Carl Hendrick On The Science That Actually Improves Learning

We unpack what actually drives learning, why engagement is a poor proxy for understanding, and how to align curriculum, instruction, and assessment for long-term memory. Carl Hendrick challenges fads, makes a case for explicit instruction and retrieval, and explores where AI can help without doubling the workload.

• Defining learning as change in long-term memory
• Why learning styles and similar fads fail
• Curriculum as the primary lever for improvement
• Explicit instruction before independent tasks
• retrieval practice that targets hinge knowledge
• Aligning curriculum, instruction, assessment
• Limits of lesson observations as evidence
• Instructional coaching over grading teachers
• Smart uses of AI for planning and feedback

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Carl will be in the UAE for our Middle East School Leadership Conference on January 29th in Dubai at Al Habtoor Grand Hotel and Resort. www.schoolleadersme.com.

Please do register at schoolleadersme.com

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome And Guest Introduction
• 1:34 Events And Sponsor Shout-Out
• 3:02 Carl’s Early Career And Mistakes
• 4:35 Debunking Learning Styles And Fads
• 6:40 Learning vs Performance And Memory
• 8:48 Defining The Science Of Learning
• 12:00 Working Memory Limits And Sequencing
• 14:30 Explicit Instruction And Retrieval Practice
• 18:10 Curriculum First: Diet Not Workouts
• 21:45 What Leaders Should Observe Instead
• 26:10 Coaching Over Graded Observations
• 29:25 AI For Curriculum, Assessment, Feedback
• 35:45 Risks, Workload, And Practical Next Steps
• 38:05 Closing Remarks And Event Invite

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:29

You are listening to the Teach Middle East Podcast. Connecting, developing, and empowering educators.

SPEAKER_01: 0:43

Hey everyone, this is Lisa Grace. On this episode of the podcast, I have my special guest, Carl Hendrik, and Carl is a cognitive science learning science specialist who has written books on the subject. He continues to speak globally on the subject of learning sciences, and we're going to be talking to him on the podcast about all things learning science. If this is your first time listening to the Teach Middle East podcast, please hit subscribe. I also want to shout out our sponsor for this episode, Oric Sky Education. They are bringing Carl over to the UAE for our Middle East School Leadership Conference on January 28th and 29th in Dubai. So if you're listening to this podcast before that date, please do register at schoolleadersme.com. Now enjoy this episode. Hey everyone, Lisa Grace here for the Teach Middle East Podcast. Thank you so much for tuning in. Today I have Carl Hendrix with me. Well, it's Hendrick actually. There is no S on that. I will correct myself on this. I wish there was.

SPEAKER_02: 1:51

I wish there was.

SPEAKER_01: 1:51

I will correct myself live on this podcast because we're just going to have to go with it. Carl is known for his work in learning science. He's written books, he's taught the talk, he's walked the walk, and he is on his way here. Or maybe by the time you're hearing this, he would have already been here. But he's coming over to the UAE to keynote two special events. One, the Middle East School Leadership Conference Day Two at Al Hapto Grand, and also the Abu Dhabi Teachers Conference at Al-Yasmina Academy in Abu Dhabi. And so before he gets here, if you're lucky enough to hear this podcast before he does, then please make sure you come along and listen to him live at these or either of these two events. Carl, welcome to the podcast.

SPEAKER_02: 2:40

I'm delighted to be here.

SPEAKER_01: 2:41

Why learning science? What's gotten you into this field?

SPEAKER_02: 2:45

Yeah. So I started teaching in an inner city London school 20 years ago now, if you can believe that. And for the first five years of my career, I really had very little understanding of how learning happens. And so I was doing things and making decisions that were at best guesswork and at worst probably you could best describe it as malpractice. The kind of thing that if a doctor was doing it, they'd be struck off. One of the things that was sort of very prevalent at the time was learning styles, the idea that you should teach content to match the preferred learning style of a particular student. So what that meant in practice was that you were having to design and plan three lessons for every one lesson. So you were making a lesson plan, and I was doing one set of resources for the visual learners, one set of resources for the kinesthetic learners, and one set of resources for the auditory learners. I since learned that there's absolutely no evidence to support that at all. Obviously, the content determines the instruction or the form of delivery. What I ended up was I was in a culture where teachers were working twice as hard as the kids, and half the amount of learning was going on. So it led me to try to find what's the best available evidence about learning? And it led me to cognitive science and it led me to things around working memory limitations, long-term memory, schema building. What are the levers you can pull in a classroom to help students learn things? And I learned that one of the most powerful levers are things like retrieval practice. So testing. Testing is as Robert Bjork calls it, a learning event. Not something that you do at the end of learning, but it's something that actually drives learning. So I began to read a lot of research in that field and began to see that this is stuff that teachers need to know. This is really, really helpful if you're teaching students at whatever age, it's super, super helpful. And it's also, I think, allows teachers to make more informed decisions in their classroom and become, I think, have it have a sort of a toolkit or a kind of an arsenal of weapons or and and strategies that you can use. So I did that, and then I started working with um different people. And I was at a school when where I was appointed head of research, and the job there was to try to filter out what evidence would be helpful to school leaders and be helpful for people making decisions about curriculum, instruction, and assessment. Then I wrote a book called What Does This Look Like in the Classroom, which was essentially trying to take questions from real teachers, put them to experts, and get some sort of dialogue going. And then that's that's how I started. And then I wrote some books with Paul Kirschhner, and now the work that I do is pretty much in that sort of in-between phase between here's what the science says, here's what schools are doing, school leaders and teachers, how can we uh bridge the gap? So a lot of the work I do now is sort of translating evidence into something that schools and leaders can use.

SPEAKER_01: 6:14

So that piece about learning styles that you discovered was absolute rubbish is still pervasive till today. And so there are a lot of misconceptions about learning in the classroom that teachers hold on to. What are some of those that you've discovered over the years, those illusions that we keep following?

SPEAKER_02: 6:35

Learning styles is one that we have absolutely no evidence to support it. But some other ones are more deceptive. So the idea that uh learning and performance are two different things. The idea that you can somehow use certain things as proxy indicators of learning in a classroom. The idea that a leader can go into a room and measure learning through engagement, for example, is a very bad indicator of learning. Uh, things like kids repeating things back, nodding their heads. Learning is much more, I would describe it as being, it's circular in nature. So, for example, we can get kids to perform in a lesson. We can get them to parrot things back, we can get them to look like they're engaged, look like they're enjoying themselves, look like they're learning stuff. But if there isn't that change in long-term memory, then to what extent can we say they've learned it? I'm defining learning, this is Paul Kirschner's definition, as a change in long-term memory. If the students have not remembered the thing that you've taught them next Tuesday, then can they do anything with it? Can they use it? Can they be creative? Can they be problem solvers? Can they think critically? You can't think about something you don't know. Knowledge is something you think with. So that idea of, well, if the kids are engaged, if they're kind of, you know, running around and being busy, then learning must be happening. That I think is one of the major misconceptions about learning. So, what do we know about how learning happens? Well, essentially, we're talking about three things. We're talking about curriculum, what you're teaching, instruction, how you teach that curriculum, and assessment, how do you know they've learned it? And really, the alignment between those three things determines how well that student will be able to think critically about something in a week, two weeks, three weeks' time, because we don't want them just to be able to parrot stuff off in a classroom. We want them to have that knowledge, we want them to be confident learners, to be able to think critically in the long term. So that'd be one thing. There's a whole range of stuff like um multiple intelligences, um, you know, most stuff that's kind of faddish. The idea that communication is, you know, 90% nonverbal, what else is a myth? You know, Bloom's taxonomy is another one that was never, you know, Bloom never came up with that triangle. That was come up by business consultants much, you know, much after the fact. The idea that knowledge is the least important part of learning is profoundly wrong. You know, knowledge is an integral part of learning. And again, you can't think about something you don't know. Like try and do it. Try and think critically without having anything to think with. And we have privileged 21st century skills, critical thinking, all of these things without specifying, well, what does critical thinking look like? It looks like a particularly structured form of knowledge. And we we're learning this now through AI. We're looking at how AI thinks and structures knowledge, and a lot of what critical thinking intelligence, it's structured knowledge. It's things that are, you know, in any given domain, there's a set of knowledge components that more stick together and work together in order for that thing to function. And so if you don't know something, if you don't know the meaning of a word, 21st century skills doesn't help you. The best you can do is start guessing. And guessing is not learning. So for me, thinking about knowledge, how it's structured, what's the best format that that that the learner can encounter those steps and that knowledge to lead towards this more kind of profound and critical form of thinking? That's it in a sort of a media-friendly sound bite.

SPEAKER_01: 11:02

You know what? I want to go back, Carl. Go for it.

SPEAKER_02: 11:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 11:06

Help me out here. If any of my listeners don't know, what does it mean when we talk about learning science or the science of learning?

SPEAKER_02: 11:14

Science of learning is an amalgamation of four disciplines: cognitive psychology, education psychology, neuroscience, which is much less important. But cognitive science, really, when we talk about the science of learning, we're talking about a movement that's probably 70 years old, 75 years old. In the 1950s, you had what was called the cognitive revolution. You had a bunch of scientists, people like George Miller and others, who started to really think carefully about the interaction between memory, short-term memory, long-term memory. How does the human mind remember stuff? How long does it take to forget stuff? How many things can you hold in your working memory before something gets cut out? Now, this was first measured by Ebbinghaus in the 1880s, but it really starts to become a science in the 50s and 60s. And then what you had were these models of the mind that were created around working memory, long-term memory. What is the limits of working memory? The number one thing any teacher or school leader needs to know if you have planning instruction is how many things can the kid hold in their mind, new things, before they lose attention. Miller in the 50s measured this and he said that number is seven plus or minus two. We now think that number is near to four. Now that's unbelievably important for kids, because we are asking kids to do that every single day. Here's one thing, okay. Here's another thing, yeah, here's another thing. The extent to which the student has stuff in their long-term memory to understand those things determines how they can work with that new knowledge. So the second thing is then, is how do you get the stuff into your long-term memory? What's the most effective way? If I want to learn a language, if I want to learn history, if I want to learn the scientific method, if I want to learn us about Shakespeare, there needs to be some generative aspect to that. You don't learn passively. In other words, lecturing has its place, but you're not going to learn if someone's talking at you for 90 minutes. By the same token, discovering things for yourself is another really bad way to learn stuff. So what we're talking about with effective learning is we have evolved to share enormous amounts of information, extremely complex information. And we do it by sequencing that knowledge, explaining it step by step, building up that knowledge. As Dan William reminds us, understanding is remembering in disguise. You sort of draw together things that you think you knew, and they come together to form a new thing. So learning science is that. So instructional design is leveraging that in architecture of human uh memory. And it's the most important thing because if we're not using that, then what are we using? We're using vibes or guesswork or hunches or fads or gimmicks. So, in order to for our profession, I believe, to become something like engineering or science or medicine, then we need an agreed-upon body of knowledge. And that body of knowledge for me is the science of learning or cognitive science.

SPEAKER_01: 15:52

Makes sense. You know, when you were talking earlier, you were saying learning cells debunked. Maslow's um, what's that one, the the triangle?

SPEAKER_02: 16:02

Room's taxonomy.

SPEAKER_01: 16:03

Room's taxonomy, that's also out the window. What do school leaders, educators need to bear in mind when they're adopting these pedagogies, these theories, these things into schools? Because a lot of us, we thought those were legit. What are we missing?

SPEAKER_02: 16:25

Well, I think that learning is a lot like anyone who's gotten in shape or tried to lose weight, they know that 90% of it is diet. You can't outrun a bad diet, you can't out-crossfit if you're just having a bad diet. And curriculum is the same thing. You cannot out-teach a bad curriculum. So the first thing is what is the knowledge you're teaching? How is it sequenced? How does the knowledge build upon you? Like we do this really well with early reading. There's there's very little disagreement now about the way to teach early reading, systematic synthetic phonics, and then fluency, and then they build on that. Nobody gives the four-year-old a book and goes, right, just discover for yourself how to read it. There's not many discovery learning driving instructors. There's not many dentists who are going, Well, I'm just gonna try it this way, because it's like, you know, I think this works for me. Yeah, teachers are doing that all the time. They're going, Oh, well, uh, here's a news thing I've seen on Pinterest last night. I'm gonna go in and try that. And I mean, imagine imagine going into your doctor, and he's going, Well, I know what the Science says, but I'm gonna do it this way because this is what works for me. So I think the first thing would be to think about what is it you're teaching the kids in the unit? What's the best sequence curriculum that we have? And then the instruction, what you're teaching the kid determines how you teach it. And really not to be focused on activities over knowledge. I think a big mistake we make in schools is we think activities first. You know, like the person trying to get fit, they think about, well, what am I gonna do to get fit? I know, I'll just I'll do yoga without actually thinking about, you know, their diet or or you know, anything else. So knowledge correctly sequenced, 99% of people will learn things. We know that to be true. People with, you know, even people with SEN difficulties, especially people with learning difficulties, my own door is autistic, and I have been on this long journey trying to find out well what's the what's the best learning environment for her. And actually, again, it's like nutrition. She doesn't, you know, if you want to learn uh uh the uh letter sound correspondences, there's a really good way for any kid to learn that. She just has a problem sitting down and it, you know, on uh staying at the table, but that's fine. But the nutrition is the same for her. If she eats a lot of haribos, she's she's the same kind of physical body as her sister. So she just has behavioral changes. So I think learning science basically allows us to make really good decisions about curriculum instruction assessment in a way that is, you know, we have decades of evidence uh on this. And I think the problem we have is that most teachers are trained in departments or universities where there's little or no cognitive science. And I think that's something that is changing, something that is, you know, has to change if we're going to become a more professional profession.

SPEAKER_01: 19:54

Talk to me about the use of retrieval practice then, because a lot of talk now is that teachers no longer need to be the fountain of knowledge, teachers no longer need to impart knowledge, kids can go and get knowledge anywhere and come and do this, that. How does that sit alongside retrieval practice work in classrooms?

SPEAKER_02: 20:20

Great question. Well, first of all, I I totally disagree with uh when people say I mean, the idea that the most knowledgeable person in the room should be the one who talks the least is ridiculous as it sounds. If you're teaching a bunch of 14-year-olds about Shakespeare, the person who should be explaining it at the start, at the beginning, is the teacher. The kids shouldn't be guessing their way towards an answer. That's incredibly inefficient. What I would say is you want explicit instruction up front. You want very clear explanation of what the thing is. And then as students become more knowledgeable, then you release them to be able to uh use that knowledge and discover things for themselves, but only when they have very good schemas of knowledge about that thing. Um, so retrieval is an extremely powerful thing. So, for example, if you teach a key concept on a Monday, and it's something like um the causes of World War II, and there's a key thing you want the kids to know. Not like stuff that's not really that important, like certain dates, or you know, although that is important, but there'll be certain kind of really important critical things to know. For example, if you're teaching Shakespeare, something like what is a soliloquy, it's a speech that the characters make at the front of the stage. That's a really pivotal hinge piece of knowledge. You want kids retrieving that a bunch of times so they don't forget it. So they don't get to three or four weeks down the line and they're going, yeah, I I've forgotten the thing that we spent an hour on, you know, a couple of weeks ago. As a general rule, 20% of the knowledge drives 80% of the learning. And retrieval means identifying what that 20% is. What's the 20% non-negotiable? If there was, if if if you remember nothing else, kids, remember this 20% of things. What is that thing? Have you identified that at the start of the year? And are you hammering that home? Are you do the kids have multiple opportunities to re-encounter that knowledge? And if they do, they're gonna learn it. They're gonna learn it and they're gonna not forget it, and as a result, they're gonna be more confident learners. What we've got are teachers who go, Well, I've covered it, so therefore I move on. Whether they forget it or not is not my problem. And teachers saying, as I did, you know, for many years, oh, you guys, you know, you like I taught you this on Monday, it's now Friday. Why can't you remember it? Well, the reason I can't remember it is because you haven't given them retrieval opportunities. They're not that like they're not tape recorders, they're not file drawers. You know, this is the beauty of a well-sequenced curriculum, which is structured in a way as to almost make the learning irresistible. Here's a truth about human thinking and our brains. We don't want to think hard. We will do anything other than thinking hard. If you've got that email that you need to write, oh, suddenly I'll I better do some tidying up. I better do you will do anything other than focus and think. We just do not want to do it. But there are certain hacks, there's certain shortcuts, there's certain levers you can pull to get around that. And one of them is retrieval practice. And it's uh kind of a you can say, I want the kids to know this thing, and I want them to know it in six months. So here's the important concept. I'm gonna explicitly explain it to them. I'm gonna give them a quiz on it in two weeks' time. I'm gonna give another quiz in four weeks' time, I'm gonna another quiz in six weeks' time, and they're gonna know that thing and they're gonna recognize it. And again, Williams understanding is remembering in disguise. They're gonna have this feeling of understanding this stuff because they're gonna draw together all the stuff you've taught them and you've you've created this brilliant curriculum. And that's what a well-designed curriculum is, and it's really hard to do that, which is why I think curriculum design is such an important aspect. But what do, you know, in my view, school leaders they're often focusing on completely the wrong thing. They're focusing on activities. They're going to a lesson and thinking, oh, looks like the kids are really engaged, they're paying attention. That's the lowest proxy indicator of learning we can possibly have. Learning happens long before they get near the classroom. It happens in the curriculum. How is the knowledge sequence? How is it designed? I could talk about this for another five hours, Lisa.

SPEAKER_01: 25:18

No, listen to this though. I know school leaders have a very difficult time because they have to go in, they have to observe lessons, they have to give certain feedback and judgments. So, given what you've just said about, you know, activities and maybe the buzz and chatter in the classroom not being not a very strong indicator of learning, what are they meant to be observing? What are they supposed to be looking for?

SPEAKER_02: 25:47

I I would want senior leaders to look at curriculum plans of every single department before they even go near a lesson. How coherent? What is the scope and sequence of your curriculum? How is this knowledge constructed? Where are the students encountering hinge concepts? Where are they encountering those important ideas? Have you built in retrieval? I think that lesson, I mean, the model of senior leaders going into a lesson wants a term. It's a completely fake economy. I mean, we all did that, at least. I did that for 20 years, where a senior leader would say, All right, Carl, I'm gonna observe your lesson next Tuesday. I'd go into my class and I'd say, right, if you want to live past next Tuesday, we're all gonna play a little game. And I'd pull this little cirque de soleil lesson out of the drawer, all singing, all dancing, kids running around the room, sugar paper, all the rest of it. Senior leader would come in and they'd go, What a fantastic lesson. Brilliant, kids so engaged. They'd leave the room and I go, right, let's strip it all back down. We're all gonna go back to like learning how we normally learn, which is you know, boring but efficient. Now, that's a false economy. That's just a massive waste of time. It was in the UK about 15 years ago that Rob Co. Lesson observations is another myth, another junk science. There's no evidence to support the idea that that's a meaningful measure of learning. His claim was that you'd need a minimum of five leaders who'd all been trained, observing five different lessons of one teacher, and only then could you get. And this is proven by the fact that what's a valid and reliable measure, you need to get the same results with different observers, and you don't. You get people going into different lessons looking at different things. What is the measure of a woodwork teacher observing a science lesson? What are they looking for? Did they know the knowledge? Do they know the content? All they're looking for is behavior. They're looking for activities, they're looking for, and then they'll say the same kind of thing, I think. So I think the really good schools that I see and work with, they have a much more instructional coaching model, which is less about graded lesson observations and more about saying to the staff, can we identify something we want to improve in a term? What is something that we think we can improve upon? And let's work towards that improvement. So you don't have this thing of leaders going into lessons of which they know nothing and kind of crit in this false grade. You have teachers working together in groups, identifying part of their professional practice and saying, we're gonna hone in on this one thing. And it might be something like questioning, like your questioning time, your cold calling, using mini whiteboards, like an actual tangible thing improvement that you can say over six weeks, these teachers they're gonna go in and out of each other's lessons, they're gonna they're gonna focus on this one thing, they're gonna provide feedback to the teacher on you could have paused a little bit longer there, or these students weren't as, you know. So those models, I think you see this much richer form of improvement, and it's a cultural change where you get teachers really wanted to work together and identify things that they can improve upon, rather than this judgment culture where the teachers don't really know what they want to improve. There's a kind of an adversarial antagonistic or school leaders going into lessons, and I think you know, Step Lauber didn't fantastic work there, obviously, with instructional coaching. And I think those models are just much healthier for school culture.

SPEAKER_01: 29:39

I agree with you, but there is always that thing where you've got to report, and I don't know where we need to change this, but you've got this kind of oh, we have this number of outstanding teachers and this number of teachers who are good, and this number of teachers who require improvement. And I don't know where we need to nip that in the bud to get that whole coaching model embedded.

SPEAKER_02: 30:02

You're just creating junk data by doing that. You're just creating data that is just completely and utterly it's nonsense. It's, you know, you at best, what you're talking about is who can control a class. That's really what you're saying. You've got a leader's going around going, the kids are really behaving in this lesson. This teacher can sort of answer questions and it like, has the school identified what good practice even is? You know, uh like it's like what you're measuring it against. And it's a model of school improvement that's kind of 20 years old now. We can learn a lot from other fields. And I think instructional coaching is a really interesting model, and it's also, you know, I don't know many teachers who get a lot out of being observed once a term. I don't know many teachers who sort of think, well, that was a really useful, it's a prof it's a tick-box exercise that we think we need to do. And I think it's because, as Dylan William reminds us, it's it's not because teachers are not good enough, it's it's because every teacher can be better. And every teacher has the ability to improve. But if you haven't identified what they want to improve and also be linked with their own professional vision as well. And I think like, again, it's the same with curriculum and assessment. Unless you've identified what the curriculum is and what is to be learned, then you're just creating spreadsheets that are just they don't mean anything.

SPEAKER_01: 31:34

You heard it here, guys. Let's talk a little bit about how AI is changing our practice. I know we're we're kind of touching on the time, but I really want to know your thoughts on how you see AI reshaping the classroom and what we do with it.

SPEAKER_02: 31:53

I think it's kind of exciting, if I'm honest. Like I I've always been one to say I think technology should be kept out of the classroom. And I think AI, when we talk about AI, there's two things that people mean. One is students using AI to create essays or answers, and that's obviously very bad, because there's no thinking done there at all. Learning is intrinsically linked to the level of thinking that's being done. If there's no thinking being done, then there's very little learning being done. The second area where I think people talk about is in things like curriculum design, assessment, and to a lesser extent, instruction. And that to me is exciting because we could have a world where AI is designed, like I just there spoke about curriculum. We're seeing already some studies coming out where AI is designing curricula. In other words, a teacher starting off the year and they're going, I'm teaching these 30 kids. Here's their ability, here's their cultural background, here are their learning needs, here is the knowledge to be taught, here's the previous knowledge they have, here's what I want them to learn. And we're seeing AI designing really good curricula, and not just the you know, the sequence, but the activities that would need to be done. And then you could see a world where you're then giving the AI after two weeks the student or some kind of measure of learning, and the AI responding to that and going, for this particular kid, here's the gaps in their knowledge. They have missed out on this idea or that idea, and they need that to be filled. Very often, the feedback loops in most classrooms are too long. We're finding out too late that a kid doesn't know something. So if a if a kid doesn't know something, very often, you know, the teacher doesn't know, you know, or they do a test two weeks later and it's like, well, you don't know, you don't understand that thing. So you need to do does the teacher go back and reteach the thing? It hasn't got time, you've got to keep moving. Is there a world where AI could then come in and say, you didn't understand this part of fractions or this part of this particular language? Here's a brutally designed video or a beautifully designed set of retrieval patterns questions specifically for that kid. And I think that's exciting. The other area is I've I point to the work of Daisy Chris Todoulu with a comparative judgment, where AI could mark work or assess work at a level that we have never seen before. The idea of teachers marking for four hours on a Sunday, bringing the books in on a Monday, the kids taking one look at the mark and not reading anything that the teacher said, again, is that a good use of our time? I don't think it is. So there is evidence of AI being able to assess a class set of uh books and provide really rich feedback, not just for the kids, but for the teacher in terms of forms of assessment. In terms of imagine if you could have a set of books, and particularly in subjects like history, ma uh history, English, and so on and so forth, where the AI is telling you, okay, 30% of the kids didn't understand this concept from this work. They made this spelling mistake, they made that, you know, where where they could then go in the next lesson and go, right, guys, we're just gonna go over this for five minutes. Now, there are some problems with that, which is that if a kid writes an essay, they kind of want to know that you've read it. And so that's a problem. And these are new problems that we face. And also the fact that the by reading a student's work or a class's work, the teacher has a really good sense of their ability of what they've learned or what they've not learned. But it may be the case that AI can deliver that report on a set of books in a way that is a better use of time than that four hours on a Sunday marking. And that time then, that teacher time, could be better spent doing one-on-one, working with some pupils, meeting their needs, really helping them with some key things that they've that they've misunderstood. So I think marking, assessment, curriculum planning is gonna be an interesting area. And let's face it, we're not putting the genie back in the bottle. You know, we're not going back. There's no world now where, you know, and I would say, you know, GCSC, six-form essays, student essays, I don't think we can pretend anymore that they're being done in a way that is like it was, you know, five, ten years ago.

SPEAKER_01: 37:02

Yeah. I do agree with you. I think the gene is definitely outside of the bottle. It's just, it's just that I think we're still grappling with how do we use it to our advantage? Um, how do we use it safely? How do we ensure that we are harnessing it in a way that we don't double the work? Because I'm very worried for education in terms of doubling work, where we will have the ability to do certain things more efficiently with AI. But because we're traditionally beholden to a way of doing something, we actually keep doing it the way we're doing it and still double the work.

SPEAKER_02: 37:40

So very good point.

SPEAKER_01: 37:42

Yeah, I'm still worried about that just a little bit. But guys, we're at the end of the podcast. If you want to hear Carl talk a bit more, then you've got to either come to one of the events, or if you have missed it, then if I'm lucky enough to have him back on the podcast, then we'll do a round two. Carl, thank you so much. Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_02: 38:00

It's great to talk to you.