Please be advised that this episode contains mentions of violence and may be unsuitable for some listeners. I'd like to flesh out what I've been saying before about the power of economic analysis in explaining people's actions. Whereas when we normally think about motivation we think in terms of psychology, economists naturally think in terms of incentives. This kind of thinking is generally missing in educational discourse. There are two books that I found particularly fascinating and instructive on this point: The Social Order of the Underworld: How Prison Gangs Govern the American Penal System by David Skarbek; and The Invisible Hook by Peter Leeson. This recording focuses on the former. David Skarbek's book is fascinating and rich in both detail and theoretical explanation, so I focus on what I find most compelling and most relevant to transfer over to thinking about other contexts. First of all, he introduces existing criminological theories that aim to account for the rise in prison gangs, namely Deprivation theory and Importation theory. The former suggests that inmate behaviour is a result of the pain of imprisonment, and the latter focuses on pre-prison beliefs and experiences that are brought into prison. Skarbek departs from both of these theories, grounding his own analysis in political economy. He introduces us to the basic assumptions of economics - that people are self-interested and respond rationally to incentives - and goes on to describe the role of governance in society. His fundamental thesis is that prison gangs provide governance, meaning that they provide a form of public good which enhances personal safety and opportunities for trade (mostly in drugs). While I'm yet to fully apply the ideas of political economy to education (except for reading about it inThe Beautiful Tree, China's Examination Hell, and Education and the State), I feel that digging in to some examples like this can help us appreciate the reasons why people do things. Crucially, they are not all psychological. Enjoy the episode.

140a. Political economy pt. I: The Social Order of the Underworld

Education Bookcast released its first episode on the 1st of January 2016. I'd like to take this opportunity to talk about some of the big things that I think I've learned in that time. I speak about:  Psychology is overrated - the replication crisis and the bias in cultural sampling, and therefore the importance of anthropological evidence; Psychology is underrated - how amazing the field of cognitive architecture is, and how little known it appears to be as a field; apparent resistance to scientific findings from some people in the field of education; understanding expertise as a key to knowing how to improve education; the power of economic thinking in understanding motivation and behaviour; the failure of behaviourism, and the incorrect conclusions some people have drawn from it; and how school seems to be good for society, but the mechanisms of how this happens aren't completely clear, and I remain neutral on this point as I gather further evidence.  Enjoy the episode. ### SUPPORT You can support the podcast and join the community forum by visiting https://www.buymeacoffee.com/edubookcast.

139. Reflections after 7 years

This is the second episode concerning self-related beliefs taken from chapters of The Cambridge Handbook of Motivation and Learning. Here I talk about self-efficacy, which concerns how much you believe that you can do something specific, e.g. solve a particular kind of maths problem. Self-esteem, self-concept, self-efficacy - it's easy to get confused with so many "self-words" flying around. There are even other words which aren't used by academics but are in common parlance, such as self-belief. I go into more detail and give more examples of the difference in the recording, but basically, whereas self-concept concerns your attitude to an entire domain (e.g. how good you think you are at sports), self-efficacy refers to how likely you think you would be to succeed in a specific class of activity (e.g. do you think you could run a marathon). Like self-concept, self-efficacy has been found to be strongly correlated with a bunch of positive behaviours, such as perseverance, but also outcomes, such as academic interest and academic performance. Unfortunately causality doesn't seem to have been established (as far as I can tell from the article), which blunts my enthusiasm about it somewhat. Nevertheless, this is definitely something to keep an eye on. The article also explains the sources of self-efficacy beliefs, which are four: mastery experiences (succeeding or failing); vicarious experiences (watching another person suceed or fail); social persuasion (including encouragement); and physiological state (e.g. anxiety). This list suggests interventions that can be used to increase self-efficacy, namely encouragement and the presentation of models (i.e. peers who can also succeed, possibly after some struggle). One thing I forgot to mention in the recording: in Chinese culture, it is common to tell children stories of famous successful people both from China and from around the world who struggled through great difficulties to achieve their life goals. Marie Curie seems to figure particularly prominently in these biographies, being somebody who had to move to a foreign country (France) to study, breaking the mould as a woman in science, being famed for her extraordinary work ethic, and going on to be the first person to ever achieve a Nobel Prize in two different disciplines (Physics and Chemistry). While there are many ways to interpret the details of how such stories would affect people, it might in part have a self-efficacy effect, by showing young people that it is possible to succeed even in difficult circumstances. Enjoy the episodes. *** RELATED EPISODES 13. The Psychology of Self-Defense: Self-Affirmation Theory by David Sherman & Geoffrey Cohen 45. The problem with self-esteem 46. Self Compassion by Kristin Neff SUPPORT If you would like to support the podcast and join the community forum, you can visit https://www.buymeacoffee.com/edubookcast.

138. The science of self-belief, part II: self-efficacy

Among the huge academic tomes that I've been ploughing through recently is The Cambridge Handbook of Motivation and Learning. I've long felt that my understanding of motivation is superficial and incomplete, and I wondered whether motivation was understood at all by anybody in the academic literature, or whether remained a mysterious and convoluted problem. The Handbook has shown me that there is much good research that has been done that sheds light on motivation, interest, curiosity, and how they relate to learning. The Handbook starts off with five chapters on "The Self and Its Impact". I have previously covered a number of self-related concepts on the podcast, such as self-esteem, stereotype threat, self-affirmation theory, and self-compassion, but my conclusion was that raising self-esteem does nothing to help people academically or to improve their character, and in fact could lead to narcissism, which is now at epidemic levels following the self-esteem movement that began in California in the 1980's. However, the Handbook has shown me that a closer look at self-related beliefs paints a more positive picture, and shows that such beliefs are central to students' academic success, as well as to people's life outcomes. I have had to radically change my understanding of the role and impact of this kind of belief, as well as greatly increasing how important encouragement seems to be for young people to flourish. In this first of two episodes on the science of self-belief and beliefs relating to the self, I will discuss self-concept, which is similar to self-esteem but domain-specific rather than global. For example, somebody might have a high self-concept for physical appearance (i.e. they think they are handsome / beautiful), but a low self-concept for physical performance (i.e. they think they are bad at sports); or a high self-concept for English (i.e. they think they are good at those classes) but a low self-concept for Mathematics (they think they are bad at maths). This domain specificity allows us to see through experiments where self-esteem interventions seem to do little, as often they do a lot for one specific self-concept, while not affecting the rest, thus making it seem that globally not much has changed, when in fact there has been a major positive impact. Overall, self-concept seems to be a very important concept (ha) for understanding what makes people successful, and a vital lever to pull in helping people reach their potential. Enjoy the episode. *** RELATED EPISODES 13. The Psychology of Self-Defense: Self-Affirmation Theory by David Sherman & Geoffrey Cohen 45. The problem with self-esteem 46. Self Compassion by Kristin Neff SUPPORT You can support the podcast and join the community forum by visiting https://www.buymeacoffee.com/edubookcast.

137. The science of self-belief, part I: self-concept

In this interview, I have the honour to speak with Professor Christian Lebiere, researcher in cognitive architecture, co-author of The Atomic Components of Thought, and one of the main developers of the ACT-R architecture. We talk on a range of topics relating to cognitive architecture, cognitive modelling, and psychology. My questions are listed below, by theme. A note on cover art: this is a diagram of ACT-R version 2.0 from 1993. More modern versions of ACT-R contain somewhat different components, but we discuss this diagram in the interview so I have shared it here. OVERVIEW. What is cognitive architecture? What is ACT-R? Why should we care? EVIDENCE. What evidence is there for ACT-R? How much evidence is there? What sort of human activities can it model? Can it model non-goal-driven behaviours such as daydreaming, for instance? Has ACT-R been tested with people of different ages (children vs. adults vs. the elderly)? Has it been tested with people of different cultures? SCOPE & ELEMENTS. ACT-R version 2.0 had no working memory component - why not, and what were the circumstances that led to it being introduced? How does ACT-R deal with consciousness? How is ACT-R being extended to deal with emotions? APPLICATION. When did ACT-R become mature enough as a theory for you to move from basic science and theory-building to application? What are the educational applications of ACT-R? PUBLIC RELATIONS. It took me over 7 years before I found out about cognitive architecture as a field. Nobody in education, or in the general public, seems to know about it, and it seems to never be mentioned by the vast majority of psychologists either. Given its achievements in modelling human cognition, why do so few people know about it? Enjoy the episode. *** RELATED EPISODES 79. What learning is 80. The Chimp Paradox by Prof Steve Peters 82. Memorable Teaching by Peps McCrea 85. Why Don't Students Like School? by Daniel Willingham 95. The Reading Mind by Daniel Willingham SUPPORT You can support Education Bookcast and join the community forum by visiting http://www.buymeacoffee.com/edubookcast.

136+. Interview with Prof. Christian Lebiere on ACT-R and Cognitive Architecture

I have recently discovered the field of cognitive architecture. I have been reading around the area for the last couple of months, and I would like to introduce it to my audience. It's an area of study with incredible achievements which revitalises my belief in psychology as a field, but which for some reason is not at all well known, even in education circles where it deserves to be known to all as the most impressive set of theories of cognition and learning ever produced. I particularly focus on one theory known as ACT-R, though I have also been reading about other architectures such as Soar, LIDA, EPIC, and CLARION. I will be able to go into more detail about some of these in later episodes of the podcast. For the moment, the biggest takeaway is what a cognitive architecture is and how impressive the achievements of the field have been so far. Cognitive architectures aim to describe human thinking and learning through analysing the mind into parts, and clearly specifying the role of each part and its interaction with other parts. It then makes predictions of how people would behave in a given situation based on these models - predictions that often achieve startling levels of accuracy, over a wide range of scenarios. The field is now mature enough that the architectures are routinely used by some psychologists to explain the results of their experiments, and the architectures are also used in technology as a basis for robot cognition or for computer game AI characters. Enjoy the episode. *** RELATED EPISODES 79. What learning is 80. The Chimp Paradox by Prof Steve Peters 82. Memorable Teaching by Peps McCrea 85. Why Don't Students Like School? by Daniel Willingham 95. The Reading Mind by Daniel Willingham SUPPORT You can support Education Bookcast and join the community forum by visiting https://www.buymeacoffee.com/edubookcast.

136. Cognitive architecture and ACT-R

One of the patrons of the podcast wrote to me on the forum that while I have covered the research on learning to read in a fair amount of detail, I'm yet to speak about learning to write, and he would really like to know more about this since he teaches writing day to day. I happen to have been reading Cambridge Handbook on Expertise and Expert Performance edited by the late great K. Anders Ericsson (among others), and there is a chapter entitled Professional Writing Expertise which I thought might be relevant. So this one's for you, Tom. The chapter starts with an overview of the definition of what expert writing is as a task, followed by a description of the characteristics of expert writers, and finally goes on to describe something of the learning process of becoming a writer. Writing is a difficult skill to characterise because it comes in so many different forms, genres, and domains of expertise, but commonalities among expert writers are still possible to elucidate. While this article is more of a study of experts and expertise rather than a detailed map of how to go from zero to hero in writing, it does help us to understand the nature of the task and the kinds of skills that need to be mastered in order to write well, as well as identify the sorts of issues that even the pros struggle with. Enjoy the episode. *** If you would like to support the podcast and join the community forum, go to https://www.buymeacoffee.com/edubookcast.

135. Professional writing expertise

In this episode, I have Judith Millecker on as a guest. Judith is the author of the Philosocats series of books, which aims to help children ages 4-10 to engage in philosophy. It is an outgrowth of her work running philosophy for children sessions in London. We discuss her most recent book, social and emotional learning, critical thinking, and how pedagogy might vary by domain. Enjoy the episode.

134. Philosophy for children

I was reading the Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance edited by K. Anders Ericsson yesterday, and after going through a chapter on medical experts, something struck me about the nature of expertise, automaticity, and Kahnemann and Tversky's System 1 vs. System 2 (also known as dual-process theory, popularised by their book Thinking, Fast and Slow), which joined together what I know about chess players, doctors, and how literacy works. I'm excited to share it with you today. Enjoy the episode. *** RELATED EPISODES 11. Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahnemann 17. Blink by Malcolm Gladwell 24. Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell 52. How We Learn by Benedict Carey 79. What learning is 95. The Reading Mind by Daniel Willingham 114. Philosophy of Science - the good bits 124. The Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences SUPPORT To support Education Bookcast and join the community forum, visit www.buymeacoffee.com/edubookcast.

133. Patterns are fast, rules are slow

I now have a new podcast, the Pedagogue-Cast! Together with Justin Matthys, co-founder of Australian education technology company Maths Pathway, we discuss how education research can be applied in the classroom. It's designed to be an easier listen for busy teachers, with a more immediate practical takeaway. Website: https://thepedagoguecast.com.au/ Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/437GYDF4jkkFxfkGR4cknc I've shared the first episode of Season 1 in this recording so you can get a sense of what the podcast is like. To listen to further episodes, visit the Pedagogue-Cast itself. I'm excited! Enjoy the episode.

I have a new podcast!

In this part of the episode, I will discuss the evidence for the effectiveness of Direct Instruction, drawing from Project Follow Through, but also from 50 years of studies that have been published since. Enjoy the episode. *** REFERENCES The Direct Instruction Follow Through Model: Design and Outcomes by Siegfried Engelmann, Wesley Becker, Douglas Carnine, and Russel Gersten (1988) No Simple Answer: Critique of the "Follow Through" Evaluation by Ernest House, Gene Glass, Leslie McLean and Decker Walker (1978) Follow Through Revisited: Reflections on the Site Variability Issue by Russel Gersten (1984) The Effectiveness of Direct Instruction Curricula: A Meta-Analysis of a Half Century of Research by Jean Stockard, Timothy Wood, Cristy Coughlin and Caitlin Rasplica Khoury (2018) RELATED EPISODES 76. Comprehensive School Reform SUPPORT To support Education Bookcast and join the community forum, visit https://www.buymeacoffee.com/edubookcast.

132b. Direct Instruction: the evidence

I've spent a lot of time on the podcast so far discussing discovery learning, but not had any episodes explicitly dedicated to what might be considered its antithesis, Direct Instruction. In this episode I finally get round to this worthy topic. First of all, uppercase "Direct Instruction", or DI for short, should be distinguished from lowercase "direct instruction". The latter refers to explicit teaching in general, whereas the former, as a proper noun, refers to a specific implementation and philosophy as designed by Siegfried Engelmann and colleagues, starting in the early 1960s. Direct Instruction is also considered to be a type of Comprehensive School Reform (CSR), and indeed, in my episode covering a meta-analysis of CSR I pointed out that DI was one of the three most effective CSR models. Direct Instruction came to fame in the early 1970s as a result of Project Follow Through, which was the largest educational study ever funded by the United States government. DI was one of the 13 models used in the program and performed very well. Since then it has had a further half century of evidence gathering, which will give us plenty to look at. In this first part of the episode, I introduce the nature and methods of Direct Instruction, as well as a brief introduction to Project Follow Through. The aim is to have you familiar with exactly what this approach is before we go into how well it does or doesn't work in the later recordings of this episode. Enjoy the episode. *** REFERENCES The Direct Instruction Follow Through Model: Design and Outcomes by Engelmann et al. (1988) The Effectiveness of Direct Instruction Curricula: A Meta-Analysis of a Half Century of Research by Stockard et al. (2018) RELATED EPISODES 74. Marva Collins' Way by Marva Collins and Civia Tamarkin 76. Comprehensive School Reform 88. The Failure of Constructivist, Discovery, Problem-based, Experiential, and Inquiry-based Teaching 90. Discovery learning: the idea that won't die SUPPORT You can support Education Bookcast and join the community forum by visiting https://www.buymeacoffee.com/edubookcast.

132a. Direct Instruction and Project Follow Through

[By the way, the cover image is of the proportion of children in different countries who have a growth mindset (darker red is more). The data was taken from PISA 2019 and I constructed the image using Python. Grey countries are those for which I didn't have data.] I was initially a huge supporter and admirer of Carol Dweck's work on fixed vs. growth mindset. The very first episode of the podcast was about her book, and I mentioned it many times afterwards, talking about how amazing it was. Then a couple of years ago I lost confidence. Angry about being misled by advocates of constructivist, project-based, or discovery learning, and pessimistic about psychology as a whole with my recent discovery of the degree to which studies would have completely different results depending on cultural sample, I heard that Dweck's work was having trouble replicating. In episode 100, I spoke about my concerns with mindset, which was particularly bitter since I'd once been such a strong advocate of it. It just seemed like the entire field of psychology was collapsing around me and there was nobody I could trust. Since then, a listener of the podcast asked me to elaborate on my position regarding mindset. Why had I changed my view? What do I currently think? I decided to take a deeper look at what had been happening in the mindset scene, and this episode is the product. Enjoy the episode. *** RELATED EPISODES 1. Mindset by Carol Dweck 68. The Upside of Stress by Kelly McGonigal (about stress mindsets) REFERENCES Mentioned in this episode (in order of appearance): Does mindset affect children's ability, school achievement, or response to challenge? Three failures to replicate by Li & Bates (2018) Failure to Replicate: Testing a Growth Mindset Intervention for College Student Success by Brez et al. (2020) Changing Mindsets: Effectiveness trial Evaluation Report from the Education Endowment Foundation (2019) To What Extent and Under Which Circumstances Are Growth Mind-Sets Important to Academic Achievement? Two Meta-Analyses by Sisk et al. (2018) THE ONE VARIABLE THAT MAKES GROWTH MINDSET INTERVENTIONS WORK by Russell T. Warne (2020) Schools are buying "growth mindset" interventions despite scant evidence that they work well by Brooke Macnamara (2018) What Can Be Learned From Growth Mindset Controversies? by Yeager & Dweck (2020) SUPPORT If you would like to join the Education Bookcast community and support this podcast, visit https://www.buymeacoffee.com/edubookcast.

131. Mindset: does it replicate?

I stumbled across a fascinating paper looking into how children conceptualise the world around them. Mental Models of the Earth: A Study of Conceptual Change in Childhood shares an experiment where children were asked questions about the shape of the Earth, and the authors found six (!) different mental models that the children had: rectangular, disc-shaped, spherical, flattened sphere, hollow sphere, and the bizarre "dual Earth" model. There are important theoretical and pedagogical implications of an enquiry like this. Cognitive scientists argue about the right way to think about novices' preconceptions - do they have small, fragmented pieces of knowledge with no consistency on further probing; or self-consistent "alternative theories" that can generate answers to novel questions, albeit wrong answers? The answer to that theoretical question leads to different implications about teaching - are we aiming to provide knowledge where there is very little, and consolidate the little bits of correct thinking into a larger whole; or are we looking to change children's theories of how the world works, which would generate some resistance from the children, and would require careful targeting of the weak points of their existing models? In the case of basic astronomy, this paper supports the latter view, that children construct self-consistent "alternative theories" that make sense as a whole, given the constraints on their thinking based on their everyday experiences. There are some fascinating examples of children making up imaginative models to accord with what they've been told and what they have experienced, and overall it offers a window into the way that children think. Enjoy the episode. *** REFERENCES  Mental Models of the Earth: a Study of Conceptual Change in Childhood by Vosniadou & Brewer (1992) SUPPORT If you would like to join the Education Bookcast community and support this podcast, visit https://www.buymeacoffee.com/edubookcast.

130. How children learn that the Earth is not flat

You can now support Education Bookcast and join the community forum, where we discuss all things education. Visit https://www.buymeacoffee.com/edubookcast to learn more.  

Support the podcast & join the community forum!

This episode has such huge implications that I didn't know what to call it. Efficiency and Innovation in Transfer, the actual name of the book chapter, seemed far too dry to put across the fundamental shifts in thinking about pedagogy, assessment, education research design, and cognitive theory that this article suggests (at least to me). The authors suggest that the current literature on transfer of learning has too negative a view of the possibilty of transfer, and suffers from too many internal contradictions. They propose a new perspective on transfer called Preparation for Future Learning (PFL), as opposed to the generally accepted standard which they label Sequestered Problem Solving (SPS). In short, when you ask people to solve an unfamiliar problem and grade them on whether they get the right answer (SPS), they universally do badly; but when you ask them how they would approach solving the problem, including what questions they would ask (PFL), then you get a completely different perspective - not only do people do much better on the whole, but more educated people tend to do better, showing that education is apparently teaching some more broad kinds of problem solving (which is otherwise very hard to demonstrate). In addition, when you allow students a bit of time to invent solutions to problems at the start of the class before teaching the standard solution, not only do they perform just as well in a test as those who spend the whole time learning the solution, but they far outperform them on measures of transfer of learning, getting in one case almost triple the score of the control groups. Mind-blowing! When I discovered this article I was slightly shocked and somewhat whiplashed, as I felt forced to change my mind again on discovery learning, to a third position (it has its place at the start of a class learning a new concept, where it can dramatically improve transfer of learning for students). I was sort of ready for it though, as I had been thinking recently that while I had seen a lot of research on discovery learning and more didactic approaches (such as Direct Instruction), I hadn't yet seen anything where the two were used within the same lesson. Well now I have, and the results are astonishing. Enjoy the episode. *** Link to paper: https://aaalab.stanford.edu/assets/papers/2005/Efficiency_and_Innovation_in_Transfer.pdf RELATED EPISODES: Mention of generative learning: 127. Necessary Conditions of Learning by Ference Marton Transfer of learning: 98. Range by David Epstein; 108. Expert Political Judgement by Phillip Tetlock; 110. Transfer of Learning by Robert Haskell Discovery learning: 88. The Failure of Constructivist, Discovery, Problem-based, Experiential, and Inquiry-based Teaching; 90. Discovery learning, the idea that won't die

129. A Transfer of Learning bombshell

I wanted to talk a bit about some areas in which my thinking about education has improved with the addition of nuance, and about the ways in which thinking can be more nuanced.  Desirable difficulty - a case where quantification and the awareness of countervailing forces / costs improved my initial, flawed understanding. Cognitive load theory - a case where I was so enamoured with the power of the model that I had started to equate the it with truth (or confuse the "map" with the "territory"), but a well-put listener comment made me realise that there are phenomena that the theory cannot account for. Motivation - a case where perspectives offered from other cultures and other disciplines undermined my initial confidence in the findings of psychologists.  I also discuss the idea put forward by Ference Marton in discussing the following questions:  Is learning by yourself better than learning by being taught? Does homework enhance learning? Is problem-based learning better than lectures for big classes? Is individualized learning preferable to group work? Is project work a good idea?  Marton writes:  The problem with questions of this kind is that they cannot be answered. It is not that they cannot be answered yet, and it is not because of a scarcity of research funds or a scarcity of good ideas. They are simply imponderable because of the degree of generality. Asking these questions is like asking whether pills are better than operations, or whether a hammer is better than a screwdriver, or whether eating is good for your health.  While I do believe that there are some ideas that can be flatly considered wrong or unhelpful, there is something to say for Marton's view. Ultimately a mature understanding requires a well-developed worldview or philosophy, which can't be transmitted in a single sentence. Questions at the level of generality of "Is eating good for your health?" demand a structure to be put in place explaining the nature of human nutrition and digestion, not simply a "yes" or "no" answer. Enjoy the episode.

128. Nuance

A listener of the podcast by the name of Malin Tväråna (senior lecturer at Uppsala University's Department of Education) requested in a review of the podcast that I cover this book, and so here it is! Ference Marton is a professor of Education at Göteburg University. His big idea is about discernment of important features of a situation (what he calls "critical aspects") being a (the?) key element of learning, and therefore the importance of the nature and quantity of variation in instruction. He explains his ideas in theory at length, after which he provides a number of examples of experiments that provide evidence for his interpretation. This is one of those cases of a simple and apparently obvious idea being particularly fruitful when thoughtfully applied. Of course we can't learn something if we can't notice it, and of course it's difficult to notice something if it's always the same - hence the classic "fish in water" problem. But this retrospectively obvious principle can be used to make learning more effective, and, among other things, is partly responsible for Chinese students doing so well at mathematics. The book also brings a few other interesting ideas to light, such as starting a lesson from "discovery learning" with a problem and following up with instruction causing a kind of pre-testing effect (I have elsewhere on the podcast spoken about the danger of the former and the value of the latter); and the bizarre case of "generative learning", where people do better on a delayed test than on an immediate test. Marton uses his own theory in trying to explain these and other anomalies (who could blame him?), even in cases where I would find it more natural to reach for a different kind of explanation, but I'm grateful for hearing about these counterintuitive tidbits regardless. Thank you again Malin! Were it not for you, I wouldn't have known about this author or this book. Enjoy the episode.

127. Necessary Conditions of Learning by Ference Marton

"Are you left-brained or right-brained?" Brain lateralisation has been known about in neuroscience since the early days, but it has been a taboo over the past few decades since pop science sources distorted the literature and made the topic disreputable. Neuroscientists could detect differences between the hemispheres in different activities, but they were having trouble understanding the big picture of why there was asymmetry at this fundamental level of brain structure. Iain McGillchrist used to be an academic of English literature at the University of Oxford, but after becoming frustrated with what he saw as the over-analysis of poetry so as to make it lose its implicit meaning, decided to change career entirely and pursue medicine. Since that time, he has taken ten years to research and write this book about brain lateralisation and its importance to life, culture, and our moment in history. For me personally, reading this book made me realise that my most commonly used approach to thinking about the mind - cognitive load theory, dividing long-term memory from working memory, and describing the structure and schemata of long-term memory in order to understand the nature of knowledge and learning - never included any reference to brain lateralisation, despite, as it turns out, enormous differences between the two sides. I also had some takeaways regarding my own philosophy and ways of thinking. In this episode, we will be focusing on McGillchrist's characterisation of the differences between the left and right hemispheres of the brain, with references to many findings from scientific papers, as well as overall themes that emerge from this synthesis. While I can see no real practical insights regarding what to do in a classroom, I believe that this book is a major contribution to our understanding of the mind, the brain, and humanity, and therefore it should interest many listeners. Enjoy the podcast.

126. The Master and his Emissary by Iain McGillchrist

Dr Rasmus Koss Hartmann is an associate professor at Copenhagen Business School and author of the article that I covered in the first part of this episode, entitled Towards an Untrepreneurial Economy: the Entrepreneurship Industry and the Veblenian Entrepreneur. In this interview we spoke about where he got the idea, the damage that Veblenian entrepreneurship can do to the economy, urban myths about entrepreneurship, potential flaws of popular mottos such as those promoted in The Lean Start-up by Eric Ries, and the role of entrepreneurship education. Enjoy the episode.

Education Bookcast

Education Bookcast

Get Started

Download the App