Dive into educational technology with Peter Twining as we unravel the complexities of edtech's role in our classrooms. Peter, a seasoned expert in education and pedagogy, joins Olivia, the Director of Education at Bedrock Learning, and our usual host, Andy Sammons, to offer a nuanced perspective on the challenges and promises of integrating technology within educational systems. The conversation blends academic research with practical wisdom, helping educators to navigate the ever-evolving landscape of learning and technology.
Dive head-first into the heart of how educational beliefs shape the deployment of technology in our schools. The discussion with Peter and Olivia brings to light the different influences on student motivation, teacher autonomy, and classroom dynamics. The guests share stories and insights that reveal just how pivotal pedagogical alignment is, not just for the effectiveness of edtech, but for staying true to the values we hold dear in our educational journeys.
Our guests leave us pondering the role of human competencies in an AI-driven world and challenge the one-size-fits-all approach of standardised education systems. The conversation also empowers educational leaders to drive technology choices with pedagogical outcomes at the forefront, fostering on-demand mindsets and informed technology use among students. Together, we underscore the necessity of a systemic shift—a change that recognises the individuality of teachers and students alike, and one that can truly harness the transformative power of educational technology.
For more insights from Peter:
Dive into educational technology with Peter Twining as we unravel the complexities of edtech's role in our classrooms. Peter, a seasoned expert in education and pedagogy, joins Olivia, the Director of Education at Bedrock Learning, and our usual host, Andy Sammons, to offer a nuanced perspective on the challenges and promises of integrating technology within educational systems. The conversation blends academic research with practical wisdom, helping educators to navigate the ever-evolving landscape of learning and technology.
Dive head-first into the heart of how educational beliefs shape the deployment of technology in our schools. The discussion with Peter and Olivia brings to light the different influences on student motivation, teacher autonomy, and classroom dynamics. The guests share stories and insights that reveal just how pivotal pedagogical alignment is, not just for the effectiveness of edtech, but for staying true to the values we hold dear in our educational journeys.
Our guests leave us pondering the role of human competencies in an AI-driven world and challenge the one-size-fits-all approach of standardised education systems. The conversation also empowers educational leaders to drive technology choices with pedagogical outcomes at the forefront, fostering on-demand mindsets and informed technology use among students. Together, we underscore the necessity of a systemic shift—a change that recognises the individuality of teachers and students alike, and one that can truly harness the transformative power of educational technology.
For more insights from Peter:
Hello everyone and welcome to Literacy Works, the podcast hosted by Bedrock Learning. We'll be trying to bring you the most interesting and best people from around the world of education to write into your ears. Really and we've done a few of these. Now we're really excited about where it's going and I would have to say this is right up there in terms of who we've managed to get onto the podcast. We've got Peter Twining today. Welcome, Peter, as well as Olivia Sumpter, who is the Director of Education at Bedrock Learning. So no pressure on me having Liv on here, high Liv as well. It's lovely to have you both.
Andy:We're actually recording at, as it says, 8pm British time, because Peter is in Australia. We have world renowned experts on this podcast. I'm not going to not sorry to embarrass you, Peter, but thank you so much for coming on. And yeah, but just to kind of give people a sense here, the reason why we asked Peter on is because his book found its way to me and I was asked to read it as a really key piece of literature and I must admit it didn't take much persuading to read it, because it's just up my street, From EdTech to PedTech. I just think that's a fantastic title. I think that's really brilliant, and so the first thing I'd like to really ask you, peter, is a bit a little bit about your background, your history and where the, where the book came from.
Peter:Really, Okay, well, so a bit about my background.
Peter:I was a primary school teacher very long time ago in the East End of London, but that was interesting because actually I had studied artificial intelligence and social psychology at university.
Peter:I was really interested in computers and AI and how do you get computers to attract people and I then did some work around intelligent tutoring systems, which weren't very intelligent, they were basically just really skill. And then I really got interested in working with kids and teachers in schools, so I can qualify as a teacher and then work in the East End of London. And I then moved to initial teacher education, then moved to the Open University and I spent, I guess, 20 something years at the Open University, so working there helping them to integrate technology into their teaching and their courses, and then became head of school of education. I became the co-director of the Center for Research in Education and Education Technology, okay, and I became professor of education futures. I then moved to Australia because I was quite excited about some of the movements in Australia around big picture schools and the way they were integrating big picture schools alongside mainstream schools and I thought it would be an ideal opportunity to come over and kind of be more practically involved in trying to bring about change in the schooling system.
Andy:When was that? When did you go to Australia? What positive years 2019. Okay, right.
Peter:So just in time for COVID. Yeah, so I was a professor over here at the University of Newcastle in Australia. The book came about because, gosh, a long time ago 2009 to 2013, I ran a big project for the DFE. I'm looking at how to enhance the use of digital technology in schools in England. During that time I did a lot of work with people like Fiona Wobery Smith, bob Harris and people like that.
Peter:Fiona then became one of my doctoral students, so we worked together for quite a long time and she had this model which is incorporated in the book, the funnels of influence model, and that was really interesting. And I was saying to her I mean, she did a great thesis on the best thesis I've ever read. And I was saying to her you know, you got to write, got to write this up as a book, you know, because no one's going to read the thesis, but you've got a book there and she didn't want to write the book on her own. She persuaded me to do the book with that. So that's the book about, right, it was a great for me. It was a great knowledge of Fiona's incredible understanding of the practicalities of working in schools, her kind of pragmatism, expertise in merging in with my more academic work around learning theory, managing the change and those sorts of things. So we've got those things just kind of merged in the book.
Andy:I must admit I read the book. I started it kind of a few days ago and finished it today actually, and I did. I did genuinely find it quite seamless in terms of how the ideas went from one one to the next, and I love the kind of the praises of the of the successful aspects of implementation in schools which, if nothing else, would be something that I would really urge colleagues to read. Is that? What did we say? It was a second chapter.
Peter:Right, so the research, that our summary of the research, is in chapter two.
Andy:Yeah, yeah, I thought that was really interesting and but then when you kind of started to go off, you know you put your own stamp on it, really in term it later on, and you know what. I really wanted to tease that because you spoke, spoke before about her kind of practical knowledge of schools and your more academic approach background. You separate political, institutional and personal. I mean that you know there's lots of all the things that could have gone into a book. Why that? What made you do that? Because you saw these different contexts surrounding a teacher when it comes to use of ed tech, right.
Peter:Well, so I've done all the work around visions of education and the need to have a clear vision that drives what you do within your school context, and that notion of alignment. And one of the things that struck me very strongly was that you know we talk about alignment between your vision, your curriculum, your pedagogy and your assessment, but actually you need to think about that at different levels because you have this kind of the broad context, what you might refer to as the political level, which kind of sets the agenda in terms. You know, here's a national curriculum, here are the national assessments, and we need to get those things aligned. But you also then have alignment within the school in terms of the schools policies and they're responding to that broader political context. So you've got to get alignment within the school between the schools policies and the schools practices, but that also has to be aligned with the political context of what the national curriculum makes you to do and what the whole levels or GCSEs or A levels or whatever it is you're dealing with expect you to do. And then you also have to get alignment at the classroom level, because we make this assumption that the school kind of has a pedagogical approach and the school has all these policies, but we also know that when you get into your classroom, what you do as a teacher is very dependent on you and your values and beliefs and how you interpret the policies and how you engage with the curriculum and particularly the natural relationship you have with your children.
Peter:And so you've got these three different levels, which you have to have consistency within each level, but you also need consistency between the levels and that's something that's kind of missing in the literature.
Peter:We talk about alignment, we talk about the importance of alignment, but we hardly ever talk about the alignment at the different levels and we particularly hardly talk about our values and beliefs. We talk about what to be feeding through and we need alignment between our values and beliefs and all those other things that we're doing in the school context. And that seems to me to be missing, and I think that's one of the things that differentiates edtech and edtech. Edtech, yeah, there's some really great frameworks you know the ERF from NACE and frameworks like that which are really strong in terms of, you know, get alignment with your vision, make sure you have a strategy for how technology is being embedded in your schools but they don't talk about teachers beliefs and they don't talk about the values that underpin what you're doing, and we know that what you do in your classroom I mean some of the stuff you believe you can't articulate, it's tax it, so it comes out in your practice.
Andy:Yeah, I read that. It was almost like it's revealed in how you behave and how you interpret frameworks without knowing them. Yeah, that's really good.
Peter:And you're pressured as a teacher. I mean, it's really hard as a teacher if your your, this is what the school believes and these are the schools tachycological approaches for you as an individual teacher to you know, you're going to count how you're going to come there, you're going to speak the speak. And it's the same thing with policies. Policies come out and they talk about constructivism or they talk about the sort of approaches you should take, and there's just an assumption that you believe that's not and that you agree with that stuff.
Olivia:We're encouraged in our early you know, in the early career teacher framework, we're not necessarily encouraged to really reflect on our position and our values as a teacher.
Andy:Yeah, that's what that's like, but very much based on knowledge.
Peter:That's one of the things that I think is really important and why I think the values and beliefs thing is really important. You know when I, when I, did initial teacher education, you know we spent a long time talking about sociology and education and our values and beliefs and principles and why you did things. And you know at that point we didn't have a national curriculum, we certainly didn't have in literacy and numeracy strategies and we didn't have a lot of the constraints that have been. Teachers were much more trusted. I mean there still were. It's only defined cricket. I worked for the London Educational Authority and you know they had curricula but as a teacher you had professional judgment about what you were going to do and how you're going to do it in your classroom, and teaching has been progressively deprofessionalized. I would agree.
Peter:The extent that almost we're becoming technicians. You know, you teach like this. You're going to have your three part lesson. You're going to teach synthetic onyx in this way. You're going to do X, y and Z and in order to make space for teaching people about how to do the three part lesson, or how to do behavior management or how to teach synthetic onyx, we pushed out all that stuff which is about how you, as a professional, make judgments.
Peter:The art is going to do in your practice. Yeah, and I think that's really problematic. And part of my passion and part of what I think the book is about is saying as a professional, you need to understand what you value and what you believe so that you can then think OK, so this policy directive is coming in. What do I feel about that? How am I going to respond to that? If you don't understand your position, it's really hard for you to make an informed, professional decision about what you're going to do.
Olivia:But then equally, we have schools that make space for that element of reflection Absolutely.
Peter:Absolutely, and I think it's part of the whole problem with the system all the way through the system. In a liberal world Government doesn't trust teachers. Teachers don't trust their classroom teachers. Teachers don't trust their kids. We have this kind of you know, we've got to enforce, we've got to check, we've got to measure to make sure that you're providing quality experience all the way through, because we don't trust you.
Andy:We have some In with my teaching learning team. We speak to schools all day, every day, all the time, and without question, it's my favorite part of the job that teachers just speaking to teachers just lifts me. I can't believe what an incredible body of people we have in schools in the UK. They are the dream and the worldwide as well, actually speech teachers all over the world.
Andy:And what I find really frustrating is that there's so much variety and that, which is fine, but there's so much not variety but inconsistency with our in terms of our platform, in terms of, sometimes, the rationale around the per you know why it's been brought in and and then how it's being used and all that sort of stuff. And everyone says, oh no, we need to make sure we've got literacy right for our children. That's really, that's a moral thing, that's really important. But actually you're so right in unpicking what your beliefs are about what that looks like and how, how the implementation of Bedrock looks in their setting and because it's subtle, it is one a tech platform, that's true, it's singular, but actually there's all sorts of beliefs and, as you say, assumptions and deeper philosophies that actually need to be aligned in order for that, in order for successful implementation to take place.
Peter:I think the word I took out from the struck me when you were talking is that word subtle. Yeah, things that seem quite insignificant make a massive difference to the learners experience. You know the way you know your tone of voice, the way you ask a question, the way you look at them when you're talking. You know responding to them changes the nature of the relationship, it changes the dynamic in the classroom, it changes how the learner experiences it and ultimately it's about how the learner experiences that matters and you need to be aware of that and some of that stuff will just come out.
Peter:I mean, one of the things that really struck me with the end is research that she was doing as a doctoral student. She was observing teachers in their classrooms and she described to teachers who both were welcome in the kids as they came into the classroom. Okay, and from her initial description they both sounded like they're doing the same thing. But then when you watch the videos, the way they stood and the way they greeted the children was dramatically different. One was establishing control and dominance in the classroom and one was actually genuinely engaging with the kids as they came in. Completely different, but it sounded like the same practice and you know some quite subtle differences just in the way they stood as the kids came in and you know what they said to them in terms of using their first name and that sort of thing made a dramatic difference to what they were actually doing and how it would have been experienced by the learners.
Olivia:And I think in you know, in my teaching experience, I've seen that with ed tech platforms as well, that you can use two teachers can use the same ed tech platform. You know the same amount with comparable cohorts of children. And actually if a teacher says this matters to me, this is important to me. I'm going to weave it into my teaching practice. This isn't just about you being busy while I mark my books over here. It's that implementation that makes such a difference and the way that the teachers show it matters to them.
Peter:Yeah, well, I'm not just, not just that they show it matters, but how they implemented. So I mean in the book. I'll keep plugging the book in the book.
Andy:We we listen to this by the book. It's amazing. I'm happy to say that. I'm happy to pedal that all day.
Peter:Have a pedal that all day for you, and if you buy in January, there's a 20% discount off from Reflej. We can hopefully you're going to put up a link at some point for where they can get the book. In the book we describe a range of technologies which are available in most classrooms. We talk about people who've got different pedagogical sciences, different views about learning them. They would use the same technology in different ways in their classrooms to align with their beliefs about how kids learn. They're radically different and so I think unless you understand how you believe children learn, it's hard then to make an informed decision about. So how am I going to use this particular tool? And the literature is very clear it's not the technology that matters, it's how you use the technology that matters.
Olivia:Always.
Peter:Yeah.
Andy:That's so interesting because it's really making me reflect. Actually, I speak all day, every day, to schools and I think I'm like the Oracle when it comes to using bedrock, but actually I'm reflecting myself on the kinds of advice I'm giving schools and actually that it's revealing something about me and I always say the key is consistency, consistent praise, consistent valuing, consistent making sure that there's always that touch point in the week where pupils know they're going to be checked in on and the language and the points discussed with them and all that stuff. But actually that's revealing something about me, isn't it? That's revealing something about how I would implement it and something you know, and that's fine, but there must be more to it than that, and there is, but there must be more to it than that and it's a deep, more meaningful thing.
Peter:And one of the problems with edtech is very often you get an edtech evangelist who comes in and says you know, use it like this. Yeah, and very often edtech evangelists have a quite progressive pedagogical stance. You know they're probably constructivists or social constructivists. They come in and they assume you agree with their pedagogical stance and they tell you to do it like this because that's how they would do it. But if that's not your pedagogical stance, that's not going to work for you, and even though you're going to corrupt it, you're going to either actively resist or in some subtle ways you're going to undermine what they're telling you to do, because your approach, your stance, how you think kids learn, is different to the one that they're assuming you have, and so the advice you're giving them just isn't going to work. And so you've got to start from. What does the teacher believe? What do they think kids learn like?
Andy:Yeah.
Peter:And then you've got to say so you use the technology that aligns with your beliefs. And I started off. You know, when I got into technology first I thought it was a Trojan mouse. I thought it was going to be a catalyst for change in classrooms and I've done research in hundreds of classrooms.
Peter:What you find is it's not a capitalist to change. What it does is it amplifies their existing pedagogical stance, so it allows them, sometimes it liberates them to do things that they couldn't do before, that they wanted to do but were held back from, and sometimes it just amplifies them standing at the front. I mean, we all know about interactive whiteboards. They were supposed to change practice and for a lot of classrooms they didn't. It just made it better for the teachers standing at the front. It was a bit more glitzy and they could show some videos and it made the kids a bit more engaged. But pedagogically it reinforced a traditional model and didn't change practice, whereas for some teachers it allowed them to actually engage the kids more in the kids being active participants in the process and it allowed them to do what they wanted to do all along, but found really hard to do with a whiteboard.
Andy:There is a real, certainly in the UK at the minute. There's a real drive, certainly in my experience, of whether you call it Rosin's shines principles whatever you want to go about talking about it it's very didactic, very kind of explicit modeling and all that stuff and it is lending itself to a certain type of style of teaching which is proving very popular in the UK and I'm not going to count myself out of that. That's definitely how I've taught in the last five, six years Very much model practice, explicit retrieval, all that kind of thing. But this really is in some ways I won't lie to you, this is quite uncomfortable for me to actually readdress, reexamine some of my own assumptions that I've just I've walked into making over the last five years or so and it's quite interesting.
Olivia:That's the key thing. And I wonder, pete, if you could show us, if you could model for us, maybe when you were an early teacher how what questions did you ask yourself to identify those key values?
Andy:Yeah.
Olivia:Did it come as a result of that?
Peter:Sorry, paul, there's a real challenge for us.
Peter:Ok, because we know assessment drives practice and, quite rightly, if we're being judged about how our kids do in some test or exam, we want them to do well and so therefore, we will prepare them to do well in that test or exam.
Peter:The problem we've got is the tests and exams tend to focus on a very narrow range of generally quite academic competencies and we'll have all this gut for about 21st century skills, which aren't 21st century or skills very often. But we want kids to be able to collaborate and to problem solve and to be creative and all those sorts of things. But we don't assess those things and therefore they are not the priority for teachers. And that's not the teacher's fault and this is the problem. As you said, andy, we have some amazing teachers, lots and lots of them in our classrooms, but they are amazing despite the system, not because of it, and we need to change the system so that we start to say, if we're saying we want collaborators and we want problem solvers and we want great communicators and we want leaders, then you're not going to assess them sitting on their own in the room without access to anything except their own memory.
Andy:That's the other thing, doesn't it? I mean, I think this links actually to another point I was going to ask you about, which is you do talk about pedagogical alignment in the book, and do you think, if teachers go back reflecting on some of this stuff, that I wonder how many would naturally agree with what you've just said. I wonder how many would say actually we need to really think about the types of learners that we want our schools to produce and whether we are encouraged in our classrooms to actually facilitate that, whether we're allowed to. And yeah, I think that's really interesting. I mean, can we unpick? Well, can you unpick for us what you mean by pedagogical alignment? First of all, OK.
Peter:So in terms of pedagogical alignment, my starting point is what are my values under these? The most important one from my point of view, pedagogically, is how do I believe kids learn? And that then frames what I call my pedagogical stance. So I believe and within the book we talk about four different models we talk about what we call traditional, which is really the idea of individual constructivist, which is a kind of Piagetian type model. Social constructivist, which kind of I got sleep through and that kind of stuff, and then sociocultural, which would be Leven and Benga, and each of those have different assumptions about the purposes of education the view of the learner, the view of the teacher, the view of knowledge. And if you look at those four kind of areas, each of them provides a different explanation of how learning happens. And they're not compatible, right, Because their explanations are how something happens, and if one explanation is right, the other explanation is wrong. It's a different explanation. Ok, so you can't mix and match. So let me give you an example If you believe that children are internally motivated to learn, then if you start using a start chart or other extrinsic motivators, you're telling them that their internal motivation isn't the important thing. What's important is your rewarding stuff OK, your start chart OK, and that undermines their internal motivation.
Peter:I had a classic example of this. I started learning Spanish using Duolingo OK, and I was really motivated. I was going to Peru. I wanted to be able to speak Spanish when I got to Peru and I'd been learning it for 98 days OK, and I had a 98-day streak Right, because every day it adds on and you go straight. For how many days you've learned without the break? And I then went on a five-day retreat where we weren't allowed to use any technology and I lost my streak and it was like, oh, I've got a stint again. I gave up.
Olivia:I actually gave up. Yeah, that's the point.
Peter:Because I'd lost the streak and my motivation had changed from learning Spanish, which I generally wanted to do at the beginning, to improving my streak Right. And we give these mixed messages to kids. We say we believe X and then we do something that demonstrates we don't really believe X at all, and they then get this confused. What are they supposed to take from that in terms of how they should be learning and what's important and what's going to be most effective? We're saying we believe this, but we're doing that. That just undermines what we're saying to them, so we get inconsistency.
Olivia:I've been reading a lot about this in terms of reading for pleasure, that actually if children are very intrinsically motivated and enjoy reading and genuinely read for pleasure, that actually having an ed tech platform that has that extrinsic reward for reading that actually it can undermine the whole process and it turns them off reading.
Peter:Yeah, and so the alignment thing for me is about what do you believe about how kids learn, what's your pedagogical stance, and then how do you turn that into what you do in your classroom that accurately builds on and reflects that pedagogical stance? Because if you haven't got that alignment, you're going to be fighting against yourself and you're going to be giving the kids mixed messages about what is important and how they should learn, and that's really what, and just to make an observation as well, around particularly UK schools.
Andy:So many of the UK schools now are defined by centralized systems, whether it's groups of schools or within a school. I'm happy to say when I ran a faculty for the last few years, I prided myself on the amount of systems that I put in place and the amount of things that made things consistent, because I felt like I was giving the biggest amount of learners the best opportunities. But now I'm just reflecting on whether things need to be bigger than yours.
Peter:You're making the ed tech mistake, andy. You're assuming that the system defines the outcomes. Ok, and the question is how did the teachers use the systems? It's not the systems that matter, it's how the teachers use the systems that matter. Yeah, I totally agree. Yeah, and so you can put in any system you like and teachers can corrupt it or they can use it in the way it was designed to be used.
Peter:And I mean, I did a project once where we were trying to see the extent to which you could embed pedagogy and some educational software, and so we had some educational software which had a very strong underpinning pedagogical models, right, and we worked with this was actually academics and universities. We got them to use the software and we gave them quite explicit instructions about what the pedagogical model was, how it should be used in their teaching and so forth, and without exception, they corrupted it. They didn't do what we had told them they should do when they were using the software. They did something that aligned more closely with their own personal values and believes in how they liked to operate, and in so doing, they are very often completely lost to the point of the software. The software lost its value Interesting Because they weren't using it in the way it had been designed Right.
Peter:And so my starting point is always what do you believe? What do you think? And I think the other thing I'd add is, actually we have much more freedom in our classrooms than people think. So, yeah, you have to put up your learning objectives at the beginning of the lesson. You have to do x, y and z. But how you do those things, the emphasis you put on them, how much time you spend doing them, the way you talk about them with the kids changes how the kids perceive them and react to them.
Peter:Fiona and I wrote a series of five blog posts about the degree of freedom you've got in your classroom on the way, just the way you talk to kids, the degree to which you give them a choice. Here's the task you're going to do. You can do it like this or like this. You can walk on your own, you can work with a partner, you can choose who you work with. You can do it on screen, you can do it on paper. Just giving them choices allows them to start making decisions and to understand what works best for them and to be more creative and to take ownership of their learning and have some responsibility, and that's really powerful. So I think within almost any school, I would say 99% of teachers have way more freedom than they've probably recognized that they have to change the nature of what happens in their classroom. I've got a controversial question. Even if they're extensively teaching the same thing in the same way you want to look at the.
Peter:UK name.
Olivia:Yeah, well, I've got a controversial question that we may end up cutting, but I wanted to ask it anyway. Given the possible variation then in implementation of ed tech based on teachers' values, can ed tech ever reliably report on impact if it looks so different in teachers are truly living and their values, is impact ever reliable?
Peter:Gosh, I think so. This is one of the interesting questions, that research, okay, and again we talk about this in the book the degree to which the kind of what works agenda is really problematic, okay. So, so, if you look at a lot of what happens within countries in terms of kind of government centers being set up, they're going to give you advice about good practice, right, and they do these big randomized controlled trials to see what works, and it's not very helpful because what works for Andy might not work for me, right, and they assume, and one of the things I get when I'm doing research, right, I had a really interesting conversation with one of my research fellows the other day. She was saying well, why don't we all ask the same questions when we're interviewing somebody? And she wanted, you know, here's the list of questions you work during the interview. And I said well, look, if you're in a meeting with a head teacher and she's an attractive 26 year old woman and I'm a grumpy 6 to 63 year old guy, you know, if I go in and I ask a head teacher a set of questions and she goes in and asks the same head teacher a set of questions, the same set of questions we're going to get different answers. We might use the same words, but they're not the same questions because the context is different.
Peter:Right, and you get the same thing with educational technology. You know you've got different kids with different needs. You've got different experiences and competencies and values and beliefs yourself, and the way you, in which you interact, is not going to be the same. You might be teaching the same lesson, you might even have the same script, but just your inner intonation or the pace with which you do something or the way you respond to a child in the classroom will mean it's not the same. And if you ever taught the same lesson to two different classes, you can know what I mean. Right, and it worked brilliantly with class A and it didn't go well with class B. I mean, it did the same lesson, right? Well, it's not the same because they're not the same kids and you're not the same person, as you've done it before, see, or refined it, or maybe you're tired when you do it the second time or whatever. So I think you've got a real problem. So I think what's really important for me about research is you understand enough about the context, on how it was done, what the interaction was to be able to say, okay, so this is how they did it in that classroom and this is what the outcomes were, and to what extent. You know, if I look at another classroom and I can look at the interactions and I get different outcomes, but I can see the differences in the nature of the interactions. Okay, it's really hard to do that big scale, but it's one of the things that I find very frustrating.
Peter:Right is, teachers know, have a lot of expertise. Right, teachers are the people who know about learning, but very often their individual examples of what works and what doesn't and why it works and their techniques are not given much credibility compared to a randomized control trial, because it's just one individual teacher. But if you get, you know, 200,000 teachers who will find this is effective. That should be important and it's how you kind of accumulate that evidence from lots and lots of different practitioner experience is really problematic. That's one of the reasons I kind of am an enthusiast of practitioner research and I've got this thing about professionalization and being seen as experts.
Peter:You know, if you're not contributing to the professional knowledge base, then you're not seen as the expert. And within the teaching profession, who contributes to the professional knowledge base, people like me, academics and universities who do the research right, and we're not the experts. The experts are the people in the classroom who are doing it day by day but they're not sharing their expertise with the wider profession, they're not contributing to the professional knowledge base and therefore they're not seen as being experts. And that's partly why teaching has kind of, you know, been reprofessionalized and teachers are not held in the highest theme in the UK that they are in some other places Because they're not seen as being experts.
Andy:That's been kind of accentuated by the national curriculum and literacy strategies and synthetic phonics and remove a lot of philosophy, education and sociology of education from initial teacher education courses and that assumption that you're a technician delivering a particular mode of practice, I think addressing the issue thing definitely seemed to fit with a certain modus upper, and I have schools, you know, post, probably 2010, something like that and this is really interesting because I'm always trying to relate it back to my working life and my own kind of my own perspective here, and one of the things I think we were saying before we started recording was that the big piece we're trying to look at at Bedrock at the minute is we're trying to move away from being people just simply need to obtain their points or learn their vocabulary, or would it, you know, show they've done their work for the week, and we need to move it towards being something within the classroom, within the school culture, where we start talking about completion as something which is they do, they do, they engage with a platform because they value their academic literacy, because they're, they're investing in something much more important than just completing, you know, their homework for the week, and I think by part of that is moving what we offer the vocabulary insights, the grammar insights into the classroom more.
Andy:And it seems a real shame that you know, just at the moment in ed tech, where we need practitioners to be yet, to hold themselves in high esteem, to hold themselves to have confidence, say no, no, this is, this is how I want to go about doing this. It seems like the education sector as a whole is kind of pulling in the other way and say, no, we just we don't want, we almost don't want personality. We just want everyone to deliver to a certain, to a certain level. In a certain way.
Peter:It's really dangerous in the era of generative AI, isn't it? Well, yeah, and one of one of my things when when people talk about education is standardization facilitates automation. It's one of my favorite phrases at the moment If you can standardize it, you can automate it. Those are all about standardizing.
Peter:What we ought to be doing is saying what we want is to be developing all those human competencies that AI just can't do, all those interpersonal relationships and emotional stuff and mindfulness and all that stuff which AI is never going to teach you. Well, okay, never is a bit extreme, not for 20 years anyway, you know, because we want to be human Right and I think there's a real challenge for us around the whole standardization agenda. And I think there's a real challenge around what we do, what is assessed, what is valued, as well as doing what we think is important. And there's a massive leap of faith to think I can do both these things. If I put in this sort of way and I encourage the kids to make decisions and choices in the classroom and I really engage with their intrinsic motivation, they're going to do better than if I'm just forcing them to go through the hoops that have to be jumped past the task.
Olivia:Is there also anything you've explored in terms of teacher well-become and teacher burnout that actually living, you know having to work under a set of values and beliefs that don't align with your own, but that is actually very strenuous and exhausting?
Peter:I don't have hard, hard evidence about this, but you know common sense tells you if you're doing something that feels wrong to you, doesn't align with your values and beliefs, that's going to be problematic. If you're not valued and your opinions aren't valued, that's going to be problematic. Why do teachers leave the profession? And I look at you know I'm in teacher education here, I was, I was until November. They come in full of enthusiasm and wanting to be like that teacher who made a difference in their lives. And that teacher who made a difference in their lives was not doing what they're supposed to do in terms of you know you're going to follow these steps. They were making a personal connection and personal commitment and actually really supporting an individual and as they go through the system and get into their first job, it's really hard to be that special teacher because you're having to conform with a system that wants to standardise you, because that's what gets the results in the exams.
Andy:Do you think a lot of this depends we talked earlier about the three levels and do you think a lot of this? I mean, feel free to push back and say no, actually I don't. I think it's more about something else. But do you think a lot of this comes comes down to school leadership and the leaders in the schools being able to kind of take what that wider sociopolitical context is, but then say to their teachers take risks and not just go and take risks I'm not going to check on you this week but support them in taking educated risks and and doing great stuff together. How important do you think the leader is in this scenario?
Peter:It's very clear when you go into schools where you've got a leader who is, who trusts their staff and who believes their professionals, who isn't going round doing the observations in classrooms to check that they are doing X, y or Z edge, to check that they've got computers turned on or to check that they're doing whatever it is that the head thinks they should be doing in some sort of kind of controlling sort of way. You want someone who says you're a professional, I trust your judgment. Obviously, at the end of the day, you and I both know we want these kids to do well in terms of assessments, but we also want them to be happy, rounded individuals. We want them to find their passion. We want them to develop those 21st century skills. I'm trusting you and I will have professional dialogues with you about what you're doing and what other colleagues are doing, and you will share your expertise and you'll take risks and you'll make mistakes. If you're not willing to make a mistake, you're never going to learn. That's true for adults as well as for kids. So you've got to create a safe environment in which people can make mistakes, they can try things out, they can get it wrong, they can correct and redirect themselves.
Peter:I think it's unfair at one level to say but it's the headteacher that's the problem, because it's not. It's really hard being a headteacher. You have all of this pressure on you from all sides actually parents, or I'll say whatever so it's a really difficult job and you have to be a very strong, very principled person to be able to stand up and say no, I'm going to ignore that directive, I'm going to do what I think is right and I'm going to ignore that, even if it might mean I get the sack. That's a really tough call. So for me, it's the whole system. It's the system that's broken. Clearly, individual teachers can make a massive difference, absolutely massive difference, but they, like the classroom teachers, are doing it in spite of the system, not because of it, and we need to change the system.
Andy:Do you think that? Is that something that's in your view? As someone who's been in education for a long time, would you say that's now more the case than ever, or do you think it's something that you know? Is it a case of? It was ever thus, I mean. What do you think?
Peter:Well, I think what we need from schools is changing. So I think when schools were first set up and what you wanted was factory fodder, you wanted compliance, you wanted standardisation, because you wanted them to go into the factory and all to be able to, you know, do the same job or comply with the orders or whatever Then schools were probably pretty good at getting compliance. There's a great book called what's wrong with schools that says what schools do is they demonstrate kids will be compliant, they'll work reasonably hard and they're reasonably confident. And that's really what schools demonstrate. That's what they achieve. And the kids who do really badly go on to set up Facebook and Google. You get the rebels who are the great thinkers.
Olivia:Have you seen the Ken Robinson, the TED, talk about?
Peter:changing the car. Yeah, it was actually an RSA talk, I think the most viewed video ever in education. Yeah, that one, and he's right. And one of the things I say is, if we look at what's happened with automation, we look at the speed of change of technology and what's happened with automation, particularly over the last year, you've got to think there are a lot of jobs that are going to get automated. And I don't know if you've seen the shift happens video, which has this nice narrative about all these jobs will get automated, but new jobs will come along. And I'm thinking, yeah, well, they'll probably be automated too.
Peter:And when you get to a point where a very large proportion of the population is unemployable because so much of the work is automated, what is school for? And, of course, school is still for something, because and my vision for education is individual fulfilment and universal well-being right, Because you need that individual and the social aspects of it. And if you think about, well, so what would a school that's working towards individual fulfilment and universal well-being in a context in which, when you meet someone, you don't say what do you do, meaning what job do you have, but you say what's your passion? You know that's schools would have to do something different if that was the question we all got asked when we first met someone, because none of us had any jobs anymore. It's like you know, what are you excited about? How do you earn money?
Olivia:And you know, maybe at that point this idea of functional education, like functional literacy for instance, maybe that will totally shift and the function of education would be something entirely new. So we might still have a version of functional literacy, for instance, that it would be something entirely entirely different.
Peter:I think the point you made earlier about you know kids reading for pleasure, right? I mean, what is the point of the system that gets kids to be able to bark at print but never want to pick up a book? Yeah, yeah, we failed, right. I mean, the reason we want them to read is so that they will read, not so that they can read but never do. We've lost it if we think being able to read what not wanting to is a good outcome. We're crazy, right. I'd much rather have kids who are really enthusiastic but struggle over some of the words, but will struggle over them because they want to know what they mean. But do you?
Olivia:not think that one does lead to the other. And without that first stepping stone you're unlikely to get to the love part.
Peter:I think different things work for different people. I think there'll be some kids and you look at some of the home educators where they don't worry about their kids reading and they might be eight or nine or 10 and still not fluent readers, and they don't worry about it because at some point they know that kid is going to want to know how to mend a motorbike or do whatever it is that they've got passionate about and they'll find out and they'll learn to read when they're ready, whereas for some kids, that much more structured, supported way is going to be more productive. So I think one of the things that I would say about education systems is there isn't one system that's going to work for every single person. Different people have different experiences, different ways of being supported, different levels of competence, different support at home. There isn't a one fit, one size fits all, but I do. I'm a really strong believer that we are learning machines.
Peter:You look at kids before they come into school, right, what do they do the entire time? They learn, they learn, they learn. They fall over and they get up and they fall over and they get up and they fall over and they get up and they imitate what you're doing and you make noises at them, and they make noises back and they're trying to replicate what you're doing. And what do we do? We stick them in a class and we tell them to sit down and shut up, because one adult can't answer 30 kids questions at all at once, and so the model has to change. Whereas when you're at home with your mum or dad, you know you can ask them stuff all the time and they'll respond to you all the time, hopefully, but when you've got 30 kids, you can ask them no, no, no, no, no, no, shut up. I can only deal with one at a time. It's not easier if I just do the talking and you listen, because that's manageable. That's not really the most effective way to support learning.
Andy:So, having reflected on all of that and kind of, I wanted to get to my last question, really, which was around. You know lots of leaders will pick up your book. Lots of people, you know. I hope so Exactly. You know trust. You know IT leads in trust, people who are really interested in not just buying something and then plonking it out there, but actually meaningful implementation. You know, having said that, about the way that every child, every teacher, every person is different, what are your top takeaways? Do you think around really effective implementation? If you're leading a setting, how would you kind of begin to distill that?
Peter:Okay, so my first and really you're asking me to summarize the kind of six key takeaways we've got from the research on digital technology and schools. I resist calling it ed tech, because I think ed tech is a failed approach and we're trying to change that to a pedtech approach which is driven by pedagogy. So the first one would be we can't who's driving the ed tech bus. The decisions about what you're doing with technology should be being driven by the strategic leaders within the school. So that's the first one. So it shouldn't be being driven by ed tech enthusiasts. They should be driven by the people who are leading the school strategically, because really, any decision about technology is a pedagogical decision. Right? That's something that some ed tech people argue with.
Peter:I think any decision you make in a school is a pedagogical decision. If I decide to paint the walls, that's going to have a different impact on painting them white or painting them red. Right, the color of the walls is a pedagogical decision. The brightness of my light bulbs is a pedagogical decision. The fact that I want to spend money on that rather than that is a pedagogical decision. Any decision you make in a school is a pedagogical decision, even if it doesn't feel like it Okay. And then the second one is know your pedagogy, know what your beliefs are about how kids learn, know your pedagogical instincts and know what your pedagogical intentions are. What is it you're wanting the kids to achieve?
Andy:Do you mean as a leader? If you're a leader in a school, do you mean kind of know what your pedagogical intent is as a school?
Peter:Yeah, absolutely. And again, it's that issue of the different layers, right, you need to. The school leadership, hopefully bringing their entire team with them, has to have a shared understanding about what the school thinks is important, what the school's vision is for pedagogical intentions, what the outcomes are from what we're doing and ideally, you know, in the optimal world and this is really tough one, you know we should have alignment between our values and beliefs about how kids learn within the school, because if we're all doing it differently, we're giving mixed messages to the kids again.
Andy:There's a difference, isn't there, between diversity and mixed messages? Yeah, absolutely.
Peter:And even if you and I shared a view about how learning happens, the way we interact in the classrooms is going to be different, because we're different human beings with different personalities, and we've got different strengths and different weaknesses, and you've got different interests to me, so the things that you are passionate about and light up about will be different to the things that I am passionate about and that I light up about, so that the experience will be different, even if we've got a shared understanding of how we think kids learn. Yeah, because we're different and that's good. Diversity is really important. We need it in this world.
Peter:So that's my first. Two is, you know, make sure you've got strategic leadership, actually making the decisions about what's happening and recognizing their pedagogical decisions. And secondly, understand your pedagogical position, understand how you believe kids learn and what your intentions are, and that's what I call them. My third one is an on demand mindset, that notion of the kids should be allowed to use the technology when it's appropriate, and the kids should be making the decisions. They should be learning how to know when it's appropriate to use different technologies when do I use a pencil? When do I use a color? When do I use the paintbrush? When do I use a laptop? Those are pedagogical decisions, but the kids should be making some of those decisions because we want them to learn how to use the technology appropriately to achieve the outcomes that they're trying to get.
Andy:That needs major scaffolding, doesn't it? That needs major scaffolding. It's not. It can't be a factual.
Peter:And it's, you know, in particular in the context where kids have been de-skilled and taught to sit back. I mean, I did, I just did some research in schools back in 2017. And you know, going and watching a lesson the teacher said all the right things about. You know you're working in pairs. If you've got a problem, help each other. If you can't help each other, ask one of the other children in the classroom or try and look it up and then, if you know, if that fails, then come to me.
Peter:And what happened was the kids sat down as soon as they got a problem. They got the hand up, right. I then took those same kids out into the lunch hall and we sat around in the table and I wouldn't let them call me sir. They had to call me Peter, and you know it was very informal and chatty and I got out my iPad and I said I don't know how to do this. Does anyone know how to do this? And one kid said yeah, I know how to do that. The other kids were literally crawling over the table to see what he was doing Right, because they wanted to know how to do it Right.
Peter:So you've got in literally 20 meters apart in the classroom, de-skilled, not asking each other stuff, not learning from each other, relying on the teacher to tell them what to do and how to do it. You take them 20 meters out into the school hall in an informal context and they're all over each other learning from each other, because we taught them that the teacher is the front of all knowledge. The teacher is the expert. You guys don't know anything. I know stuff and I'm in control and I'm in charge. So unless I tell you to do something, you really shouldn't be doing it and we need to change that. But you're right, andy. You can't just say, ok, I've been doing this for the last two terms and now suddenly you can make your own decisions.
Olivia:It's not going to work.
Peter:It's just not going to work. So you've got to scaffold that. If you started when they first came in at age three or four or five, and you built on what the learning they're already doing, because they're pretty much self-independent, self-regulating learners before they get into formal education If you built on that, they'd be amazing. They'd be terrifying by the time they're 10. I mean, we would all be scared. Interesting that, how powerful they were.
Andy:I've got a little girl who's in reception, a little boy who's in year three and it's so interesting listening to what he says. All now we're in year three, it's much more serious. You have to sit down more and there seems to have been a very big shift in his school experience and the way he speaks about being in class now is changed. There's a bit of what they're saying to the kids about year three and the message is there. I mean, these kids are seven and I'm not saying it's right or wrong, but there is clearly a discourse around year three and the way that these kids are feeling. There's a market difference, the way that my youngest is learning in perception yeah, and you know that notion of play.
Peter:Where does that go? I mean, we should still be playing as adults. You know that's a safe space to make mistakes and experience stuff and learn from other people, and we just lose that in schools. So, anyway, that was. That's my first three. My fourth one is trust changes everything, whether that be trust by politicians or headteachers, or trust by headteachers of their classroom teachers, or trust by teachers of their kids, trust changes everything. We've largely lost it within the education system. We need to get it back, and that's really hard because that's about control and it's about letting go. Yeah, and that's a real tough one, but it's critical.
Peter:And then my next one is monitor what you value. If your intention is that they become great communicators or great collaborators, then because we're in a neoliberal world where if you don't measure, if it's not valued, you're going to have to measure their ability to collaborate or to communicate, because you've got to be able to demonstrate that you're achieving the things that you've said you value. And if you're not measuring it, it won't get valued, and that's sad. The world shouldn't be like that, but that's how the world currently is, all right. So measure, monitor, track the things that you actually value are important, and if you claim that something is important and you're not monitoring it, no one's going to believe that you think it's important. And then the sixth one is you know, use the evidence that's out there, but use it intelligently. And you need to understand there for the nature of different sorts of evidence, the nature of different sorts of research and how to interpret those things and what the biases are. You know the fact that if you commissioned me to do some research about your software, it will be unlikely I'd turn around and say it's rubbish, because you're paying me to do some research about your software and I know that you're not paying me to turn around and say it's rubbish. Now, in fact, I probably just refuse to do it.
Peter:But there are researchers who do that. You know. Say you get research from Microsoft saying you know, this is the greatest piece of software, or from Google, the Google classroom, saying this is the greatest, the fastest impact ever. And you've got to take it with a pinch of salt. There's bias in that.
Peter:Why do people do research? They do it for different reasons. They might do it because they need the money. They might do it because they're interested in it. They might do it because they're passionate about this piece of this product and they want to show it's effective. But you've got to understand what the motivations are behind things and you've then got to understand the limitations of different approaches to doing research. Chapter two of the book is great in trying to explain how to understand some of these things and some of the limitations and some of these things.
Peter:So that would be my sixth and I think that sixth one the ice cold thing is don't underestimate the value of the professional knowledge of your colleagues, right, yeah, don't just go with what the big randomized controlled trial said. You've got to learn from each other. You've got to share. I think that sharing something and not being frightened to be vulnerable and for people to say why did you do that? And have a kind of genuine, honest discussion about what's working and what's not working within your context. That's a scary thing to do, particularly if you've got a principal who goes around monitoring in a kind of controlling sort of way. You have to have that risk taking that you talked about early, andy. Yeah, that risk taking, trusting environment in which you can have on his conversations and learn from it. Yeah, and if you don't make some mistakes, you're not going to learn, and if you're not listening to your colleagues, you're missing an opportunity to learn from other people. So those would be my six kind of key takeaways.
Andy:The whole thing is that culture is just for breakfast.
Peter:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Peter:People keep saying we need more research about educational technology and I've been saying, well, I actually did a report for Bechtar I don't know if you remember Bechtar.
Peter:I did a report for them back in 2005, which they didn't want to publish because the key finding and it was evaluation of part of the harnessing technology strategy the key finding was all the problems we've known about for the last 30 years are still problems, and it's not that we don't know the solutions, it's just we haven't got the political will to implement them. Well, that's still true today, right, and yeah, the technology changes. Right, you get a new gizmo, right, and people say, oh, we got to investigate, we got to learn how to do. Well, the issues are exactly the same because the pedagogy hasn't changed, the changing management issues have not changed. You've just got a new toy. But actually, fundamentally, all the things that have been the issues, that barriers or facilitators to implementing digital technology in school are the same barriers or facilitators that they were 40 years ago and we've just got a different toy, and so we don't actually need more research. We just need to have the political will to implement what we already know.
Peter:I mean that's not my stuff out of the job?
Andy:No, I don't think you have. I think it's about no, I don't know it's about. It's a shift in understanding, it's a shift in approach to the whole thing about, as you say, everything. You know everything. All of this stuff is a pedagogical decision. We know what data management systems, what MIS, everything you're running in a school, the way that you're talking about, the, when you start to plan all those things, and I think that's quite an empowering message for leaders to have, actually for us to kind of end on, I think, which is, you know, a nice place to end. So, honestly, thank you so much. That was, that was so enlightening and inspiring and equal measure. That was so good. And thank you for taking time out of your trip to speak to us. That was really good, yeah.
Olivia:I'm not going to sleep tonight. I've got so many things wearing around my head now I'm protecting my own experience as a teacher that I've never really thought about like this.
Andy:So, yeah, thank you, it's been great. Thank you so much for coming on. It's been, it's been a delight. Thank you for inviting me. Take care.
Olivia:Bye, thank you, bye.