Education Bookcast
206 episodes - English - Latest episode: 3 months ago - ★★★★★ - 35 ratingsEducation Bookcast is a podcast principally for teachers and parents who would like to know more about education. We cover one education-related book or article each episode, going over the key points, placing it in context, and making connections with other ideas, topics, and authors.
Topics include psychology, philosophy, history, and economics of education; pedagogy and teaching methods; neurology and cognitive science; and schools and school systems in historical and international perspective.
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Episodes
156. Entrepreneurial expertise
January 25, 2024 16:39 - 43 minutes - 39.7 MBIn order to understand learning, we need to understand the result of learning - expertise. This is much easier to approach in so-called "kind" domains, such as chess, where the rules are fixed and all information is available. However, there exist more "wicked" domains than this, such as tennis (where your opponent changes each match) or stock market investment (where the world is different each time). How do we study the development of expertise in fields such as these? Chapter 22 of The ...
155. How experts see
December 18, 2023 14:58 - 41 minutes - 38.3 MBThere has been a ton of research on how experts see things differently than novices. (Like, with their eyes.) Everything from where they look, how long they focus for, and their use of peripheral vision, to their ability to anticipate what is going to happen through picking up subtle visual patterns. In this episode, I summarise and discuss this research. Enjoy the episode.
154. Mindsets everywhere
December 11, 2023 11:59 - 29 minutes - 27.3 MBMindset was the first thing I spoke about on this podcast. I even did a separate episode going into the controversies surrounding replication of Carol Dweck's original work. Then there were stress mindsets, introduced by Kelly McGonigal in her book The Upside of Stress. (I happen to have also covered a book by her twin sister Jane, Reality is Broken, about applying the motivational principles learned by game designers in wider life situations). But now I've encountered another kind of mind...
153. Comparing learning different dance styles: Argentine Tango vs. Ballroom & Latin (Dancesport)
November 26, 2023 11:59 - 1 hour - 70.7 MBI haven't spoken on the podcast yet about my personal experience learning dancing. At university, I took part in dancesport, which is competitive ballroom and latin dancing; and in the last few years I have been learning to dance tango. I am struck by the differences in philosophies, skill sets, values, and learning cultures between these dance styles, so I wanted to share my experience with you. Enjoy the episode. *** Music used in this episode: Uno by Anibal Troilo https://open.sp...
152. [VIDEO] Education and generative AI: conference video for STEM MAD Melbourne, October 23
November 19, 2023 11:59 - 8 minutes - 252 MB VideoThis is my first ever attempt at a VIDEO podcast. If you just listen to the audio, you should be fine. This was a video produced for the STEM MAD conference in Melbourne in October 2023. Unfortunately I couldn't attend the conference, so I made this video to introduce the panel discussion on the role of generative AI in education. Enjoy the episode.
151. 8 years, 150 episodes
November 13, 2023 17:34 - 36 minutes - 33 MBThis is a quick review of where I am now after 150 episodes and just short of 8 years of Education Bookcast. Thanks for all of your support! Feel free to leave a review of the podcast, or, if you wish, support me on https://www.buymeacoffee.com/edubookcast . Enjoy the episode.
150. A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin
October 26, 2023 14:46 - 58 minutes - 53.9 MBSince I've now reached episode 150, I've decided to do something I've never done before - discuss a fiction book. (This episode contains spoilers.) A Wizard of Earthsea is a fantasy novel from 1968, a time when the genre was still not very well-developed. Ursula Le Guin deliberately wanted to contravene some trends she saw in the existing genre, including the main characters being fair-skinned, and war as a moral analogy. In this book, the key issues are internal to a character, a fact tha...
149. How Popular Musicians Learn by Lucy Green
October 23, 2023 12:53 - 47 minutes - 43.1 MBA lot of the classic expertise research, especially the research about deliberate practice and the "10,000 hour rule", is inspired by K. Anders Ericcson's study of violinists at the Berlin Conservatory. However, we have seen before how misleading sampling a particular culture and generalising the findings over the whole of humanity can be. Thankfully, Lucy Green's How Popular Musicians Learn gives us something of an antidote to this classical music bias. Green's book is based on interviews...
148. You Know the Fair Rule by Bill Rogers
August 18, 2023 09:30 - 1 hour - 66.9 MBAny teacher in a Western cultural context knows that classroom behaviour is the most challenging part of the job. A lot of the time, it seems like crowd control is the main issue, and "teaching" is secondary. Unfortunately, teacher training courses don't do a good job of preparing teachers for this reality, with behaviour management rarely instructed at all. Bill Rogers has been helping teachers develop their classroom behaviour management and discipline skills for decades. He has brought...
147. Large language models (LLMs) - interview with Dr Guy Emerson
July 24, 2023 07:05 - 1 hour - 65.3 MBDr Guy Emerson (a.k.a Guy Karavengleman) is a computational linguist working at the Cambridge University Computer Laboratory. In this episode, we discuss issues surrounding LLMs such as ChatGPT, GPT-3, GPT-4, and Google Bard. Guy is concerned about misinterpretations of what the technology does and is capable of. As a computational linguist, he works on language models with a focus on semantics and human language acquisition, and thus questions of linguistic meaning and understanding are p...
146b. Lessons from EdTech - The 90% Rule
May 07, 2023 12:43 - 31 minutes - 28.6 MBIn the second part of this two-part episode about lessons learned from my time working in the education technology sector, I wanted to share a very significant quantitative finding to improve learning: what I call the "90% rule". Desirable difficulties is a concept that many know about and try to apply to teaching situations, but there is a question of how difficult one should make things. Surely there is a level at which things are too difficult? In which case, what is the perfect level o...
146a. Lessons from EdTech - the Fundamental Duality of Educational Materials
April 30, 2023 12:29 - 48 minutes - 44.2 MBI've now been working as a data scientist in educational technology for over four years. In that time I've thought a lot about various educational concepts within edtech, and I want to share some of what I've learnt. In the first part of this two-part episode, I want to talk about what I call the Fundamental Duality of Educational Materials. The Fundamental Duality is that we use our content to measure our students / users (e.g. what they know), but we also use our users to measure our con...
145b. How to be a better lecturer (practice) - a message for Guy
April 22, 2023 20:19 - 1 hour - 61.6 MBThis is the second part of the message for my friend Guy about becoming a better lecturer. In this part, I go over 27 practical techniques and tips for improving lecturing (as well as improving the way homework exercises are designed), referring to the principles and theory outlined in the previous part to explain how and why these work. To be completely honest some of the suggestions are more general pedagogical suggestions rather than being specific to lecturing, but I decided to throw the...
145a. How to be a better lecturer (theory) - a message for Guy
April 22, 2023 13:35 - 56 minutes - 51.3 MBAnother in the series of "really long voice notes from Staś". My friend Guy is a lecturer in natural language processing. He asked me if I could give him some tips about how to lecture better, so I told him I would record a podcast episode about it. I've divided the episode into two parts. In this first part, before we speak about practical things to do, I will discuss what the basic aims are, and some important preliminary framing questions - what are we trying to achieve? How does learni...
144. Developing Talent in Young People by Benjamin Bloom
April 15, 2023 13:58 - 1 hour - 57.4 MBBenjamin Bloom is best known for Bloom's Taxonomy, a scheme for categorising ways of thinking about or interacting with learning content on a scale from less to more sophisticated. However, the project he led investigating the lifelong development of expertise should be much more famous. The book's full title makes it feel as though it was published in 1685 rather than 1985: The dramatic findings of a ground-breaking study of 120 immensely talented individuals reveal astonishing new inform...
143. Talent, revisited
March 19, 2023 20:08 - 1 hour - 63.3 MBCover image: horse and rider by Nadia, age 5. The nature of talent is something that I dealt with near the beginning of the existence of Education Bookcast, reviewing books like Genius Explained, Outliers, The Talent Code, and Bounce. The general consensus was that talent is an illusion - people simply get better at things through exposure and practice. My confidence in this assertion was shaken when reading the IQ literature, but now, in the book The Road to Excellence edited by K. Ande...
142. Season 2 of the Pedagogue-Cast is out now! Taster: Music and Learning
March 11, 2023 08:59 - 36 minutes - 33.4 MBSeason 2 of the Pedagogue-Cast is here! The Pedagogue-Cast is a separate podcast project I share with Justin Matthys, founder of Maths Pathway. We discuss the kinds of questions that teachers might have about good practice which touch on cognitive science, making sure both to make the most of the research findings while also making it practical for use in the classroom. In this new season, Justin and I are going to discuss music, flow, focus, student choice, social & emotional learning i...
141+. Feedback on constructivism
March 10, 2023 12:06 - 45 minutes - 41.5 MBAfter my last episode on behaviourism, cognitivism, and constructivism ("A Message for Zoë"), I heard back from Zoë herself, and also heard from Malin Tväråna, an education researcher in Sweden. I decided that it was worth recording an episode relating what I heard from them, and my thoughts about it. Enjoy the episode. ### REFERENCES Miłosz, Czesław (1953): The Captive Mind. Radford, Luis (2016): The Theory of Objectification and its Place among Sociocultural Research in Mathemati...
141. Behaviourism, Cognitivism, Constructivism - a message for Zoë
February 25, 2023 13:27 - 44 minutes - 40.6 MBMy friend Zoë (hi Zoë!) is taking a course on learning design. In it, she heard about Behaviourism, Cognitivism, and Constructivism, and while she said that she found it confusing, her main takeaway is that "you need a bit of each". I recorded this episode to help her have a clearer sense of what these three words really mean, and that "a bit of each" is emphatically not the right message. I thought that others might benefit from the same summary. This is a frequent topic in education cour...
140b. Political economy pt. II: The Invisible Hook
January 30, 2023 12:00 - 42 minutes - 39.2 MBIn the previous recording, I was speaking about political economy using the example of prison gangs, taken from David Skarbek's book Social Order of the Underworld. In this recording, I give the example of 18th-century Atlantic pirates, as discussed in Peter Leeson's The Invisible Hook. (It's a pun on Adam Smith's "invisible hand of the market".) We may have an image of pirates as fearsome, but this is at least somewhat deliberately manufactured by the pirates themselves. They wanted to hav...
140a. Political economy pt. I: The Social Order of the Underworld
January 29, 2023 15:44 - 1 hour - 64.2 MBPlease be advised that this episode contains mentions of violence and may be unsuitable for some listeners. I'd like to flesh out what I've been saying before about the power of economic analysis in explaining people's actions. Whereas when we normally think about motivation we think in terms of psychology, economists naturally think in terms of incentives. This kind of thinking is generally missing in educational discourse. There are two books that I found particularly fascinating and...
139. Reflections after 7 years
January 01, 2023 01:00 - 50 minutes - 46.2 MBEducation Bookcast released its first episode on the 1st of January 2016. I'd like to take this opportunity to talk about some of the big things that I think I've learned in that time. I speak about: Psychology is overrated - the replication crisis and the bias in cultural sampling, and therefore the importance of anthropological evidence; Psychology is underrated - how amazing the field of cognitive architecture is, and how little known it appears to be as a field; apparent resistance ...
138. The science of self-belief, part II: self-efficacy
November 14, 2022 09:24 - 34 minutes - 31.6 MBThis is the second episode concerning self-related beliefs taken from chapters of The Cambridge Handbook of Motivation and Learning. Here I talk about self-efficacy, which concerns how much you believe that you can do something specific, e.g. solve a particular kind of maths problem. Self-esteem, self-concept, self-efficacy - it's easy to get confused with so many "self-words" flying around. There are even other words which aren't used by academics but are in common parlance, such as self-...
137. The science of self-belief, part I: self-concept
October 31, 2022 09:00 - 54 minutes - 50.2 MBAmong the huge academic tomes that I've been ploughing through recently is The Cambridge Handbook of Motivation and Learning. I've long felt that my understanding of motivation is superficial and incomplete, and I wondered whether motivation was understood at all by anybody in the academic literature, or whether remained a mysterious and convoluted problem. The Handbook has shown me that there is much good research that has been done that sheds light on motivation, interest, curiosity, and h...
136+. Interview with Prof. Christian Lebiere on ACT-R and Cognitive Architecture
October 16, 2022 22:08 - 1 hour - 97 MBIn this interview, I have the honour to speak with Professor Christian Lebiere, researcher in cognitive architecture, co-author of The Atomic Components of Thought, and one of the main developers of the ACT-R architecture. We talk on a range of topics relating to cognitive architecture, cognitive modelling, and psychology. My questions are listed below, by theme. A note on cover art: this is a diagram of ACT-R version 2.0 from 1993. More modern versions of ACT-R contain somewhat different ...
136. Cognitive architecture and ACT-R
October 11, 2022 12:00 - 43 minutes - 39.8 MBI have recently discovered the field of cognitive architecture. I have been reading around the area for the last couple of months, and I would like to introduce it to my audience. It's an area of study with incredible achievements which revitalises my belief in psychology as a field, but which for some reason is not at all well known, even in education circles where it deserves to be known to all as the most impressive set of theories of cognition and learning ever produced. I particularly...
135. Professional writing expertise
October 10, 2022 14:21 - 1 hour - 62 MBOne of the patrons of the podcast wrote to me on the forum that while I have covered the research on learning to read in a fair amount of detail, I'm yet to speak about learning to write, and he would really like to know more about this since he teaches writing day to day. I happen to have been reading Cambridge Handbook on Expertise and Expert Performance edited by the late great K. Anders Ericsson (among others), and there is a chapter entitled Professional Writing Expertise which I though...
134. Philosophy for children
October 05, 2022 21:30 - 1 hour - 63.9 MBIn this episode, I have Judith Millecker on as a guest. Judith is the author of the Philosocats series of books, which aims to help children ages 4-10 to engage in philosophy. It is an outgrowth of her work running philosophy for children sessions in London. We discuss her most recent book, social and emotional learning, critical thinking, and how pedagogy might vary by domain. Enjoy the episode.
133. Patterns are fast, rules are slow
August 20, 2022 10:26 - 48 minutes - 44.6 MBI was reading the Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance edited by K. Anders Ericsson yesterday, and after going through a chapter on medical experts, something struck me about the nature of expertise, automaticity, and Kahnemann and Tversky's System 1 vs. System 2 (also known as dual-process theory, popularised by their book Thinking, Fast and Slow), which joined together what I know about chess players, doctors, and how literacy works. I'm excited to share it with you today...
I have a new podcast!
August 10, 2022 17:52 - 43 minutes - 39.7 MBI now have a new podcast, the Pedagogue-Cast! Together with Justin Matthys, co-founder of Australian education technology company Maths Pathway, we discuss how education research can be applied in the classroom. It's designed to be an easier listen for busy teachers, with a more immediate practical takeaway. Website: https://thepedagoguecast.com.au/ Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/437GYDF4jkkFxfkGR4cknc I've shared the first episode of Season 1 in this recording so you can get...
132b. Direct Instruction: the evidence
August 09, 2022 05:00 - 58 minutes - 53.8 MBIn this part of the episode, I will discuss the evidence for the effectiveness of Direct Instruction, drawing from Project Follow Through, but also from 50 years of studies that have been published since. Enjoy the episode. *** REFERENCES The Direct Instruction Follow Through Model: Design and Outcomes by Siegfried Engelmann, Wesley Becker, Douglas Carnine, and Russel Gersten (1988) No Simple Answer: Critique of the "Follow Through" Evaluation by Ernest House, Gene Glass, Leslie Mc...
132a. Direct Instruction and Project Follow Through
August 08, 2022 05:00 - 54 minutes - 50.1 MBI've spent a lot of time on the podcast so far discussing discovery learning, but not had any episodes explicitly dedicated to what might be considered its antithesis, Direct Instruction. In this episode I finally get round to this worthy topic. First of all, uppercase "Direct Instruction", or DI for short, should be distinguished from lowercase "direct instruction". The latter refers to explicit teaching in general, whereas the former, as a proper noun, refers to a specific implementation...
131. Mindset: does it replicate?
August 01, 2022 05:00 - 1 hour - 63.7 MB[By the way, the cover image is of the proportion of children in different countries who have a growth mindset (darker red is more). The data was taken from PISA 2019 and I constructed the image using Python. Grey countries are those for which I didn't have data.] I was initially a huge supporter and admirer of Carol Dweck's work on fixed vs. growth mindset. The very first episode of the podcast was about her book, and I mentioned it many times afterwards, talking about how amazing it was....
130. How children learn that the Earth is not flat
July 25, 2022 05:00 - 35 minutes - 32.5 MBI stumbled across a fascinating paper looking into how children conceptualise the world around them. Mental Models of the Earth: A Study of Conceptual Change in Childhood shares an experiment where children were asked questions about the shape of the Earth, and the authors found six (!) different mental models that the children had: rectangular, disc-shaped, spherical, flattened sphere, hollow sphere, and the bizarre "dual Earth" model. There are important theoretical and pedagogical impli...
Support the podcast & join the community forum!
July 20, 2022 13:01 - 6 minutes - 6.29 MBYou can now support Education Bookcast and join the community forum, where we discuss all things education. Visit https://www.buymeacoffee.com/edubookcast to learn more.
129. A Transfer of Learning bombshell
July 18, 2022 05:00 - 55 minutes - 51 MBThis episode has such huge implications that I didn't know what to call it. Efficiency and Innovation in Transfer, the actual name of the book chapter, seemed far too dry to put across the fundamental shifts in thinking about pedagogy, assessment, education research design, and cognitive theory that this article suggests (at least to me). The authors suggest that the current literature on transfer of learning has too negative a view of the possibilty of transfer, and suffers from too many ...
128. Nuance
July 11, 2022 05:00 - 38 minutes - 35.2 MBI wanted to talk a bit about some areas in which my thinking about education has improved with the addition of nuance, and about the ways in which thinking can be more nuanced. Desirable difficulty - a case where quantification and the awareness of countervailing forces / costs improved my initial, flawed understanding. Cognitive load theory - a case where I was so enamoured with the power of the model that I had started to equate the it with truth (or confuse the "map" with the "territor...
127. Necessary Conditions of Learning by Ference Marton
June 27, 2022 06:00 - 59 minutes - 54.2 MBA listener of the podcast by the name of Malin Tväråna (senior lecturer at Uppsala University's Department of Education) requested in a review of the podcast that I cover this book, and so here it is! Ference Marton is a professor of Education at Göteburg University. His big idea is about discernment of important features of a situation (what he calls "critical aspects") being a (the?) key element of learning, and therefore the importance of the nature and quantity of variation in instruct...
126. The Master and his Emissary by Iain McGillchrist
June 19, 2022 19:11 - 1 hour - 64.7 MB"Are you left-brained or right-brained?" Brain lateralisation has been known about in neuroscience since the early days, but it has been a taboo over the past few decades since pop science sources distorted the literature and made the topic disreputable. Neuroscientists could detect differences between the hemispheres in different activities, but they were having trouble understanding the big picture of why there was asymmetry at this fundamental level of brain structure. Iain McGillchrist...
125+. Interview with Rasmus Koss Hartmann
April 02, 2022 19:01 - 1 hour - 86.3 MBDr Rasmus Koss Hartmann is an associate professor at Copenhagen Business School and author of the article that I covered in the first part of this episode, entitled Towards an Untrepreneurial Economy: the Entrepreneurship Industry and the Veblenian Entrepreneur. In this interview we spoke about where he got the idea, the damage that Veblenian entrepreneurship can do to the economy, urban myths about entrepreneurship, potential flaws of popular mottos such as those promoted in The Lean Start-u...
125. Entrepreneurship education and conspicuous consumption
March 09, 2022 17:09 - 43 minutes - 39.4 MBEntrepreneurship is an important part of a thriving economy, and entrepreneurship education is intended to make sure that those who have the potential to succeed in this way have the resources and knowledge to do so. But the opportunity for innovation, being one's own boss, and making money are not the only reasons that people become entrepreneurs. Some do so to fulfil a kind of fantasy, or simply to look good. And there is an entire educational sub-industry offering to help them to indulge ...
124. The Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences
December 13, 2021 12:01 - 1 hour - 87.2 MBI picked up The Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences hoping for a longer term project of enrichment from a volume published by one of the most prestigious universities in the world. However, it only took reading the introduction by editor R. Keith Sawyer to see that this book is suffused with ideological stances commonly supported and even dogmatically preached in educational circles, whose major tenets have been shown wanting time and again by empirical evidence from cognitive scienc...
123. How the Brain Learns by David Sousa
November 29, 2021 12:01 - 1 hour - 58 MBHow the Brain Learns is one of the first books I bought about education, all the way back in summer of 2014. It sat on my shelf for seven years before I finally got round to reading it. Now, with the benefit of knowledge gained from so many years of investigation, it is much less impressive to me than it would have been when I started. After introducing some basics of brain anatomy, the author starts to describe learning, covering a lot of ground that we've already seen in this podcast in ...
122. Hive Mind by Garrett Jones
November 15, 2021 12:01 - 48 minutes - 44.5 MBIn my episode on Stuart Ritchie's Intelligence: All that Matters I spoke about IQ and intelligence, after a long silence on this issue. In Hive Mind, we get a look at how IQ affects the fate of entire nations, rather than just the individuals living in them. Jones' argument rests on data showing that IQ correlates positively with patience, win-win thinking, productivity in teams, supporting "good" policies (i.e. those endorsed by experts), and saving more money. There is also data to indic...
121b. Attachment Theory around the world
November 02, 2021 12:01 - 1 hour - 64 MBThis is the second part of the episode on the book Multiple Faces of Attachment - Cultural Variations on a Fundamental Human Need. In this section, we will look at three societies - the Beng (Ivory Coast), Nso (Cameroon), and Makassar (Sulawesi) - to see how children are brought up there, and the extent to which Attachment Theory as it is currently formulated makes sense within these example societies. We will see the themes of the child not "belonging" to parents, alloparenting or additiv...
121a. Attachment Theory as cultural ideology
November 01, 2021 12:01 - 59 minutes - 54.3 MBThe title of this episode might ruffle some feathers. Attachment Theory is developmental psychology's shining star, the theory with the greatest predictive success, and one which has become popular among child psychiatrists. You can now hear it spoken about wherever child psychology is the main topic, and it has become something of a buzzword. Could this scientific theory really be "cultural ideology"? What would that even mean? Attachment Theory as Cultural Ideology is the name of an essa...
120. Aztec education
October 18, 2021 12:01 - 52 minutes - 48.4 MBWhich country was the first ever to have universal, free, compulsory education? Zero points if you said "Prussia". The correct answer is the Aztec empire, almost four centuries before the oft-cited German state. I happened to find out this bizarre fact from an aside in a YouTube video, and decided to look into it. If this isn't an independent societal data point on the development of education, then I don't know what is! In this episode, I discuss the article Developing Face and Heart ...
119. Stages of learning
October 04, 2021 12:01 - 35 minutes - 32.3 MBI realised I missed something, and I kicked myself. For a while I've been toying with the idea that learning occurs in two stages, which can be mapped between cognitive science and neuroscience: Exposure to new material -> neuronal connections Practice and repetition -> myelination ...with elaboration (e.g. relating one piece of information to another) being a practice that involves both stages. This model appeals to me for several reasons. Firstly, it is simple, which is a relief in...
118. The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks
September 20, 2021 12:01 - 1 hour - 71 MBThis book touched my heart, and it changed my mind about neuroscience. I wasn't going to read this book. While I was at my friend's house, I picked this book up and read the preface, written by Will Self. He wrote that Oliver Sacks is extraordinary in the way in which he fuses such humanity with his scientific probing of the brains of his patients. At that point, I got interested, and my friend told me I could borrow it. I gobbled the book up in two days. Having read the book, I can see ...
117. Gut Feelings by Gerd Gigerenzer
September 06, 2021 12:01 - 49 minutes - 45.8 MBThis episode feels almost nostalgic, as it is a return to the theme of the roles and interactions of the conscious and subconscious mind, something which I focused on early in the podcast and came out strongly in my main series on expertise (around episode 20). It also shares some relation to books on the topic of cognitive biases on the one hand, and the complexity of the world on the other. Psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer has two main points to make: firstly, that ignorance and cognitive bi...