Patrice Bain spent a good while sharing the odd glass of wine with the two cognitive scientists running research in her classroom, talking about teaching and why some of her students learned brilliantly while others didn’t. To her they were just Mark and Roddy. It took her a while to realise that Mark and Roddy were Mark McDaniel and Henry Roediger, two of the most cited researchers in the world on how memory works. She’d been on first name terms the whole time, with no idea quite who she was sitting across from.
Her classroom was the first in the United States where researchers studied how children actually learn, rather than college students in a lab. You’d think that would put her at the centre of everything. It did the opposite. She felt like an island. Nobody in her school to talk to about any of it, nobody on social media yet, no one who knew what she was on about.
What shifted it was tiny. She read a blog she liked, had a question, and messaged the writer. He wrote back. She still calls it her Blake Harvard moment, the day it sank in that there was someone else out there who got it. Her island, in her words, grew a few little boats she could row out to and come back from feeling less alone.
A lot of us carry that island feeling without ever naming it. There’s the work in your own building, and then there’s that other education world of books and names and research, and the two can feel like they never touch. They do. That wider world is far more welcoming than most of us expect, and most people answer.
Pick one person whose work you admire and have never spoken to. A writer, a researcher, someone two schools over doing something you’re curious about. Send them a short message this week. Tell them what landed. See what comes back.
Patrice and I get into all of it in this week’s episode, including what she’d say to a deputy head who reads everything but never reaches out, and the one question she wishes every leader would put to their staff.
So, who’s the person you’ve been meaning to message but never have? Hit reply and tell me. I may even be able to make the introduction.
Shane
PS Patrice’s books, Powerful Teaching and Powerful Classrooms, are full of things you can try on Monday with no training day required. Worth a look if the science of learning is on your radar.
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