Learning science is becoming increasingly influential in education - but many conversations reduce complex ideas about teaching into overly simplified approaches. This discussion explores what learning science actually means when applied in real classrooms.
Conversations about explicit instruction, inquiry learning and evidence-based practice are often framed as competing approaches, creating the impression that effective teaching can be reduced to a single method or philosophy.
In this episode, Dr Stoo Sepp and Matt Fyfield explore what learning science actually tells us about how students learn, and why applying these ideas meaningfully in classrooms requires nuance, context and professional judgement.
Together, they discuss cognitive psychology, memory, attention and explicit instruction; the tensions surrounding current education debates; and why effective teaching often relies less on choosing one approach over another, and more on understanding when and how different strategies best support learning.
(00:00) What Learning Science Actually Means
(04:08) Why Learning Science Matters Now
(07:46) Explicit Instruction and Inquiry Learning
(12:14) What Learning Science Looks Like in Schools
(15:49) Memory, Attention and Cognitive Load
(17:43) Professional Judgement in the Classroom
(21:38) How Students Respond to Learning Science Approaches
(25:10) Translating Theory Into Practice
(31:01) Where Learning Science Gets Oversimplified
(35:00) Supporting More Flexible Teaching Approaches
Special Guests:
Dr Stoo Sepp
Senior Lecturer, School of Education and Culture
Faculty of Education, Monash University
Specialising in learning science, cognitive psychology and learning design.
Dr Matt Fyfield
Lecturer, School of Education and Culture
Faculty of Education, Monash University
Focused on translating evidence-informed teaching approaches into classroom practice.
Resources:
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[00:00] Rebecca Cooper: This podcast is recorded on the land of the Boonwurrung people of the Eastern Kulin Nation. We'd like to pay our respect to Elders past and present and acknowledge that this land was stolen and never ceded. Welcome to Let's Talk Teaching, the podcast created by teachers for teachers.
[00:19] Matt Fyfield: Now, if we come back to first principles, knowledge matters and knowledge is how we interpret the world.
[00:26] Stoo Sepp: When were you ever taught to learn? And I think for the most part, like, we aren't. We aren't taught how to learn. We're taught content. We're taught how to prove that we learned content and concepts and skills and things like that. But we're never taught how to learn generically.
[00:41] Matt Fyfield: There is a danger of "we already do this"-ism, which is where no matter what you pitch, we can in the staff room go, "Oh yeah, we already do that." But if we go to the classroom, we'll find there are things that we can change.
[00:54] Rebecca Cooper: Learning science is getting a lot of attention in education right now, but what it actually means in practice isn't always clear, and at times it's being oversimplified. This raises important questions about how we understand learning itself and how those insights can be used in ways that genuinely support students in their learning rather than reduce teaching to a set of fixed approaches.
[01:17] Stoo Sepp: Learning, it is a thing that happens in our brains, but it involves the rest of our bodies too. It involves and so many other factors, but being able to understand that really gave me a better insight into like how I can be an effective teacher wherever I am.
[01:31] Matt Fyfield: Nothing's more motivating than I can do something today that I couldn't do yesterday, and we're making that really, really apparent to our students with those constant checks for understanding, which are part of a learning sciences approach.
[01:43] Rebecca Cooper: I'm Associate Professor Rebecca Cooper, Assistant Dean of Initial Teacher Education at Monash University's Faculty of Education. Each episode we bring together education experts and alumni to unpack real challenges in the classroom with insights you can apply in your own teaching practice.
[02:01] Joining me today are two guests from Monash University's School of Education and Culture. Senior lecturer Dr. Stu Sepp, whose work draws on learning science and cognitive psychology, and Dr. Matt Fifield, a lecturer in education and alumni of the faculty whose with practical classroom perspective to these ideas.
[02:22] Thanks so much for joining me today. Stu, I'm gonna start with you. Big question here. When we say learning science, what do we mean?
[02:33] Stoo Sepp: It depends.
[02:34] Rebecca Cooper: Ah, Stu.
[02:35] Stoo Sepp: Yeah, right? So learning science is like, you can take a broad perspective, right? So you can think about it like any sort of science to do with learning. Like a really broad perspective could be like instructional video, what happens in the classroom, If you go back long enough, it's like kind of behaviorism and like pure psychology kind of research, even like Indigenous-based research, Indigenous knowledge, things like that.
[02:58] To me, that's all learning science. The learning science is the science of learning, all these different topics, right? So I think within that broad perspective, like so many different things, right? But then I think when we're talking in the Australian context, in the Victorian context, learning science, the science of learning, has a kind of a different, more scoped meaning, I think.
[03:19] And what they're talking about there is probably along the lines of like cognitive science, like what is happening cognitively when we are learning. And that has to do with memory and cognition and all of these different things.
[03:30] Rebecca Cooper: Matt, weigh in here.
[03:32] Matt Fyfield: No, no, that sounds about right.
[03:33] Rebecca Cooper: That sounds about right.
[03:34] Matt Fyfield: Okay. I think, I think Stu's got it that you've got the broad definition, but really in anything we're using language as a code for a shared meaning. One of the problems is we don't have a precise shared meaning, but the closest we've got is that kind of cognitivist view of of learning around the role of knowledge, the limitations of memory, and therefore the teaching practices that emerge from that kind of understanding of what's happening in a student.
[04:02] That at the moment would— we would call the science of learning or learning sciences. Yeah. All right.
[04:08] Rebecca Cooper: And it's a big thing in, in education right now at the moment. Really, really hot topic for teachers in initial teacher education, but why do we need this? Have we not been doing this in the past? Is this all so very new and different?
[04:24] Matt Fyfield: In a word, no, we haven't necessarily been doing it in the past. Now, all of us, many of us, you and I included, graduated from initial teacher education programs a long time ago.
[04:35] Rebecca Cooper: Oh, he's up there.
[04:37] Matt Fyfield: I'm including myself there, Bec. Oh, thanks. And I don't recall learning about what was happening when a student was encoding new memories. Why does it matter that we secure attention?
[04:53] And the reaction I get from teachers, both in-service and pre-service teachers, when we explain what's happening in the mind and a model of the mind, and therefore the behaviors that the teacher takes, is almost one of relief, of almost I get the underpinnings of what's happening in the classroom, and therefore I can make decisions around it.
[05:13] So in short, I don't know if we have necessarily been foregrounding this for a long time. And in the last— definitely in the last 5 to 6 years with the introduction of the Victorian Teaching and Learning Model 2.0, the vision for instruction in MAC schools, it's certainly come to the fore as probably the underlying logic of the direction of instructional practice.
[05:36] So. Yeah, it has taken a new turn.
[05:38] Rebecca Cooper: And so why does all of this matter then? Why is it so important?
[05:42] Stoo Sepp: I think it comes down to like systematic change, right? When we look at wanting to improve teaching and learning, when we want to— not that teaching and learning like needs to improve to a degree like that we can articulate, but I think there's a push to be able to say evidence-based, right?
[05:57] I'm using bunny ears, air quotes, whatever you want to call them. But I think when you look at other systems around the world and how they're kind of functioning in terms of their education systems, then Australian, like, politicians and folks in charge of the systems in place are looking at that going like, okay, what are we doing that is maybe akin to that or that we can either emulate or adapt into our context?
[06:22] So having a look at all of the research and things like that, it comes down to being able to operationalize those changes that maybe just haven't been operationalized before. And especially if you're like, I don't know, look at change management and things like that, you can suggest certain changes and then those will happen.
[06:38] But I think in this case, it's just a matter of going, like, yeah, we have this mountains of evidence, then how do we translate that into practice and how do we operationalize it at all the different scales we need to?
[06:48] Rebecca Cooper: So we're starting this operationalized piece and we're starting it with all the different scales that we need to. So where is this evidence coming from, this big evidence base that we've sort of been missing that's going to help us operationalize at scale?
[07:06] Stoo Sepp: So, I mean, depending on what— how you interpret the learning sciences, right? Like, you could say that learning sciences started tens of thousands of years ago, right? I think formally I would more put it around like 150 years ago-ish. But more recently, you get all of these kind of models of memory and like kind of the, the way I think of learning sciences, maybe the last 70 years, probably 70-ish plus years.
[07:29] So it's just a matter of translating what we found in the last 70 years. And I would say, especially in the last 40 years and getting that evidence into the classroom. And so it's just that operationalization of that and translation of that into the classroom that hasn't necessarily had that happen before.
[07:46] And I think it comes back— there was a paper written like 20 years or 20 years ago that was basically going like, this approach that we tend to use, like in quiet— I think they said specifically discovery-based learning doesn't work. Because there's no evidence that it does work.
[08:03] And so I think that paper is quite contested. It's by, um, Sweller and Kirchner. Uh, great paper. Uh, and I think interpretation in all of this stuff is, is a very, very important thing. Like, how do people interpret research and how does that interpretation come forward into policy and practice?
[08:19] Rebecca Cooper: So I think when you're talking there about that notion of interpretation, is there a risk here that we're ending up with dichotomies or an oversimplification maybe?
[08:29] Stoo Sepp: I think in my mind, when I talk to teachers, when I talk to researchers, when I talk to everybody in the space around the changes that are coming through and are expected to be implemented in the next couple of years, a lot of it has to do with how things are articulated. So when you look at the Victorian Teaching and Learning Model, when you look at statewide and other, like, national kind of programs of implementing this stuff, it says a lot of things, And it doesn't say a lot of things.
[08:57] And I'm in those conversations, I'm noticing a lot of people are focusing on what is not said. And what is not said is a lot of stuff around inquiry, problem-based, like guided inquiry, all of these things that teachers have been doing for decades, those traditions, right?
[09:12] So when I try to talk to people, I go, okay, well, all of these changes, because that's not included here, it doesn't mean we need to say it doesn't exist. Just because it's, it's not mentioned, it doesn't mean we're being told not to do that.
[09:27] That is my kind of middle ground that I'm trying to find internally, as well as when I discuss this with other people. So I think that's important to consider. It's like different teaching and learning practices have their place, and the Victorian Teaching and Learning Model explicitly around explicit teaching has its place, and Matt can speak to that way better than I could.
[09:48] So perfect handoff.
[09:49] Rebecca Cooper: You've come from a school and now you're here at Monash teaching all these wonderful things with us. How does it fit together? So if we're saying to teachers, you know, it's not saying don't do what you've done and it's not saying chuck all of that out. How do you put it together?
[10:04] Matt Fyfield: Yeah, look, and I'm with Stu that it's really complicated. You know, the old arc of expertise. I know nothing. I know everything. Trust me, it's complicated. But when we're dealing with schools and a teacher who's trying to maintain the plane while they're flying it and they want to know what they're doing on Tuesday, we need to have some pretty concrete advice for them.
[10:21] So for that, I would say yes, in a particular order. Now, if we come back to first principles, knowledge matters, and knowledge is how we interpret the world. There's some really interesting research done around giving students a passage to read about soccer or cricket.
[10:40] Now, the student who knows about soccer or cricket will— sorry, football for most of the world.
[10:45] Stoo Sepp: Thank you.
[10:48] Matt Fyfield: Will pick up more information from that than the good reader. Because it is the knowledge that they already have which allows them to read the text. I could give you 1,000 examples of it. So because we know that knowledge matters, giving a student a problem to solve prior to having the knowledge to solve it means that they have to rely on what we call randomness as genesis, trial and error.
[11:14] It's slow, it's frustrating, it's overwhelming. So what we would say to bring it back to the question is yes, explicit teaching actually in its most— in its purest form is a faded or a gradual release of control from teacher in control at the start.
[11:31] Here is the knowledge to learn, really clear worked examples, very structured with the teacher in control. And gradually over time, as the student moves from novice to expertise, the student gets more control to try new problems, to investigate, to do that— what we would call inquiry.
[11:50] So a pure inquiry approach may say the big question comes first and the students investigate their way. Explicit teaching would say the teaching of the knowledge comes first with the same endpoint that we want them to be critical and creative, etc., but we can only do critical thinking with what we know.
[12:09] So that's probably Yes, but in a particular order.
[12:14] Rebecca Cooper: And have you seen this play out in schools? Is it— how does it look in a school?
[12:19] Matt Fyfield: Yeah, and what it might look is that in the first instance, the explicit teaching might look a little robotic and a little teacher-centric. There might be some choral response work, lots of mini whiteboards, checking that every student knows the precise knowledge.
[12:36] But then as that progresses, the students can have more freedom and then there's more of a chance for the students to do that exploratory work. If I gave you a little example, let's imagine that I'm a history teacher and I give students a diary excerpt that was written in Poland in 1941.
[12:54] That has a very, very particular context to it. Unless I know what was happening in 1941, why Poland, why they're— I can't do that analysis. So what it might look like in a school is there's lots of precision teaching.
[13:10] Maybe there's some recall tests, maybe there's some retrieval practice over a number of lessons to the point where the students have the requisite knowledge. Then there's some worked examples of how to analyze an excerpt, like a diary excerpt, and now the students are given the freedom to maybe find one, investigate it, etc.
[13:27] So same point, they're getting to the point of critical and creative and deep analysis, but we're giving them the tools to do that along the way. That's what probably maps onto a science of learning approach and that cognitive architecture.
[13:40] Rebecca Cooper: So if we're, we're in a position at the moment, this is absolutely a big deal in education, in schools, in initial teacher education. This is all rolling out at quite a systemic sort of level. Where do you start?
[13:55] Like, this is big.
[13:57] Stoo Sepp: The way I've been explaining it to my students is just starting with that concept of novice to expert. Matt and I have talked a lot about this. And so articulating that when you are learning something new, you literally know nothing about that specific thing, right? So that would make you a novice.
[14:14] Doesn't mean you are an empty vessel to be filled, which is that kind of old way of kind of thinking about learning. Our students aren't to be filled like empty glasses, right? But like thinking about they have prior knowledge, they know things that they already know, about interacting with the world and previous lessons that they've had, perhaps.
[14:32] But in that particular thing a teacher is teaching them, if it's a new topic that they're covering, they literally know nothing about it. And so going back to that idea of kind of like random generate and test and trial and error, I always kind of put it to my students like, okay, without ChatGPT, without all of the tools that we have, like 10,000 years ago, how did people learn something new?
[14:55] Like, the only possible way to learn something brand new to them was either from the environment and injuring themselves, or we always talk about tigers attacking you, but, or from another human, right? And that's sort of the way I posit it. It's okay, well, like, if you're introducing a new topic to a learner, like, they sure, they can, you can just let a computer teach them, but that's not how what education systems are set up for.
[15:19] So, it requires the involvement of, I think Vygotsky called it, a more knowledgeable other. So linking all of these things that we already know together, I think like it's, it's important to be able to acknowledge previous traditions and existing traditions around different notions of learning into this stuff to kind of make that bridge.
[15:36] This is not new stuff. It's just kind of framed in a different way. So for my students, I start with that. Okay. If they know nothing, then they need a more knowledgeable other to give them that new knowledge. And that's where I start.
[15:49] Matt Fyfield: If I was to take your question from the perspective of what do we do with a school and they're currently running a school at the same time as trying to improve. The first thing I would do with teachers is explain the why, the human cognitive architecture. And for that, I mean, in the very briefest sense, huge amount of information in the world.
[16:09] We've got to pay attention to a little bit, a huge amount of long-term knowledge. The more knowledge we have, the easier it is to learn. Very, very limited working memory. What are we going to do with that working memory? So a bit of an overview of, of that. The second thing I would do with the school is work on behavior curriculum.
[16:26] Now that's a strange place for a learning scientist to come in, but we know that if we cannot attend to what the teacher is teaching, we cannot learn. Now that is both internally, if I'm feeling afraid, and externally if there's extraneous load, we call it, from the environment.
[16:42] So until we've got calm learning environments, whatever else we're gonna do is gonna run into interference. So that'd be the second thing. The third thing I'd be looking at would be low-variance curriculum, getting teachers to the point where we've got high-quality curriculum resources.
[16:59] Because for some reason in Australia, we've always had this idea that the teacher is the resource creator, the curriculum designer. That's not the case in other systems around the world. So low-variance curriculum, that doesn't mean the teacher loses their professional identity, and we can go into that in a bit more if you'd like to, but some great curriculum resources and then The final step would be those MTSS structures of how do we use our data to focus in on the students who are struggling, who are not making.
[17:29] So that'd be my step-by-step approach. Where would I start? The why, then the behaviour curriculum, then the low-variance curriculum, and then finally with an MTSS structure about how do we deal with those students who need that extra help.
[17:44] Rebecca Cooper: Just going back to picking up on the teachers and the professionalization and that professionalism there, does this change their role? Does this change their ability to be agentic? Does it change the notion of what it means to be a professional teacher? And does it change what they do in the classroom?
[18:01] And if so, how?
[18:03] Stoo Sepp: I'm not going to give you a one-word answer.
[18:05] Rebecca Cooper: That's okay. Wasn't asking for one, Stu. That's okay.
[18:10] Stoo Sepp: So yeah, in that case, I don't think it changes their agency at all. Like I always say, like every teacher has their toolset. And I think all this does is just add a new toolset that might not have just been there before, right? We have like decades of research on how the brain works and all the psychology behind learning.
[18:25] So in that sweet spot of students, like in that novice sweet spot of them not having the schemas, that's what we call kind of the memories and long-term memory. If they don't have those, all this does is kind of systematically give a mechanism or a strategy of how to get them that base knowledge so that they can move on to more, I guess, agentic strategies that this teacher would take and more kind of, as we would traditionally say, exploratory mechanisms for the student to take.
[18:53] Matt Fyfield: Did it change what I did? Yes.
[18:55] Rebecca Cooper: Yeah.
[18:55] Matt Fyfield: Yes, it did. So it changed definitely the way I thought around my classroom practice. And probably more than anything, I thought within that kind of framework of what's happening with the knowledge in the room, I was checking for understanding far more often, lots more opportunities for responding so that I could check that my students had the prior knowledge before I just went on with another anecdote.
[19:18] Not suggesting that's what teachers do primarily. Maybe that was just my teaching. But I would say yes, at some level that low-variance curriculum does change what a teacher does. Teachers for a long time have spent their wee hours of the morning, those late nights, writing that extra PowerPoint slide or that extra handout or that extra— When that stuff is a grade, there's more headspace for a teacher to do what we call intellectual preparation, putting
[19:48] themselves in the place of the student. What's the student going to be doing cognitively when they're solving this problem or analyzing this piece or writing this essay? And therefore, what can I do to help? So I'm now no longer the PowerPoint designer. I'm now thinking through what's the productive struggle going to be in my classroom?
[20:09] And I think that is a bit of a shift in the thinking of a teacher and what they do, which to be honest, I think is an exciting thing. I spent a lot of my early career wondering whether I was getting through.
[20:25] Dylan William asks two really powerful questions. What have they learned and how do you know? I think with this view of I'm checking for understanding a lot, I'm looking for prior knowledge, I'm looking for what that change is, I'm now mapping that onto what they can do next analytically.
[20:44] I could answer that question far more regularly and therefore I walked out agentic as a teacher because I could see the impact. The second thing it does is it changes the kind of conversation that a teacher has in the staffroom. When I was designing my own curriculum and we were all kind of doing it our own way— again, at secondary that is a particular difficulty because there's so many subject areas running at once.
[21:09] The conversation might be, they're not getting this topic idea, they're not getting quadratics at the moment. When we're using a low-variance curriculum, when we're using similar stuff, it's the first worked example I think goes too far. I reckon we need a worked example before that one.
[21:26] It's a far more nuanced teaching discussion around how we're going about the teaching, which I think is again a more exciting and more agentic conversation than the one before.
[21:38] Rebecca Cooper: And how do learners respond to this? Because this is more work for them. From what I'm hearing, it means the learners have really got to work hard. How do they respond?
[21:50] Matt Fyfield: In some way, some of the learners have to work hard. But remember the top-end students, when I say that, the ones with lots of prior knowledge, the ones with the parents asking them all the questions, where they're reading the newspaper on the weekend and watching the news together, they were never struggling. They were finding it pretty fun.
[22:07] Part of this is capturing those students who were— falling through the gaps is probably a wrong term, but you know what I mean. But is it more work? Yes, there's lots more opportunities to respond. But I reckon if you ask a student what's the worst part of school, it's sitting there just listening the whole day.
[22:25] It's the boredom that sucks. It's not that quick-fire interaction, nothing's more motivating than I can do something today that I couldn't do yesterday. And we're making that really, really apparent to our students with those constant checks for understanding, which are part of a learning sciences approach.
[22:43] Then I actually think it's more exciting. I had a Year 12 student walk into my class once and said, where's the do now? I've got my mini whiteboard out, where's my do now? And he was being silly, but He had a point. He was so used to this stuff, he was going to walk in and start working.
[23:00] And where was his task to do? I think our students actually prefer it.
[23:04] Rebecca Cooper: What do you reckon, Stu?
[23:06] Stoo Sepp: Yeah, I think like there's, there's that kind of thing around, well, learning is not something that is done for you. It is something that you actually have to actively engage in. So I think at a system level or school level, class level, whatever level you're thinking, however we can include students more, it allows for that.
[23:22] So I think a lot of like checks for understanding, opportunities to respond, all of these different strategies, they kind of bring what is that lifting all boats in the harbor. It's accomplishing that, I think, in a really salient way.
[23:34] Matt Fyfield: I should just put in there that sometimes when we're talking kind of learning sciences approaches, what we see in the video, what we see on the poster is the first bit. It's the bit that looks like lots of choral response, lots of students kind of in unison doing— and it looks quite robotic.
[23:53] And it's really important to notice that's just the first bit. And then it's because I've now got this knowledge that I can do something new and different with it and achieve success. That second bit is exciting. So I think if listeners are going, yeah, but I've seen this and that's when the teacher stands at the front, points and they all chorally respond.
[24:14] That's not the whole picture. And that's probably important to know. If that was the whole picture, 7 hours a day, every day. Oh gosh, I think everyone would be—
[24:22] Rebecca Cooper: Everybody pack up and go home.
[24:23] Stoo Sepp: Yeah, that's right. Well, it's telling too that all the videos that we see on those topics are like 2 to 3 minutes long, 5 minutes at most, right? So—
[24:31] Rebecca Cooper: Are you saying then that that's what it should be in the classroom too, like that it's only showing you a snippet of a bigger—
[24:38] Stoo Sepp: Exactly, yeah. And I think that's the thing that maybe we get swept up in. And so we see all of these things kind of articulated in the Victorian Teaching and Learning Model and other models as well as this is what teaching is now, wholesale, right? And when I think about that, it's like, no, no, no, this is just again one strategy that kind of has its place and it fits in this specific place, but it actually does support getting all the students on the same page so that teachers can then use their professional judgment to engage in everything that they're
[25:09] already experts in.
[25:10] Matt Fyfield: And in defense of the Victorian Teaching and Learning Model 2.0, which I did not write, that's where it ends up. So when you look at the diagrams of the VTLM, it wants students to end up in that project, in that inquiry, in that, you know, we want the student writing the letter to the to a minister.
[25:30] But first they've got to know what a minister is. They've got to know which arm of government they're writing to. They've got to da da da. And once they've got the knowledge and sentence structure, et cetera, then they're doing this. We want them to be agentic. And I think that's built into the Victorian Teaching and Learning Model. It's just in an order.
[25:46] It's in a particular order.
[25:48] Stoo Sepp: And it maybe doesn't use the nomenclature that people have been used to for a few years. So it's just, yeah, being able to go like, okay, that's where that does fit. And I do as a teacher have agency to keep doing what I'm doing.
[25:59] Rebecca Cooper: In a way, it's about finding yourself as a professional within the model. So there are bits that you will already be doing. It's about nuancing and adding and making appropriate decisions to support student learning to get to the bit you're already doing.
[26:14] Is that what I'm hearing?
[26:16] Matt Fyfield: There is a danger of 'we already do this'-ism, which is where no matter what you pitch, we can and the staff can go, 'Oh yeah, we already do that.' But if we go to the classroom, we'll find there are things that we can change. I was never a horrible teacher and I know the students enjoyed the classroom, but what I did when I learned about this kind of model of teaching and the importance of knowledge and the importance of knowledge as the building block of analysis, what I did was
[26:46] went through every piece of instructional material I used, did a task-level analysis of what the students needed to do and broke it down into the required knowledge, the required skills, and then explicitly taught them. Now I had to check for understanding each time and make sure students knew using worked examples, etc.
[27:05] So changing the order of instruction that I did. So it was a bit of work and I shifted it and, and we had huge change in our VCE results as a, as a result of adopting this approach. Now that's not the only measure, but it's a measure.
[27:21] And I can tell you what, it was a measure that the students cared about deeply. So I think there is a risk of we already do this-ism. And I think there's a— it's incumbent upon both teachers but also schools to set aside the time to do this properly.
[27:37] How do we change our approach to instruction? And that might be little by little.
[27:43] Rebecca Cooper: So if we're changing this little by little, I sort of two-part of a question here. What are the skills and knowledge that you need in order to implement this? And if we're doing it little by little, what are the conditions? What are the sort of structures that school leaders and school communities can put in place to support teachers to develop that skills and knowledge as they go and to implement it effectively?
[28:06] Matt Fyfield: I think you're spot on. We need worked examples. A colleague of ours, Russ Fox, often says, why do we suspend the rules for the adults?
[28:14] Rebecca Cooper: Yeah.
[28:15] Matt Fyfield: So if we're going to teach students using worked examples, using the key knowledge that we know, We've got to do the same for the adults. I, I was at a conference once and I saw somebody, a before and after PowerPoint. This is how we used to present the information.
[28:30] Now this is how we do it. And a light bulb went off in me and I went back and looked at all the things that— so we need to give clear worked examples. We need the why, the structure of how our brains work. And more than anything, we need the time. Now I would say to a school, once you've done your behaviour curriculum such, if you're going to do this, don't do anything else.
[28:53] So often the professional learning of a school is broken into, we're going to do this this week, then this this week, then this this week. Everybody goes and does their own projects. One of the absolute joys of my career was turning up to a school and as Deputy Principal Learning and Teaching and essentially being handed the entire PL time for the year.
[29:17] And that's all we did. And over a period of 3 years, we remapped the curriculum, rewrote curriculum materials, and had a teaching team that understood the why.
[29:30] Rebecca Cooper: Stu?
[29:32] Stoo Sepp: I mean, Matt's the expert in the teaching world.
[29:34] Matt Fyfield: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[29:35] Stoo Sepp: So I think it's just a matter of, yeah, the mechanisms behind it. When I first started teaching, I'm mainly a uni teacher. It just came in. I'm like, okay, well, you deliver the content. To a lecture theater of what, 200 people, you see confusion on their faces. You don't have much agency to do anything at that point. You wait till the assessment comes in and that's your benchmark of whether you are effective or not, right?
[29:55] But the more I learned, in a previous life, I was a learning designer. So the more I learned about the psychology behind it, how actually people learn. And I have to say, like, learning is, it is a thing that happens in our brains, but it involves the rest of our bodies too. It involves so many other factors, but being able to understand that really gave me a better insight to like how I can be an effective teacher wherever I am.
[30:18] Matt Fyfield: The other part to it is once you've got an idea of the how and the what, how do I go about doing the instruction and what am I instructing? What's this really great curriculum? Instructional coaching matters, rehearsal matters, and it's so often things that teachers don't do.
[30:36] For example, if we're going to use a mini whiteboard in class, actually practicing how am I going to do it, what's my routine, how am I going to prepare the students, how am I— it feels silly as a teacher practicing the routines. But if we think teaching is something you can get better, that's, I think, something that lots of schools are turning to now.
[30:55] But I would have that as an embedded part of my professional learning if I was at a school.
[31:01] Rebecca Cooper: And then I suppose the quality of the coaching as well is, is going to matter in terms of what that feedback is like, how it's rolled out, all those sorts of things. I imagine you're doing a lot of this work with our pre-service teachers coming in? So I know you both work with first-year students.
[31:18] How are they taking to this? Is this something they've experienced in schools or is it something that they're finding, you know, you're seeing a lot of lightbulb moments for them?
[31:27] Stoo Sepp: Yeah, quite a few lightbulbs.
[31:28] Rebecca Cooper: Yeah.
[31:29] Stoo Sepp: Sometimes off, sometimes on.
[31:31] Rebecca Cooper: Right.
[31:32] Stoo Sepp: Okay. But for the most part, yeah, like they're really receptive to the concepts, especially around the psychology stuff, because it kind of relates to them as learners as well. Like it's nice to be able to go like, okay, where it's almost like a lot of pressure on Matt and I because we are having to model while also teach the thing we are modeling, right?
[31:49] It's almost like this, like, snake eating itself, where it's basically the students are studying this while we're teaching them about how to study this. And so the studying part is a really nice thing because we can kind of help them with their studying. And then we go, oh, okay, let's like, what does it mean as a teacher take that different perspective now?
[32:08] So I think they're pretty responsive to it. Like, I think the activities that we're doing are really fun and they're just kind of more interested in the side of, yeah, what is learning actually? Because that's the thing that I keep saying to my students is like, when were you ever taught to learn? And I think for the most part, like, we aren't.
[32:26] We aren't taught how to learn. We're taught content. We're taught how to prove that we learned content and concepts and skills and things like that. But we're never taught how to learn generically.
[32:36] Matt Fyfield: Yeah, absolutely. There's lots of lightbulb moments. I imagine over time, that will become— that will decrease because students will emerge from schools that are using these kinds of approaches. But as we said, it really has been the last few years that, that the— this focus and some of the routines that come with this focus, which are open to criticism, have been implemented in Victorian schools and Australian schools and international schools.
[33:06] At the moment, We are marking assessments and the students have watched a video of expert teachers in practice and the critical thought that is going into that is incredible. Some of our initial teacher education students are now saying, I would have done X, but now that I know about how we process knowledge, I would probably do Y.
[33:29] Now that's pretty exciting. We also explicitly teach what are called neuromyths. Some things that we commonly think are true but just aren't. As Mark Twain said, it's not the things you don't know, it's the things you know for sure that just ain't so. Such as learning styles.
[33:45] I'm a visual learner. I'm an auditory learner. No, you're not. The amount of students who were surprised by that is the majority, I would say.
[33:53] Rebecca Cooper: So give us another one then.
[33:55] Matt Fyfield: Another neuromyth? Yeah. You can multitask. You can't.
[33:59] Stoo Sepp: What's the one with numbers that you always throw out?
[34:01] Matt Fyfield: Which one?
[34:01] Stoo Sepp: The one about you use like X amount of your brain.
[34:04] Matt Fyfield: Oh, 10% of your brain.
[34:06] Rebecca Cooper: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[34:06] Stoo Sepp: I love that one.
[34:08] Matt Fyfield: It makes for a good sci-fi movie though, because then the person activates the rest of their brain and can like move objects and stuff. Yeah, it's cool. We're using all of our brain most of the time, even when you're sleeping. Sorry, everyone. But what is it? I've only got a certain amount of room in my long-term memory.
[34:25] No, you don't. Long-term memory is basically infinite. We've never found the edges of it. When I say multitasking, people sometimes go, but I can walk and I can talk. It's two thinking tasks at once. There's some fun little activities that we do during our classes to deliberately impose a cognitive state where the brain's trying to run two rule sets at a time and the students laugh and their brain doesn't work anymore.
[34:52] And so we do a lot of work in trying to kind of have these have these little brain games so they can experience it. It's good fun.
[34:59] Rebecca Cooper: So, Stu, where's this taking you next in terms of research?
[35:03] Stoo Sepp: I think I'm really interested in— there is this cognitive, cognitivist approach to like learning science and things like that. It's really prevalent, but more so like the theory is kind of integrating different approaches within and outside of cognition, right?
[35:18] So we have this thing of, right, yeah, learning happens in the brain, but the brain is attached to a body within an environment. So that's one of the areas that I'm really interested in is like embodied cognition, it's called. So basically, how do people use their bodies, their hands to learn different topics?
[35:34] And I think, again, there's the whole thing of like, yes, teachers have been doing this for years, but the research around it is emerging around like pointing and tracing and attentional self-attention cues and things like that. So that's really, really interesting to me.
[35:47] Rebecca Cooper: And Matt, where are you heading next with yours?
[35:50] Matt Fyfield: Look, there's a thousand directions, but probably the one that's, that's most interesting is there's a thing called the expertise reversal effect. And long story short, we need to scaffold really closely for novice learners. But the more that you learn and the more expert you are, the less of these scaffolds you need and the more you want to go and explore.
[36:10] And you actually learn more from solving problems on your own. So when do you let go as the teacher? What's that process by which we shift from— we know we're going to shift from from tightly controlled to more exploratory, the when is still very abstract.
[36:32] What we'd like to do is, is lots of work around, well, what are the cues that teachers should be looking for that say my class is now ready to do this? Or when should we say, nah, they actually need some more automaticity practice on their recall and before I move on to— and that's where that agent agency comes from as a teacher.
[36:52] And at the moment, we're kind of— it's the vibe. So that's the work that we'd love to do.
[37:00] Rebecca Cooper: That's just fantastic. It seems like it's a really exciting time to be in this area. So I just want to thank you both so much for your time today. It's been a really interesting conversation. And one of the things that's been brought into focus is how quickly complex ideas about teaching can be reduced to simple choices and how so much gets lost when that happens.
[37:22] For teachers, that often comes down to professional judgment, knowing when to guide, when to step back, and how to respond to the needs of students in the moment, with learning science acting as a guide to support more informed and flexible decisions within practice.
[37:38] And when it's used in that way, it helps move the conversation back to what actually supports student learning. Thanks again, Stu. Thanks, Matt.
[37:48] Matt Fyfield: Thanks, Bec.
[37:49] Stoo Sepp: Thank you.
[37:51] Rebecca Cooper: We've included a wealth of practical resources in our show notes that support your teaching journey. Be sure to check them out. If you're enjoying the show, don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review, and follow us on social media. We are grateful for the support of Monash University's Faculty of Education in producing this podcast.
[38:09] For more information on short courses and undergraduate and postgraduate study options, head to monash.edu.au/education/learnmore. Thanks again for listening to Let's Talk Teaching.