Behaviorism & "Cog Sci" - Oh No!

Speaker 1 Hello, and welcome to episode 99 of our podcast at Human Restoration Project. My name is Chris McNutt, and I'm a high school digital media educator from Ohio joined by Nick Covington, a social studies teacher from Iowa. Before we get started, I want to let you know that this is brought to you by our supporters, three of whom are Monte Cyre, Sarah Passour, and Travis Gatauzanel. Thank you for your ongoing support. You can learn more about the Human Restoration Project on our website, humanrestorationproject.org, or find us on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook. In this podcast, Nick and I are continuing our foray into random topics of progressive education. Today's episode centers cognitive science, research movements, and, quote, unquote, studies of the brain. Within, we'll be talking about what's currently going on at HRP, articles and books that Nick and I have been reading recently, what's going on in our classrooms, a q and a from listeners via Twitter, and then a pop quiz for who stays alive.

Speaker 2 How are you, Nick? What's going on? I'm I'm coming to you from a from a hotel room in Lincoln, Nebraska. So that's kind of fun, you know, kind of enjoying the the daylight savings hour. I came in last night to come to come to a concert happening downtown. And then, yeah, we'll record the podcast, and then I'll I'll head back home later today.

Speaker 1 We'll start off by talking about, what's currently going on at Human Restoration Project. We've been relatively quiet on the, I guess, like, the constituent end. People haven't been seeing maybe as many writings or as many podcasts coming up. But that's because behind the scenes, we've been working on a lot of grant stuff and a lot of, kind of cool course development stuff. I don't know how much we can share based off that partnership that you've been developing, Nick. We've been developing out a course for ungrading that may or may not award graduate credit, and that might turn into more progressive classes, based around learning different systems and how you can change them in your class and get university credit for it. So that's pretty cool. Yeah. It's awesome. Yeah. Yeah. So so the the partnership hopefully will be through,

Speaker 2 the Iowa State Education Association, their ISEA Academy, which, you know, traditionally just helps to offer continuing education credits. Sometimes you can you can take those for grad credit as well. So we're gonna put together a syllabus for an ungrading course, and hopefully then teachers can sign up for that. I think probably a requirement is that you you might have to be an Iowa resident to do that, but that's just kind of where, our connections lie. But if we get this thing going, it could be, you know, something that,

Speaker 1 that we can we can, pitch elsewhere and hopefully spread that spread the word. Right. It's coupled with two other pretty major things that are going on. One is we are attempting, to finalize a pretty serious grant that could help us develop coursework for classrooms for students to engage in this work. A lot of our work so far has been very teacher centric in the sense that we're still centering students, but the materials are aimed at educators. This grant would have us creating materials for students that educators could then use, And it also, dictates some of our research into progressive education. And kind of with that coupled, human restoration project was recently shortlisted, for the QS reimagine education conference, via Wharton University, and that's, that's pretty cool. It's the top 12% of applicants. I can't remember off the top of my head. I wanna say it was 1,200 people applied, more in the top 12%. Yep. So it's pretty darn cool. You'll be seeing something out of that in likely the next month or so. Yeah. Big things on the horizon. A lot of things going on. Just not a lot to show for it so far. Yeah. Not not on the public facing end. Right? Because, you know, given the fact that we are full time classroom teachers,

Speaker 2 I mean, our entire, you know, staff has other other other things that we do full time, you know, the time that we put in behind the scenes then kind of takes away from the the public facing stuff. So One thing that we are releasing that you can check out is via a hundred days of conversations.org.

Speaker 1 Go there. You can see the insights that are coming out of it. I believe since this last podcast, we released the equity conversation. It's really cool. Not only did it take a ton of time and analysis and work from our partners, You'll just be able to find a host of different resources, organizations, concepts to explore with students about what equity means in education and what that means going forward. And there will be the same concept coming forward here with about seven other insights. There's a lot of work going on there. Be sure to check that out. There it is. Transition. Gotta get a better transition sound. That's that's the transition. It's a spaceship whoosh by. We're gonna talk about some articles that we're reading. I have a feeling this might jump into that cog size stuff. Maybe. I think it will. Yeah. Alright. Do you wanna start or you want me to start? Oh, man. I can start. Now I'll say it's it's, you know, it's early on a Sunday morning, so so my brain is a little bit a little bit rattled by this. But but the thing that I wanted to bring to the table here was

Speaker 2 but maybe I'll I'll again, since I'm addicted to context, I'll kinda share the context for this. But I went to two, I guess, allies of of mine in this battle of in this trivia battle that we're gonna fight here. So I went to Trevor Elio, and I went to Michael Weingarth. You can find him at learning pillars, I think, on Twitter. But I went to those guys, and I said, hey. You know, I Chris and I are gonna have another episode coming up, and, it's gonna be about cognitive science. It's gonna about be about kind of research ed. And I wanted them to maybe pull some stuff that I could use to stump you in the trivia. And as we were talking about that, I mean, they threw numerous resources at me that, that I had not been made aware of that I dove in, headfirst into. And, actually, it could be the case even that that partnership kind of turns into something kind of fun in terms of a future podcast series that that we had talked about a little bit, and, you know, we're all we're all just busy folks. So something to look out there in the future. But they turned me on to this podcast, rethinking education, and it's a podcast from oh my gosh. Who is the who's the guy? I know who the guest is, but, okay, the podcast is called rethinking education. I don't remember who hosts it because it doesn't list it on the on the, on the episodes page. But Mister education. Yes. It's with it's it's with doctor education, actually. Oh, doctor. He's got a PhD. Yeah. But it's with Mary Helen Immordino Yang. And, apparently, this is a name that everybody needs to be familiar with in the realm of cognitive science because her work, not just as a, like, a neuroscientist, but she she also I kind of get the vibe that she is also writing for more popular audiences as well. So so, obviously, like a serious academic, but just listening to her, speak and then the the the work that she has written and and the books that she has published, also, like, wanting to bring that message to a broader audience other than just academic journals. Right? And that's just apparent in the way that she speaks about education. But one of the things that has been really, I don't difficult about cognitive science and and progressive education and kind of the way that those things have seemingly been at odds with each other is that cognitive science has kind of been used as a as a as a cudgel almost to replicate the tools of the the the the laboratory classroom, in schools. So, right, trying to control for various variables in order to, control for outcomes that then we can measure and say that, you know, kids have improved their learning on x, y, and z thing. Now the more variables that you add into that or you start to talk about more qualitative ways that kids might think or talk about their learning, it's gonna really confound the correlation between inputs and outputs. Right? Right. But she's trying to bring meaning, and feeling back into, back into education and really talk about how the way that kids feel about their learning, is, you know, as important or maybe more important than, you know, the the the random bits of memorization that that they would otherwise, just come out of that. So so for example, right, the the the popular phrase for the last decade or so has been facts don't care about your feelings. And it turns out that they facts really do care about your feelings. And she's done a lot of work that actually shows that the way that kids feel, about what they're learning and the stories that they tell themselves about these, can glean a lot, not just about, how kids are learning, but also, how the kind of their trajectory for, for what they will be in the future as well. So, yeah, I would just really recommend that podcast, for rethinking education. It actually came out on 10/15/2021. Mary Helen Immardino Yang on the neurobiological case for progressive education. So it really is about bringing cognitive science to bear on the kinds of things that we've been talking about from a from a humane lens. And I'll I'll I'll just read a couple of different quotes that I pulled out of that pulled out of that thing. So she says, for example here's a really great one. She says, what actually allows us to predict the growth, the physical growth, and the change in function of teenagers' brains across years and into adulthood, which in turn predicts their young adult happiness, how productive they are, how well they do in school, how much they like their close relationships, how coherent their identity is, how purposeful they feel their life is, really important stuff about people's outcomes. What predicts that is not what they know, it's how they think. It's the dispositions they bring to the world as they engage with complex problems with open ended, with open ended problems without one answer. So, again, she's bringing in that, that gray zone, that purpose finding, that meaning making into what has usually been a pretty sterile, you know, what, retrieval practice, interleaving, and all of those other kinds of more traditional practices that justify traditional classrooms and saying, no. Maybe the the the difficult complex stuff that students do is more important for their future than the what it is that they can remember.

Speaker 1 Yeah. It it seemingly does not connect to a lot of the conversations that you tend to hear from cog sci people, cognitive science people, which if you're not familiar, cognitive science people tend to focus on this back to basics, fact based approach where kids do a lot of recall based, a cognitive load theory. It's it's all essentially based off of studies that have happened in labs where students have increased test scores based off of behaviorist style, like positive and sometimes even negative reinforcement metrics of just repeating the exact same thing over and over. However, in practice, in a classroom, those types of techniques don't really work. And they also ignore all of the other researchers in this field. Like, I think of, Kendall Cottonbronch, William Damon. What's the, Susan Engel, who Yeah. Are doing the exact same line of work and counteracting, saying like, hey. Yes. This stuff increases test scores in a lab setting, but having a classroom that actually looked and felt like this would be someplace that you would never wanna send your kids to. Because it would be sterile and boring and brutal, and there's a lot more that goes into a classroom beyond just memorizing a bunch of facts. It's it's a it's a community space, and it means a lot more than that. And this type of work showcases that the research is not all on one side. There is a plethora of research from a bunch of different people talking about bunch of different things from different perspectives.

Speaker 2 Yeah. What I think is so interesting is and and I joked about Trevor and Michael about this, but I was like, you know, it's taking neuroscience. Now we're coming full circle into, you know, finding the cognitive benefits of progressive practices that, you know, have been been written about since the time of, you know, John Dewey, up through the nineteen sixties. The history of that that we always talk to and and that we always connect to. But but I I think a lot back about Frank Smith's, book of learning and forgetting, and I'll talk about this book till the end of time, because he actually kind of breaks down the history of learning science, quote, unquote, back to this dude, Ebbinghaus, and how he was able to kind of study the the the learning curve. Right? Like, oh, the more that you practice, these things, then then the more likely that you're able to learn them and then the degrading of that of that memory over time with the forgetting curve. But this had happened, back in the the early nineteen hundreds with lists of nonsense words. So, you know, they were words like zug and, just things that nobody would able to remember because it was really important for, for the study for it to be not, out of context, right, to not have any meaning. Otherwise, you'd be studying people's background knowledge and, you know, their biases, etcetera. So so Frank Smith says about this. He says, the laws of learning state that learning follows this predictable and replicable course only when nonsense is involved, when there is no interest or comprehension. If there is interest in comprehension, then learning is inevitable and effortless. And he even says then, you know, if you want to study how people learn without the involvement of interest in past experience, study how they learn nonsense. And I think for us, the criticism of, you know, cognitive science or maybe hashtag cog sci in the way that it's wielded in in education and pedagogy is through that lens. Right? Why would you want to bring practices that have people studying nonsense in the laboratory of what use is that to, you know, harness the meaningful experiences of the students that we have in our classroom in front of us. And so that's where we've been resistant to those ideas. But, right, if we can, get the get kind of the neuroscience, the cognitive science, approach to that, then maybe that can help bolster, you know, and kind of strengthen our case, not just for why those practices are more humane, which, you know, we know that they are or, that they, improve students' experiences of school or mental health, etcetera. But, you know, hey. Here's actually the research that says that they learn better. And for some people, that's that's really important too. You know? Yeah. And I think it connects too to the book that I've been reading,

Speaker 1 which is teaching machines. I've I've finally started teaching machines by Audrey Waters, which I feel like I'm I'm kinda behind the the curve there. That came out in August, and it's been sitting literally on my shelf since then. It hasn't moved those actual dust on it. And I I really wanted to read it, but I if you could see my desk right now, there are at least 30 books on this desk that are just randomly stacked with but, yeah, Audrey Waters, if, I mean, if folks aren't familiar, she's pretty much spent the majority of her writing focused on ed tech and the, quote, unquote, like, personalized education movement and and kind of debunking a lot of the history and promise behind those endeavors. So teaching machines is about the history of personalized learning. I'm not through it yet. I'm about halfway through. And it traces essentially Khan Academy, which was promised by the the Gates Foundation to be this thing that was going to revolutionize education because kids could just work at their own pace. Everybody would be kinda doing their own thing, and kids would just, like, watch Khan Academy videos all day. And traces that back to, Sydney Pressy, which is, like, mid nineteen twenties. He invented the first teaching machine, which kinda looks like a cash machine, like a a thing that, like, you would check people out with. It's like this weird, like, receipt machine where you plug in certain slots and, like, it will tell you the right or wrong answer based on how you manipulate the slots. And how that's all rooted back with, like like, the Thorndike Dewey argument. Like, Thorndike really wanted there to be this, like, machine that could automatically tell a student if they were right or wrong. And Dewey was all talking about, like, no. It should be experiential learning and draw upon student experience. And Waters says, rightly so, that, you know, Thorndyke won this argument because we are still using Thorndyke's, resources in most classrooms across The United States. This this focus on standardization, a focus on kind of everyone doing the exact same thing at the exact same time, a focus on just kind of like this already right and wrong based approach to education as opposed to experiential creative endeavors. The problem is is that this personalized, quote, unquote, solution to education, which, also was adopted by, like, BF Skinner, in the fifties and sixties, a little bit earlier, is all really gross and behaviorist and controlling. It's not really personalized. It's more like, hey. We're gonna force all these kids to sit in our room, and they're all gonna go through their times tables or whatever. They're gonna memorize it, and then they're gonna walk out, they're gonna be brilliant. All of this to say, what I did end up actually reading was in the first chapter of Teaching Machines, she mentions, the fact that B. F. Skinner, the founder of behaviorism, wrote a utopian sci fi book called Walden two, which is so fringe. And I was like, BF Skinner, the guy that made the Skinner box that trained animals to, like, react and have positive behaviorist approaches that, like, teach like a champion uses. That guy wrote a utopian book. So I read Walden two. It is about, I don't know, like, 150 pages in very large type font. It's it's available on archive.org because it was written, I wanna say, like, late forties, early fifties. I can say that it reads, like, bad pulp. And I'm I'm a huge fan of, like, pulp sci fi, and it's it's terribly written. Here's the plot. Alright? So the plot is that the main character is, like, living in this, I guess, kind of decrepit society. And him and his friends are so sad because society just sucks in general. And he reconnects with one of his old college friends named Fraser who has started this society called Walden two based off of, like, Thoreau. That's, like, where that name comes from. Right. So they go and visit Fraser at Walden two, and Fraser spends the next, literally, a 150 pages just describing how Walden two is set up. There's no plot. Like, this has no, like, hero's journey. This has no, like it's like someone read Brave New World and didn't get the fact that it was a dystopia. Like, that's that's what it reads like. Like, the whole thing is like, okay. Yeah. But, like, when are, like, they, like, gonna figure out that this is all a farce and it's all bad? No. They never do. It's just like Walden two's great. And it it's very funny because the entirety of Walden two is based off of behaviorism. The idea is that, like, little young kids from birth are raised in this very controlled environment where they're rewarded for doing small repetitious tasks over and over again well. And as a result, as they grow older, they are all very personalized, autonomous human beings that don't need anyone to control them because their entire lives, they've been, like, predisposed to just doing the things that they know how to do, and they just do those things, like, without question. And it's meant to be like this, like, anarchist society where people just, like, live, like, on their own. But the the irony of it is that this dude, Fraser, turns out to control everything. He develops the economic systems. He develops how people live. He develops every single little thing, which is it's like a dictatorship or, like, fascism or some kind of, like, like, ultra authoritarian state. Because what happens if you don't listen to the behavior he's teaching? Like, that's never brought up. So it's seriously like like an Orwellian

Speaker 2 type society as if someone wrote it with missing the point of what George Orwell was trying to talk about. But but but think about it. Right? Like, the emphasis on laboratory controls, if we think this is the the best way to create human beings, is to, right, have them push levers and get a get get the reward or whatever is to incentivize everything else and and, you know, basically treat human beings like, like Pavlov's dog. Mhmm. Well, then, yeah, like, that that naturally leads to controlled environments and controlled situations where people aren't thinking about, about, what it is that they wanna do. Because if they have to think about what is they wanna do, they might not do it in the best way possible. K? But that's what we've modeled our classrooms over, isn't it? So you could say that this, the the Walden two is basically the, that's like the precursor to teach like a champion, right, writ large for society. You know? It's just that teach like a champion, and and it's kind of ilk is is that brought into the classroom to be used. It's it's the Skinner box, for kids. You know? Yeah. And I think the the best way to to see this from a BF Skinner standpoint

Speaker 1 is BF Skinner early in his career, and Waters mentions this in the book, one of his first inventions was this lab style crib for babies, and he raised his own kid like this. So he built ostensibly, like, a hamster cage. So, like, this, like, cage that a baby would rest in that was heated. So it, like, felt like you were, like, being held or, like, a like, a blanket was on you. And the idea was the baby could hang out inside this box without a blanket, without anything that could, like, potentially hurt them. They literally just sat inside the box with their diaper on. That's it. And then Oh my god. The only thing the parent had to do was at designated times throughout the day, like, spend time with their child. And the idea was you would get rid of all the crappy stuff you had to do, like monitor, like, their food habits or keep them warm, etcetera. Like, things that you do to, like, raise a child. So this is the guy that came up with behaviorist tendencies that thinks that that's normal and not weird and not super creepy. And It like, child abuse, quite frankly. Abuse and very break like, that's actually a scene from Brave New World. Like, he he actually talks about in Walden too about, like, the community raising children and, like, getting rid of, like, a familial, like, parent style relationship, which is the plot of Brave New World on how they raise their children.

Speaker 2 Right. This this has me thinking all kinds of we should just abolish, you know, like, Skinnerian approaches in education entirely. Like, it like, what? Oh my god. I'm I'm flabbergasted. Well, the whole thing was that he was discredited.

Speaker 1 Like, there was, like, a whole thing where a bunch of different researchers came in and said, yo. This guy's, like, nuts. Like, the stuff that he's talking about is not accurate. But then in the last, I don't know, maybe since, like, the eighties, nineties, when behaviorist approaches became more and more common,

Speaker 2 it's not uncommon at all to find Skinner as a reference point for folks that are working in classrooms. And a lot of professional development is based around his ideas, especially teach like a champion, which I may or may not get to later. My god. Think I think back to the last episode we recorded. Right? We were talking about Carl Brigham and IQ tests and ACTs and all those kinds of things. Think about these guys that we've that we've modeled our education systems around. You know? And they're connected. Eugenicists and and wackos and people who just had the most corrupted vision for human behaviors and interactions. Like, how have we not figured out a better way that doesn't involve connecting these these these weirdos and their outdated notions of of human interaction

Speaker 1 from from education systems. It it's an insane thing. Yeah. It it actually is. It it is one of I encourage anyone to check out that book. Do not read Walden two. It's entirely a waste of your time. I just thought it was fascinating. Let's then shift into let's talk about what we're doing in our oh, wait. I almost forgot. Here. It sounded like that book Cherout hit the mark. Those are laser beams hitting the mark. Oh, doesn't stop.

Speaker 2 Alright. There we go. Sounds like an old if you've ever had an old like amplifier that had a reverb module built into it Mhmm. It's got that spring. And that's what that spring sounds like when you when you twang it.

Speaker 1 Well, it's a laser. Yeah. I Alright. Well, let's talk about what we're doing in our classrooms.

Speaker 2 So, yeah, I I got got kind of a cool idea. You know, AP Euro is such a content heavy course, and there's just there's there's so much that you gotta try and and do. And and there there's part of me that that just entirely rebels against that idea, but at the same time, wanting kids to be able to be successful on an AP test that they're gonna pay $94 for and and know how the stakes are high for college costs, which we don't seem to to want to do anything about from a policy level. So, you know, I I always struggle with how to teach, like, this era of absolutism because I mean, god, it's a thing that that I still struggle with. I told my my students that I took an English history class in college. It was the worst class that I that I ever took. I didn't learn a single thing about it. I've learned more from Monty Python than I learned from my English history class. And so I I was really open with my kids about, like, hey. This is a tough thing to teach. There's just a lot of, of names, of of of families, and, you know, accomplishments. And I did a new thing where I I was experimenting with those tier lists. You know, you've seen them on YouTube where they'll be like, let's rank all of the Led Zeppelin albums, like s, a, b, c, d, tier, whatever. And I I had done with my eighth hour econ class a couple times just when we had some time at the end of class. We did, you know, pop tarts one day. We did Halloween candy another day. And it's just always kind of like a a good, I don't know, a good experience, good kind of classroom culture building thing, and and kids are kids are clamoring for it. Whenever we have time now at the end of class, they're like, come and do us do a tier list. And so I made a tier list for absolutist rulers. And kinda I just had them set up. I picked 11 absolutist rulers, you know, that that would be from their textbook section or whatever. And, we looked at the criteria for absolutists and basically, I turned them loose just to just to do some research using the resources that we had, to try and figure out, you know, who and depending on how they answered it, who was the best ruler, because sometimes they said the people who were the most absolutist were the worst rulers or who was the most absolutist. You know? So they put, like, Ivan the terrible is, like, s tier. You know? Louis the fourteenth is, like, s tier. Ivan the terrible is an s tier. Yeah. But they'd be like, oh, the I wouldn't wanna live under these things. Like, okay. So maybe there's inverse relationship to that. But that's what I'm getting at here is, it's the first time I'd ever done anything, you know, like that. I don't know. Call it project based. Call it whatever. But, the thing that was so cool about it was hearing the conversations and kind of the prework that went into that because I had students record the the video, of their tier lists. So they had to do a lot of, preparation, and kind of work going into that and just the debates that they had, in their in their groups as as they were doing it. And then as they were recording their videos too really justify the whole thing to me because then, again, I think, okay. If they're talking through and they're going through their evaluation and they're discussing, you know, that evidence and kind of debating, debating who should go where on that, then that to me shows that they're, you know, making the connections and then they're doing the learning. So I kinda just turned it over to them for a week to do that research, and to create those those tier lists. And I think, overall, it was it was a super successful way to teach something that, historically, for me, has been, kind of a slog, and kinda dull for kids.

Speaker 1 But I think it's something I'll definitely do in the future. Yeah. I know you had shared out doing tier list just for fun, you know, before those pop tarts. And I did the same thing with my class just for fun one day because I found if if there was something that was lost in the last couple of years, it's maybe communication. I just feel like the kids just don't talk to each other as much as they used to, or if they do, they only talk to their little tiny close friend group. And I was trying to figure out ways, well, how can I get these kids laughing and talking with each other about silly things? So we did tier lists for for Halloween. We did, like, candy and and Yeah. Pop tier list, that kind of stuff, which Sour Patch Kids won every single time. Heavy agree, by the way. That is an s tier candy.

Speaker 2 By far my favorite. So Swedish Swedish fish for me. Wow. It it was really funny when I when I was going through because because some kids didn't know what tier lists were when I when I did the introduced the AP Euro activity. So I just pulled up the Halloween candy list, and I started ranking them how I would rank them. Oh my god. You there was gonna be, like, a riot. They were gonna tear me out of the room because you know? Yeah. Like, my 35 year old tastes do not match the taste of, you know, today's 15 and 16 year olds. So they'd be like, oh, Covington. I don't know. What did I put as as, like, as d tier? Something that they they all love. But put it out like d tier. Like, that candy is trash. And so I kinda just let that go for maybe five or ten minutes as I was going through and kinda changing things in response to that. I was like, you see how that went? We're gonna do that with the absolutist rule. You guys all have experience with candy. Right? You have your own preferences, and you can make those arguments. So we're gonna have to figure out, you know, who who these rulers are, what they did, what makes them, good or bad or somewhere in between, and kind of rank them, in between each other. And then they're like, oh, that sounds so cool. So Nice. Yeah. It was it was nice. Awesome. I I also plan on using that to do feedback from my class for end project units.

Speaker 1 So, like, after we do we usually do maybe eight or so major projects during a year. Yeah. So I'm gonna make a big list out of those. You can make your own tier list onto your list maker.

Speaker 2 Just put, like, screenshots of all of them, and that way I can figure out what projects were good and what projects were really bad. Or at least, like Such a great idea. How they're going. The funny thing, though, is that when kids were asking, oh, are we gonna, like, watch these in front of the class? Because they're all they're all anxious about, you know, hearing themselves talk. And so I said, no. But I am gonna put, your videos on, like, a a shared slideshow so you can watch each other's and kinda see where they're, where other groups put them. And then somebody had the idea to make a tier list tier list. Nice. Met And I was like, I'm totally gonna do that. Not only gonna do, like, the s and a tiers. You know? I I don't wanna I wouldn't put anybody on the spot by putting them any lower, but, I think that would be kind of fun just to make a quick video of, okay. So group one second hour, you know, yours was s tier over here. I love what you did with this, blah blah blah blah blah. Just make a quick, video with some of the some of the better, like, exemplars. And then that way, I have that, feedback going into next year if I do this too. So That's cool. Kind of a fun thing just evolves.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Speaking of projects, we've been working on, workshopping magazine spreads. So students every project is outside of the very first one I have students vote on. So I'll give them four or five, maybe six different options, then we just go with the majority, and that's the project that we work on for about the next three or four weeks. And that gets more and more open ended as time goes on. I teach a digital media class, so that's pretty step by step on learning the software. So we have to go a little, like, baby steps towards the beginning, and then it gets more hardcore as time goes on. Anyways, the students voted to do magazine spread. So they're making, hypothetical templates for a magazine or whatever they want in Adobe InDesign. We spent the last, I don't know, maybe two or so weeks learning how to use the software through practice activities, that kind of thing. But then the last week has been workshopping, which the way I do workshop in my classes, students always work on stuff, obviously. I give them a huge list of resources with all the hot keys, walk around, help them, assist them. And then they turn in their drafts to Floop, which Floop one day will maybe sponsor, me because I feel like I rep them all the time. So it's floopedu,uh,.com. And Floop is a software that allows you to turn in assignments, just kinda like a normal Dropbox, and then you leave little dots of feedback throughout the assignment, which is hyper useful for an art style class because I can point to very specific elements on the page. If I try to leave feedback through an LMS or something, it's like describing, like, foreign object, like like alien objects to be like, you should move the left line one inch further to like, it doesn't make any sense. So it's very visual. And what I like about it is, one, you can leave as much feedback as you want. It's you I mean, I leave a lot of feedback on those things, both good and bad. You can store that feedback in, bank because I tend to say the exact same thing over and over again. You can see if students have read the feedback. Every now and then, there'll be a student who, like, left, like, 20 things of feedback for, and it says 0% feedback read, they turn it back in. And I'm like, no. You gotta you know, what's one of these things so I can help you get better? And they can also reply to the feedback right within the software. You'll So get, like, a little notification that way. Like, if someone's like, I don't know how to do that, or I don't understand what you are saying here, I can respond to that any hour of the day as opposed to just during class. Because usually during class, I have to be helping everyone because it's confusing. So I'm always going around helping different folks, And that's kind of an asynchronous way that they can then submit things and interact with me if I'm maybe not available. And as a result, maybe by the third or fourth different turn in, because I I've gotten used to at this point the fact that it's never good enough. It's always a resubmission. I'll I'll be nice about it. But we always try to make things better no matter what level you're at. By the third or fourth submission, they are vastly improved. And that's how I I do ungrading. I still have to assign a grade, but your grade is determined off of how you implement that feedback. So if you turn in something that's maybe a comparison to, I guess, the norm, not so great, maybe you're just not so good with computers, maybe you're just not used to doing art, your improved product is not going to look the same as someone who maybe has taken a digital media class before and knows exactly what's going on. Their initial submission is gonna be pretty darn good, but they also have to make theirs better. So we're operating from, like, a sizable gap versus a small gap to improve. But in that case, both students would obtain a's. Last thing that's nice about Floop is you don't have to assign numbers or a letter grade. So I just give a smiley face every single time until it's at an a. I never give a grade. It's just smiley face, smiley face, smiley face, and then eventually you get an a once you finally turn in the last time. And the vast majority of students are really good about turning those back in because they wanna see that a pop up. Right. I I love the idea too that it's just it's not done until it's done. Right. Like, hey. What what kind of things can we do? Not just turn it in and get a c minus. Right? Oh, I got a 72%.

Speaker 2 Just move on to the next thing. Right? That that just that doesn't teach them anything. But, if they're go constantly going through that iteration and, and having to then start to that will start to imprint those habits of mind and those, and those sort of heuristics for themselves, or they'll begin to ask themselves, to preempt that feedback. Because my guess is that students don't, you know, generally want to be like, oh, I have to do more work to fix this. So they'll start to check themselves, which is to say, okay. If I'm McNutt right now and I'm looking at this or if I'm they'll start to put on, like, a peer lens too, which is to say, like, oh, if I were someone else looking at this, which then, right, they're starting to think about their thinking, that's that that's a meta skill that's that's kind of important. And then, yeah, just kinda think, okay. Is this done yet? Is this done yet? What could be what could be done better? And the products that you've shown for that, Chris, are are awesome. Like, the work that kids did, you know, there it it's you could say that those are professional magazine spreads, and I would believe it entirely. Like, the there's just stellar, work. And that's not that's not the product of grades and grading. That's the that's the product of iteration and feedback. That's the power of those things. You know? Right. Work workshopping is so powerful in general. Just the ability I I would say there's, like, three major things that make this work.

Speaker 1 One is delaying the grade, which is an ungrading technique. As in, I basically don't give a grade until it's at an a. Now when, like, yes, the semester's over and I have to report a grade, I'll meet with those students that never turned it in and say, you know, I need something from you, and we'll negotiate that and figure that out. But I would say maybe for those last assignment, 80% of students are an a right now. So the vast majority get there. And that means that everyone's constantly iterating upon and improving their work. The second thing is I give them a ton of time, arguably too much time at at points. They have, almost a week and a half to go through this workshopping process of resubmitting things. And that does mean that some students will finish early. So what I do is, it's kinda tongue in cheek, but it does work, is I have them identify a special friend. And their special friend has to also finish the assignment at an a before they can do anything else. So it forces the students to work with each other to improve with each other because the student who finished it super fast, who already has an a that's that's killing it, can then teach the other kid, hey. How to do this better? Because, again, usually, I'm answering questions all period. I can't necessarily sit next to a kid for forty five minutes and help them, but their special friend can't. So it it works. The the kids kinda get a kick out of it because it's it's very it's almost cynical, but they they get used to that, and they they improve with each other. No. No. No. Think about the power of that, though, because then, like,

Speaker 2 then kids are they're being the instructor for their peers, you know, peer instructors in that case, and then they are right, as they are teaching their their peers in that context, they are reinforcing, you know, that learning for themselves. So, I mean I mean, how how often do we say, like, teaching teaching something is the best way to learn it? Well, how often do we actually get kids to do that in the classroom? And and like you said, it doesn't make sense for you to have to be be available to all, you know, 30 some odd kids every single class period. It's impossible. So empowering kids, through that collaborative that collaborative process, not not just I mean, makes for a better classroom environment for everybody, but then kids are learning more and and learning better than they would be if they just had to rely on you as the sole source of that stuff. So that's a that's a special friend strategy. That's a great strategy, man. It works. And final thing I'll say about that is a lot of people, whenever they try to tackle on grading, say, hey. I don't know how I would ever have time to do this.

Speaker 1 Well, the initial day or two when I get all those Floop submissions starting to turn in, I see, like, a 120 Floop submissions I need to get through. Yeah. One, the bank helps a lot. I can get through them really quick with the bank because most people tend to make the same errors. But two, that's the day where I say, hey. You all really need to work with your special friends today because I'm gonna sit here, and I'm gonna finish all of these. And it's all done during class. I rarely give any feedback at home, if at all. And I just I'm super transparent with the kids and tell them, I don't have time to do this. So I just need to do it right now, and you can all work on each other on something. I'll I'll be with you in a second. That's perfectly fine. That's that's such a smart strategy. I I kinda try to do something like that with AP Euro DBQs, which are infamously,

Speaker 2 you know, tedious to grade, especially if you have as many AP Euro kids as I do. You know, 85, 90 kids. So so I do something similar where they have to peer review two other, two other essays that somebody else other peer submissions. Right? Which means that they're gonna get at least two other sets of eyeballs on their own work, and then they have to go back through and, like, respond to that feedback in there and then turn it into me so that by the time I see it, their stuff is already all annotated. It might even go through a round of revisions if they if they need to do that. So then by the time I'm seeing it, you know, it it's probably a better a better product, but then it has annotations on there that are gonna help me get through that more quickly. So that way, you know, say, the the the AP Euro DBQ is scored out of seven points. Well, if they already have two sets of peer, peer scores on there, you know, say one says it's a a three and one says it's a seven, well, that means, you know, for me that there needs to be some recalibration and the inter rater reliability there. But, also, then I'll spend more time giving feedback on those. But if one says it's a six and the other one says it's a six, well, then I can kind of skim through that just to just to kinda secure it. But there's really not a lot of feedback I need to give that kids haven't already nailed. And then kids are doing that evaluation. You know? If you wanna think about that, the old school kind of Bloom's taxonomy. Right? Well, what are what do we want kids to be able to do? We want them to create, to evaluate, to do all those high level thinking skills. Well, they're doing that with their peer work when they do peer review. So it's like that's not just a way to improve classroom practice for ourselves and kind of decrease that burden. But if kids are doing the thinking and they're doing the teaching and they're doing evaluating, well, then they're doing better learning in the first place. It's just a better pedagogical, you know, strategy to use. Alright.

Speaker 1 So let's move into Is that a space panther? What it was that? It's a it's a spaceship that goes by. It's the same transition I've been using the whole time. God.

Speaker 2 No there's no sound in space. We gotta we gotta get

Speaker 1 There you go. Did I just get tased? Next we have some q and a questions. Yeah. I got we're gonna address two right now, for for time purposes. I'll open us up with the first one here. This comes from Jeff. Jeff asks, via Twitter, can you give tips or reading suggestions on helping reluctant learners to engage in their learning. So I've been thinking about this one. Yeah. And I have I have three things I thought about the top of my head that I think could help. And all of them are fairly obvious, but I think it's worth reiterating. One is cheesy, one serious, and one is kind of like a classroom strategy. So the first cheesy one, and I feel like this has to be said, is the the building relationships component. Mhmm. But I think it's worth mentioning that a lot of us tend to build relationships only within the first three days of the year. And then all other relationship building solely comes through content in our class, which is something. But I think there's also space for stopping at various points throughout the year. Would even say, like, once a month to just play games and hang out and make class something that's not content or stress related. Because in my experience, the most reluctant students are also the ones who are not doing very well. And as a result, they are probably not doing very well in the majority of their classes. And the last thing they wanna do is build a relationship with you in a class that's not going well. So taking some time throughout the year to just pause and stop and just do something silly to get to know that student better because that you might be able to use that to figure out, well, what's going on? How can I help you in some way so you're the trusted individual? There have been many times, I'm sure, where teachers have identified a student who is failing every other class but is passing or at least doing decent in your class. And usually, it's because of relationship building. So that's kind of a cheesy one. It's it's got always sad, but I think it's worth reiterating. The second, which is more serious, is nine times out of 10, students that are reluctant learners, the point that they're failing, have something else that's going on that is not school related. And being able to forward them on to guidance, mental health, folks that they can talk to is vastly more important than anything academic that's going on. There has been many circumstances where we've had students either repeat grades, repeat classes, etcetera, and it's been totally fine because they have been talking with, you know, a mental health counselor for twice a week for the last year, and that's where their focus is right now. There's no rush to get through school. We need to focus on those underlying factors first before we can even think about caring about, some academic course. Like, who cares about digital media if you're homeless, for example? Like, it's it's irrelevant. So so centering that. Finally, in terms of a classroom strategy, I kind of, I I'm just gonna repeat the exact same thing. That special friend strategy actually does help a lot. Because if students aren't motivated by me, they tend to enjoy being motivated by their peers. I've had a lot of success where students who maybe just tend to not do much in the classes, they just don't enjoy it. They don't wanna do it. With their friend being there who they enjoy being with, they will start doing things that's like, hey. You know, this is fun. We should do it together. Let's try this thing. And, like, they teach them how to do it, because they get along with their friends. They wanna do something with their friend. It's any way that we can get peers interacting with each other where the peer can show the other peer, oh, hey. This isn't that bad or it's actually pretty cool or let's do something fun with it, the better, because they tend to, kind of hone in on that and see the value and the activity more than maybe the authoritative figure.

Speaker 2 Yeah. I think those are great tips. I I think to take a step back, like, my initial response to this when I saw this question too was initially, well, what is a, quote, reluctant learner? Right. You know, is is that is that even something that that exists? And in that, I I can kind of remember that being a turning point for me too. I can remember the specific student and the specific year. He was a he was a he was a football player, and, you know, he was failing my then world history class. But he was, you know, playing varsity football and doing incredibly well in that endeavor. And and that for me was the biggest thing in kind of challenging that reluctant learner because he was a kid who was not a reluctant learner. He was a voracious learner. You know, he was an adept learner when it came to, you know, football plays and and and the the stuff that mattered to him on on the field. And, you know, world history just didn't enter into the picture for him most of the time. So, really, it was about kind of decentering myself in that picture and just trying to meet the student where they were at just to say, hey. I know that football is is a thing that's very important to you. How can how can I help in in in making this class matter? Because whether or not you you like it or like me or whatever, you know, you have to have this class to be able to do that thing. So how can we make this a place where where you can be successful in here so that way you can be successful in the things that you wanna do on the football field? And which is really surprising that it took me so long to to want to do that because in a lot of ways, I can think of myself in high school as a reluctant learner. I didn't wanna do math, but you know what I was doing? I was trying to figure out how many you know, I knew to to the exact, you know, decimal point how many how much experience points I got for killing a character in in, you know, my my online RPGs that I was playing back in the early two thousands. And I knew how many of them I would need to kill in order to rank up to the next level. And so those were the kinds of things I was thinking about and drawing on my paper in math class. And, you know, I think in a lot of ways, my math instructor saw me as a reluctant math learner, and yet here are the ways that I was, you know, applying that to the things that were important for me. So I think just maybe taking a step back and putting things in perspective and just saying, you know, kids aren't kids might be reluctant to talk about economics, but or to learn economics in your class or to do the work when when when they're given the opportunity to do so. But I'm willing to bet that they're they're not reluctant learners as as a whole. Find find a thing that they can, really sink their teeth into or that you where you can you can help ignite in them, and partner with them to realize either here's how, the things that we're doing in class could be important for reaching those goals or just to level with them and say, hey. You know, I I understand that this might be irrelevant for you, but how can I help you, get through this so that way you can get on to the thing that that is gonna be important for you in your life? And and that's been kind of a successful strategy,

Speaker 1 for me too, on that front. Right. That's a really good point. And I think that's worth mentioning that, like Yeah. Because I I didn't really bring this up in my answer, but being careful behind labeling students from a deficit angle. Like, you wouldn't want to send a kid to the guidance counselor that's failing your class that otherwise is doing great in all other aspects of, like, their other classes and their, like, their friend group, etcetera. Yeah. That's kinda like a circumstance where we just need to talk to them about what's going on, trying to be transparent, figuring out sometimes just what's the bare minimum that they they need to do. Like, I've I've leveled with kids many times where they just don't care about digital media. That's fine. It can be frustrating sometimes as a teacher because that's what you're passionate about. That's what you like doing, and you feel a need that most students need to learn it or else you wouldn't be teaching it. But the exact same time, I I know in the back of my head that the vast majority of students probably aren't going to use this. And sometimes that's just a matter of taking a step back and saying, hey. This is what I I know I have to have you do.

Speaker 2 And students are very responsive usually to to you kind of fighting in their court and trying your best to help them out. Yeah. At a certain point, you know, I I've done this a lot for kids where you you were saying earlier, you'll work with kids to you won't grade them out until they get an a. And then for kids who, you know, don't engage in that process or or can't for whatever reason, then you can kind of grades as negotiable. And and that's where, honestly, like, ungrading or even contract grading is is super, super flexible and super useful for kids is, then you can actually work to kind of establish, here's a floor. Right? Here's let's at least get this this groundwork going here so that way you can get credit for the class. And a lot of times, that's empowering for kids then who wanna do a little bit more because you can say, hey. Here's here's the bare minimum that I can when when I go to put grades in at the end of the semester, I'll give you a d if you hit these boxes. You know? And then a lot of times, they'll they'll figure out that that's not actually, you know, too difficult for them. And then they'll unlock that d, and they'll say, like, okay. What what else can I do? And then so you can actually kind of raise the bar for them progressively through that rather than just have them languish with an f for, something else for the whole semester. And then at the last minute, they're gonna be like, hey. What do I have to do to pass the class? You know, as teachers complain about it. You know, if we're proactive with it, we just say, hey. Here's what you need to do. And then if you hit that bar and you wanna work on something else, great. You know, you you're secure in the at least passing that class. But I found in my experience that kids will wanna at least do a little bit more because they feel energized and motivated by that. Let's move into question two. Yeah. Can I take a lead on that one? Yeah. Go ahead. Okay. Cool. So it's from Shandra Roberts. Send it on on Twitter there. She said, what a student I was wondering to know what a student driven curriculum looks like in practice. She said, I'm super interested in this, but get quickly overwhelmed when I try to think about implementing it. And, gosh, that that was one that I think, Chandra, if you're listening, the previous twenty minutes where we were talking about what that looks like can actually be very helpful. Right? That that Chris' special friend strategy and and some more of those cooperative learning things can actually be pretty pretty secretive ways to help unlock student centered classrooms. But I think, you know, the theory behind that too or the pedagogy behind that is you've created safe places where kids feel, emotionally, intellectually, physically safe in order to, contribute and collaborate. Because they know they're not gonna be punished or accused of cheating by helping out each other. You know, you're creating a collaborative space. But I wanna take a step back too and and say that for me, I guess a student centered classroom can can really look like a lot of different things, but the way that I approach it in my classroom, is really more along the lines of a of a democratic classroom environment. So I start out the year just asking kids, some questions about expectations. What are expectations you have of your peers? What are expectations you have of yourself? What are expectations you have of me? And we actually use those things to build a set of collective commitments that I I write a draft up. And kids I give that to kids. I give them all the data that they had submitted there. You know, it's been anonymized. And we can just see straight up, hey. What what goals do we have for ourselves in this classroom space? And you kind of build a social contract with kids in that process. I have them vote on it. You know, we we do a poll. It's like, hey. Do you agree with the expectations for yourself, for your peers, and for adults as outlined in the, you know, draft document that you looked at? And unanimously, generally, a 100% of kids say, yeah. That's that's what I want. And and that's, I think, a way then that you can show that you you're not only soliciting feedback from kids, but you're being responsive to it. And you're saying, here's how I'm gonna live up to the expectations that you've laid out for me. Here's how I'm gonna lay out the expectations that you have for each other and for yourself. And, really, then you can build in whatever projects, PBL, kind of whatever the curriculum that you have around that in the student centered maybe strategies. But I think it just starts with understanding that democratic classroom. The more that kids see that you're not just interested in getting their feedback, but also being responsive to it, I think can then really help not just build relationships, but but build a more collaborative

Speaker 1 classroom culture. What do you got, Chris? Very similar thing. And just taking that then over to the curriculum where you let students know, like, hey. This is what I have to cover. But the way that we cover it is really in your court and figuring out what it is that you're interested in. So I was saying before that usually the first project in my class is very teacher centric. I tell them, like, hey. I need to teach you how to even start so you even know what's possible. And we spend about three or four weeks where it's very much, fairly traditional. It's just like, hey. Here's how you do this. Here's how you do this. Here's how you do this. And we get through it, the kids know that, like, on the horizon, they'll have a little bit more self selection. Then we go through that exact same kind of democratic classroom selection where they choose between various things that kind of I'm comfortable with doing. Like, I tell them, like, hey. This is what I know how to do. And we can propose other things too, and that's it's not just like a Google form where it's like, vote once. It's more of like, hey. We're gonna brainstorm something together, and here are some different ideas. What do you think about this thing? Just a class discussion. Then we have a form, then we vote on it based off of what we populated there. And I always give students an opt out as well. So if they all vote on something, and they like, you know, three or four kids were really passionate about doing something else, say, hey. Propose it to me. Let's talk about it during that workshop time. Let's figure out what exactly you wanna do with that. However, I will say that almost every single time, once all the students start working on something and those students realize what it is and they see their friends doing it, they tend to just go along with what they were doing anyway. There's maybe three students per year that actually do an alternative to what everyone else is doing because, typically, students are gonna pick things that are cool, Like, or else they wouldn't have voted on to begin with. And as a result, that does take away some of your power as a teacher because some of the things that maybe you thought were really cool aren't. I was going to do a unit on, like, generative art. So, like, where you take, like, different eyes, different ears, and you put them in a Photoshop file, it makes, like, 10,000 different images based off the combinations. I personally think that's super cool. The kids said, no. That sucks. I have no desire. I have literally three kids out of a 125 that were like, oh, that sounds cool. So finding ways to to put, you know, put the power in the students' hands to to guide that curriculum. And you could still have authority as a teacher. You can still say, like, hey. This is the theme or this is the concept I need you to explore because that's what the standard is. And it doesn't mean that everyone has to go off and do their own thing either. They can all be collectively deciding that's what they're all going to do. That's okay because that teaches that democratic cooperative behavior that we want them to develop. It's just finding more and more ways to to make that work student centric without it devolving into more of a faux choice where it's, I'm giving you all of the information, and then you have the choice to make a poster or, like, make a song. Because a lot of times when you do that, it it's trivial. Like, it doesn't feel authentic. Instead, when I say, like, we're proposing projects, like, we're doing, like, a full on project. It's a it's a it's a professional piece that everyone's deciding what they wanna do. Now we're going into game show mode. Space game. So I'm pretty sure last time you started off our game show, but this time I feel like I need to start. I don't have I I have music, but I'm not gonna play it just yet. Need it. Last time, you you stumped me a little bit by having a ton of context, in your, quote, unquote, lightning round, which took, like, thirty five minutes. So this is a lot I'm gonna bring in. Lightning. I'm I'm gonna develop some, ball lightning, questions on my own here. So the theme of this, pop quiz, which the the plot is is that whoever loses this gets, pushed off the spaceship. They get sent out of the air block. So this is a life or death scenario, so stress is on. The theme of our quiz today is cognitive science and research and studying the brain, the things that we've been alluding to over the course of this podcast. And my quiz is called Doug Lemov said what? So this is a game show based around Doug Lemov, author of teach like a champion. If you're not familiar, teach like a champion is the best selling professional development book for educators, both in The United States, but also in Europe. Teach like a champion features all these different strategies to try that a little bit, all these different strategies to, essentially help, quote unquote, help students learn. It's been criticized for being very, authoritative. A lot of the the techniques involve literally controlling students' bodies. I think many people will be familiar with the concept of slant, which has been popularized from that, which is sit up, lean forward, ask and answer questions, nod your head, and track the speaker. The idea being, like, you raise your hand, everyone's supposed to look at you and supposed to, like, nod their head yes, like, when someone gets the answer right. It's used by a lot of, like, charter schools, that tend to focus on test scores where kids sit in rows. It just feels very, very laby, very lab style, very BF Skinner, very much just yeah. Very Walden two. This is the Walden two dreamscape is teach like a champion. So, my game is based around, did Doug Lemob say this or not say this? So here's here's here's question. Here's question one. Okay. Teach like a champion is about to release teach like a champion three point o. I believe two point o came out, like, kinda like more than ten years ago. So 3.0 is in development, and it centers itself on rebranding a bit. For some background, I have listened to about four different podcasts each hour long featuring Doug Lemaugh, and I also have been reading Doug Lemaugh's blog. So there's been a lot of research into this. I had to rake a lot of leaves yesterday. So I put that in, and I got very frustrated listening to Doug Lemaugh. So three point o is in development. It's focused on rebranding around equity and inclusion and backing up its information more with research. Lavov, on various occasions, has prided himself on understanding the research and not only drawing from cognitive science as we've been referencing here, but also social scientists and economists. In 2019, he wrote this article called who's reading the cognitive science? And he writes in there, quote, cognitive science has learned more about how people learn in the last twenty years than in the previous three hundred years combined. But you visit a school or a district and talk about research on memory or perception, and people haven't read it. Few people are pulling out their copy of Kahneman out of their bag. You only see that in some parts of the high performing entrepreneurial school sector where people are serious about proving a concept, but not in the average in school. Instead, you often find people carrying around the baggage of unfounded or discredited ideas. Dewy, multiple intelligences, and vague platitudes about learning by doing or teaching your peers about the best form of learning. Bygotsky's writings from 1918 count as science. So that's a that's a common theme across most of Lamar's blog and work. He he works with entrepreneurs and has charters and just a focus on economics and kind of global competitors in the marketplace. That's the size of the point, though. Nick, do you know who Kahneman is that he's writing about there? I I feel like I've seen the name, but I couldn't tell you what concepts are associated with Kahneman. Okay. So brief descriptor. This is this is, like, super brief. Kahneman's a psychiatrist. He mostly applies his work to business and how businesses operate, but his most famous work is thinking fast and slow, which is the the thing that he published. He developed this idea behind two different thought systems. There's system one. System one is like fight or flight. It's how we survive. It's our our, like, our first thing that we think about whenever we think of something. Okay. And then there's system two, which is slow and logical thought. And the cognitive science crowd, the folks that run these behaviorist style classrooms have connected Skinner and Llamov's work, centered around the research by Kahneman behind the system one fight or flight and system two, which is slow and logical thought. So here's here's the actual question. Here's the dog Lemov says what. Okay. So did dog Lemov write this? Quote, in particular, it underscores a couple of points. Kahneman writes that decision making starts with perception, and so systematic exposure to situations where players learn to perceive and recognize viable solutions is critical. This is why it's necessary to build knowledge. You want to build problem solving ability. The biggest single misperception in education today is that problem solving is something that you can develop without background knowledge.

Speaker 2 Oh,

Speaker 1 that that's totally something Lemoff would say. Yeah. Yes. He he did say that. I didn't queue up the you're right sound. I only have you're wrong. You're right. There it is. You're right. Doug Lemov does believe that as this is kinda this is like a Gimmy question because this is kind of the basis behind behaviorist cognitive science driven classrooms, that you have to do a ton of rote memorization, aka use those teaching machines until you memorize all the right background knowledge to firmly operate doing anything. So if you do a creative project that's open ended and kids have to work together to do it, it's not an effective strategy because students don't have all of that core background knowledge. The overall idea is centering on Kahneman that you need to, like, drill, literally drill students into understanding all this information so that their system one, their fight or flight response, is they just automatically know the right answer. They don't have time to get the system to because it's gonna take too long, and they don't have that background knowledge yet. Instead, focus on system one, get them know everything so that way they can do system two work down the road because they'll have such an extensive background knowledge there. And it's also it's into, like, well, their cognitive load of system two is too much. You just need to make sure you have all that information up front,

Speaker 2 that kind of thing. You know what's really interesting, though? I mean, I mentioned that Mary Helen Immordino Yang interview, and she addresses that perfectly because, right, in in certain context, maybe like England and stuff, they're they're really heavy on, like, that cognitive load management, etcetera. And even in that interview, she says this is a direct quote from from from Immordina Yang here. What if things like regurgitating memories and factual or procedural information that's been curated by someone else, what if knowing all that stuff doesn't make you a better person? What if it doesn't help you know what to do in the world, and there's actually excellent evidence that it doesn't? So it's increasingly again, right, I I feel like the cognitive science, hashtag cogsci, say, of the last ten years is exactly what you were talking about with Skinner back in the forties and fifties. Right? What if we built our education system, around what Skinner had imagined in Walden or in Walden too? You know? We we would we would would abhor it. Right? We would view it, as as a as a total failure of humanity if we had built it along his model. And yet, right, we've taken the very narrow interpretation of cognitive science from from, folks like, Lamave. Not that he's a cognitive scientist, but we get it filtered through him, right, in terms of building schools around just a few cognitive science principles and results, managing cognitive load and retrieval practice. And we've built our whole school system around managing your memory. Oh my god. Right? Yeah. We're we're gonna look back at this in shock and horror.

Speaker 1 And I mean, you don't have to go far to find schools that do operate like this. Like, the law has the uncommon schools network Right. Which like they release videos. You can find them on YouTube of like how to effectively cold call on people. And it's just like, it's a whole thing where I was gonna put this in as a question, but, like, how you're supposed to ask cold calling questions. And that cold calling is actually a way to develop relationships because cold calling is a way of saying that you matter and that the research says that cold calling ensures that students do better on tests. But I did a quick Google. When I read that, I was like, does the research actually say that? And the research overwhelmingly, just from, like, like, quick, like, summary of 10 different things, I was reading the abstracts, that cold calling leads to so much anxiety that students that are cold called on don't perform as well as students who are not cold called on. Because one, in order to do cold calling in the first place, you have to have a school environment that's very, like, lecture driven because you would just be talking at your kids all day, and eventually they'd answer the questions. But two, like, anyone who ever has been in a class that's had cold calling knows how stressful that is, especially in high school where you just, like, are always worried that someone's gonna judge you for getting the answer wrong. Like, why why would that even be an effective strategy to begin with? Now you know what's funny is you mentioned you mentioned that that that,

Speaker 2 that social stress and that social anxiety Mhmm. In that in that part, that's gonna play a very important role in, in my three questions to follow. So, we'll we'll have to come back to that. Alright. So let's get on to question two.

Speaker 1 So question two, teach like a champion, like almost every single book on education, will tell you that relationships are incredibly important to the classroom community. Teach like a champion two point o features 62 different techniques to improve classroom instruction. So here's the Doug Lemov said what? So Lemov writes in teach like a champion about technique 31, developing relationships at the beginning and ending of class. Did he say, quote, in order to best get to know your students, it's important to build a space where they are respected and welcomed. Before every class, be sure to greet every single student with a firm handshake, establish and build rapport. Ask them about how their day is going, and make a note of this later in the lesson. Do not let any student avoid the handshake or ignore the question. It's vitally important that every single student understands your respect and that you are the head of the classroom.

Speaker 2 I I that is some Harry Wong stuff right there. I've I firmly believe with a firm handshake that that that is definitely Doug Lemoff.

Speaker 1 The answer is no. That is not Doug Lemoff. Get ready for this. If you thought teach like a champion was extreme, here you go. So Lemoff states on the podcast, bind the gap episode nine, one of the many podcasts I listen to, an anecdote about his second grade daughter who seemingly his second grade daughter just really hates school. She's very frustrated by everything that goes on. It's almost like he's using her as kind of a scapegoat, to criticize teachers. So Lamaug recalled a story where his daughter was in class, which I'm assuming this is a remote class, and the teacher spent time asking all the students how their weekends went. And Lamaug states that this is a useless piece of class time because the teacher's role is just to teach. His words. Building relationships in this manner isn't useful because teachers or because students don't see the teacher's role as someone who needs to know what's going on the weekend. Instead, the teacher should just build relationships by starting class and learning about students through the content. So the teacher's only role is teach content. That's what the students like. That's what they're used to. So the way that they're gonna get to know you is by asking questions about biology, which is the reference that he uses, which I mean that Wow. That kinda speaks for itself before for for what thinks the purpose the purpose and value of a classroom is. Does Lemov also think that putting an infant child inside the a warmed crib that you don't have to interact with it at all would would grow it to to be a better human? I mean hamster feeder in there and a sitting body here. So connect it just everything about that quote blows my mind because how many kids use like, how many kids develop a community by being in the class? Like, are they not allowed to have friends at school? Are they not allowed to be friends with their teachers? Are they not allowed to, like, have another trusted adult in their lives that they can talk to things about? Wow. Like, in this hypothetical world of, Doug Lemoff teach like a champion school, the only thing kids talk about outside of at lunch is the content in the class. Any other information is completely useless. Like, it's wasted time. I I I couldn't believe that quote was real. He doesn't believe in any of that stuff. You shouldn't ask kids how their weekend went because that's just you're wasting your time. He says something along the lines of, like, I understand why a teacher would do this because they're trying to do the right thing, but, ultimately, you know, my my kid doesn't care about that. They just wanna get class started because you're wasting content time. That's not your job. I'm like, woah. That's a that's a that's a belief. That's for sure. So we are, one for two. Yep. Alright. You'll enjoy this next question. Let's do it. Okay. So in Doug Lemaugh's desire to have a more research backed teach like a champion three point o, he's also reaching out and networking with the research ed organization. So way back in 2015, Tom Bennett, who is the founder of research ed, posted on Doug Lemaugh's blog about the movement. And since then, research ed has been featured in Lemaugh's work in almost all of the publications. So, or I should say research ed has featured Lemaugh's work as in Doug Lamaque is kind of referenced all the time in research ed. So, Lamaque wrote about Bennett. This is a direct quote from his blog. He writes brilliant stuff like this recent piece on group work, which examines the research that, spoiler, allegedly supports the practice and then examines its strengths and limitations. He notes that he uses group work himself and then gets down to brass tacks, like someone who works every day in the classroom. When and why would you ever use it? With what cautions and how can you address them? You know, another balanced, pragmatic, sensible, informative, instantly useful piece for teachers, the kind you see every day. With useful pieces like that popping up from him regularly, really, only reason not to like him is that he's both trenchant and funny at the same time. Anyway, if you've read Tom's stuff and thought like me, more like that for teachers, please, you're in luck. He's coming to America. As founder of Research Ed, an organization that's about bringing research to teachers in useful ways, he's gone global and is running a conference that I highly recommend, end quote. So ResearchEd, if the listener is not familiar, it's an organization that's has quite a large following, especially in The UK that focuses almost entirely on behaviorism. They use Skinner as a primary reference in their work. Like, they they have multiple publications I was reading where they're defending Skinner, talking about how we need to go back to Skinner, And they kind of write pieces that blend together, teach like a champion, Skinner, and some other, like, economists, like Kahneman, and say, hey. This is the reason why we need to change classes to be more like those uncommon schools, more of these schools that are very rote driven that focus on, quote, unquote, core knowledge. In addition, they've also come underneath a lot of scrutiny. Benjamin Dockstatter has a piece on this, which I highly recommend, The Education Critic. He references it as equity backlash. For example, in 2019, the research egg group had made this very large infographic.

Speaker 2 Nick, I don't know if you remember this. I have this pulled up right now because I was finding it as you were talking about it. So there's

Speaker 1 like maybe like a 100 people on that infographic. I don't know the number. But I'm pretty confident that all of them are white. Right. So in response, the research ed leaders and many of their followers, instead of like apologizing or saying, hey. We need to focus more on this. It's a great point, etcetera. They basically just made a bunch of flippant comments about how this didn't matter, how our representation wasn't important. Mhmm. Like, things like, you know, we should add, you know, more people from, like, Nordic countries on there. Like, that kind of stuff. The leaders had on numerous accounts. They've been aggressive towards identity. Like, they make transphobic remarks. They comment a lot on diversity initiatives. A lot of the research crowd, a lot of its speakers that are, oftenly at their events, including Tom Bennett himself, have a lot of overlapping commentary with conservative pundits like Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro. Mhmm. They've been associated with the intellectual dark web, the IDW folks. So for example, Robert cry Cregan, perhaps. He's one of the speakers that talks at talks at research at conferences. He recently retweeted the chalkboard review. Our friends over there, chalkboard review. Chalkboard review is a publication that is connected to James Lindsay that publishes anti CRT work and a lot of very questionable comments about, equity in education. Or, recently, Tom Bennett, who again is the founder, he retweeted a piece from Jonathan Porter about how schools shouldn't teach multicultural religious ideas because of depth over breadth and cognitive load, and that students have to understand Britain's Christian heritage. And when you start teaching about all the other religions, that's just gonna confuse them, and they're not gonna know what's going on. So instead, just focus on Britain's Christian heritage because that's who the primary people in Britain are. That's a real article. You should Google it. It's it's incredibly interesting how this behaviorist cog sci kind of authoritarian crowd also happens to be taking a stand on the culture war. It is essentially like a a white supremacist lens. It's it's almost like all of that cognitive science behaviorist research is rooted in, like, white supremacist ideas, which, spoiler alert, it is. A lot of the stuff comes from, like, eugenics. So here is the the Doug Lemov said what. So Okay. You wanna say I'm addicted to context, Chris? What was So this is the Doug Lemov said what. I needed a backstory on who ResurgEd was. Was gonna say, is there a Doug Lemov question at the end of it? So here's the Doug Lemov. In 2021, Lemov this is, a couple months ago. Lemov wrote a statement on his blog. Quote, in my work as an educator, coach, and business owner, I have been fortunate enough to be informed by great thinkers across the globe and work to make teach like a champion a force for good, ensuring that students reach their full potential. In that mission, I have consistently used research and promoted others that do. In one instance, I had referenced Tom Bennett, founder of the research ag community. Regretfully, in recent years, the research ag community has consistently promoted messages of hate towards marginalized communities, and I want to state that myself and the teach like a champion movement are unequivocally opposed to these statements. So I have to say, did Doug Lemoff say that? Yes. Did he say I

Speaker 2 will say that that is fiction. I I bet he has not distanced himself himself from that. You got it. That's a

Speaker 1 you got two out of three because you better believe Doug Lemob, is constantly referenced by Tom Bennett and his followers. In fact, if you were to just, like, Twitter, like hashtag research ed and then Doug Lemob or Lemob, you'll find it constantly. They talk about it all the time. Mhmm. And he's never said a word about any of this stuff. He, in fact, has referenced research ed other times now. And it's likely, because he keeps talking about teach like a champion three point o, that, he will utilize a lot of that exact same research and questionable,

Speaker 2 content to back up his practices that he talks about. Right. And and I got I got blocked by Tom Bennett, a year or so ago because of that exact reason. I I asked him. I said, why is the hashtag research ed founder Tom Bennett so concerned with competing sociological and biological definitions of gender? And he promptly blocked me for the exact same things that Benjamin Dockstader was, was writing about. They they they're very anti trans, and and have, yeah, very, very problematic ties to

Speaker 1 to those kinds of movements and ideas. It's it's like legit racism and transphobia. Like, it's not even like a pseudo, like, talking about, like, structural, like, anything. It's just, like, flat out the conservative commentator she wrote about, like, pumpkins as genders. Yes. What's her name? Catherine

Speaker 2 Berbelsing. She goes by miss Snuffy. Yeah. She had she had tweeted this joke, said, this is the best joke of the year, and it showed a picture of a basketball. And on the basketball written in Sharpie, it says, like, I identify as a pumpkin. Yeah. And right? The to which my response was, what's the joke? Right? Yeah. Somebody please explain the joke. Oh, the the the joke is supposed to be the right. That that trans people are are the butt of the joke because they only have one joke. Right? Yeah. That's that's the only joke that those people have. It's interesting that all of their work,

Speaker 1 like, just to read a few of the articles recently published by the Chalkboard Review, which are also heavily based inside of this research ed community. Because it's almost like, again, that research is just connected to some, like, hyperauthoritarian anti, like, almost not anti, a purely, like, white supremacist lens. So Mhmm. Published on November 3, report, wokeness comes for math in Seattle. Eleven one, inclusive education isn't working. Ten twenty eight, of course, CRT is in schools. Ten thirty one, antidote to activist teaching. Ten ten twenty three, from salesperson to school board member. Ten twenty four, vocational training for the soul, bringing the meaning of work to schools. So, like, there is a obvious timeline from, Eugenics, these, like, hyper white, hyper, like, privilege takes on education back in the the nineteen twenties and excluding people who are different and that people that are educated look a certain way because they're civilized and even, like, getting into, like, white man's burden, that kind of stuff. There's a direct line from that to Taylorism and industrializing schools through, the the various different culture wars over the years to today Right. Where you have publications like this and folks that are using lab based science, which is not based out of a classroom and ignores a sizable amount of research because they pick and choose. They always go like, well, if anyone could show me research that says otherwise, I would go ahead and go along with it. And then promptly ignore all research that goes against what they're saying. And then basically publish everything that's all based around, like, culture word nonsense. Mhmm. It's all based around, like like, anti masking. They they their big thing now is, teachers that are getting fired, or let go because they refuse to get vaccinated or refuse to wear a mask or something like that. Right. As opposed to just looking at basic research. And, honestly, I think it's all just in the interest of making money. It's all just about, like, how quickly can I get fired and then go on Fox News and make a lot of money like a like a Dave Rubin or something? The grift is real. Yeah. They they certainly have weaponized, you know, hashtag cogs eye for

Speaker 2 for the culture war, certainly. Right? Because they'll say, oh, you know, the teachers don't wanna teach reading, writing, arithmetic. They wanna teach about gender identity as though, right, you you can't also learn to read and then how to, you know, understand gender identity. Like, those are competing ideas. There's not enough room in the child's brain to Yeah. To learn about, learn about more than three things. Yeah. We have to balance their cognitive load. It's a moral panic. You know? They wanna treat child's brains as a as this moral panic. So alright. Are you ready for for my take? I was gonna say, there there's one more thing about Cogsci that I briefly wanna mention, which is Okay. Like,

Speaker 1 I think it's worth reaffirming the fact that BF Skinner and these ideas have already been discredited. Like, if you read the research on this stuff, they are trying to defend ideas that are 50 years old while simultaneously saying that the research supports the work that they're doing. And the place that they draw their research from is almost entirely economists. It's about how you operate a business effectively and how do you make as much money as possible, which in businesses, there are winners and losers. And a lot of this research is like, well, if someone, you know, sucks at their job, you need to let them go. There's a lot of noise. Kahneman writes about, he has a book called noise, which is about, like, two people doing the same job and how you need to get rid of some person who's, like, not doing the same thing. Very, like, neoliberal style, cutting down on, businesses, etcetera, or just positions that don't matter. And it just so happens that a lot of these charter schools are run based off of entrepreneurial style, leadership models. So what does that mean if you build classrooms that double down on competition and ranking winnings winners and losers and getting rid of people who don't conform or forcing them to conform as opposed to treating classrooms as public community spaces that are not businesses. That's the reason why it's education and not a job. It's it's not meant to be a business.

Speaker 2 I I think it's so important for folks to tease that out and and look at these different initiatives and think about, you know, is this a business endeavor, or is this a class? Because they are very different. So let's see. So the number to beat is is, two out of three. So you gotta you gotta do a clean sweep on me here in order to get it. One thing we might have to plan for in the future is a tiebreaker question. That's true. So we'll just kinda see. I can have storm one. Yeah. I I have a feeling that it could be I I might get you with one of these and couple of the other ones you might you might, knock out of the park. So Right. So mine actually involve, I was kind of inspired by, David Buck's ungrading camp, something to check out on his on his account in particular, but, he's been running a Discord and hosting some some events in the Twitter spaces for people to talk about ungrading strategies, impacts on equity, you know, a lot of a lot of great topics. So it's something to check out there. But I was kind of inspired since our topic is, right, research ed, cog sci, etcetera, because grading is really just one of the most central conventions in formal education. We we just do it, without any sense of of the reason for why. So even in our modern so called research based data driven world, we stick with traditional grading schemes or the compromised standards referenced or standards based methods that Alfie Cohn would call lipstick on a pig, even as we study and understand more about the consequences of grades and grading on many of the unmeasured outcomes of schools. So so my three questions today deal with some of the recent research on the impact of grading on three things, on group problem solving, group coordination, and confirmation bias. Gotcha. So I'm gonna walk you through some methods here real quick, and then I'll get to the get to the question. So in a 2015 study, European researchers were looking to evaluate, quote, what happens when educators and managers want to promote cooperation because of its potential for innovation in a system that consistently and pervasively assesses group work with individual normative grades. The task as explained to participants was to study, quote, how people who work in teams get to solve criminal cases. The participants were it provided information about a traffic accident and had to collectively determine who was responsible for the accident among numerous suspects. So the crux of the experiment here was that participants were each given 21 pieces of shared information and six pieces of unshared information, making pooling the unshared information vital to crack the case and nab the correct suspect. Does that make sense? So does the does one group then have all the information or do different groups have that different information? So so, each participant was given that amount of information. Okay. So you had 27 pieces of information total. Six were unshared and 21 were in common. So you had to figure out which ones you had in common and which ones were unique to you. Your own group. Within your group. Yes. Yep. Okay. So in they wanted to look at these three different conditions, to kind of assess the impact of these things on there. So the different groups that they ran through this were in first a graded and visible condition where the teams were told, quote, although I am interested in your team product, I will observe your work and at the end also give each one of you a grade from one to six as a function of each one's contribution to the investigation. Another one was a non graded visible condition in which teams were told the experimenter was only interested in the group solution, but that individual contributions would not be assessed, and then a non graded, non visible condition where the teams were told the experimenters were only interested in the group solution and explicitly pointed out that the the cameras would be off, so nobody would be observing them either. So here's the fact or fiction. As a result of this work, the researchers concluded that visibility itself has no deleterious effects and that it is the use of grades that hampers cooperative group work.

Speaker 1 Well, I'll walk I'll walk through my thought process a little bit here. K. So I know for a fact that well, not for a fact. I know based off of research that I've read in the past that cooperative learning is hampered by assigning grades. I know that if you individually grade different students based off of working cooperatively, they tend to contribute less. There's multiple research on our website that shows that when you grade, people tend to share less information even though they're being individually graded for, which is very interesting. So I wanna say that for sure, the grades would not help. However, the question about visibility is is interesting. I that's not my answer. I want to think that visibility does matter because you feel like you're being watched, and therefore, you might feel less prone to, like, to, like, saying things you wouldn't normally say. But the exact same time, there there is potentially a motivating factor to being observed, in the sense that, like, I know I'm being watched, so, therefore, I wanna make sure I'm doing well. Based off of the grading component, I feel like it's it's relatively similar. Like, the idea of being watched, the ideas of being judged, etcetera. So I'm going to say, I I think this is the the false is as in that it it it did matter. As in you shouldn't have as in the last the last category was the better category, not watching people not grading them.

Speaker 2 Okay. So so let's see here. So you would agree with the statement, quote, visibility itself has no deleterious effects and that it's the use of grades that hampers cooperative group work. You think that's a fact? Yeah. So visibility does not matter. And, like, as in you you don't want it doesn't matter if you have visibility or not, but the grade's the problem. Alright. Yes. And that is a fact. Nice. So you nailed that one. Because I because that's where I I wanted to bring that back to what you had said earlier. Remember, I I had said visibility would come back into this. Mhmm. But, yeah, they found that visibility was not damaging, but the grades that hampered cooperative group work. In fact, they actually ran a separate experiment designed to eliminate the confounding variables, based on, right, visibility or not visibility. And they they found on the second experiment replicated the same results. Here's what they said. The second study provides supplementary evidence that in a cooperative group situation, grades interfere with the group's cooperative behavior and negatively impact the pooling of the most relevant information, namely unshared information. The results of the two studies are complementary and point to the negative effects of grades in cooperative settings. It is the use of grades that hampers cooperative group work. And they conclude, this is a quote, as the expectation of grades may prioritize individual interests and personal success, it is also possible that it induces cheating behaviors even when group members are encouraged to cooperate. With this in mind, we can only recommend to avoid grading individuals in cooperative groups.

Speaker 1 So, yeah, that was the result of the all 20 the other research.

Speaker 2 I know. Yeah. This but I liked it. That was 2015, from the Journal of Social Psychology. The the title was grading hampers cooperative information sharing in group problem solving. So Write on the notes. Right. We wanna talk about ungrading as an evidence based practice. How often, you know, do teachers grade individuals in group projects? Is that an evidence based practice? Why are we not responsive to that? So Cool. Now this one's gonna come pretty quick because, the same team of researchers also hypothesized in 2015, and I'll paraphrase, that grades elicit disruptive interactions and reduce performance in cooperative tasks that require group coordination. So what do you think here? Fact or fiction? The researchers found that grades improved group interactions and performance.

Speaker 1 Well, grades would not grades would not improve interaction. K. Yeah. It would actually if it encourages you to to cheat anyway, then I would imagine that there's no way that it would improve how you interact with each other. Okay. So what about the performance lens? Because maybe it's the case that being graded can actually

Speaker 2 help your,

Speaker 1 your performance. What do think if you be That very interesting if they found that given that in the past, they've done studies that show that the product that students produce as a result of being ungraded tends to be better. And they tend not to try as hard on assignments that are graded. So I would say that that's also fiction.

Speaker 2 Alright. And you got it. That is fiction.

Speaker 1 Nice. Yeah. I I got I got these. I could do a grading thing. The the last week was, whatever they're called, Teach for America.

Speaker 2 Yes. That's little bit outside of my wheelhouse. I can do this. That was pretty good. So so the title of that paper they released about that that study is called grades degrade group coordination. And the researchers found, quote, that although pupils were set to work cooperatively, priming grades versus neutral concepts harmed inter individual coordination by eliciting more negative dominant behaviors among pupils, which decreased group performance. So that competitive environment that that was prompted by the grades actually led to, behaviors that decreased coordination and then subsequently decreased performance. So there's kind of a chain of causation there. So it was a really ex interesting experimental design. Maybe I'll even have to send you a picture of it or something. But they had fifth graders use a paper track and a pulley system that drove a ballpoint pen in a line around the track. So the pen was in the middle, and there were ropes that went or lines that went to the different pulleys. And so if I pulled my version of the pulley, well, that would move yours as well, and we would have to coordinate our interactions to be able to drive the pen, quote, unquote, around this paper track. You see what I'm saying? Yeah. Yeah. Makes sense. And and you would get a point for each square that you were able to keep the pen in the middle lane So the, you know, the groups were able to keep it in the middle and better coordinate, got higher scores. Zero points if it went to an outer lane. You, you know, you didn't get punished by it, but you've got minus one point for going outside the track entirely. Okay. So the way that they control this actually. Yeah. Yeah. Is one group was primed to consider a label on the track in the center that had just unit conversions. So one meter into millimeters, kilometers, and so on. And another group was primed to a grading scale. The Swiss equivalent in this case of an a, b, c, d, or f scale. Okay. And they concluded that, quote, priming the pupils with grades in comparison to neutral priming resulted in tenser relations during the game, more floor taking control, and intrusive behaviors to direct others. And, additionally, they found priming the people with grades from the outset of the game indeed resulted in lower group performance that they attribute to the increase in negative dominant behavior. So Yeah. You know, that scoring system, they actually performed worse

Speaker 1 due to the lack of, cooperation in that case. Yeah. They're stressed. I just imagine if I put some of my kids together in a room and said, if you don't do this, you're gonna fail. Like, chaos would ensue.

Speaker 2 It just doesn't work because that's not In a in a in a environment. Right? Like, one kid starts doing it all for themselves, and then, you know, that breaks up the the the cooperative sort of nature, and then some kids drop out or whatever. The the the research behind that was pretty fascinating because the way that they measured the negative behaviors was, like, in qualitative ways. So they have examples of things that the kids would say. Yeah. Like, when they would complain about others' behaviors or, or some of the other things too. So it was it was pretty, it was kinda funny to read. Like, they put, one participant telling another, pull the pulley, exclamation point, while simultaneously dropping his or her own pulley in order to mime the action or verbal interventions with tones of emotional negative tension, I e annoyed and scornful tones, e g, argh. No. Not that way. And are you stupid or what? Oh, I. Those were things that the students had said to themselves that they coded as negative. Well, I'm just happy I can't get something out of the airlock now. Unless we're tied. It's a tie. So yeah. Keep going. It it's like the thing. Right? Now we gotta figure out who it is. So let's see here. So the last one. So now we've seen how grades negatively impact group problem solving and information sharing as well as increase dominant intrusive behaviors that negatively impact group performance, let's talk about the phenomenon of the preference effect or more commonly known as confirmation bias. Alright. So that's the tendency to seek out evidence that confirms your initial preferences. So kind of the question here in just a second will be kind of in which direction do you believe that grades and grading will have an impact on this bias? So, essentially, this will be kind of a test of your own confirmation bias, Chris, but it might come with a twist, so be careful. Okay. So in a 2014 study, and I liked all of these because they're all within the last ten years, researchers studying the notion of grades and confirmation bias, again, divided participants into three conditions, a graded visible condition in which participants were individually evaluated by an authority on a range of one to six, but in front of the group so everybody knew what grades everyone was getting. A non graded visible condition where there was the presence of an authority to oversee the work but not evaluation. And then the last one was a non graded, non visible condition in which no authority was present during the experiment and participants were not graded. So the last two conditions are both non graded, but the difference is visibility. Gotcha. Okay? So fact or fiction? The researchers found that the bias for confirming evidence, confirmation bias, was higher in the non graded, non visible group than the non graded visible group. So what wait. What what is the bias that they're

Speaker 1 that they're concerned with? Okay. So, basically,

Speaker 2 the amount of information that they used that confirmed their previous hypothesis as opposed to including disconfirming information.

Speaker 1 Wait. What is the task? Like, are they actually doing?

Speaker 2 Gosh. I was hoping that it wouldn't it wouldn't

Speaker 1 I was hoping that it wouldn't So you're saying like that's like they're working on some kind of like project, some kind of problem. And question is whether or not the group had more confirmation bias or not when gathering evidence for that that product in a ungraded environment versus a graded environment?

Speaker 2 Well, in this one, both of the conditions that I said are not graded. Okay. So now this gets to visibility. So did they find that con however they measure confirmation bias, right, like in percentage or raw figures or whatever, was they found more confirmation bias present in the non graded non visible group. So the ones which no authority was present during the experiment and participants were not graded. Yep. Then in the non graded visible group, so that would be the one in which there was a presence of an authority but not an evaluation. And that clear as day. That

Speaker 1 how that sounds. So there's two sides of this. I'm, like, trying to fight. Okay. One side is I feel I I feel like my own bias would say that by having an authoritative figure there, that you would be less likely to have confirmation bias because you'd wanna ensure the person who's an authority knows that, like, you're thinking about different things and you're you're working with different perspectives. However, the other side of me also thinks about the fact that typically when you have people that are judging you, you tend to jump to conclusions faster because you wanna find the right answer. Mhmm. And you you, like, wanna hurry up and get to the end. So I could I could see an argument for both sides. I'm gonna go with the fact that having visibility as in having an authoritative figure makes you more likely to have confirmation bias because you wanna, like you wanna get the answer correct for that person.

Speaker 2 Oh, okay. Now that's interesting. So Yeah. I will tell you that this is I think you had framed it in a way that would make what I had said fiction. Right? So if we're talking about the researchers found that the bias for confirming evidence, the confirmation bias was higher in the non graded, non visible group than in the non graded visible group, and that is a fact.

Speaker 1 So they did have more confirmation bias when they were not visible.

Speaker 2 Correct. And I think that might be the opposite of what you said. That is the opposite of what I said. Okay. Yeah. It's gonna make for great podcast content. It really is. Okay. And I'm gonna put this up on the thing here. Can you see that v right there? Yep. That middle group in the just, again, a visual prop for an audio podcast is just v going down that basically, like, one group is really high, one group is really low, and the other group is, like, halfway. Yes. So the group in the middle is the non graded but visible group. They had the lowest preference bias or confirmation bias compared to the graded visible group, which had the highest amount of confirming, you know, evidence. And the non graded non visible group was that is that third one that you can kinda see. They had almost as much as the, as the other group. Now I thought this was fascinating. Okay? So they found that the graded visible participants showed a far higher preference for confirming evidence than either of the non graded groups. The paper I'm quoting from is called, grading reduces consideration of disconfirming evidence. So they did discuss what they called, quote, an interesting although unexpected result was that the preference effect was higher in the non graded non visible condition compared to the non graded visible condition for the exact reasons that you had mentioned, Chris. So I thought maybe that's what you were gonna gonna go with here. So they said, this may suggest that when one's work is not expected to be visible, individuals are not particularly motivated to revise their preferences. This is consistent with research on social loafing, which I had not heard of before, showing that people reduce their individual contributions to group work when their effort is not visible, which I found fascinating. Right? And kind of shows, a a lot of what we've talked about, which is, you know, making that work authentic and public facing and for an audience, be it for peers or for an Internet audience or for parents or someone else, right, kind of kind of triggers in kids sort of that that need to, that need to perform the task. Right. So that way, you know, they could the kind of that social pressure factor of it here too. And the people who in the non graded non visible group just didn't you know, they were just like, yeah, kind of whatever, about that thing. So so I thought that was really interesting. On the right track, and I I saw it. Then you flipped it. That's why I had to ask about it. Oh. But yeah. But but even the non graded the not graded, but the visible. Right? So the visibility, right, improved a kind of thought process that we would want students to participate in, which is, right, let's seek out disconfirming evidence for the things that we think. And then we'll, you know, put thesis, antithesis, and we'll come to to better conclusions about that. But the graded, visible condition just caused kids to look for evidence of things that they already think and believe. So that creates, again, the kind of wrong kind of critical thinking that we would want kids to be able to engage with, which is why I thought for as confusing as the study is, I thought it was really important to think about in terms of creating the kinds of thinkers and creating the kinds of kids that that we want, you know, is is

Speaker 1 yeah. Well, let's do this. Really quick. Actual actual lightning round. Woah. Alright. Real quick. Tie breaker question. Alright. Alright. I already got the tie breaker question. I was thinking about it in that that explanation. So, here's the lightning round question. It's gonna be an a b c or d question. If you get this right I love it. I'll get sent out. If I if you get it wrong, you're getting sent out. Okay. So here's the question. I'm gonna call back. I'm gonna tie this all back to some BF Skinner behaviorism. So all of the studies that are referenced by behaviorist cognitive science people are almost entirely taking place in a lab, whereas all of the research that we just cited here for on grading are taking place in classrooms. As in, we're taking groups of students who are working together, actual human beings. They might be in a lab like setting, but they are still, like, actual people. Whereas the vast majority of behavioral studies feature, like, animals or, like, individuals, like, seated in a room by themselves. It's not it's meant to be hyper controlled. So you hopefully, you don't know this, but you you might already know it. So, you know, Pavlov was famous a famous kind of, like, precursor to behaviorism for Pavlov's bell. You know? The the dog would be the you know, the dog would ring the bell and it would get something and salivate. Right. What animal was B. F. Skinner famous for using in practically all of his experiments? In fact, they wrote about it all the time in, like, science weekly. He was known at Harvard for keeping a bunch of these animals for all of his studies. Can you know the answer already? I believe the I believe the answer is Pigeons. The answer is Pigeons. My god. Wait.

Speaker 2 Alright. I'm the executive director now.

Speaker 1 No. It'll be even better than last time. You knew the answer before I could even do it. I didn't even give you the ABCD.

Speaker 2 But, you know, I had a I had a thought because I was thinking of those those, Little Albert experiments. Do you remember hearing about those? Did they make a child deathly afraid of this mouse or a rat or something like this? I have no idea. What? Okay. Well, maybe I won't even say anything about that. Yeah. The Little Albert experiment. A controlled experiment showing empirical evidence of classical conditioning in humans. Yeah. So I I I believe that was no. Who was that? Oh, John Watson. I got you. Okay. But, yeah, they made they made a they made a little boy terrified of a of a mouse, and it's it's very difficult to watch.

Speaker 1 Fascinating. Wait. One more BF Skinner question. Bonus follow-up question for me to come back inside the airlock. Do you know what yeah. I'm knocking for air right now. Do you know what was the most famous experiment that BF Skinner did with his pigeons? Oh. It deals with World War II and the Cold War.

Speaker 2 With his pigeons? Yeah. Well, I know that he had them they hit a they hit a little lever. Mhmm. Right? They could, like, peck the thing and then

Speaker 1 then some food would come out. Yeah. I don't know what task What were they training to do though? Like what made that research so public? Because yes, they did hit the lever and then they get a piece of food for it, but what was the purpose of that? What were they training them to do? Yes. No. No. No.

Speaker 2 Shoot. You know what? I don't I don't remember. I don't know. What is it? You can I'm come back

Speaker 1 coming back in. Alright. So this is another true BS Skinner fact. Despite being like a kind of a terrible person when you think about his legacy, the guy is hyper interesting. So he was on a project called Project Orcon, which is also known as Project Pigeon, which the goal of this was to create pigeon guided missiles where pigeons would carry missiles with their with their feet, with their claws. And they were trained to carry these missiles and then peck to get the food. Like, the reason why they were doing the behavior is, like, pecking for the food. The idea would be, like, they would dive bomb, using a missile and just, like, blow people up or buildings up or whatever. Oh, my god. I know. How dark and weird is that? It the the project never got approved by the military, but it was funded by the military. So, like, they really did do this.

Speaker 2 It just never was, like, actually used at combat. My god. If that's not a commentary on the use of behaviorist techniques in the classroom, I I don't I don't really know what else to say. Like, speaks for itself. Wild. Oh, using classical conditioning,

Speaker 1 we can get people to want to blow each other up. Yeah. It's like, hey, using possible conditioning, we can make everybody hyper patriotic and they never question what their country does. And Yeah. Everyone will just get along because everyone will be the exact same. And then they'll carry bombs and go blow up people in other countries. Great. There you go. Isn't it? Yeah. And then they'll get a little treat at the end to We did it. For their hard work. Problem solved. With that, the podcast.

Speaker 2 Yeah. So, again, thank you. If you've if you've gone on this long, I so apologize. Yeah. If you The goal is to make this podcast five hours long by the time we're done doing them. Yep. Exactly. It'll just be a full day. You'll it'll be like the Lord of the Rings extended edition at some point. But, my goodness. Yes. Thank you so much. You know, feel free to share it. Send us q and a if you thought that that was I I enjoyed answering those questions. So if you like that, send us more questions. We can tackle those in future episodes. Yeah. Follow us at Humores Pro. I'm at Covington E D U. And I'm at McNutt E D U. Nice. We corner the market on the e D U's. Yeah. And, hopefully, we can you know, we'll do this again and together, we can restore humanity together.

Speaker 1 Nailed it. Thank you again for listening to Human Restoration Projects podcast. I hope this conversation leaves you inspired and write it push the progressive envelope of education. You can learn more about progressive education, support our cause, and stay tuned to this podcast and other updates on our website at humanrestorationproject.org.