Education Bookcast

Edward de Bono's work can mostly be divided into two parts: models of how the mind works; and applications of principles extracted from those models to improve thinking, particularly creative thinking. The Mechanism of Mind is his first book, and it primarily deals with the first of these two parts. De Bono wrote The Mechanism of Mind in 1969, at a time when not much was known about the brain, nor about complex adaptive systems (the types of physical objects and situations studied by the fields of mathematics and physics known as chaos theory, complexity theory, and dynamical systems). De Bono's key insight was to realise that the brain is a complex adaptive system, and to run with this insight to produce new insights into how human thinking works, how it differs from the working of computers, and how to make the most of it. The Mechanism of Mind introduces the reader to how de Bono thought that the brain probably worked when he was writing in 1969, by providing a series of analogies or "models" - the polythene-and-pins model, the jelly-and-ink model, and the thousand-bulb model. These aim to clarify the behaviour of the brain both in terms of what kinds of things the brain does, and how this behaviour arises from the brain's structure. His expectations from 1969 were surprisingly close to the overall understood behaviour of the brain (or, at least, small collections of neurons) according to modern neuroscience. Overall, the book serves as a stimulus to thought, and need not be believed in its entirety. It is, after all, one man's guess at how the brain worked based on what was known to science half a century ago. Nevertheless, his explanations do support a number of interesting propositions about thinking, with important consequences for the nature of creativity, which he explains in detail in his other books. Enjoy the episode. Music by podcastthemes.com.

Cal Newport is a computer scientist at Georgetown University who writes a blog called Study Hacks about effective study methods. We have covered one of his books already, So Good They Can't Ignore You, when I wanted to discuss career advice. Before writing How to Become a Straight-A Student, Newport visited a number of university campuses in the USA and looked for students who got the best grades. Curiously, he found that these usually came in two types - those who were constantly grinding away in their studies, as one might expect from a top student; and those who seemed to their peers never to be overworked, and led full extra-curricular and social lives, but always seemed to do the best in their courses. Newport interviewed these, and their approaches to study make the basis of this book. It's interesting to see some of the cognitive science ideas like those put forward by Benedict Carey's How We Learn being put into action by these students, generally without any of them being aware that they are doing so, as they apparently happened upon their study techniques by themselves. It is particularly enlightening to see how they prioritise certain important cognitive features - for example, considering coloured pens for notes to be superfluous (despite scientific evidence that this would improve memory). It would appear that these successful students have figured out the relative importance of various techniques or insights into learning without having to carry out any scientific experiments or read the cognitive science literature. This is the first study guide that I am covering on the podcast, and I don't intend to cover very many. I'm more interested in talking about fundamentals on this podcast than in sharing tips and tricks. The fact that I like the author (due to his other books), and that his approach seems more empirical than other study guides, but less clinically divorced from the real world than scientific books and articles, led me to want to share it with you. I hope it helps you in your studies, or in your teaching. Enjoy the episode. Music by podcastthemes.com.

Edward de Bono is an expert on creativity, author of over 40 books on the subject. He invented the term "lateral thinking" in the 1960s, which is now a part of common parlance. Over his long career, he has worked with numerous large corporations such as Microsoft, Apple, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Siemens, Bose, HP, LinkedIn, and Texas Instruments, as well as schools, charities, and governments. His basic premise is that creativity can be taught by direct teaching of thinking skills and techniques, and that this kind of thinking is not a normal part of culture, but that it should be. Controversially, although highly scientifically and mathematically trained, he does not work on scientifically validating his own ideas, only on trying to develop them and promote them, and on making them accessible to a general audience. However, his ideas are nothing if not interesting and original, and I am persuaded enough by much of what he writes that I find it sensible to share it on this podcast. He is also rather topical because of recent interest in the idea of direct teaching of thinking, which is often combined with the idea of imparting so-called "21st century skills" to schoolchildren. Cognitive scientists often insist that general thinking skills cannot be improved, and that we may only improve at thinking within some particular domain (though some skills are important within many domains, such as reading). For some reason, Edward de Bono never seems to be mentioned during these discussions - neither by those who are in favour of teaching thinking (who, you would think, would be fans of his), nor by those who claim that teaching general thinking directly is a fool's errand. This strange silence, as I perceive it, is something I would like to go some way to fixing. In this episode, I want to introduce Edward de Bono himself, as well as talk about one of his most famous and commonly applied ideas, the Six Thinking Hats, popularised by a book of the same name. In future episodes we will have a chance to dig more deeply into his work on lateral thinking, creativity, the nature of the mind, and direct teaching of thinking skills, among other things. Enjoy the episode. Music by podcastthemes.com.

This is the second part of the episode about Brain-Based Learning. In the previous part, I discussed the chapters concerning relative lateralisation (left/right hemispheres), rhythms (such as circadian rhythms), gender, physical activity, stress and threat, and the senses (vision, touch, taste, smell, and sound). In this episode we look at the chapters on emotions, teacher communication, motivation, attention, teaching how to think, memory, meaning making, and enriching the brain. Enjoy the episode. Music by podcastthemes.com.

Eric Jensen is a former teacher with a PhD in Human Development from Fielding Graduate University. In 1981, he co-founded "the United States' first and largest brain-compatible learning program"[1], and he has been the head of Jensen Learning, a company that trains teachers what he calls "brain-friendly" or "brain-compatible" teaching and learning principles, since 1995. Brain-Based Learning is one of the first books that I read as I was getting into finding out more about education research several years ago. I am quite disappointed with this book. It's not very good. The problems with it are numerous.  Firstly, it does not appear to have any central guiding principles. Generally, a good book will give you ideas in the form of kernels which will be applicable in many situations, and it will show you how those central ideas operate so that you can understand their power and generality. In Brain-Based Learning, Jensen sets out what he wants to tell the reader as essentially a list. This makes it difficult to make head or tail of the book as a whole. Secondly, there is a pervasive lack of references. This means that most of his assertions are stated just as bare-faced facts (with occasional "research has shown..." + random fact, which no reference), meaning that we are supposed to just take him on his word. In some cases, his references are highly dubious, such as when he cites a video produced by Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) inventor Richard Bandler as the only source for over a page of information and suggestions. NLP is generally understood by psychologists to have little scientific support (what science there is on it tends to show that it doesn't work), so this is obviously somewhat dubious. Thirdly, most of his suggestions are obvious in the first place. When he suggests that children need good nutrition or that people need to be hydrated, who is he arguing against? Who didn't think that, or was unaware of that, in the first place? There is a sense in which he is using the idea that his approaches are "brain-based" to lend extra authority to his statements, but the statements themselves were often already well-known and widely accepted approaches prior to his advocacy for them. There are many more criticisms that can be made of this book, and I do make them in the audio. I end up doing a mixture of pulling out the occasional interesting idea, enriching what he writes with context that actually makes it make sense, and pointing out the many places where his work is not useful, or is just confusing. I hope that, despite the rather negative nature of this episode, you will still find it worth listening to. Enjoy the episode. [1] Quoted from http://www.ascd.org/Publications/ascd-authors/eric-jensen.aspx on 9th January 2018. Music by podcastthemes.com.

This is an episode which requires little justification for its relevance to education - the title says it all. How We Learn presents a selection of cognitive science's more recent findings, some of which are rather counterintuitive, and gives several "tips" for how one might study more effectively based on these. Topics covered include the importance of forgetting (!) for learning; the effect of context on learning, and the idea that varied context provides for better learning by enhancing the number of cues for memory retrieval; the power of spaced repetition; test-taking as a study method; and incubation and percolation, two ways of enhancing creativity and problem-solving by making use of downtime and the subconscious mind. The idea that seems to run through everything most strongly is desirable difficulty, not a phrase that the author himself uses, but one that he explains in his own way. If there's one key take-away, it's "make learning hard". Personally, most of the topics covered make me think of my approach to learning languages, which seems to jibe well with many of the ideas, although in some cases I clearly could do things better. There are a number of things here that I could have used either in my own learning or in my teaching, but somehow forgot about them all in the time (more than two years) between reading this book and recording this episode. Hopefully the audience will make better use of these ideas than I have so far! Enjoy the episode. Music by podcastthemes.com.

I've spent some time thinking about the past 50 episodes of the podcast, and I've identified a number of themes - why people do things; how people get good at things; inner states and beliefs; mathematics education; and educational myth-busting, to name a few. But I decided that this episode would be more interesting and helpful if it linked as many ideas as possible under a single umbrella. So, what's the most important idea that I talked about these past (almost) two years? To my mind, many episodes focused on the interaction between the subconscious and the conscious in learning. This led to considering the optimal interaction between the two - flow - and the best known conditions for encouraging flow, both externally (games) and internally (process orientation).  In this episode, I remind the audience of these ideas and their connections to try to produce an overview of much of the past 80 or so hours of audio. Hopefully it will be a good review for those who have been listening thus far, and it might be a good jumping point for those who are new to the podcast. Enjoy the episode. Music by podcastthemes.com.

Explanations can broadly be categorised according to two adjectives: nomological and mechanistic. Mechanistic explanations are to do with cause and effect, and focus on events and causes that immediately precede the fact that we desire to explain. Nomological explanations are based on general principles. The following is the definition of the word "nomological": nomological. adj. Relating to or denoting principles that resemble laws, especially those laws of nature which are neither logically necessary nor theoretically explicable, but just are so. Here are some word pairs that I came up with that are near-synonymous to the above two terms, and help to clarify their meaning: NOMOLOGICAL vs MECHANISTIC. Why vs How. Simplifying explanations vs Causal explanations. Morals of stories vs Stories themselves. General laws vs Causal systems. Strategy vs Tactics. Atemporal vs Temporal. Essence vs Origin. Solution vs Process. Intuition vs Calculation. Cutting the knot vs Untying the knot. Whole vs Parts. "Abstract" vs "Concrete". Art vs Accountancy. Taking the lift vs Walking up the stairs. Market inevitabilities vs Specific catalysts. Firstly, I think that this is a fascinating topic, and one that is rarely talked about. When was the last time you talked about what kinds or styles of explanations you think are convincing? Did you even realise that there is such a thing as a style of explanation? Secondly, I think that this can be important when we think about how we are teaching and learning. The best kinds of explanation are both nomological *and* mechanistic - like Yin and Yang, the two complete each other to provide "thorough" explanations. There are also certain kinds of explanations that are more appropriate for beginners. Apparently, there is some research showing that cognitive styles (as the above are called) vary by discipline, so that, for example, linguists tend to think much more nomologically than psychologists. There is also evidence demonstrating that people's tastes in this regard don't tend to change much over time, partly because of natural disposition, but partly due to the self-reinforcing nature of holding a certain kind of taste and then mixing with your own kind. This episode is inspired by the article Cognitive Styles in Two Cognitive Sciences by James Myers, but most of the content is my own thinking around this issue. Enjoy the episode.

Josh Waitzkin was the international under-18 chess champion at age 18, only to quit chess at age 22 and pursue Tai-chi Push Hands, the martial application of Tai Chi. He became world champion in this martial art at age 28, and won the title several more times since then. As an accomplished competitor in two fields - one mental, one mostly physical - a book written by him about how he learns is obviously going to contain some interesting ideas. The main themes of what he writes about are two: learning by focusing on principles and deeply understanding the fundamentals; and how to increase concentration and overcome distraction. Interestingly, many of the things that Waitzkin writes in his own personal way square with a lot of findings of cognitive science, many of which we already talked about in other episodes of the podcast. Ideas such as the role of the subconscious, chunking, and expert blindness all appear in his writing, but he usually refers to these by other names. Two quotes from the book didn't make it into the recording, but are worth sharing, and so I will share them below. On losing: "There is something particularly painful about being beaten in a chess game. In the course of a battle, each player puts every ounce of his or her tactical, strategical, emotional, physical, and spiritual being into the struggle. The brain is pushed through terrible trials; we stretch every fibre of our mental capacity; the whole body aches from exhaustion after hours of rapt concentration. In the course of a dynamic chess fight, there will be shifts in momentum, near misses, narrow escapes, innovative creations, and precise refutations. When your position teeters on the brink of disaster, it feels like your life is on the line. When you win, you survive another day. When you lose, it is as if someone has torn out your heart and stepped on it. No exaggeration. Losing is brutal." On competition: "From one perspective the opponent is the enemy. On the other hand there is no one who knows you more intimately, no one who challenges you so profoundly or pushes you to excellence and growth so relentlessly." Enjoy the episode. Music by podcastthemes.com.  

This book is about shame. Shame is a taboo emotion in our culture. It is not talked about, which is part of what makes it so powerful, and part of its essence - it is an emotion of disconnection, or feeling rejected or not worthy of the group. It can affect students as well as teachers, almost always negatively. Students can experience it coming from teachers (often with good intentions), or coming from other students as a form of bullying. In an educational or work setting, shame is often used as a motivator. It doesn't work, though. Guilt can be a motivator, because guilt is about regretting something that you have done; but shame is about regretting who you are, which does not spur one on to action. Guilt and shame can be seen as the growth- and fixed-mindset versions of the same psychological mechanism (this last is my conclusion, not Dr Brown's). Shame is also distinct from humiliation. Humiliation is when you don't believe that you deserve the undermining of your dignity that has occurred; whereas shame is when you believe that you do deserve it.   Whether shame is deliberately meted out or happens upon someone with nobody else's intention, it is a terrible feeling, often described as "the worst feeling in the world". It paralyses people and makes it difficult for them to make progress, or even function normally. Dr Brené Brown has made a career of studying shame, and this book is based on the results of hundreds of interviews that she conducted for her research. She discusses what shame is, how it works, and how to build "shame resilience" - the ability to pass through shame in the fastest and most constructive way, and to feel less suffering than one otherwise would. Enjoy the episode. Music by podcastthemes.com.