These notes are completely raw, taken in real time with no editing. They have not yet been processed into usable form. Please do not judge any speaker based on what I have written here.
“I started ResearchEd as an act of hope. I hoped every student would have a teacher who had been exposed to the science of learning. I hope you’ll see someone you agree with. I hope you’ll see someone you disagree with. I hope you’ll see someone you’ve been hoping to see for weeks. I hope you’ll see someone you’ve never heard of.” - Tom Bennett
Keynote: Dr. Jim Heal and Meg Lee
Meg runs professional learning for a 50000 student school district.
Jim is a founder of Deans for Impact
Wherever there is darkness, there is the promise of new growth. This is what spring teaches us. The US is at the beginning of a movement for evidence based instruction. Teachers want to know how to take the best evidence about education and turn it into great practice. If the science of learning in the US was a person, it would be a teenager. It is trying to figure out what it wants to be, sometimes contentiously, with pendulum swings but the promise of becoming something really great and interesting.
There’s a sweet spot between overgeneralizing and under generalizing, growth mindset v. speaking about gifts, There are low resolution implementations of practices, but we want real fidelity.
What is the science of learning?
A set of principles representing our best understanding about how people learn, backed by evidence from the field of cognitives science and show to have positive effects on learning. Applicable to instructional context int he form of demonstrable teacher actions. Until it is used in a classroom, it is not an applied science, only a theoretical one
“The most important single factor influencing learning is what the learner already knows.” - D.P. Ausubel
As you become more expert at something, everything you learn comes in not only in isolation but in connection with other things you know that are related, it connects ideas and allows innovation.
Draw two circles. Draw the rest of the owl. Doesn’t work if you don’t know any of the steps in between. Taking students from their current state to the desired state can’t mean putting them in an inquiry state. That’s a game of guess and check in an area in which they have no knowledge. Teaching foundations and architecture of your content allows them to reach the desired state more directly.
Showed a complex paragraph about cricket and asked how much you estimate you will remember. It’s not about whether you can interpret it. It’s about whether you have enough knowledge of the subject to bring to your interpretation of the text. If you know about cricket you activate more of what you already know to the learning.
Baseball, you confusion me video
Don’t expect students to bring new understanding to something they don’t understand at all. Otherwise, you are presenting them with a redacted view of the world and expecting them to figure out the parts you redacted.
New knowledge needs a place to live within the knowledge you already have.
The beauty of this is that the more you learn, the more you can learn and the more interesting, sticky, and rich it becomes. Since the new learning has more ways of hooking to what you already know, you remember it longer and at more depth.
Understanding is remembering in disguise. It is your brain responding to new information with “I’ve seen something like this before.”
Hansel and Gretel example - solving a riddle in which a path must be marked is easier to figure out if your grow up with this fairy tale than it is if you didn’t.
Inquiry learning is inherently inequitable because those who have advantages of prior knowledge will be able to figure things out. Those who haven’t won’t. It is our responsibility to give them all prior knowledge.
Every child deserves to be taught by a professional who understands how learning happens.
Teaching is very hard, but we make it harder for teachers when we prevent them from understanding what works for most student most of the time. Every teacher deserves to understand how teaching happens in order to prioritize and focus the work.
Evidence informed Venn diagram (Scutt, 2018)
Evidence guides us, but it can’t tell us what to do because context matters and requires expertise, experience, and professional judgement to implement. This is using the teacher’s schema to place new understanding about research within their already existing practice.
Expertise and experience are not the same thing. Experts see problems differently because they recognize patterns and categories.
Surface prior knowledge, make schema explicit, intercept misconceptions, connect surface feature o underlying conceptual architecture, hang the new knowledge in the right place.
When schema is underdeveloped
- use examples and analogies
- Provide scaffolds
The science of learning allows for aligned acts of improvement rather than random ones. Aligning them will be powerful for improvement in your school.
Learning science is not an initiative. It’s a lens for improving our practice. It’s the way we accomplish our goals.
Zach Groshell - Explicit Instruction
Explicit instruction is NOT lecturing.
- A lecture is a continuous monologue.
- Explicit instruction is interactive and responsive, even though the teacher is the one delivering information.
Personal definition: A lecture might as well have been a video. Explicit instruction requires an alert human who can adapt.
Working memory is limited
Pairing words with visuals is better than words alone
Stories are psychologically privileged
Examples and analogies help make the material concrete
Generating a response promotes retention and transfer
Lecture is transient. Working memory limitations prevent you from holding onto it because it passes by too quickly.
Explicit instruction involves lots of small chunk presentations with a pause to check for understanding, prompts for short interactions, and retrieval.
Hands up only participation privileges the confident student. Use choral response, cold call, turn and talk, mini-whiteboards, etc. to hear from more students and make all of them think. This type of explicit instruction uses methods that recruit all students to think and participate.
Working memory has two complementary channels, verbal and non-verbal. Pairing them doesn’t overload working memory. It optimizes it. Don’t make them compete by reading words to them outlaid. That’s putting two things in the verbal system at once. Make a diagram, pause to allow students to take it in without listening to you. Take away extraneous information, point to words and diagram (or add the words as you teach) to orient attention.
Story arc: Exposition, rising action, falling action, resolution
“Imagine a time when you . . . “
“Put yourself in the shoes of . . . “
Examples and non-examples have a lot of nuances that allow students to find the boundary of definitions. This is a a covalent bond. This is a covalent bond. This is an ionic bond (How is it different). This is a polar covalent bond (close, but different - we’ve encountered a boundary of the definitions of both ionic and covalent). Ask a lot of yes and no questions about the examples and use a lot of them.
Explicit instruction involves a lot of scaffolding. Removing the scaffold requires them to generate answers.
8 Generative Strategien
Summarizing
Explaining
Testing
Drawing
Concept Mapping
Imagining
Enacting
Teaching
Adina Lopatin - Examples and Non-examples
Most teacher prep programs pair you with a highly regarded teacher and say, “Do everything she does. Now.”
Can beginning teachers have things broken down into pieces?
Brilliance is equally distributed, but quality teaching is not.
Students should think about meaning when they encounter key ideas. How do we make that happen?
- Draw attention to meaning
- Prompt effortful thinking
- Use examples and non-examples
Examples and non-example help build student schema.
- Contrasting similar things clarifies what is included in a concept and excluded from it, helping the brain to organize concepts in long term memory.
- It frees up working memory and allows transfer across contexts.
Varied examples
- Don’t just show one. Show several that have the defining feature in common but a lot of other differences. (Three triangles of different angles and colors)Contrasting non-examples
- Show something with defining differences while keeping everything else the same. (A blue triangle and a blue square, a bat and a bird)Prompts to elaborate
- Ask how the things are the same and how they are different, so they can bring it back to the defining qualities (If bats, birds, and airplanes all have wings, are wings the defining characteristics of birds? Then, what is?)
Cult of Pedagogy video - How to t Teach a Concept Attainment Lesson
Panel Discussion
Q: If you could design an AI tool that would actually be helpful for teachers and education, what would you want it to do? (Personal note: Everyone knows that I refuse to participate voluntarily in AI, so take the summary of these answers with a grain of salt.)
A: It would help with administrative tools, like lesson plans. If it could recognize the BS in our lesson plans, we could make more effective plans.
A. Focus on augmentation, not automation. Make it do something that is impossible for a human today (like a crane), not replace a human (like a loom).
A. If it could help students better see and understand all of their students by facilitating communication between them.
A. Design it to norm rubric based grading.
Q. What would it look like for teachers to learn together and have that inform the practice of the entire school?
A: Teachers volunteer to host observations after implementing something they learned through PD.
A: Trust and camaraderie is required for transparent sharing and allowing people to watch each other.
A: Principal programs teachers in the same room because it requires them to watch each other teach.
Q: Is there a gap between what students and teachers need and what systems prioritize? How can research address that?
A: Obviously, there is a gap. The people who make decisions about what go on in classrooms are not in classrooms enough. The administrator should come in curious and interested in why the teacher has made the decisions they have made. There is currently no feedback loop about products and initiative implementation.
A: We should explain why policy decisions are made and give time to adapt. If a teacher isn't doing it, we should care about find out the reason, not just being upset that they didn't do it.
A: Meet with stakeholder groups regularly and frequently to ask questions about priorities before making decisions.
Q: How do we get more teacher voice and involvement in decision making without overloading them?
A: Build time into their schedules.
A: Every teacher should be part of some team. Allow them to choose which conversation they want to be a part of. They all want to be part of at least one of them if given the opportunity.
A: Partner teachers with researchers, so the researcher can observe the expertise and try to translate it into something explainable and transferrable to others.
Tom Sherrington - Evidence Informed Teaching -What Does it Look Like in Practice
You can't think about the research while you are in the flow of running the room, but you have to be thinking about something as you make decisions about what do. How do we take the enormous wealth of learning and turn it into a model of teaching and learning that we can implement.
Ausubel's Meaningful Learning talks about how to connect new material to prior knowledge. That's where meaning is made.
Ask yourself what prior knowledge they might be missing. (If you use Rome as a synonym for the power of the Pope while teaching about Henry the 8th, do your students know that's what it means?)
Students struggle because of
- lack of prior knowledge
- attention deficits
- poor fluency of recall
- working memory overload
- task completion as a proxy (a poor one) for learning
Is everyone thinking? Making meaning? Practicing? Building schema?
Dylan Wiliam's Formative Assessment Strategies:
Rosenshine's Principles
Scaffolding:
- Map out components of the task
- Provide supports at a detailed level
- Provide supports at a generalized level
- Practice explaining with the support to check
- Remove supports as they practice.
Short feedback loops - Give a couple of examples. Then ask students to generate one. Once you have developed a pattern, you can play with it by making small changes to the pattern.
You don't get better at a sport by endlessly playing a sport. You break it down and drill the components before putting it back together.
Richard Wheadon - Teaching Learning Habits - How to Develop Independent and Successful Learners
Teachers are becoming more evidence informed, but we have forgotten to tell the students.
Kids leave you. Have you instilled enough knowledge of the science of learning in them that they can learn without you? They are sitting in a college lecture where all the things you did in middle and high school aren't present, can your former students help themselves? Understanding cognitive science gives them the freedom to make better decisions.
Learning - Working memory is limited. Knowing that should change how you teach. If they know that, it should change how they study. Explain chunking to them so they can chunk things themselves when they need to. Teach them why retrieval and rehearsal work.
Thinking - "Memory is the residue of thought." - Daniel Willingham. If you don't spend time thinking about something, you will not remember it. You lose your phone or your keys when you think about something else because it has left your working memory. That's why we retrace our steps when we are looking for something. Listening and thinking are two different things. Do things that require them to think. Teach them that for studying as well. Could you draw a dollar bill accurately? Probably not, because when you are holding it, you are thinking about what you want to buy, not what the bill looks like.
Fast and slow thinking - Daniel Kahneman - When you do things automatically (habits, frequent things), you forget them quickly. You don't remember a normal drive home. If you encounter a detour, you remember more of it because you had to slow down to navigate new challenges. Fast thinking is important for saving our mental energies day to day, but it is bad in learning new material because it is loaded with bias and reinforces logical fallacies.
Substitution Bias - Instead of answering the question they are asked, students answer a simpler question. A bat and ball together cost $1.10. That bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? A child will answer 10 cents, but it can't be. The ball has to cost 5 cents, but they just look at two numbers and subtract them.
Sunk Cost Fallacy - They keep doing things that don't work because they don't want to admit that it they have been doing it wrong for a long time.
Structure things and create rules that slow down thinking. Train in statistical thinking. Remind people why you are doing what you are doing (Nudge theory). "Hey, there is a trick question in here, so try to find it."
Habits - Habits are formed through self gratification, motivation, and routines. As a teacher, you have more control over routines than the internal processes of the other two. Our brains are wired to prioritize immediate pleasure over future rewards. Habits can help you overcome that impulse and overcome procrastination.
The law of effect - Success breeds success. If something leads to a desired outcome, it is reinforced.
Atomic Habits - Cue, Craving, Response, Reward - Breaking the cycle is required to change the habit.
Tom Bennet - Addressing the Behavior Crisis
I didn't take notes in real time because I enjoy Tom and really wanted to just listen. I'll summarize later.
