On: Teaching

Episode: N/A

Date: December 9, 2013

Background: School administrator and author.

Key Subjects:

• Better teachers.
  • Teaching is a performance profession involving complex behavioral tasks.
  • Requires practice.
    • Automate things you don’t want to think about “during the game”.
      • Get better at the core task.
    • Free up cognitive processing capacity to worry about other things.
• Better students.
  • “At bats” (again, practice).
    • Repetition: learning requires repetition.
    • Variation: variety of contexts -> broader understanding and application of concepts.
    • Example: wordplay (using a word often and in different circumstances) enhances vocabulary enhances reading (understanding the differences and nuances).
  • Education is feedback.
    • Check for understanding: what students know and don’t know.
      • “It’s not whether you taught it, it’s whether they learnt it”.
    • Normalize errors: getting it wrong is the normal state of learning.
    • Make errors more visible.
      • Examples: cold calling (broader class engagement), call and response (high energy back and forth).
• Making teachers better.
  • Three areas of competence.
    • Teaching techniques.
    • Managing a class room.
    • Subject-specific knowledge (may be hardest to train).
  • Observe, provide feedback, evaluate, etc.
• Better learning: importance of writing.
  • Writing: use specific word and syntax, capture what an idea is and what it isn’t, complexity.