Ep. 82 - Loosening the Reigns on Teaching with Dr. Tim Dasey - Science 360

Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
It's a little bit like when cursiveinstruction was removed from elementary schools. There
was a huge outcry, and ultimatelyI ended up seeing the excuse from from
those who were proponents that well,they need to be able to read old
documents. Well, okay, justbecause some little part of the world has

(00:20):
to be able to do that doesn'tmean we teach it to everybody. M
Right. Cursive was because it wasinvented because of you know, ink wells
and feather pens that blotted. Right. But you know, it's just an
example of how silly the conversation canbecome. If what we're arguing about is
is it useful? That's not theright question. The right question is what's

(00:45):
most useful? M. Welcome backto another episode of Science three sixty.
This is Tim Stevenson, your host, and on this episode I have doctor
Tim Daisy, author of his bookWisdom Factories. This is a challenging,

(01:07):
thought provoking, and somewhat in yourface kind of conversation. Don't worry,
we do it with a smile.Put us a medicine worth taking. This
podcast is a proud member of theTeach Better podcast network, Better Today,

(01:27):
Better Tomorrow, and the podcast toget you there. Explore more podcasts at
www dot Teach Better Podcastnetwork dot com. Now let's get onto the episode.
Doctor Tim Daisy knows how to pusheducational buttons, and let me be clear,

(01:48):
this is a good thing. Ifound this out as I recorded this
episode and listened to Tim's theories onhow schools need to evolve. These theories
come from a thirty year career inAI development MIT. Now compelled to rattle
the cage and poke the bear,Tim is attempting to nudge educators into what
I would call hard but essential conversationsabout what we're teaching and how it needs

(02:10):
to evolve. In his book WisdomFactories, Tim says that AI in the
classroom isn't going to be the biggestchallenge. It'll be preparing students for an
AI workworld. Wisdom Factories asks whatare the fundamentals of schooling don't fit the
AI era. Tim's premise is thatAI will be the work experts, so

(02:31):
humanity has to supply the wisdom.This requires upending a century of educational dogma.
Doctor Daisy reckons with an unavoidable conflict. Schools currently spend most of their
energy teaching students to do what AIdoes best. The solution for schools and
work is to focus on wisdom skillslike critical thinking, creativity, relating,

(02:53):
and teaming. These complement AI,not compete with it. Learning wisdom can
only be done well, he says, with a new educational model that's nearly
upside down from the current one,a model that changes the curriculum, teaching,
and even the structure of schooling.In this episode, Tim speaks extensively

(03:15):
on experience play, meta knowledge,and multi disciplinary curricula as being the new
fundamentals to be taught in schools.I describe it as the sort of conversation
that needs to be brought up instaff and department meetings. But what I
see is a real hesitancy to retoolwhat and how we teach in schools,

(03:36):
likely due to our tight grip onthe historical and traditional model that we've grown
to be so comfortable with and perhapscomplacent within. To serve our students best
is to engage them with the newestand most meaningful and relevant information that's available.
If we're seeing a lack of engagementwith the material in the curriculum,
how much longer will we blame amodern generation of students instead of placing a

(04:00):
good deal of the blame squarely onthe shoulders of outdated content and practices.
Yeah, these are hard questions,but there are questions that I ask myself
all the time. I've seen positiveresults from challenging my own practices and then
bringing new content that I've picked upfrom doing my own research. Greater engagement,
greater desire to know more, moreindependent research, and even requests to

(04:23):
follow a related line of thinking andresearch quite independent of and separate from my
lesson plan. And I love that, and so do the students. I
hope you reflect deeply on this conversationand then pick up a copy of doctor
Daisy's book Wisdom Factories. Perhaps letthis episode be the beginning of many more
conversations as you participate in loosening thereins on teaching. Now, allow me

(04:48):
to introduce you to doctor Tim Daisy. Well, and you must have school
starting up pretty soon, if not, if not already, well no,
yeah, here in Canada, schooldoesn't start till the day after Labor Day,

(05:09):
so we're still the ways away.Nice. Yeah, I know in
the US a lot of teachers areback at work and yeah, but not
in Canada. Yeah, surprisingly,it's the warm weather states that start later.
For reasons. I don't particularly understandwhy you'd want to have kids go
to school when it's one hundred degreesand not hold the schools I'm sure I

(05:30):
have are modernized appropriately. No,unless you're in the computer lab or the
library, or maybe the office wherethe principal sits, that's where you get
your air conditioning. But why don'tyou give us a bit of context as
to your role and where you areand and then we can get into your
book Wisdom Factories a little bit.I got a lot of questions to ask

(05:53):
you and have you expound on someof the issues you've written about, but
start with you and what it isthat you're doing on a day to day
basis. Well, historically, mydoctorates in biomedical engineering, and I was
working back then on this was backthen, it was late eighties, early

(06:14):
nineties, and I worked on someof the early machine learning methods. I
was applying them to neural science andbrain modeling and also understanding neurological signals.
So my interests early on were aboutlearning in general, not just for machines,
but also trying to tease apart howhumans learn at least at the small

(06:40):
neural networks scale in the brain.And then I did ahead a career at
a thirty year career at MIT,which lasted until last year, and that
touched a variety. I mean,AI was always a common theme, but
I was doing a lot of bioscience, you know, military operations of various
sorts for homeland security, public health, disaster management, led groups groups of

(07:03):
scientists anywhere from forty to sixty peoplenormally along the way when I was one
of those people sort of stepped backand said, you know, what do
I want to do with the restof my career? And I had already
been writing regarding learning and regarding thesort of what I was seeing in terms
of workplace changes, and how AIwas both enabling some of those changes but

(07:30):
also about to take off, tryingto help people deal with the impact and
figure out how to use it ornot use it productively. I guess at
this point, after your thirty yearcareer at MIT and all these other things
you've done since by the way,I've just finished my thirtieth year as a
teacher and going into year number thirtyone, but you've written this book called

(07:54):
wisdom factories, and you described itas something that you felt compelled to do
because you saw and and sort ofan inequity between these two ideas of wisdom
versus expertise or wisdom versus knowledge.What's the school delivering? What's the school?
What the school should be delivering?Can you sort of expound on the

(08:15):
sort of the rationale behind the bookjust to get get us formed up here.
Yeah, the wisdom exp the wisdomexpertise dichotomy that I lay out isn't
perfect, both because those terms arekind of squishy, but also because you
know, any schooling needs some ofboth. I just think the balance is
off and and I think the mainreason I wrote it were really two factors.

(08:39):
I basically put my head down afterChad Gpt came out and wrote it.
But it wasn't really that related tothe product launch. It was more
related to I had some time andand and you know, the primary rationale
was I thought that educators weren't seeingthe broader implications. And I'm using I'm

(09:03):
saying that in a blanket way,and of course that's not true in a
blanket way. There are some prettyprescient and deep thinking people in the community
who are really wondering how to transformand wondering and thinking hard about about doing
that. But there's also a largeset of folks in education at all levels
who are change resistant, and wecan get into why that might be.

(09:26):
So you probably have a perspective differentfrom the mind and so largely it was
to you know, jump up anddown, put an exclamation point on the
changes. Is not that you needto pay attention to. Isn't primarily how
your job is going to change?That's important. That's a huge tactical issue.

(09:48):
I think that's it needs to bepaid attention to, and there's no
avoiding it right in the dialogue aboutabout AI and classrooms and AI helping teachers.
But the bigger issue is that everyother job is going to change,
and that what that implies our differentskills will come to the four Now,

(10:09):
the problem is we don't know whichskills those will be. You know,
in a particular sense, it's hardfor us to identify the expertises that will
be needed in ten years or fiveyears. Just because the world is changing
so quickly, there will be inentire new fields and so that sort of
takes you into a realm where themore important thing to convey to students is

(10:37):
their ability to learn and adapt andevolve, because it's no longer the case
that somebody is going to be ina job at thirty years like I was.
And you know, I won't saythat that's always true, but I
think it's less true and more moreover, even if you stay in the same
field, it will be dramatically differentas the decades of all and quite commonly

(11:01):
people are switching careers, uh,you know, part way through, part
way through their lives. So thatimplies a set of general cognitive skills that
are in the long term more importantand more valuable than any particular knowledge base.
Right the the amount of knowledge thatthat's out there is vastly bigger than

(11:26):
what humans can absorb, and soit's now not as as important to get
people to memorize information. They haveto they have to be able to sort
through and understand how to apply informationand insights to whatever the problem doujure is.
And those workplace problems tend to bemore complex, more uncertain, more

(11:50):
multidisciplinary, and so that that againleads you to this focusing on these these
big cognitive skills and school have overthe history of education kind of decided what
is the knowledge that we need inorder to be successful in life, and
that knowledge hasn't really evolved. Youmentioned that schools and maybe even teachers are

(12:18):
hesitant to change. It's undeniable thateverything in the world is evolving rapidly,
but schools aren't. We're still verycellular. You know, we're separated by
age, and we're separated by subjectarea, and we shut our doors when
the class starts, and we stillset up our course based on units,

(12:43):
and that often the same units thatI was taught when I was in school
in the eighties. And I worrythat the evolution of this knowledge base is
not happening when the whole world is. And this has kind of been the
one of the themes that came outin your book, isn't it. Yeah,
And that's particularly true in stem right, which is more rapidly evolving than

(13:09):
some of the other subject areas.I would claim. You know, we
can pick on different parts of thecurriculum, but you know, even just
looking at a typical high school progression, there's very little emphasis on what I
would call out of the computer skillsto do math. There's very little emphasis
on you know, statistical and largedata kind of problems compared to the maths

(13:35):
and sciences that lead to single preciseanswers or or that are you know,
fairly narrow universal concepts. And Iworry about not just that. So one
retort to that is it doesn't matterso much what we're teaching them. We're
getting them in the end to understandthese bigger concepts. But I don't think

(13:58):
that's necessarily true. Solving equations doesn'thelp me understand what math to pick when
I'm presented with a real world problem. And that's the more important skill these
days, is what math to pick, and that abstraction change is really powered
by technology. At first it wouldbe computers doing the math operations. Then

(14:22):
it would be you know, computersperhaps choosing the right kind of math given
a certain problem option, or helpingyou choose that. And it's a completely
different skill, one that we don'tget practice with. So there are a
lot of issues in terms of theability for schools to change, you know.

(14:45):
One of the ones that I focuson as I start to get to
recommendations later in the book is thatthere's a really poor feedback signal from business
as to you know how and whetherschools are meeting their needs. At best,
it's a objective signal where businesses mayput their hands up and say,
yeah, we'd like people with betterteamwork skills and critical thinking and problem solving

(15:09):
and you know, somewhere down thelist is domain knowledge. But that's not
quantified in any way, right,It's it's you know, they're they're,
they will, they will say,and survey after survey over the past few
decades that that we can find enoughpeople with these skills. But yet they
don't try to measure them in anyway, and neither does the education system.
We go, we measure what iseasiest to measure, as opposed to

(15:33):
what's more important. And so eventhough that those more important measurements might be
imperfect and and and and certainly youknow, have subjectivity and aspects of them.
Uh. Nevertheless, if that signalcan be generated, let's say,
by businesses doing a certain amount ofcompetency testing for these general these big picture

(15:58):
skills, if that is something thatbusinesses can figure out doing as part of
hiring or evaluation processes, that's agood feedback signal for schools, because I
think that's missing. Now my kidsare in the college process. The one
just finished and the other one's goinginto her junior year. I have no

(16:18):
idea which school does a better jobat preparing my kids, and whether paying
cost X or costs HY really makesa substantive difference. Those are really really
hard things to measure, right.The best the Lewis Labor Department says is,
hey, we've got a certain numberof people going into this field,

(16:41):
and they make a certain amount ofmoney, and they're turned out by the
following majors. But we already knowthat things like GPA do not correlate well
with work performance. You know,in fact, an IQ test is a
better indicator of how someone will doin most corporate role, even for even
for roles you might not think requirea lot of education, like truck drivers

(17:06):
and administrative assistants, and all thatevidence is that that's the better measure.
So, you know, I don'tthink we want around want to go around
and judge students by IQ test results. There's been a lot of bad uses
of those tests in the past,but the principle remains that, you know,
somehow we are fine in a workplacewith evaluating people based on subjective criteria.

(17:34):
We're not fine in schools doing that, and and you know, I'm
there are potentially a lot of youknow, real world reasons for that,
for introducing biases and for you know, a whole bunch of other problems that
can emerge. But using knowledge retentionand regurgitation as approxi is not a very

(18:00):
good one. In where I livein British Columbia, we've moved to something
called core competencies, and there area lot of these same sort of soft
skills that now there's a movement towardswanting to even evaluate those, but not

(18:21):
numerically, not with some sort ofquantitative data, but more along the lines
of through discussion and through reflection,are the students getting their opportunities to collaborate
and to communicate and to be empathetictowards other people's situations, And are they
learning to be creating new opportunities orlearning through a different lens that reflects sort

(18:44):
of kind of the reality of dayto day experience. I like the direction
it's going, but at the sametime that that's happening, the common discussion
you might hear around the water fountainis, oh, look, we've got
to do all these new things buti still have all my units to teach,

(19:07):
and I've got to get through allthis content, still the traditional content,
and that's the evidence right there thatwe're not really evolving as fast as
we should be. That's right,that's right. And you know, the
system written large quote unquote is ispushing you toward that content because they have
to be prepared for the next nextclass that uses that as a base for

(19:30):
further further thinking and analysis, right, and the whole it's the system and
how it's organized. If I wereto say to you, you know,
the twenty first so I'm used largelyusing the word wisdom as a proxy for
these twenty first century skills and forthose that aren't educators, those are those
are the skills we've been talking about, critical thinking, creativity, collaboration,

(19:53):
communication, tech savvy, et cetera. So you know, the problem is
not much progress has been made becausethose, as you say, those priorities
get layered on top of the existingexpertise what I'm calling the expertise oriented model,
and you can't serve both well atthe same time. You know,

(20:18):
I kind of go in a littlebit of the neuroscience and the psychologies try
to keep it at a layman's level, but and talk about you know,
at any given if you think ofhow memory in our brains really have to
be organized, and that's as anassociative network, right of of pieces of
information. It's not organized like computerstorage is typically organized where there's an address

(20:41):
and I got to know what it, what it means to retrieve it,
et cetera. It's a big networkof associations, not onlike a social network
online. And and so what we'redoing. You know, if you think
about what are what powers those generalcognitive skills, well, it's the it's
the parts of the network that arereally highly connected in that associative network,

(21:02):
right, They've got they've got tentaclesthat from all over the place. We
start out as babies, and theonly thing that babies, we think,
can really understand conceptually is how theirbody feels. And I think psychologists call
it the core affect. You know, it's sort of how pleasant or unpleasant
and how stimulated, right, andfrom that emerge all of these other concepts

(21:23):
good and bad and variations on that, and language makes makes those concepts explode
once you start providing that, right, that's the core of being of a
powerful general purpose associative network. IfI'm getting a little bit too in the
weeds, let me know, andso we don't develop those you know,

(21:48):
to use the analogy if I thinkof this network as a tree or a
bush or some plant life. Right, the babies got roots that are about
how their body feels. The rootsof the system are still in embodiment,
and that there's a lot of evidencethat sort of that sort of stays throughout
our lives at some residual level.We we then go from you know,

(22:10):
elementary school where we do work onthose general cognitive concepts, to then junior
high, high school college where it'sabout knowledge. So what we suddenly do
is we go from what kids arenaturally doing, which is building these core
reusable concepts innately, often by play, and and we then start to say,

(22:34):
well, we're going to give youa bunch of leaves. We're not
going to give you branches and trunks. We're going to give you a bunch
of leaves. Somehow they have tocome together eventually, but that's up to
you. Right, We'll give youall the leaves, and then later on
you're going to be able to figureout how they've attached to branches and everything
else. But really that's a prettyhard process and and the more the more

(22:55):
direct way to get to those corecentral concepts is to give people the branches
and the trunks, and those arereally hard to give as a lecture,
right, Those are very experiential andintuitive and tacit concepts that you know that
really you have to do by givingpeople enough situations, and those situations have

(23:18):
to be varied, they have tobe multidisciplinary and complex, because otherwise they
don't transfer across two different problems.And the teacher has to be searching for
these ways and means to do exactlyas you're describing. And that is the
challenge of being a teacher in thispart of the twenty first century, if
we're truly going to evolve, youknow. I think of an example that

(23:42):
I've used before. In Grade twelvechemistry, there's a unit that we call
electrochemistry, which, by the way, electrochemistry is the essence of our future,
isn't it. The battery technology iseverywhere and evolving constantly. I always

(24:03):
use the example of there's a particularquestion in the textbook that we use.
I use very minimally by the waythat deals with an ion whose formula is
YOUO four. I don't know exactlywhat that would be, perhaps uranium tetraoxide.
It's put into some sort of redoxreaction and the students are required to

(24:29):
balance the electrons, and in theend they can probably do it. But
when you talk about electric cars,cell phones and all the electrification of all
of our bluetooth units that we use, who's talking about UO four? I
mean, nobody is right, right, But what people are talking about is

(24:49):
cobalt, lithium, nickel, manganese, phosphorus, iron, aluminum, copper.
And where are these things coming from? Well, a lot of it,
in terms of the liftium and thecobalt comes from a place called the
Democratic Republic of the Congo Congo.Yeah, And there's all kinds of moral

(25:11):
issues, human rights issues, thingsgoing on there that we're supporting by buying
these products. And then at thesame time comes in a discovery of these
nodules at the bottom of the ocean, where all of these same things are
just sitting there waiting for us tojust pick them up. And the problem

(25:32):
though it is to get them fromthree thousand meters deep in the ocean we
need to get down there with somesort of scooping machine that's going to completely
disrupt the bio sphere down at thatlevel. We have no idea what the
implications would be there. And thenalong comes somebody like Elon Musk who says,
you know what, there's riches tobe had because all those same metals

(25:53):
are in the moon and the asteroids, and we could go and mind them.
Well, wait a minute. IfI'm in a classroom, I've got
and as to say, I'm giventhese two choices. One is I could
learn to balance this readox equation usingthe uranium tetraoxide ion. Or I could
say, wait a minute, what'sgoing on in the congo. I didn't

(26:14):
know that. Wait a minute,those kids, they're being put in these
minds without any safety equipment. That'scare and the bios like the ecosystem at
the bottom of the ocean is beingdisrupted. What are the implications there is
that are ever going to recover?And then wait, that'd be cool.
I've heard about Elon abus He's apretty interesting guy, and he's going to
go mine the asteroids. I wantto learn about that. Now, all
of a sudden, I'm being drawnin to these opportunities to learn about the

(26:40):
very same thing. But I've gotemotional ties, and I've got excitement ties,
and I've got sort of all thethings that draw me towards wanting to
learn instead of having to learn.Yeah, I used to one of the
interview questions I always would ask incomingscientists, and they were largely I largely

(27:00):
hired right out of graduate school usually, But I would ask them, I
said, are you are you motivatedby the problem you're solving or are you
motivated by the technology you're using?And I would tell them it's not it.
There's no right answer, right,I need both, right, But
the problem oriented people will be theconnectors and the multidisciplinary folks, and they

(27:22):
care about addressing those problems. There'sanother set of students that you might get,
though, who are just really interestedin like cool ways to do technology.
And for those folks, I wouldsay, it's not the use context
story. That's it's sort of likethe review paper motivation. Right, here's

(27:42):
what we know in this field.Here's what we don't have a clue.
You know, I'm not a batterychemist, so you know we need cobalt
and lithium and all that because thefollowing things won't happen in a battery.
We'll have these constraints if we don'thave these minerals because these are special parts
the periodic table and they do thefollowing things right, And that may sort

(28:03):
of lead into what are what thosekinds of elements do in a in a
battery or electrolytics system. But youso you're motivating one set of students by
by sort of what's cool about thetechnology and more importantly, what's unsolved?
What do we not need? You'regonna go in the work world and you're

(28:23):
going to try and solve some mystery, right in order to get a new
product out or scientific discovery or whateverthey're training to be or if and if
they're not chemists to be, thenit's so, you know, how does
that relate to my life? Right? And so and so, if you're
not capturing and you and I've heardyou say this in some of your other

(28:45):
podcasts, if you're not capturing,if you're not getting kids to care when
they're in the class, good luckwith the rest of it. And caring
means connecting it to life. It'sgot to be connected to life. Life.
And then you can go down andteach the details. And that's largely
the kind of paradigm that I'm I'mpreaching is I call it an upside down

(29:08):
model, but it's you know,I'm not laying the bricks of a of
a of a new a new buildingand never putting the roof on right.
I'm I'm trying. I'm covering witha with a makeshift tent, and then
I'm building a better structure as Ineed to to solve a particular problem.
That's probably a bad analogy. Justmade that up on the fly, what

(29:30):
I on the spot. But it'sbut it's a you know, it's it's
trying to make sure that there's acontext right if if not, all knowledge
is important, and we know it'snot right, some of us will never
use the knowledge we're taught in schoolprobably a you know, for every student

(29:51):
that comes out with a degree,there's some huge fraction of that knowledge.
It never gets touched again, right, So we give it to them just
in case. And I'm saying no, let's take another perspective. What are
the common kinds of tasks and analyzesand thought processes that people in the workplace
are confronted with, and they're generallyproblem based things. I want to be

(30:17):
able to solve this new customer's problem, or I want to be able to
figure out what's going on in thisgap in science that I don't understand.
Right, it starts with here's theproblem. It doesn't start with, well,
I'm just going to do a bunchof stuff and see if I get
lucky. In order to get goodat thinking big picture and working on complex

(30:40):
problems that have trade offs and constraintsand multiple objectives and all of these squishy
factors, we have to put studentsin those situations. You know, just
just like any other skill, weneed practice. And this knowledge that you
need is often not the detailed knowledgein the field. It's often the meta

(31:03):
knowledge. How do I know whatto look for? What what kind of
paper? When I go searching tofind out about X, Y Z and
chemistry? Am I gonna you know, what are the search terms that will
help me find out whether that's beenknown or not, or discovered or not,
or there's a technique out there thatmight be useful. And then once

(31:25):
I get that, you know,do I I? You know, if
you've been in the field long enough, you'll know the questions to ask about
a new technology, because you've seenhow other new technologies have failed because they
didn't consider a certain factor in theiror a constraint that they were going to
run into. So that experiential lore, the kind of thing that makes anybody

(31:51):
in any field the best at theirfield, takes time, practice, and
it takes variety, not repetition,per se. I like the expression meta
knowledge. I don't think in schoolswe teach meta knowledge. We teach menuishi.
And with this podcast and with anyopportunity I ever have to go speak

(32:15):
to teachers, I admit I attemptto try to influence the way they think
about how they do their job,because the need is there for students to
work with a broader, sort ofthirty thousand foot view of information and knowledge
and allow the question when are wegoing to have to use this? Allow

(32:39):
that question to simmer in your classroomand think about that and say, well,
you know what if I can't answerthat one, You're right, I
don't know if I need to teachit. But I am going to give
some long, hard thought too thisquestion when will I have to use this?
And if I can find a goodreason, I'm still going to teach
it to you, and sometimes thosechoices aren't in your control. Right,

(33:00):
there's a two to oh one course, and you're teaching the one on one,
and that two one's expecting you tohave a certain I try so hard
not to run my course for thesake of the next teacher. I'll teach
my course as I see best suitedfor the students in front of me,
and not for the benefit of thenext teacher who's going to see them next

(33:20):
year. This course is for you, guys, not for this teacher next
door who you're going to see nextyear. And I hear it all the
time. All we have to teachthis because they expect you to know this
in the next grade. Well thatthey expect you to know this in the
next grade, then you teach itto them because in this grade, here's
what I'm teaching you, and II think that needs to be a part
of teacher's repertoire. Well, Imean, at the at the high rid

(33:45):
level, that may be doable,because professors are given latitude in a lot
of ways. At the K twelvelevel, the standards lock that down right.
You're you're evaluated as a teacher basedon how well, you teach too
those standards, and those standards arevery particular pieces of information or small,

(34:05):
narrow concepts and certain domains that thestate or another authority has decided kids need
to learn. Yeah, and sothere's no doubt in the US that it's
much more that way. I feelvery fortunate that in Canada, I feel
I have a lot more latitude thanmy American colleagues, and I feel bad.

(34:27):
That's great to hear, Yeah,because I think it. You know,
there's no reason to believe that thesegeneral cognitive skills I'm talking about don't
also have critical learning periods. Ifyou've ever you know, the first teaching
I ever did in college was forkids on epidemic paration in the engineering school

(34:51):
that I was in, and theythey were required to take a study skills
class. So this was one onone. You know, I probably met
with ten students a week. Forsome of them, they just hadn't put
the effort in. You know,those kids generally recovered, but for many
of them, there were basic insightsthat I would immediately see, even though

(35:15):
I wasn't taking the course about justlooking at their notes. He Here're the
kind of things you're going to seeon the test based on what this teacher
is emphasizing. And it was surprisingto me that other students couldn't see some
of those things, and I hadno idea how to teach them to be
able to see it. I wasstymied and largely still am. And so

(35:37):
if you get somebody in the workforce, I think a lot of managers and
bosses unfortunately assume they can't. Thesepeople are what they are, and that's
a huge travesty. It is hardto get people to think differently, but
it can be done. I've seen. It takes time and energy and patients.

(36:00):
It would be much easier if wetaught students the principles of I don't
pick a subject. Let's say negotiation, right, the principles of negotiation.
Nobody outside of business schools are taughtthat. Right, there's no reason we
can't teach that to a middle schooler. There are just certain common principles,

(36:22):
and these days, there's no reasonwe can't have the students negotiate with avatars
that put them in a bunch ofdifferent situations, that have them interact with
a bunch of different you know,virtual personalities. So there's no reason that
these that there can't be attempts earlyon in a student's progression to teach these

(36:44):
big picture skills directly, not indirectlythrough a bunch of knowledge that we feed
them. Yeah, big picture skillsI think are so important, and it's
definitely become a theme in my practice. I am much more generalist, which
is a theme that was in yourbook, this idea of do we teach

(37:07):
all the details or in my case, what I'll say is, I want
you, guys, at the endof this course to know a little bit
about a lot of things. Sowhen you walk away, something comes up
in conversation and you go, youknow what, I learned something about that,
and you can join a conversation andhave something to say. Now,

(37:30):
if you want to become more specific, there are courses for that. There
are universities that you could become morespecific. But for now, in high
school, I want you to bea generalist. I want you to know
a little bit about a lot ofthings, and that's my job to bring
you that variety. I think that'sa superb attitude. It takes a lot

(37:52):
of extra work and a little bitof courage to do that because and I
think that's another reason why why schoolsare change resistant is that there really is
perceived to be risk. Right,there's risk if I do something different,
it may not work out and Imay be doing disservice to my kids.

(38:15):
But if you don't try something different, you'll never evolve. So you have
that, you have that trade off, and kids are much more resilient than
you think. I think one ofthe keys that I've been thinking a lot
about, even for you know,let's say dealing with AI in the classroom

(38:36):
these days, is to be upfrontwith students and say, look, the
world's changing fast. Jobs that thatyou know, we are changing fast.
Our educational system has got to catchup, and we're going to have to
try a few different things this year, and some of them may not work.
But you're part of helping me understandwhat works or not so that the

(38:57):
next kit class will it'll be betterand get them invested in in the in
the notion that you know, inthe learning process itself. Here's why I
picked this way to teach this,you know, and they can give you
feedback on it may have been betterthat way. Right, Okay, let's

(39:20):
do a little experiment. You couldread this half, you could say,
it's a lot more work. Butbut you know, I think of what
do I want people to come outout of a class with. Right?
Do I want them to come outknowing all the stuff about chemistry. If
that's all they come out with,they'll forget it. They'll forget it in
no time. I want them tocome out knowing that chemistry is cool,

(39:46):
right, and chemistry is only coolif I get their attention. You know.
Secondly, I want them to knowhow to go find out more about
chemistry. How I read the articlethat's talking about some new thing and understand
the terms that are in it,understand the gaps that it's pointing out,

(40:10):
and connect those two problems that Imay someday want to solve. Yeah,
we when we were doing a titration, Well we live near an ocean.
You live near an ocean, differentoceans. But we brought water from the
local beach into the lab and wedid a salinity test. We found out
what its concentration was, and youknow what we found was it was about

(40:32):
two and a half to two pointseven percent salt. And so to me,
the automatic question is I wonder ifthat's is that high or is that
low? I mean on a globallevel, Yeah, exactly right, right,
So I asked that question and thenthey did some research found out that
globally it's about three point five percent. So that I thought, well,

(40:53):
Darta, would we make a mistakebecause we only got like two point five
What do we do wrong? Oris there another reason? And sure enough,
it turns out that the entire NorthernPacific Ocean is about two and a
half percent. Because we're in ahigh precipitation area, there's a lot of
option glaciers and it dilutes the oceanand globally, but then it's all about

(41:17):
two and a HALFI sode we're righton marn target for what it was supposed
to be. But that was onlybecause I thought of a question. I
wonder if the kid And the importantthing is, you know, I think
this is powerful for kids to notthink of teachers as the know it alls
in whatever space they're working. Itwas a mystery for all of you.
You had to go discover and figureit out together. And you know what

(41:39):
now that I know this next yearor the year after, because we did
this two three years ago and Inow know this right, I now know
the first year I didn't know.Now I know, And now when the
next group rolls in and I haveto kind of pretend that I don't know,
that's okay, Yeah, but therecould be there'll be some mystery.

(42:00):
I think one of the things that'shappening, especially, you know, if
we imagine, I like to thinkabout what's an end state, right,
and almost everybody I've talked to aneducation says the end state is every kid
is treated as an individual and learnsaccording to their best path for learning whatever
it might be. Right, Itmay be maybe reflect different interests and maybe

(42:23):
reflex some things that we need tothink everybody needs to know. But whatever
the criteria are, we've individualized thatfor the student, not just maybe what
they learned, but how they learna whole bunch of other things. So
if that's an end goal, well, how do we get there? And
I'm saying that another end goal isit has to be that we teach big

(42:44):
picture down for a lot of whatwe do, Okay, And so if
that's the goal, how do weget there? Well, I cannot imagine
that being the goal and still havingthe teacher at the center of delivering all
the knowledge and the information. Itjust it won't work, right, There's
there's no way to serve all ofthese students individually and in a very customized

(43:09):
learning progression. So that means thatat some level, you know, as
AI integrates into classrooms, teachers aregiving up or maybe forced to give up
them being the experts. Right,just as I've talked about that happening in
other fields in my book, whereAI will take over the detailed work,

(43:30):
the actually delivering content is probably notgoing to be a teacher's job. Now,
that doesn't mean the teacher isn't stillcritical, right, because the teacher
is going to be helping to connectit whatever they're learning to things they care
about, and it's going to beworking to make sure that this customized path

(43:51):
that it's one student is on actuallyhelps another student in their path because those
social interactions now become important. Youknow, if I'm taking a physics class,
and I'll use my older daughter asan example, who's a musician and
a pretty good one, but largelycould care less about science and math,

(44:12):
right, did it was? Itwas the whole process of schooling where she
had to get in science and mathclasses was try to get through it because
I just knew there was nothing inthose classes that was going to innately excite
her. But if somebody had comealong and said, let's talk about electromagnetic
radiation in the context of music,Let's talk about the harmonics and how they

(44:39):
work, about you know, propagationof sound, about other you know,
maybe it's about uh, you know, blending of noise, and what's so
appealing about an octave when I hitlow C and high C? Why is
that so appealing to my ears?Right? The psychology of that right,

(45:00):
And so there's It means certain contentwon't be taught to her that doesn't connect
to her interests. And it maybe that the student, the next student
over, is doing something completely different. But if the right processes are set
up in the classroom, in thecurriculum, where the students share their experiences
and what they've learned, the studentsbecome a teacher to other students, there's

(45:22):
still a path to interest those kidsin a broader array of things. So
it's, at least philosophically, seemslike the way we sprinkle do Johnny Appleseed,
with all the knowledge is in someway to try to get kids interested
in something. We'll throw a lotof stuff with them will gravitate towards something.

(45:43):
The reality is that they're probably alreadygravitating anyway outside of school, right,
so you know, the best youcan do is expose them. But
if you try to force it intothem, you're going to get resistance from
you know, whatever particular interests theyhave that are different. Yeah, if
we're serving a meal and everybody's gettingthe same menu night after night, well,

(46:07):
if it's macaroni and cheese, orif it's pizza, or you know,
you're probably going to get some buyin. But if one night they
serve blended chickpea soup, there's afew people who will like that, there's
a lot who won't. That's right, that's right. So point being,
I guess that not every subject areais going to be exciting to every person.

(46:30):
But it made me think was tenmaybe ten years ago, they started
using this expression of personalized learning,and a lot of teachers thought, oh,
what does that mean? Like,does that mean we're teaching If I
have twenty five students, I'm teachingtwenty five different lessons to suit their personal
tastes And that didn't seem realistic.But this sort of conversation is the essence

(46:52):
of what personalized learning can become.Technology can be an enabler that I believe.
Sure, sorry to interrupt, butI like, for instance, if
if a student, if a classhad twenty five students, a good chunk
of them are gonna be okay withthe traditional content of that course. But

(47:15):
there's gonna be three, four orfive. I don't know. However,
many students who say that this doesn'treally resonate with me, I'm not really
that interested. But if someone wasgiven the latitude, such as your daughter,
to say, I'm gonna can Ilook at this from a musical side
of things, and the teacher said, yeah, yeah, would that interest

(47:36):
you? Yes? It would allright then for you, this is how
I want you to learn the material. And so it doesn't have to be
every student has you know, Ihave twenty five students have twenty five lessons.
No, but you allow those studentsto run with their idea when they
also come up with it. Itdoesn't have to always be my idea.

(47:58):
It could be their idea, youknow. I think of when chat GPT
came out. I heard somebody sayit's a great thing, uh a quote
and it wasn't my quoi camera whosaid it? But when when new things
come out, it forces old teachingto become better, and that becomes the

(48:20):
challenge. We have to become better. If I if I, if I'm
going to have the chat GPT isgoing to be there. Well, I
always give essays, and now akid could just type a prompt and get
chat GPT to write the essay.Forum All right, Well, then you
got to come up with a betterassignment. You got to evolve with the
with the technology, right I was. I was making this point earlier today

(48:46):
in another conversation, which is youknow when I when I do when I
learned a new computers programming language,I mean, the typical process I would
go through is you know, you'dget a manual, whether online or Neil
Day's paper. I put it offto the side, right, And the

(49:07):
first thing I wanted to see isone I go to the one one of
the better coders in the organization andsay, show me some of your code.
Just send me a bunch of code, right, because I get to
see the big picture of how theyorganize it and how they you know,
what choices they make, right,these variables are declared this way. They
could have done it another way.Now, in order for me to do

(49:29):
it that way, I needed toknow the general principles of languages, right.
I know that computer science usually hasthese following concepts, and they're going
to show up in some form,but the syntax will be different, and
and and the like. But thatcould very well be a path we see

(49:50):
for writing right in the progression.It's really hard and stressful for kids to
write on a blank sheet a pace, right, But we don't have to
have that be the entire process.That can be a later stage in the
evolution, where the first stage mightbe I get something to write for me,

(50:14):
and then I pick it apart andtry to do it better. It's
a modification as a step to mastery. And then eventually you get to a
point where in anyone who's done alot of writing news, it doesn't come
out right the first time. Anyway, it's going to have to it's going
to have to iterate. But theyou know, but the hardest thing for

(50:35):
a writer to do is put thosefirst words down because they're just never going
to be right. They're never goingto be the best way to express it.
They're just a point in time.So it can help students. I
think to teach that a little differently. I'm not a literacy expert, but
the reality we have to look atthe reality and say that, at least
in the United States, a fairlylarge chunk of the population doesn't read and

(51:00):
write very well. And they wentthrough our schooling system. And so,
you know, is school taking youutopian kind of attitude, which is where
depriving students they're already deprived, theyalready don't know how to do it.
Okay, at least a decent chuckof them. Yeah, My wife teaches

(51:22):
at a local university and had herclass in it's a fitness kinetics human kinetics
course, and she had the classuse AI to develop for them a personalized
fitness training program. And then theylooked at them to see what this thing

(51:44):
recommended that they do, and theycritique the repetitions, the weights, the
variety of exercises that it suggested,and and in fact found that in some
cases it wasn't that good. Butthey started with, well, let's let
chat EPT write me a fitness program. And it was a kind of a

(52:05):
neat way to use AI and thenbounce off of it to something that evolved
into something better. So there's astrategy that teachers could use, right,
you know, I think the estimateI heard is that in Silicon Valley about
half of all code is written byAI right now. But that doesn't mean
that the job has become simpler.Right, The mundane part of the job

(52:30):
is now taken. But the realgood computer scientists are thinking about architecture and
paradigms and how to get all youknow, what are they going to be
the gotchas that come out of thisthree million line piece of code, And
those are the things that are bigpicture, experientially derived and you know,

(52:52):
rely on underlying concepts, but differentones from the individual coding line syntac concepts.
So these are a couple of neatstrategies that it just worries me.
I know that in New York.The knee jerk reaction was, oh,
well, we're gonna have to banchatGPT then from all the schools. But

(53:15):
you just you can't do that.It doesn't. First of all, this
doesn't work. It's head in thesand kind of thing. It is.
You're going to have to work withinthe world constraints. Sometimes that don't mean
students got to do it on theirown, and those are going to have
to be situations where you have themdo it in the classroom, right to

(53:35):
really be sure that they're not usinghelp. But in a lot of other
cases we should be people letting themuse the help, right, because that's
that's a talent they need to toget better. At two, how do
I how do I set up theproblem or the questions right so that so
it gave me an answer that makessense and it's not miss as misleading as

(53:57):
it otherwise could be. So,you know, there is no there is
no canonical, set in stone setof knowledge that the human race needs.
It evolves as are as we evolve. Right. In eighteen twenty, seventy
percent of the country in the USwere farmers. Agricultural science would have been

(54:21):
a subject in a high school ifthey existed at the time. Right,
it's not anymore. I always saythat we're not teaching kids how to hitch
horses anymore. That's right. Asurprisingly large fraction of science curricula still treat
parts of it like a history lesson, and sometimes that's useful, Right,
I would argue in physics that's kindof appropriate because it's you know, it's

(54:47):
a subject that lends itself to sortof universal laws and things that are incrementally
discovered, which if you just throwit at students all at once, maybe
too much. But in a lotof other fields the old stuff's kind of
irrelevant. We'll be like teaching ptolemy, you know, when you want to
understand that the universe right, youdon't need to teach kids about, you

(55:12):
know, Mendel's pea plants anymore,when there's a whole bunch of really interesting
genetics you could be talking about now. And and I think students, you
know, that seems to have beendone. As you know, storytelling is
a better you know, the learningresearch says if I tell things in stories,
kids will be more interested in absorbit. But I think increasing the

(55:36):
kids look at that and say it'snot relevant. I know better. Recently
I had doctor Greg Hammer from Stanfordcome on and he said he made a
bold statement. I'd loved it becauseit's right up my alley. But he
said, you know, I thinkin high school we really need to de
emphasize math. And I thought,oh, what kind of feedback am I

(55:59):
going to get from a math feature? Who hears that? But take what
he said deeper and start to think, are there bits and pieces of the
math curriculum that we really don't needanymore, just as there are parts of
the science curriculum that we don't needanymore. I've said, regarding English,
for example, is there a casefor dropping Shakespeare? Now there may not

(56:21):
be. There may be thousands ofteachers. You say, you know what,
I can draw things out of Shakespearestill to this day that has meaning
and relevance to the students. Well, then that's awesome. Do it.
But that's sort of the role ofthe teacher is to be able to take
these things and find relevant meaning intoday's context. And if you can,

(56:42):
more power to you teach a fellowteach Romeo and Juliet I love it.
But if it's just sort of thatrote, you know, out of history
and tradition, we are just doingit because we always have. Wow.
Maybe we give that some thought,and like doctor Hammer says, maybe we
deemphasize certain aspects of the curriculum,but that takes guts. But I think

(57:04):
in the for the most part,the wrong question is being asked when it
comes to curricular offerings. Right,the general question you get or the response
you get is it's still useful,right, I had you know Latin is
still useful. Well, sure it'suseful, But the question is what's most
useful. And it's not whether it'sit's the opportunity cost. You have a

(57:28):
certain amount of learning time and energyand you can't keep just adding. You
just can't. Right, at somepoint you have to take away and I
would rather I feel strongly that everybodyis going to be a better learner if
if this this associate of network,if those core reusable principles that are that

(57:52):
derive from from working big complex problemsare really fed very well, because I
feel like that network, a reallyrich associative network in our brains, allows
us to pick up new information faster. It means that whatever new knowledge is
presented to us a year, fiveyears, twenty years from now can be

(58:15):
more readily integrated into your framework thatyou think with. So it's a worthwhile
conversation though, to have and toand if you can come to the conclusion
that you're confident that what you're teaching, whether it's a traditional topic or not,
if you've thought it through, thenthat's the joy and the privilege of

(58:37):
being a teacher is you can bringthe material because you know in your heart
that is going to benefit your studentssome and you can teach it in that
way, then keep doing it.But it's a conversation that needs is an
evaluation that needs to happen within theteacher's own mind. Is am I doing
it because I always have? Oram I doing it because I can still

(59:00):
draw meaning from it? Right?I have? I think the other thing
that probably shouldn't be taken for granted, And I don't mean this as I
think this could be taken very negativelybut from some teachers, But I really
don't think a lot of teachers reallyunderstand what's happening in the workplace. If

(59:20):
you've spent your whole life in theeducation system and that education system hasn't changed
very much over time, you reallydon't see the dramatic difference in that that
and the changes that have happened inthe workplace. And this, you know,
ironically came about when I started talkingto a few math teachers and I
started I basically just said, doyou know that what we're teaching, you

(59:45):
know, algebra, geometry, precalcalc and the exact methods and that we're
teaching students and that we generally veryfew people do that in the workplace and
use those tools like I call itso of moon Eate Moon Launch era mathematics,
right, much more set up forthe mechanical and the physical. I

(01:00:07):
generally get a response like, really, of course they do. No,
they don't, they don't. There'sthis thing called computers, and they have
like very different methods. And youknow, at this point you don't even
need to know the methods as well. What you need to do is you
need to go grab the piece ofcode that somebody's already written. You need
to understand what it's good at andwhen it's not appropriate to use it.

(01:00:30):
I'm more interested in teaching math ina way that says, this is a
body of math. This is reallyuseful for these kind of problems. It
makes these the following assumptions. Youknow, whatever it might be assumes a
Gaussian distribution. But this phenomenal problemthat you're working with, shit might not
have a Gaussian distribution, so itmight be inappropriate to use. Or here's

(01:00:52):
how, here's how I need toparameterize the call to this subroutine, right,
and I've got these adjustment knobs,and here's how those adjustable knobs do
to the technique that I can describein English to somebody or draw a plot
on a board to describe, right, But it has nothing to do with

(01:01:13):
you know, how the integration isdone in a calculus problem. It has
to do with can I figure outthe right tool to use at the right
time. That isn't the same skillat all. Yeah, right. It
may ultimately rely on the same kindof numeracy in math principles, but you

(01:01:36):
can get there in a completely differentway. You don't have to teach all.
It's a little bit like saying that, you know, if you're a
mechanic yet, you're going to bea good driver. No, maybe,
but necessarily not necessarily different skills.My son is a mechanical engineer, and
he did a lot of math courseswhen he was studying to get his degree.

(01:02:00):
And you know, you got somepretty good marks in those math courses.
How much of that do you doin your job now as a mechanical
engineer? He goes never. Isaid, I said, that's sort of.
But is that frustrating? He goes, no, It's so simple because
there's a computer program. I justtype in my parameters and so you know,

(01:02:20):
cynically, I would. I thinkin the United States, a lot
of high school curricula are written byeither people who have been in the education
system forever or by professors, andprofessors aren't necessarily representative of the workforce either.
And I've I've worked with a lot, I've worked with many, many

(01:02:44):
incredible professors, and I've worked withsome that couldn't put a project plan to
save their lives together because they neverhad to do they had to teamwork.
So, you know, a professorwould say, well, these are there,
this is the core for all math, this is how all math starts.

(01:03:04):
You've got to build the ground levelstuff or they're not going to be
able to understand how to do howAI does XYZ or how you know,
I can figure out how to modelweather or something like that. And they're
right right that if that's really whatI have to do in the workplace is

(01:03:27):
build that model or then I probablydo need to get down into the weeds.
But I don't need to get intothe weeds until I have the problem
to solve, right, because there'sa different It's a little bit like when
cursive instruction was removed from elementary schools. There was a huge outcry, and
ultimately I ended up seeing the excusefrom from those who were proponents that well,

(01:03:51):
they need to be able to readold documents. Well, okay,
just because some little part of theworld has to be able to do that
doesn't mean we teach it to everybody. Mm hmmm, right. Curse of
was because it was invented because ofyou know, ink wells and feather pens.
That blotted right, But you know, it's It's just an example of

(01:04:16):
how silly the conversation can become.If what we're arguing about is is it
useful? That's not the right question. The right question is what's most useful.
That's a great way to put it. These are just really hard,
look at yourself in the mirror kindof questions that we need to grapple with.

(01:04:38):
I wonder how much time is spentin schools actually grappling with them.
Is it heresy to bring these thingsup in a math science or an English
department meeting? Unfortunately, I thinkit probably would be. It probably shouldn't
be, but it probably would be. And there is one more point I
wanted to ask you about, whichI really you really like you brought it

(01:05:00):
up in your book, the wholeidea about the sort of the gamification of
education, and I'll springboard you thisway. I think of our assessment strategies
where typically we look at it likefirst day of class, we're all at
one hundred every time you do somethingwrong and take a mark off. But

(01:05:23):
with any sort of a gaming situation, we all start at zero and we
were every time we do something right, we're rewarded and we go up a
level. And I think that metaphorfor education is the direction that we need
to go for assessment. But whatis your take on the gamification of education

(01:05:44):
as it relates to your book?Yeah, I want to disc distinguish two
things. In particular, I'm talkingabout a particular kind of game. Okay,
a lot of educational game offerings,if you see the commercial and off
the shelf offerings, are about teachingknowledge still right, There's there's a reading
objective or a math objective, andthere's a game framework put around that,

(01:06:09):
but the basic premise is still aboutteaching details or about concepts for that.
So that's like putting lipstick on somethingthat's just inherently boring. There's a second
kind of there's a there's a secondkind of of game, which is,
Okay, maybe I want to teachabout electromagnetics and you know, the magnetic

(01:06:30):
fields around an object, and Ihave something on a computer that they can
manipulate and visualize things that are invisible. Right, that is an interactive model,
and I'm that's great, But I'mnot talking about that either. What
I'm talking about are particularly putting peoplein these complex, multi factor situations where

(01:06:53):
they have to make nuanced decisions wherethere isn't a single right answer right,
And so you can still have thoseneck doesn't have to be some grand fancy,
highly graphical environment. It can stillyou know, we did resource management
games with FEMA, with disaster managers. You know, the the game could

(01:07:15):
have been written on a whiteboard.I think the only the only thing the
reason it was on a computer wasthat was that allowed more participants and et
cetera. So it doesn't have tobe fancy. But the key problem with
experiential learning is experience takes time.To really go through a whole project cycle
in depth on a complex topic willtake you a whole term, or two

(01:07:38):
terms, or ten years if you'rein the workplace, right, So what
you want to be able to dois give people variety. Remember I talked
about variety instead of repetition. Ineed to give them variants on situations in
order for them concepts fundamentally are youknow required, are they they fit into

(01:07:58):
a span of of situations? Right? If I'm trying to to understand,
you know, under what conditions doeslowering taxes help or hurt the economy?
Right, There's no single right answerto that because it depends on what you're
trying to measure as a health ofthe economy and all these other things.

(01:08:20):
But if I put people in varioussituations where they have to trade off those
multiple objectives in order to try tosolve a real problem. Okay, at
a skill level appropriate to the student. I'm not going to have some giant
economic simulation. It may just bea simple supply and demand curve to some

(01:08:41):
kid underneath the hood at an earlierstage. But I need to give them
those situational variety for them to developthese these you know, the big branches
of that associative tree. And sogames are a way to fill in that
gap. Where whereas experience wisdom takesa long time to develop. We associated

(01:09:02):
with age because you need a lotof situational variety, and that's not the
only thing. You need to reflecton it too, But we could do
a better job at giving more situationalvariety. It's hard for a student to
get that from the teacher, rightbecause this means the teacher's got to understand
all of these real world situations wherethis, you know, this, this,

(01:09:24):
These are things that the professors andgurus of the world will spend their
life studying. We're not going toimpart that to a teacher in high school.
So the computers in game framework canallow putting students in particular situations and
make them work their way through it, and that's a powerful way to kick
off reflective thinking. Engagement. Inother words, engagement in games, which

(01:09:48):
is generally the primary purpose of theeducational game community, is a byproduct of
putting students in challenging situations appropriate totheir learning level, and you can easily
get some customization in the process.There's more learning levels to go through,
students can progress as far as theywant. They could take a resource management

(01:10:11):
problem and have it be about disastermanagement, or it could be about you
know, how do you deploy membersof your sports team, or there's some
other interesting you might just be thetime you have available in the choices you
need to fill those times. Butin the process I can teach them about
the different kinds of resource constraints,the different kinds of underlying systems that you

(01:10:33):
know, maybe underdamped or overdamped,or you know, whatever it might be.
That's a scientific principle you're trying toteach. Those come about because I
put people in situations that are onboth sides of some decision boundary that they
have to learn. And there's alot of parallels. I'm in the process

(01:10:54):
of writing an article right now inthe parallels between AI learning and human learning,
but that's one of them. Right, If you don't give people and
if you don't give AI enough situationalvariety in their examples, it's not going
to learn to generalize very well.And that's the same principle for people.
You know, they have to seethe boundary cases, they have to see
the failure cases, and they haveto see enough variety. And games is

(01:11:16):
just an easier way to do thatin volume and obviously something that students enjoy
doing. I'm from a practical pointof view, as you're saying that.
I'm I'm one hundred percent buying intowhat you're saying, But I'm trying to
picture where am I going to getmy hands on this sort of a game
that I could use in my classroom? Are these are they already made the

(01:11:40):
things I can just sort of tapinto Generally not, And I think there's
a big gap there. I mean, the good news is that you can
build simple games without coding knowledge.Now. You know, companies like Unity,
which is a giant gaming platform,a lot of their games are for
AI training in fact, or evenyou know, chat GPT's coding of games

(01:12:01):
is sort of not clear how skilledit is at this point, but you
know, there are This may beone of those things that a year or
two from now, a skilled personwho understands what they want the game to
accomplish, will have the ability tohave AI write the code for him.
So as a teacher, you shouldbe able to fairly shortly do this yourselves.

(01:12:24):
I know that's hard to imagine.Well, yeah, because less than
a year ago, chat GPT wasn'teven in our vocabulary. I mean maybe
it was in yours, but itwasn't in mind. And then that all
of a sudden, it just emergedonto the scene, and now six seven,
eight months later, we're talking aboutthe possibility of using it to write
code for a game that I kindof conjured up in my mind. Wow,

(01:12:46):
that's an evolution of education. Butit could happen, couldn't it?
Absolutely? Absolutely? Yeah, Soit sort of puts that onus on teachers
to continue to be creative and tothinking outside the box and away from the
tradition. In terms of what yousee coming up in the next few years.

(01:13:10):
You did talk a lot in yourbook about the evolution of schools.
How do you want to see schoolsevolve? Maybe we've already talked a lot
about that, but can you sumit up in some succinct way? You
know, I think, I thinkI as I've already indicated that, I
would I think the fundamental mindset shiftchange is away from something that's emphasizes knowledge

(01:13:32):
acquisition to something that emphasizes, youknow, big picture, transferable concepts learning.
And I would say that the rhetorichas been appropriate to that. A
lot of folks are saying similar things. But to really make that happen,
you can't have these knowledge based disciplinarydivisions. You have to actually organize your

(01:13:55):
curriculum around these big picture topics.You know, have a course in critical
thinking, have a course in inyou know, interpersonal relationships. You know
there are there is real knowledge toteach in all of those areas, right,
which you can't do justice to bysprinkling it around into other courses that

(01:14:16):
are already doing different things with theirtime. So with respect to teachers,
I mean, I think that there'sthere's all kinds of little changes that teachers
make all the time. I thinkthat's where the greatest creative. So in
my mind, loosen the reins,have your standards, focus on change,

(01:14:38):
not on doing more of the same. Right. So I'd rather see it.
I'd rather see a standard say intwo or three years, you got
to have a course in these followingareas, or you have to teach these
you know, these the knowledge relatedto these big picture skills, rather than
say, you know, you gotto do more math and reading and writing

(01:14:59):
because we all know they're going todo the math and reading and writing because
they have been doing that and youknow, and momentum is powerful. But
if you want people to change,you have to you have to give them
explicit permission to do so. AndI think that permission in the US system
is I think pretty important you dothat and the students, I think the

(01:15:20):
schools will be surprised with how creativeteachers can be. Now teachers need to
have the time. They're over stressed, and there's just wall to wall,
you know, immersion, and youknow, the more experienced users can do
it more effectively. But the newteachers and the younger, less experienced teachers

(01:15:40):
are particularly going to benefit from AIhelping them with lesson plan generation, with
with with the generating, you know, evaluations, with grading, with all
of those things that are important buttime consuming. That will free up the
time so they can learn new things, loosening the reins. When you said

(01:16:03):
that, I thought, you know, that sounds like the title for this
podcast episode. There you go,all right, and and honestly you in
with regard to me anyway, you'repreaching to the choir, I am.
I think there are a lot ofpeople in there are a lot of people
in the system who feel similarly.Yes, right, you know, big,

(01:16:23):
big institutions have have momentum and haveyou know, can get calcified in
ways that aren't necessarily reflective of theindividuals in it, so there are a
lot of outside influences and and youknow, so this is not a blaming
exercise here, but rather, youknow, I think sometimes in my in

(01:16:45):
my case, I think there's anadvantage that I've I've had a little time
in the system and I've had alittle more time outside of it, and
I can give a perspective that hopefullyadds to the conversation because others in the
system may not see it as well. Well, it is adding perspective to
a necessary conversation. And honestly,that's why I run this podcast, because

(01:17:06):
I want people to listen to thisand just say and reflect on it and
just see where it can apply tothem. And maybe in some cases it'll
be encouraging that people will feel likethe reins have been loose and like they've
been given that latitude and that encouragementto try something new and be more creative

(01:17:26):
with the way they've been delivering informationand to start to teach from a broader,
more thirty thousand foot view. Yourstudents are going to buy in.
They'll be there with you, Iguarantee you because I've seen it happen in
my own classroom. Well, thankyou very much, doctor Tim Daisy,
author of Wisdom Factories. I'll puta link in the show notes to your

(01:17:48):
book. It was a very interestingread, and I have already. I
don't know if I'm supposed to dois. I actually shared it with a
colleague of mine in the town nextover, and I said, you're gonna
like this. I'll I'll continue toshare your book around and make sure people
can link to it off of thispodcast. So thank you very much for
joining me today. It's a pleasureto talk to another Tim, and I

(01:18:12):
really enjoyed this conversation. I thinkyou brought You brought as much to it
as I did. So that wasdoctor Tim Daisy. I'd recommend you check
out his website simply Tim Daisy dotcom. Just check that spelling T I
M D A S E Y dotcom and just look through some of the
material he's posted there, and perhapssign up for his newsletter. Connect with

(01:18:35):
him on LinkedIn to prove that I'mdefinitely on board with his theories. Perhaps
go back and check out other episodeson my podcast, episode forty six,
where I talk about shaking up scienceeducation. I take a bit of a
swing at the way we teach scienceand also episode fifty three where I had

(01:18:59):
one of my student so Callum Neely. He was the valedictorian in my school
the year he graduated, and wetalk about how he reimagines education and hearing
it from the mouth of a studentwho's been involved in the system is a
worthwhile perspective. So I encourage youto check out those two episodes and until

(01:19:19):
our next time, when I'll bebringing you a conversation with Scott Olhatchick of
a great organization called Oceanwise at oceandot org all about sea forestation. And
until then, have a great day. Bye for now.

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Ep. 82 - Loosening the Reigns on Teaching with Dr. Tim Dasey

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Ep. 82 - Loosening the Reigns on Teaching with Dr. Tim Dasey