Teachers have non-linear schema in their minds. Mostly, we then turn them into linear series of words. We then expect students to develop non-linear schema in their minds.
In this conversation, Oli Cav, author of over 37 books on dual coding and spatial thinking explains why we need to think seriously about schemas.
Transcript:
[00:00:00]
Oli: Technical books for sports used to do stop motion, so you see someone doing a long jump – run up, take off, lead leg comes up, arm comes up, legs swivel into a hitch kick, two hitch kicks, legs thrust out. And you see that’s what it is. They showed the javelin like that: boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. I think that’s what teachers need to do.
And as we still learn, the two major things we learned from Jean Piaget is that of assimilation and accommodation. It either makes total sense and it assimilates into your schema. So it’s gone from non-linear structure in the teacher’s head to linear communication in their speaking. From the pupil, it’s a linear reception of words which connects up and goes into a non-linear understanding. That’s the assimilation.
If there’s accommodation, there’s something the teacher said that doesn’t quite fit with your schema, then there’s a bit of difficulty going on, for which conversation is probably the best thing to happen, where you probably change a bit of your organizing structure of your own schema. Tell me one lesson of any subject, of any age group, where that isn’t the fundamental dynamic.
[00:02:25]
Phil: I know most of the people on the call obviously already know who you are, but when I was putting together the Luma event description for this, I put in that you’d written 36 books, and then I actually went back to check because I looked at Goodreads, and there’s basically 36 books that you either authored or illustrated.
Oli: I’ve got no idea what they are. I’m sure it’s not 36. Sure it wasn’t 326!
Phil: So I went back to Goodreads and actually in the meantime, you’d already published another book, which is the Coaching Walkthroughs book. Anyway, it’s honestly like a massive pleasure to be speaking to you, and I have been really inspired by your work on basically developing what I think we’re going to talk about in terms of multimodal learning. But also, obviously, you were a special school head teacher and are one of the leading information designers or learning designers. Really, it’s a pleasure to have you.
Oli: Thank you so much, Phil. And by the way, if anyone has a question as we go along, please put it in the chat.
Phil: So this call was actually initiated because I bumped into Oli at a conference and he drew a picture for me which represented the fact that teachers have non-linear schema in their heads, they then tend to present that schema linearly in their teaching, and then they expect students to develop the non-linear schema themselves in their heads. I thought that was a really powerful idea. So I guess, could we start – could you just explain that, Oli?
[00:04:28]
Oli: Yeah, first of all, I want to introduce this book to you. It’s pretty old, I think it’s at least 20 or 30 years old. Joseph Novak is a researcher who used to work a lot with David Ausubel – although Sarah Cottingham keeps telling me I’m mispronouncing it – but it’s some other variation.
So he’s a 1960s educational psychologist that no one ordinarily would know about, but he’s quoted because he said: if you had to reduce teaching to one thing, it is find out what a child knows and then teach them what’s next. They worked lots together and Joseph Novak invented the concept map. That’s not the generic term for graphic organizers, as John Hattie irresponsibly calls them. It’s a very specific type.
And in this book, he says his view is – and I’ve got it quoted somewhere – but it more or less says the fundamental problem, challenge in teaching in classrooms that’s always present, whatever the policy, the government, you know, it’s always here and it’s a hidden dynamic. And it is this:
One, the teacher has knowledge, and that knowledge – we all agree to adopt the story that we have schema. I say story because it’s not true. You know, neurosurgeons cut your head open and they don’t find any schema. There’s no such thing as a schema going on. Neuroscientists are telling you how we have these grids and they connect up. So schema is a good story that we’ve had before the neuroscientists came along. In fact, it was a term taken from Kant and the psychologists.
But what we say is that it’s always depicted and talked about as if it’s non-linear. And we also talk about it being hierarchical in nature. So we have clothes here, and underneath that we have tops, and under tops we have shirts and t-shirts and jumpers. Very simply, it’s hierarchical. If anyone likes the technical words, it’s hyponymic hierarchies. It’s how dictionaries are constructed, are connected. You know, when you look at a definition of a word, going up it says it’s part of this, and going down it says attributes of it are. So it’s like a triangle, a hierarchical triangle. And that is essentially how a lot of people depict or at least describe with words the nature of schema.
So teachers have this schema. And my guess is 99% of them just walk into the assumption that they have to convert it into a string of words. And if they’re very conscious, as you are, as you should be when you write a book – so I’ll go off, but I’m coming back to explain it.
[00:07:48]
When you write a book, you have more or less all these post-it notes, you know, and you cover your wall or enormous desk, and you collect everything you’ve got there. And then you cull it, you make sure things aren’t appropriate or they’re duplications. And then you group them, and then you put them into hierarchies. And that’s very satisfying – that’s my book, that’s what I want to communicate, that’s the idea.
But of course, working for a publisher and an editor, you know how to convert that non-linear, very satisfying, very validating, comprehensive and accurate representation into sentences and paragraphs and chapters. So as you write it, if you’re very conscious, you’re writing something and you think, “Oh, I could say this connects to what I’ve said before, and it will connect to what I’m going to say later, and it will also connect to what I haven’t written about, but it’s useful as a supportive reference.” And you think, “Well, actually, if I put that in that sentence, we’ll never finish the damn sentence.” So it’s always a problem.
Phil: So how do you let the students into the schema that you’ve developed then, I guess, as a teacher?
Oli: Well, anyway, so I’ve slowed it down, put it in slow motion, maybe concrete, without writing a book. So it’s not as concrete, it’s not visible, it’s almost instantaneous. And the teacher has to find the words to describe what they want to. And then because teachers are good speakers and they’re good storytellers – and there’s a lot to be said for, as Willingham says, about the cognitive privilege of stories – it’s more easily understood, it’s easier to communicate and remember, blah, blah, blah.
Nevertheless, the assumption of a teacher is: if you pay attention, even if you slant away as much as you want to, have a rigid back which will kill you later on in life – so you’re slanting away, you’re paying attention and you’re tracking – that doesn’t make the following process happen, which is you have these strings of words which both connect to your prior learning and connect to all the words that are being said in a particular order with either the implied or explicit connections, and then it attaches to your schema.
[00:10:21]
Willingham’s never talked about it because we’ve become, I think, complete slaves to who the chosen cognitive scientists are. You know, I could give you half a dozen. And if they started talking about Joseph Novak’s insight into this dynamic of communication – the relationship between the internal non-linear schema and the external linear communication of it – everybody would be talking about it. So I think there’s an enormous amount of groupthink, or in this case, group non-think, just because it’s not publicized and people aren’t curious enough.
Phil: That’s a really interesting point because I know that you’ve spoken a lot previously about the work of Barbara Tversky. And in her book Mind in Motion, she said that spatial thinking rooted in perception of space and action is the foundation of all thought. Do you think it’s a correct summary to say what you’ve described previously is dual coding story one – the idea that we should use images. Would you say that Barbara Tversky’s work is quite central to what you’ve previously called dual coding story two, or the idea of spatially arranging information is really important?
Oli: Yes, I do. And there’s a couple of other bits of research which – giving a meta conversation – one of the problems that I’ve just said about groupthink is a one perspective on reality. Reality is never captured with one perspective. So you need multiple perspectives.
And with dual coding, people talk about visuals, but actually we talk about visuospatial. And so almost no attention is given to the spatial aspect. So Lakoff and Johnson were someone in the 80s who wrote about metaphors, but not metaphors in the literary flourishes we normally know them as. Lakoff was a linguist and Johnson was a philosopher.
[00:12:21]
And they said – and they worked with people like Jean Mandler, a famous cognitive psychologist – when they’re looking at children, before we have language, we play with the world, we play with objects in space, and we discover some principles. And they are principles we have without any language at all, let alone “mum” and “dad.”
So one of them, which is the most famous one I guess, is you notice that when you have an empty cup and one of your parents or elder siblings fills it with juice for you, you notice that – and it seems almost weird to say, it’s almost deeply philosophical – the more liquid you have in your cup, the higher the level of it. And we say transfer doesn’t work, but it’s the self-same principle. When you notice that pile of bricks you have, the more bricks you put on, the more bricks there are in the pile, the higher the pile. So we have this principle that “more up equals more.”
And we go through life using that and expanding it. It becomes – with no notion of it at all – when we can talk about, I think, you know, the higher order thinking skills, or the low morals, or, you know, it just goes on and on. Just notice up and down. We almost couldn’t express ourselves without up and down as a metaphor.
So this is all spatial. Barbara Tversky, who you just mentioned, talks about the spatial nature of our thinking. And she says we treat ideas as if they were objects. And this is the link. Obviously, objects don’t live on their own. They live in space. And the way we manipulate and arrange objects – I just talked about post-it notes and I can’t help but gesture spatially in front of you.
[00:14:21]
And what I did in one of my books, a chapter, I was a bit provocative – well, not provocative, I think humorously – I looked at some of the words of our leading thinkers and cognitive scientists, and lo and behold, they cannot express themselves without using metaphors: higher order, grasping, manipulating, constructing, you know. I mean, that’s all poetry. None of it’s real. It’s all metaphoric talk based around ideas as if they were objects and us manipulating them in space. So you see how that really accords with our story of schemas being spatial.
And listen, I’m guilty of saying so much, I’m not writing any of it down, but you’re hyper clever, so you’ll have no problem with this. I wanted to say something else. Now I confused myself.
Phil: So I was just going to quickly interrupt. Because with the dual coding story one, the idea of having visuals alongside text and words, and then the dual coding story two – I was just wondering, in your experience with classrooms across the UK currently, where do you think teachers are at with both of those? Because sometimes I wonder whether – because I guess it might be a progression that first as a teacher you might start implementing techniques that accord with dual coding one, and then you kind of move on to thinking about more spatial representations as part of the dual coding two and, you know, informed by Barbara Tversky. But I guess maybe it’s the case that lots of teachers around the UK are currently trying to implement other research-based methods and that this dual coding story one and two revolution, let’s call it, hasn’t actually happened yet. I don’t know. So my question is sort of: where do you think teachers are at currently with both dual coding story one and dual coding story two?
[00:16:47]
Oli: I think teachers are at the effect of their leaders, who themselves are at the effect of their reading, which in turn are affected by the thought leaders who, consciously or not, are very, very selective.
So for example, we all love Paul Kirschner, we do. Yet when Paul Kirschner is asked to say, “Out of all the cognitive science strategies, which three are the most important?” and he lists in the top three dual coding – completely and utterly ignored. Utterly ignored.
Now I can understand if I was a teacher in secondary school, you know, I’ve got timetables, I’ve got pressures, and I’m good with words, and I’ve discovered retrieval practice – just get the ideas down to words, send it across, test them, they’ll remember it. So I can understand that. It’s reducing learning to only “tell, test.” Just tell them, just test them. Just gets results.
Phil: If, say, a teacher isn’t currently implementing dual coding story one or dual coding story two, would you – what would be your initial tips to support them? What would you say are the first things that they should be doing?
Oli: Well, some subjects you have to use images. I can’t imagine how you teach science or geography without images. You can teach languages, you can teach the humanities without images, but some you just can’t. So I guess you would have to differentiate the people according to their subjects in a secondary school. I think, and that will still be present but less strongly so in the primary sector.
[00:19:03]
One thing I wanted to point out, which I had forgotten, is that about 10 years ago I did a series of posters for the Learning Scientists – Yana Weinstein, Megan Sumeracki – and they got translated into over a dozen languages. They were free, you could download them. What I discovered: in over three-quarters of the languages in which they were translated, the word “diagram” was the English word we use. The equivalent in their languages was versions of “schema,” “schema.” So in all the other languages, the word “schema” is the same as “diagram.”
So it’s like the idea of non-linear representation. Because we have two different words, I don’t think it’s immediate unless there’s almost a semi-philosophical linguistic discussion. “Hold on, we’ve got lots of important things. We’re just going to have half an hour out in this philosophical discussion about the nature of the word diagram and schema.” So if they got diagram and schema the same thing as they do with the other European languages, then I think that would make an enormous difference.
But I haven’t answered your question: what would I do? Well, I’d go to the subjects. See, I’m semi-retired from this, you know, I’m doing my own work with the Waterfoods, so I haven’t really lent myself. Had I still been involved in this area, I would have got some practitioners from subjects and from – rather like we did with dual coding with teachers, I invited people to bring them in. I would have expanded that. I’ve expanded and then I’d have looked at...
[00:20:44]
So one thing I’m really interested in is the idea of mental simulation. So you ask them: Are you really clear what’s the intention of this? And what would the disadvantage be if you didn’t do it? So what are the pitfalls when you try and do it? So really try and surface all the real practical problems which the teachers face, and then give them some simple solutions and tell them the pitfalls.
In a sense, although I kept saying “don’t do this,” for a number of years, people thought they’d cracked it by populating everything they can think of with as many icons as they could. So dual coding, ticked off.
Phil: That’s really interesting because I would say creating a high-quality diagram is really difficult, which is maybe one of the reasons why... We were talking about this earlier before we started the webinar, but one thing I wonder is whether the fact that we use PowerPoint for teaching is also to some degree a limiting factor in the sense that it does a little bit preclude drawing to some degree. If you’re designing a slide rather than writing on a blackboard or a whiteboard, it’s a bit easier to just have lots of text, and I guess arguably it makes the learning process sort of linear. I don’t know, would you agree with that, the PowerPoint?
Oli: Yeah, a couple of things I want to say about that. First of all, the drawing part – there really is a growing body of evidence of the benefit of drawing things live in situ. One, you know you don’t overwhelm the audience. Two, you can determine which bits they look at. I mean, just this week, yesterday, Peps McCrea talked about attention and how you can signal and make sure you’re doing it. There’s no better way than saying, “Here’s this.” That’s all you can look at. You talk about it. “Now I’m going to show a connection.” It’s either part of something, or it has something attached to it, or it’s a process that comes before.
[00:23:01]
So there’s all these adjectives – all these prepositions, sorry – that you’re going to use. And you can tell them: “What I’m going to write up now is the relationship between...” and then you do it. So you’re also priming them before you draw it. And there’s lots of other research to show that in terms of mental simulation, watching someone doing it and imagining yourself doing it, in some instances, is as powerful as rehearsing it.
But the point we talked about before we started: the whole PowerPoint thing. Richard Mayer’s multimedia learning – for which read multimodal learning, that’s what he meant. He didn’t mean which device, which computer trolley, which overhead transparency. It’s multimodal, the modes you have.
There are some principles, and we need to be careful – when you write the word “principles” with a capital P, it sounds like a rule, because then it’s under cognitive science. So anything under the heading cognitive science means it’s scientific, which means any principles thereof is a rule. Yet I think it’s far more useful to think of them as heuristics, a rule of thumb – roughly, generally, in most cases – but you can break them, and break them you must, because some of them are in conflict.
So one of them is: if you want to teach something complex... And this came from educational psychology with children with severe learning difficulties in America in the 1960s, when we realized there’s no child that is ineducable. If you break a task down small enough – then called task analysis, we now use the hip NLP term, “chunk it down, man.” You know, it’s just task analysis. So Richard Mayer, by the way, calls it segmentation. Sounds more scientific, doesn’t it?
[00:25:01]
So segmentation is you chop it up, you salami chop it up, and you’ll find that in management books: How do you eat an elephant? Well, chop it up. Excuse me, vegetarians. You know, you just chop it up. So that’s really clear.
There are, however – it immediately has difficulty with one other principle, which is the contiguity principle. Things are close together, they’re contiguous, so they’re either – and best if they’re contiguous in time, so it’s immediately followed, not like a minute later – and it’s contiguous in space, it’s not on the other page, it’s not the next slide.
So really those sorts of things are best done in one canvas. That’s why the old-fashioned, especially the Japanese who have a whole pedagogy devoted to blackboard writing – you know, you see the lesson going from this blackboard, green board actually, right across the whole wall. And you can see in time the development of thinking. You can go back in time, it’s there, it’s always there. You can master time. So you always have temporal contiguity and it’s spatial contiguity. It’s one broad canvas.
But with PowerPoint slides, well, you know, I’ve asked people, I’ve provoked people on Twitter: “All right, here’s the problem. Tell me how you get around it.” And of course, the theory’s answer: “Well, do slide one and do it and practice and do retrieval practice and elaboration, blah, blah, blah, until they get it. Then move over to slide two.” Blimey, that’ll be boring.
Phil: Yeah, that’s really interesting. The whole class – you can’t move on because Jim hasn’t got it yet. “Hold on, you might be another 15 minutes. I’ve got to go through it all over again. Then you can look at slide two.” It’s never going to happen.
[00:26:49]
Because it is interesting. I don’t know if there are – it would be interesting to see whether the instructional medium that comes after slides... Because slides are really modern. I mean, I guess people have only been using slides – I know my mom actually used old-fashioned slide projectors, you know, when you put them in. So I know they’ve been around a bit longer than PowerPoint. I guess they’re relatively modern in terms of instructional history. And it’s interesting – it’d be interesting to see whether some form of continuous medium like a canvas kind of took the place.
Oli: I’d like to say a couple of things. One is Alan Watts was the hippies’ favorite professor, and he used to come up with some wonderful metaphors. He says, “You’re in a dark room.” And I’ve noticed people have picked this up – I’ve introduced them. It’s a 60-year-old metaphor.
You’re in a dark room and you can either have a torchlight, which is incredibly powerful, obviously very, very narrow. And whatever it lands upon, it provides you with unbelievable acuity. You know exactly what it is. Then, of course, you move to somewhere else. You’ve forgotten. You’ve completely forgotten where you’ve been. All the details have disappeared. Not only have the details disappeared, you don’t know the nature of the relationship between that bit and the bit you’re looking at now.
Or you have a searchlight that lights the whole room up, and it’s kind of hazy and nothing’s clear. That’s always the problem you’ve got with PowerPoint.
And if the scientists don’t use those metaphors, they’ll never see... Oh, they’re scientists, they’ve got to use metaphors. You have to use imagination. It’s the greatest cognitive gift we have. Otherwise – and I presume teachers who look at Richard Mayer have decided, “Oh, it’s science. I don’t need to use my imagination.” So they’ve never considered there’s a tension between the segmentation and the contiguity principles.
[00:28:48]
Now, 10 years ago – no, 15 years ago – I went to a three-day conference of visual practitioners in Berlin. I was the only educator there. And even 15 years ago, I saw a video of someone in Silicon Valley where the whole damn wall was – well, two walls were digital. So he had his PowerPoint slide, and when he finished it, he flicked it and it was over there. So it’s like an enlarged digital Japanese chalkboard.
Phil: Wow, that sounds amazing.
Oli: Now, by the way, after having seen that, when I was doing training all the time, I found an analog solution. So I went into the school hall where I gave the training. And you know those lovely dinner tables where you flick the tables on? Well, I had them all. I had tables in a semicircular shape around me, so my slides behind me, and around me are these tables. And upon them, they were out, upon them I put tables on their end. And I’d already had some marker text paper, really big sheets of paper.
So after, I don’t know, 15 minutes, I went up and on the first left-hand side, I blue-tacked – low tech – I blue-tacked my notes that I’d already prepared. So as I went through the day, they could see the development of their thinking, which means not only is there a recall, but I could then say, “Do you remember when we looked at that? How does that relate to this?”
So within the linear structure of me speaking and there’s time and there’s sections, I found a way to make explicit and practical, I think, interestingly, the multiple connections.
[00:30:39]
Interesting that – in nearly 50 years in education, the words I’ve heard all the time is “make connections,” “only connect,” you know, “make connections, do connections.” And I never hear anything other than that. Just last week I saw a famous person talk about, “Oh, we need to reveal to pupils the underlying structure of knowledge, the connections.” And nothing follows up: What type of connections? Is there a taxonomy of connections? Can we use...? Empty sloganeering: “Connections, man.” Right, okay, what’s the next slogan? Empty, vacuous.
Phil: Correct. But yeah, I read a really interesting book about curiosity recently where the – I mean, maybe this falls into the trap of using the slogan of connections – but they have the phrase which is “curiosity is edge work.” And by edge, they mean curiosity is more about the connections between two pieces of information than about the piece of information itself, which I thought was quite interesting.
Oli: Yeah.
[00:31:53]
Phil: Go ahead. I had a quick question that I wanted to ask kind of tactically. So in terms of your work, you have a distinctive style. I think most people, if they saw a piece of your work, would know that you’ve done it if they’re aware of your work. How important do you think is internal consistency for teachers who are trying to develop as learning designers? Is it important that – like, for the cognitive load of students – that if they’re designing, say, a diagram or an illustration or something, that it is consistent from lesson to lesson? How important do you think that is?
Oli: I think it’s very important. I mean, you’ll notice in the Walkthroughs, I spend a long, long time investigating it, coming up with a format, and then it’s the same format for every single 160-odd walkthroughs.
Phil: And in terms of schools... You learn it once and then boom, it’s done.
Oli: And should schools and departments be consistent also? Because one thing, working for technology companies, they have design systems, which means that the user interface for one page looks the same as for another page. So there’s components. And it does strike me that I don’t think most schools tend to have design systems. I guess, do you think that that’s an important thing that schools could be considering?
Oli: Yes, I do.
[00:33:17]
Yes, yes, yes, I do. Here’s a bit of a provocation. I don’t know whether there are any art teachers listening or any design technology teachers or whatever that subject’s called now. I’ve been disappointed that up and down the schools I’ve seen in the country, I have – apart from a few examples – I haven’t seen any overt examples where those two departments have led the application of cognitive science and cognitive load theory in the application of design, creating exactly what you’re saying. And it’s their job to do it.
If I was still doing it, I could do a one-day, I could do a half-day course that would cover the main grounds about the consistency in design for diagrams, because certainly consistency in slides and in documents.
I did advise... No, no, I won’t talk about that, sorry.
Phil: That is really interesting. So what do you think about a whole system-level approach? The reason I ask this – and I already talked to you about this – but for everyone else, I did the Information Design Summer School this year, which I can put a link to. It’s a really good summer school you can do on information design.
And in that summer school, we were talking about the ISO 24495. It’s a standard for plain language documents. And I know that the legal profession is developing their own, the scientific profession is developing their own for scientific articles. I was wondering – I’m not saying it has to be part of the ISO family or anything – but do you think there’s any benefit? I know there would also probably be drawbacks, but is there any benefit in having some sort of framework that educators from universities to schools to colleges could kind of be following?
[00:35:22]
Oli: Yeah. Behind that, I think, is your argument for modularity. So you’d spend a lot of time designing the core modular units. So that would be design, language, hierarchy of knowledge, the visual signs – long, long time getting agreement. Looking at the research, looking at applications, looking at things like – I mean, I’ve got a book here. Look, let me show you. It’s a real nerd’s book. This is everything about the application of forms.
So I could tell you how the Dutch post office, you know, real professionals to cognitive science, they’ve looked at design and they’ve tried it out with the population at large. So even if something looks rational – you know, as I find with most websites, they get lost because they’re useless because they don’t ask me what’s the problem with their website. So they’ve tried it out. And those principles are there all the time.
So a school would need to work on that. And they’d need to know why. It’s because to reduce unnecessary cognitive load.
Phil: Yeah, that’s a really interesting point. Because I mean, it’s like going back to your point about you’d be able to design a half-day course on consistency in diagram, slides, documents, et cetera. What would that look like in the sense of would you suggest schools should have templates or principles, or how would you propose that schools develop some level of consistency in design?
[00:37:21]
Oli: Did you see I tweet it now and again? I – sorry, I’ve got four... I’ve read loads of design books for non-designers, you know, and they’re very clever and it’s great, but they’re all too complicated. So in the end, I kept getting requests for feedback on their bits of work, and I came up with four principles, which I didn’t get from a book, but simply I could see – this is, you know, we talk about giving whole-class feedback. This was whole-class feedback. This was whole-country feedback of teachers.
And I’ve got four very simple guidelines to follow, which I won’t go through now, but you know, you could follow those. The secret of all professional design is the grid. Underneath every bit of proper professional design, there is a grid that will determine how many columns you have, the space, and things should align. Things should align.
So if teachers think, “Oh, dual coding, I’ve got to be artistic with no graphic or artistic training,” they’ll have this assumption: artistic means random, organic. So they’ll put photos any which way, and it’s just absolutely awful. So I say, look at a newspaper. You know, they have the TV guides for the weekend. And look how ordered that is – the hierarchy, the bold, the finer print, the caps, the alignment, the clarity. Now, you’re not going to present something as complex as that, but that’s what something really well designed looks like.
[00:39:03]
Now imagine that information with your design principles: “Oh, I think I’ll put a flower in here. I’ll add 55 colors. I’ll use every font I’ve got. I won’t – I don’t even know about alignment. I’ll make it all kind of like a garden,” you know, this... So sometimes even I say, listen, it’s no secret – I mean, I sometimes shop at Waitrose, but you could do it at Tesco’s or Lidl’s. They’ll have a magazine free. Pick it up. And it’s done by top professionals for people who are busy shoppers. It’s just perfect. Just copy it. It’s in front of your eyes all the time. Magazines, copy them. Newspapers, copy them. They’ve got all the articles there.
Let me tell you something else which I taught. People say, “Oh, I can’t draw.” I can teach them how to draw. I can teach everybody how to draw in about five minutes, and they’ll draw like an architect, really superbly.
But there’s something else, a very, very old technique, which is now being incorporated by the digital world, and they’ve got no idea. It’s called tracing. So you have a picture you want – get a bit of tracing paper, get a thick felt tip because you want to simplify it and you want to exclude all those details that aren’t the ones you want them to pay attention to. Scan it – boom, it looks fantastic. It’s all in proportion, it’s all correct, and it hasn’t got all the disadvantage of a photograph. Photographs are mostly useless because they bombard your eyes with loads of things you don’t want them to look at.
[00:40:48]
So I did that. I went to a secondary school when a history teacher said, “I’m teaching American kids how they taught the Wild West,” and they showed me like a 1960s lovely illustration of the Wild West, you know, wagon trains, etc. He says, “I showed it to them and they can’t see what I’m asking them.” I said, “No, because they’re not looking at it. Now you’re looking at it.”
So I told him to get a tracing paper and trace the bits that you were... pull it out and show them the picture, which is rich and everything and colored. “Now look at my tracing. That’s what I want you to focus on. Now put the tracing on top of the original,” and they go, “Ah, I’ve got it.” So you can model someone by shaping their perception. It’s just fantastic.
I mean, you do it with layers on drawing digitally. That’s just so fantastic. So you can show them the complex photograph, then you show them the simplified version. “Now look at that. Ignore all the other details. Focus on that bit.” Then go back, put it on, put it on again. You’re shaping their perception. That’s really fantastic. You actually can train them to see the expert that you are.
So there’s lots of little things that you can do, which would be a fun course for me to design because I’ve done bits of it before. It would be a fun course for people to do as well.
Phil: I think it would be really interesting.
[00:42:19]
So there is a question in the chat, which I think is a good question from Michael: If we accept the fact that we organize and encode things we learn into non-linear metaphor, and if we accept the fact that students are receiving information from us in a linear way only to then reorganize it into a non-linear form in their mind, what are the best ways of helping students organize and encode new information in a non-linear way? And at the end of a sequence of lessons, I’m trying to get students to draw their own mind maps, but I don’t know how to mark them. What are the do’s and don’ts of creating a good...
Oli: Great question. That covers a lot of things I’ve discovered over the years. One is: mind map is only one graphic organizer, and I’ve actually re-termed them “word diagram” because these graphic organizers – because that’s what they are, they’re diagrams made of words. Whether you use colors or pictures or icons is kind of – by the way, we’re looking at non-linear organization of words, and they sit in between theories about how we deal with images, dual coding, and how we deal with language. They are neither sufficiently well explained by either of those two types.
So I just tweeted that they’re basically – I think what’s really useful, by the way, I worked with a male infant teacher who did this with his pupils. They absolutely loved it. Whenever he was about to teach them something, he says, “I’m going to now use – we’re going to focus on one of these four, you know, the four. We’re going to focus on this way, or we’re going to cut it up.”
[00:44:03]
So basically in life, they think of the content or process. You could say there’s schema or there’s mental model, and those are broken down. So there’s four all together. Under the content, we have chunk, whole-part-whole, categorization – that’s all the same thing – or we compare. Under process, we can order things temporally, chronologically, or we can process, we can sequence things causally.
And when I went round schools for 15 years, I used to ask teachers – and I went to quite a few top private schools – I said, “I want you to catch me out. You’re subject experts, some of them had PhDs. Tell me any aspect of your subject which I couldn’t teach with these four distinctions: whole-part-whole, chunking, categorizing, compare and contrast, sequencing temporally or chronologically, and sequencing cause and effect.” Not one. I could answer all their questions. That is what your curriculum that we go on about so much – curriculum design, knowledge of structure – but they never get into any details. And you can teach kids that in one lesson and you go over it.
By the end of the week, they’ve absolutely got it. They’ll then be asking you, “Sir, miss, are we doing – are we looking at this new subject first by comparing it, and then should we break it down, look at how the wholes and the parts fit together? Or are we going to look at what happened?” It’s so simple, so simple.
[00:45:49]
So then, only when we get that – because otherwise the main problem is, well, there are several problems. One is teachers choose the wrong tool for the task. So if you’re going to look at something cause and effect, you really, really wouldn’t want to use a mind map. I know Tony Buzan, the originator, says you can – if you draw, you know, first episode on one branch and draw an arrow – there’s just no need. Western conception of time and cause and effect is linear left to right. So there are multiple tools you can use for that.
So you need to know – you need to look at the structure of the knowledge of what, which aspect you want to clarify. Then you go and choose a tool in either of these four camps.
Phil: That makes a lot of sense. So, yeah.
Oli: The last thing we need to work out is that the research shows that pupils get a great deal of benefit if they create them themselves. And here’s this lovely tension. But of course, Frederick Reif in Applying Cognitive Science for Education says learners who know nothing about the new information, by definition, can’t organize it. You know, you can’t organize unfamiliar information.
So then, yes, but they benefit most if they did, but they can’t. And that’s fundamentally, when you look at the research, you know, I’ve split my head trying to work it out. They would do better if they could create it, but they can’t. So obviously, what’s the answer? The answer is: teacher models and teacher scaffolds.
[00:47:22]
So drawing, “Here’s this thing.” It could be a timeline or each node you expand it. “So here I’m going to draw this next because this I think we saw was next. So what might I add to it? Right, you copy it, you add to it.” That would be the way. And then you gradually release the scaffold.
Phil: That makes a lot of sense. So you first understand the purpose or the cognitive category, and then you work out which representation from there, and then you model and scaffold.
Oli: Because it even gets more complex. So when you say, “I really want to analyze it causally, cause and effect,” then when you look at the tools, they all kind of do something slightly different. And they would accentuate... There’s a relations diagram, there’s Edward de Bono’s flowscape, there’s a Gantt chart, there’s in-out, you know, there’s the Ishikawa fishbone diagram, you know, there’s lots of ones which would highlight different aspects of the causal relationships.
Phil: I was going to say, this book, Organized Ideas, basically is a good reference for this, right? That would be the book of your books I’d leave to look up for this one.
Oli: Yep.
Phil: Because one thing I was going to ask, though, on that is that, so if you look at this Organized Ideas book, which I’m sure many of you have, there’s obviously a really wide range of different representations. My only question on that would be, I guess there is some level of balance because some of the diagrams are quite complex, maybe.
Oli: I just wanted to have everything in there, like a dictionary has long words that you wouldn’t use, but sometimes you might need it.
Phil: But I guess, because you know what you said about modeling and scaffolding? I guess, depending on the level of your students and things like this, you’d probably have to introduce each type of word diagram slowly and gradually with scaffolding and modeling.
[00:49:27]
Oli: Let me tell you how I used to do it. I used to – I created a little video based on a storybook of the 1960s which, by the way, was banned in primary schools because it was anti-empire. So I put these slides together, made it into an animation, added some music, so we had a story. And then I asked teachers basic questions about the story. Honestly, it was a really, really simple story. The story was designed for primary-age children. But when you bring your sophisticated political background, you can analyze it on a higher level.
So then we analyzed it, and then we looked at what types of... I asked the questions based on these four types. And then we reconstructed them out based on those four types. And then the best courses – I also had staff come along with, if it’s mainly in primary schools, otherwise you need to do it by faculty in secondary schools – come along with what they’re going to teach. So we worked on their material. And that really is the best way.
So, you know, I’d have all you by my side, you know, “What are the problems? What are you going to teach? What’s going to happen?” And I’d ask you a question in dialogue: “What are the main misconceptions? What type of thought are we looking for – these four thoughts?”
[00:50:54]
So maybe I’ll illustrate this. One of the schools I went to, when I was asking the teachers to find fault with this, someone said, “Yes, Oliver, but could it answer a question like, you know, ‘Explain the changing psychological profile of Lady Macbeth from the beginning to the end of the play’?”
So I walked this. So on the stage, on the left-hand side, I said, “Here, I’m asking: What is her psychological profile?” And we could use any number of tools that would demonstrate that. Then I walked across to the other side. “So this is the end of the play. Here’s her psychological profile there. So I’ve asked the question, ‘What is it?’ So we’ll look at overarching themes and details, attributes, and we’ve answered it twice.”
I’ll then bring them together doing cause and effect and look at which parts are the same, which parts have changed. I’d then walk the same distance from both points. So from the beginning of the play to the end, I’ll point out the major events that happened. And of those, so we’re looking at the – we’re summarizing it in terms of temporal plot line.
[00:52:08]
But if we now go back and look at it causally, given we know that which parts of their two profiles have changed, let’s go through those running of events: Which one of those you think had an influence, a cause? And this – perhaps we need to have asked history teachers on Twitter – the language of cause and effect, the concepts of cause and effect in science can’t be used and applied to history or the humanities. We’re having to use words which the scientists would be kind of fuzzy. But teachers of the humanities would say, “This contributes to it, this is the major factor within the push towards.” So we use that type of language, for which there are graphically organized word diagrams which are able to accommodate that more rich and multi-factor analysis of the effect.
And she said, “Yes.” I said, “You would expect your pupils to do that in their head. And maybe very clever ones, for the most part, can. But you can slow it down, you can put slow-mo on it.” Essentially what I just did was put slow-mo onto the thinking process.
[00:53:21]
That’s really interesting. And I asked that: if you’re not doing that, tell me what you’re doing. Now, because you know it so well, it just pops out. That’s not teaching, that’s showing off. It’s not teaching, it’s just showing off. You need to be able to put slow-mo on your... The Olympics last year – there was something that’s very old – but in the 1960s, technical books for sports used to do stop motion. So you see someone doing a long jump: run up, take off, lead leg comes up, arm comes up, legs swivel into a hitch kick, two hitch kicks, legs thrust out. And you see, that’s what it is. They showed the javelin like that: boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. I think that’s what teachers need to do.
Phil: That’s really interesting. Which is a problem with worked examples. You do everything. It’s almost like me saying, “Here’s the javelin. Jump, boom. There you are. Off you go. Do the javelin.” You need to go step one, boom. Step two, boom. And you can always go, “See step one?” You don’t want to do a video – step one disappears. So you have to bear in mind temporal contiguity. I don’t want “now,” and then I don’t know where “then” was. You want time to be captured.
I’m going very quickly. Does that make sense?
Phil: It makes sense to me, but please shout in the chat if anyone has a question. Actually, if anyone has a question, please let me know and I can unmute you and you can ask it right now.
[00:55:02]
I had one follow-on, though, to what Michael was asking about in terms of how do we support learners to develop these non-linear schemas. And because we’ve kind of established that it seems like the skill of designing learning is really difficult to attain – well, it’s relatively difficult to attain, and it doesn’t appear that most schools are supporting a coherent learning design approach, and there isn’t really an overall system-wide approach to learning design that is being adopted by many people. So I guess, do you think that – what do you think we should do, Oli? Like, if, let’s say, in 10 years we wanted to see an education system in the UK that was much more focused on learning design and supporting students’ non-linear – developing non-linear schemas – how do you think we could get there?
Oli: Well, this is a financial opportunity for someone. I think you would need to collect all the research, and it will go well beyond just Sweller and Mayer. By the way, I’m doing something very similar. I’ve been invited to co-author a chapter in a book where everyone’s a professor and PhD – little old me. I’ve kind of changed their views. Dual coding is way more than Sweller and Mayer.
[00:56:32]
You would need to collect it. You would need to show examples in the real world of other areas. You need to show how that works when you go to Stansted Airport or Heathrow – how they organize information. You need to look at things like that forms book. You need to look at newspapers. So it’s everywhere, because if people don’t do it successfully, they lose money. Of course, the thing with classrooms, if you’re not successful, it doesn’t matter. The kids turn up.
No, that’s where the economic world, the financial world, has some real benefits. You’re in a continual experiment. If you don’t do it well, they don’t buy your stuff. Schools don’t do well, you know, the kids still turn up. So look for examples.
Then you’d need to – and what I would do with it – I would then have, and then I’d make it ever more complex. But for each stage, that would have the principles explained with all examples. I would have a number of templates – templates for documents, templates for slides. So they could just pick it up. They could just pick it up.
[00:57:54]
There’ll be very, very few people who want to follow on eCav and learn all the background nerdy details. No one wants to know about Barbara Tversky and the concept of ideas as objects.
Phil: I do, but yeah.
Oli: You and I do. But, you know, people have got other concerns. They’re busy. So they need to have the solution. And maybe once they get the solution... The trouble with schools is if they have a solution, if it’s designed by the management team, and then they’ll go against all the principles – they’ll have all their... “The logos must take over a third of the slide, every slide. I want a picture of the head of the academy, and I want all the grants we’ve achieved, and all our Ofsted, and that will take up a third of the slide, everyone, everyone.” And they will insist on it, and they’ll get their way. It’ll be terrible.
Phil: Yeah.
Oli: They are busy people and they’re good intentions, but it’s just awful.
Phil: Yeah. That is definitely food for thought. I was going to ask as well, because one thing that’s really interesting about your Organized Ideas book is that you have examples from lots and lots of different teachers – maybe 40 teachers or 30 teachers.
Oli: Yeah, a lot, a lot, yeah.
Phil: Different subjects, different phases, which I think is really powerful. But one thing I’ve wondered is whether there is – whether there could be an extension of that, like, let’s say, a website where everyone could – where teachers who are interested in this sort of thing could share their – or even a shared canvas or something where people share...
[00:59:51]
Oli: Yeah, I think that’ll be good.
Phil: Excellent. But does something like that already exist in terms of, is there a network already, do you think? Or are there already...?
Oli: I really don’t know. I don’t know. I mean, another series of books might work where you have more examples, discussion, go into details, have a case story, discuss, you know, all those thoughts. And or have a community and develop it. And had it been another time, I might well have asked you and the audience this morning to join me and we’d start such a venture. That’d be really useful.
Phil: Maybe we should do that.
By the way, so I think at this point, please, if you have a question, put up your hand. We only actually have a couple of minutes left, really. But if anyone had a question, put up your hand. I know Nikki, you were... You might have had a question from the chat. Please raise your hand and ask a question.
Nikki: I didn’t have a question, but I did actually just want to say I found it so absolutely fascinating, everything you said. I work in schools a lot. And one of the things that I think is really interesting is that I often say to teachers that everyone teaches in the way that their brain organizes and processes information. And so what we struggle with is the students with needs are often very much left behind because they need to break down concepts into a system that they have in their head, and they don’t understand what that system is yet.
[01:01:33]
So I’ve really, really found I could talk about this with you for ages and learn so much because I find it absolutely fascinating. So thank you very much. I didn’t really have anything else to say apart from that.
Oli: That’s kind. I think one of the problems has been over the last few decades is that psychologists sometimes show their lack of understanding of psychology. So we look at the perennial problems of learning styles, and they haven’t learned that 30 years of saying, “Here’s the research, you’re stupid. You’re so dumb and stupid. Here’s the research, learn.” And then two years later, “You’re so dumb and stupid.”
But actually, if you investigate it still further, you’ll find there are some better explanations than learning style theory. There’s embodied cognition, which is incorporated in cognitive load theory – how we need to use our bodies.
Nikki: And if you’ve got a book that you recommend on that one, actually, because that’s a really interesting one that I’m probably at next – is how to debunk this whole learning styles idea but also look at the visuals are so important.
Oli: Yes, that’s fabulous. She’s a journalist, so she’s not a scientist, which is good. She’s a journalist, so she knows how to write.
Nikki: Okay, is that Annie?
Oli: Yes, you’ll find that fascinating.
Nikki: Thank you so much.
Oli: I want to promote – there’s a much thinner version that I wrote with two teachers. I’m dyslexic, so I like thin books, especially if they’ve got pictures in.
Nikki: Oh, lots of pictures. Yeah, there are lots of pictures. Okay, I’ll buy that on the next one then.
[01:03:11]
Oli: So I’ve asked a couple of famous psychologists – I won’t name them – “You’re a bit dim, aren’t you? Just keep telling people they’re stupid, and then you’re surprised they don’t learn.” And when I said, you know, “Already established evidence in embodied cognition and other areas do answer the main problems, and that would really start to give some practical evidence-based alternative interpretations.” “Yes, we don’t do anything.”
Phil: It’s a really interesting point about the... We’re probably going to have to wrap up soon, but it’s a really interesting point about the terminology used. I know you said earlier about multimedia learning should really be multimodal learning. And, you know, your point, Nikki, about learning styles. When I talk about this sort of thing with teachers, they often ask me, “Oh, is that one learning style?” So I think there is a question about how best to talk about this, which I don’t really know necessarily the answer. But obviously the work you’ve been doing, Oli, in terms of thinking about word diagrams and just basically stressing the importance of the terminology, I think is definitely a good start. But I don’t know if you had any other reflections on that, Oli, in terms of how to frame it.
[01:04:32]
Oli: Yeah, I’ll give you one more story I got from this thing, this three-day conference in Berlin that had many people who were currently working and were working with Apple and others at the beginning of Silicon Valley. And they came away with – I came away with – the phrase, “The wall is the new desk.”
So one, they’re standing up. Two, three-point communication. All the post-it notes – Silicon Valley, by the way, is built on post-it notes, nothing digital. And that is our mind. Not my mind, it’s our mind. So we can discuss it.
And why they did that was they found that when they had meetings where they have the normal talk, you know, they’re all PhDs, so hyper-clever guys. And of course, no individual has the thought, “I wonder if I’m understanding this.” Immediately they hear the words, they understand. However, what they’re understanding isn’t necessarily what the person meant who’s speaking.
And this is where finance is really useful. When they found out that they’ve lost a couple of million pounds on this project that was misconceived at that meeting – because everyone went away totally... I mean, no one – do you ever go away from a meeting going, “Did I understand that?” Everyone goes away thinking, “I understand it. All the others are stupid. I understand it.” And they went away and engaged in these projects, and it wasn’t what was communicated.
[01:06:01]
And they found by having this non-linear public shared space, like a collective mind, they could then investigate it really rigorously in a way that is not possible socially given the mores. So for example, you and I getting on well – but if we were at a meeting and I were to interrogate you face-to-face the same way I interrogated the arrangement of post-it notes, it would be socially unacceptable. But when we both look at the post-it notes, it’s perfectly acceptable. In fact, very enjoyable. So that’s one of the other myriad reasons.
I think it touches on learning styles inasmuch that it has nothing to do with the individual, other than humans as a whole never consider they don’t understand. If they get one glimpse of an understanding, they immediately assume that is the understanding. My understanding is the understanding.
Phil: Yeah, that’s a really interesting point. And one of the many things I took away from your work is the idea that – and I think Nikki just put in the chat something about graphic facilitation – and your point about three-point communication and visualizing that, I think, is also a really powerful way of maybe getting around the fact that everyone takes their own schema away from meetings or learning experiences.
[01:07:29]
But Oli, thank you so much. This has been a tour de force, and I’m looking forward to us, you know, all carrying on this conversation, this revolution together at some point. So hopefully we will get together some sort of network eventually. I’ve got – want to actually bring forward a class, a problem, a topic, and we’ll use it as a... I’m really into the word I’m really into at the moment is “microcosm.” It’s just a fabulous idea.
So say you have a subject and there’s a thousand examples. One microcosm represents all the others if you really investigate it well. So if you bring forward a topic, it’s a microcosm, and you should learn enough to be able to then apply it. And this thing that psychologists think doesn’t happen – but that’s because they’re negatively inclined – transfer that to whatever your issues. So that might be a really interesting – maybe more than an hour workshop where you bring something along and we... we have a discussion where we really hammer out to make sure we both understood. That would be really good.
Phil: Would you be willing to do that?
Oli: Yeah.
Phil: We have a microcosm. With the microcosmonauts!
Oli: That would be good fun.
Phil: Amazing. Well, actually, if anyone’s got an idea for something they wanted to bring along to a meeting such as that, then let me know. And I would definitely love to attend and/or help organize. That sounds great. But Oli, thank you so much. Thank you so much, everyone who joined. We had a great, great chat. And yeah, thank you so much. Have a great evening.
Oli: Thank you. Thank you for indulging me in all these fancy ideas.
Phil: Thank you. Thank you so much.
