The Knowledge Nest - by Jo Griffin

Success Builds Belief & Belief Builds Success

Jo Griffin — Fri, 08 May 2026 08:54:27 GMT

Poster look familiar? Is belief truly the magical antidote to failure?

Success builds belief. And belief, in turn, builds more success. There is good evidence for the loop in both directions, and most of us know it intuitively from our own lives. But if both are true, the more interesting question is the one we tend to skip past.

Which one do we actually have the most power over?

That question has been sitting with me for the better part of a year, ever since I started my MEd research at La Trobe looking at how self-efficacy develops in primary aged students. So, at the risk of utter humiliation, and with the certain knowledge that no one will ever invite me to be part of their bowling team after this, I am going to share with you a story that led me to an analogy. Unfortunately, it features me being an utter goose. But here goes nothing. May my unfortunate evening be both your entertainment and your introduction to the quiet power of self-efficacy.

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A bowling alley and an accidental experiment…

The bowling alley was lit. Music thumping. Children sprinting between lanes with birthday party hats on. Sensory overload in every direction. I was pretending to be all in, when really I would have been very happily tucked up on the couch with a cup of tea and something undemanding on the television.

What ensued was utter humiliation.

Every single bowl I took went straight to the gutter. It did not matter what I changed. The angle. The positioning. The run up. My husband, watching me deflate, tried gently to give me a few tips (he was absolutely sure of his bowling prowess and the ensuing national title 🙄), hoping I might at least hit a pin and lift my mood. Nothing worked. Ten or more bowls in a row, no exaggeration, every single one rolling cheerfully down into the gutter.

My story at this point was simple. I am no good at this. I give up. I am done. The children were despairing, exchanging worried looks across the lane because they could not quite work out what was happening with their mother, who was beginning to sulk in earnest. The lack of success was starting to really bother me.

My husband, half joking, suggested we put the guardrails up. I responded with something of a death stare and the words, Absolutely not. That would be ridiculous.

My next turn came around. And all of a sudden the guardrails were up. He had quietly snuck off while I was not looking and asked the attendant to update the system to include guardrails for my turns. Laughing in spite of myself, glancing around to make sure not too many people were watching, I decided, oh well, I will play along. At least now I know I will hit a pin or two. At least it will not go in the gutter. I am going to have some success. I knew that much, because there was a support in place that basically guaranteed it…

I stepped up in my best form, took the next bowl, and the strangest thing happened. The ball did not bounce off the rails. It rolled straight down the centre of the lane and almost got a strike. Two pins left standing.

Hilarious. After more than ten gutter balls in a row, the moment a set of supports went up, I could suddenly bowl. The whole family had a laugh at the irony of it. So did I, but mine was a slightly more complicated laugh. Because at that very moment, the focus of my MEd research was sitting in the back of my mind, and what I had just experienced was uncomfortably close to the thing I was reading about every night.

The night continued. I kept bowling, the guardrails kept going up, and I kept having success. By the end of the evening I genuinely did not need them. But the system had decided I was a guardrails kind of bowler and the supports stayed in. My husband, by the way, was on his way to a landslide victory, his belief in his own bowling prowess fully and unfortunately vindicated. Still not one of my better nights at the alley. But it left me with this story, which I have found increasingly hard to ignore.

Posing as a woman with a plan. The next bowl went directly into the gutter, like all the ones before it… 😆

What I had stumbled into…

What I experienced in that bowling alley was an analogy of self-efficacy in action, or more accurately, the lack of it, followed by the rapid and almost startling rebuilding of it once the conditions changed.

Albert Bandura coined the term self-efficacy in 1977 to describe a person’s belief in their capability to organise and execute the actions required to succeed at a specific task. In plain language, it is the belief that ‘I can do this’.

That belief is not a personality trait, and it is not the same thing as confidence in general. It is built, piece by piece, where the work happens. And it can also be eroded, piece by piece, when the work consistently does not work... 🎳

What that night highlighted for me, with embarrassing clarity, was how fast belief crumbles in the absence of success. Ten gutter balls was all it took to dismantle a 40 something year old woman’s willingness to keep trying. And it reminded me of something else. That the supports a learner needs are sometimes literal. The guardrails on a bowling lane. The carefully sequenced steps in an explicit lesson. The teacher kneeling beside a child, narrating the next move in the strategy. These are not crutches. They are the conditions under which early, regular success becomes possible. And early, regular success is the foundation on which belief anbout our abilities is built.

This is a big part of building self-efficacy. It is not the whole story - but it is the foundation, and we need to think carefully about the implications of this.

Wellbeing - A national priority

Self-efficacy is not a fringe concept in Australian education. Wellbeing for learning and engagement is one of three national priority areas under the Better and Fairer Schools Agreement signed by the Commonwealth and all states and territories. Within that priority, AERO’s 2025 review of evidence-based practices in school settings for student wellbeing identifies fostering student self-efficacy as one of seven high-impact strategies, with high confidence in the supporting evidence. The review describes the practical work like this:

“scaffolding learning so that mastery of one task leads students to feel confident and capable of attempting the next task.” (AERO, 2025)

That sentence is worth sitting with. It tells us self-efficacy is built. It is the cumulative product of carefully sequenced, scaffolded experiences of success, where one win earns the next.

I want to be careful here, because I do not want to oversell the influence of self-efficacy as the answer to wellbeing in our schools. Wellbeing is complex. It is shaped by relationships, belonging, safety, family, community, and circumstances that sit well outside any teacher’s control. Self-efficacy is an intriguing and potentially very powerful part of the story behind the mechanisms that support engagement and wellbeing - and we have meaningful control over inside the development of self-efficacy in our classrooms. That is why it deserves a closer look.

Why this conversation cannot wait

Disengagement in our schools is at a critical point. The issues are systemic and persistent, and they have not recovered since COVID. Fewer than two-thirds of Australian students attend school 90% or more of the time, with chronic absenteeism increasingly evident in the primary years (Groves et al., 2025). Further estimates indicate that there may even be as many as 50,000 children missing from our education system altogether (Watterson & O’Connell, 2019). Alarmingly, home schooling has risen to around 45,000 students nationally and continues to climb, with families increasingly looking for alternative pathways (English, 2025).

The numbers are concerning. Whilst many families choose home schooling from the outset for a variety of reasons, in a worrying number of cases families are forced to make this choice - because their child was no longer thriving, no longer believing, no longer able to find a way back to learning.

So what are we doing about this? How are we changing, adapting, responding?

The instinct in many systems has been to add more wellbeing programs. Bolt on a wellbeing program. Bring in a guest speaker. Run a workshop. These efforts come from the right place, and some of these initiatives genuinely add value. But in my experience, even the well-intentioned ones tend to treat the symptom rather than the cause. Disengagement is not, in the main, a wellbeing problem with a wellbeing solution.

The face of the problem

I know what this looks like up close, because I have lived it as a mother. My daughter arrived at school eager to learn. She was bright, curious, and her early formal assessments placed her as ‘well above’. The system had evidence, on paper, of a child with real capacity. The early years of her schooling were grounded in inquiry-based learning, with stations and activities set up across literacy and numeracy that she could choose between on any given day. There was a beautiful relational tone. The intent was good. But explicit instruction was minimal, and the learning got lost in translation.

By year three, those classrooms were behind her, and she was facing a more formal academic transition. The year three cliff, familiar to many of you, similar to the year seven cliff. She had not been set up for success. And quietly, she had come to believe she was not smart. The teachers and leaders were not negligent. They were doing what they had been led to believe was best practice. Inquiry-based learning is not the devil. But it was not the answer to my daughter learning to read, write, and spell.

The journey has taken a couple of wrong turns since, including a difficult transition into secondary school that held all the right wellbeing intentions but not the explicit instruction she needed. We have since landed somewhere that prioritises both, and the change has been transformative. She is flourishing. She now arrives at school without crippling anxiety and believes she can succeed - she even willingly completes homework without us badgering her now as she has been set up for success (I’ll take this win while I can! 😜).

But this should not be happening at all. Not to her. Not to anyone’s child. That I knew what to look for, and that we had the means to keep looking until we found a way through, are forms of privilege most families do not have. There are children sitting in classrooms across Australia right now, quietly building the same story she was, and most of them will not have a parent who can identify what is going wrong, let alone know how to raise it with the school or advocate for what their child needs.

Watching a bright child come to doubt herself, simply because the foundational success she needed never quite arrived is just not ok. So much rests on those early years. Engagement. Belief. Persistence. The long-term sense of being a capable learner. When those foundations are missing, the consequences are not always loud. But they are lasting. That is what is at stake here.

What I went looking for in the research

My master’s research set out to understand the mechanisms. Not whether self-efficacy mattered. The evidence on that is clear. What I wanted to know was how explicit instruction could be deliberately designed to amplify the development of self-efficacy in primary aged students.

I honed in on fifteen empirical studies and looked for the common threads. Three things kept surfacing across the evidence base, with striking consistency.

Engineered mastery, through guided practice, scaffolding, and incremental wins. Self-efficacy grew, reliably, when teachers structured learning to provide early, repeated, authentic experiences of success. Small steps. Cumulative practice. Clear success criteria. Frequent checks for understanding. Bandura was clear that mastery is the most influential source of self-efficacy, and the studies bore this out. When challenge and support are carefully balanced, and progress is made visible through micro-wins, learners begin to attribute their improvement to their own effort and strategy. When scaffolding was thin or instructional clarity absent, the opposite happened. Self-efficacy and engagement declined, as students lost the success cues they needed to keep going.
Transparent modelling, for cognitive visibility. Self-efficacy strengthened when teachers made expert thinking visible. Verbalising reasoning. Demonstrating how to manage error. Showing the steps of successful performance. When students could see how learning happens, they could begin to see themselves doing it. Modelling did more than clarify cognitive processes. It also built relational credibility. Students who saw their teachers persist through difficulty, share mistakes, and narrate strategies were more willing to take intellectual risks themselves. In the early years, this took on an additional dimension. Calm responses to error created the emotional safety that made risk-taking possible.
Feedback as a catalyst for metacognitive growth and learner agency. Once mastery and modelling have laid the foundation, feedback is what sustains and amplifies the belief. But not any feedback. Specific, timely, process-focused feedback. The kind that links progress to controllable factors like effort and strategy, rather than to fixed ability or judgement. One study has stayed with me. Zhao and colleagues (2024) gave children brief, accuracy-based feedback on a task. Those children gained in self-efficacy, and they also halved the rate of cheating in subsequent tasks. Those who received no feedback showed no change. Credible feedback does not just build belief. It builds integrity. And done well, feedback becomes a dialogue rather than an evaluation, prompting children to interpret their own progress and gradually assume ownership of their learning.

These three threads, taken together, illustrate the architecture of self-efficacy through explicit instruction. Mastery builds the foundation. Modelling makes the path visible. Feedback teaches the learner to navigate it. Each on its own is necessary but insufficient. Of course, there is a lot more nuance that need exploring here, but that is where my research landed more broadly.

(Note: My research went further than describing these threads. It also offered four recommendations for translating them into practice across Australian schools, including how cognitive science can be mobilised to address disengagement and wellbeing at a systems level. I will share more in future pieces, and welcome conversation with anyone who wants to dig deeper.)

And then the guardrails have to come down…

Here is where this gets interesting, and where I want to be careful about something. Because if we engineer success forever, we have not built self-efficacy. We have built dependence.

A student who thrives in a feedback-rich, carefully sequenced classroom but collapses the moment those supports are removed has not internalised belief. They have learned that the conditions are favourable. That belief is conditional. It belongs to the system, not to them.

There is a second risk on the other side of this. We do not want to engineer the Dunning-Kruger effect either, where students develop a belief in their capability that outruns their actual competence. Children need to experience both success and, in age-appropriate doses, genuine struggle and failure. That is part of life. That is part of learning. A self-efficacy that has never been tested by real difficulty is fragile, and a self-efficacy that has been protected from every failure is dangerous, because it can lead a learner to overestimate what they know and underestimate what they still need to learn.

The work, then, is not just to engineer success. It is to build the kind of self-awareness that lets a learner see their own capability accurately. To know what they know. To know what they do not yet know. To know how to close the gap between the two. This is the territory of self-regulated learning, of metacognition, of the slow handover from teacher direction to student direction.

AERO’s practice guide on self-regulated learning is clear that students who develop these skills are better equipped to succeed not just at school but throughout their lives. And they do not pick it up by accident. It is taught.

The guardrails go up. The student experiences success. The teacher narrates the strategies that produced the success. The student begins to use those strategies independently. The guardrails come down, gradually, deliberately, with the student’s growing capability calibrating the pace. Along the way, the student learns to monitor their own thinking, to recognise what they understand and what they do not, to seek help when they need it and to trust their own judgement when they do not. By the time we are done, the student does not just believe they can succeed. They know how they made the success happen, and they can do it again. They also know when they are out of their depth, and what to do about it.

That is the move from conditional belief to internalised agency. Agency and responsibility, taken over their own learning, is the ultimate endgame of schooling. Not the test scores. Not the certificates. The capacity to keep learning, to keep adapting, to keep building genuine belief grounded in genuine capability, long after the classroom is behind them. Children who consistently experience this kind of mastery do not need to be cheered into believing in themselves. They have evidence.

Something to sit with: How are we supporting our teachers to develop self-efficacy?

If everything in this piece is true for students, and the research is fairly emphatic that it is, then we have a problem we need to talk about.

Because everything I have just described, engineered mastery, transparent modelling, responsive feedback, the slow careful release of support as capability builds, is exactly what teachers need too.

Teachers are being asked to enact one of the largest pedagogical shifts in a generation. To embrace explicit instruction. To use shared curriculum materials. To teach in ways that may feel unfamiliar, in classrooms where they are simultaneously building students’ belief in themselves while their own professional belief is being quietly reshaped.

And in many systems, the same principles we apply so carefully to students are not being applied to teachers. We hand them the new model and expect mastery without scaffolded practice. We expect them to make their thinking visible to students without anyone making the new thinking visible to them. We give them feedback that is evaluative rather than developmental, and then we wonder why teacher self-efficacy & wellbing is fragile…

Teachers, like students, do not develop belief in their capability through pep talks and posters. They develop it through engineered mastery. Through transparent modelling. Through responsive, credible feedback that links their effort and strategy to visible progress. They develop it the same way their students do, because the cognitive architecture of belief does not change when we cross the threshold of forty.

So the question to sit with is not whether teacher self-efficacy matters. We know it does. The question is how, and where, and through whom, the conditions are being created for it to grow.

And it is the next piece I want to write…

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Restoring the Heart of Education

Jo Griffin — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 06:12:21 GMT

Why did you really become a teacher?

Was it for the lesson plans? For the staff meetings? For the data collection and analysis? For the instructional frameworks, the improvement cycles, the cognitive science, the data walls?

I doubt it. For most, it was something much deeper…

At the core of this calling, before the professional standards, before the science of learning, before the policies and procedures, there was something far more human.

A desire to connect.
A desire to inspire.
A desire to make a difference in the life of another human being.

Teaching is one of the most ancient professions in civilisation. Long before curriculum documents and school improvement plans, there were elders, philosophers, storytellers and artisans. There were people who carried knowledge forward and entrusted it to the next generation.

Why has this profession endured?

Because societies cannot survive without it.

Because every civilisation depends on those willing to stand between what has been learned and what is yet to come.

And right now, many educators are tired. Disillusioned. Disconnected. Exhausted by the pace of change and the weight of reform.

So this is a love letter...

A love letter to teachers who are quietly holding classrooms together before crumbling into tears behind closed doors.

To leaders carrying the tension of systemic reform and staff morale, while wondering how much more they can absorb.

To those questioning whether they can keep going one more term, one more week, one more day…

This is a love letter to tell you that you are seen.
You are heard.
You are needed.

Before anything else, this is a gentle invitation to return to the heart of why you chose this path.

A New Era

We are living in an era of extraordinary clarity about how learning works.

Cognitive science has given us language for the processes of learning. Neuroscience has illuminated the biology that underpins attention, memory and knowledge schema. Educational psychology has sharpened our understanding of feedback, motivation and self-efficacy.

In Australia, system guidance, instructional models and frameworks point us toward practices that reliably improve outcomes. High expectations. Explicit teaching. Effective feedback. Wellbeing. Collaboration.

The research is rich. The evidence is growing. The direction is clear.

And yet, for many teachers, this can feel strangely disconnected. Clinical. Technical. Removed from the heart of the work.

Which is unsettling, because teaching is, and always has been, a deeply, innately human profession.

So if we trace this research back to its origins, what do we actually find?

Not algorithms. Not compliance. Not control.

We find humanity.

Educational researchers did not devote decades to studying memory, instruction and motivation because they were captivated by spreadsheets. They were driven by a belief that children deserve to succeed. That classrooms can alter life trajectories. That inequity is not inevitable.

Behind every framework sits a moral impulse. Behind every model sits a human hope.

The Science of Learning is not cold or devoid of humanity.

It is an attempt to honour the dignity of every learner by understanding how to teach them well. At its best, it is an expression of deep care. A disciplined, rigorous, evidence-seeking form of care that insists that the next generation deserves more than guesswork.

In that sense, the science is not separate from our humanity. It is one of the ways we protect it.

Some ask where the humanity sits in explicit teaching. Why we spend so much time preparing knowledge-rich curriculum and ensuring instruction is responsive.

Look closer…

High expectations are not about pressure. They are about belief.

Explicit instruction is not about rigidity. It is about clarity.

Feedback is not about criticism. It is about care.

When we teach explicitly, we remove unnecessary struggle so that students can think deeply. When we build knowledge, we give students access to conversations they were previously locked out of. When we use evidence, we are saying that learning matters too much for guesswork.

The humanity is not lost in the science. It is protected by it.

We cannot untangle the threads of head and heart, and nor should we try. This is what makes the humanity and the art of education so uniquely, inextricably, intangibly magical.

Education has always required both.

And in this new era, it still does.

AI is coming for our jobs… or is it?

We are also standing at the edge of another shift.

Artificial intelligence. Automation. Acceleration.

The future feels louder. Faster. It raises real questions about what schooling should look like in the next era.

But there is one thing that cannot be automated.

Connection.

No algorithm can replicate the moment a teacher kneels beside a student, looks them in the eye and reassures them that they are capable and supported.

No machine can replace the shared laughter in a staffroom after a hard week.

No AI can embody empathy, moral integrity or genuine human presence.

The tools may evolve.

The heart of education remains deeply human.

Socrates is often attributed with saying that “education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel”. Whether the wording has shifted across time or not, the sentiment has endured. Education is not about storage. It is about awakening. Awakening through knowledge that leads to deep thinking, ideas, inspiration and empowerment.

And awakening, I believe, requires authentic human connection.

Before Tomorrow

Before you step into your classroom tomorrow…
Before you run that professional learning session…
Before you present the data…
Before you refine the lesson sequence…
Before you meet with the concerned parent…

Pause… Breathe in.

Remember the younger version of you who first felt drawn to this profession. When did that inspiration land? What did you hope to be part of? Who did you hope to serve?

Breathe out.

Connect with the humans in front of you. Look them in the eye and truly see them. Pause long enough to feel the profound importance and quiet joy of this work. Sit with the humanity of it.

Smile. Reconnect.

Because at the core of education is not control, performance or perfection.

It is the audacious belief that we can create a future that is wiser, kinder, more thoughtful and more capable.

Educating the mind without educating the heart, is no education at all. (Aristotle)

The science sharpens the mind. The heart gives it direction.

In a time when change feels relentless, let this be a steadying truth: Education is not merely a system. It is not merely a reform agenda. It is not merely a collection of strategies.

It is a profoundly human endeavour.

And you, in all your imperfection and persistence, are part of that.

So this love letter is a reminder…

A reminder that beneath the marking, the meetings and the metrics, there is a calling.

A reminder that your work matters in ways that cannot always be measured.

A reminder that restoring the heart of education begins with remembering why you entered it in the first place.

Forgive the nostalgic Australian moment, but John Farnham’s lyrics (our unofficial National Anthem!) still carry weight:

🎵“We have the power to be powerful, believing we can make it better… You’re the voice, try and understand it.”🎵

Teachers are the quiet champions of that message.

You are seen.
You are heard.
You are deeply needed.

And the heart of this profession still beats because of people like you.

P.S. Please share this widely with all who make a difference in education every day ♥️

When Success Masks Fragility

Jo Griffin — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 08:33:24 GMT

Recently, after engaging with several published articles and reflecting more deeply on the mechanisms of explicit instruction, I’ve noticed my own thinking shifting.

Not in a dramatic way. Not in a way that rejects what has come before. More in the way professional understanding often evolves: gradually, thoughtfully, with a few new questions rising to the surface. Not about whether explicit instruction works, but how we optimise it.

❓How do we ensure that, as we move through the familiar phases of I do, We do, You do, we are not simply eliciting participation, but cultivating deep thinking?

❓How do we move from visible engagement to cognitive engagement?

Because alongside the national shift toward more structured, explicit approaches, there is a subtle tension. For some, this way of teaching and learning feels unfamiliar.

The routines; call and response, structured checks for understanding, the expectation that everyone is cognitively present; can feel more deliberate and stepped out than what came before.

It looks different. It sounds different. At times, it can feel downright awkward while everyone builds fluency with it. That is not a flaw. It is what happens when norms evolve. But as we settle into these routines, it is worth asking a deeper question:

❓As we move through a lesson, how sure are we that students are truly thinking and learning - not just participating?

That distinction matters. Participation can be visible. Thinking is not always.

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The Goldilocks Problem: Are We Calibrating Challenge?

At the heart of this reflection is calibration.

Robert Bjork coined the term ‘desirable difficulties’ in 1994. The idea is deceptively simple: certain learning conditions that make performance feel harder in the moment can strengthen long-term retention and transfer.

In practical terms:

Too easy → boredom creeps in
Too hard → frustration takes over
Just right → students experience the satisfaction of genuine problem solving

Willingham reminds us in Why Don’t Students Like School? (2009) that people enjoy thinking when they can succeed. Humans are naturally motivated to solve problems. However, success must be attainable.

This is the Goldilocks zone.

Explicit instruction reduces unnecessary cognitive noise. It clarifies new material, makes vocabulary precise, and strengthens retrieval. That clarity is not the opposite of stretch. It is the condition that makes stretch possible.

The question is not whether we are scaffolding.

The question is whether we are calibrating.

Explicit Instruction: Not About Who It Is For

One persistent misconception is that explicit instruction exists primarily for struggling students. Cognitive science does not support that view.

All learners:

Process new information in limited working memory
Build schema in long-term memory
Require retrieval to strengthen understanding
Benefit from reduced extraneous cognitive load

High-performing students do not learn through a different cognitive architecture. They may move more quickly through modelling and guided practice. The structure remains beneficial; the pacing adapts.

The more useful question is this:

❓What becomes possible when capable students have their reasoning sharpened before independence?

The Paradox of Practice

Paul Kirschner’s recent reflection on what he calls ‘the paradox of practice’ is particularly instructive here.

He challenges the assumption that alignment means matching the format of practice to the format of assessment. Alignment, he argues, is about matching cognitive processes.

He writes:

“Practising recognition tasks prepares you for recognition. Practising explanation tasks prepares you for explanation. Practising generation tasks prepares you for generation. When learning and later use require different kinds of thinking than during the teaching, performance drops even when the content is familiar.”

This distinction is powerful:

Recognition confirms familiarity.
Explanation reveals understanding.
Generation strengthens transfer.

If students practise selecting answers but are later required to reason, evaluate or adapt, we should not be surprised when performance falters.

Kirschner also discusses contextual interference: varying conditions of practice so students cannot rely on surface cues. This may reduce short-term smoothness; however, it strengthens long-term flexibility. He writes:

“If learning looks a little worse in the moment, that may be the clearest sign that it’s finally doing what we want it to do.”

That is worth sitting with. Smooth lessons can produce brittle knowledge. Carefully designed struggle can produce robust understanding.

Retrieval Is Necessary. It Is Not Sufficient.

Natalie Wexler, in her recent piece Don’t Forget to Elaborate (2026), echoes this concern.

Explicit instruction and retrieval practice are essential. They lay the groundwork. But laying the groundwork without building on it does not produce deep knowledge.

Wexler highlights the role of elaboration.

Elaboration involves asking students to:

Answer how and why questions
Generate examples
Compare and contrast ideas
Connect new learning to prior knowledge
Extend concepts into unfamiliar contexts

Elaboration deepens comprehension and strengthens retention. In other words:

Retrieval builds access.
Elaboration builds understanding.

Stopping at repetition risks mistaking fluency for depth.

When Beautiful Work Can Mask Shallow Processing

Recently, I was looking through some of my husband’s primary school workbooks from the late 80’s/early 90’s. He was a highly capable student. The kind teachers loved. His work was beautifully presented, confident and structurally sound. It met the brief. It exceeded expectations.

In one task where he was asked to write a story, the plot sounded very suspiciously like a slightly altered version of Jack and the Beanstalk. Different names. Different setting. Same suspiciously towering problem.

In another entry, where he had to write about Roald Dahl, the vocabulary and sentence structures strongly suggested that the World Book Encyclopedia set from home had been working very hard behind the scenes…

There was nothing fundamentally wrong with the work. In fact, it looked quite impressive. But it prompted a deeper question:

❓Was this evidence of robust understanding, or skilful reproduction?

Highly capable students are often exceptional at reverse-engineering expectations. They infer quickly. They adapt. They learn what success looks like and deliver it efficiently.

But when we gently interrogate the thinking behind the product, something interesting can happen.

If we ask:

Why did you choose that structure?
Can you summarise the key idea in your own words?
What assumption underpins this argument?
Can you elaborate on what you meant when you said…?

We sometimes discover that polished production does not always guarantee precision of reasoning.

This is not a criticism of capability. It is a reminder that adaptation is impressive. Optimisation must be intentional.

And optimisation requires that we look beneath the surface of correct answers and beautifully completed tasks to examine the thinking that produced them.

This distinction sits at the heart of the current conversation.

Stretching Thinking Across Explicit Instruction

Explicit instruction is often misunderstood as linear and procedural. In reality, it provides multiple opportunities to increase cognitive demand. Stretch does not have to wait until the final independent task. It can be embedded deliberately throughout the lesson.

Below are practical ways to strengthen thinking across each phase.

1. During ‘I Do’: Make Thinking Visible

Modelling is not simply demonstrating procedure. It is an opportunity to expose expert reasoning.

Instead of modelling silently, consider narrating - eg:

Why one option is stronger than another
What assumptions are being made
How evidence supports or contradicts a claim
What might go wrong

Example: “I could use this word, but does it convey precision? Let me test an alternative. Which choice best captures the tone I want?”

Stretch during modelling looks like:

Comparing two possible solutions
Evaluating competing interpretations
Surfacing a common misconception and correcting it
Demonstrating how to interrogate one’s own reasoning

This prompts and models metacognition early, not just at the end.

2. During ‘We Do’: Move Beyond ‘Correctness’

Guided practice is fertile ground for elaboration. Instead of stopping at: “What is the answer?”; Extend to:

How did you know?
Why is this distractor incorrect?
What evidence supports your choice?
Would your reasoning change if the context shifted?

Practical routines:

Ask a student to restate another student’s reasoning
Require justification before confirming correctness
Introduce a slightly varied example to test transfer
Remove cues gradually

Even in a multiple-choice context:

Correct answer → Why?
Incorrect option → Why not?

Recognition becomes reasoning and an opportunity to elaborate.

3. ‘You Do’: Making Thinking Visible

The You Do phase is not simply independent practice. It is where thinking becomes visible.

As Wexler asserts, writing is a powerful vehicle for making thinking visible. It creates an opportunity for elaboration. It forces students to slow down, to select words deliberately, to structure ideas coherently and to clarify what they actually mean.

Vague understanding struggles to survive on the page.

For capable students in particular, writing can shift them from fluent production to deliberate reasoning. It invites precision.

Independent work, then, should not simply rehearse learning. It should extend it. Eg.

‘Explain the concept’ moves to → Compare it to a similar concept; OR → Distinguish where the similarities break down
Solve the problem moves to → Create a similar problem OR → Create a harder one that requires a new layer of reasoning
Identify the theme moves to → Defend why it is the most significant
Summarise the text moves to → Evaluate or critique the author’s argument

Stretch does not require new content. It requires deeper interaction with the same content.

To conclude…

As our understanding of the routines and expectations of explicit instruction becomes more fluent, this feels like an important moment to pause.

Not to overhaul. Not to abandon. But to sharpen.

A few points worth holding onto:

Clarity enables complexity.
Retrieval strengthens access; elaboration deepens understanding.
Recognition is not the same as reasoning.
Smooth performance does not always equal secure knowledge.
Well-calibrated challenge strengthens long-term thinking.

The work now is not simply to implement routines, but to interrogate the cognitive work happening within them.

❓Are we designing for participation, or for precision of thought?

When students can defend their answers, generate new ones, and transfer ideas beyond the lesson, we know we are not just moving through phases. We are strengthening understanding.

Explicit instruction is not merely a support for those who struggle. It is a disciplined approach to learning that serves every student - including those who already succeed.

Thanks for reading Knowledge Nest - by Jo Griffin! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Dear Families: This isn’t a step back in time (and your child isn’t really 'bored'...)

Jo Griffin — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 23:19:21 GMT

You could be forgiven for looking at some contemporary classrooms and interpreting what you see as a step back in time. Calmer walls, desks in rows, teacher at the front… more structured lessons… children sitting, listening, practising, thinking.

From the outside, it can look like a case of ‘back to basics’. How school used to be. Older practices resurfacing under new names.

Many families are starting to ask questions and there is an uncomfortable ‘rumbling’ going on in the background

“What has happened to the joy and creativity?”"
“My child says school is boring.”

These reactions are understandable. They deserve to be taken seriously.

For teachers, this moment can feel particularly vulnerable. Many of the visible signals once used to communicate care, such as colourful displays, flexible layouts, and constant activity, are being replaced with something quieter and less immediately reassuring. Without explanation, that quiet can easily be misread.

So let us be clear. What you are seeing is not a step backwards. It is a step forward, informed by what we now understand about how children learn.

Why ‘bored’ does not mean disengaged

When children say they are bored, it is tempting to assume something has gone wrong. Research suggests something more nuanced.

In Why Don’t Students Like School?, cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham explains that people do not dislike learning. They dislike thinking hard. Thinking requires effort. It draws on working memory - which is limited. When thinking is unavoidable, sustained, and structured, it can feel uncomfortable at first.

So when a child says, “School is boring,” what they are often really saying is:

I am adjusting to new routines
I cannot tune out as easily as before
I am being asked to concentrate and practise more deliberately
Thinking feels harder right now

That is not disengagement.

That is cognitive effort.

Explicit instruction, when done well, reduces unnecessary distractions so students can direct their mental energy toward learning itself. Effortful thinking does not always feel enjoyable in the moment, particularly while students are still learning what is expected of them.

As routines become familiar and skills strengthen, learning often becomes more fluent, more confident, and more rewarding.

Acknowledging real concerns

It is also important to say this plainly. Some family concerns are understandable.

When routines and expectations are new, classrooms can feel more structured and, at times, even rigid. From the outside, this can look like an overemphasis on rules or compliance. It is reasonable to wonder whether this signals a narrowing of learning or a loss of warmth.

Let us reassure you. This is not about creating a generation of robots.

Clear routines, rules, and expectations are essential conditions for learning. They reduce uncertainty, minimise distractions, and create the cognitive space students need to concentrate, practise, and think deeply. When students know what is expected, they can devote more mental energy to learning itself rather than working out how to behave, where to sit, or what comes next.

These structures are not the end goal. They are the foundation.

By establishing predictable routines, teachers create the space to build rich knowledge, stretch thinking, and engage students in meaningful discussion. Structure supports learning so that creativity, inquiry, imagination, collaboration, and play, particularly in the early years, have something solid to rest on.

That said, this phase can feel wobbly at first.

Teachers are learning too

Teachers are adjusting alongside students.

As classroom practices shift, teachers’ cognitive load increases. They are thinking carefully about lesson sequencing, attention, routines, expectations, and student understanding all at once. In the early stages of adjustment, classrooms can appear less relational, not because connection is no longer valued, but because teachers are building the systems that will ultimately protect it.

This is where we need to extend some grace.

These routines are not designed to reduce connection with students. They are designed to create more space for it.

Over time, something important happens.

When classrooms are calmer and more predictable, teachers spend less energy reacting to constant interruptions, low level behaviours, and repeated resets. Less time is spent managing the room, and more time is freed for teaching and for connecting.

This creates more time for settled beginnings, meaningful interaction, rich discussion, and dynamic, responsive teaching that emerges once strong structures are in place, allowing teachers to engage deeply with students’ thinking and respond in the moment to stretch and support them toward their best potential.

For families wondering where the connection has gone, the reassurance is this: Connection has not disappeared. It is being protected.

By reducing the daily friction of persistent low-level behavioural issues that drain both teachers and students, we are making room for deeper, more dynamic relationships to grow.

What these changes really signal

Dear families… while your child’s classroom may look quieter than you expected, and the routines may feel more structured or even rigid at first glance, we want to reassure you that something important is happening.

At a deeper level, these changes reflect more care, not less.

They signal a refusal to accept the status quo. Australian schools have let too many children down for too long by quietly accepting that some will fall behind, fall through the cracks, or be written off as needing something ‘different’ instead of being taught to read, write, and work confidently with numbers. We are no longer willing to accept that. All children deserve the opportunity to develop deep knowledge, strong literacy, and numeracy, and to think critically, reason carefully, learn from history, and understand the complex systems shaping the world they are growing into.

These are not optional extras. They are the foundations young people need to become informed citizens, creative thinkers, problem solvers, and leaders in a complex future.

So while the walls may look calmer and the routines more deliberate, there is real magic happening beneath the surface. Knowledge is being built. Thinking is being stretched. Ideas are forming, connecting, and deepening. Your child is learning how to concentrate, how to persist, and how to make sense of the world.

And when we understand that, the conversation changes. Instead of asking why this looks different, we begin asking how we can support children as they adjust, practise, and grow.

That is a conversation worth having.

Together.

This post is public, so feel free to share it.

Move over, Pinterest classrooms… Make way for 'Pinterest brains'

Jo Griffin — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 08:06:34 GMT

Step away from the laminator. Gently lower the staple gun.

It’s that time of year again. When fonts, colours, and classroom themes suddenly feel like very important decisions (I beg you to steer away from the apparently resurfacing 70s and 90s trends… 😱).

I’ll confess upfront: I’ve been there. I’ve fallen down the themed-classroom rabbit hole more than once. Rainbow era? Guilty. Matching labels? Absolutely. There is something deeply satisfying about a beautifully styled room that feels warm, intentional, and ready for learning.

But here’s the quieter question worth sitting with:

What purpose are all these displays and decorations actually serving?

This isn’t an argument against caring about classroom environments. The spaces we create matter. They communicate safety, belonging, and purpose. But research suggests that how an environment supports thinking matters far more than how photogenic it looks. Some design choices support focus, memory, and self-regulation. Others, despite the best intentions, quietly compete for students’ attention.

In this piece, I want to move beyond aesthetics and into thinking. Drawing on research and lived classroom experience, I’ll unpack what we know about environments that genuinely support learning and share practical ways to design classrooms that feel calm, organised, and supportive, without draining your time or energy.

(Bonus: there is a free download at the end to help you make these shifts)

What does the research say about classroom environments?

This is where things get interesting – and a little uncomfortable.

For years, many of us (myself included) have worked from a well-intentioned belief: more colour, more visuals, more displays must equal more engagement and better learning. After all, vibrant classrooms feel warm, welcoming, and alive. For many teachers, particularly early in their careers, the classroom becomes a visible expression of care, effort, and professionalism.

The problem is that when intuition meets evidence, this assumption starts to wobble.

Research consistently shows that visually busy classrooms compete with students’ attention rather than support it. In highly decorated rooms, children spend more time off-task, with their attention repeatedly drawn away from instruction and towards wall displays, even when those displays are familiar and unchanged (Godwin et al., 2022; Rodrigues & Pandeirada, 2018). Crucially, repeated exposure does not solve the problem. The brain does not simply ‘tune out’ visual clutter - distraction persists as a constant, low-level drain on attention (Godwin et al., 2022).

From a cognitive perspective, this matters because learning relies on working memory, a system that is limited and easily overloaded, particularly when students are learning something new (Sweller et al., 2019). When the environment adds non-essential visual information, it increases extraneous cognitive load - mental effort that does not contribute to learning and reduces capacity for understanding and retention (Sweller et al., 2019).

Large-scale evidence suggests these effects are not trivial. Barrett et al. (2017) found that environmental factors such as visual organisation, layout, and light accounted for up to 16 per cent of the variation in student learning outcomes, a contribution comparable to well-established instructional influences. More recently, dos Santos (2025) argues that classroom design remains largely disconnected from what we know about how the brain processes information, with visual overload a central concern.

Importantly, this burden is not evenly shared. While all students experience increased attentional demands, the impact is felt more acutely by more vulnerable learners, including those with attentional or sensory sensitivities, language or learning difficulties, and younger students still developing self-regulation (Hanley et al., 2017; Godwin et al., 2022). Design choices that increase extraneous cognitive load disproportionately affect students who have the least cognitive ‘spare capacity’ to give.

This is not a call for sterile classrooms. It is a call for intentional ones. The question is not whether environments matter, but whether they are helping students think – or quietly competing for their attention.

What about displays? I don’t want my classroom to feel ‘sterile’…

Let’s clear something up first. Calm does not mean bare.

A classroom can be organised, intentional, and cognitively supportive without feeling clinical. If we want ‘Pinterest brains’ - brains full of colour, motion, ideas, and connections - then the space students look at most often needs to be doing the least.

Front of the room: protect thinking

Treat the wall students face during instruction as a cognitive anchor, not a gallery.

Keep this space visually calm and deliberately sparse
Include a clear, well-organised visual timetable that can be interpreted at a glance

Limit anchor charts to those that:

are explicitly referenced during teaching
are used during explanation and modelling
are removed once they are no longer instructionally necessary

Anchor charts should earn their place. If they are not actively used, they quickly become visual background noise rather than learning support.

The goal here isn’t deprivation. It’s precision. When the front of the room is calm, students have more cognitive space to build rich internal “Pinterest boards” in their minds, rather than being distracted by external ones.

Back and side walls: minimal, but personalised

You do not need to plaster every available surface with student work! A few calm wall hangings or thoughtfully chosen images can add warmth and personality.
These elements may also support acoustics, particularly in rooms where sound carries.
Think of these walls as shaping the emotional tone of the room, not competing for attention during teaching.

When you do display student work, make it easy (future you will thank you!)

Be selective about where student work is displayed. Invest in low-effort, high-impact display systems, such as:

Clipboards Velcro-dotted to the wall
Simple frames or display pockets with student names already attached

This allows work to be swapped out quickly as learning progresses. Future you – exhausted and watching the clock – will thank you for systems that don’t involve another round with the laminator and staple gun. Easy displays mean you can close the door, leave on time, and reclaim your afternoons.

Floor and mat areas (especially for younger students)

Keep these spaces clear, calm, and uncluttered.
Ensure shelves, tubs, and loose items are out of reach or visually contained.
The mat area should quietly signal: this is a place for listening, thinking, and shared attention.

Considering the line of sight to the front of the room

Ensure all students have a clear line of sight to the board and teacher.
Avoid hanging displays across the room or using tall furniture that interrupts visual focus.

What about furniture layout? Start with how you teach.

If your teaching is explicit, structured, and responsive, your furniture layout should quietly support that - not work against it.

Prioritise desk pairs (with flexibility built in)

Desk pairs work beautifully for explicit instruction, supporting easy partner talk, quick checks for understanding, and low-friction collaboration without the chaos of constant group reshuffles.

Be intentional about pairing, not just placement.
Avoid layouts that require students to twist or crane to see key visuals.
A simple bonus: pairs can quickly become small groups by turning to face the pair behind them, without moving furniture or losing momentum.

Protect movement - for you and for them

Ensure clear pathways so you can move freely, provide in-the-moment feedback, and scan and respond quickly
Students should be able to access resources or exit the room without disrupting others
Partner talk should not require scraping chairs or reconfiguring the room.

Resist the urge to over-furnish

More furniture does not equal more functionality. Every additional piece takes up physical space and visual space. Ask yourself whether each item genuinely supports teaching, learning, or movement.

*A quick note on teacher desks: large, cumbersome desks often anchor teachers to one spot and consume valuable floor space. If you need a desk, consider a small, portable option or position it outside the main teaching zone. When you’re teaching explicitly, you’re rarely sitting behind a desk anyway.

A simple rule of thumb: If your layout allows you to teach, move, notice, and respond with ease, and allows students to sit, turn, move, and focus without friction - you’re probably on the right track!

Furniture should fade into the background so learning can take centre stage.

Colours, décor, and organisation: calm spaces support busy brains

The visual and organisational choices we make in classrooms quietly shape attention, regulation, and cognitive load.

Colour and texture - less stimulation, more calm

Research suggests that natural colours, textures, and visual connections to nature are associated with lower stress and improved comfort and attention in learning environments (Barrett et al., 2017; Li & Sullivan, 2016).

Aim for a base palette of soft blues, greens, and earthy tones, with natural materials where possible.
Use colour sparingly and deliberately to draw attention to what matters most
The same applies to labels: simple, minimal designs often create far less visual noise than heavily themed alternatives

Décor with purpose

Decorative elements should earn their place by adding calm, warmth, or instructional value.

A few thoughtful inclusions are often enough: a globe you regularly use, tidy shelving with predictable organisation, or a small number of nature-inspired wall hangings
Plants can help soften the space and support regulation; even artificial plants can provide visual relief if maintenance is a concern

Organisation that streamlines

Use a clear system for storing student work (trays, tubs, or magazine holders organised by subject) to streamline collection, checking, and return.
If students have desk trays, I recommend you keep them for essentials only (mini whiteboard, marker, basic stationery); store all other work centrally. This helps maintain order and access to student work.

Side note: desk trays benefit from a regular reset (Friday works well). For younger students, simple monitor roles for shared resources help maintain order and build responsibility.

A visually calm, well-organised classroom reduces unnecessary cognitive load, supports regulation, and makes day-to-day teaching smoother - with the added bonus of keeping your classroom running efficiently – this protects our cognitive load too!

Light and noise: clarity supports thinking

Light and sound quietly shape how effortful it is for students to attend, listen, and think.

Prioritise natural light and reduce glare where possible
Be mindful of harsh or flickering fluorescent lighting
Reduce reverberation with simple sound-absorbing additions such as rugs, fabric noticeboards, or soft wall hangings
In acoustically challenging rooms, a teacher voice amplifier can dramatically improve clarity and protect teacher voice

The goal isn’t silence or perfection. It’s clarity. When students don’t have to strain to see or hear, they have more cognitive capacity available for thinking and learning.

Planning for ‘Pinterest brains’

Here’s the quiet shift this whole conversation is really pointing toward.

For many of us, hours have traditionally gone into elaborate displays, themed borders, colour coordination, and visual polish. While those spaces can look beautiful, both research and lived experience keep nudging us in a different direction.

What if that same time and energy were redirected?

Time spent laminating becomes time spent sequencing learning based on what students already know and what the data says they need next.
Time spent styling walls becomes time spent sharpening explanations, examples, and models in response to what students are getting – and what they’re not.
Time spent perfecting displays becomes time spent designing learning that builds rich knowledge and stretches students toward increasingly complex skills.

This is the heart of planning for ‘Pinterest brains’. Brains that are full of colour and motion - not because the walls are shouting at them, but because their internal worlds are expanding. Brains that are building rich mental images, meaningful connections, and durable knowledge about how the world works. Brains that are being lifted by stories, ideas, language, and understanding - much of it completely invisible from the outside.

A calm, intentional classroom does not compete with learning. It gets out of the way so learning can happen.

And while a Pinterest classroom might earn compliments in Week 1, a Pinterest brain is something far more powerful. A child who can see more, think more, connect more, and carry that knowledge forward long after the posters come down.

The real Pinterest boards belong in students’ minds, not on the walls.

Thanks for reading! This post is public so feel free to share it.

You’ll find a FREE checklist linked here to help you reflect on how your classroom currently supports learning, and to identify small, meaningful areas for improvement.

If this piece has sparked any thinking for you, I’d love you to join the conversation. Let’s start shifting the focus from Pinterest classrooms to Pinterest brains. Share your reflections in the comments - and if you’re willing, photos of classrooms designed to support thinking rather than decoration. Consider it the ‘anti-Pinterest classroom’ board 😎.