Two podcasts, two science(s) of learning
What matters most to students in classrooms?
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Happy Friday, Bell Ringers. This week, in news *almost* as big as Travis and Taylor, I was a guest on the NPR health and science podcast The Pulse, and got to present my case for why understanding how humans learn is the future of education, not AI. I’ll get more into it below, but you can also just jump to listening to the whole episode, “Back to School in a Changing World,” right here.
I was also delighted this week to find that two of the five most popular stories about the science of learning at the UK’s Tes Magazine were written by yours truly. My stories focus on working memory, and the concept of primary and secondary learning—the theoretical explanation of why learning to walk and talk is not the same as learning to read and do math.
In the interview with David Geary, the psychologist who developed the theory of primary/secondary learning, I asked him directly about whether he was worried that the ‘science of learning’ would become a fad—one of the themes of today’s letter. Here’s a snippet of our conversation:
Are you worried that your views - and the science of learning movement more generally - are going to become misinterpreted and do more harm than good?
I am concerned that this will become another educational fad. There’s a tendency to jump on fads and to implement them in ways that probably were ill-founded to begin with. Or if they’re well-founded, they may not work if they’re not done carefully and systematically.
Also great to see that Tools for Practice alum and high school chemistry teacher Marcie Samayoa talked to Education Week about her new practice of dialing back student use of Chromebooks in class. She told her students on the first day to keep the Chromebooks in their backpacks, and then just kept on doing it. She saw a difference in the quality of their attention, and their work, when they used pencil and paper. Samayoa said:
I’ve been doing that for two weeks, and I saw a huge difference in attention.
Students were more engaged with the material, because they were not distracted by their devices. And me as a teacher, my goodness—so much energy was conserved. I had more energy to invest into the lesson itself, instead of managing screens and devices.
I don’t want to go back. I want to keep it that way. But unfortunately, our textbook is online. Every once in a while, we are going to have to use the Chromebook, but I am limiting their use in my classroom.
Coming soon: A new season of The Bell Ringer Interview with an Expert
Catch up on last season here:
* Natalie Wexler on the science of learning’s “blind spot”
* Amanda VanDerHeyden explains why so many students can’t master math
* Paul Kirschner on why engagement doesn’t equal learning
* Nathaniel Swain on the big differences between explicit and inquiry math instruction
* Karen Vaites on why so many students are reading all excerpts and no books
Two podcasts, two science(s) of learning
My interview on NPR’s The Pulse, and a foundational argument over which science matters most in classrooms
Amanda Smithfield, the librarian and civics guru at Hume-Fogg High School here in Nashville, Tennessee, reached out to me last week, wanting to know if I had heard the latest episode of NPR’s Hidden Brain podcast, an episode called “How Our Brains Learn.”
When she saw the title, Smithfield, who has been an educator for more than two decades, was expecting to hear something about what I have been loosely referring to as the ‘science of learning’—focused mostly on how our memories work, how attention works, and how that affects what teachers and students do in classrooms.
