3 important things to know about how the brain works:

Brains -
➡️Predict
➡️Preserve
➡️Protect

(Inspired to write this by a great talk from @C_Hendrick and panel with @HughesHaili and @PepsMccrea at the Steplab expertise conference!) 1/Brains *predict*
We don't just passively encounter our environment; we actively predict what might be about to happen. This is optimal for survival.

On what basis do we make these predictions?

First up @C_Hendrick 🧵 Are we evidence informed ?

We expect teachers to make fine judgements about important things without good evidence…

Health produces loads more research than the field of education -

🧵Getting people to learn is *hard*.

I'm trying to flip the way I think so that I make better assumptions about learning.

Here's how it's going (plea for help at the end)

I now see three learning DEMONS 👿👿👿
.... 👿#1 Assuming Attention

The Demon: thinking that students are listening without any actual evidence (silence is a poor proxy!).

@adamboxer1 writes so well on this here and in threads:

What to do about it:achemicalorthodoxy.co.uk/2022/11/30/the…

Working with schools and trusts has taught me a very valuable lesson.

There’s almost *no point* in talking about improving teaching practice without one key thing:

A *shared mental model* of how people learn

Why is this so important? Let’s break it down...🧵 #1: It Focuses Everyone on the Same Problems

Our mental models guide how we *see* situations, i.e. what we notice and interpret.

Very different mental models of how learning happens = very different conceptions of great teaching.

This is an issue when-

Behaviour change… an elusive goal!

We can know what to do but this doesn’t mean we do it (hence why many New Year’s resolutions fail).

This app gives examples of many well-evidenced behaviour change mechanisms - ‘BCT taxonomy’
Handily groups techniques into categories and explains each one.

I really like how they can relate to coaching…

Some ideas you just keep coming back to in your work.

Here are *5 powerful ideas* and phrases I keep returning to which help me think and act better as a teacher educator: 1/ Upstream thinking

@PepsMccrea 's Evidence Snacks are fab.


Peps says:

"our efforts can sometimes be better directed at tackling problems before they occur… towards prevention. This is 'upstream thinking’."

What does this mean for PD?snacks.pepsmccrea.com/p/upstream-thi…

@MattTeachCoach brilliant presentation

Brief 🧵so all can get the takeaways… The coaching sweet spot is when it is personal, cognitive and technical

5 things I've learned about *adaptive expertise* in teaching:

🧵debuting @olicav's Simple Mental Model graphic plus a free webinar... 1/ Adaptive experts do what works *and* are sensitive to the situation

Adaptive expertise often gets contrasted with routine expertise.

Routine expertise:
Doing tasks efficiently usually by mastering a set of procedures.

What is your school's professional development communicating to teachers? 🧵 Everything your professional development in school *is* and *does* sends a message to teachers about their role and what it means to improve.

What messages is the sector perhaps guilty of sending?

@researchED1 was one of my all time favourites.

Here are just a few takeaways from the sessions I saw - @olicav on organising ideas:
Expert teachers have deep representations but students only see the product of them - they don't see how they are organised.

"organisation is invisible"

A thought on coaching.

What should coaches/leaders focus on when they observe? Let's start by thinking what observers are trying to do.

They want to help the teacher to improve their practice to improve student learning.

But this is misleading. 'Improving their practice' sounds like we can just get teachers to master particular techniques. Actually -

Coaching should not *just* be about teachers learning how to execute techniques but about supporting teachers to develop their *judgement* too i.e. deploying techniques appropriately to meet goals.

Therefore, we need to know about mental models.

Why? Because MMs are a useful construct to explain how we use our knowledge and experience to judge the most appropriate action.

So what are mental models?

Sometimes a phrase is so well put it captures the gist of many of our experiences. It seems to follow you around growing and growing in meaning.

For me this phrase is “memory is the residue of thought” - Daniel Willingham.

This is what it means to me: 1/ On task design: we can design a task and claim it’s in service of learning but unless the task focuses students on that learning it won’t achieve its goal. Learning the important stuff can’t be left to chance.

Too often I planned lessons as a series of engaging activities.

Teacher learning and student learning - are they really so similar?
Here's my take and why it matters for teacher training -🧵 The shift to viewing teacher learning like student learning is welcome. We always think very carefully about student learning but in the past, assumed teachers, being adults, would somehow absorb information. And so-

Reflection on the importance of 'when' in coaching:

I remember a while ago a wonderful Craig Barton podcast episode where he discussed transfer of knowledge in his students, i.e. helping them understand *when* to use something they know in a new context.

He reflected that... Most lessons have titles that give the game away, e.g. students in a lesson called 'Adding fractions' are given a set of qs at the end. Of course they know to just practise applying their knowledge of adding fractions.

This means...

Teacher educators: I think we may want to support teachers to develop *adaptive expertise*.
Please let me know your thoughts... 🧵

First, what is adaptive expertise? Not a clear concept but research suggests adaptive expertise means teachers have –
1. Efficient *core competencies*
(things (I think) that have many aspects that can be routinised, e.g. entrance routines, delivering clear instructions etc)

Can teachers who already have quite a lot of expertise in teaching benefit from coaching?

I think so for three reasons 🧵:

(A thread that should have been a blog - please stick with me!) (1) Expertise is domain specific and teaching has a lot of domains!

People develop expertise in specific areas. It's often hard to transfer this expertise even to a seemingly similar area (even pro tennis players may be pretty novice at badminton). This means…

I've been thinking of *barriers to learning* (of which there are many!).

Here's three barriers from a memory perspective:🧵 Summary:
1/ Failure to consolidate stops students stabilising knowledge.

2/ Familiarity tricks students into thinking they've learned something well when they may not.

3/ Failure to transfer prevents students seeing where their knowledge applies more broadly.

More detail -

🚨BLOG (and short thread): Remembering is recreating

I've been exploring how dynamic our memory is and what this might mean for teaching.

Take 5 mins to read here -

And here's a short thread on the key idea...🧵overpractised.wordpress.com/2023/10/21/rem… What if every time we retrieve a memory the memory changes?

Remembering wouldn't be like accessing a file on a computer (a static stored representation). Remembering would be a dynamic recreation of past ideas in new contexts.

In other words...

Being a bit time poor makes me value quick curated nuggets of wisdom on teaching and learning.

Here are some of the ones I read…🧵 Evidence snacks from @pepsmccrea. Succinct weekly summaries of big ideas in teaching and learning with perfectly matched images to support understanding.
Subscribe here snacks.pepsmccrea.com

🧵THREAD on *Ausubel's Meaningful Learning* (with pictures)

Ausubel is famous for saying
"the most important single factor influencing learning is what the learner already knows." (Ausubel, 1968)

But there's much more to this sentence & his theory than meets the eye... Here's a one-pager of implications of Ausubel's work - thank you @XpatEducator for making it!

I'm speaking at @researchEDWarr & @rEDBerks on *Ausubel's Meaningful Learning* - do join to learn more.

Here are a few things in the meantime...