13. Unlocking Learner Potential: Inclusive & Tech-Enhanced Learning with Dr Alix Hibble

In this episode, we speak with Dr. Alex Hibble from EdProof, who draws on her psychology expertise from the University of Oxford and her experience with innovative educational practices. We delve into the integration of technologies like ChatGPT in schools and discuss how EdProof helps measure key aspects of student well-being and engagement. Alex shares insights on adopting a holistic approach to student development that transcends traditional academic metrics.

We also explore the broader impacts of a grade-focused education system and a competitive job market on student well-being and motivation. The episode examines the links between addictive behaviors, as outlined in "Dopamine Nation," and academic achievement pressures. We discuss EdProof's pioneering methods for assessing and enhancing student growth beyond test scores, including strategies for aligning student competencies with national benchmarks.

Furthermore, we highlight the crucial role of teacher-student relationships in fostering student engagement and addressing individual needs, particularly for students with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND). The conversation covers the importance of personalized teaching approaches and maintaining inclusivity in the classroom to ensure all students have the necessary support to succeed.

Join us for an in-depth discussion on transforming educational practices to better support every student's potential.

For more insights from Alix:

• Visit the EdProof website
• Follow her on LinkedIn

Transcript

Andy: 0:01

Hi everyone and welcome to the Literacy Works podcast with Bedrock Learning. I'm Andy Sammers, the Deputy Head of Teaching and Learning at Bedrock, and we're really gathering momentum now. We've got so many listeners, so many people subscribing to it, which is just lovely, so lovely to hear that people are kind of really interested in what people were pulling into these conversations, which is great. And today's guest is a brilliant one for me. Actually, it's Alex Hibble from EdProof. I came across Alex's profile on LinkedIn and I just said to her before recording this now I said, well, I sort of threw out a bit of a Hail Mary here to see if we could get you on and it was, you know, again really happy that Alex has come back and said she'd come and speak to us. So thank you so much for coming.

Andy: 0:42

Uh, dr Alex Hibble, I should say um from EdProof. So we're going to just start off um. Could you give us a little bit first of all, before we talk about EdProof, just a little bit of background about yourself. That would be really, I think, really important for the listeners to hear first of all.

Alix: 0:57

Thank you, andy. I'm really, really excited to be here. I love to chat about education and student well-being, so I'm really happy to be having this conversation. So my background I'm really passionate about psychology.

Alix: 1:09

I went to the University of Oxford to study psychology and I went there for my undergrad, but I loved it so much that I stayed for my master's and for my PhD and during my PhD, as many students do, I got quite involved in doing some additional teaching and I was really fascinated with all of the factors around the content that helps students learn, whether it was their motivation or their time management or even just their sort of academic engagement or their general well-being.

Alix: 1:36

And so after I finished my PhD, I got involved in academic skills and study skills with the university study skills with the university and then I joined a small company where I went into secondary schools to really help students learn about effective learning and all of the factors that support learning, and did that for several years and it was absolutely fascinating and we were talking about this just before we started recording. I got to go into schools multiple times a week and I think yeah, I can't even count how many schools I've been into and it's been really, really interesting to see the differences in schools across the UK, and after that I then started working for EdProof.

Andy: 2:10

Okay, brilliant, brilliant segue into EdProof, which you know, to fill people in with this. This is a relatively new company, isn't it? And working with schools to kind of help understand outcomes in a kind of and the nuance of outcomes. I suppose could you give us a bit of information and a bit of background about, about EdProof and what you guys do, because it does sound fascinating.

Alix: 2:33

Yeah, so obviously I completely agree. I think EdProof is a really interesting company, like you said, really new. So the drive for EdProof really came from this recognition that schools are amazing at measuring the academic outcomes of their students so in test scores, in exam results, and those are obviously really really important in predicting how well students are going to go on in life, whether that's career success or general happiness. But there's also a lot of other factors that help determine student success, such as academic engagement, the feeling of belonging at school, your character development, your well-being, your ability to acquire new skills quickly, particularly in such a rapidly changing world. I mean chat GPT.

Alix: 3:13

I think if you told me five years ago about it I would have thought you were dreaming. And now this is a tool that students have to understand how to use and how to use it ethically. The idea behind ed proof is that we help schools measure all of these additional factors that impact student well-being and future success and then help them work out where their schools are doing really well, where their schools could improve and how to better support their students in their future success I mean that sounds really interesting, because I think what schools often do is and they have to, because so often the thing that schools are often assessed on is other outcomes, and the academic outcomes are the things which I think most teachers feel that they can impact.

Andy: 3:55

Most schools feel they can impact at scale. So that's where, I guess in lots of ways rightfully so, where the emphasis gets placed. But what you're really trying to do here is you're trying to really pin down some of those other less tangible factors around student well-being and mental health and other really crucial in fact, if not crucial almost more directly effective predictors of a young person's future. Right, right, that's the key, isn't it? Those wider factors.

Alix: 4:30

Yeah, absolutely, and I think the word you mentioned, intangible, is so important because, in a sense, it's relatively easy to measure academic achievement right. You give an entire school year a maths test and they all get some score out of 100. Whereas if you're actually looking at your students' confidence in accessing new technology, trying to work out how do you put a number on that across students is really, really difficult, and that's part of the fun of EdProof, but also part of the difficulty.

Andy: 4:51

It's interesting actually.

Andy: 4:52

I mean I know that at Bedrock we're obviously not a school, but we spend a lot of time working with schools around in my team around implementation and really helping them kind of sharpen up their literacy strategy, really help them to kind of see where the impact is.

Andy: 5:06

And we've spent a lot of time recently speaking about schools and how not all staff, not all colleagues, are the same in terms of their confidence with being able to go into dashboards and have a look at information and sort of see where we can make all sorts of assumptions. And I remember as a director of English I used to make all these you know fancy Google drives and various things where students could go in and find resources, but actually I was making all sorts of assumptions about the confidence that people had and the willingness they would have to go and engage with that type of material. So being able to kind of understand and join those dots I think is a really interesting, a really interesting venture and a really really valuable one is a really interesting, uh, a really interesting venture and a really a really valuable one. And I just wonder, obviously without naming schools have you got any interesting examples of schools you've worked with perhaps, perhaps a couple of your favorites.

Alix: 5:53

I'd really like to hear and understand about, you know, some of the impact you've had so I think so what you're really talking about right is about accessing learning or accessing a platform, and there's no use in putting together a great learning resource or a great platform for teachers if people can't actually access that. And one of the things I find really interesting in schools is I would go in and I would give several talks to several year groups, but I'd also usually be lucky enough to sort of sit in the start of the school day assembly and different schools had really different attitudes to why their students were there and what they were meant to be doing. And I remember one school this was last year and it was a really interesting week so I went from a really high achieving you know fee paying school to a you know like slightly less well achieving state school, but you know double the size, you know, from a year group of 70 students per year in the school I saw on tuesday to the school I saw on thursday.

Alix: 6:47

They had about a thousand students um and it was just, you know well, not a thousand students, but I think I saw a thousand during the day.

Alix: 6:53

I think it was about 200, 300 per year. But you know a very different school environment and in in the first school it was all about achieving academic grades and they were talking about you know, you know you've recently had mocks, we know where we need to improve. And then in the school on Thursday, they were talking about you as students and they sort of said you know, we've got a speaker in today that going to be talking to you about revision strategies and exam techniques. But we really want you to remember that these are just one facet of you as a person and, whatever you do, we're going to be proud of you. And they were really trying to push this idea of like sort of holistic view of a student and that it was all about progress rather than achievement. And it was really evident when I was talking to the students, you know, in the sessions and after the sessions, the students in the first school wanted to know what I got for GCSEs, which I found quite funny.

Alix: 7:43

So I think it was about three years after completing my PhD, so I was like GCSEs is a very long time ago. And then the students in the second school I saw that week wanted to know well, when I'm struggling when I get home, because I feel really tired after the day and I want to start homework but I don't have that energy, what would you suggest? And it was such a different mindset mindset between the students and so, even though you could see there was sort of difference in potentially you know exam results, it really felt as though the students in the second school were probably going to go further, because they'd sort of understood that it was about forward momentum rather than just getting somewhere and then resting on your laurels.

Andy: 8:18

Yeah, and I think, having been in plenty of schools and being on the other end of this, I certainly feel as someone I've been in plenty of schools and been on the other end of this I certainly feel as someone I've been guilty, certainly, of launching initiatives and kind of constantly trying to find the solution without actually asking any of the right questions first. And I think you know, in schools, when you're under so much pressure and you're so time poor, you spend your time working out solutions, the next solution, the next, what is it, whereas actually what you need to do sometimes is step back and understand what's going on for those young people, and I think you're right. I remember reading something recently. I think it was Hidden Potential. Have you come across his Adam Grant and his work?

Alix: 8:56

Oh, it sounds familiar.

Andy: 8:57

I'm definitely going to make a note of that now.

Andy: 9:00

He's fascinating because he he looked at young people in primary school and he looked at kind of long term success and predictive success and happiness and various things like that.

Andy: 9:11

And it was interesting that the exam grade at a very young age, that kind of academic attainment, wasn't the most accurate predictor of long term outcomes. It was all about how the people and the teacher had understood that, for want of a better term sort of sense of growth mindset, being able to kind of respond to setbacks, you know, being able to kind of almost you know meta, understand what their needs were. You know my energy dropping. I need to, you know xyz, I need to find a different way and kind of having that different way of figuring out how to meet life challenges rather than just it's all about the grade, it's all about the grade, it's all about the grade. So I think that's a really interesting comparison you've given there. So so if you were to kind of give some advice to schools from what you've seen in your different kind of working with schools, what would you say? Where do you think the most successful schools are currently focusing their energies?

Alix: 10:09

I think so. I think one of the things that I didn't really understand before I went into schools and now I think I understand a little bit better before I went into schools and now I think I understand a little bit better is that, although a school is a unit, it's made up of so many different teachers with so many different ideas about what good teaching and what good education looks like.

Alix: 10:27

I was at Research Ed Birmingham this weekend which is a fantastic place where teachers who are interested in education, research, all give up their Saturday and come along and we go to talks and talk and it was. It's just so interesting because you meet some teachers who are really, really engaged with the research or really really engaged in thinking about these other factors for students versus, you know, other teachers who you know not to not to stereotype or characterize. You know, some of the older teachers in the teaching profession seem to be a little bit more focused on grades and less about, you know, grit and growth mindset and and do you think that there's a?

Andy: 11:05

I mean in terms of wider education and and your experience of working with schools, is there something structural going on here around around schools, feeling like they have to be, like that it's all very well, saying it's up to the leadership, it's up to the teachers, but is there something about the climate in education do you feel in your work with the range of schools you've connected with?

Alix: 11:30

I'm not sure if it's. It feels as though it's teacher-driven but also, in a sense, student-driven.

Alix: 11:35

I speak to students all the time at secondary school, but I also work at the university setting and students are really keen on getting grades and it can be quite, you know, demotivating sometimes if you spend a lot of effort putting comments on someone's essay and they just want to know what grade they've got. So I think there's this level of competitiveness. Maybe this is fueled by, you know, the media talking about, like the shortage of jobs or the fact that you know, by 2030, 75 percent of traditional jobs will no longer exist, and so I think both students and teachers have latched on to the idea that the future is uncertain and one way of differentiating yourself is exam grades, despite the fact that for many students, exam grades, instead of becoming a competitive thing, are more of sort of opening doors.

Alix: 12:15

You know, if you reach these grades then you get to. You know, take this, do this post-16 education versus that post-16 education. And actually you know, whether you've got a five or a six at GCSE doesn't matter as much as, like you said, the ability to persevere when you're faced with a new technology or trying to learn a new skill.

Andy: 12:32

Yeah, I think that's really interesting because, I mean, again, I think the system to an extent, and whether that's conscious or unconscious, can be almost hooked on this sense of I mean. Another book I'm reading at the moment is Dopamine Nation. I don't know if you've heard of that one, but it's incredible. It's all about how you can be addicted to that next kind of fix of oh, I've got a good grade, I've got a good grade, I've got a good grade, I've got a good grade, I've got a great, and you can go chasing the outcome, as opposed to kind of those taking the longer view and and so on. That if a school were to approach you and say you know, we want to unpack some of these deeper things, some of these, you know, some of these behaviors that we want our pupils to really kind of um internalize and understand, and kind of to enrich them as learners and enrich our school community, what does a partnership with EdProof look like?

Alix: 13:24

So we will begin with talking to the school and trying to get a really good understanding of what makes your school different, what makes your school unique, because every school comes from a completely different context and it's formed in a very different way with different motivations. So, working out what the school thinks its priorities are because every school has an idea of these special characteristics that they want to develop in their students Then we'd do the fun part, the data collection. So we have this very in-depth survey based on lots of ideas from cognitive science. Pupils would fill that in and then we'd have a look at the data and just think our students, um, you know the survey covers six main dimensions.

Alix: 14:03

So it might be academic engagement is really high in this school, but perhaps social development is, you know, less well developed and then, particularly, um, at this time, um, we're thinking like years eight and nine are really impacted, so there would have been years three and four maybe in the pandemic, and so they're really missing out on a lot of key social development.

Alix: 14:22

And so it might be that overall the school is doing well, but they have pockets of weakness in this. This year isn't doing so well in social development and maybe, you know, these years aren't doing so well on sort of you know, leadership and teamwork or collaboration, and so really digging into the data and working out what can we learn about individual students, individual clusters of students, and then feeding that back to schools and saying this is where you're doing well, this is where you're doing less well, and then also comparing that to national benchmarks. So you know, in your area these things are going well across all schools. However, compared to schools nearby, this is a sort of pocket of disadvantage you have. And can we figure out what's going on in your school? That means these things are going well and these things are going less well.

Andy: 15:03

Interesting. And when you mentioned national data, do you have national data yourself that you guys have developed or that you're pulling from somewhere else, or how do you benchmark nationally?

Alix: 15:15

So at the moment it's a bit of both. We're hoping to grow our national data set. So we have a small data set at the moment that's come from students who have sort of voluntarily opted in. So by doing different tests that we have online, different careers reports, university reports, we're hoping, as we work with more schools, that data set will grow. But you can also there's a lot of data out there um published about, you know, not just academics, but how school, how students are feeling about different metrics.

Andy: 15:43

So a bit of both some data we're collecting ourselves and then some other published data do you know, I think sometimes that getting up close to this data about how students feel or how people, how stakeholders feel, I think it's it's almost like when people do these in my other half she's currently doing a, you know, one of those 360s about her colleagues and what they think of her and all that type of thing, and it's actually, I think, for sometimes for schools, it can be probably quite scary, um, at one level, inconvenient.

Andy: 16:10

Another level, because you just want to get the implementation out, you know, and get it out there. But actually another level, it could be, you know, quite scary to be able to listen to what, what, what colleagues and what young people think about, you know, because that's probably that could potentially, uh, you know, unearth a whole lot of different problems. So it it's probably quite a painful thing for some in some cases. Is it, would you say, that school or schools that work, the schools that approach you generally have a really open mindset to what they're going to find or what? What's the dynamic like there?

Alix: 16:39

so I think you've really hit the nail on the head and that some schools are really keen to find out about their students, whether it's good or whether it's bad, and they see that you know areas of weakness are areas for improvement.

Alix: 16:51

So it's it's amazing because it means they can be really strategic in where they spend their time, where they spend their resources to help the students that need it most, whereas I think other schools tend to see it as you're going to come in, you're going to tell me something that we're doing badly and oh no, that's a disaster. And what if it gets out? It's going to damage our reputation. And I think, alongside the sort of reputation element, is also that schools have different levels of comfort with data, and that's usually driven by you know who is in the school right, which are the teachers, which are the senior leaders, and some people, just like me, right, love data, think it can tell us really interesting stories, think it can tell us a lot more than just having conversation. As long as it's paired alongside conversations, data can tell us a lot, whereas I think other people see a bar chart and their mind just goes blank and they just think, oh goodness, no numbers.

Andy: 17:39

I thought I'd left these behind there is something to, yeah, the way that you understand and internalize and create narratives around data, and I think some listeners will be wanting me to ask you now how does this link with outcomes? I mean, how, how would you be able to link, uh, what you do with with the academic outcomes in terms of what would that look like in terms of interventions and other things that you could? You know, work alongside you know your data and, and your and your fight, your, your insights of the school, what would you do?

Alix: 18:12

so I think that's a really interesting question. That's also one of the things that drew me to this area. So the original areas I worked in were in like the visual system and vision science, where it was very basic science. You go into a lab, you find something interesting out and that's kind of it, and the other people who are interested in it are also people who like the visual system and the brain and it kind of stays in that conversation and it kind of stays in that conversation, whereas in education you're doing this for a much wider purpose. You're studying students because you want to find out what's happening, and then you also want to apply that to classrooms and beyond and really have a positive impact in the world.

Alix: 18:46

But as you sort of recognize that, there's still this big disconnect in education research, where there's a lot of basic science that happens in the lab and then people try and make interventions or deliver resources to schools, which are such complicated environments, and so sometimes interventions and resources work really well, sometimes they fail and it can be really difficult working out why things have worked, why things haven't worked, or even, before you put an intervention into place, sort of predicting why it's worked. So you have to look at a whole bunch of literature, you know from the sort of cognitive psychology side where we're looking at, okay, in a small lab group, this is what happens, but then also looking at, well, what's already happening in schools and where do we see things working and what are the commonalities and how can we work out what's going to scale.

Andy: 19:29

So it's sorry, not a very succinct answer there, but it's very complicated working out what will happen, and I think there's a there's a almost sort of this seductive attraction to do this, then this will happen. But actually you need to. We need, as schools, to be able to step back and and really take the nuanced view about what's going to work in this setting for different types of pupils. And as appealing as it is to have an off-the-shelf solution which just makes everything okay, it it doesn't. Schools don't work like that. If schools did work like that, then things would be very different.

Andy: 20:02

Um, and one of the things we find I mean I I have until recently was it was a teacher and director of english and what I felt, what I found, is that I really need to kind of move alongside the schools and help them understand that, yes, even though Bedrock is a very part of the platform anyway, is very off the shelf and can be, is very plug and play. Actually, you see the biggest, you see the biggest movements and the biggest gains in terms of literacy and reading ages and outcomes, when it's, when it underpins your literacy strategy, when it works alongside. There's no such thing as an intervention that just works in a silo. It needs to plug, plug in as part of your ecosystem, and I think that's the thing that schools need to really reflect on is where does this intervention sit in the bigger picture? How is this pulling on threads in that bigger picture? And, if nothing else, I feel like ed proof is something that's really going to help join those dots, and I I spy.

Andy: 20:55

I mean, I went on your website. When I saw your profile on LinkedIn, I just thought that looks fascinating. I wonder what on earth they do and how on earth they go about their business, and obviously you've spoken about that with us today. So, just finally, in terms of thinking about schools and your interest in schools, what do you think are the biggest barriers that schools face to meeting their pupils' needs? What are you seeing in terms of your work with schools and your wider reading? What are those biggest barriers and those biggest pain points that particularly senior leaders are feeling at the moment?

Alix: 21:34

That's a fantastic question and there are are hundreds of factors, but I would say the biggest thing I see at the moment is pupil disengagement, and it's just that thing. If a student switches off, if they don't want to be in class, they don't want to be listening to what you tell them, you have the best teachers in the world, but that student isn't accessing that learning and so it's working out. What are the factors that help students stay engaged in school and stay interested and motivated? And I think it's one of those really, really critical factors where, if you get student engagement correct, it unlocks everything else. But if people engagement isn't working, then nothing downstream can improve.

Andy: 22:17

And if you were to advise and or observe on what you've seen in terms of enhancing pupil engagement, where have you seen that work really well? Or what examples have you seen that have pulled the levers there effectively?

Alix: 22:34

So I think the answer is it's in every school right now, in that you will have some teachers who have fantastic rapport with their student. They have really strong relationships. They're friendly but not a friend. They respect those professional boundaries, but they have students who trust them, who see the student not just as an instructional leader but also as a person. And if you get that positive relationship right, that's when pupil engagement soars. And I haven't been to a single school where I haven't seen, you know, one superstar teacher, but also I've been to schools where I've seen one superstar teacher and then a few who could really learn from their colleague.

Andy: 23:12

Interesting. So it comes back to relationships. But how would a school do that at scale? I mean, I'm probably putting you on the spot there, but how do you think a school can facilitate that at scale?

Alix: 23:25

so I think, firstly, you have to identify again where things are going well. So if you have every school, every student in your school, surveyed, and you see, oh, class 9s and class 10s, you know academic engagement and simulation are way up. What's the commonality between these two classes? They have the same form tutor, for example. That's when you start to see okay, here's a kernel of something that's working really well.

Alix: 23:50

And then going in and observing and having conversation and saying you know, what is it in your practice that is embodying these positive relationships and then working out how you deploy that at scale.

Andy: 24:00

So it's probably not the answer you're looking for, but it's no, it's actually hard to do, but it's there the information's already there it is because, uh, yeah, I have to say it is because I think that you know what you did there was, you learned straight back on the data. Because, on the reverse of that, I was chatting to my, my wife sister, who's a psychologist herself, actually, and, um, I was talking about, uh, young people with scnd. And I said, given that I I myself haven't been diagnosed with anything, uh, scnd or related, I always found it relatively straightforward as a teacher in lots of ways to to differentiate and to work with pupils with scnd. I always felt quite comfortable doing that. I was never perfect, never the best, but I always thought I could do it. And she said, well, what is that? And I said I just felt like I could reduce things to their really basic component parts, break it down and break those steps down in a way that I wouldn't for perhaps other learners.

Andy: 24:56

And because we were comparing, for example, my son's been diagnosed with dyslexia and I said I find it really difficult when he struggles with a word or he struggles with his reading, because there's so much emotion bound up in me because I want to get, want him to get it right, whereas I don't have that emotion with pupils and I'm able to kind of just break it down, keep separate, and I think it's interesting that I'm just in my own head, thinking out loud here, that my anecdotal discussion with my wife kind of fits a little bit with you know, with your data, because you might say, well, which teachers are being more effective and where you know, where are the people's, where do the people's feel most in control of their learning? Where are the people's feeling that they can be successful the most well? Which teachers, which rooms, which subjects is that happening in? Right? Well, what's in place there? How do we go back to the structures and you're right, that word kernel, the kernel of an idea. How do we then go back to the root cause of that? And I just think this is really interesting, really interesting data to then pull on and investigate, and I think it's something, if nothing else, it's certainly something for schools to think about. I just find you said there really interesting. So it was the answer that I was looking for, actually.

Alix: 25:59

Well, I think no, you go on?

Andy: 26:02

no, go on. I think you're going to say something much more interesting.

Alix: 26:04

Go on well I was going to say.

Alix: 26:07

One of the things that I find fascinating about gathering this data on students is it's so easy to make assumptions about what your students know and what your students believe and how your students feel, but once you get that sort of quantization of it and you can say, okay, well, this student is struggling with this.

Alix: 26:24

Oh, I didn't know that because maybe they didn't feel able to say actually, I'm really struggling with collaboration, I just want to be on my own, or I'm really struggling with feeling frightened about the future, and by collecting this data, we're really allowing students to have this voice own, or I'm really struggling with, like, feeling frightened about the future and it allowed by collecting this data, we're really allowing students to have this voice.

Alix: 26:42

But also for schools to get all this extra information, because once you understand where your students are, that's when you can, as you say, start to unpick things and build these building blocks for students and lead them forwards, whereas if you just assume that all your students feel this way about certain things, then you, some students are going to progress really well because they're at the level you've assumed, but the students who haven't quite got to that part are going to be left behind, and that's obviously something no teacher wants and we talk about it all the time in terms of differentiation, responsive teaching, whatever you want to call it, but this is, you know, no people left behind.

Andy: 27:13

But ultimately, this stuff really matters, doesn't it? In terms of not making too many assumptions, and I think that's the best thing about all the strongest schools is they never assume too much, and, if nothing else, I think that's what airproof is really trying to do. So, um, good luck with it. I know you're at early doors and, uh, there's a way to go, but you know, good luck with it. And I will put alex's uh email address and various contact details in the episode description, so I'm sure she'd be delighted to hear from you if you'd be interested to work with Ed Proof. But thank you very much for coming on, alex. It's been an absolute pleasure. Really insightful, great conversation. Massively appreciate it. Thank you for your time.

Alix: 27:55

Thank you so much for having me.

Andy: 27:56

I've had a really lovely morning discussing these with you and hopefully we'll get to do it again sometime in the near future. I'd love to have you back on oh, that would be amazing.

Alix: 28:05

We can share some of our early data love to okay.

Andy: 28:09

All the best. Thank you very much all right.