Education Bookcast

Eric Jensen is a former teacher with a PhD in Human Development from Fielding Graduate University. In 1981, he co-founded "the United States' first and largest brain-compatible learning program"[1], and he has been the head of Jensen Learning, a company that trains teachers what he calls "brain-friendly" or "brain-compatible" teaching and learning principles, since 1995. Brain-Based Learning is one of the first books that I read as I was getting into finding out more about education research several years ago.

I am quite disappointed with this book. It's not very good. The problems with it are numerous.

Firstly, it does not appear to have any central guiding principles. Generally, a good book will give you ideas in the form of kernels which will be applicable in many situations, and it will show you how those central ideas operate so that you can understand their power and generality. In Brain-Based Learning, Jensen sets out what he wants to tell the reader as essentially a list. This makes it difficult to make head or tail of the book as a whole.

Secondly, there is a pervasive lack of references. This means that most of his assertions are stated just as bare-faced facts (with occasional "research has shown..." + random fact, which no reference), meaning that we are supposed to just take him on his word. In some cases, his references are highly dubious, such as when he cites a video produced by Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) inventor Richard Bandler as the only source for over a page of information and suggestions. NLP is generally understood by psychologists to have little scientific support (what science there is on it tends to show that it doesn't work), so this is obviously somewhat dubious.

Thirdly, most of his suggestions are obvious in the first place. When he suggests that children need good nutrition or that people need to be hydrated, who is he arguing against? Who didn't think that, or was unaware of that, in the first place? There is a sense in which he is using the idea that his approaches are "brain-based" to lend extra authority to his statements, but the statements themselves were often already well-known and widely accepted approaches prior to his advocacy for them.

There are many more criticisms that can be made of this book, and I do make them in the audio. I end up doing a mixture of pulling out the occasional interesting idea, enriching what he writes with context that actually makes it make sense, and pointing out the many places where his work is not useful, or is just confusing. I hope that, despite the rather negative nature of this episode, you will still find it worth listening to.

Enjoy the episode.

[1] Quoted from http://www.ascd.org/Publications/ascd-authors/eric-jensen.aspx on 9th January 2018.

Music by podcastthemes.com.

Jane McGonigal is a game designer who believes that, in many ways, games bring out the best in people. The reason for their popularity, she claims, is that they satisfy fundamental human needs. This leads, for example, to the highly insightful and completely counterintuitive notion that a big reason for people playing games is that it makes them feel productive.

She peppers her book with reality "fixes" - comparisons of games with reality, where games come out on top, and lead the way to a better future. Here is a full list of those fixes.

1. Unnecessary obstacles: Compared with games, reality is too easy. Games challenge us with voluntary obstacles and help us put our personal strengths to better use.
2. Emotional activation: Compared with games, reality is depressing. Games focus our energy, with relentless optimism, on something we're good at and enjoy.
3. More satisfying work: Compared with games, reality is unproductive. Games give us clearer missions and more satisfying, hands-on work.
4. Better hope of success: Compared with games, reality is hopeless. Games eliminate our fear of failure and improve our chances of success.
5. Stronger social connectivity: Compared with games, reality is disconnected. Games build stronger social bonds and lead to more active social networks. The more time we spend interacting within our social networks, the more likely we are to generate a subset of positive emotions known as "prosocial emotions."
6. Epic scale: Compared with games, reality is trivial. Games make us a part of something bigger and give epic meaning in our actions.
7. Wholehearted participation: Compared with games, reality is hard to get into. Games motivate us to participate more fully in whatever we're doing.
8. Meaningful rewards when we need them most: Compared with games, reality is pointless and unrewarding. Games help us feel more rewarded for making our best effort.
9. More fun with strangers: Compared with games, reality is lonely and isolating. Games help us band together and create powerful communities from scratch.
10. Happiness hacks: Compared with games, reality is hard to swallow. Games make it easier to take good advice and try out happier habits.
11. A sustainable engagement economy: Compared with games, reality is unsustainable. The gratifications we get from playing games are an infinitely renewable resource.
12. More epic wins: Compared with games, reality is unambitious. Games help us define awe-inspiring goals and tackle seemingly impossible social missions together.
13. Ten thousand hours collaborating: Compared with games, reality is disorganised and divided. Games help us make a more concerted effort - and over time, they give us collaboration superpowers.
14. Massively multiplayer foresight: Reality is stuck in the present. Games help us imagine the future together.

The book has many case studies and psychological experiments backing up the points that it makes. Overall it reads like a sort of manifesto, but for me, the most important thing was the way in which it explained things about people that I never realised before. It gave me a new perspective on human motivation, on learning, and on myself. I hope you will gain from it as I did.

Enjoy the episode.

I spent a month in summer in Lithuania on a language course. Some events while I was there prompted me to realise something about education that I had heard before, but never quite understood.

The music played in this episode is Lietuvos istorijos repas by Šventinis bunkuchenas.

Enjoy the episode.

Which country was the first ever to have universal, free, compulsory education?

Zero points if you said "Prussia". The correct answer is the Aztec empire, almost four centuries before the oft-cited German state.

I happened to find out this bizarre fact from an aside in a YouTube video, and decided to look into it. If this isn't an independent societal data point on the development of education, then I don't know what is!

In this episode, I discuss the article Developing Face and Heart in the Time of the Fifth Sun: An Examination of Aztec Education by Timothy Reagan. You will hear about Aztec society and values, and how the education system fit within the society in order to achieve its educational aims. You will also hear a lot of bloody stories of human sacrifice.

Enjoy the episode.

I realised I missed something, and I kicked myself.

For a while I've been toying with the idea that learning occurs in two stages, which can be mapped between cognitive science and neuroscience:

1. Exposure to new material -> neuronal connections
2. Practice and repetition -> myelination

...with elaboration (e.g. relating one piece of information to another) being a practice that involves both stages.

This model appeals to me for several reasons. Firstly, it is simple, which is a relief in the complex world of teaching and learning. Secondly, it is grounded in the idea that learning is all about addition to long-term memory, which is now a deeply ingrained idea with me. Thirdly, it is in line with the way that most teachers would teach, which makes sense - you would think that teachers tend to do something more or less right after so many years of experience.

However, there is one anomaly that I couldn't place in this model: pre-testing. It turns out that when you are given a test on something before you start learning, even if you're completely ignorant of the topic, it boosts your learning compared to just starting off with study straight away. How could this make sense with the above? For a while I just brushed it aside, but now I realised how it would fit in, as "stage zero": humility, or realisation of ignorance.

As I understand it, this is a stage where you can overcome your cognitive biases which make you not want to expend effort to learn anything, by assuming that you already know this, or that there is nothing to learn. Immediate exposure to a test shatters this illusion, and makes you more able - even subconsciously - to pay attention to the lesson.

One of the great things about this way of thinking is that it makes room for some "progressive" ideas within the starkly "traditional" view of stages 1 and 2. While I still feel that progressive education is largely a bad idea and a failure, I don't want to become dogmatically married to another way of thinking, especially not one which is to some extent defined by its opposition to progressivism. The chance for at least some reconciliation through synthesis is something that I warmly welcome.

In the recording, I also discuss how this relates to ideas of mental warm-ups, desirable difficulty, and the differences between learning and performance.

Enjoy the episode.