Reflections from Learning and the Brain Conference - Part 2 - Meaning and Purpose

Each year, when I attend the Learning and the Brain conference, I return with a very full brain, and much of what is in it is disconnected.  So, in order to process all of it, I look for themes and write about them.  This year, there will be three.  Last week's was on thinking and learning.  This second one is about meaning and purpose, and the third will be about well-being and happiness.  

If you ask teachers or school leaders to think about what they want for their students, the word purpose is likely to arise.  The GRACE vision statement talks about God's plan for our students' lives.  Look at the surveys of empty nesters or the recently retired, and you will find that they initially struggle because, unless they are intentional about redirecting, they have lost their sense of purpose (having defined it wrongly in the first place).  Professional athletes like Tiger Woods won't retire because they don't know who they are without their sport.  It's the only purpose they feel they have.  This is not true and represents job idolatry, but that's a rant for a different post.

It turns out that research into how we learn also involves a sense of purpose and meaning.  According to the work of Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, the way kids make meaning out of the things they witness enables processes of adaptive change in their brains. It influences the white matter of their cerebral cortex and makes more connections between neurons.  So the psychology of learning has a biological effect, and biology has psychological effects.  Even between people, there is feedback between the emotions of one person and the biology of another.  We've all had the experience of a friend's tears or a supervisor's anger making us feel sick.  When a baby focuses its gaze on us and smiles, there are physical changes in our heart rate.  Petting a dog or cat is thought to lower a person's blood pressure.  Since we aren't carved up pieces, we cannot separate physical neurology from psychological change.

What does this mean for my classroom?  Quite a few things, actually.  It shows us that a teacher's emotional state influences the class' physical atmosphere.  If I remain calm, students are less likely to spiral into a hormonal spin.  If I let them work me up, we create a dangerous cycle.  In past posts, I've called this "feeding the crazy."

It also means that I should carefully approach how to help my students make meaning of their learning.  This doesn't mean I am going to ask them how they feel about Newton's Second Law, but it might mean I should put them in the problem.  If they can get a physical sense of applying a force (even just in their minds), they can make the meaning of it more real.  

In her keynote address, Mary Helen Immordino-Yang showed a poem that her daughter wrote to her baby brother, Teddy.  She told him that she loved him "more than the whole earth-size."  Having just learned they lived on a very large ball of dirt that floated through space and moved around the sun, this second-grader connected her love for her brother, which she couldn't quite wrap her head around to the size and movement of the planet, which she also couldn't quite wrap her head around.  Making these connections is a natural process, but we can leverage it to make better use of it for our lessons.  We can connect the slope of a graph to a slowly or rapidly changing process that is common to students (or ask them to suggest a connection).

Daniel Willingham also discusses how having a student connect content to deeper meaning helps their memory.  He recommends a relatively slow process for using flashcards.  We typically fly through them pretty quickly if we are getting the answer right, but he suggests stopping after each card to ask yourself a why question.  So, you have answered the question "What is the relationship between volume and pressure?" with "Inverse."  Now, ask yourself why is that relationship inverse rather than direct?  Connecting to the meaning creates a more complex story that may involve emotion (e.g. The balloon will pop if the pressure is high enough, which will startle me) and will cause more change in the brain.  

Students have long wanted to understand the purpose of what they are learning.  This is one of the reasons we get asked the question "When am I ever going to use this in real life?"  There are a lot of ways to handle that question, but you don't actually have to convince them that they will use it as an individual.  It can be enough that they know this information is used by someone.  As John Almarode says, "They just need to know that it means something more than the grade in the grade book."  If engineers use it, tell them.  If poets, artists, doctors, CPAs, factory workers, or receptionists use it, your students will benefit from knowing that.  It will help them see purpose and meaning in what they are learning.  

By the way, it is unlikely they will admit it in that moment, so don't get your hopes up for them to say, "Oh, great.  Now, I'm cool with doing the hard thing you have asked me to do."  Just know that your explanation did have a deeper long-term effect on their brain than what you are seeing.

I Literally Just Told You

I spend a lot of my day repeating myself.  I repeat information.  I repeat student's names to get their attention.  I repeat directions over and over and over and over.  While part of this is an issue of attention and listening (particularly when they are just ignoring their own name), some of the problem is also with the mystery of our memories.  The combination of our working memory and how we encode information creates a challenge for teachers as we try to put things into their long-term memories.  

During the pandemic, I discovered a love for British game/panel shows on YouTube.  There's one I am not sure will last long, but it has an interesting premise.  It's called "I Literally Just Told You."  All of the questions in the show are being written live and are about the episode you are watching.  For example, they introduce each contestant as you would on any show, and then the first question might be, "How many children does Darren have?" or "What does Lisa do for a living?"  You would think that, knowing the premise of the show, the contestant might pay really good attention during those introductions.  They might, but they certainly don't remember it sixty seconds later when they are asked.  

Our memories are complex and often paradoxical.  We can be singing an 80s song in our heads, flawlessly remembering every lyric from four decades ago, while walking into the bedroom, only to realize that we have no idea why we walked into the bedroom.  Did I need shoes?  Was I going to make the bed?  Is there a book in here that I want to take to school with me?  I have no idea, but I am still singing "Secrets stolen from deep inside, the second hand unwinds . . ." from Cyndi Lauper's early career while I can't remember the thought I had just twenty seconds ago.  Clearly, recency alone is not what our memories need.

If you attend church, can you summarize last week's sermon?  Your minister worked hard on it.  He structured it in such a way that he hoped would help you remember.  Chances are, it was filled with really important things that struck you upon hearing them.  What about last night's news broadcast.  There was an awful lot of important stuff in there; big things are happening in the world.  Yet, the importance of those story details is not enough for your memory to store it.

For a while, researchers thought memory was related to emotion because of the involvement of the amygdala and because we obviously remember emotional moments vividly (weddings, funerals, where you were when you heard of a tragedy).  Yet, most of what we want to remember and want our students to remember is not inherently emotional.  How would I attach emotion to balancing chemical equations or the quadratic formula?  And, even if I could, is it good for kids?  They are already walking around in an emotional soup, and it may not be ethical for me to add to that.

Could it be frequency?  Maybe I remember the song lyrics because I've heard them so many times.  TV commercials certainly rely on that.  Maybe all the repeating I do is valuable after all, even if it drains my energy.  But . . . ask anyone who has been in a play, having read and heard the lines at every rehearsal doesn't help them on "crash and burn day," the first rehearsal where they are required to be off book.  

This example from the great Daniel Willingham's book, Why Don't Students Like School? shows that frequency is also not enough for your memory.  Which drawing of a penny represents the way an actual penny looks?  There are a few I am certain are wrong.  I know Lincoln does not face left.  But is the year on the left or right?  Yikes!  I am far less sure of that.  I think the motto is on the top, but aren't there some coins where it isn't?  If you are interested, the correct one is G, but the point Willingham is making is that seeing a penny thousands of times doesn't mean you remember its details.

So, how does memory work?  I'd encourage you to read Why Don't Students Like School for the best explanation (or watch Daniel Willingham's TikTok videos (you know I saw them on YouTube) in which he talks about study skills.), but I'll summarize it with this sentence.  We remember what we put effort into thinking about.  As he says it, "Memory is the residue of thought."

Asking your students to think about the material means asking questions.  "Family VIIA is the most reactive non-metal family" is much easier to remember if you understand that each member of that family has 7 valence electrons and only needs one more to fulfill its stability requirements.  So, when I ask students this question in a retrieval activity, I should follow up by asking, "Why is that true?"  Why questions automatically require students to put thought into the meaning of the fact.  It is also helpful to put a fact in the context of relationships.  If family VIIA is the most reactive non-metal family for that reason, what would be the most reactive metal family?  Is the reason the same?  Sort of, so now let's think about the difference.  

This takes a lot of time, and you can't do it with everything you teach.  But if there are things that are going to come up again that you want them to remember and use, invest the time.

As for the directions you keep repeating, write them on the board.  Then, just point back to it when they ask you to repeat it again.