Bedrock Talks from Bedrock Learning
Welcome to Bedrock Talks, a podcast from the team at Bedrock Learning that delves deep into the heart of literacy in education. Hosted by the insightful and experienced educator Andy Sammons, this podcast stands as a beacon for anyone passionate about enhancing literacy skills and understanding its pivotal role in education.
Each episode is a journey into the world of literacy education. Andy brings together a diverse array of voices from across the education sector, from seasoned teachers to renowned academics, policy makers to literacy advocates. All of our guests share a common goal: to explore and expand the horizons of literacy education.
We go beyond surface-level conversations. Our discussions are in-depth, nuanced, and filled with insights that only years of experience and expertise can bring. We tackle a wide range of topics, from innovative teaching methods to the latest research in literacy, the impact of technology on reading and writing, to strategies for engaging diverse learners. Our aim is to provide a platform where the complexities of literacy are unpacked and understood in a way that is both accessible and enlightening.
Join Andy and his guests as they illuminate the multifaceted world of literacy. Subscribe to Bedrock Talks and be part of a community that believes in the transformative power of literacy. Together, let's shape a more literate, informed, and connected world.
Bedrock Talks from Bedrock Learning
30. Interdisciplinary approaches to modern education with Carl Gombrich
Carl Gombrich is the Lead Academic at London Interdisciplinary School and oversees curriculum design, teaching, and learning. He was previously a Professorial Teaching Fellow of Interdisciplinary Education at UCL and is a Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
In this episode, prepare to rethink higher education as Carl shares his journey in pioneering a revolutionary academic model. Discover how LIS challenges traditional university structures by focusing on real-world issues like inequality and sustainability, rather than conventional subjects. Carl offers a compelling vision of how students can be equipped with diverse methodologies, empowering them to generate and critique knowledge actively and creatively.
Our conversation also navigates the intricate balance between domain-specific expertise and essential 21st-century skills. We confront the ongoing debate between upholding academic rigor and fostering a skillset that's applicable in the modern workforce. Drawing from personal experiences and insights, we propose a balanced educational approach, integrating transferable skills and cross-disciplinary frameworks. The importance of structured secondary education is highlighted, setting the stage for success in both academia and future career paths.
Finally, we explore the transformative potential of AI in education and innovative assessment methods that push the boundaries of traditional learning. Hear about the exciting ways students are engaging with AI, not just as passive consumers but as critical thinkers and creators. As we look towards future trends in education reform, Carl and I challenge the outdated remnants of the Victorian education system, advocating for a more integrated curriculum that truly prepares students for the complexities of the modern world. Join us in championing a holistic educational experience that bridges the gap between traditional methods and the skills indispensable in today's job market.
hi everyone, thank you for continuing to download, subscribe and all the rest of it to the Bedrock Talks podcast. I'm Andy Sammons, the host. I lead teaching and learning at Bedrock. I'm privileged to do that, and today, alongside the director of education, olivia Sumter, we have Carl Gombrich, who's I mean we've just had a quick five ten minute chat with Carl before coming on. This is going to be an absolute banger of an episode, this. I can't wait for you to listen to this. Um, no pressure, carl. Um thanks.
Speaker 1:He's the dean of london uh interdisciplinary school and it just, frankly, what he's talking about and what his website and what, what the university is attempting to do, is absolutely mind-blowing and incredible in equal measure. It's the first new university. Correct me if I'm wrong, is it 50 years? You said yeah to have degree awarding powers, which is no, no, um mean feat by you know, given, given how difficult it is to to get, to get that those be given those awarding powers. Um, and just diving into what carl and his colleagues are attempting, and successfully attempting at the interdisciplinary school is incredible. So, carl, thank you so much for coming on. Um, it's amazing. I couldn't quite believe it when, when we got this lined up. I couldn't believe when it dropped in my calendar um, would you mind, just, starting off, just giving us a brief kind of pricey kind of your background, how you came to be where you are now and the university's vision? That would be really helpful for listeners, I think.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thanks, andy. Just to correct a very minor point. Sorry, it was all very technical, but it's all very legal as well. So I want to get this right. We're the first university for 50 years to get our degree awarding powers. From our inception, from when we were founded, um. Usually you have to grab degrees of other unis for a long time, so you use their degree awarding powers, but because we were um, our quality was very high, we were sufficiently innovative. The office for students, um get, gave us our own degree awarding powers from the start. So that's, that's been an amazing achievement, um, not, as as you say, historic, but slightly different from being the first uni for 50 years.
Speaker 2:So basically, our curriculum is extremely radical, but also extremely simple. In some ways, we don't teach any subjects, but we teach about real-world problems and ways to tackle those problems and, in a nutshell, that's it. But you and I could spend an hour unpacking what that really means. But if you just think about, we teach about real world problems, so things like inequality, sustainability, technology and ethics, urban futures, and we teach a wide suite of skills. We call them methods in a more academic context, but methods that you can use to tackle those problems.
Speaker 2:And another couple of sentences on this. Just unpack that a little bit more, if you like. The methods range from data science and mathematical modeling right the way through all the social science methods, like how to design surveys, how to run focus groups, right the way to artistic methods, how to create a great video, how to create a great infographic, and the students start off with a very wide suite of methods to tackle these real world problems that they use and the gradually they specialize more in the methods and the suites of methods which they like and they think will be useful for them in their, in their future careers.
Speaker 1:It's interesting that because in my I mean I've I taught for I've talked for over a decade and a lot of what you've just spoken about there are all things that I've asked learners to do in my time as a teacher. I mean I've had do an infographic, produce a video, and we kind of ask them to do all of these things in in order to demonstrate learning. But what you're doing is you're almost flipping that on its head. You're you're giving them the tools to then go and discover more and learn more. Is that? Am I right in saying that?
Speaker 2:yeah, I think that's a really nice way to put it. Um, yeah, exactly that. So we're almost using uh, the learning outcomes are to demonstrate that they can use the tools to either generate new knowledge, which is valid, rigorous, relevant or critique knowledge, which we would give them so some kind of report, government report. They can then say, oh well, this focus group wasn't carried out quite in the right way, or the data isn't actually saying what the report says it's doing. But that's right. We focus on the methods and the value of learning those methods rigorously, rather than saying this is the knowledge we want you to know and reproduce.
Speaker 1:So at Bedrock. We talk a lot because we have we have a one of the areas of our, of our solution is called bedrock mapper, where we have over 35 000. It's growing, as as it is, I think live live will be able to tell us what the, what, the word number is where we can drop very subject, specific, high level, tier three, vocabulary, um, and sequence it alongside curricula. So if we're you know, if teachers are teaching a particular topic, they can select words that learners are then asked about, taught about, and it all drives it into their individual knowledge organizers. And we talk a lot about domain knowledge alongside implementation of this.
Speaker 1:You know domain knowledge, thinking, talking like a subject expert, and I suppose one thing I really wanted to tease out here was you know, you don't have those traditional canonized subjects, as we touched on just before the show, but what's your view on that connection between domain specificity knowledge but then those broader skills? Because I think there's been a shift and both of you are equally, if not more qualified than I, certainly, to comment on this, but there's been this shift since, certainly 2010,. You know, ed Hirsch, domain specificity knowledge, unlocking learning, that's really where a lot of secondaries have landed in terms of curricula, in terms of testing knowledge, knowledge, understanding, that being the key. Where do you feel this should sit in terms of those domain, specificity versus creativity and critical thinking, because I think what you're doing here is really blowing the lid off a lot of that in some ways well, it's a fascinating, deep question, andy, we can't do this justice because there's so many nuances here and the whole debate got so over characterized between treads and progs and all this stuff.
Speaker 2:You lived through all that, as I did, I'm sure. Um, first thing I want to say is I'm very concerned with rigor, and often interdisciplinary learning is, uh, seen to be and maybe sometimes correctly seen to be not rigorous enough. So we, we really are conscious about the, the, the rigor element. Um, gosh, let me take, let me take, let me take first the angle that I, we were discussing off air and then see if we go back into the other, because there are so many ways to unpack this. As a university person, I'm very concerned with the education that we give our students, being relevant for the rest of their lives, not just the jobs they do, but also the kind of fulfilling lives they want to lead. But if I look at just the employment aspect the Institute for Student Employers, which is a fantastic organization that looks at all the kind of trends of student employability and speaks to hundreds of graduate employers They've now for years been surveying what graduate employers actually want in graduates and it's been between 80% and 90% of all graduate employers that civil service, banking sector, creative sector, whatever you like 80% to 90% don't care what undergraduate degree a student has when they join them, right? So the idea, and so let me tie this in straight. I haven't actually spoken about this for a long time, so it's quite nice to revise this. Let me tie this into the trad view like but knowledge is non-transferable and therefore you have to learn domain specific language, because that's what you asked about that.
Speaker 2:What the the one of the paradoxes in the heart of the trad, the trad thinking there are paradoxes on both sides and neither side they really acknowledge, I think is is that they say, you know, have to learn this stuff and that's what rigor is, and so on, but then they don't seem to recognize that no one is using that education then when they go into the workplace, or at least they're not aware of that. So they're either, you know, ignoring it or willfully disregarding the fact that the education that they're then giving the students is irrelevant for most graduate jobs. And I think that stems from the traddies, if we could characterize that, having a very outdated view of what employment is actually like in the modern world. No one is actually going on to be a historian or even an economist. Yes, they might work in business, but they don't use the language of formal economics, let alone biology and all those things.
Speaker 2:So traddies claim, maybe correctly, that you need subject-specific knowledge to get that thing, get that discipline down if you like and be able to work in it, but then either ignore or are unaware of the fact that that's completely useless for up to 90% of graduates going into the world of work. So how do we square that circle? Progressives, on the other hand, might correctly say, yeah, it's all kind of useless, they need to be learning other things, but they never then say exactly what they should be learning and what the rigorous aspects of it are that they should be learning. So I think both sides have things they really need to consider in in their arguments.
Speaker 3:Um, and I think I would sorry I'll ever go ahead. I think you know we would probably name that in secondary education skills. That tends to be the other side of knowledge and actually you can't apply your knowledge without the skills of being at. You know, without having that language, without having that skill set of being able to communicate effectively, write an effective essay, read analytically can I, can I jump in there?
Speaker 2:so sorry because I slightly lost. You've actually helped remind me what I really want to say, because the progressives would say we need to learn all these 20th century skills. Right, yeah, and they're not wrong in the sense that those are actually the things you're going to need in the workplace. But the uh, but we, no one's, but the traddies won't admit because they don't admit, they don't think about domain transfer that you can then transfer what you learn in english literature or biology or mathematics into the workplace because transfer of knowledge doesn't exist in the trap, in the ultra trial argument, right, so you know which. Which is it? Is it that subjects actually do give you those kind of very important generic skills which you can transfer out from subject disciplines into the workplace, but in which case the tradies are wrong that it doesn't transfer? Or is it that you can go completely broad and not learn via different disciplines for the actual workplace what people do after university, but then the proggies never actually codify that in any way. They never actually say these are the things you learn. They're never rigorous enough about the different categories of language vocabulary knowledge that you do need to learn to go into the workplace. So no one's quite getting this right.
Speaker 2:I'm not saying we're either getting this right, but we do think that, well, we go very much by what is actually useful to our graduates. Of course I've got tons of data on this because before this I worked at UCL where I set up the first Bachelor of Arts and Sciences in the UK which is like this kind of education. So we've got tons of data that the sorts of skills and knowledge and methodological rigor that our students know is really useful for the workplace. But it's not entirely subject-specific. It crosses between different subjects, it uses various frameworks, various assessment requirements which require students to evidence all this kind of different sort of vocabulary which isn't necessarily domain specific, um. So yeah, I think you've got to. You've got to let go of some of the subject specific specificity, but you mustn't let go of rigor while you're doing it.
Speaker 2:I think that's the that's the point I'm trying to make. So you're seeking new vocabulary, new things, you want to teach new ways of demonstrating that you've learned those things, uh, which may not be attached to individual disciplines. Now, that's for university people. As, again, we said before we got on air, that may not be what you need at secondary. I'm quite sympathetic to thinking that secondary students need a lot of structure. They need to understand that the world is categorized in certain ways and each thing brings with it certain vocabularies which have to be learned, also certain methodologies which have to be learned as well. By the way, epistemological worldviews, all those things come with subjects and it's quite helpful to separate them, sort of for mental hygiene, if you like, just so that students can learn, have some clarity in their learning in this crucial kind of year 11 to to the I'm sorry year 7 to 13.
Speaker 3:I think one of the things that we uh talk about often, carl in say, in a secondary setting, is that when we think about tier 2 vocabulary, we think about our academic verbs, so verbs you know, analyze, evaluate, etc. And actually when we look at the whole school curriculum, I think evaluate has got eight distinct meanings in different subject areas right is that something that you come up against that actually, depending on domain, meaning changes, or is that?
Speaker 3:is that something that you equip your students to navigate? Is that something you've thought about in in your setting?
Speaker 2:I honestly I'm not going to say that we have thought about it. I think that's in a funny way, that's a consequence of very siloed education.
Speaker 3:I suppose it really is, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:And because we try to either you could think of it as jump over that or kind of deconstruct that in some ways we don't worry too much about what each different discipline says these particular verbs mean. So that is a clear contrast thing between what you're trying to do. What we're trying to do, um, as I mentioned, what we're trying to do is give students the tools, the analytical tools, from understanding the way the knowledge was generated, how a scientist generates knowledge, how a social scientist generates knowledge, how a humanities person generates knowledge. Understand how that knowledge was generated in order for them, our students to either critique that knowledge or produce similar knowledge of their own. Both are valuable.
Speaker 2:But that kind of strips out a little bit the kind of worrying too much about what particular vocabulary means in every particular area. If you know how that knowledge was generated, you may not need to kind of fuss too much about what particular vocabulary means in every particular area. If you know how that knowledge was generated, you may not need to kind of fuss too much about the nuances of the different terms, I think I mean you might disagree with that a little bit. Maybe you think the vocabulary is extremely important even so I do.
Speaker 3:Well, I mean, my life's mission is definitely predicated on the fact that I do think language is very important, for sure. But I also entirely agree with you that I think I think it is reflective the fact that evaluate needs to mean eight different things for a student going into a different classroom hour on hour. I think that that's a like, I mean, that is a headache, isn't it? That is, for me, reflective of a system that has not really thought holistically, that hasn't thought globally about actually, how are we kind of sharing curriculum learning across the different subject areas? How are we building in a need for a school to make links between different subject domains? How are we building in that kind of much more holistic thinking? I think it, I think we need to answer to it, because that's the assessment system that we work in and therefore we do need to equip our students with that understanding. But I think, more broadly, it speaks to the fact that that holistic thinking isn't really in place in our curriculum.
Speaker 2:Do you guys work with things called threshold concepts? Do you know? About threshold concepts I don't.
Speaker 1:I've played with them when I was director of English in my previous role and that's how we really looked at designing our, our curriculum, using at least a version of that term, which was you know what other concepts we want, the, the, the, the pupils to be able to kind of move past as they progress through the curriculum. But I think what I hope you're about to touch on and was what I was about to ask you, which was about, you know, we talked previously about giving learners opportunities to address real world problems. I think at this point in the conversation it'd be really useful. Could you give us a sense of the types of module, the types of experiences that that learners in your interdisciplinary school? Could you give us a sense of kind of an you know, the, how you would break that learning experience down? Yeah, sure, philosophy. I think that would be a really important moment in this conversation yeah, sure.
Speaker 2:So we look at the problem of inequality right. That's a what we call a problem area in our lis london interdisciplinary school vocabulary problem areas inequality. Then we'll have two to four external people come in from the real world outside academia and talk about what inequality means to them. That could be financial inequality. So we had someone come and talk about the racialized financial wealth gap when it comes to getting loans. So people from some ethnic backgrounds find it very hard, much too hard, and disproportionately hard to get loans from banks compared to others. We had someone come in and talk about health inequality. So we have people come in and talk about this concept of inequality and how it plays out in their real world area. Then our students work in groups to refine what we call a problem statement about a particular area of inequality they're interested in. So then there's quite a lot of that shaping, which is so, so important in higher education, about what is an actual tractable research question, because we know students always want to go very, very broad. How can I solve health inequality in?
Speaker 1:the world you know.
Speaker 2:No, how can you help bangladeshi second generation women in tower hamlets have reduced health inequality when it comes to women's health issues.
Speaker 2:You, you know that's the kind of targeted, rigorous, precise research question we want them to ask and then they'll go in do some research to answer that question. Now, the first year, they can't apply a lot of data science to that because they haven't learned that they can't make a great campaign video. They haven't learned how to do that. But we thread in more and more of these methods. We teach focus groups, survey writing, analysis of archives. We've got a fantastic library in the city of london here where students can go and look up archives and do archival research there and gradually they will do, they will use the methods they've learned on each of these big problems modules, on the refined research question which they've done coming out of the out of the out of the problems module to actually tackle that problem in a meaningful way and come up with a meaningful contribution really to understanding that problem question from their own perspective that's so interesting when you're grounding it in that, in that kind of that real world scenario.
Speaker 1:Because and I loved again, um, what you said, uh, what you've said previously about the hourglass model yeah, how you see it as an hourglass, because I think a lot of you know secondary, secondary colleagues and primary colleagues actually primary certainly as well who are listening to this, who will think that they'll be interested in this stuff because they're listening to it, but at the same time, I think they'll also be thinking about how they can possibly ground this in their own roles as well at work. So, where do you see, just explain to us briefly, give us a recap of that hourglass model and how you, where you see this fitting, because to a certain extent, we're kind of stuck with this system. You know eight different meanings of evaluation. You know not having through up front and and we, you know we're still you know, let's be honest, we're still living in a, in a system where we've got the six weeks holiday because that fit the agrarian.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we're stuck with some remnants, right, but yeah, in terms of curriculum design, I know there are some schools that are starting to break these barriers down. There are days, um, there are, uh, this in the north. I forget that the name. I apologize. I'll put it in the in the we're andy, we're working with some schools.
Speaker 2:Now we have quite an interesting, quite a powerful consortium come to us to ask to redo, uh, some aspects of the their curriculum because they want to help in making connections across subjects and doing some we call them sort of almost post-disciplinary things like systems thinking. I don't know if you guys know about systems thinking, but we have a, a fantastic person that I think is I'm helping him get a book out. I hope he's going to become much more better known. But there are all sorts of um, new ways of crossing the curricula, sort of things. You mentioned libya that I think you can weave them into into the school, um, uh way of doing things. I mean, the ib does this, to be honest, has been doing it well for years. Unfortunately, the UK government doesn't seem to be able to afford it. But you can do perfectly traditional and you probably should do some quite traditional disciplinary stuff alongside insisting that students then connect that stuff to other disciplines. So this hourglass model you were mentioning, basically you start broad at the bottom when students are young, because you know students don't see academic subjects, they just see world, and the world is non-disciplinary, as someone once famously said. But then I think as you get to that adolescent period, years 7 to 13 you know there's a lot going on in the developing brain there and the structure is just helpful. I think it's helpful for clarity, for sort of mental hygiene, for just organizing the school day. I don't really have much of a problem with it in that in that period. But I don't think it should get too set either.
Speaker 2:I do think british students with their famously narrow a-level system I think it's the narrowest in the world apart from mauritius, or certainly used to be. It might be a bit out of date there, but even china and india some of these systems we think of as very traditional have five subjects if you include English. So I think the UK system is way too narrow and it's certainly too siloed. I mean you still get students like my little boy who's brilliant at science but he's still asked the question like is that physics or is that chemistry? And I'm like who cares?
Speaker 2:You know it's interesting, it's both. It's neither you know, but that's the way they're taught. They interesting, it's both, it's neither you know, but that's the way they're taught. They're taught in these very narrow bands. They still ask those kind of slightly irrelevant bureaucratic questions. So I think you've got to be careful not to let students get too siloed, particularly 16 to 18, and there should be part of the curriculum, whether it's the extended essay, you know, the sort of epq. Extended essay is the ib thing, then the epq is the sort of A-level version or systems thinking of some new A-levels even introduced which encourage students not to get too rigidly confined to their silos, because that just won't help them in the longer run.
Speaker 1:I think this links directly to. I mean, you speak on on your website and you know you've spoken. We've spoken previously about the changing nature of expertise. You know I've got this.
Speaker 1:As I said before, I've got this kind of double-edged sword. When it comes to ai, I am fearful of it and in love with it in equal measure. Um, in terms of what? The, the potential and I? I spoke to dan fitzpatrick a few months ago and, and I agree with him wholeheartedly, I think that ai is akin to fire in terms of elemental. I think it's just incredible.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and so you, you spoke, you speak, you've spoken about the change notes for expertise. In a world where content is generated the click of a button, yeah, in a world where you've got access to all of, as you've said before, all of these kind of information, um, your trads, I think. Still, to some extent, I agree, you do need domain-specific knowledge in order to function, as you say, in certain domains. But what I would ask here is what is your view of this changing nature of expertise where you can produce, you can research, at the click of a button? We've got for, for example I use often perplexity ai is yeah, I love perplexity, I love it yeah and so what role do you see literacy playing in this, in this, because it really is.
Speaker 1:It's we're about. We're on the precipice of something massive, aren't we?
Speaker 2:we are. We are totally on the cusp of something massive. Um, and for me the divide is going to be people who are able to critique what ai shows them and those that can't. And um, for me this is a right back to methods again, and I think for schools it's a huge challenge because not as it only is it back to methods, but it's then a back back to were the methods used correctly and but, and who was the authority, if you like, in quotes who used that method? Now, when you get to 18 plus, you can start to ask those questions. It kind of makes sense in the world. You start to doubt a bit more.
Speaker 2:But how can you talk to a nine year old about the legitimate generation of knowledge? Do they have any concept outside what mum and dad tells them, that knowledge is even generated? That's a weird phrase. Right, there is stuff, there isn't stuff. But that is where we are, because they are themselves going to be typing into AI, getting all sorts of stuff the machine gives them, with no concept of how that knowledge in quotes that AI presented knowledge came to be. But that is what we have to try and teach.
Speaker 2:It seems to me increasingly young people have to understand that all knowledge is in a sense generated by humans at some point in history and in some ways. And in generating that knowledge, all humans use some methods to do it. They use experimentation, they use creativity, they use digging in the ground if they're archaeologists. So, again, it's about teaching students the methods that generated that knowledge and then teach them. Every single time a machine presents them with some knowledge, they have to ask the question where's this knowledge from? How is it produced? Why do I trust the person that's produced it? And I think that's hard enough and rich enough, but exciting enough at university to do how you do with younger learners. I have no idea, because how can children even think of the world in that way?
Speaker 1:you've just, you've just annihilated my next question there. I was going to ask you, you know, from your you know, uh, knowledge of the secondary system, where you, you know, with your own children, you know 10 gcses, 3a levels and that type of thing. Yeah, if you did have a magic wand, or at least half a magic wand, to be able to do half of the things, or even a quarter of magic wand to be able to do half of the things, or even a quarter of the things that you would like to do, where do you see this? Where do you feel the system could shift to, or or thinking about moving towards?
Speaker 2:so, um, this is fun, and because I've got no um dog in this fight, because I'm not in school system. But I look at my, my young boy, who's super good at science. He's doing the double maths, physics, chemistry, and he doesn't do any coding. He doesn't do any. You know, which is crazy. I mean, maths is now coding. Basically, there's a bit of mathematical modeling needed, but a tiny fraction of what they're actually told. But I would like to flip it entirely on its head and say'd say to them okay, we're going to tell you nothing about um, the mechanism, this, but you have to go off and produce a piece of code which is going to um design, I don't know, a, a toy rocket that's gonna be sold in the shops, and they have to go off and use the ai to do that. But the, the requirement because this is what people are nervous about is the is when it goes wrong. Right, so you can get a great mark if it's right. But you're going to get massively penalized if you've done an uncritical accepting of what the ai has told you, told you without looking deeper into why it's told you that. So by all means, produce stuff. But the bar is now so much higher, and I'm actually doing this at my uni with my students, but not around coding, this is more around quality stuff. The bar to getting like really good grade is so much higher anyone can pass that bar now. So they're going to be much tougher penalties on if you haven't critically engaged with what the ai is telling you. So that's what we're going to assess is your critical engagement with the code, with the information you're given.
Speaker 2:And in my university I asked students to produce a five-minute video which evidences how they interacted with the AI all the way along the piece. They can talk me through it, they can produce slides, they can give me screenshots, whatever it might be, and that has an equal weighting in the assessment to the thing actually produced. So so I dived in with a code example, because I think the stakes are a bit higher there and I haven't done this myself, so I'm actually less good at describing it than the other thing which I just did describe. But I think you could produce certainly university rather than students say I don't know anything about coding, you say, right, you've got a weekend, go on chat sheet, bt, code something. But then what I'm interested in is your critique of the code and seeing how they then use all the machine stuff possible to critique the code that they've been given. This is very, very unworked out because we're right at the foothills here. But I suppose the take-home for me now is the bar is so much higher and we mustn't stop students getting over that bar because that's a good thing to do. But they've also got to understand the stakes are so much higher if they get something wrong, because these machines make terrible mistakes and they have to know about that and there has to be kind of rigorous spot-checking of that and they might therefore lose a lot of marks when they do it.
Speaker 2:And I suppose the sort of halfway house between those two things is what I'm doing with my students at the moment. They have to produce an essay. It's a complex thing to explain but it's quite a creative essay. It's called a vision paper. It combines all sorts of ideas of arts and sciences and problem solving. But what I'm actually just as interested in looking at is their critical engagement with the AI in the process of producing that paper. And I don't the hard thing. I don't think that's actually too difficult to set and I think it's actually quite fun for teachers to engage with and it's inspiring. Actually to see students have these thought partners and work is amazing. What's difficult is the time required to assess it. It's not conceptually difficult to do and it's actually really valuable for the teacher and the students. But just marking, you know, 10 minute videos of students engagement with this stuff is very time-consuming, so that bit I haven't worked out.
Speaker 3:My good friend is a lecturer in international politics and she was having such problems with AI-generated essays that she now just sets podcasts to produce a podcast episode that is an assessment and she said that whilst the time marking button is actually important, you know larger in the first, in the first instance actually, and to remark and guide the students through the reiterations of that project actually ends up being kind of 50, 50. Um, and the and the initial output from the students is much of a much higher quality and shows, like you say, that they've engaged with it critically.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, I completely agree with that. Of course, we're probably only two years away from AI producing a perfect podcast in a student's voice.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's probably true, can I? Ask you something which is a bit provocative.
Speaker 2:Yeah, go on.
Speaker 3:Who does this work for, can you like? If you think about the students that are coming through your doors, are they highly highly academic students who would thrive in any model? Highly highly academic students who would thrive in any model. And if I was a teacher sitting here listening to this in a secondary setting, there might be students who think, actually, if I just set them a more open-ended task without that scaffolding, they would really struggle to access that. So is this way of thinking. Is this model appropriate for all? Is it universal?
Speaker 2:What do you think about that? It's a really good question. At UCL, of course, I was spoiled with some of the best literally best students in the world. Right and um, you just open up a course like this and they're like oh, thank goodness, something like this exists at uni. At last I can go somewhere and do something I want to do.
Speaker 2:And I was a bit worried that, you know, it was basically quite an elitist thing and only a tiny fraction of students could cope. But I had the privilege privilege, of course, of going around to many other unis I won't name them because that would look like I was dumbing down on their students but I went to some very not Russell Group universities and they were all very interested. Many students there also said we wish we could do something like this. You know, combining English literature and biology. I remember and I'm afraid I can't remember the particular thing the student was working on, but it was very coherent, it made a lot of sense. She was doing something between developmental biology and English literature and it was great. So I think it's something to keep an eye on.
Speaker 2:I think you're right to raise it as a possible elitist thing and I think the way around, that is, to develop these specific courses, like in systems thinking or in um, in cognitive biases, so kind of new cross-disciplinary type courses which in a sense have a bit of the smell of the old. You know, they're packaged, they're a bit of a silo, but they're explicitly not old-fashioned disciplines. They cross different disciplines and require different vocabularies to use your, your guys ways of thinking or different um, different knowledge sets from traditional disciplines. So yeah, so I don't. I think it's okay. I think it's something you've got to keep an eye on.
Speaker 2:I do think super bright people flourish in this kind of environment because often very bright people are interested in lots of different things. I mean, it's as simple as that and when you give them the opportunity to study all those things and connect them, they're just, they're like in a playground. They love it. But I don't think it has to be only super bright or super academic, should we say people. I think there are other ways to scaffold this and reframe where we've got to in knowledge which everyone can engage with it's so interesting when you, when you think about when, when you think about where this is moving towards.
Speaker 1:And I think the final thing I really want to sort of touch on and just looking at this here is where do you see things moving in the next? I mean, I think you guys are obviously ahead of the curve. I think there's that that. I don't think that's really up for debate. I think you're ahead of where things are moving to. But we at bedrock we talk about the classroom of the future, we talk about um, where we are trying to move to and support schools to move to in terms of that much more fluid um interaction with it, um being able to kind of enter into dialogue with teachers online, all that sort of stuff. Where do you see things moving in the next five, 10, 20 years? What do you see in terms of the young people coming through your university? And, more broadly, have you had your crystal ball? What are you thinking?
Speaker 2:Well, andy, I like to joke about this. I've been wrong for 15 years, so you certainly shouldn't listen to me, right? I thought when the moocs came along in 2010 wasn't massive? Open online courses, the free courses from stanford, from harvard, from yale I thought why would anyone blow 70 grand going to uni when you can literally get the same knowledge, probably better taught, from your bedroom? So I completely misunderstood what university had come to mean in our culture, which is a great right of right of passage for a generation. It's, I mean, students will tell you they go for the learning, but actually an economist would say you're not going for the learning because you can get the same learning for 70 grand, 90 grand less at home. So it's not really you know. So there's a lot of really really weird mysteries in the, in the university sector in particular, which do not fit any rational theory of human behavior, economics, right. But putting that aside, um, I think we've got a really bad disconnect from the way education's gone in this country the last 12 years and what graduate work actually is, leaving out the whole university piece in the middle.
Speaker 2:And I'm sympathetic. You know I've followed Tom Bennett for years on Twitter. I admire Tom, I know he's very traddy and he has a lot of detractors. You might be in Tom Camps or David Dido, these people but I admire them. I like their emphasis on cognitive science and all the learning sciences stuff and I'm naturally quite a progressive person. I find the wooliness and a lot of the prog side of things, uh, you know, a bit dispiriting, to be honest. Yeah, but I but I but I do think that insisting on you know, on on siloization and nothing else and insisting on exam prep and I see this, of course, with my kids has been pretty disastrous for, uh, the university sector and for then students actually understanding what the world's going to require of them four or five years after doing their A-levels. So perhaps the way to get back to this is, as I was saying to Olivia a bit earlier, to think of new things which fit in with the trad view of what rigor is required, what it means to use what the learning sciences have taught us for hundreds of years and the properties kind of ignore, but some actually new, more progressive type modules which require that. So, whether it's in systems thinking, whether it's methodologies or something about the scientific method, having students do more of their own um, experimental work or generating their own stuff, critical evaluation of ai, all those kinds of things could, I think, perhaps bridge that divide between the desperate need, I think, for novelty and some progressive thinking in the UK school system and being rigorous about it and not just being all fluffy and saying that let students do what they want.
Speaker 2:I mean, one thing that amazes me is that we still really don't have a respectable and rigorous media studies A-level and university course in the country. Why aren't Oxford and Cambridge delivering the most exciting media studies undergraduate degree in the world? Is there anything more important than understanding the modern media's role in society? And it's a combination of computer science, politics, psychology, um graphic design. It's a fascinating interdisciplinary area and we've had like 15 years to think about developing this now and we're still sort of ridiculed and you know you don't get your very best students doing it. The best universities don't offer it. I mean, that's just a symptom, if you like. That's emblematic how incredibly kind of uh, victorian and backward a lot, a lot of the education system is. But yeah, it's just one example.
Speaker 1:I often say, because, as an English teacher, I often say that I'm frustrated with the modern English language. Gcse, you know, from my very confined experience, you know, even just as a minor step towards what you just said there. Why are we talking about what we're talking about for the non-fiction paper and we're not talking about how newspapers construct images and bias and things like that? Why aren't we giving out? You know, I think that I actually, uh, wouldn't, you know, don't shy away from saying this.
Speaker 1:I think there's a certain amount of moral failure going on. We're not, we're not allowing and exposing our young people to how narratives get shaped in the media. I won't name names, but I've got apps of all sorts of all sorts of newspapers on my phone and, as an as a linguist by trade, as an english language degree, um, uh, you know, that's, that's what I got, as in my linguistics, I love reading all range of newspapers and apps because I love looking at the technical side of how the bias is produced, but I would hate to be a passive recipient of some of these.
Speaker 2:Yeah, 100%, 100%, 100%. Why don't we teach cognitive biases through academic subjects in a rigorous way? That's another thing we could do to make the system much more relevant and progressive and rigorous.
Speaker 3:I think we do do that in Key Stage 3. I think, where schools have got bandwidth to do that, some schools are doing brilliant jobs doing that. Okay good. I was at a school the other day and they were talking to me about just that and had an amazing scheme of work about media, but then at Key Stage 4, obviously that gets….
Speaker 1:Narrowed.
Speaker 3:Exactly about uh media. But then at key stage four, obviously that gets narrowed, exactly. It gets pushed aside because it's not within the assessment uh criteria, which is I mean this has been an incredible conversation.
Speaker 1:I've this is flown by.
Speaker 2:I've loved it yes, not enough time.
Speaker 1:Sorry about that. I mean, I would love, sincerely love, to have you back on again later this year, carl, because this has been so incredible, and please do in the follow up obviously we'll get some details from you, but please do, we'll make sure you share your links with us for the university. I would love to work with you further in the future and engage further, because I think what you're doing is is really incredible and I and the sort of the litmus test for that.
Speaker 2:I would love my own children to come through and oh, that's nice so it's 100% the litmus test, andy, I I've put a post on linkedin. I don't post as much as I should probably, but I basically said my, my sole criterion really is can I create educational things that I would be happy for my children to to do? You know, and I and it's been challenging we got there, we've got the last two or three years I think two years maybe LAS. Now we've really been there. My oldest boy wanted to come, uh, to LAS and I felt good, I thought, yeah, he could be here, but unfortunately my wife and the, the boss here, thought it wouldn't be a good idea for him to be, so he's gone somewhere else doing something similar. But that was a big moment for me when I felt, I felt, um, he would get an education here which I think I'd be very happy for him to get so yeah, it's nice to hear that you feel similar.
Speaker 3:That's great in terms of application? Does it work in the same way that happens through ucas? Just thinking about we, could, you know, flag that to the advisors within the secondary schools yeah, no, it does it.
Speaker 2:We're on UCAS and we also have an independent application as well if students don't want to make us one of their choices.
Speaker 2:But yeah, we're completely kind of in the mainstream now in terms of applications. We have a longer process, so we interview all students to make sure that they're a good fit and actually this is quite an interesting point actually, and it sort of touches a bit what you were saying earlier, livia, about who this is for. We have a really interesting cohort because we can be more flexible with grades than some unis, but we also have some very, very good students. We have 3A stars and so on, and it kind of segments into a few different categories. So we have quite a few mature students who who, uh, have been out for a while, or students have been in really tough circumstances in school that we're able to consider, who some you know universities might not be able to, and we have, um, you know, traditionally very, very good students as well. So it's a bit more like a comprehensive school actually than many universities, uh, and I like that. That also feels really kind of progressive and more you need to be doing doing that sort of thing as well.
Speaker 3:But what are your visions for kind of scaling? What are your ambitions?
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, it's been interesting. So our master's program has really taken off way faster than we expected, but our undergraduate has been a bit slower. So I think we're going to be 45 intake next year, which would be great. It's still pretty small, though. I'd much rather be at sort of 60 to 80 now. Um, so I think the the honest answer is uh, firstly, stability and growth for the undergrad and quite a lot of growth in the postgrad. So we're launching an lsmba actually next calendar year, and we plans for another master's in education and possibly one in systems thinking as well. Um, that might be a symptom that this sort of thinking is a little bit more, um, apparent as to why it's needed as you head into your 20s, but that itself, as we've touched on, might be simply because school students are so poorly educated for the modern world. Yeah, but they don't realize they need this stuff until they get out in the modern world yeah, yeah, thank you so much, um, carl, it's been amazing.
Speaker 1:Um, and all the very best um for everything you're you're continuing to work on, and congratulations on everything you're doing, because it sounds amazing and if there's anything we can ever do to kind of promote that message and and speak to schools on, if you know, on your behalf, I would love to advocate for you. What a fantastic thing you're doing pleasure.
Speaker 2:Well, thanks so much. Thanks, guys, have a good day.
