Teaching Channel Talks Episode 116: Effortful Thinking and the Power of Learning Science (w/ Dr. Jim Heal)

Dr. Wendy Amato: Welcome to Teaching Channel Talks. I’m your host, Dr. Wendy Amato, and as often as I can, I jump into conversations about topics that matter in education Today, I bring a leading expert in the applied Science of Learning. Welcome, Dr. Jim Heal.

Dr. Jim Heal: Thank you so much, Wendy. It’s a pleasure to be here with you.

Dr. Wendy Amato: Let’s jump in by helping people understand what learning science is.

Dr. Jim Heal: Yes. So learning science, can be quite a slippery term. It’s certainly a term that’s been used to describe a variety of different ways of thinking about how to connect, research and practice. But certainly within the world of education, I would offer kind of three main legs to the stool.

The first is that I. These are principles of the mind, and they represent our best understanding of how people learn. The second is that they are supported by evidence from fields such as cognitive science, educational psychology, and the like, and that this evidence demonstrates that these techniques or principles have a positive effect on student learning.

Dr. Wendy Amato: I love that you’re using a three-legged stool analogy because we can understand right away that it doesn’t work without all three.

Dr. Jim Heal: Exactly. Exactly right. And actually the, it’s the third leg of the stool that I would argue is really the one that, that it would not work without. And that is that these principles and the evidence upon which they are based.

Have to be translatable and transferable into the actions that teachers take every day. There are plenty of fascinating studies, a adorning the hallways and the bookshelves of universities all over the world. But unless a teacher can hold them, use them and understand why they work.

Then what is it for? And so, our best understanding backed by evidence, but that it’s usable, it can be employed to good effect for learners and for the students that we serve.

Dr. Wendy Amato: Let’s talk about your understanding of the practical nature of what needs to happen in classrooms. What kind of experience do you have that makes you credible?

Dr. Jim Heal: Well, I think one way to answer that would be to go back to the sort of beginnings of my time as an educator. I was a classroom teacher myself for a decade. I was an A school administrator that was back in the UK before I moved to the us And what I started to realize over that course of time was.

There were things that I wish I had known sooner. There were approaches to teaching and learning that only once I found out about it was impossible to sort of unsee. And yet, before I knew those things I was kind of flying blind. And so what I’ve discovered since then and what I’ve been very fortunate enough to be able to work in this arena is to either.

Talk about lecture, about, write about, and engage with learners all over the world and schools all over the world, to simply ask the question, how do we know that what we are doing works and how would an understanding of how learning happens help us to make better decisions as educators? So whether that’s through my doctoral work or my research or my writing, to me that’s the fundamental piece is what is that through line of knowing what works and why.

So we can do it more of the time.

Dr. Wendy Amato: Your experience as a classroom teacher and as a school leader gives you that key perspective, understanding that the feeling teachers have, it’s almost a frustration. I think when you and I have spoken before, we’ve said teaching can be frustrating because we wonder if the approach we’re using is going to work.

And we shouldn’t wonder. So it’s a healthy frustration. It’s born out of wanting to be a good instructor.

Dr. Jim Heal: And again, this is not to say that. Another thing I notice is that educators all, all over the world. Walking into classrooms every day and doing phenomenal work. Yes. There, there is so much.

I’m always struck by how talented and capable teachers are. So it’s not always a case of going in and saying, you know, wagging your finger and saying, if only you knew these things about how the mind works, then you’d be a better teacher. Not at all. It’s more to the point that teachers. If they know why things work, they can do them even more of the time.

And so we often find that this is a really affirming process that teachers say, oh, I always wondered why that that was the successful strategy, and now I know why I can iterate on it and have it show up in different ways more of the time.

Dr. Wendy Amato: As often as we ask, how do I know if what I’m doing is going to work?

We do also ask, why did that work? And in order to replicate it, we have to have the kind of understanding that your work provides. Tell me more about learning science. I.

Dr. Jim Heal: Yeah, so perhaps one of the best ways to describe it is to explore some of the principles themselves. And so when I talked earlier about how these are principles of the mind that we’ve come to understand that are robustly supported by the evidence for instance, it is an.

Undeniable irrefutable fact that our working memories as individuals and our long-term memories are entirely different. Our long-term memories, as far as we know, are practically infinite versus our working memories, which are incredibly finite. And we can only hold a certain amount of knowledge items on a, on our plate at one time.

What came out of this realization and through the work of people like John Sweller and Paul Kirschner and others, came to rise, what we now know as cognitive load theory, that is to say, if we know this about the mind, it behooves us as educators to manage the cognitive load that students bear at any given moment.

This can be regulated by. The amount of information you share at any given moment, but it can also be regulated by what prior knowledge are students bringing into the room and what does it mean for them to be able to encounter new ideas through what they already know. And so that even just those two concepts, you know, so the relationship between working memory and long term memory.

The role that cognitive load plays in classrooms and what the students already know that will help them come to know new things. These are tangible, accessible ideas that then give rise to a whole host of instruction or choices that teachers can make that perhaps they wouldn’t have that sort of palette of possibilities at their disposal if that were not part of their repertoire.

Dr. Wendy Amato: Dr. Heal, what you’re describing reminds me of another conversation we had where we talked about the myth of engagement or the illusion of engagement. Can you share what you have been teaching others about engagement and learning?

Dr. Jim Heal: Yes. Well, the one of the first things to know and this is often these approaches sound like they make intuitive sense when you first encounter them, but unless you actually scrutinize it, you don’t kind of go there.

In this case that the sort of, the wisdom that, that the research reveals is that engagement and learning are not the same thing. And you can be highly engaged in something. But it may or may not have anything to do with the aims and intentions of what? Of what learning. A actually ought to consist of a good example of this that I think many people can speak to from their own experience is, you know, remembering a time when a, a classroom activity was involved, you know, we were studying ancient Rome and so we all dressed up like Roman centurions and my teacher dressed in a toga and so on and so forth.

These often lead to what we sometimes call kind of flashbulb memories because the surface features of what you are seeing are the thing that in the moment at least engaged you and left a lasting effect. The question therefore becomes though, when someone tells you such a thing and you then say to them, okay, but what was the point of the lesson?

And what about that, that activity communicated to you something that you needed to learn and remember about, say, the Roman kind of culture and experience, and that’s when the response that normally comes back is, oh yeah. No, I don’t really remember what the lesson was about. I just remember that I dressed up as a Roman centurion.

So there is an enormous amount of work that goes on in classrooms every day. That is incredibly well intentioned by teachers for which students very ably go along for the ride and enjoy that level of engagement. But my question would always be, what are you engaged in? What would success look like and what would it take to get there?

And unless a student can answer those things, the argument goes that they are likely to be engaged in something that is either tangential or redundant as far as what real learning actually looks like.

Dr. Wendy Amato: When I was a middle school administrator, I know that I had teachers whose projects were more or less intended to provide something for the bulletin boards, and I’ve, I suspect that there was too much emphasis on the glitter and the penmanship than on the deep understanding that should have come out of investigating a question.

Dr. Jim Heal: Yes. Yes. And that actually speaks to another one of these sort of fallacies, if you will, which is that performance and learning are the same that, that nor is that supported by the evidence. We know that in fact, learning and. Performing what you are have supposedly learned actually could work in contradiction with one another.

This is why we have the effect of people eng students engaging in standardized tests asing tests, and then. Three weeks later, they couldn’t tell you a single thing about whatever it was that they were learning. When we know about how the mind works and how we encode information into our long-term memories, we understand how to do that durably not as a series of kind of short, sharp recollections, but can you strengthen those memory traces so that you can recall them?

Tomorrow and the week after and the year after and decades later. ’cause that’s what learning ought to be. It should be for all time.

Dr. Wendy Amato: One of the books that you’ve co-authored the beginning of the title is How Teaching Happens And It Goes On. But I was curious about that book title because it’s.

Emphasizing the teaching when we’re in an era of student learning and student-centered thinking and student data-driven decisions. But I was curious about that word choice for the book title, especially because of your emphasis on how learning happens.

Dr. Jim Heal: Yeah it’s interesting. I think that sometimes it does warrant having both of those conceptions in under the same kind of umbrella.

And often what I’ll say is. In order to know how to teach, we must first understand how learning occurs. And really the reason I focus it on teachers is that we cannot legislate for. What students know and are able to engage in.

We cannot legislate for where they have come from or what it took for them to get to school that day. And nor can students decide which teacher gets to stand in front of them. And to the detriment of those students and to the shame of our system, right? Insofar as which students get to think deeply and engage with real learning and which don’t.

The only thing we can do something about is I. Teachers and teaching and schools and school systems, that is the, that is within the locus of our control. And so for me, how teaching happens matters because it’s the thing we ought to be paying closest attention to. And it’s the thing that as professionals, we can have agency around.

It’s not that, you know, I, I’m kind of frankly fed up of how teaching gets sort of demoted to being further down the ladder of kind of professional integrity. When I work with teachers and schools to explore this stuff, you can see those teachers growing in their sense of themselves as a professional.

And to me, that’s why teachers in my work are the first kind of stop on the journey. Then of course, the ultimate aim is improve student outcomes as a result.

Dr. Wendy Amato: You recently co-founded Learning Science Partners. What do you do for schools through LSP?

Dr. Jim Heal: Yes. Well, I, I must first put a shout out to my good friend and colleague, Meg Lee, and we founded the organization together.

I think one of, one of the things that we noticed quite early on, I. There was lots of great theory out there and that understanding of that theory was growing. And there are a lot of wonderful educators who are amazing at implementing ideas at scale and infusing them in the way into the way that schools and school systems do what they do.

What we didn’t see very much of was examples of organizations that bring both of those conceptions of the work into the same space. And so, not to say that it is as crudely divided as this, but I lean more towards the theoretical component with a degree of implementation. And Meg, as a. 30 year veteran of school systems at executive leadership is just incredible at moving the needle in implementation terms.

And so what we are lucky enough to be able to do is to go into to K 12 school systems and work really closely with them over extended periods of time, is definitely not one and done professional learning. It’s not train the trainer it’s saying. How would you do things differently if you utilized learning science as a lens through which you engaged in your everyday practices as leaders, as teachers, as anyone involved in supporting the lives of students and learners?

And when you bring that conception, you’re actually talking about deep, durable change rather than just rearranging the furniture and thinking that that’s going to make a difference.

Dr. Wendy Amato: You two balance each other wonderfully. It’s a yin yang set up. And certainly a powerful combination that can move the dial in schools.

Thank you for that work, and thank you for not limiting yourselves to a one and done type effort. Those just don’t work. So, learning Science Partners is in schools. What would an interaction with you all look and feel like if you were coming to my school?

Dr. Jim Heal: I think of course it depends on where that school is at in its current journey or where that district is at in its current journey.

Sometimes we’ll have districts approach us that have, have already done many years work into this. I will say, however, that in the United States, even though learning science is becoming more widely adopted at the moment, we are more likely to encounter a school district where they’re very much. Early on in their adoption of these kinds of principles.

So whenever that’s the case, we would likely come in. We often, we often begin by simply saying, how can we set the table for what we mean when we talk about this work? We want ultimately there to be a common language of what it means to, to describe and act good learning. So whether that is.

Teachers working collaboratively with one another. The relationship between a teacher and a coach or mentor the way that leaders speak about the work, the way that students speak about the work, coherence is absolutely critical. And oftentimes you, if you don’t norm the way that we think about learning, you end up with this kind of tower of Babel effect where everyone wants learning to be done well, but everyone’s operating according to a different version thereof.

And so. I think step one is always to ground our principles, to huddle around common definitions of the what, the why, and the how of this work. And then once you’ve done that, you really can start to infuse it into the daily systems and practices.

Dr. Wendy Amato: You all come in prepared for a range of needs to address whatever the school or the district.

Needs at the time. It’s in a, an inventory first in providing shared language and norming. That’s perfect. It means that you’re addressing what needs to be addressed based on the local context and resources. You’ve used a phrase in the past, effortful thinking. It’s a phrase that I love and probably one that weaves into your work in schools.

What does that mean? What does it look like?

Dr. Jim Heal: Yes. So, one way to position effortful thinking is that it is in many ways the antidote to the illusion of engagement. When we think about the fact that our, as I said earlier, our working memory being as limited as it is, and we can only think about a certain number of things at one time, what becomes absolutely critical is the manner in which we think about things.

And so oftentimes we think that all. Thinking is created equal. And just as long as you think about something, then that will mean that you’ve got a chance of remembering it. That is just not true. Firstly, we know that if you don’t process a piece of information within about 20 to 30 seconds after first encountering it, it is very likely that it will ricochet off the surface.

The other is that you don’t ascribe meaning to what you are thinking about. For instance, trying to memorize a date from history without attributing what was significant about such a date. It just isn’t going to stick. And then the third is the, as the word effortful might describe is that it, it needs to be difficult, but it needs to be difficult in the right way.

And so a lot of cognitive bandwidth is expended by students all the time on things that are not necessary for learning. The question becomes how do you focus students so that they have to dig deeper? They have to work harder for what they are coming to know, and what it turns out is, is that that effort, if you will, strengthens the relationship between that idea and their ability to remember it.

One way that I normally summarize this is to say. If learning comes easy, it will go easy. And so you need to address the difference between those two things. And that comes in the type of tasks we set, the type of questions and prompts that we put in front of students. And again, the decisions that teachers make, are you getting them to think or are you just acting in surface phenomena thinking.

Dr. Wendy Amato: The phrase effortful thinking has so much in it that simply exploring. What is underneath Effortful Thinking is an exercise and a lesson of its own for educators. It’s an important one. I love the phrase, let’s make it trend. In the past, colleagues in the field of learning sciences have spoken on topics such as teaching struggling brains, but we know that.

Learning science is not just for struggling brains. Can you assure me that your recommendations apply to all learners, whether they’re in school or way beyond?

Dr. Jim Heal: Yeah, and in fact, I’m I, I’m not sure the phrase, the idea of a struggling brain is something that even sits very comfortably with me because barring, you know.

Real serious cognitive impairment, which is obviously a real factor of how some people are affected in life. There is so much more that is similar about our brains and how we learn than there is difference. And so I believe that one of the things that is really reaffirming about this work is that it is that we all bring a brain to school.

That actually the capacity for us to learn is much more uniform than we give ourselves credit for. Therefore, when we try to apply labels to learners and then when we attempt to shape the way we teach according to those labels, that’s when we’re starting to perhaps lose the thread. Instead, I would ask myself.

What are the conditions that you can create in cognitive terms so that you are offering the widest part of the funnel so that irrespective of who the learner is or where they come from or in what kind of work they are engaged in, that there is a means of accessibility into meaningful thought.

Dr. Wendy Amato: Dr. Heal, what you’re describing is amazing, this broad funnel. Can you give me an example?

Dr. Jim Heal: Yes. Well, there’s a, there is a really fascinating study which speaks about the difference between what certain students can access versus others. What the researchers did was to provide the respondents with a riddle and the riddle was about a man entering a cave and needing to know how to get back out of said cave.

You may already be beginning to ascertain that the answer to this riddle is easier to come by if you know the the fairy tale of Ansel and Gretel, because the ri, the answer to the riddle, in part at least, is drawn from being able to breadcrumb your way out of the cake. So that’s the straightforward part.

Here’s the really interesting part when they ask students from the United States to answer that riddle. Roughly 75% of them got it correct when they asked Chinese students to answer the same riddle. Roughly 25% of those students got it Correct. Does this mean that students from the United States are smarter than students from China?

Well, absolutely not. Of course, what it meant was, was that they had the cultural capital. In this instance to be able to understand the terms of what they were being asked to solve for. We know this because when they made a fairy tale from a Chinese culture, the center of the riddle, the trend reversed.

And in that consideration, roughly 75% of the Chinese students got the riddle right and the opposite was the case for those from the United States. So for me. This is irrefutable evidence that there is no such thing as what we might call innate intelligence, but rather, what do you already have that enables you to pick up what someone is putting down?

And if prior knowledge or cultural competency is a currency, we must ask ourselves whose currency is acceptable. You, you does your personal history, your familial history, your heritage, your race, your way of seeing the world, the way that you were raised, the communities that you’ve been lucky enough to be a part of, are these things lending themselves to a currency that.

Is, makes sense and works within a school or within a classroom, or does your richness of experience happen not to be met by what’s going on in that classroom? And that just doesn’t make sense that doesn’t matter only in terms of belonging and feeling seen and feeling safe. It actually turns out that has implications at the cognitive level and that it is the difference maker between whether or not a student is capable of.

Learning in a way that is conducive with what’s going on around them or not.

Dr. Wendy Amato: Since we know this understanding of learning science can make all the difference in teaching and learning, I. You surely have a call to action for the educators sharing this conversation with us. Where can we make change happen?

Dr. Jim Heal: I mean, of course you can go out and buy my books. I mean, that would be a great Absolutely. I mean, yeah, that, um, but no, I, I think truly that I. There is so much more out there now than there has been for the longest time. There are also lots of conferences and different ways of interacting with new ways of thinking about learning.

I could point to organizations like research ed, who have a presence here in the United States. Learning Forward have been very good at trying to pick up on some of this stuff. Learning in the Brain is a very good organization that runs conferences here in, in the us. Um. I would argue that exposing yourselves to these ideas and, and getting your hands on them is only obviously the first step.

I, I think I have to, uh, uh, cite Meg here ’cause a lot of this is her great work in terms of implementation. Four ways to think about something when you’ve encountered a new way of understanding, learning. Begin, retire, adjust, elevate, begin. What do you, what do you wanna start doing? Based on what you now know, retire, what it, what do you now know is probably not in the best in in interest of students.

And so it will probably not make sense for me to do that thing anymore, adjust what is close. But with a few tweaks and a few tightening of the screws here and there in my practice, how would that be made even more impactful and elevate? What’s already there that we can affirm, that we can model, that we can lift up and say, yes, this works, and now we know why.

And so for me, when I first encountered these ideas, I was so enthused by them that I wanted to say, how’s this gonna affect what I do on Monday? And so at the very least, if it was just the first step of a thousand mile journey, those kinds of activators. I find her a very good way for you to just start getting these ideas rolling.

And as I said earlier, once you see them in action and once you start to hold them in your hands as an educator, it’s very hard to unsee it after that. And I think that’s part of what makes this movement so special.

Dr. Wendy Amato: Begin, retire, adjust, elevate. Okay. That’s our call to action and it’s a good one. So we’ll send our educators off with those final words.

Thank you, Dr. Heal.

Dr. Jim Heal: Thank you so much, Wendy. It’s been a pleasure speaking with you

Dr. Wendy Amato: and to our fellow educators. Thank you all for joining us in the conversation. If you’d like to explore topics that Dr. Heel and I discuss today, please check out the show notes at TeachingChannel.com/podcast. Be sure to subscribe on whatever listening app you use that will help others to find us.

I’ll see you again soon for the next episode. Thanks for listening.