Transcript - AI Generated
Interview with Eddie Wu from Wootube
[0:18] Hey everyone and welcome to the Effective Teaching Podcast. Today I have one of the most, probably the biggest guest I've had in terms of how well he's known.
I'm going to be chatting to Eddie Wu from Wootube. He is an educator here in New South Wales, Australia, but he is globally famous for his YouTube channel where he explains maths and basically does like a flip learning type process there with mathematics.
But we're going to chat to him about how he went and grew as a professional, how he got stuck into teaching and the processes of how we can actually all improve as teachers because teaching, you know, it's a science and a craft and we blend that all together.
Eddie's journey into teaching
[0:56] How do we go about making sure that we're the best teachers that we can be but eddie thank you so much for coming and joining me today can you tell us a little bit about how you got started in teaching dan it's a pleasure to be here i got started in teaching i guess on some terms you could say a really traditional way i finished school knew i wanted to be a teacher i'd worked that out actually surprisingly early especially compared to one of my peers so i went to university with the full intent of going into uh whatever i needed to do to become a qualified high school teacher.
Did that degree for four years and then came out and went straight back to school.
[1:33] That makes it sound like a really straight line. But if we sort of take a step back for a minute, when I was in sort of year 10, I think, is probably when I realized that I got this taste of helping other people learn.
And I loved it. I just kind of fell in love immediately with seeing that epiphany, the whiteboard moment that us as teachers are so familiar with.
Falling in love with teaching
[1:56] And I thought, this is brilliant.
I love that I can do something to help other people experience that.
And if I could do that for my whole life professionally, what do they say?
You know, if you love what you do, you won't work a single day in your life.
Early teaching experiences
[2:10] So anyway I went down that journey and I went to the University of Sydney which is where I studied my my degree my major in mathematics and actually computing studies it's a it's a little known fact that I'm qualified to teach software design and all those kinds of things as well haven't done it for a while as you might imagine but I trained to study and teach those and then yeah popped out into schools and have always attended as a student public comprehensive schools schools run by the government since I was a kid and have only ever taught in those as a teacher myself.
And yeah, here we are 15 years later, still loving it.
[2:48] I think we've all had those kinds of experiences as students where we've had the benefit of teaching someone else.
I used to always get harassed. This is going to be funny. In my maths classes, I used to always get harassed to help all the other students.
I used to suck at the actual exams because I didn't care enough.
I never did any prep, but maths was something that I'd say came naturally to me, but I think it's just because my mum was a maths teacher.
And then my mother ended up growing up and being a bit of a maths nerd and went off to uni actually. actually, and then I'd do some, like, special statistics and analysis, and there's some high up, there was, like, six people who were selected to do this course, and he got selected to do it.
He was, yeah, he's a bit of a genius, but that's a different story. He's now a teacher, too.
[3:31] He saw the light, good on him. Yeah, that's right.
I think it wasn't the fact that both his parents were teachers, and that his older brother's a teacher, and his other older brother's a teacher, and his sister is a teacher.
Eddie's journey to improve as a teacher
[3:41] Nothing to do with it, no, no. my family there we're all teaching so you started teaching and then how did you go about the process of improving as a teacher i know a little bit of this story already because i got to hear you not that long ago tell this story but i think it's such a great story i want to hear it again and i think everyone else can benefit from it that your process that you went through to actually go from just a first year out kind of graduate who we all we've all seen them in the classroom They all think they're really, really good.
The kids love them, but they're not necessarily the most effective teachers.
[4:14] No, it's a fascinating area to explore for me, actually, because as you point out, this is something I thought about from early on, but even all of my years into my teaching career now, and as someone whose job, whose primary role it is to deliver professional learning that helps teachers improve, I feel like I've just gone deeper down the rabbit hole and there's more things I'm still learning about it.
But to go back, as you mentioned, to the early days of my teaching journey, even though I knew I liked teaching and I was reasonably good at it, like as in I could say things to people, I could relate to kids well, and I knew that they would understand most of the time and things would be clear.
I was also very, very conscious from pretty much the start that there were some parts of teaching I hadn't mastered.
I'll give you two quick examples, right? So one of them was a lesson that I prepared for a year 11 class on their introduction to differential calculus.
[5:12] And it's something that I, as a student, knew pretty well. And I thought, oh, I'm excited about this lesson. It's going to be great. Planned it all out like I always did.
And then as I started to deliver the lesson, something started to go wrong because I was looking, as many teachers relate to this, looking out at the faces of my students.
And the glazed over eyes of either abject confusion or apathy or just, sir, we've got no idea what you're talking about.
And I kind of had this slow feeling of panic rising in my gut as I thought to myself, this is not working.
[5:48] And number one, I have no idea why. Number two, I've got no alternatives up my back pocket.
I don't know what else I could do to try and make this clearer.
And that lesson was a total train wreck. My kids came out of that really confused.
And I thought to myself, okay, I've got to get better at this, right? So that's my first illustration. And my second illustration is that.
[6:09] You know, as a teacher, you do get little glimpses, even without seeking these out, you get little glimpses of other teachers at work.
And you can pretty quickly see the kids, the students love to be in certain classes more than others.
And some teachers have a way of commanding attention and other teachers, it just seems like the kids know, like, don't even bother in this class. Right.
And I thought, what's going on there? Can I try to to get to the bottom of why the same kid who it's not about like oh is this does this kid really enjoy academic experiences or not um does this kid love to sit down in the classroom or not it was the same kid but responding to different classroom environments responding to different teachers and their practices i thought i want to get to the bottom of this and i didn't i didn't understand i didn't see any pattern or structure that would make sense of it for me so in my first I set out to observe every single teacher at my school.
It's a mid-sized school, so about 60, 65 teaching staff.
And I pretty quickly worked out. I didn't want to just see the maths teachers.
There's so much to learn from other key learning areas and the different styles of a lesson.
A PE lesson outdoors has such different challenges to me in my normal mathematics classroom sitting in rows, hardly get them to stand up, though that did change, which was something I learned from my PE teachers.
[7:36] So I learned every lesson that there was something I would pick up, some practice that I would observe and think, wow, I would love to do that, bring that into my own classroom.
Or I would learn by counterexample, I would see something being done and I would see the kids respond or not respond to it and think, okay, do I do that?
Is that something that I should stop doing?
And I guess sort of the phrase to cap it all off that I think I didn't know back then, but I picked this phrase up from a wonderfully experienced educator a few years ago.
She said, what does one of London know who only London knows?
[8:17] It's a weird phrase. I'll say it again. I'm trying to unpack it.
What does one of London know who only London knows?
If there's someone who's lived in London their entire life, you'd think they know London pretty well, which of course in some senses is true.
But if London is the only thing you've ever experienced, then you kind of become a bit blind to the things that are particular about London that no other place in the world has.
And it's only by going outside of that context that you're so familiar with, then you start to understand understand your own environment and I would say by extension yourself better when you realize oh not everyone does it this way we're really weird or I'm really weird or uh maybe this is a peculiarity that should lean into so that was definitely something that I appreciate all of my colleagues helping me learn particularly in those early years yeah I loved hearing your examples there of things that didn't go well in your classroom I've always wanted to do like an episode of just all the the greatest failures that teachers have ever had because I think a lot of the new teachers particularly that come out and they're like, you go through these experiences.
Learning from failures in teaching
[9:20] Like I remember being dragged in front of the principal's office and being told off by a parent because of something that I'd done in the classroom when I was young and I was foolish and I said something that was partly by mistake but also like in reality I should never have even been engaging in that kind of a conversation with students.
[9:37] So I think it's great to hear teachers' failures because then you get to see how they progress and improve and you went around going around and seeing all the teachers at your school teach uh would have taken a lot of time but did you go through like did you use a template or something these days there's lots of templates universities have all these studies done even on how to go about you know what to observe and how to improve did you use a template like that or did you just go in and sit down and take notes like how did you go about this actual process, this yeah so i i am definitely a verbal processor um and the particular kind of verbal processing that i love the most is with a pen or a pencil in my hand and i'm jotting things down and i definitely knew that i would go in there and you know over the course of a 53 minute period i was going to see some things at the start but even just by the end of that lesson i would have forgotten about i i didn't know much back in about some of those frameworks that you mentioned which i've since discovered um you know by the time that i started teaching the australian professional standards for teachers were things that i had to create my portfolio for and all that sort of thing so i knew they were there but i didn't know them well and i certainly didn't know them well enough to use them as a lens to understand what was happening in the classroom or what wasn't happening in the classroom that came much later so yeah i pretty much went in there with my with with my piece of paper and my pencil.
Observing other teachers in action
[10:57] And I was keeping an eye out particularly for things –.
[11:02] Got a response out of students. And when I say response, I don't mean like, oh, they shouted or they kind of were excited or very negative.
But, you know, sometimes the response that I was looking for was when students switched off, you know, like students are coming in from recess and they're excited and they've got lots of energy going around.
And maybe if the lesson starts off with something interesting, then they're automatically kind of engaged.
But at a certain point, their attention just kind of tapers off or something distracts them they're like i'm just gonna sort of look at my phone that's the thing which doesn't happen in new south wales schools anymore do our new mobile phone policy but back back then you know this was a thing which oh okay we're much more flexible about it when does the student drift off uh when does the teacher do something i don't expect when do for example they would notice something that i didn't notice i'm like watching all of these people and they would pick up on some minute behavior that I didn't even realize was happening.
So I was looking out for those things that when I'm teaching myself and I'm in full flight, it's easy to either not notice because, you know, say for example, I would pay particular attention to certain students in the class because they're, you know, either acting up or they're the ones who always have their hand up.
They're always like, sir, sir, pick me.
[12:18] Those students would easily get my attention when I'm teaching, but there There were others who would absolutely kind of go to the periphery of my vision, if you want to put it in a metaphor, and I would just not realize what they were doing.
So I took that opportunity where I was like, okay, I'm just here to observe.
And I never failed to see something which was surprising or which made me ask questions and want to get to the bottom of things.
[12:43] Yeah i think it's good to see like even as an observer when you go into a classroom like i know because i've done lots of times for the youngest teachers and all that kind of stuff and i've seen lots of older teachers too but as the observer you see a whole bunch of stuff that they miss but then also they see a whole bunch of stuff that you've missed you're like how's this yeah we're both sitting here observing everything that's going on and yet we both we're all missing stuff uh yeah and there's times where things are like when you get experienced teachers you're like You missed this.
He's like, no, I didn't miss that.
I just didn't think it was worth interrupting the entire lesson to adjust that.
Just let that slide. I'll come back to it later if I need to.
But I know that kid's going to get back on task.
And that experience of knowing what to actually address and what not to address and when to address it would have been great to have experienced earlier on, particularly in my career.
I stopped for way too much stuff.
I loved when I started being the person at the front talking a lot, which is a bad habit, I think, for us to get into if that's what we're doing a lot of.
I was very happy, actually, when I switched over to flipped learning and I stopped talking at the front.
It meant that those long lectures that I used to give suddenly were only like 10-minute lessons. You're like, oh, right.
[13:54] It's a whole different way of – that's right. Yeah, it's like, oh, I didn't realize until now that I maybe should have not spent so much time being excited about having the spotlight on me.
I mean, I put a lot of effort into preparing this explanation, but it's not about my teaching. It's about the students learning, right?
Yeah. Yeah. And the ability to be able to check in on everyone's learning while you're doing that kind of thing, it just never works.
Challenges in keeping students engaged
[14:17] You always just get, you know, one or two kids and then you go, okay, that represents the class.
And you keep going. That's not quite the truth.
Teachers' reluctance to be observed
[14:25] Now, did you have, Eddie, when you were going around doing these observations, you went to every teacher's classroom. Did you have any teachers who were like, no, I don't really want you to come into my class to observe me or that felt like they were kind of being invaded?
[14:40] In my teaching history, we actually had our school got a whole bunch of funding to go into this whole process of having all the teachers go through and observe each other's lessons, use a particular template, all this stuff.
And so many teachers just got up in arms about it and were like, no, I don't want people in my classroom.
I'm going to get judged. I might get fired because who knows how good what I'm doing is.
And I remember sitting there thinking, this is crazy.
Like, I loved having people come into my classroom. I don't know if that's just my personality, I guess.
I was quite happy for that. I was looking forward to going and watching other people teach.
But there were all these people that were just really stressed about it and worried about it. Did you have that happen?
Overcoming apprehension in observation
[15:22] Have you seen that? I'm sure you've seen it since you've been teaching now with me, similar type of thing. You started in 2007. Is that right when you started?
Yeah. Yeah, that's exactly right. Yeah, I'm 2006, mate, so one year on here.
[15:35] Good vintage. Yeah, that's right. We're old school now.
I just think that those teachers, you would have seen lots of them, I imagine, teachers who find it very personal to have people come and watch them teach.
Did that happen to you? How did you overcome it? Or how do we address that now anyway?
Yeah, it's such a perceptive observation because absolutely I encountered people who I was quite surprised, especially the first few times it happened.
They were very apprehensive about having someone in their classroom. room.
And I thought to myself, especially early on in my career, it's like, I'm obviously not here in the capacity of a supervisor or a manager.
This is not about me judging you. I'm clearly here to learn. But.
[16:20] I do remember thinking to myself, huh, why is there so much not only emotion, but negative emotion balled up with having someone else in your classroom when there's no stated kind of, you know, I'm here to try and pick apart your teaching or something like that.
I really just said, hey, I'm trying to improve the way that I do things.
Would you mind helping me out?
And even though it did surprise me early on, I've since learned and seeing things into to myself and understanding my own, what drives me and my own motivations, I think I've understood there are valid reasons.
I can definitely see and sympathize with a lot of the reasons why there is reluctance for observations to happen from one teacher to another.
Eddie's fear teaching advanced mathematics
[17:04] Probably the best illustration of this comes from the very first time that I taught mathematics extension too. So I know you've got listeners from all over the place.
So just to translate for people, this is the highest level of mathematics you can teach in the New South Wales High School Certificate.
It's so high, even I didn't study it when I was at school because I love learning all kinds of things. And I particularly love the humanities.
I took a lot of English and drama and history when I was in year 12.
And so I literally just didn't have enough space in my timetable to say, oh, yeah, let's fit four units of maths in here as well. So I didn't do it at school.
[17:43] And I remember the first time after a number of years teaching, I had the opportunity to teach it myself.
And I thought to myself, I'm kind of excited to take on this challenge, but I absolutely was nervous about it.
Partly because the biggest reason was what I just mentioned.
I didn't take it when I was a student. And I felt like.
[18:06] The kids are going to work out any second. Like they're going to see through my facade of being the teacher who knows everything.
They're going to, they're going to figure out that I'm a fraud and I don't know what I'm talking about.
And they're smarter than I am. Like if these guys are taking extension two and I didn't do it when I was at school, they're obviously better mathematicians, like, you know, comparing like age and that kind of thing.
And I was, I was really scared actually. And what that, the expression of that, when I was in that 12 months of teaching that course was that I would burn the candle at both ends.
I'd be up at 3am trying to finish every last question in the exercise I was about to set a few hours later for that year 12 class.
[18:51] Because the thought of them being able to pose a question to me that I would just stand there frozen and not know what to say, or that I would be up at the board and I'd be trying to go through a worst example and i'd make a mistake right that thought terrified me and not only because of um, you know them them working out that i'm not as good a teacher not a smarter person as i was trying to project but also because i felt this huge responsibility for these students i remember hearing from someone at uni when i was on my first prac they said look.
[19:29] We know you're on the learning curve. We know you're early on.
You know, you are barely older than some of the students who you're going to be teaching, but never use it as an excuse.
Don't say, oh, it's just my first time, because for them, it's their only time for learning some things.
They've got this one shot, and you have this privilege, this responsibility to pour blood, sweat, and tears into making sure your lessons are as good as they possibly can be.
Don't just phone it in. in. Don't just go easy on yourself.
Push yourself to be the best teacher that you can, right? And so I have all these complex emotions swirling around in my mind.
And I think that that feeds into any teacher being observed by anyone, a colleague, a peer, a supervisor, that element of fear.
And what if I stuff something up? Because as you pointed out before, Dan, every lesson that that we teach is this series of hundreds of little decisions that we make about which kid to pay attention to or which question to pose or what to say to the kid who walks in a few minutes late and whether we kind of pull them up for, you know, like, where have you been, et cetera, et cetera, or whether we know that kid, we know they're going through a bunch of things, actually probably aware they came from the student counsellor just now.
We're not going to cause a big issue about this, right? Right.
[20:50] There's there's a thousand decisions in every single lesson.
And of course, you're not going to make the perfect one if such a thing exists every single time.
And so to be judged for that is it's a scary moment.
[21:04] And also, I do know that I've worked with teachers who've been, to be frank with it, they've been burned by that experience.
Establishing trust in teacher observations
[21:12] Experience they've they've opened their classroom in good faith and then they've been observed by someone who then went at them afterwards and just tore them to shreds and that's a that's a pain that's a traumatic experience right um especially if you're teaching for quite some time you know you're not perfect but you're trying your best and then you and then you get a really negative piece of feedback and you're like look I I know I'm not perfect but I'm trying right so I think a lot of that feeds into um you know trying to create a culture of psychological safety for people so that they are are ready and open and actually a lot of the work that i do in the new south wales department of education is to lead and support this team of instructional leaders who are spread across the state who work with uh their colleagues to mentor and support them and help them become better teachers and one of the hardest but most important jobs that they do when they arrive in a new school is to develop that trust and rapport with their colleagues who don't know them from a bar of soap so that they know that when this instructional leader comes into their classroom there that instructional leader is for them is is is backing them is supporting them is not there to point a finger um but just to help them become better so i think that that's not easy um but it's really really valuable.
[22:28] Yeah, and I think some of what you were saying there, like even the language that we use, like you were talking a bit there about people coming in and judging other teachers, and I think it's important that we kind of move away from that element of the teacher's not there to judge you.
It's not a scoreboard competition. It's not a, you know, this is not us ranking how good you are.
This is actually, it should be more about, you know, this is collaboration.
This is just general improvement. This is how we improve as a team, you know, because across the school we're a team. We all address different sports.
Teaching as a craft, not just science
[22:56] I feel like it's a bit like cricket. it you know we're all kind of back individually but overall our school you know uh combines together we can achieve great things together as a team so that's the way i view it it's it's a team sport because you know i'm a p teacher so it's a team sport and you have you know teachers they all need to improve like regardless of how good you are you can always improve that's that's the best thing about teaching and it's a it's a craft it's not it's not a science there is science it's involved in it, but how it's executed is very much a craft.
There's so much. You talk about the thousands of decisions you've got to make, so that means every lesson is going to be so different just based on those few small decisions that you make.
[23:37] You did that magician when you shuffle a deck of cards, and it's uniquely always going to be kind of no shuffled deck the same.
It's kind of the same with your lesson. It's never going to be the same lesson again.
Even if it's the same one that you took from last year, you got the same lesson plan, and you go and deliver it, it's going to be different because the students are different.
The classroom may even be different all kinds of stuff so eddie i think part of it how we help our students to.
Shifting language in feedback for improvement
[24:02] Not our students, our teachers, sorry, to be willing to have that in, is to shift the language around and to make sure that when you're going into someone's classroom that you're really clear about your purpose, that you're clear about how feedback is going to happen, and to make sure even if it is a really terrible lesson, we still, like with our students, we still find the good things.
You know, we still find, oh, that's good, that's good, even though these 7,000 things over here are terrible, and we don't give them the 7,000 things, do we?
Like we give them one or maybe two, but you go, hey, work on this first, right?
And I think we need to focus on that kind of approach too with our teachers is to actually go, yeah, these are the things you did well and here's something that you can improve on.
And it's just a much more simple process.
And then you can say, yeah, I'm going to help you to improve on that.
I'm going to do a lesson that you can come and watch over here and I expect you to also give me something that I can improve on because it's not about judging.
It's just about feedback and improving, which as teachers, we really should understand a lot more than what we often show. So, yeah, I hope that makes sense.
I don't know. What do you think?
[25:05] No, I 100% agree, Dan. And I think to myself, actually, a way that I like to encapsulate this, especially when I talk to pre-service teachers, because I do a bit of work.
I actually went back to the University of Sydney, and after 20 years, I am, like you said, old school, right?
So we've got this next generation that we have a responsibility and opportunity to guide and to mentor, just like we were when we were fresh and green like that.
And one of the things I often say to them is the best learners become teachers and the best teachers remain learners by which I mean you know it's not that every every great effective learner becomes a professional educator but that's a bit like you in your in your classrooms when you were a kid you know people would would reach for you because they knew that you understood things deeply enough to be able to explain and that's actually a really hard skill right I think that But Richard Feynman was the one who said, he was a physicist who was not only incredibly intelligent, but known for how good he was at math.
[26:05] Taking complicated concepts like quantum physics and translating that into language that other people could understand he said you don't understand anything truly until you can explain it simply and so so the best learners do become teachers but i think the best teachers remain learners we never go away from that place of uh realizing that there's stuff for us to grow and develop and deepen our own understanding uh you know i think that we fall prey to the what do they call it the curse of knowledge when we know so much that we forget what it's like to not know and then we can no longer connect with a learner and have empathy for when you know doing the mental acrobatics to wrap your head around this new concept was uh new and novel and difficult right so being able to remain deeply connected to the learners who we have in our care i think for For me, it's actually one of the reasons why I didn't realize it at the time, but having not taken those highest levels of maths and actually struggled through mathematics, even though I wanted to understand it as a subject, but it didn't come easily to me, that's been a huge asset to me as a teacher because it's helped me always stay close to the learners who are in my classroom and empathize with them when they're having trouble because they always do.
Learning and Growth
[27:25] Well, let's continue with this idea of learning, Eddie. Tell me, from when you did your observations, how else have you then continued to improve yourself as a teacher?
So there's so many things that exist out there. Which ones have you actually found most beneficial for you as you've been growing as a teacher?
Exploring Professional Development Tools
[27:42] How long do we have to record for this podcast again, Dan?
It's a long list, right? I guess that I'd probably have to say the top two because it's a long list.
There's so many different ways and it's impossible for me to be comprehensive, I guess, with this list.
But the top two would have to be, I'm going to say, engaging with research and evidence in community, community, engaging with research and evidence in community.
And then secondly, and I know this is a bit particular to myself, but maybe it doesn't have to be so much.
It was also the act of recording my classroom lessons, which I've done for the last 12 years now, the vast majority of my teaching career, and being able to sort of reflect in that way. So let me talk about each of those two, right?
I know some people might be watching this recording, but I apologize to the listeners because I'm about to do something visual.
Just behind me, Dan, you can see there's this shelf of books.
It's just sort of a small section of my library.
And what those books are, they're not textbooks.
They're books about the, you know, you talked about science before.
Science is a part of how we teach, even if it's not everything.
It's about, you know, the science of how we learn best and teach effectively.
And those books, a lot of them are about teaching mathematics specifically, but not all of them. A lot of them are about effective professional learning because that's my role.
[29:10] Engaging with what the research and evidence says has really supercharged the way that I think about my own teaching, mainly because even the research and evidence can be quite intimidating, particularly when, I mean, sometimes I will pick up a research paper and I barely understand the title, let alone, you know, like, and to be in fairness, the title is like a paragraph, right? It's this long, pregnant sentence.
I'm like, who came up with this thing, right? Anyway, I look at it and I need it.
Yeah, for sure. I need to sit with a dictionary beside me just to understand the first few paragraphs.
[29:47] Some research and evidence can be very difficult to access.
But I'm really grateful. Over the last 10, 15 years, this has improved so much.
There's work out there like building thinking classrooms and teach like a champion and growth growth mindsets, stuff that is relatively easy to engage with.
And there are such takeaways, such fantastic takeaways in these pieces of these studies and these pieces of work that sort of encapsulate people's experience that I'm a big believer that, life's too short to only learn from your own mistakes you have to learn from other people's as well and that's all research and evidence is it's a systematic approach to thinking okay can we consolidate and then express in in a helpful and clear way what lots and lots of us over time have learned about good teaching and learning that's that's really really been helpful and i mentioned not just engaging research and evidence and reading it um i should say not just reading like listening.
I love to listen to audio books and podcasts when I'm out on a long run or things like that, or doing chores around the house.
[30:54] Those things help, but what makes it 10 times better is doing that in community.
I love gathering with my team of, like I said, instructional leaders across the state.
And one of the things we do every fortnight is we have a book club and we'll all be saying, okay, let's read chapter one over the next couple of weeks.
And then let's think about what that makes us think and the questions that it tickles in our minds and the things we disagree with or the things that resonate with us.
And just having those conversations, I love that with our fail, in my little subset of this big book club, the three or four people that I'm chatting with over those 45 minutes, they will always, every time, notice something that I haven't noticed when we're reading and so it just in enriches and deepens the the value that i get out of that research and evidence so that's probably number one and then number two like i said.
[31:47] I didn't start a YouTube channel with the intent, with the plan of that being a way for me to professionally develop myself.
That was definitely not the plan, but there is nothing as objective as a video camera in your classroom, capturing every single word, every minute movement, movement, all of the little turns of phrase that I had no idea I use and overuse again and again and again.
You know, Dan, you were talking before about a teacher noticing something in the classroom and then, you know, another teacher noticing a different thing in the classroom, right?
You can have five teachers in a classroom, and this literally has happened, seen this happen, all group observing a lesson, right?
And then they, you know, they all take notes and then and they debrief afterwards.
And then you play back the video.
And there's something in the video that not one of the teachers has observed.
And it's a bit like that famous cognitive experiment. I won't entirely spoil it for people who haven't experienced it before.
But when someone plays a video for you and says, okay, there's a bunch of people wearing black clothes in this video and a bunch of people wearing white clothes, and they're all passing a basketball around.
And I want you to focus on the white clothed people and how many times they past the ball, right? And you're like furiously counting.
And by seeing you nodding, I think you've done this experiment before, right?
[33:13] And yeah, it's so powerful.
And again, not to spoil it, but even after 30 seconds of watching that video like a hawk, there are things that slip past our attention and our cognitive blinders that are down.
And it's just unbelievable to people. Yeah.
The first time you see it and they play it back to you and you're like, I can't believe that that happened and I didn't see it.
So a video by contrast, it sees and it hears everything.
And that's been a really powerful way for me to inspect my own teaching and make it better because I realize I can improve lots of different aspects that I didn't notice in the first place.
[33:53] That's great, Eddie. I think one of the questions I had listed here was about how you know, you doing YouTube actually helps you professionally grow.
I found too, even just, you came and spoke, for example, at Google to a bunch of Google certified, whatever, you know, teachers, coaches, trainers, and innovators, or whatever else we all are.
But I found even just being part of that group and the connections I've made and the conversations I've had with the people in there, absolutely transformative for a lot of the stuff that I do. So it's been absolutely amazing to be part of those kind of networks.
And reading through books and book clubs and that kind of stuff is great.
I mean, there's actually fantastic research around the most successful people in the world.
And the most successful people in the world, the top CEOs of all the highest companies and that kind of stuff, they read 62 books a year.
Compared to the average person in the world who reads one or two in a year.
And if you want to be a fantastic teacher, I think part of what you need to do is actually engage, you know, in whether it's the research or whether it's, you know, summarised research in natural books that make it a little bit more accessible for us.
[34:59] But we should be, you know, I don't expect you to read 62 books a year.
You're busy enough generally as a teacher.
But, you know, to be able to constantly be in books and learning from books and, you know, having other people read books and give you information from those books is actually fantastic because you can learn so much.
I remember when I first started doing flipped learning, it was actually just from a conversation I had with my deputy principal who happened to also be my head teacher at the time, and she just mentioned something about flipped learning from a workshop she went to.
And I went, oh, that sounds really cool. I'm going to do that.
And I just straightaway implemented that with my U11 and 12 PBHPE classes and that just led me down a whole path of flipping and creating way better videos and, you know, I started off recording over PowerPoints because, you know, it was before you thought about actually making proper videos of yourself or recording yourself in class.
I didn't think I was quite up to that. So well done for that.
Advice for New Teachers
[35:57] I think it's really, there's so many ways that we can improve ourselves as teachers.
If you have a teacher who's just getting started, so there's a few different teachers I'm going to ask you to give advice to but let's start with our first year they just graduated this is their first week back at school that we're recording this what advice do you have for them as they go about, actually you know starting their career as a teacher yeah wow um so many places that my mind goes but i guess maybe feeding off of this conversation i think that maybe the most obvious thing to do and i i say it's obvious but i'm embarrassed by the fact that i didn't do it even even though what I'm about to say makes it seem completely ridiculous that I didn't do it.
But remember, we were talking about me getting into other people's classrooms, right? And how useful that was to me.
[36:46] By the same token, as we've been talking about a lot today, Dan, go take the initiative to get other people into your classroom and to, you know, cast their eye over the way that you do things.
And they'll notice things about how you, you know, the style that you take or the way that you ask questions or you don't ask questions or the way that you use wait time or the way that you group students or you don't group students.
They'll notice things that you didn't even know to notice, right? right?
Because their eyes are attuned to, and their ears are attuned to things which you haven't yet developed because, you know, you still need time.
I remember reading in, I'm pretty sure it was Malcolm Gladwell's book, Outliers, that one of the things that separates experts from novices.
[37:27] Is that experts see structure where novices just see a tangled mess and they don't yet have the the experience to know, oh, that's a thing you should pay attention to, right?
A chess master will be able to notice particular configurations of pieces and say, oh, there's a strategic weakness.
Whereas a novice might look and just see a jumble of pieces all over and there's nothing particularly noteworthy, right?
And so as early career teachers, we all begin in that novice place. So get people in.
Don't just go and seek out that information. Have the humility to say, say, please come in and look at what I'm doing and give me some ideas, right?
And that give ideas thing is also really important.
Dan, you're talking about the fact that every lesson that we give, you know, us year to year, even if we're teaching, quote unquote, the same syllabus concept, we'll teach it differently because we're changing and our students are different, all that kind of thing.
One of the things I learned in that first year of observing all all those teachers was I would see a teacher do a thing and it would be amazingly effective, right?
It's like, whoa, rowdy year nine on a Friday afternoon. And you know.
[38:37] Greg McNulty, he just looked at the students.
He just had this gaze in his eyes and he just stood there mid-sentence.
He stopped explaining whatever he was explaining and he just looked at them.
And suddenly, he just commanded silence.
And I was like, wow, that's amazing.
I'm going to give that a go, right? And you can probably predict that fell flat on its face as fast as you can imagine. I thought, well, what went wrong?
I did exactly the same thing Greg did. and that's because i i wasn't and i am not greg right it's not as though even though there are a bunch of things which we can say yeah overall all students and all teachers will benefit from doing x there are certain stylistic things that come from the teacher's personality and who you are you've got to work out what those things are right and so the best way to work those things out is to try all the different things and have lots of different teachers come to you and say hey try try this, try that, and not to be disheartened if they don't work, but to know you're in the process of working out what does fit you as a teacher.
[39:42] I know this is a weird direction to go in, but what this reminds me of is when my, when my oldest child was born, when my daughter was born and we were still in those early days, my wife and I stay in the hospital and you know, three, four days that we spent there before we got discharged and took baby home on our own and and all that kind of thing.
And I remember the growing sense of frustration that my wife and I had, particularly my wife, as you'll see in a second, when nurse after nurse after nurse would come in and they would say, you're breastfeeding that child wrong.
Here's how you should do it instead. And the second or third time it happened, we found it useful because we were like, oh, thank goodness, because it's not really working.
And thanks for giving us a better tip. But then Then when the sixth and the seventh and the eighth nurse told us and they like every successive one gave us different advice.
We're like, we're going mad, aren't we?
Like, I think, I think someone's playing a practical joke on us because every single one is telling a different way.
And it was just so maddening until it dawned on us that every, every baby is different.
Every, every parent is different.
[40:51] You've got to work out the way that works for you. and it may maybe it'll be one of these six or seven or eight methods maybe it's a ninth or tenth one that no one's told you yet and you've got to find out teaching feels quite similar to that you've got to work out a lot of the styles and strategies that fit you and so so early career teacher be patient with yourself take the time to find out what that is and don't be disheartened if it doesn't quite work the first time often it takes quite a few tries, Yeah, they do say that an expert needs at least 10,000 hours of actual practice or putting in with that particular skill.
And I actually dive into that kind of research because I love that kind of stuff.
And it's not even just 10,000 hours.
It actually has to be 10,000 hours that has explicit feedback, basically built around it.
I can't remember the word now, whatever practice it's called, but deliberate practice, I think maybe.
But it's that idea of, I'm working on this, I need feedback on that.
I'll get better at that, then I'll pick the next thing, I'm going to get feedback on that.
And it's 10,000 hours with a coach, basically, that you need to be able to become an expert.
And I think one of the things that our system, it's getting better at setting up.
I think these days the new teachers who come out, they get mentors, they often get extra time off to learn and develop and do some planning for their lessons and stuff.
At least they're meant to, whether or not they get it or not. Yes.
[42:17] But yeah i think that element of having that time to improve and to you know do you use books and stuff often as that element of getting feedback to improve what i'm doing and then i'll get someone to come and watch me teach you know i'll go and watch people teach i think that's that's a fantastic thing for us to be building in generally across our whole all of our systems to improve that, now any word about our teachers who have got it up that 10 000 hours uh they're sitting here at at the moment, maybe they're a head teacher or they're just a really experienced classroom teacher, maybe they're a deputy or assistant principal, depends on where you are.
[42:53] What kind of advice would you give them for how they can continue to improve?
Because often we get to that point where we're like, well, everyone around me, you know, I'm coaching all of them.
And I know that there's an element of, you know, I'm going to learn from those who I coach. That's the thing.
But how do they go about beyond that? that how do they connect and improve beyond just the coaching that they're already doing, i think that the first place that my brain goes thinking about experienced educators who are really trying to go to that next level maybe they feel like they've reached a bit of a plateau um and they're like look i i feel like i mean i'm good i'm pretty i'm pretty good at what i do i know that i'm competent but i want to i want to deepen my expertise and and challenge myself more the the first place my brain goes is put yourself in a place where you know you're a novice right and go out on a limb what would i love that uh great diagram well i mean whatever you want to call it where there's like this circle and it says like the comfort zone right and then there's this dot outside of it there's an arrow that points to it and says this is where the magic happens right so getting out of our comfort zone i i still remember my first step into leadership like formal leadership within a school, I should say, when I became a head teacher of mathematics, man, in that first year, if I got a dollar for every time that I thought –.
[44:18] Is it too late to hit undo? Like, can I go back to where I felt like I knew what I was doing and I was comfortable and all that kind of thing?
I'd be a rich man today. It was harrowing, actually, going through that.
[44:32] The early part of a learning curve is always super steep, right?
And it makes you question your own identity. Like, am I any good at anything anymore?
I don't know. So that's probably the first place my mind goes.
The second place my mind goes is this phrase I learned from a piece of research about social networks and it talked about the strength of weak ties the strength of weak ties there's this idea that in terms of all of the people who we know and that we relate to and and interact with there are there are strong ties these are people who you live close to work close with spend a lot of time around right and you know there's that phrase you You know, you are the average of the five people you spend the most time around, right?
So we pick up things unconsciously, sometimes good and bad from the people we are closely tied to, right?
So those strong ties are obviously very important in the formation of who we are and what we do with that.
But there's something unusual and special that happens with weak ties.
These are the people who actually, you don't cross paths with them a lot, maybe hardly Hardly ever.
Maybe you see them only once a year at that conference that you'd like to attend.
Or maybe they are someone who you bump into because they're a friend of a friend, right?
So you never regularly reach out to them, but then you see them at a party or a wedding or something like that.
[45:58] Those weak ties, even though they don't interact with you regularly and frequently, there's a unique strength to those weak ties because by virtue of them being far away from you and separated from you and walking in different circles to you, they are going to know things and experience things that you might never in 20 years of your work encounter just in the everyday, right?
And so those weak ties can add really important value into how you think about yourself because they will ask questions that you never thought to ask or they will introduce you to practices or ideas that are literally foreign to you.
I remember when I was in Dubai a few years ago for this global education conference.
It was an incredible experience.
[46:50] And I was meeting people from, you know, forests in Colombia and a Canadian teacher who lived up in the Arctic Circle.
And this amazing teacher who taught art and textiles in London and lived in a high population of migrant area, could speak all these different languages, interact with her kids.
And their parents. Uh, and she, by the way, went on to win a million us dollars in this thing called the global teacher prize. That's what we're in Dubai for.
And these incredible people, I'm sure that was a factor. I mean, she's also just an incredible human being.
Um, Andrea Zafiraku, if you're listening, a huge fan, but you know, it's, it's those people who maybe I've actually not crossed paths with them ever since.
Maybe I've just, you know, stayed in touch with them on WhatsApp or something like that, but they would ask me questions about the way that I did things that...
[47:46] No one had ever asked me from here within Australia or in my little, little orbit within Sydney.
And those things have been like a, like a firecracker in my life and have made me question things in a way that I never otherwise would.
So, so there's experienced educators out there. I would encourage them to, to seek out those weak ties.
It's easier than ever with, you know, the access we have to technology and things like that.
And even though I will freely admit some social media platforms are absolutely dumpster fires that you would want to avoid at every opportunity other places are just wonderful places to connect with people who yeah you're you're might never meet in real life but nonetheless can really uh help you see things from a different perspective and will grow you as an educator couldn't recommend it highly enough so basically join youtube.
Achieving Work-Life Balance
[48:39] That's one way of doing it yeah that's right that's right just get yourself on there and make lots of videos uh the other thing that i want to ask you for one of the things i do a lot with teachers is i try and help them to reduce their workloads our stats say that teachers are working you know 54 hours or more a week on average and so what can we do to help them to reduce that workload regardless of where they are at in their career what advice do you like what strategies did you use as you were going through to make sure that you you've got a family how did you still manage to get home and see your kids before they went to bed uh and actually have some time with them uh how do you make sure that you've got that balance that's happening with teaching because teaching can it's one of those jobs it can eat up literally every minute of your life if you let it uh so how can we go about making sure that we help everyone to to reduce that down to something that's manageable where they still have lots of time to do other things.
[49:31] I think one of the most important things to acknowledge with this, Dan, is that obviously there are no silver bullets.
There's no, oh, just do these five easy steps and the problem is solved.
The way I've started to think about it, especially as I've got three kids, they're in high school and primary school, and as they've gotten older, the complexities of life have changed and grown.
I think the way that I've started to think about it, you talked about balance before, right? right?
I've started to think about it as balance is a verb, not a noun.
[50:06] Balance is a verb, not a noun. Now I know there's going to be an English teacher out there who's going to yell at me and say, wait, grammar wise, actually balance can be a noun.
But what I mean is that thinking of balance as this elusive idea out there that I'm just, I'm just running after it. One day I will find it.
I've found balance, right?
I think that's a mirage. It's a rainbow that you will chase forever and never reach because our lives keep on changing.
Our family circumstances change, the nature of work changes.
I mean, we've transformed so much as we've lived through this global pandemic over the last few years.
Life keeps changing.
[50:47] Education and school keeps keeps changing. I think it's actually a really demoralizing thing to imagine that there is some mythical balance that we can perfectly reach and then we've nailed it, right?
I think it's much more helpful to think of balance not as a noun, but as a verb.
It's a constant act of looking at yourself, inspecting, thinking about the seasons of your life and taking moments to pause and reflect.
Even though I know we get smashed for it by people who are non-educators, i'm going to put them in quote marks right the holidays that we get between each school term, you know non-educators like you guys get it so easy right uh obviously the teachers who are listening know we we work through holidays we work a lot actually there's so much planning and marking and assessment writing face-to-face time i'm pretty sure right exactly that's 100 now obviously i don't need to go over that but i think it's really wonderful to use that time to pause reflect take stock and say okay.
[51:48] Where's the ship at? What course are we running at the moment?
Are we headed in the right direction or actually are we just exhausted?
Can we look for the signs?
Like, have we gotten sick a lot this term? And when we spend time with our family and our loved ones, are we able to, you know, have those warmth of relationships that feed and nourish us?
And I say that in full knowledge of the fact that even though this shocks people, like, I think, you know, Dan, because I think I mentioned it on the day, I'm like 85, 90% introvert.
I mean, for those people who believe in measuring such things, right?
For me, spending time with other people, I mentioned conferences before, right?
I love conferences and I also find them exhausting.
After a full day of interacting with lots and lots of people, I need to go back to my room and curl up in the fetal position and just be quiet for a while, right?
Even as someone who is so deeply introverted, I know we we were built for relationships right uh no man is an island and so those kinds of things uh they ebb and flow in our lives as well I remember learning early on uh my my oldest child was born in my first year of full-time work which you can think of as either uh you know brave or stupid depending on uh which way you know how that went and all that kind of thing but I I remember resolving to myself that even though I do plenty of work during school holidays.
[53:16] And I resolved that if my children approached me during those two-week breaks or over the summer and they wanted to talk or they wanted to play a board game, I resolved that I would never refuse.
If I was in the middle of doing some work, I would find another time to do it because I knew that during school term, I would be focused on trying to mark a set of papers and I needed to get it done by the next day.
And I would have to not spend as much time with my kids as I wanted.
And so that that balance was a constant tug of war and i think just reconciling myself to the fact that yeah this is what it is and there's a reason why if you watch someone who's a tightrope walker right these things are amazing terrifying to me i'm scared of heights but i watch them and they hold that really long beam right and it looks like it must be like how does that help them to hold this really heavy object out in front of them uh or out in their hands to you know walk walk across this high height and just tiptoe their way along?
And the answer is they are using it to balance, balance as a verb.
You watch their minds and their arms as they are constantly adjusting and feeling the wind as it's pushing them in this way or that way.
And it is pretty amazing to watch.
[54:30] And we all as educators do the exact same thing every day as we maintain that tension tension between the work that we engage in and that we love and also every other aspect of our lives whether it's as I've mentioned you know relationship or it's it's diet or exercise these kinds of things I think just being vigilant and always being brave enough to say okay I'm not doing this quite right now let's adjust let's let's compensate and let's let's do it better that's probably my my top tip for doing that as best as we can well anyone thank you so much for for coming on and joining me to do this interview.
It's been fantastic to chat with you. Lovely to catch up and I'll let you go because I'm sure you've got a very busy day for the rest of today.
[55:16] Thanks so much, Dan.
Well, how good was that to sit down and chat with Eddie and to learn about his journey, his successes, his failures, and to benefit from his years of experience?
I can't, I just, yeah, it's amazing when these fantastic educators give up their time so that other people can learn. So thanks so much, Eddie.
And I hope the rest of you get lots out of that episode. Make sure that you hit the subscribe button if you haven't, but otherwise, hope you have a fantastic day.
Enjoy your week, and we'll chat to you again soon.