Ep 38. Boosting attention and learning with Blake Harvard

This transcript was created with speech-to-text software. It was reviewed before posting but may contain errors. Credit to Deepika Tung and Jazmin Boisclair.

You can listen to the episode here: Chalk & Talk Podcast.

[00:00:05] Anna Stokke: Welcome to Chalk & Talk, a podcast about education and math. I'm Anna Stokke, a math professor, and your host.

You are listening to episode 38 of Chalk and Talk. My guest in this episode is Blake Harvard, a secondary teacher in Alabama. Blake's new book, Do I Have Your Attention? is available for preorder, and we discuss some of the insights from his book, including how he incorporates cognitive psychology into his teaching.

Our conversation explores topics like cognitive architecture, memory constraints, attention contagion, and common learning pitfalls. Blake provides practical strategies for implementing retrieval practice and spaced practice, highlighting their benefits in reducing test anxiety and enhancing long-term learning outcomes.

Our conversation ends with a discussion on creativity. Blake argues that traditional schooling doesn't kill creativity. It enables it by building a strong foundation of knowledge. I have been a longtime fan of Blake's work, so it was a privilege to have this conversation with him. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Now, without further ado, let's get started.

I am excited to be joined today by Blake Harvard, and he is joining me from Alabama. He is a secondary school AP psychology teacher in Madison, Alabama. He has a Master of Education in Secondary Education and Teaching. He's an expert in the implementation and application of cognitive psychology and learning strategies in the classroom.

He has worked in an advisory capacity for various organizations, including the U. S. Department of Education, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Institute of Education Science, and Deans for Impact. He blogs at theeffortfuleducator.com, and I have to say that's one of my favourite blogs. It has like a million hits.

And he has a new book, Do I Have Your Attention?. I was lucky enough to get an advance copy and it will be released in January. It's available for pre-order. It's a fantastic book with lots of great tips and strategies for teaching. It's Very practical, and I highly recommend it. Welcome, Blake. Welcome to my podcast.

[00:02:36] Blake Harvard: Well, thank you for having me. It's always fun to talk about teaching and education. So, yeah, it's an honour. Thank you.

[00:02:44] Anna Stokke: So, let's start with a bit about your background. How long have you been teaching?

[00:02:48] Blake Harvard: This is my 19th year of teaching. I have taught from 7th grade to 12th grade. Most of it in high school, but about 5 or 6 of it in the middle school.

[00:02:57] Anna Stokke: Okay. So, did you teach things other than psychology previously, then?

[00:03:01] Blake Harvard: Definitely. Yeah. So, when I was in middle school teaching in the middle school, it was civics. I have a degree in history, so I have taught U. S. history. I have taught economics, government, everything in that realm I have taught before.

[00:03:13] Anna Stokke: So, you mentioned in your book that you spent the first decade of your teaching career doing what you thought was best, but you were unaware of the application of cognitive psychology in the classroom. So, what changed that? And do you think you are a better teacher now?

[00:03:27] Blake Harvard: So, I guess the immediate answer is yes, I do believe I am a better teacher now. So, I mean, I think I was doing what every teacher does, right? You get your degree you start teaching and you just, you know, you, you trust the professional development you are getting.

You think, hey, I spent a lot of money on this degree, and it must be worth it. And for a large part it is right. Like it's not useless, I'm not saying that. But about eight years ago, I found myself just perusing Twitter, and I came across the learning scientists. And I clicked on one of their links for some reason. And I started reading about a certain article and it just clicked. It just made sense, right?

It's simplified things. It made teaching. It made learning sound like, wait a minute. Like, why am I thinking about this thing is it being so complicated? When it does not have to be right.

And also, oh, wow, here are studies about what we are talking about, and here is evidence of improved outcomes.

And you know, like a month later, I am in contact with the learning scientists and they are like, hey, you want to write something for us. So, I wrote a blog for them, and I really enjoyed that. And then, a month later, I'm starting my website, and then I am up all the research I can in cognitive psychology.

I am trying to improve my practice and improve outcomes for my learners, my students. That's, that's the main goal, of course, and I do believe, certainly, that it has made me more streamlined. It's gotten rid of some of the, perhaps, the fluff that we sometimes do in our classroom. That seems like the right thing to do, but does it improve learning?

You know, I would want to see some evidence of that and some research on that. You know, when I found the learning scientists eight years ago, I mean, it just changed everything for me, and I have been reading about cognitive science ever since, and it's been fantastic.

[00:05:18] Anna Stokke: Let's get into more specifics about your book, which is fantastic. So, the first part of your book is focused on understanding memory constraints, and the second part is on maximizing learning. you start by discussing cognitive architecture, sensory memory, working memory, and long-term memory. And actually, you know, we have talked about that a few times on the podcast, but in case someone's tuning in for the first time, would you be able to just give us a quick sort of low down on cognitive architecture?

[00:05:49] Blake Harvard: Yeah, certainly. So, I think, you know, there's kind of, I will say, three memory holes: sensory memory, working memory, and long-term memory. The goal is to get the information that we want students to know to long term memory, but it doesn't just automatically go there. Sensory memory is exactly that, it's sensing the information.

For most classroom that, that means seeing the information, whether it's on the board or in a handout or whatever, and hearing, right? Those are the two main senses I will say we use in most classrooms. So, we have got to sense the information. We have got to pay attention to that information, which is a big part of my book there.

And then that information, if we are sensing it, we are attending to it, moves into working memory. But working memory is finite. In its capacity and how long we remember things there. So, usually, what we have to do to get that information reliably over into long-term memory is we got to rehearse it.

We have got to practice with that information which is another big aspect of my book talking about retrieval practice. Then we get that information over into long-term memory so that students can access it most immediately, probably for some assessment, but the bigger picture is that they can use it in a meaningful way that can become the foundation, hopefully, and then they can build upon that knowledge.

But, you know, I find a lot of common ideas about learning, wants to skip to the, let's grow with the information, and we don't pay attention to the foundation enough. So, a big part of my book is making sure that we understand memory so that we can work within the constraints of that memory.

[00:07:18] Anna Stokke: And on that note, you talk about four choke points and three pitfalls. So, what is a choke point?

[00:07:26] Blake Harvard: So, this is coming from research by Dr. Stephen Chu, who is a cognitive psychologist at Stanford University. And a large part of my book, while this is not certainly the only research I reference, but he talks about choke points and pitfalls in one of his papers. I highly recommend it for any teachers. It is very accessible, very easily understood, not a lot of technical jargon in there.

But he says that a choke point across this memory processing kind of continuum here, a choke point is, a constraint of memory. It's something that as humans, like we all deal with basically there is nothing we can do about it other than know about it and then teach within those constraints, right?

So that's a choke point such as again, I have already mentioned one working memory is limited in its capacity. you can't teach out of that. It is what it is, right? So, you, it's important for teachers and students to understand these types of choke points so that they can best work within those constraints.

A pitfall is, it's basically like a common error that we make in learning, right? So probably one of the biggest ones that we see in the classroom is multitasking. This idea that I can do more than, more than two things at once and consciously and cognitively pay attention to both of those things, and we just can't do it.

So, you kind of think of it more as a choke point is a limit. It's a limitation on human memory. Whereas a pitfall is like a human error. We are actively doing something that we should not be doing to maximize learning.

[00:08:56] Anna Stokke: Would you say, like, the pitfalls are things that we have more control over? Whereas the choke points are things that, you know, we don't have control over, but we really need to keep those things in mind when we are considering how we teach students.

[00:09:10] Blake Harvard: Exactly that. You are exactly right there, yeah.

[00:09:13] Anna Stokke: Okay. So, let's talk about some of those, and as you mentioned, one example of a choke point is that working memory has a limited capacity it can hold only about four chunks of information at once. And that's something we've discussed a fair bit on previous episodes. You mentioned that securing attention is in your opinion, the largest barrier to learning in the classroom.

So, let's focus on this particular choke point that you mentioned, narrow focus of attention limits memory. So, can you expand on that and discuss what you think are the biggest distractors in the classroom?

[00:09:48] Blake Harvard: So, again, the idea is that we have only got so much attention to give, and where we give our attention, that is, that's the information that we have a chance of remembering. We cannot take in all of the information in our environment and attend to all of it. So, it's really important in the classroom that the students have their attention focused on the thing they need to be focused on.

And while that seems very obvious, I believe that we don't always design our classroom physically to maximize attention. Sometimes we make it more difficult than it needs to be for students to pay attention. And then learners don't always study with that sort of idea, that choke point in mind, either, right?

So, I'm going to back up just a minute. When we think about designing the classroom, a very simple example of this is thinking about how our students are seated in our classroom. I know that, you know, flexible seating and all of this is an interesting tactic for arranging a classroom. But if a student isn't faced where the information is coming from, so, if it's me up at the front of the classroom, and I am giving a presentation on something and I have got students seated around tables, and half the students are facing away from me, but are expected to still be paying attention to me, right?

That, oftentimes, is a big enough barrier to attention that they are not going to get the information, I need to set up my classroom in a way that it is as easy as possible for my students to pay attention, to the information because that's why they are there. Other things are like what's on your walls in your classroom? Those can serve as distractions.

They can also be aids to help in memory. But, I mean, think about what's on your walls and is it more important that they are zoned out and reading that motivational poster? Or is it more important that they are paying attention to the material? I am not saying we need to live in a dungeon in our classroom, and it needs to be pure cinder block, and that's it.

But what's on your walls matters because it can steal attention away from learning and then obviously, you know, not necessarily just the physical environment that plays on that narrow attention, but how we present information is also, you know, something that we, we've got to be aware of they can only attend to so much.

You know the lessons you teach where it's like, man, students typically kind of struggle with this information, there's confusing information in it, it's more complex. So, like, if we know we are teaching those concepts, the instruction needs to be extremely streamlined and, you know, more basic and stripped down.

You don't want some complex activity that the students are having to pay attention to these seven instructions to do this, this activity correctly while also learning this complex, you know, algorithm or whatever, because attention is, is narrow and they can only attend to so much. So, I found that just having that lens of you know, paying attention to what's, what's going on in our environment and how we design our instruction can really help to focus our students attention, that is limited.

[00:12:53] Anna Stokke: Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, as you were talking, it kind of reminded me of I have talked to quite a few behaviour scientists, and they often talk about breaking things down into their component parts because that makes it easier for students to learn the more complex material, right?

But what we often see, certainly in math, is this: people wanting to start with the complex material. And so, you have like really wordy word problems and there is all sorts of things going on that the students are supposed to figure out. And that actually is quite unhelpful, right? Like you need to be able to focus on those, small component pieces to actually build up to figure out how to do the more complex things.

So, I think that's kind of along the same lines.

[00:13:39] Blake Harvard: Definitely. Yeah. Yeah. If they can't, again, if they can't do the foundational stuff, how are they going to do the more complex stuff? If they can't do it in a very basic context, how are they going to see it in a bigger context?

[00:13:55] Anna Stokke: All right. So, what is attention contagion and what does the research say about it?

[00:14:00] Blake Harvard: Yeah, so this is something that I have kind of, I got into certainly for the book, but I, I started getting into a little before writing the book. So, the idea of attention contagion is thinking about how contagious attentive and/or inattentive behaviours are in the classroom, right?

So that's kind of like the basic definition, and it’s looking at if one student is attentive, will the students around that student be more attentive? or if a student is inattentive, will the students around that student be more inattentive? or is there no, is there no effect at all, right? To the best of my knowledge, there are only three papers out on this specific term, attention contagion, that exists right now.

The first one I believe came out in 2021, another in 2022 or 2023, and then the last one just now, you know, I think May of this year. So, not very long ago, in 2024. And what's interesting is looking at those three papers is an interesting look at how the research grows, right? Because I love to read research. But it's important to see it within the context of what it is, right?

So, the first paper that occurred in 2021 was in a lab, so a very sterile learning environment. There were two students. One student was a confederate of the experiment. So, it was designed to either be inattentive or attentive, and then they watched the participant, and said, you know, how did the participant do being in that room with the inattentive or the attentive confederate, right?

So, some of the participants were put in a room with attentive confederates and then another with inattentive confederates. And then, they looked at how many notes were taken by the participant.

Kind of the mind-wandering idea of how attentive did they look. But then also there was an assessment at the end and, and how did they, how did this impact the learning outcome, I guess, of the assessment. And you could probably guess what happened. Those that were with attentive confederates were more attentive. They took more notes and they did better on the post-lecture assessment. The participants that were with the inattentive confederates did worse than their attentive counterparts.

And what's interesting to note about this is that when we say inattentive behaviours, we are not talking about distracting behaviours. I'm not talking about they pulled out their phone and started, you know, texting on their phone or they were outwardly, you know, gregarious and they were like causing a disruption. The inattentive confederates just simply didn't write as many notes, or they would just kind of look away from the lecture more, or they would slouch in their chair more, but nothing that was just outwardly disruptive, and even when those inattentive confederates were just, again, inattentive, but not outwardly obstructive, it still impacted outcomes in that initial lab study.

The next paper, which is interesting, was actually in a virtual classroom. So, it was attention contagion in a virtual classroom where you have got like the four or five kinds of thumbnails across the top and you can see other students right in a virtual classroom, and in that one again same setup, some students saw attentive confederates at the top of their screen, some students saw inattentive confederates.

So again, they were looking away, they didn't look like they were like nodding and paying attention to the lecturer or whatever. And again, same idea. And actually, I think the biggest difference in assessment outcomes was in this virtual one. Assessment grades were down didn't take as many notes, that sort of thing.

The third experiment, and this is the one that I think most teachers would appreciate, was actually in a classroom, right? It was actually in a lecture hall with 60 students, and again, confederates were spread out amongst the 60 that were designed to either be attentive or inattentive and then there were participants sprinkled in there to see.

Same thing happened. Of course, as you could probably guess the students that were seated closest to the inattentive confederate were more inattentive. They actually had a side of the lecture hall that was kind of set aside where there were no inattentive confederates, and it was just all participants, and they felt they had no change at all.

But participants that were seated in between inattentive confederates, they saw a decrease in notes, a decrease in assessment. And interesting to note in this particular experiment that only the inattentive behaviours seem to be contagious. The attentive behaviours were not contagious to the students around them, which is not what we wanted to hear, right?

So, this is just the beginning, right?. Like one study is only one study, three studies still only three studies, but we are starting to see some trends in what's going on here and like I said earlier, teachers probably could have guessed this, but it's nice to not have to be intuitive about it and to see results like these things coming out as far as we have got people studying this to see what's going on.

So, we are at the beginning of attention contagion and what is and what isn't attention contagion and where it occurs and where it doesn't. But we are starting to see some trends. And that's what's important to see here because every classroom is a little different, right? My setup is different from yours, my students. So, when we start to see these trends across different classrooms, we can start to more readily rely on the results.

So, and it's something that I think teachers definitely need to understand and know about, but also students need to understand this. Your attention or inattention impacts others. Again, it may be obvious to the teacher that it does, but we don't always think outside of ourselves, and especially if we are dealing with students who are on the younger side, they are definitely less likely to think outside of themselves and realize that their actions actually can negatively impact others.

[00:20:00] Anna Stokke: I believe this. I think I have even observed this. What's your recommendation then? If this is true, if inattentiveness is kind of contagious, how can we get students to be more attentive?

[00:20:15] Blake Harvard: It all goes back to, I think, classroom expectations. What do you expect out of your students? If they are allowed to be inattentive or more inattentive, that's what they are going to do, right? A simple one, and I would say that, and this is just my thinking here, that probably in the modern classroom today, the particular thing that steals the most attention are cell phones, without a doubt, you don't even have to have your cell phone out, right?

I believe there are studies out there that just having your cell phone near you can steal attention, you hear somebody's cell phone buzzes, and all of a sudden, everybody's wondering, was it mine? Did I just get a notification? Who wants to message me? And attention's gone.

So, just you know, just having the expectation of cell phones away can stop attention from being stolen and then being contagious, you know, one person's on their phone, so now I might as well pull my phone out, right? This lesson must not be worth much if they are not paying attention, and I think they are a good student, so if they are not paying attention, why do I need to pay attention?

You can almost see it occur like a ripple effect in the classroom there. So, I think just expectations of what students should be doing again, straightforward instruction, all these things help to train students to pay attention to what they need to pay attention to. And it, again, it goes back to the design of the classroom, the design of the instruction and some ways kind of lends itself to the students paying more attention in some ways it doesn't.

[00:21:45] Anna Stokke: We will talk about a couple more of the pitfalls, I guess, or, or the choke points, and then we will move on to practical strategies. So, you mentioned that people are often overconfident when judging their level of understanding. Can you discuss that?

[00:22:03] Blake Harvard: Definitely. here are the two, probably the top two things I have noticed in my students over the years. The first kind of idea, I guess, is that I heard the teacher say this yesterday and it made sense to me. I understood it. Whatever concept we are talking about, right? I saw them do a work example on the board.

Okay, I see how they found that answer. And they leave the classroom, never practicing it, but believing they know it because they understood it yesterday. And not understanding that a lot of forgetting goes on there and not understanding that, that teacher has a lot of expert knowledge on exactly what should happen, knows exactly what it should look like, how it should sound.

And they tend to see it as just one concept where there may be lots of little understandings within that concept that if they haven't practiced it, they don't really know how to do it. So, the first hurdle they come up against usually derails their knowledge, right? So, the first thing I tell my students is that just because you think you know it today, absolutely doesn't mean you will know it tomorrow, right?

You can understand the concept today. You can understand the key term today, but when I ask you tomorrow, are you still going to know it? And oftentimes you gotta show them, and that, I think that will get in, more into our practical discussion later.

The other thing I notice is that, you know, let's just say students come in and they do a review, they do a review, they answer some questions, they can't answer some of the questions, but inevitably, they are gonna, they, they leave with all the right answers, because we go over the right answers because I don't want them thinking incorrectly. But what they do is they leave, and I will just make this simple. There are, let's say there are ten questions on this, they really only knew six of them, but because we went over all the answers, they end up with all ten.

So, what do they believe when they leave? I knew ten, ten out of ten. I got it when in reality, they really only knew six out of ten, and maybe they guessed on one or two of those, so they didn't really even know those either, but they are left being overconfident because "I left with a ten out of ten, so I must know this."

And again, a lot of forgetting is going to happen in 24 hours after that, so it's important to come back to that information. And so, it's, it's strange as it sounds is that those assessments that we do at the beginning of class or during class or whatever, really important for pointing out students overconfidence because they are, they tend to be overconfident.

[00:24:22] Anna Stokke: Yeah, so we see that in math a lot, right? So, students struggle with a math problem, and they go and they ask for help. Sometimes, they ask their prof., sometimes they ask a tutor. Prof. shows them how to do it. And then they think, "yeah, I know how to do it," but we always say math is not a spectator sport, right? Like you have to do those problems yourself.

You have to put away the solution that someone just showed you and demonstrate to yourself that you can actually do it. I agree with you. It’s really common that students think that. So, I think what I agree with what you say, I think we have to tell students this. It's just important to get that point across.

[00:25:01] Blake Harvard: Something I say to my students because they are reluctant to want to practice in a real way where there's a chance of failure, partial, total failure. But something I tell my students is that you would rather get it wrong in the practice than get it wrong on the summative assessment.

You would rather find out now that you don't know it because there's still time to correct it. On the summative assessment, it's probably too late to correct it. You are gonna find out you don't know it, you just decide when, and whether you have time to correct your overconfidence, right?

[00:25:32] Anna Stokke: So, you also talk about the forgetting choke point. You have kind of brought this up a little bit already, but I think it's an important thing to talk about. So, how does forgetting work in the context of learning, and is it normal to forget something you just learned?

[00:25:49] Blake Harvard: Absolutely. These students, since they are, whatever, four or five years old and going through their schooling, forgetting has always been a bad thing because it impacts their grade and, you know, we, I think we all feel kind of the negative connotations of a bad grade and the negative connotations of forgetting.

But forgetting is absolutely, completely, totally normal. Everyone forgets. So, we need to, I think we need to talk to our students about, "Hey, everyone forgets, right?" I will even show my students the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve of when you are more likely to forget things within 24 hours, 48 hours of when you come into contact with it the first time.

So, it's normal to forget. So, when we do those quick formative assessments at the beginning of class or the end of class or whenever you do them, I try to stress the normality of you are going to get some of these wrong probably, and that's okay. And another thing that most students don't realize is that by getting it wrong now and getting feedback on it, you are actually more likely to get it right the next time now.

So, in a strange way, getting it wrong now is actually a positive, not only because it can shape how you are going to study going forward, but you are creating new context in your brain for remembering that information, a new memory in our brain is quite fragile, especially if there's very limited context with that.

We can't relate it to ourselves, but the more we come into contact with that memory with practice, the more context we add to it, and typically speaking, the more context we add, the more ability we have to retrieve that memory when we want to, and the stronger that memory gets.

So, thinking about this information, even if we are forgetting, even if we are getting it wrong, is actually a positive, so do yourself a favour and really give these assessments, formative assessments, a real go, a real effort. Because again, even if you get it wrong, you are more likely to get it right later.

[00:27:49] Anna Stokke: And so, we will start talking about some of the strategies. In the second part of your book, you talk about maximizing learning and you focus on two main strategies, retrieval practice and spaced practice. Now, there's a lot of strategies for learning. So, why just those two?

[00:28:08] Blake Harvard: So, I think across all grades, all learners from 5 to 75, all ability levels. These two strategies have the most promise for like the biggest bang for your buck in a classroom, right? And that's what teachers are looking for. They need the strategies that are going to reach the most students, the most effectively, that will most positively impact their learning, not only in their classroom, but in the future.

You know, retrieval practice and spaced practice, not just something they should do in my AP Psychology class, they should do it in their math classroom, their english class, you know, you name it. The brain isn't thinking, well, this only works for AP psychology, this strategy won't work somewhere else.

No, it's retrieval practice, spaced practice. Over a century on both of these strategies, over a century of information and research showing the positive impact of these strategies on learning. And you can imagine over hundreds of, experiments all different types of contexts, all different types of learners.

And for the most part, the trends are they help, period. In my textbook, I even devote a few pages to just show the magnitude of the research on these two strategies of again, from about five to 75 different ways that experts and researchers have looked at these strategies. So, I think, again, because time is so limited in the classroom for teachers, right? They need something that can help the most people over time. And I think retrieval practice and spaced practice is definitely the way to go.

[00:29:44] Anna Stokke: Okay, perfect. And just because I have a lot of people that listen who teach math. So, I just want to be clear that retrieval practice in general just means pulling something out of your memory, recalling something. in math that can mean a lot of things. So, it can mean things like, remembering a fact, it could mean recalling the quadratic formula, right?

It could mean recalling that six times seven is 42. But more commonly, it means things like recalling how to do a certain mathematical procedure, how to work through a certain type of problem. Those all fall into the retrieval practice category. I just like to make that clear because I think a lot of times people think that retrieval practice means memorizing facts and dates and events and that sort of thing. And that's not quite correct. Would you agree?

[00:30:40] Blake Harvard: Definitely. Don't get me wrong, memorizing facts, memorizing certain aspects of balancing equations and things like that, it's definitely important. But that's just the foundation again. But you have got to have the foundation before you can build the rest of the house and the more firm the foundation, the better the house.

I was talking actually with one, I have a teacher who's a couple of doors away from me and she teaches AP stats and AP calculus, and they were doing a test. Now, I'm out of my depth already, okay, when talking about this. But she gave a test and she was like, "I can tell which of my students firmly know how to factor and how to do some sort of factoring, and those that don't because the ones that do finish the test in like 20 or 30 minutes, and those that don't, took them about 50 minutes to finish it."

And that's just talking about time, not even how effectively you can actually answer the questions and move on to the next thing. So, yeah, I think retrieval practice and cognitive science on the whole gets a bad rap because I think from the outside looking in, people think it's just about memorizing and learning facts, and it's not. It's about memorizing and learning those facts so that we can more effectively learn more things and build upon it. That's just the beginning. But again, if you don't have a strong foundation, nothing else really matters.

[00:31:59] Anna Stokke: Precisely that fluency piece like getting really good at something and being able to do it relatively quickly. It makes it easier to do harder problems, right? So, we are all speaking the same language here, even though we are in different fields.

[00:32:14] Blake Harvard: Sure. Well, you don't even have to be in the learning, in the teaching field. You think about athletics or dance. Just last night, I was at my daughter's ballet studio, and it just happened to be like parents can come watch today, so we were watching, it's an hour class. I bet they spent 20 or so minutes just on the very basics, really fine-tuning the foundation of how to be up on point and how, where do you want your knee over which toe, and like all this different like shaping and it was not this fantastic, beautiful ballet piece that they were doing.

It was really honing in on the foundation so that then they can build up on it. You see it in sports, you see it in bands, know the basic stuff so well that it's almost automatic and then build upon it. If it works so well in every other facet, why do we not want to do it in learning? I don't get it.

[00:33:10] Anna Stokke: About some of the things you talked about, this one I actually hadn't heard of before. So, what is diminishing cues retrieval practice?

[00:33:19] Blake Harvard: Okay. So again, retrieval practice is just trying to retrieve memories, right? Retrieve information. So, I think we need to talk about the difference between recognition and recall. So, recognition is like multiple choice. It's matching. The answer's out there somewhere and you have just got to recognize the right answer. It's there. Just recognize it.

Recall is short answer. It's: here's the problem, tell me the answer with no help. You can either recall the information, or you can't. There’s a lot less, I am not gonna call it cheating, because recognition questions aren't cheating, but you can guess a lot more on recognition, right?

I can not know the right answer to a multiple-choice question, guess B and get it right. But recall, I can either write the short answer, or I can't. It's a lot easier to recognize than to recall.

And I think most of us would probably agree with that. Don't get me wrong, though; recognition questions can be written really well, whereas recognition questions are very difficult, too.

But the, a particular paper that I looked at on this diminishing cues, said that, you know, if you, if you teach students something one day, and then the next day, you go straight to recall, write me an essay about this thing we talked about yesterday, you are probably not going to get good work.

You are overshooting their abilities. But if you can start out with some recognition questions, where there are some hints at first. Give them the hints so that they can they can be successful in retrieving the information because of those hints, those retrieval cues.

And then over time, practicing that information, the next time, provide fewer cues. And then the next time provide fewer cues until it's almost like you are, you can turn information that they need to know from recognition into recall over the course of two or three studying attempts. And they found that, that created better learning because they were more successful recognizing it before they had to recall.

And again, sometimes, not always, right? But sometimes, when we go straight to the recall, and there's no help, there's no retrieval cue they may not be able to retrieve at all. That's not the key, I don't think, we want them to be able to retrieve it. So, pretty neat idea. And again, there's, evidence out there to support it.

Realistically, it's hard to do this, though, because teachers' lesson time is limited. So, you certainly can't choose, I am gonna do this with every bit of information they need to know. So, you have gotta really, as teachers, figure out like, what's important to me. What do the students really need to know? And then perhaps do, with those sorts of things, really do that.

You know, a lot of the times with retrieval practice, I will get this, oh, you, so you just want me to ask questions then? Well, yeah, that is retrieval practice, but if you really hone in on it, there are different ways of asking questions even within retrieval practice to increase learning.

[00:36:14] Anna Stokke: So, let's talk about another strategy that you talked about that you use with all retrieval practice opportunities. Another thing I had never heard of, I don't know if this is your invention, but you call it Brain Book Buddy. So, you actually even say that it might be the most important strategy that you teach your students.

So, can you explain this and why you do it?

[00:36:34] Blake Harvard: So, I definitely don't want to say I like invented it or came up with it. I probably, you know, as teachers do, I probably read about it somewhere and then kind of fine tuned it from, from my classroom and what worked with my students. But the idea is going back to what we talked about earlier is to kind of battle that overconfidence of, I want, I want to give students an honest assessment of what they know.

And the reason I love Brain-Book-Buddy so much is that it can be applied to any assessment, again it doesn't have to be in my classroom, it can be in their math classroom, wherever and it works to really give them a true understanding of what they know, while also being able to provide them some feedback, and to give them kind of a jumping off point for studying in the future.

So, the idea is this, and again, I will, I will keep it very simple, this example, very simple. So, let's say they come in and they do some retrieval practice. I got 10 questions that I want them to answer. The first time they go through it, they are using only their brain, period. This is your brain. If this was the final assessment, what would you know right now today?

So, they, they go through it the first time with their brain. They can probably immediately see that I don't know this, I don't know this, or I don't know this, right? So, let's just say the first time through, they get 5 out of 10 correct, or they at least write down the answers for 5 out of 10. Then, after they have completely finished using only their brain, then I want them to get out their notebook, and I want them to, number 1, go back and check their answers on the 5 they wrote down, but then on the other 5, I want them to see if their notebook has the answer, right? You were in class yesterday.

Did you get this written down in your notebook? And often times, again they find that some of the stuff is in their notebook that they could not write down using only their brain. Which only helps to highlight the forgetting piece of forgetting's normal, right? You wrote it down yesterday, but you still forgot some of it.

So, let's just say they used their notebook, and now that what was a 5, is now a 9 out of 10. The last component of that is, the third time through is to talk with a peer, and say, "Hey, I could not find the answer to number 8, I didn't know it wasn't in my notes. Did you get number 8?"

And if they find that their peer, the person sitting next to them, knew number 8, now they have to think a lot about, well, how did they know it? Was it in your notes? Well, if it was in your notes, how did, how did I miss it then? And it really makes them think about how they are conducting themselves in class.

Because if Johnny got it next to me and I didn't, did I zone out? Was I in the bathroom? Was I absent that day? Like, did I, do I need to come back and get some notes that I didn't realize I missed? It's more than just an assessment piece of "did you get all 10 right?" It really helps them to think about their learning through the process.

"What did my brain know? What did I know today?. What did my notebook know that I didn't know? And then what did my peer sitting next to me know? that I missed from my notebook, and then obviously from my brain, just knowing it on its own." And it really helps them to, to really slow down and think about the assessment.

And, you know, I say things like the only grade you can really trust right now is the one in the first column, the brain, that's what you really knew. So, although today you left with a 10 out of 10, your notes knew some more of it that you didn't know, and your peer used, knew some more of it that you didn't know.

And when it's time for the summative assessment, you are not going to have those things, you are only going to have yourself and your brain. I love this strategy because it gives them an honest assessment. It helps them to think about their thinking, think about their attention in class, think about how they are going to study in the future.

But it's also something that hopefully you can see like would be very easy to use in a chemistry or biology or a math or any type of class where they need to know stuff, it works, and it takes some time at the beginning of a semester or a year. You got to invest, and you got to go really slow at first, really parceling out.

Okay, do this and then stop. Okay, now take out your notebook. Okay, stop. But after doing this, you know, a few times, you just let them go. And you can see them go from using their brain, and then they just automatically pull out their notebook, and then they will wait for the person beside them to be ready, and then they start talking about the buddy aspect of it, and it goes a lot faster. I think it's well worth the investment in the students and in their learning, because, again, It's not just something that's for my classroom. It's also something that they can use everywhere, and they are a better learner now forever using this. So, I absolutely love it.

[00:41:03] Anna Stokke: Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. It's a great idea. I can see that it would give students a chance to sort of self assess, so that you think about, well, what did I really know? You say you also ask students, "Did you guess?" in formative assessment and retrieval practice situations. So, you ask them to place an asterisk beside all questions where they are less than 75 percent sure of the answer. Why do you do that?

[00:41:29] Blake Harvard: Because I want them to be honest with themselves again, especially with recognition questions again, where it's a matching or a multiple choice or something. You can't always trust yourself, because if you guess and get it right, I don't want you thinking you actually knew it, because if you knew it, you wouldn't have had to guess.

And again, all, doing these sorts of things, getting a real honest assessment from your students, it makes them more familiar with retrieval practice. It makes it kind of more at home, and more normal to get things wrong. And they see that there's not this immediate, red mark on their paper. And it's, you know, it's personal.

No, let's, let's figure out if we guess now, let's figure out what we know honestly right now so that we can fix it in the future. And did you guess it's just a, I mean, it's so simple, as you are going through this, if you are not certain, some questions, you know, a kid reads it, and they know the answer. Boom. Great. Feel confident in that. But if you are just guessing, you shouldn't feel confident in that.

But again, it comes back to the overconfidence. If I guessed and I got it right, that's great. And, and that's more context for that memory but it's probably still something we need to look at again because you might not guess right the next time you come up against that information.

[00:42:36] Anna Stokke: It seems to be a lot of these strategies are sort of based on that. pitfall, right? That pitfall that students think they understand more than they do, it's trying to get them to figure out that and become aware of what it is that they actually don't understand, so that ultimately, they learn better.

[00:42:56] Blake Harvard: Exactly. 100%.

[00:42:58] Anna Stokke: Now, there is evidence that using retrieval practice decreases test anxiety and stress. So, can you talk about some of the research about retrieval practice reducing test anxiety? This is something that comes up a lot in math, by the way. It's a really important thing to talk about.

[00:43:15] Blake Harvard: Yeah, definitely. So, the, the paper that I reference in my book is by Dr. Pooja Agarwal, and she is one of the main characters in retrieval practice, does some incredible work and she, she studied the, the test anxiety that can accompany practicing knowledge, you know, people will say that they are poor test takers or they become anxious and I am not saying they don't. I, I definitely believe them that they do.

But as I have kind of mentioned before, I think it sounds funny to hear, but like making failure kind of a normality because we all forget assists with decreasing that anxiety that surrounds it. I think that some of that anxiety that comes with being a poor test taker or test anxiety comes from finding out on the test that you don't know something.

But when we, again, when we test formatively beforehand and they already know that and they can fix it, I think that helps to decrease it. And that's in Dr. Agarwal's paper. That's kind of what she found. Now it was, it was kind of self-assessment, I believe from the students. Pretty much across the board, the students felt that through practice they now felt less anxiety about the final test on that topic.

It's making it more normal to be asked questions in a classroom. It's making it more normal to get things wrong with the thought of, "but I can correct this." And I think that really helps. And again, Dr. Agarwal's experiment kind of showed this, that if we do these types of things, it can make students more comfortable with the idea of "okay, I will try now," right?

Where "before, I would not try because I don't, I don't really want to know whether I actually know this or not. But if I know if I get it wrong, I am not going to get called out in class or something like that and there's going to be chances for me to get it right later." I think they are more likely to take that risk. And with that, kind of the anxiety can decrease that goes along with it.

[00:45:08] Anna Stokke: This always makes a lot of sense to me, but unfortunately, a lot of times the, go to recommendation is just avoid tests, I mean, you are the AP psychology teacher, avoidance isn't really the way you want to deal with something that someone's afraid of.

[00:45:24] Blake Harvard: That's exactly right. Yeah, exposure therapy is kind of what it is. Now, I definitely don't want to say that this is exposure therapy, clinical exposure therapy. That is not at all what I am saying. But right, avoiding the thing you are, afraid of or anxious about typically doesn't improve the anxiety.

[00:45:42] Anna Stokke: So, another thing you talk about, the, the second thing is spaced practice, right? So just a quick reminder, in case someone's tuning in again for the first time, can you remind my listeners what that means?

[00:45:59] Blake Harvard: Sure. So, spaced practice is, it's basically the opposite of the more, more popular cramming. Cramming is, is "I am going to study for two hours the night before the test." Spaced practice, and there's, again, another century of research on this showing that on the whole, instead of trying to study two hours the night before the test, if you can space that out and study for a few nights, for a lot less time, you can have improved outcomes, right?

So instead of two hours the night before the test, let's study for three nights before the test for 20 or 30 minutes each. You can actually save time studying, probably decrease your anxiety, get more out of it, because nobody's paying attention for two hours straight anyway and improve learning because those memories, when we recall them over time, recall them over time, add context again to those memories, and they become stronger. So, spaced practice, by and large way more advantageous for learning in the long run, than cramming.

[00:46:57] Anna Stokke: Absolutely. So, I'm curious if you are able to get your students to use space practice techniques.

[00:47:06] Blake Harvard: Well, I certainly try, and one of the best ways to do it is to model it in the classroom. And I will just quickly talk about one thing, I did one kind of quasi-study, very quasi study that I did in my classroom. And it's called last lesson, last week, last unit, or last month, where I ask a few retrieval questions, questions from the last lesson, a few retrieval questions from the information from a week ago, and then a few from a month ago.

And it's very interesting for the students to see that, you know, I think intuition would tell us that, that we are going to do best on what we studied yesterday. We are gonna do, then, do the next best on what we did a week ago, and we are gonna do the worst on what we did a month ago. But what I have noticed, and the students get to see this, because we do it in class, and like, there's no better modelling than that, is that they actually do really well on what we studied a month ago, because right, if you think about it, they heard it in class when we talked about it a month ago.

They heard it when we probably tried to retrieve it the next day. They heard about it about a few days later, probably, when they were studying for the test. When they tried to retrieve it on the test, now they are doing it again, right?

So, like, they have retrieved that information five, six, however many times. So, it's in there, what they typically do the least, like they do the poorest on, sorry,is last week, because they have, they had enough time to learn it, but then they have also had, you know, four or five days in there where they haven't retrieved it in a while, but they don't have the five or six times of retrieving it like the last month stuff does.

And it's, you can almost see the light bulbs come on their head, in their head of like, "oh wow, okay, like, spacing it out and studying over time is much better than just the one-time retrieval, the night before the test." And again, it's one of those things that I talk to my students about over and over again. I know they get tired of hearing the words "retrieval practice" and "spaced practice" in my classroom.

But they need to know it, they need to see it modelled. Number two, like that's a big ask for a 12-year-old. Hey, go into your planner, which they don't have anyway, and plan out your studying for the next week. Like we have got a test Friday, so plan out 15 minutes of studying Tuesday night, Wednesday night, right? But when they see it done in class that adds to the buy in, I think, and they see the results of it.

[00:49:34] Anna Stokke: You have a great short blog post. This is my favourite one. It's called "What Creativity Isn't," and it's in response to Sir Ken Robinson's TED talk, which asserts that traditional education kills creativity. I gather you don't agree.

So, can you elaborate on that?

[00:49:53] Blake Harvard: Yeah, definitely. So, the idea here, and it sounds fantastic, right? A lot of these ideas sound like, "Oh man, yeah, and the fact that it's on the backdrop of a TED talk also adds to it, I think, a little bit, but the idea that schools just, what is it, drill and kill, right? It's, they are just memorizing facts and that students need to just be creative. They just need to be creative. That can't happen. I can't be creative with information I don't have.

And, you know, okay, so what do I mean by creative? I mean, we are creating something that is novel. It's relatively original. But it also has value. Right? Anyone can create something that is unusual or novel, but that doesn't make it valuable, and the way I talk about it in my classroom is I tell my students that, hey, I am going to create a really fuel-efficient engine for a car, but I know nothing about cars.

So, what I do is I take a piece of paper, and I crumple it up and I just hold it there. And I'm like, incredibly fuel-efficient, right? It's just a piece of paper; is that unique? Is that novel? Exactly. It's very novel that a piece of paper could be an engine for a car. It's incredibly novel, but is it worth anything? Not in the slightest. I have to know a lot about cars and the science and the physics behind it to actually create something that's creative that in that, in that vein.

So, you, again, you, you can't skip to the creativity part of learning without the foundation of knowing how to be, knowing the information to be creative with. A quick little anecdote. I was watching, I went to an art show at our school, right? And the art teacher has Art I, Art II, Art III, and then like AP art.

And she has them lined up and you can clearly tell the Art I students because they are working on the really basic stuff, formations and stuff like that, right? Forms and shading. And then the AP art is like very fluid, and they are doing much more complex techniques.

And I spoke to the teacher about this, right? And when we think art, we think that's the, that's a creative domain. And obviously, it is. But she said something that really stuck out to me, and she said, "I have to teach the students - the students have to know the rules of art before they can break the rules of art, and really create something unique and creative," right?

So even in the domain of art, which is incredibly creative in its nature, there are still some rules, there's still some foundational knowledge to know to be able to create the things that are creative, right? And so, to say that schools kill creativity, I think that's entirely wrong. Schools enable creativity because if you don't know anything, you can't be creative with it.

[00:52:46] Anna Stokke: It's been a great conversation today. Now, is there anything you want to end with, say, advice for teachers?

[00:52:54] Blake Harvard: This lens that I see my classroom through I will be the first to tell you, it's not everything, right? It doesn't speak to the whole student, I totally get that. But I would just say to teachers, think about your students thinking. Think about how you are getting the information to your students and how your students are showing whether they know, or they don't know something, and then give them plenty of opportunities to do that.

And then also, don't try to be good at everything at once. You can't, right? Pick and choose and improve in some areas. And then, when you feel confident, then move on to being better at something else. And that, I guess that's particularly for new teachers, improving in small areas and then move on.

But just try to see, try to look through the lens of cognition and cognitive psychology. I think it will simplify how you think about the classroom while also improving outcomes. And if you are a teacher, I hope you agree with me that that, that's the end goal, is to improve learning. And I think cognitive psychology is the way.

[00:53:49] Anna Stokke: Thank you so much for coming on today. And I will just remind people that there are lots of other things in your book, like lots of other strategies and pitfalls and choke points that we didn't get to today. So, check it out and thank you so much. It's been a pleasure to talk to you and it's been, it's so nice to meet you.

[00:54:07] Blake Harvard: I love talking about this stuff. I am a nerd about it and thank you for having me on.

[00:54:12] Anna Stokke: As always, we have included a resource page that has links to articles and books mentioned in the episode.

If you enjoy this podcast, please consider showing your support by leaving a five-star review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Chalk and Talk is produced by me, Anna Stokke. Transcript and resource page by Jazmin Boisclair and Deepika Tung. Subscribe on your favourite podcast app to get new episodes delivered as they become available.

You can follow me on X, Blue Sky, or LinkedIn for notifications, or check out my website www.annastokke.com for more information. This podcast received funding through a University of Winnipeg Knowledge Mobilization and Community Impact Grant funded through the Anthony-Swaity Knowledge Impact Fund.