'The Art of Explanation' by Ros Atkins

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In January 2020 I sent a cheeky email to someone I had never met, one of the world’s great educators and communicators, Professor Barbara Oakley of Oakland University in Michigan. I asked if she might be interested in speaking in October 2020 at the second researchED conference, at my school in Dublin. I didn’t expect to hear back.

But I did hear back, mere hours later, with a classy ‘sorry’ email, signed off ‘Warmly, Barb.’ Of course, everything after March that year was cancelled anyhow. But in early 2022, once again planning the conference, I tried for a second time, and on September 22nd I collected Barb and her husband Phil from Dublin Airport; two days later she gave the opening keynote to researchED Dublin 2022 to 350 educators in our school hall.

I start this piece on Ros Atkins’s new book The Art of Explanation: how to communicate with clarity and confidence with Barbara Oakley because her one-hour explanation of neuroscience, cognitive science and the nature of how we learn was probably the best single instance of extended explanation I have ever witnessed. Her subject-matter was extremely complex. But she led us through these areas with compelling clarity and gathering momentum, aided by a brilliant use of those notorious distractors, Powerpoint slides. No less an authority than Professor Paul Kirschner, who delivered the closing address, tweeted from the front row:

What a wonder this woman is. She can make the most difficult things so extremely easy to understand with graphics that make you laugh and then comprehend.

And also

This might be the best keynote I’ve ever experienced.

That should not be too surprising. Barbara Oakley is the co-creator with Terence Sejnowski of the world’s most popular Massive Open Online Course, Coursera’s Learning How to Learn, which over 3 million people have taken. You don’t get those numbers if you can’t explain really well. Her Dublin talk was not filmed, but you could look instead at this short explainer on neuroscience: How to turn information into intelligence which refers to chunking, an idea Ros Atkins also deals with.

How do you reach such excellence in explanation? Expertise, domain-specific knowledge, preparation, systematic organisation, purposeful work, research, practice: all the qualities that Ros Atkins explores in depth in The Art of Explanation.

I knew I wanted to read this book partly because I have admired the BBC video ‘explainers’ which have become very popular in the last couple of years. We are deluged with information about local and world events, and I find that if I do not follow the initial moments of such events, I often ‘give up’ mentally as they ramify: the Atkins videos ground me in the basics. Here, for instance, is his explanation of the background to the recent catastrophic floods in Libya. But another impulse is professional: so much part of my job as a classroom teacher and school leader is about explaining, in two quite different arenas.

  • As a classroom English teacher: vocabulary (‘What does sojourn mean?’), grammar (the use of the imperative),  literary terms (assonance), the nature of my pupils’ independent ‘homework’, the success criteria of a particular task, feedback and guidance on improving work, writing formal reports explaining where a pupil is in his/her learning, talking to parents in meetings and explaining their child’s standard. And, in associated work, I give explanatory webinars on topics in English, and speak at conferences.

  • As a school leader, I am responsible for much of the everyday organisation of our school. I have to explain processes to colleagues in person and by email, write notices which leave no possibility of misunderstanding, talk to the whole school about arrangements for an event, compile written reports, and so on. Early on in such a role you learn how much ‘leakage’ there is, how much people misread or don’t read explanations. All you can do is hone your own language to the most precise form possible.

A few comments on things which struck me:

  • The Art of Explanation is not one of those glib self-improvement books with advice like ‘the best way to explain is to be yourself and trust your instincts’. Rather, it is pleasingly actionable, with fine-grained guidance on the small steps you need for improvement. Atkins is driven by a strong self-analytical impulse: If we don’t consciously think about what’s working and what isn’t, it’s far harder to do it better next time.

  • One of the core challenges for teachers is managing attention: not just the obvious matter of mind-wandering, but pupils properly attending to the essential, rather than turning their focus to the peripheral or unimportant. All of Atkins’s techniques are directed to focussing on the essential.

  • Maybe the key cognitive bias for all teachers to understand, and consciously address, is the curse of knowledge. When you know so much, how do you put yourself in the position (again) of those who do not? How can you avoid making assumptions about understanding? As Atkins says, his mission to understand how to explain best Applies to subjects I know intimately and subjects I knew nothing of twenty-four hours ago [but] I should warn you, sometimes the former can be harder than the latter.

  • Teachers by definition know their subjects, but in every single class we face the challenge of trying to help our pupils bridge the gap in knowledge, and clear explanation is a crucial tool in this. We have to hone our approach so that we can eradicate obstacles of understanding in the phrase of Atkins’s BBC colleague Allan Little: we tread the difficult line between knowing every detail (as I do of, say, Macbeth and King Lear) and focussing novice pupils only on the detail which opens the way to their deeper understanding. Atkins writes about sifting for the essential: how do I do that with a text as massive, complex and confusing as Hamlet?

  • Among teachers who know some cognitive science there is now recognition of the dangers of distracting visual material, but the fault is still widespread. I regularly watch presenters read out text from slides, and include attractive but counterproductive images. Andy Tharby here writes about how the key educational concept Cognitive Load Theory should be applied to slides: reading out slides overloads working memory because students cannot process two types of language input simultaneously. As Atkins writes, Hunting down distractions in all their forms is essential to giving your explanation the best chance to communicate what you want to say. 

  • In the section ‘What story do you want to tell?’ Atkins emphasises the potency of stories… The best explanations deliver an abundance of relevant useful information via the best-told stories. Good teachers know the power of narrative. You can hardly fail to draw in pupils with a well-told story. In Why Don’t Students Like School? Professor Daniel Willingham wrote that The human mind seems exquisitely tuned to understand and remember stories -so much so that psychologists sometimes refer to stories as “psychologically privileged,” meaning that they are treated differently in memory than other types of material. More here on this from Tom Sherrington (he uses an explainer by the scientist Brian Cox).

  • Ros Atkins regards what he calls ‘strands’ as vital building blocks towards explanation. Essentially these are chunks of interconnected information, building up to what in cognitive science are called schema. He shows how we can develop flexibility in connecting them.

  • I found a couple of pages under the heading ‘Surfacing the structure’ particularly useful as an English teacher. I will in future ask my pupils to be more explicit in their addressing of the reader (the marker-examiner) of literary essays: That structure helps us organise our thoughts, but it can also help the people you’re addressing see the subject from the same vantage point as you. I can give them the same bearings. This technique simply involves not just having a structure but saying so.

I started with Barbara Oakley as a top-level explainer of educational ideas. Here are three more in this domain I admire: 

  1. I have already mentioned Daniel Willingham: his explanations in Why Don’t Students Like School? of abstract research in psychology have changed many teachers’ professional lives for the better.

  2. There is no person more dedicated to visual clarity and precise explanation than Oliver Caviglioli: look at his website. It’s no surprise he is the go-to illustrator of books on education.

  3. Peps Mccrea sends out Snacks, a weekly 5-min email for evidence hungry teachers, which is beautifully concise (as are his books). As an example, read ‘Smartphone tax on attention: How digital devices can inhibit learning.’

Reaching such a high level of clarity as Ros Atkins does, takes deliberate practice, self-analysis and consistency. As teachers, we do not have to explain complex current issues in a short time to hundreds of thousands of viewers, but explanation is still central for us. Our aim is to explain as well as possible as we help our pupils on their journey towards their own understanding, to the point at which they no longer need us. That need is all the more important in a world swimming with inaccurate language and false ‘information’.

In his poem ‘Adam’s Curse’, W.B. Yeats wrote that

A line will take us hours maybe;

Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,   

Our stitching and unstitching has been naught. 

That is what we are aiming for: clarity, credibility and confidence which look effortless. In The Art of Explanation Ros Atkins goes below the surface of his work as BBC Analysis Editor, and valuably shows us that effort in action.

Go to this post for a suggestion of how one of Ros Atkins’s explainers might be used in class: this one is on Manchester City’s finances.