Effective learning techniques

Kirschner, P. A., & Hendrick, C. (2020). How Learning Happens: Seminal Works in Educational Psychology and What They Mean in Practice. Routledge.

Chapter 21 Learning techniques that really work

I have read several books and lots of articles on this ‘strategies that work’ area, mainly in search of material for a Delta Module Two input session to debunk the VAK / multiple intelligences happy clappy stuff about learning styles. Kirschener et al recommend a meta study by Dunlosky that investigates ten popular techniques students and teachers use for learning to assess whether they are actually effective.

Dunlosky sifts through studies that might provide evidence for the efficacy or otherwise of the techniques. Their conclusion is that (8) practice testing and (9) distributed practice have clear support of their efficiency, (1) elaborative interrogation, (2) self-explanation and (10) interleaved practice seem to be moderately effective and (3) summarization, (4) highlighting, (5) mnemonics, (6) using imagery and (7)  re reading seem to be of little use. Kirschener and Hendrick report all this fairly directly.

I was surprised that (3) summarization was said to be of little use as surely that forces you to process the material and realise if you have understood it or not, but it turns out the caveats are because (a)  what can be said to be a summary varies so widely and (b) you have to be able to write a good summary (if you can then it is effective) and many people can’t. I knew (4) highlighting and (7) rereading were ineffective. Both make you think you know and understand things when actually you are likely just recognising them which may not involve either knowing or understanding. I can only see (5) mnemonics working for a very limited range of things, so it makes sense that it comes up as ineffective.

When you compare this to the six strategies the learning scientists present (in reading they seem to encapsulate what I have read on research based effective techniques), they have all the strategies Dunlosky found effective, but they also have using concrete examples (especially examples that cross domains so underlying concepts are made clear). Kirschner mentions this a lot in other chapters though. The one point where Dunlosky and the learning scientists seem to differ is on imagery / dual coding and even there maybe they are in fact talking about different things. Dunlosky reports on studies where students were asked to create or draw mental images as they listened or read and found some positive results but much that was so mixed with minor variations from study to study that it is hard to say unequivocally if  imagery is effective or not. The learning scientists describe a wider remit where transforming information into flow diagrams or charts are also included as ‘images’. They also say you should then recreate the main ideas from the images and toggle back and forth between the two. This sounds like considerably more processing, so perhaps that is what makes the difference. 

Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K. A., Marsh, E. J., Nathan, M. J., & Willingham, D. T. (2013). Improving Students’ Learning With Effective Learning Techniques: Promising Directions From Cognitive And Educational Psychology. Psychological Science In The Public Interest, 14, 4–58.

Chapter 20: feedback

a response to the chapter in Kirschner, P. A., & Hendrick, C. (2020). How Learning Happens: Seminal Works in Educational Psychology and What They Mean in Practice. Routledge

This chapter is recommending a 2007 article by Hattie and Timperley on the power of feedback. I’d read about Hattie and his ranked lists of factors that impact learning and knew feedback came high up the list and indeed he quotes effect sizes here, but he is looking at elements or methods of feedback and comparing those. There is some overlap here with the last chapter, but also further specifics. They point out that not all feedback is useful (generalised praise having no effect) and also that any feedback will be useless if the student doesn’t have some knowledge base. If that is the case they need instruction not feedback.
For feedback to be effective the student needs to be clear on

1. Their goal
2. Their current performance in relation to that goal
3. What to do now to close that gap  

Feedback should not just say something is wrong but should be explicit about how it is wrong. Also it should address whether the student is self-regulating or not (a lack of self evaluation will lead to feedback being taken as judgement rather than acted on). If the teacher is the only one actively involved in the feedback process then it will likely not be impactful. Good feedback involves criteria to aim at and examples. 

This reminds me strongly of a presentation Rob Tesh did at the CETA symposium in Kiev. He was talking about CELTA but it applies equally to Delta. He stated that most common problems with them not acting on feedback are 

• Not getting the idea
• Not understanding why
• Missing the practical application
• Not seeing they made the mistake

So the answer is (and don’t do it for everything or you would drown them in volume of feedback, just choose the most urgent things
Be systematic and when you pick up on any point, ensure you tell them

1. What the general requirement is
2. What the underlying principle / reason is
3. Suggest a technique 
4. Point out what they did

So for example if they had lectured a grammar presentation instead of eliciting or guided discovery , feedback should say

• Make the students work things out – don’t tell them 
• This is more memorable and helps demonstrate to you if they understand or not
• You could have given them a text like the one in Xs lesson with some T/F questions such as …
• You talked at them about the present perfect and didn’t ask them anything

I think I usually do it 4123, but I like the systematicity /simplicity of how he put it. 

Assessment of, not for, learning

a response to the chapter in Kirschner, P. A., & Hendrick, C. (2020). How Learning Happens: Seminal Works in Educational Psychology and What They Mean in Practice. Routledge

This is one of the chapters where I agree entirely with their basic point, am glad to now have sources to back up what I had only hoped was actually true, but am frustrated by their not addressing the hugely problematic hurdles to practical implementation.

They are recommending an article by Black and Wiliam from 1998 called Assessment and Classroom Learning, though they quote Black as later saying this was badly named and should have been called Responsive Teaching. The article was quite readable till I noticed it was 69 pages long, at which point I resorted to skimming. 

It is a meta study about the impact of different types of feedback on learning. Kirschner mentioned John Hattie’s work showing feedback to be one of the most important factors which impacts on learning in the introduction to this section of the book. The article by Black looks at what kinds of feedback are most effective. They first look at the difference between (1) just giving a grade, (2) giving a grade and comments on what is good about and how to improve the work or (3) just giving comments on what is good about and how to improve the work but no grade.
Unsurprisingly (I think), the first is more effective than no feedback, the second is more effective than the first and the third approach is the most effective of all e.g.feedback that makes it clear (usually against criteria), what you have mastered and what to work on next. This fits neatly with the earlier chapter on mastery goals being more effective than performance goals.
But …

To train a teacher how to give this kind of feedback takes time, means they have to understand what they are assessing at a significantly deeper level and that feedback will take significantly more time to deliver. From training Delta tutors I’d also suggest that some teachers are deeply uncomfortable with the idea of this style of feedback and want things to be more concrete, countable and black and white.
Then problems on the other side of this are that a lot of students also want things to be more concrete, countable and black and white. If the student doesn’t want to ‘improve’ but only to pass, they can see it as a waste of their time (and I have had complaints about this on all three modules in varying forms e.g. they should just tell me on the draft what I need to do to pass). In Module Three someone even wrote in to complain about getting a merit saying they hadn’t wanted one, a pass would have been fine and we should have given feedback more precisely to show them where that line lay (as if this were even possible). Some students don’t seem to (or on one or two occasions openly state ‘I haven’t got time to read that as well’) read the feedback, in which case it will not have an impact.
This system also means students need feedback during courses, not at the end. If there is no opportunity to respond to the feedback, then it is not useful.

The Black article also found significant impact from using self assessment and peer assessment (I assume because in the same way that the teacher needs to understand a goal well to see how it has and / or could be better achieved, so does a student). Again both need scaffolding or training which will take time and also considerable effort on the part of the students. 

So all the ideas in here are laudable and learner centred, but all will require considerable commitments of time (and so money) and effort from both teachers, management and students, and that is not easy to achieve

Black, P., & Wiliam, D. (1998). Assessment And Classroom Learning. Assessment In Education: Principles, Policy & Practice, 5(1), 7–74.
Hattie, J. (2009). Visible Learning: A Synthesis Of Over 800 Meta-Analyses Relating To Achievement. London: Routledge

Chapter 18 Direct Instruction (and is teaching language ‘different’ ?)

a response to the chapter in Kirschner, P. A., & Hendrick, C. (2020). How Learning Happens: Seminal Works in Educational Psychology and What They Mean in Practice. Routledge

Reading this chapter made me wonder if the reason (at least partly) I am so unimpressed by a lot of what the book is saying might be subject related. Examples are sparse, but when he gives them they tend to be maths, chess, or I think there was one about history. 
The recommended article is the one by Rosenshine and he has referred to it before at which point I read it. It is perhaps the most readable thing he has recommended, but it only deals in general approaches, not examples of classroom practice.Rosenshine has 10 principles of instruction almost all of which are laudable:
1. Begin a lesson with a short review of previous learning.
Recycling is always good – scope for mini games or tests
2. Present new material in small steps with student practice after each step.
To a large extent yes, though the tricky bit here is how small is useful without making it unhelpfully easy and of course that is the bit they don’t help you decide about.
3. Ask a large number of questions and check the responses of all the students.
This one I’m not so sure about. Checking understanding is important and questions might help with that, but so could getting them to do other things. But check the responses of all the students is odd. How ? In a big class ? With questions ? If you ask an open question then they all hear both question and answer, so you would need 30 different questions to check a concept with (which sounds unfeasible) and it would take ages. But if you get them working in groups with questions you don’t know who said what. 
He suggests students noting down answers and holding up cards or teachers eliciting choral responses, neither of which sounds like a particularly effective check. 
4. Provide models.
Always a good plan.
5. Guide student practice.
OK they will need some support and scaffolding. Though again finding the sweet spot between guiding and doing it for them is again the hard part and the part that Rosenshine does not explore.
6.Check for student understanding.
OK but then what were all the questions for in number three if not this ?
7. Obtain a high success rate.
He says an 80% success rate is most effective, but I’m not clear if he means 80% of the class must be able to do something before you move on or if students must be able to work with 80% of the material. A high success rate is always going to be attractive, but measuring it might be complex.
8. Provide scaffolds for difficult tasks.
How is this not just 5 again ?
9. Require and monitor independent practice.
Absolutely !
10. Engage students in weekly and monthly review.
Again, sensible, but could it not be combined with 1 ?
So to my mind we have six useful if somewhat general principles: review, keep steps manageable, provide models, check understanding, scaffold practice and require lots of independent practice. 

As with other things in other chapters, part of you is thinking ‘but of course, who wouldn’t’ ? But his further reading includes some blogs, one of which has a teacher observer saying he watches lessons at times where the teacher tells the students something and then assumes that is ‘done’ and should not have to be covered again. And to give him his due, I’ve occasionally run into that attitude myself. 
Clicking through a couple of links in the blogpost they recommend took me to a post called the number one problem in teaching and the blogger is talking about the mistake of not checking that everyone has understood (only that somebody has). There is a pretty big gap though between assuming one right answer means you can move on and ensuring that every member of a group has understood completely and one of the commenters points out that in a class with a mixed ability profile that means either differentiating everything or holding a lot of students back a lot of the time.
But another comment on that same post comes from a fairly acerbic ELT blogger who I’ve quite often read – Jeff Jordan – who says
You seem to start from the – false – assumption that learning English as an L2 is a predominantly a matter of explicit learning about the language. Yet the evidence from research into instructed SLA gives massive support to the claim that concentrating on activities which help implicit knowledge (by developing the learners’ ability to make meaning in the L2, through exposure to comprehensible input, participation in discourse, and implicit or explicit feedback) leads to far greater gains in interlanguage development than concentrating on explicit learning.
And the original blogger – Tom Sherrington – comments only ‘I really don’t know what this refers to’. I do though. Jordan is saying you shouldn’t be teaching language students about language, such as what grammatical elements are called  or a list or rules about when to use the passive tense. You should be getting them to use it. When they use it they will discover whether it works or not and change their beliefs about it accordingly. Why does Sherrington not understand this comment at all ? That’s what makes me think teaching language might be qualitatively different from teaching other subjects in one way. When you do maths at a school level you aren’t expressing your own meanings, just showing you know and understand principles which were thought up by others. Even with some of the trendier approaches to history in schools where source work is part of learning, it is only a very small part. But in language if you can grasp some basic concepts you then use it to express what you want (and even to a degree in the way that you want). You only get to make new meanings in most subjects if you are operating at a doctoral level. OK within language you are not inventing new language, but you can express yourself through it in ways you cannot in physics or geography. Does that make it ‘different’ in terms of how it can or should be taught / learnt ? 

https://teacherhead.com/2018/06/10/exploringbarak-rosenshines-seminal-principles-of-instruction-why-it-is-themust-read-for-all-teachers/

https://teacherhead.com/2019/10/04/the-1-problem-weakness-in-teaching-and-how-to-address-it/

Rosenshine, B. V. (2012, Spring). Principles Of Instruction. Research-Based Strategies That All Teachers Should Know. American Educator, 36 (1), 12–19. Available From Www.Aft.Org/Sites/Default/Files/Periodicals/Rosenshine.Pdf.

Chapter 17 Discovery Learning

a response to the chapter in Kirschner, P. A., & Hendrick, C. (2020). How Learning Happens: Seminal Works in Educational Psychology and What They Mean in Practice. Routledge

It is actually called ‘why discovery learning is a bad way to discover things / why inquiry learning isn’t, but I find that title deeply annoying. This same issue has come up in other things I have read, most recently in Christodolou’s book about myths in education. She quoted a lot from the same Kirschner article (so he is presenting one of his own) they are presenting here and I read it then too. 
Kirschner starts by defining learning as being ‘that there has been a change in one’s long term memory’, which if you take that change as potentially being not only acquiring a new ‘bit’ of information, but also how to apply things you already know to processes etc then sounds fine to me.
He says his article challenges the widely held belief that ‘direct instruction or teacher-led learning is a less effective approach than allowing learners to discover knowledge for themselves’
I have several arguments with his assertion that discovery learning is a bad way to discover things

1. He labels leaving someone with zero help or instruction (even quoting Rousseau and that if you leave a child alone in a room with books it will learn to read) as discovery learning. If this is discovery learning then of course it is not as effective as other methods. People can teach themselves things, but unsupported that method is erratic and can be time consuming and I think it works rather better for some things than others. He says guided discovery is much more effective, but I see discovery learning, inquiry learning, guided discovery and problem based learning as similar terms for getting students to do things (rather than lecturing them about things), with support, examples and frameworks. There is a cline from more to less support, but too little could be as unhelpful as too much. He says inquiry learning works because it includes support, examples and frameworks. So then all we are arguing about is how the terms should be used and he doesn’t cite sources for that – just states his definitions. He also says ‘after about 50 years (now 60) of advocacy for minimally guided instruction, there is no real body of research supporting the approach’. Where are these people advocating that we leave students only with the raw material and expect them to work it out for themselves ?
2. He only states that various terms have more or less support, not how much and there are no examples of what he means in practical classroom terms, so it remains very abstract. 
3. He writes the paper to challenge orthodoxy because ‘unguided or minimally guided instructional approaches are very popular and intuitively appealing’/ But with whom ? Where ? No examples – who would promote teaching with no support ? I find this hard to imagine as it doesn’t really even sound like teaching as I understand it. 

The other things he says about working memory being limited and too much new information leading to overload, all of which are sensible. Unless I am missing a whole debate somewhere in mainstream education, this article doesn’t promote a ‘new’ idea, it just chooses to label things in such a way as to make one label an obviously unhelpful approach, as opposed to looking at how much the teacher is trying to make the learners do more or less of the work in the classroom and labelling in that way (more or less active/ passive learning and more/less learner or teacher centred in the actual contact time).

Christodoulou, D. (2014). Seven Myths About Education (1st ed.). Routledge.

Kirschner, P. A., Sweller, J., & Clark, R. E. (2006). Why Minimal Guidance During Instruction Does Not Work: An Analysis Of The Failure Of Constructivist, Discovery, Problem-Based, Experiential, And Inquiry-Based Teaching. Educational Psychologist, 46(2), 75–86.

Chapters 15 and 16

a response to the chapters in Kirschner, P. A., & Hendrick, C. (2020). How Learning Happens: Seminal Works in Educational Psychology and What They Mean in Practice. Routledge

Chapter 15 Activities that give birth to learning

The chapters up to now have either been about something I have heard of or a writer whose name I know even if only very vaguely. This chapter doesn’t work for me at all. It focuses on Ernst Rothkopf and his 1970 article on mathemagenic activities. Mathemagenic seems to be an overly long and obscure name for activities that promote learning. 
The only thing they point out that seems useful is that this was the first time someone acknowledged that the learner had a part to play in what they learnt (as opposed to it being entirely determined by teacher or syllabus. I looked at the article itself and was none the wiser and then searched for mathemagenic activities online, but there is very little to be found and what I did find wasn’t enlightening. 
Rothkopf talk about three categories of mathemagenic activity
(1) Orientation: Moving students towards what they have to learn. (2) Object acquisition: Focusing the attention and studying of the student on certain things and in a certain way (3) Translation and processing.
Perhaps I am missing something but that seems to amount to 

• Get their attention
• Help them see what is important
• Give them things to do that ensure they manipulate / process the material

And if you are not doing that in a classroom you are not helping students learn. I can’t see it needs an oddly spelt word to describe it. 
They say that the first two parts of this are more observable, but that the third is now partly observable using technology like eye tracking so you can see how a person is solving things. 
They also say that activities can promote learning, be neutral to it or hamper it, but nothing about specific characteristics which would make something any particular one. 

Chapter 16 Zooming out to zoom in

This is the first in their section called the teacher. But this is almost as uninformative as the previous chapter. This time is based on a chapter in a book. REIGELUTH, C., & STEIN, F. (1983). THE ELABORATION THEORY OF INSTRUCTION. But again it seems to be stating the blindingly obvious and taking an awful lot of words and not enough concrete examples to do so. Perhaps this is my lack of knowledge of educational history. Maybe before this chapter there was another way of looking at these things, but I am baffled as to what it might have been. The original is hard going and searching for this term just brings up such a wide range of ideas as to be useless. 
The core of it seems to be …

• To be able to grasp something you should be toggling from whole to parts and back again.
• Move from the easier to the more complex
• Have a solid core example to build from.
• Relate things to what they already know
• Have summaries and self tests
• And to be able to do all this you have to be very aware of what you are trying to teach at a variety of levels.

See what I mean ? Who is planning courses which don’t have that built in ?
After two ‘dud’ chapters in a row, I’d be tempted to give up, but some of the chapter names coming up sound good so I’ll hang in there a bit longer.

Chapter 14 Problem solving

a response to the chapter in Kirschner, P. A., & Hendrick, C. (2020). How Learning Happens: Seminal Works in Educational Psychology and What They Mean in Practice. Routledge

This chapter is about a book rather than an article, but also it seems to overlap a lot with chapter 6 (what you know determines what you learn). The book, by Newell and Simon is from the early 1979s. Apparently before this there were two ways of looking at how people solve problems (a) behaviourist where you reproduce something you have seen before to solve the problem or (b) Gestalt where you just keep shifting things around till you hit an answer. Both of those ways of seeing things have major snags: (a) requires you to have seen something similar and (b) could be infinite and so impossible in terms of time. They mention a Rubik’s cube as being something it would take  you a very long time to solve with random moves. 

Newell and Simon talk about ‘problem spaces’. So you have the problem itself as represented in the real world, but also the way someone conceptualises it. With things like the cabbage goat wolf small boat problem, the real world picture is boat, river, animals, but the problem space is the same idea as all those puzzles where you have to move discs across rods under certain rules. If you just randomly try putting wolves and goats in boats you could take a long time trying, but if you can conceptualise the space ? work in the problem space ? then you are moving concepts, not individual items. I think … They talk about the structure of the problem space. 

They take this back to have another dig at discovery learning, saying you need to help students get a sense of the problem space, not leave students trying to discover the solution to a problem they have no idea about. But once again I’d say which teacher would do that ? Surely this is a straw man conception of discovery learning. 

Chapter 13 The Holy Grail: whole class teaching and one to one tutoring

This chapter is about an article by Benjamin Bloom (he of Bloom’s taxonomy) called the 2 sigma problem. 2 sigma is about significant effect sizes in research. They put in a little box explaining the concepts underlying standard deviation and effect size, but having read it twice I have decided knowing that significant effect sizes were found in this research is enough. 
The research had three groups of students

1. A class of 30ish being taught conventionally
2. A class of 30ish students being taught with ‘mastery learning’
3. Tutoring – alone or maximum with a group of three

They say the average tutored student score was higher than 98% of the students in the conventional class (an effect size of two which is massive). Which to a large extent makes sense though I would say even that would depend a lot on the tutor. 
Bloom was trying to find a way to change whole class teaching to capture some of this and he suggests ‘mastery learning’. He calls it a ‘feedback corrective’ process. You teach them something, then test if they know it. If they don’t get 90% you go back and work on it some more until they do. I assume this parallels the fact that in a tutorial you can see clearly if a student has grasped something or not and adapt what you do accordingly. So Bloom came up with factors you could change in a class that might reduce the gap between tutoring and what he sees as conventional teaching in a normal class. One of those factors is what he calls mastery learning.
He assumes that in a normal class (a) you only test intermittently and that this is the teachers only access to a true understanding of who has grasped what and (b) teachers only get answers from proactive (and so bright) students, so the class moves on at their pace leaving many behind. 
Perhaps it used to be like that, but my experience of watching people teach has been that some teach to the fastest and some to the slowest and both have their problems. 
In what he calls mastery learning you teach a bit, test it, reteach where needed and don’t move on till it is mastered. And the paper describes the process as :

… classes were helped to review and relearn the specific prerequisites they lacked… the teacher retaught the items that the majority of students had missed, small groups of students helped each other over items that had been missed, and the students reviewed items they were not sure about by referring to the designated pages in the instructional material. It was algebra and French so a language. 

And they got an effect size midway between tutoring and not doing this – so very positive results. But it does feel a bit like teaching to the slowest. Everyone is repeating stuff in various ways until everyone can understand. I can see the learning outcomes would be better, but won’t it take a lot  more time to get there ? Are the groups streamed ?
They don’t talk about other ways to achieve individual feedback, though all require a lot more time investment from the teacher. You don’t have to test, you can set homework to get a clear profile of where everyone in a class is at. At a more superficial level you should be calling on a range of learners, not just the ones who always put their hands up first. Things like getting them to check in pairs before feedback could help with spreading the knowledge out a bit more. 

You could use flipped learning so they are supposed to have worked on the material in some way before they arrive then you test at the beginning and teach what they still need help with. Though there you still have the group moving in lockstep. Or deliver material before class, then have tasks ready for them to work on in class so you can help individuals as needed. Or have fully differentiated materials so they work independently and there are tasks to stretch the fast finishers.
So while I can see his idea of mastery learning is slightly more teacher hours friendly than individual tutoring I think it will only increase learning outcomes significantly with the input of a lot more teacher preparation time. Which makes it considerably less revolutionary than it first sounds as then you are back to time, money and what institutions will support. 

Bloom, B. (1984). The 2 Sigma Problem: The Search For Methods Of Group Instruction As Effective As One-To -One Tuto Ring. Educational Researcher, 13(6), 4–16.

Chapter 12: Why scaffolding is not as easy as it looks.

a response to the chapter in Kirschner, P. A., & Hendrick, C. (2020). How Learning Happens: Seminal Works in Educational Psychology and What They Mean in Practice. Routledge

It is nice to know the origin of the word scaffolding in the sense of supporting students through a process till they can manage it alone. And they say this article is the first time that idea was mooted, that up till Bruner people thought learning was all copying models and memorisation rather than leading the learner to taking steps themselves that would result in understanding on their part. But this chapter is another that raises more questions than answers. Especially as it talks about scaffolding from the task, but also to the position of the individual learner. 

The piece is by Bruner and about small children, but it seems to apply in many ways to any learning. I looked at the original article, but this time the book seems to put it across pretty well and the only thing the article adds ıs a photo of the block puzzle whıch explaıns why ıt needed scaffoldıng ın the fırst place. The diagram in the Kirschner book makes it look like a simple pyramid. 
In the study they have adults with 3,4 and 5 year old children and they want to describe systematically how a child responds to support from an adult (or a non expert working with an expert). One remark in the abstract I need to explore further though is 
The focus here is on problem-finding activities as opposed to problem-solving activities (Mackworth, 1965).
The study was designed so the adult would only act in response to what the child seemed to need – they didn’t have a fixed path pre planned to lead the child through. But if the child ignored the task the adult would show them how to pair blocks, if the child started building but in a flawed way the teacher could point this out verbally and the adult should allow them to correct any mistakes they made. 
Different age groups responded better to being shown things or told things. 
What was key is that the adult has to have knowledge of the outcome or solution, but also to be able to envisage where the child is in this context e.g. what the child currently sees the solution as in order to be able to pitch help well. 
Bruner describes six stages of scaffolding.

1. Recruitment – generating interest in the problem at all.
2. Reduction of degrees of freedom – offering choices that are appropriately narrow so as not to overwhelm.
3. Direction maintenance – keeping them on task and moving through the task.
4. Marking critical features – making steps clear.
5. Frustration control – don’t make steps too easy or the child ends up dependent on the teacher creating steps.
6. Demonstrating – modelling but in a way that makes getting to the solution clear.

And their takeaways from this are laudable and abstract. I guess it is good to have it articulated, but also to have it illustrated would be more useful.
But in terms of language teaching and teacher training it makes me think…

1. Recruitment – if you have students who have paid for a course or teachers who have paid for training you would hope they would be interested in ‘the problem’, but given that some learners are paid for and sent in both contexts and that there is a difference between having a long term goal of speaking X or having the Delta it could be relevant. But how ? That comes back to classic questions about motivation and to what degree and where sheer enjoyment can (or should which is another argument) be built into things. 
2. Reduction of degrees of freedom sounds right in most contexts. Too many choices and you might as well not be supervised at all, but judging where appropriately narrow lies will be the hard part. 
3. Direction maintenance also sounds as though it could make sense in any area of life. We all need nudges now and again for most things. 

4, 5 and 6 seem more complex.

4. Marking critical features. You often think you have done this (you design the lesson – language or anything else – with the idea of stages that feed into the aim), but only in the actual implementation do you discover if you succeeded or not and I have always enjoyed teaching things a few times over as then you can refine the steps to the point where they usually do work in practice. 
5. Frustration control is also a really difficult balance. The more support we put in place, the less they are learning to do things independently, but in both language learning and teacher training you are hoping to foster a capacity to go on learning for life. But in both scenarios learners seem to look for more and more support. Or is that just that I didn’t even notice them asking in the past ?
6. Demonstrating. This is the only one where I’m not really sure if I have it straight for language learning. In teacher training it feels like the problem of seeing things done well, but therefore having no real sense of how much was done to make them work well – kind of the swan gliding past and you don’t see it’s feet paddling madly below the water. This subject often comes up when trainees want to see ‘good’ lessons and while of course you can learn from that, sometimes you can learn a great deal from seeing something go wrong. 

In language learning do you think it could be that if you only see proficient speakers, you become disheartened at your own lack of language ?

Chapter 11: Where are we going and how do we get there ?

a response to the chapter in Kirschner, P. A., & Hendrick, C. (2020). How Learning Happens: Seminal Works in Educational Psychology and What They Mean in Practice. Routledge

This is the last of the chapters in section two ‘prerequisites for learning’ and (a) it overlaps a lot with the Dweck ideas in chapter 9, but (b) comments they make at the end of this chapter make me want to read some of the later sections (fortunately, as in the last chapter or two in this section and the same in some chapters in the first section ‘how does our brain work?’, we seem to be covering some overlapping ground. I guess they are just being thorough, but it makes it harder to keep the ideas straight).
Dweck talked about mastery goals (wanting to be able to do something well) and performance goals (wanting to be able to get specific grades or outcomes in relation to others). 
The article they focus on is by Pintrich and he split this further splitting both of these into approach orientation and avoidance orientation. 

Pintrich points out that

1. You might vary across this matrix according to subject or context. These are not labels to be attached to a person, but rather to a person’s behaviour with regard to one area
2. You can combine them e.g. wanting to increase your own capacity to do something while also taking pleasure in scoring well.

They repeat from chapter nine the idea that mastery goal learners just enjoy things more than performance goal learners (kind of the opposite of a vicious circle where the pleasure of learning spurs you on to greater things) and also that the performance goal learners tend to choose superficial strategies to try and achieve ends (strategies which may or may not work). 
But they note that as long as both are the approach orientation then mastery and performance goal learners can achieve the same level of outcome, but the mastery goal learners having enjoyed it more are more likely to go on further.
They also note that while the two different orientations (approach and avoidance) don’t make a huge difference for someone more mastery goal oriented, there are significantly less effective outcomes for those who are in the performance goal avoidance orientation corner. This is due to choosing things they think they will be able to do well (fear of failure) so not challenging themselves and so not learning. It is also partly as a result of giving up if things don’t go well rather than trying to find a different approach. 

The Pintrich article is not a comfortable read, but the idea paper by Svinicki that they recommend as further reading is a nice overview of the whole with a much more practical bent.
There is a particularly nice chunk in this on page four :

First of all, teachers should focus on wrong answers not as failures, but more accurately as misunderstandings. No student sets out to give a wrong answer; as far as they’re concerned, they’re giving a correct answer. They may just be answering a different question. So instructors should take errors as “teachable moments,” opportunities for learning to occur, and react accordingly. That provides students with a different model of how to react to mistakes with renewed determination to understand rather than with resistance or frustration. The same opportunities present themselves when instructors make mistakes. These, too, are teachable moments. They give the instructor an opportunity to model how to cope with a mistake in a positive way rather than becoming defensive and annoyed. 

As to applying this in class, again there is a lot of overlap with chapter nine. 

1. Encourage risk taking (writes she who tries to cheer Module Two course participants on to do focuses that are novel with very varied results. Some take up the challenge with zest and some as soon as they realise their idea is not following a well worn path, back off and look for something that does).
2. Don’t react negatively to ‘failure’ or mistakes. 
3. Encourage collaborative work not a competitive atmosphere.
4. Model the behaviours you want. So again coming back to a ‘we are all in this together’ teaching approach, rather than an ‘I know and will now impart that knowledge to you’ approach. Perhaps even the simple tenet that if you are enjoying it all they may well too, but if you aren’t they definitely won’t.

Pintrich, P. R. (2000). Multiple Goals, Multiple Pathways: The Role Of Goal Orientation In Learning And Achievement. Journal Of Educational Psychology, 92, 544–555
Svinicki, M. D. (2005). Student Goal Orientation, Motivation, And Learning. Idea Paper #41. Manhattan, Ka: The Idea Center.