[00:01] Announcer:
Welcome to Principal Center Radio, helping you build capacity for instructional leadership. Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center, Dr. Justin Bader. Welcome, everyone, to Principal Center Radio.
[00:13] SPEAKER_01:
I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to welcome to the program Dr. Zach Groeschel. Zach is a former teacher, author, and consultant who brings the science of learning into schools. He is the host of the Progressively Incorrect podcast and a frequent presenter at ResearchEd and other conferences around the world. And he's the author of the new book, Just Tell Them, The Art and Science of Explanation.
[00:38] Announcer:
And now, our feature presentation.
[00:41] SPEAKER_01:
Zach, welcome to Principal Center Radio.
[00:42] SPEAKER_00:
Thanks for having me, Justin.
[00:44] SPEAKER_01:
Well, I'm excited to speak with you face to face and in this format because we've been chatting for months now on Twitter or X and have talked about a lot of topics in education and education research. And I'm very excited that you are putting a lot of your research into the book, Just Tell Them. So take us into the idea behind the book. What need did you see within the field to explain Explanation?
[01:10] SPEAKER_00:
Right. Well, when I was first becoming a teacher, it was really important to my professors and to the people that eventually went to evaluate me, my principals. It was important that they know that I should really minimize my teacher talk. They would say things like, you can smile and walk away to let students get unstuck. They would say sort of arbitrary time limits and how long I talked, like let's maybe talk only for five minutes or maybe talk only the amount of minutes of the age of the students you're working with in a row. And never did I get really any advice or even any training on how to explain stuff.
[01:48]
And when you think about it, if you think about a great teacher in your life or just somebody in your life who's really good at explaining, that's often what we intuitively associate with being a great teacher, someone who can break something down with clarity, who makes you feel smart, makes something that's really complex seem simple. And I felt there was a need for a book about explanations. There's been a lot of books about explicit instruction and direct instruction, but without the emphasis on modeling. So I wanted to kind of bridge that gap and have explicit instruction and direct instruction, but with a explanation and demonstration presentation focus.
[02:26] SPEAKER_01:
Because, you know, I've never really heard anybody say explaining things to kids is bad, right? There's nobody who's really opposed to good, clear explanations. What people seem to be opposed to is an excess of teacher talk, right? And we've probably all had teachers who just talk the entire period and nobody ever learns anything and nobody ever does anything other than listen. And of course, we know that that is too much of a good thing becoming a bad thing. And if the good thing is not even done well, then...
[02:54]
in no amount is it a good thing and so it's really curious to me that you know we get this advice don't talk too much don't dominate the discussion too much don't spend too much of your time just talking to your class so if we're going to minimize the amount of time we spend talking and explaining to our students it makes total sense that we would want to be as good at that as possible as efficient at that as possible right because if we're not thoughtful if we're not intentional if we're not careful then those explanations are going to go longer. They're going to be less effective. It's like the old Mark Twain quote that said, I'm sorry this letter is so long, I didn't have time to make it shorter. You know, that kind of idea.
[03:29] SPEAKER_00:
Well, I think that the critics of Teacher Talk have got some of that right, right? In the book, it's really important to me to focus on when the communications are made, that they're made as minimal statements, meaning only the words that you need to say are said. We don't go off on tangents. And I define different types of tangents, different types of discontinuous language where you insert something that's just not necessary or should be saved for another time. The biggest chapter of the book is the second chapter where we talk about how explanations in terms of teaching are really interactive. It's not like a TED Talk where you're supposed to stand up and everyone listens, but every minute or so, very frequently, maybe as much as nine to 12 times, in the course of an explanation, you should be eliciting responses from students.
[04:20]
And that's not only just to check if they're understanding what you're saying, but to check if they're listening, right? You want to make sure that as you're explaining that your audience is captivated, and if they can't even answer, you know, one word responses, or they can't turn and talk and say anything productive about what you just said, you know, they're not listening, right? Or that your explanation isn't landing. The bulk of the book really addresses that criticism of teacher talk, but then it really goes into all the other areas like where should the teacher stand? What kind of visuals should they use? All trying to draw on sort of the movement around the science of learning, like how does cognitive load play a part?
[04:57]
How should attention be directed and regulated? So I understand those concerns. I just don't think that that means we abandon explanation. And I think it actually means we focus on it a little bit more.
[05:12] SPEAKER_01:
Wonderful. So yeah, if we're going to kind of optimize our teacher talk, and if we're going to explain things that need to be explained in as clear and concise a way as possible, we have to recognize that there are some best practices around explanation. As the title of the book says, there is an art and a science to explanation. First of all, is there any basis to that rule of thumb about student attention spans that if I'm going to talk to my class. I have, you know, five minutes for five-year-olds, 10 minutes for 10-year-olds, 15 minutes for 15-year-olds. Like, is that a real thing that's come up in your research at all?
[05:45] SPEAKER_00:
In short, it's not a thing, but it is true that attention is measured in various ways and different people have different amounts of it. But really, a lot of times they allude to like, you know, we have a memory like a goldfish and they make up some sort of like seconds. It's funny how, you know, attempts to actually measure the attention of a goldfish have not worked out very well. In short, no, an attention span relating to age or having a rule of thumb doesn't work. And we can sort of think of it in this way. If you are someone who's interested in what the person is saying, your attention is going to increase.
[06:18]
If you know a lot about the topic, imagine you're going to a university lecture around a topic that you know a lot about, you can sustain your attention for longer than someone who doesn't know anything about it. Right. It's a very difficult thing to say, you know, a set amount of minutes. So I actually avoid any sort of minute amount and say there's no hard set rule. But I do want after every small segment of information, thinking about more how many items are being funneled into students working memories. Once I give a small chunk or a small presentation of information, I want to immediately stop and pause.
[06:54]
give some processing time. And I want to ask questions about it, give students a chance to rehearse the material before sort of continuing the flow of information. This is the problem is like that unrelenting flow of like transient information going in one ear and out the other. How do we pause it? How do we make the material more permanent, concrete, presented in smaller steps is sort of where I focus.
[07:19] SPEAKER_01:
We think about the bad lecture that we've all experienced, right? Maybe in a college class where you have a professor who just drones on and on. They say, oh, well, we have to cover three chapters today, so let's get to it. And then they drone on and on. There's none of what you just described. There's none of that pausing and chunking and making sure that everybody's with you and limiting the amount that we're throwing at people at once.
[07:39]
This is probably a good time to get into memory and cognitive load theory a little bit. Set that up for us. What is your understanding of cognitive load theory and how it relates to explanations?
[07:49] SPEAKER_00:
Right. Well, if we were going to use the PhD lingo, I would say cognitive load theory is the theoretical orientation of the book. But basically, it's the theory that throughout the book, it's threaded into, you have to sort of understand certain components of the mind in order to make sense of why each of the techniques works or doesn't work. But this is cognitive load theory. And I present this to schools because they love this stuff. They love talking about the mind and how it works.
[08:17]
It's basically there are two structures that are important for teachers to know. We don't need to know about myelination and prefrontal cortexes and all these parts of the brain. We simply need to really attend to two structures, which is working memory and long-term memory. Now, working memory, we've already mentioned, when you get a lot of information incoming at once, like the words I'm saying to you, you have to work with it in mind. You have to process it in working memory. And working memory is limited to like three to five items at a time, right?
[08:49]
So if I'm presenting lots of new vocab, new definitions, adding new pictures, each of these is a different item the student has to attend to. And they also have to attend to things that the teacher doesn't intend to enter in the presentation, right? Like students being distracting, a broken, rattling air conditioner, you know, whatever. All of these things have to be thought about. If the limits of working memory are exceeded, then thought breaks down and learning doesn't take place, right? Or just a little bit of the information is stored in long-term memory and not the intended part or not the whole thing.
[09:22]
And I always say that you can't think about cognition and cognitive load theory without thinking about long-term memory. Because long-term memory is where it all goes. The whole point of this is to store it in long-term memory. And if you know the material already, you sort of override the limitations of long-term memory. Experts or students who know a lot about a topic because they've been properly taught don't need to be explained the material again, right? We can start to fade out our explanations, stop giving so much support, giving students a chance to do that kind of inquiry or discovery type of learning.
[09:58]
once it's in long-term memory, once they've rehearsed it and practiced it, once this teacher has structured it for the students, they can start to sort of release the students into sort of more independent work. So yeah, that's basically the theory in a nutshell.
[10:14] SPEAKER_01:
Right. And I think one of the key ideas there is that working memory, short-term memory, I don't know if I'm supposed to be using those interchangeably, but there's a real limit to how much can fit in our working memory. But long-term memory is basically limitless, right? We can hold kind of an infinite amount of information in long-term memory.
[10:31] SPEAKER_00:
Exactly. I mean, and you can think of like a great example would be knowing a second language, right? Like to know a second language is to know hundreds and hundreds of words and hundreds of structures, grammatical structures, conjugations, right? Each of these is an item that initially as you're learning the language, the teacher needs to present one at a time, right? You're not going to learn everything in the language at once, but eventually you can speak a second language. And when you're doing that, you're going to retrieve from long-term memory thousands of elements at once.
[11:04]
But why is it that when you retrieve those thousands of elements and you bring it into working memory, are you not overloaded? It's because The knowledge that you have in long-term memory is basically processed as a single item in working memory. It doesn't overload working memory when you remember or recall or retrieve. So it's actually incredible that we have this superpower called long-term memory in which once it's stored there and once we know it, we can use it and we can think critically. We can solve problems in our environment much more efficiently.
[11:35] SPEAKER_01:
Yeah, that's a great explanation. It kind of reminds me of the idea of area codes. And when I was a kid, I grew up in Houston and Houston was switching to having two area codes. And when you start to hear a phone number and you think, okay, they're just going to give me the last seven digits. They're not going to give me the area code. You can kind of hold a phone number and like phone numbers have the length that they have because they fit in our memory they're not too long for us to remember for a few seconds but if somebody keeps going with the digits and you realize oh no those first three digits actually were the area code and i'm not familiar with it and now i'm overloaded i get distracted by that that kind of thing seems like it must happen quite frequently for students when we haven't really thought about what we're asking them to hold in working memory what we're asking them to retrieve from their long-term memory and i wanted to ask your thoughts on how that factors in to strategies or approaches like productive struggle because this is something that i think you and i have have seen quite a bit of discussion lately about on twitter this idea that it's better to let students
[12:37]
grapple and maybe not be overwhelmed, but at least not be explicitly told what we want them to learn because there's some value in productive struggle. So taking what we've talked about so far and what you talk about in the book, help us understand that issue of productive struggle a little bit.
[12:53] SPEAKER_00:
Right. Well, it's a very popular term. A lot of the people, the folks in math who, you know, they're not here to debate it, so I won't mention their names, but a lot of the most popular folks in the world of math are in favor of this idea. It's not really well operationalized or defined, like at what point something is productive struggle and at what point it's just regular old challenge, you know, just rigor. Right. But the main idea that I take issue with that I think the research is in opposition to is the idea of withholding explanations and examples and guidance from students, especially during that initial sort of novice stage when they're just being introduced to the material.
[13:36]
It's okay, I guess. We have 180 days in the school year to once in a while maybe challenge students with a problem they've never seen before. But Let's think about prior knowledge when it comes to that problem. Is it a problem that the student has a few tools to work with in long-term memory that they can retrieve and bring into working memory? And then they're really only dealing with a small difference or a small little trick that's embedded in the problem. And now they're only thinking about one additional thing that they don't know.
[14:07]
Well, that might not overload them, right? But this idea, especially when we think about our lower students who are two, three, sometimes four grade levels behind, being confronted day after day with problems that the teacher is inadequately explained. And then the teacher thinks there's some sort of brain mechanism that is being heated up and stimulated that allows them to learn from facing frustration and failure. To me, that's just nonsense. And so really guided teaching, teaching in which the teacher slowly presents new information, whether that's in the form of a task or in the form of an explanation, and then slowly sort of elevates the challenge, that's the whole principle of scaffolding, right? And that's just good teaching.
[14:53]
So I'm opposed to any form of productive struggle, so-called productive struggle, that withholds information that could be readily present given to students that would allow them to be successful on the tasks and feel good about themselves while they're learning.
[15:07] SPEAKER_01:
So help me with the counter argument, because, you know, I don't want to strum in this. I want to make sure to present the counter argument as honestly as I can. I feel like the advocates of productive struggle would say that it's kind of like helping the butterfly out of the cocoon to over scaffold or to over explain something. Like there's this idea that whoever is doing the thinking or the talking is doing the learning. And if the teacher takes on too much of that, the students won't get to. And we're kind of not giving them the reps that they need or we're not giving them the exercise they need.
[15:37]
Like the track coach can't run the laps for the kids, so to speak. So with that kind of metaphor, and granted, that's a metaphor, not really necessarily how learning works. Where does that fall apart in your mind?
[15:50] SPEAKER_00:
Well, when we talk about practice, practice is the essential component of all learning, right? Everyone would agree that you need to, in order to get something, you need to do it yourself, right? The task needs to be turned over to the students so that they can do it. And I would argue against some of the same folks that like productive struggle actually give students too little practice. They're too busy struggling with a single problem than solving hundreds of problems in the form of drills that they could be doing a lot more quickly and with a lot less effort, right? They're giving them one or two problems, having them sit in groups where one or two students is really monopolizing the airtime.
[16:30]
And the students in the background are sort of fading out, socially loafing, maybe distracting others. And they're not getting the practice. But the idea that practice is an important component is obvious and it is backed by 100 years of psychology, right? What we're talking about is how to hand over a task the student didn't previously know how to do, how do we hand it over to them in the most gentle and efficient and motivating way, really? And for me, that starts with this idea of promoting success at the onset. I want to give you questions that you can answer so you can see I can do this.
[17:06]
And then I want to give you problems that have you apply things that I taught you so that you can see it in front of you, the success that you're making, right? I'm getting good grades. I'm just like all my peers who I thought were smarter than me. I'm keeping up with them. My teacher is bringing me along, not letting me fall off the bus, right? And then finally, when I'm doing it by myself, yeah, now it's me.
[17:28]
I can do it by myself and I can even handle a trick or two here and there. I can even handle some inquiry questions. or some discovery as some people like to call it.
[17:36] SPEAKER_01:
Very well said. And as you mentioned, none of this is especially new, right? This is very well-established science of learning or cognitive psychology type stuff. And I wanted to ask your thoughts on some of the pushback against that well-established research that seemed to me to be grounded in aesthetics or in vibes, that having students work in groups has better aesthetics. Having students stand up and write on the wall has a certain vibe that feels better to people. And using words like practice and drill and independent maybe have different vibes, even if the research behind them is a lot more solid.
[18:17]
So I know this is probably getting away from the book a little bit, but what do you think is going on with all of this decision making in education that's happening based on aesthetics and not necessarily on evidence?
[18:31] SPEAKER_00:
Well, right. We have an emphasis in leadership on evaluation and less on coaching, which is my area of expertise is how to coach someone to get better. But we focus a lot of time on measuring their performance or on pretending we know how to measure it. So I think what happens in some sort of dysfunctional teaching cultures is we have a lot of teachers who are trying to create a look that would fit on the brochure of the school that could, that looks good on the Facebook page. The teacher, the principal comes in and they convey to all their teachers, this is what they want. By taking pictures of group work and exciting stuff without really digging in deeper and figuring out the students' responses are not very sophisticated or no one's really paying attention.
[19:16]
When we bring parents around on that sort of school tour, we take them to the most exciting places, the robotics studio and the art room. And we skip over just the menial and slow march towards mastery that happens in all the other subjects, right? Really, teaching doesn't need to be all about bells and whistles and flashy, sexy teaching. It really is about conveying really time-tested, interesting, exciting material to the students and having them work with it in mind, and then do something with it. And a lot of times that means sitting and thinking about stuff. It means writing things down in silence, right?
[19:57]
It means a very quick turn and talk and then back up to the teacher as they continue where they left off. And it doesn't have to involve taking out the yarn and the markers and having a cardboard spill out your doors, right?
[20:10] SPEAKER_01:
And those things, I mean, are almost heretical to say these days that students should be sitting and thinking and solving problems and not necessarily doing things that are easily photographable or look good on a tour. But yeah, I mean, if we look at the evidence, if we look at the decades of research that we have to build on, I think a lot of these vibes-based practices really don't rest on much of a foundation. So I wanna make sure we get back to the book here. And I wanted to maybe pose the scenario of a teacher who maybe does spend too much time talking, but wants to get better at explaining. And they've picked up your book because they know you have some good guidance for them. So for someone who feels like they talk too much already, but wants to be good at explaining and i'll just say for you know my own personal experience i was a science teacher and i always felt a tension between explaining and letting students get started but often if i don't explain enough then students don't know what to do or they misuse the materials and then the lab is over because we're out of materials you know there's always this tension between explaining enough but not too much so how do i think about that and then what are some strategies for actually explaining well
[21:22] SPEAKER_00:
Right. Well, one of the things that's been very useful to me is rehearsing explanations. A lot of times our planning, depending on the school, revolves around resource creation, right? Teachers are making a lot of things, you know, going and finding them on Google and Pinterest, try to basically create a curriculum from scratch. So that's no good in the first place, right? But so really what they should be focused on as teachers is practicing rehearsing.
[21:48]
What they're going to do, what they're going to say, and how the students are going to use it. So really rehearsing explanations is a big part. You could work with your instructional coach to have them be an audience. You can present to an empty room. You can use video recordings. There's a lot of different providers now.
[22:05]
One of them that I like to tell people about is called StepLab. where basically you can record video, you can have your coach talk to you about it, you can see the unproductive features of your speech, ums and uhs and hesitations, false starts, vague and ambiguous explanations. And over time, as you grow in your expertise with the material, you can see the most efficient economical route towards conveying that information. It's so great to, even though it's kind of embarrassing, it's so great to see yourself talking and to realize like, next time I would do this differently. In terms of like strategies, and you mentioned being a science teacher, I have a whole chapter all about visuals. And a lot of times with science teaching, visuals in the form of diagrams, because so much of science learning is like learning about a process, the water cycle or photosynthesis, right?
[22:58]
So focusing in on how to pair images with speaking and sometimes actually getting off PowerPoint, even though I use PowerPoint a lot, getting off of it to pair just small line drawings as you're speaking on a blank canvas, progressively adding to the presentation, signaling to which parts of the presentation students should be focused on and pairing that with minimal statements with lots of interactive elements to get formative feedback on your explanation. If I could plug one more part, which I think it's interesting and it taps into engagement with lecturing. A lot of people say, be more engaging, right? I want you to engage them. So I have a whole chapter all about leveraging emotions, using stories and a narrative structure to convey information.
[23:49]
This might actually really fit with history teachers who know the events of history and They can be told in a dry manner, like an instruction manual, or they can be told like it's this epic story in which, you know, highlighting the conflict that makes it so darn interesting, right? So there's a chapter on that, which gets, it gets almost out of my, out of that dry area of, hey, only say the words you need to be saying, you know, be more specific and direct to this is a performance and you need to bring it, you know? So yeah, it's exciting stuff.
[24:21] SPEAKER_01:
Love it. It's impossible to square the idea that all teacher explanation is boring and unengaging with the incredible popularity of Miss Chela's TikTok videos on world history. I've seen just a handful of those, and they're incredible. She translates into Gen Z slang and...
[24:43]
Even adults who are not interested in the topic get sucked into these incredible explanations just because they're presented in a compelling way. So much cool stuff there. How much of this is discipline specific? How much of this depends on the specific subject? Because I think early on in our conversation, we were talking about a lot of things that I would say most closely paralleled math instruction, building up concepts and productive struggle. and then we've talked about social studies and science a bit how much of the book is devoted to you know specific subject areas and how much is kind of cross-cutting concepts
[25:16] SPEAKER_00:
It's intentionally a sort of general strategy book that could be used across the different subjects. And, you know, when I present to schools, I often say like, look, I was not a 12th grade calculus teacher and I wasn't a preschool teacher, even though my mom was and I visited, I haven't personally taught it. Right. So a lot of times the book is asking the teacher to make a connection to something that they teach or something that they use and and see how a principle, a general principle that may have been found with college students, or it may have been shown, you know, with much younger students, how does that principle look in your context? It would be great, however, you know, for every subject to be represented as a book. And so if I could just plug Adam Boxer's book on teaching secondary science, that is a book I would recommend if you want to know about explanations, specifically explicit instruction in science for secondary students, right?
[26:12]
But the examples I tried to draw on were as varied as possible. PE, contexts, art, drama, they're all represented somewhere with the caveat that you're gonna have to do, you're gonna have to see the principle and see how it's applied because you are the subject expert and you need to reclaim that and realize like, I know my material in and out. Now, how do I take this principle to make this information come across in the most efficient, straightforward way possible?
[26:39] SPEAKER_01:
Yeah, and I'm thinking of, You know, being a choir member and hearing, you know, some really good explanations from great choir directors that I've had of things that, you know, like they don't have a lot in common with, you know, explicit instruction in the sense of math or science. But if you can really get a sense of what somebody means and be brought together as a class by a good explanation.
[27:01] SPEAKER_00:
Well, I guess I would just kind of end with how I end the book, which is really, I think, like a social justice sort of perspective on this, right? We have a lot of students who find learning very challenging. I was an interventionist for math for many years where kids were coming in and in eighth grade, learning at a first grade, learning addition at the first grade level. And they don't find learning to be effortless. They don't absorb things like a sponge. They need things to be broken down.
[27:32]
And all of us, unless you're in homogeneous classrooms, all of us have variety and variation in our in terms of the abilities in our classes. And so really, I think that we know that working memory is very limited. Some of our students, their working memory is limited even more than others. And I just think trying to engineer struggle, trying to make things unnecessarily challenging, adding in lots of distractions and noise into the environment, creating an environment where the kids really are leading each other so that the more forceful students can sort of bully their way into sort of taking over other people's airtime. This type of learning really disadvantages those kids. And so I think this book tries to bring back the role of the teacher in managing the environment, in creating a calm and place that's conducive for learning.
[28:26]
And it does so in a way that really helps out all kids as opposed to just the kids that kind of come in already knowing the material.
[28:33] SPEAKER_01:
Very well said. So the book is Just Tell Them, The Art and Science of Explanation. Zach Groeschel, if people want to get in touch with you online or learn more about your work or find your podcast, where's the best place for them to go?
[28:45] SPEAKER_00:
Great. So I lived in Sudan in Africa for three years, and that's when I created my first website that still has the name today. It's called educationrickshaw.com because there were a million yellow rickshaws all around my house. You could hear them 24 hours a day. And so Education Rickshaw is where I post my blog and my podcast, which is called Progressively Incorrect.
[29:07]
If you're interested on sort of the direct instruction side of things, I have another side project called the Direct Instruction Podcast, which a lot of people that are interested in the work of Zig Engelman, they sort of nerd out on principles of direct instruction there.
[29:22] SPEAKER_01:
Well, Zach, it's been a pleasure. And I know we'll continue talking on Twitter and elsewhere, but thank you so much for joining me here on Principal Center Radio.
[29:30] Announcer:
Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at principalcenter.com slash radio.
