Education Bookcast

One of the main lessons from the story of Jaime Escalante's career at East LA's Garfeild High School was that it was ultimately a team effort to reach the academic level that the school eventually did. Apart from Escalante himself, there are two figures who stand out as central to the story: Henry Gradillas and Benjamin Jimenez. Gradillas joined Garfield High as a biology teacher after six years in the US army and a short stint as an orchard manager. He saw clear similarities between the young people in his classroom and those who he had been training as an army captain - they were only slightly younger, and they had similar needs, desires, and problems. He would later be promoted to Dean of Discipline and finally Principal (Headmaster) of Garfield High, positions in which he would help deal with Escalante's problem students, and provide him with the resources he needed to make the Advanced Placement Calculus courses a success. Jimenez was one of the other mathematics teachers at Garfield. Impressed with Escalante's classes, he became an apprentice and later collaborator and ally to Escalante. He would go on to run many of the courses preparing students for a the rigours of calculus, and would run some of the calculus classes themselves when the program grew above 100 students. Without Jimenez, Escalante would be left with only uninterested teachers and active enemies in his department, and too much work for one individual to carry out. Escalante himself needs much less introduction, famous as he is. The title of the book is Escalante: The Greatest Teacher in America after all. The book goes into more detail about his background than those of the others. The most interesting thing we hear about his background is how he struggled as a beginning teacher, and the teachers that he admired as he went through his training. It is enlightening to see what his early influences were in terms of his approach to teaching. Enjoy the episode.

Jaime Escalante was a Bolivian teacher who came to Los Angeles in the 1960s. After joining the chaotic failing school Garfield High as a mathematics teacher in 1974, he soon began an Advanced Placement Calculus program that grew to an unheard of size for such a disadvantaged community. In 1982, the Educational Testing Service (ETS), which wrote and marked the tests, suspected Garfield High students of cheating. This led to interest from the media and later fame for Escalante as people started to take notice of what was happening at the school. Soon after, the film Stand and Deliver was produced based on Escalante's success up to that point, starring Edward James Olmos in the leading role. However, even this film did not capture the scale of the success at Garfield High, as it came too early. After 1982, the number of students at the school taking AP Calculus continued to climb to stratospheric heights, from 18 in 1982 - already unbelievable to most, hence the media attention - to 33 in 1983, 68 in 1984, and an eye-watering 151 in 1986. Other AP programs also took off, including History, Government, English, Physics, and Computer Science. How did all this happen? What is Escalante's secret? These are pressing questions, as they could lead to a better understanding of how to motivate and teach students, as well as how to turn a failing school around. This book is written as a story, and so the themes and key lessons from it have to be disentangled from the narrative. We will be looking at it in four parts: Introducing the main characters (Jaime Escalante, Henry Gradillas, and Benjamin Jimenez); Considering the two very different approaches to discipline applied at the school, one with disastrous consequences and one that saved the school from closing; Examining how Escalante and his "team" managed to raise standards and achievement; and Admiring the "glory years", after 1982, when the whole school was on the academic upsurge. There are several lessons to take from the story of Escalante and Garfield High. I hope you enjoy learning from this exceptional case study as much as I have. Enjoy the episode.

I first read You Haven't Taught Until They Have Learned almost five years ago. In that time, I have learned much about how people learn. Re-reading the book now, I am struck by how much of what John Wooden did in his teaching is well supported by modern cognitive science. This is what I try to convey in this short addendum to the notes on John Wooden's pedagogy. Enjoy the episode.

John Wooden was a basketball coach for UCLA and an English teacher. He is renowned as one of the greatest coaches of all time, winning 10 out of 12 NCAA championships, including seven in a row, and has been named Coach of the Century by ESPN among others. You Haven't Taught Until They've Learned is a book about his pedagogy, written by one of his former players (Swen Nater) and by an education researcher who had the rare privilege to observe his basketball practices and ask him detailed questions about his teaching (Ronald Gallimore). The dual authorship gives it a valuable two-pronged perspective, that of student as well as that of researcher. As one reads the book, one is struck by the sense that Coach Wooden was not only exceptional in terms of what he did - his approach to teaching - but also who he was - a man of such strong moral character that it is daunting even to use him as a role model. He taught by example as well as teaching explicitly, and his students remember him for that. In his retirement, barely a day went by without one of John Wooden's former students calling him to talk. He pushed his students hard, but he also cared for them deeply. It is surely valuable to examine some of his practices and principles from his exceptional career. Enjoy the episode.

John Hattie is an education researcher from New Zealand with a very ambitious goal: to synthesise the myriad quantitative research studies on education in a single publication. The number of articles affecting his book Visible Learning numbers in the region of 80 thousand (!). The results of his analysis have been hailed as the "Holy Grail" of education by such prestigious authorities as the Times Education Supplement. So, how did he and his team do it? Hattie uses an approach known as meta-analysis. Meta-analyses take numerous research articles trying to measure an effect and compare them in order to ultimately determine the size of the effect. They are common in medicine, where they are often used to elucidate whether a drug is truly effective or not, as a single study may incorrectly show a drug to be effective simply by chance. However, Hattie goes one step further and carries out a meta-analysis on other meta-analyses, forming a sort of "meta-meta-analysis". With this approach, his team only directly work with 400 articles, as each of these is a meta-analysis of tens or hundreds of other articles, which is how we reach the gargantuan number 80 thousand. You would have thought that such an ambitious, influential, and widely praised work would have come under much careful scrutiny. And you would have thought that since it is so statistical, numerous other researchers in the field of education would have performed at least a surface-level plausibility check. However, you may be disappointed. It took two years for anybody to even begin to notice the glaring statistical errors behind this work, and even when they were noticed, Hattie's team didn't treat them with the gravity they deserved. Methodological criticism gradually increased in number, and by now it is clear that the "Holy Grail" has numerous leaky holes. In this episode, after introducing Visible Learning, I go on to take some highlights from one such criticism, entitled How to engage in pseudoscience with real data: A criticism of John Hattie’s arguments in Visible Learning from the perspective of a statistician, written by Canadian statistician Pierre-Jerome Bergeron. I aim to explain the most accessible points, and leave the more complex parts of the article for those with the interest and mathematical acumen to look up. This sort of thing seems to happen a lot in education. It's one of the reasons why it's so hard to figure out how things work and what's actually true in the field. At least I can warn people about the problems with this still widely cited work. Enjoy the episode.

Graham Nuthall was an education researcher from New Zealand who spent most of his career on classroom observation, both by directly sitting in on lessons and by recording them by the hundred, watching them back, and analysing them with his team. He also made extensive use of interviews with students to clarify their thought processes. This short book communicates his most important findings to other researchers and to teachers. His most impressive achievement is being able to predict, with some accuracy, what concepts or facts children have learned based solely on classroom observation. His team would analyse what different students were doing at key moments in lessons, noting whether they were paying attention to the information being taught or discussed. They found that if a student had been paying attention at least three times when the full information necessary to understand a concept was being stated, then they would almost always have formed the concept and be able to articulate it after the end of the unit. If they had paid attention only two or fewer times, they had not learnt the concept. His work emphasises the individual lives of students, and particularly peer interactions. It's not only "distraction" either - for some students, over half of what they learned had been from peers. He goes over detailed examples of classroom conversations, both the public and the clandestine, showing how these affect both student learning and broader behaviour and culture. Although the main points of the book concern peers and the number of exposures required to learn something, given that the book is a summary of the most important things that Nuthall has to say, it touches on many other points and ideas in education. Although I was hoping to make this a short episode, as per my Public Service Announcement (last "episode"), it ended up having to be around 50 minutes long to cover the most important things that he had to say, even briefly. Maybe 50 minutes is still short for me. Enjoy the episode.

It's been three years since the start of Education Bookcast. I will be attempting to change the format to make episodes shorter. I also mention some successes of the past year.

I've spent a total of seven episodes up till now on Edward de Bono's work on creativity, lateral thinking, and the workings of the mind. While reading his books, a number of criticisms arose in my mind which I never felt I had the chance to fully express. In the name of balance, I also looked for any criticisms of de Bono online, and I found some quite damning allegations. My criticisms from his books and these allegations are topics I would like to spend one episode talking about. The main problems with de Bono's books are two: (1) they are too repetitive (they all seem to say the same thing, with occasional novelties); and (2) they provide no references (ever! in 67 books by an Oxford- and Cambridge-educated author with a PhD!!). Each of these is concerning for different reasons. If de Bono kept "writing the same book" 67 times, why did he feel the need to publish so many books? And if he's supposed to be an authority on creativity, why couldn't he have come up with new ideas to fill those 67 books with? The problem of references appears even more concerning after reading allegations from de Bono's former associates that his work is practically all plagiarised. This would certainly explain his unwillingness to write references, since he would be trying to claim all those other people's work as his own.  There is a real 此地无银三百两 moment at the start of one of his later books. (The Chinese reads "in this place there are not three hundred caddies of silver". There is a story that somebody tried to hide their money by burying it and, for good measure, putting up a sign with the above words just next to where it was buried. The saying means to deny something in such a way as to incriminate oneself, or reveal the very thing that was supposed to be hidden by denial.) He leaves an Author's Note to the effect that he is sorry for not referencing anybody, because he forgot, and he really wants to give the right people credit, honest!, he just can't remember any of the conversations he's had or things that he's read for the past, oh, fifty years. It's somewhat ridiculous and really adds fuel to the suspicion that he hasn't been intellectually honest in his works. This episode may not be rich in insights into creativity, other than perhaps that which Einstein bequeathed to us: "The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources." Although I really think that there is value to the ideas that de Bono came up with / stole during his career, the possibility of plagiarism, and the lack of his own creativity in writing books with something genuinely new to say over a more than fifty-year-long career, detract from the strength of his arguments. The jury is out on where de Bono's ideas come from (although he is definitely guilty of being repetitive in his writing). We must also be aware that those who allege that de Bono has stolen the ideas of others are not necessarily trustworthy themselves. While the story weaved together by these threads is plausible, it is not known for certain to be the truth. This episode seeks only to be fair in highlighting suspicions, although nothing is proven definitively. Enjoy the episode.

Stress is broadly understood to be a serious health risk and a destructive factor in many people's lives. It has been advertised as such for several decades. In The Upside of Stress, Kelly McGonigal explains how new research shows that stress may actually be something positive and life-enhancing rather than ruinous. The most central concept is that of "stress mindsets". Similar to fixed vs. growth mindset as described in Carol Dweck's book (covered in the first episode of this podcast), stress mindsets concern one's beliefs about the effects of stress. People with a "positive stress mindset" believe that there can be benefits to stress, whereas those with a "negative stress mindset" - encouraged by ideas promulgated in the past few decades - believe that stress is uniformly bad for you. It turns out that merely believing something different about stress is enough to change its effects radically for the better. The evidence on the so-called "upside of stress" takes many forms, but perhaps the most convincing evidence is endocrinological. McGonigal cites studies showing that people who have higher stress hormone concentrations following a car accident are *less* likely to develop post-traumatic stress disorder; that the stress hormone dehydroepiandrosterone, or DHEA, is a brain *steroid* (as in, it literally makes your brain grow); and that the ratio of DHEA to cortisol (another stress hormone, but not a steroid) is dependent on your *beliefs* about stress. (My overuse of asterisks hints at how excited I am.) On of the most surprising findings is that stress and happiness are internationally positively correlated. (In case you're interested, the most stressed out country in the world is the Philippines. It's also one of the happiest.) How could this be? McGonigal explains that this relates to what stress is, psychologically speaking. Stress is a state we experience when something we value is at stake. In other words, a meaningful life cannot help being stressful, since in order to be meaningful, one must be working towards or fighting for something that one cares for. Low levels of stress are actually correlated with increased depression risk, and the explanation for this is likely to be similar. Overall, then, a big change in the way we see stress is possible, and it carries great benefits. Enjoy the episode. Music by podcastthemes.com.

Edward de Bono has written a lot of books. Although they often contain small novelties, overall his bibliography is quite repetitive, meaning that it's not worth making an episode about every one of his books individually. In this episode, we'll look at six of his books in quick succession. It's the audio summary equivalent of "skimming" these books, which deserve little more if you're already familiar with the books of his we've considered so far on the podcast. First we look at the "six series": Six Thinking Hats, Six Action Shoes, Six Value Medals and Six Frames for Thinking about Information. The first of these we already saw in the first episode about Edward de Bono, and so there is no need to go into it again in depth, but it is clearly the ancestor of the rest. They all tend to say the same sort of thing, but in slightly different contexts. It's worth quickly skimming through this and then moving on, as there doesn't appear to be much novelty here, just the ability to produce too many sequels, like the Saw movies. Next we look at Teaching Thinking and Teach Your Child to Think. These are surprisingly underwhelming and not particularly useful. There is some "evidence" provided of the effectiveness of direct teaching of thinking which is completely unreferenced and not peer reviewed, and so, unless you consider the author unusually worthy of blind trust, you are forced to ignore this "evidence". The thinking methods taught in a typical Cognitive Research Trust class (CoRT, de Bono's organisation for teaching thinking) are presented, which is interesting, but also a bit of an anticlimax, as they don't seem to amount to anything particularly novel or special. Finally, we look at Simplicity, which is ironically more complicated a book than it need be. We can extract a long list of thinking techniques from it, with the occasional pearl, but the book as a whole is not worth diving into too deeply. Overall, this makes for an unusually fast-moving episode. This is simply because there isn't much to say per book, and I have no reason to waffle and waste your time. It should round out your knowledge of some of the rest of the author's work, and you might have a few useful takeaways here and there as well. Enjoy the episode.