And that which is preferred is not always that which is best for you. And if you say that to people, you'll often get, but my son, and I say, well, do you have a second anecdote?
[38:30]
We can call that data. But it's often good enough to break that stranglehold on them about something that doesn't work. And I think that's our job as teacher trainers, as researchers, to help teachers get out of that stranglehold of poor instructional design Whereas in America, it's called poor pedagogy.
[39:07] SPEAKER_00:
Well said.
[39:07] SPEAKER_02:
You know, I think much of that work is... We've had this evidence for many years. I mean, some of the work that I cite, Rosenshine's work, 1986, and, uh, some of, um, Nicholas, uh, Nathaniel, not Nicholas, Nathaniel, uh, Gage's work before even Rosenshine, and he was, I think, the professor for David Berliner, so even before that. So we've known about this for a long time, and Project Follow-Through was also a long time ago, so I agree with your point that it's not that we have...
[39:41]
a lack of evidence. I think we have lots of evidence and we have lots of great written material, lots of great speakers now, too, but I think this is a bigger challenge to deal with these kind of beliefs, these ideologies, and that conceptual change takes time, and advocacy work is really hard work, so to your point, a colleague might have a very, completely opposite, but I think it is, it is what is necessary, conversations and discussion, and one of the things that I've seen that works is that you just let people kind of... It's kind of like saying that, just try this. Just try this, right?
[40:19]
Instead of believing me first, because don't take my word for it, but just try that cognitive load is a thing and now explain it in this way. Don't do minimally guided instruction, as Paul would say. Do explicit instruction. Try that and see what happens. So I think the change in practice, seeing the evidence from that change practice, highly likely will yield to change in belief and not necessarily the other way around. So I think the bigger work for us is not just to say, believe me, because I say so, or I wrote this, or I'm quoting Rosenstein, but just try this.
[40:55]
And I think if we can get more people to do that through continuous development, professional development, and also initial teacher training, and in leadership roles, principles, knowing that, change in practice will probably show that path better. So we really hope that our book not just changes people's sort of beliefs because they read, because Paul and I said it or wrote it, but they try some of the things that we have written in the book, and they apply the deliberate practice, and then they'll see the change in the student, because we've written this truly in service of student learning. So I think harder part, but I think the direction we want to take might be a little bit different on that.
[41:38] SPEAKER_00:
So the book is Becoming an Expert Teacher, Deliberate Practice for Effective Teaching. Nidhi Sachdeva and Paul Kirchner, thank you so much for joining me today on Principal Center Radio. It's been a pleasure. Justin, thank you very, very much for having us.
[41:52] SPEAKER_02:
Thank you so much. Yeah, it was really great to chat with you about this.
[42:00] Announcer:
Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at principalcenter.com slash radio.
