Khan Academy Ed Talks with Pedro De Bruyckere - Thursday, November 11

Hello! Welcome to Ed Talks with Khan Academy. I am excited today to talk to Pedro de Broker, and, uh, my apologies in advance for not having the correct Belgian pronunciation of his name. He is an author who has authored a number of books. We're going to talk today about urban myths about learning and education, and I'm excited to dive into what we know from research that may disprove or suggest we are wrong about some of the things that we hold to be true about learning and education.

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So with that, we're going to talk today, as I said, to the author of both of these books, "Urban Myths About Learning and Education" and "More Urban Myths About Learning and Education." Pedro, thanks for joining us!

Pedro: Thank you for having me.

Host: Good! So the first question I like to ask folks is to tell me a little bit about how you got here. How did you end up writing books about learning and education?

Pedro: Well, it's a funny story. I remember one evening, eight years ago, nine years ago, I was asked to be the "staedtler" and Waldorf in a kind of education setting, and my only job was to give funny remarks. So I thought, great!

And halfway during the second talk, at a certain point, one of the speakers was mentioning that we have a creative brain and a rational brain, and I forgot that my mic was on and I said, "Oh no, my detector is now in the red!"

Everybody was watching, "What did you say?" And, um, every time I still, when I meet that speaker, I still apologize for that moment. But he said to the audience, "I have to admit, he's right. He's correct!" But afterwards, a lot of people came over to me and started asking, "But is this correct?" or "What about this?"

I heard so many different myths that said somebody should do something about this. I was working my PhD; I had a writer's block, I have to admit, at that time.

Host: Oh, I’ve been there.

Pedro: Yeah, we all been there, I guess. And so I asked my publisher, "Can I write a little small book about urban myths in education?" and that was the starting point. Now the book has been translated into English, Chinese, Turkish, Spanish, and it has traveled the whole world. And I have traveled the whole world talking about this.

Host: And you managed to finish your PhD! That's really impressive!

Pedro: Yeah, yeah, I don't know how I've done that, but I've done it, yes I understood. So how did you gather all of these different myths?

Pedro: Well, the first book was pretty easy because we could look at research with common myths and common misunderstandings. And actually, if we followed the news just for one year, we already had a lot of them. And after the first book, we thought maybe a bit naive that we were done. But when the first book was published, we received so many questions, "Yeah, but what about this?" and "What about that?" and "Could you check this too?"

The second book is just based on all questions received for the years after the publication of the first book.

Host: Wow! Nice! So that was that?

Pedro: Yeah, just raised all of these questions for people just starting to hear about it made them question other things. That seems like that's a good outcome for the first book, to make people question more?

Host: Yep, correct!

Pedro: So let's dive into a couple of them. We talk a lot here about Khan Academy—the importance of knowledge—but there's this myth out there that if you can Google something, do you really need to learn the knowledge piece of it? How about that one? What's your take?

Pedro: Well, it sounds reasonable, but the first question is how can you come up with the right words to Google if you don't know the subject? But the second element—and that's more painful—is that the algorithms of, for instance, Google, they are not always aiming at correct answers but more aiming on what do they think you want to know.

And sometimes this can be incorrect, that's one thing. But also, if you look at information you are receiving—and I'm not talking only about fake news and stuff like that—you have a lot of people who have the same name. And so we have had in the past some very interesting discussions about famous artists, but then they were discussing a football player instead of the altered artist.

But there is another very important option, an important reason, because most of the time you have to come up with an answer straight away. You have to know things to learn new things. If there's no prior knowledge, you have nothing to connect it to, and so you don't have the building blocks for the next learning step.

And it's a bit of a quote I once said, but I think it sometimes sums up quite nicely: on the internet, you don't find knowledge; on the internet, you find information. But what you need is the knowledge to fact-check and to understand that information.

Host: That all makes sense, and I like that knowledge versus information distinction. That's really interesting. And I know the other piece is when you're solving more complex problems, sometimes you need that base knowledge to solve them.

If you have to stop every time to go Google for that base knowledge, you're going to forget what you were doing solving the complex problem while you're trying to find the answer for the base one. Is that right?

Pedro: Um, it's late in the evening over here, and one of my sons was just passing through going to bed, and actually, I remember a very nice example of this. A couple of years ago, he had to learn his tables of multiplication by heart, and he hated it. He asked me, "Why do I need this?"

And then I went to a door and I asked my son, "Can you open this door?" which he did. And he said, "Now try to imagine you can't remember how to open the door." So every time you are coming to a door, you have to try to open it, try to figure out how you need to do this. You bang on the door; you use your head for a second, "Okay, if it's open, you can only hope for one thing that there is no second door, because otherwise you will have to start over and over and over again."

Now, you have to learn the tables of multiplication by heart, and it takes a lot of effort. But pretty soon you'll need much more complex—you will see much more complex mathematics. And if you need to calculate your multiplications at that time, you will lose so much time and energy.

Host: That's so you won't be learning something new!

Pedro: That totally makes sense. Yes, so I think that that importance of knowledge for all—there's not just one reason, there's multiple reasons that you've laid out here. Why it's important makes sense.

Alright, one of the most pervasive things you talked about your detector going red—learning styles—that, to me, it's so common and people just—it seems so attractive for people. It's something to believe that there's visual learners and auditory learners, and I hear it all the time. Tell me your thoughts on that one!

Pedro: Well, um, it was one of the very first myths that I encountered that put me on the right track. Actually, a couple of weeks ago or months ago, Dan Willingham was on the show.

Host: Yes!

Pedro: Yeah, yeah, and it was one of his videos that put me on track of trying to figure out what about those learning styles. What we've seen is a lot of people recognize it. And first of all, it's true, a lot of people do have learning preferences. Maybe some people like to read, or some people like to listen.

But there is no clear correlation between your learning preference and better learning. But still, that gut feeling, "Oh, it's correct." But I can flip that gut feeling. Just a question you have to ask yourself as a teacher: are you in favor of pigeonholing an education?

No, because we think all our pupils are different; our students are different. Yeah, but if you are using learning styles, you are pigeonholing your students into three or four—the maximum amount, with MBTI, 16 holes, 16 boxes. But our children are much, much more complex.

Host: Yes, yes! And it always is the—when you look at the research, there's just no—it isn't this isn't a case where, "Oh, the research hasn't been done." There's been lots and lots of studies, and they just, across all of them, don't find this effect.

And I wonder if there's still there if there's something here about research versus my personal experience that is causing this to be persistent and that idea of people having a preference.

Pedro: Well, there is something else also happening in science. For instance, a lot of people write about education, and for instance, an area that there is a lot of research on is on computers and learning. But those studies not often are being done by psychologists.

So what we've seen is a lot of research for the past 10-20 years done on computers in education mentioning learning styles—not checking if this theory is correct or incorrect. So you will find actually a lot of research not really on learning styles but mentioning learning styles feeding all the people who think they believe in, "But I've read it in a study."

Yeah, but that study was not done by psychologists knowing their stuff; they were done by computer scientists; they were done by educationalists, perfect people—but they didn't know that they were using something incorrect!

Host: Right, right! That makes sense. They almost assumed that learning styles was a thing as an assumption of the work they were doing.

Pedro: Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. So in that world of computers and technology—also a space that I'm interested in—we hear a lot about, we hear about a lot about digital natives and that digital natives want something really different with their education and their system. What does the research say on that?

Pedro: Well, digital natives first was coined by Mark Prensky in 2001 already. And it was just based on a couple of observations; it was not based on actual research. And again, it sounds logical because if you give a device to one of your children or your pupils or students, they are very handy with it.

But there has been a lot of research. Paul Kirschner and myself, we've done a review on all the research since 2001 and what we've discovered is that it’s not true. It’s not the case.

You have to make a distinction between the content side and the strategic side on one side and the button knowledge. And it's true, young people, young students are much better at figuring out how some device is working. But if we are talking about the content, but also how to use it, also to know if something is correct or incorrect, then we see that they are not that good at all.

Actually, if we look at 30- and 40-year-olds, they are much closer to what has been described as digital natives than 10-year-olds, 20-year-olds.

Host: Ah, interesting! I hadn't known that, that piece of the last part. I remember looking, trying to find in Mark Prensky's book the research to support it, but he was basically coining a term but without having necessarily the research to support it. And it caught on!

Pedro: Yeah, and there’s a lot of research, and, and, and we keep checking all research because maybe now it will change, but we didn’t find any evidence yet. And in different regions, for instance in China or Japan, we can’t find digital natives. We can’t find them in Europe; we can’t find them in the United States.

So, sorry, actually it's a very important message because it's very important for us as educators, as teachers. We need to train our students in how to handle these devices, how to work on the internet, how to handle the information they are getting, but also to know when they can use their cell phone and when it's better to put it away.

I think that the fact that there are no digital natives gives us an extra task in education. That the idea of digital literacy and what that means is, it's so important, but people have to be taught it just like other skills.

Pedro: Yeah, I guess so.

Host: Yeah, we have a question from Facebook. Ahmad says, "In today's digital world, we have knowledge, but how can we solve problems?" That many students, you know, have degrees, but even then they get lost. And so I think that I'll ask a related question to this: we've talked a lot about kind of myths of things we haven't found. What does work for learning? And particularly maybe problem solving?

Pedro: Well, a lot of stuff works in education, actually! Not everything works and nothing works all of the time, but there is a lot of things we know that can do the job.

We know that basic knowledge and arithmetics and reading comprehension can help you a long way. But then there's also the part of problem-solving. We've seen, for instance, from research like Project Follow Through, but also from research by the OECD with the PISA results and things like that, that a base—a good solid basic knowledge can help you, and also can help you to solve problems.

But then you get—you need the opportunity to get in touch with this kind of problems and get the hang of it. So if you in education have a good basic knowledge, if you have a lot of background knowledge, it can help you too. But also, if you see a lot of examples—good examples of how problems are solved—if you get this not only in one topic but in several topics, maybe in integrated topics, but then also give you the opportunity to try and fail but learn from the failures, then you’ll get a long way. Just like you have to learn how to read a book, how you write a sentence, it's also important to learn how to solve a problem.

Host: Yes, so background knowledge, practice with feedback of whether it's right or not.

Pedro: Yes, and you know, there’s something that I want to add because when people are thinking that when people know we are writing about urban myths, they often think it’s black or white. But we use three categories in our books. The first category is "total nonsense." First, for instance, learning styles—those are no total nonsense. If you’re discussing some other topics like multiple intelligences, then we say it’s nuanced.

And for some topics we have to say we don't know because even in science there are a lot of discussions. Let’s take the 21st-century skills—it's a topic that’s also very popular and closely related to problem solving. Now there are two discussions in the scientific world that we don’t have a solution yet, but that are really relevant for this kind of discussions in education.

The first element we are not sure about is: is it actually a skill, or is it rather a personality trait? For instance, creativity: is it something that you can learn, or is it something you need to develop? That's the first point of discussion.

The second point of discussion is how generic are those skills? Because, for instance, I can be very creative in playing the guitar, but it doesn't mean that I'm very creative as, for instance, a plumber. Trust me, I'm not! So how generic are those skills? And we don't have the answer on these questions yet. But I do think they are very important to help us further in education.

Host: Yeah, so this idea that research is evolving, I think, is an important one and that we don’t always have all the answers. But psychology itself recently has been through quite a reckoning on that. Some things that we thought were true after trying to replicate those findings, we're seeing aren't replicating so well. So do you see some of that pattern too?

Pedro: Yeah, thank you for bringing this up! Actually, Eric Erickson once described that crisis means growth. Well, if that's the case, psychology has been through a major period of growth—the biggest period of growth in history.

Because it's true, a lot of classic studies have been replicated for the past 10-11 years and failed, and there is a new book coming up next year, next summer, "The Psychology of Great Teaching." Together with Kasper and Lisa, what we have tried to do is trying to figure out what is still standing and what should be left behind.

Some of the big theories, for instance—very popular in teacher training—Piaget is one of the victims. But on the other side, there’s also great news because yes, there’s a lot of stuff that wasn't able to be replicated. But there are also a lot of things that are now standing stronger than ever. For instance, if we look at dual coding, a lot of cognitive science that has been used in education for the past 10-15 years, we have now bigger knowledge confirming—scientific knowledge confirming those insights.

But great—it has been a very strange period.

Host: It has!

Pedro: So you just kind of dropped dual coding. Can you talk to folks about dual coding if they're not familiar with that?

Pedro: Oh my, sorry for that! Dual coding is the idea that if you combine images and words, we have two channels in our working memory—a channel for words and a channel for images. If you use them both, there is a bigger chance that you will learn.

Okay, but wait! If you put too much pressure on one of both channels, then you are getting less learning. For instance, if there are too many images, if the images don't relate to what is being taught, people will learn less. But also, if you have words on the screen that are exactly the same as what is being said, then the word channel gets overloaded, and again, students will learn less.

Host: That makes sense! That it's not just put all the information you can through both channels; there's nuance to it and how to do it well and what that looks like.

Pedro: Yeah, I think that's the biggest task we have as scientists—not telling people, "Do this, and miracles will happen." No, do this, and maybe this will have an effect. And if it doesn't work, please try this.

Because it’s easy for gurus to say, "Do this and everything will be better!" and it will even smell better! But in real life, it's much more complicated than that.

Host: Can I give you an example?

Pedro: Yes!

Pedro: And it's connecting several dots because we received a lot of questions about growth mindset, and it's a topic in our second myth book but also a topic in the psychology book.

Carol Dweck is not a guru, and I can prove you she's not a guru; she's a real scientist because a lot of the studies that were performed on a growth mindset had a very small group of students being involved in the study.

For the past couple of years, there has been real replication, and credit to Carol Dweck, she also participated in research on replicating her original studies. And we found out that the effect of growth mindset on average is not that enormous. Well, it's really small, but the main word in my previous sentence was "on average."

Because we see that for some children, for some students, it can even have a negative effect to stimulate a growth mindset. But if the average is small, or nothing close to nothing, and some pupils have a negative effect, then it's not hard to imagine that other students can have a positive effect.

And we see that, for instance, children from poorer backgrounds can benefit from a growth mindset approach. So for us, it's very important not to say, "Throw growth mindset away!" but when will we use it? For who will we use it? But also keep an eye on the effects because maybe in your case it can have a splendid effect, but maybe it's the opposite, and then it's you as a teacher or educator or a team to say, "Let’s do something else."

Host: Yes! So Sarah Helm from YouTube asks if Pedro could say something about motivation myths. So there's a piece about mindset and how we think about motivation from growth mindset that I think is important. Anything else on motivation?

Pedro: I can't tell a lot about motivation because there's a lot of it about it in the new book, but I'll give you two very interesting insights.

The first thing we often think about: you have either intrinsic motivation or extrinsic motivation. Intrinsic is good, and extrinsic is bad. But it's much, much more complicated.

For instance, there are a couple of versions of extrinsic motivation. And I can give you again a very simple example: you have a student who wants to become a doctor. He or she is really motivated to become a doctor, but he or she is not really into mathematics. But they know that—student knows—that if I want to become a doctor, I really need this kind of mathematics.

Then that student isn't motivated intrinsically for mathematics, but has a good positive extrinsic motivation. Please keep that kind of motivation. But also—and this will surprise a lot of you—we know that a lot of people think the more passionate you are about the subject, the better. But there is an issue with that because we know that if you're really, really passionate about something, but you don't have anything else in your life, then there is this bigger chance that whenever you get into a problem or hurdle, that you will give up.

If you have a passion, but you also have something on the side—something else, another hobby—then you are more resilient for any kind of setbacks you can encounter trying to achieve your passion. So the idea of being more motivated or more passionate is better—is again much more complicated than that.

Host: Yes, okay! So this relates to a question from Alex Morelli from YouTube who says, "You mentioned your son not liking to memorize his multiplication tables. How important is student drive in learning?"

And I think there's a follow-up question of if a student’s not motivated to do something, how do you try to get them to be motivated to do something?

Pedro: Yeah, that’s the one million-dollar question! First of all, I think we have to accept—even us as teachers—we are not always that motivated for every single part of the things we are doing. So that's sometimes I treat myself with chocolate to get through a task that I have to do right now.

Host: Yeah, you should come to Belgium: the best chocolates in the world! I wasn’t paid for that!

Pedro: Okay, but going back to the question—one of the things is we need to find that the experience—a kind of success. So if it’s too difficult or too easy, I think a first step is to make sure that everything is a possible challenge.

It's a challenge but a challenge that they can achieve. You know the classic concept of scaffolding? Good teaching is building scaffolds for every child to learn. Sometimes you'll need a kind of rewards to get things started, but there is another element, and that's often overlooked.

We've all had teachers on subjects that we weren't interested in, but surprisingly, we were by the end of the class because the teacher he or herself was so passionate about. And passion can be very contagious.

So try to be motivated yourself; show this. Try to also explain why you're motivated, but also try to explain why the child needs this. Because I have to admit—discussing my son again, as an example—I don't like anecdotes, but I want to use this to explain something: well, he, I didn't convince him, but he did it because he thought, "Well, if my dad thinks it's important, it will probably be important."

But later on he came to me and said, "You were right, I need this." And sometimes you have to ask a kind of leap of faith from your students or children: "We know you—I know it’s hard now, but you'll get by and then you'll figure out why you need this."

But one last remark on this: if you don’t know why they need this; why your students need this, and the only answer is, “It's because it's in the textbook or in the curriculum,” then you're in deep trouble.

Because if you can't answer that question, how can you motivate your children?

Host: That totally makes sense and sounds like a good place to leave us on. I could have talked to you for much longer, but we are already at the end of our time today. Thank you so much for joining us!

Pedro: Oh, it was great fun. Thank you!

Host: Excellent! And I want to again recommend to everyone both the existing books on urban myths in learning and education, and we look forward to your forthcoming book as well. Thank you, and everyone have a great day!