The Tragedy of Not Missing What You Never Had

I'm on a couple of weekly email newsletters. I have chosen them carefully to be the ones I will definitely read. One of them is called Evidence Snacks from the great Peps McCrae. 

Teachers, if you don't know Peps, do yourself a favor and look him up. He writes very short books with a lot of punch. This week's snack was special. In this snack, he was talking about how the low friction of the modern world has prevented us from growing resilience and perseverance, leading to more depression and anxiety rather than less. Then, he included a line that broke my heart a little.

Here it is: "The cost of all this is easy to miss. Nobody notices the strength or skill they never built . . . or the confidence they never grew."

I'm not a person who believes everything new is bad and everything old is good. I'm writing this on a laptop, and I am grateful for it (thought I still love handwriting a thank you note). I appreciate that I don't get lost now the way I used to (but I also recognize that I can't read a map and figure out the area the way I could before). I don't think it is awful that kids play video games when their grandparents rode bikes (although kicking the kids outside for some unstructured time wouldn't be terrible). But I think part of the reason that I can use tech while recognizing what it has taken away is that I am a member of Generation X, the one generation that bridges the time of low tech to the time of high tech. Millennials have it a little bit because they had dumb phones and Blockbuster still existed. But Generation Alpha a beyond won't have lived in a world without instantaneous gratification, low friction, and no thinking required. 

I don't use the word tragic very often, but y'all, this is tragic. 

• Because we like quick delivery, we are teaching kids they never have to wait for anything; so the next generation won't know the joy of an anticipated gift or the Aha! moment that happens after trying to remember something for a long time.
• Because we worship convenience, we are surrendering our cognitive abilities to AI; so the next generation won't get the satisfaction of solving a problem for themselves. 
• Because we want everything to be easy and seamless, we make more tools that reduce friction. But God help the helpless child when that tool doens't work because they won't know how to "do it the hard way." They will fall apart.
• Because we want to "save time," we raise the expectations of what can be done in the time we have, so we teach kids that efficiency matters more than depth. They won't want to take the time to read something long, so they'll just have AI summarize it for them. They already have a hard time sitting through a movie, which has millions of dollars of mind engaging, dopamine inducing special effects. So, a class, where learning only happens when it is effortful will seem like torture because they are used to things being effortless.

What is the result of all of this? 

More anxiety - Less strength - Lower resilience - Less mental health - Less physical health

Even worse, people who are born into this won't know that this isn't the way it was meant to be. God designed us to work hard, socialize with loved ones, and enjoy the life we have. Yes, the fall damaged all of this, but none of it stopped being true.

In the same way a fish doens't know that it's wet, kids who grow up in this world won't recognize that it goes against their design.  Kids born this year won't know that they could have been stronger. They won't know that they could have built confidence. They won't know that they could have moved more slowly. They won't know they could have enjoyed the people around them more. 

I'm painting a grim picture, I know. 

But I have good news - We have agency. We have the ability to set boundaries for ourselves and for our children (and students). We can stop doing things the easiest possible way and intentionally live in a world of friction. Some ideas:

• I was talking to a man a few weeks ago that said he had a phones free dinner with friends once per month. They could talk about anything, disagree about anything, decide a fact that another person said was wrong. But there was one rule; they couldn't look it up on their phones. If you thought someone at the table was wrong, you just had to convince the table that you knew what the right answer was. You couldn't "prove it" with Google or Grok or ChatGTP.
• Choose to remain a generation or two behind the latest phone or operating system. And give your kids a phone that only makes calls but has no internet or social media functions.
• Go outside and take a walk or a drive without your phone. If you get lost, stop and ask for directions.
• When on the phone with customer service, just keep saying "speak to a human" over and over until you confuse the bot into transferring you.
• Go to a store and buy something rather than having it delivered. Take the risk of being annoyed by the checkout clerk.
• Choose not to voluntarily engage with generative AI. I promise it's possible; I've never once prompted an AI for anything and changed from Google to Duck Duck Go because DDG would allow me to disable AI results and Google wouldn't. I know people are afraid of being left behind, but it is only inevitable because we believe it is inevitable. It doesn't have to be if we make them lose enough money.

We don't have to have the same boundaries, but we should all have SOME kind of boundary rather than adopting everything that comes along just because it is the next thing. 

Teachers, require students to use their brains in whatever way you can. Restrict their usage of tools that reduce friction, including but not limited to AI. Force them into discomfort by doing things in your classroom without access to the tools that make it easier. This goes beyond the curriculum and influences their view of both the world and themselves. 

If you don't do it, they won't complain. You know why? 

"Nobody notices the strength or skill they never built . . . or the confidence they never grew."

But you can notice it. You can prevent it from going unnoticed. And now, more than ever, it is your responsibility to require more of them than they want to give - for their own good.

I hope you will be able to read this. I screenshotted it from facebook, but it was so long that I had to reduce it a lot to make it fit into the screenshot. It's important advice to adults - Don't come along and make it easier.

No Volunteers - A Reflection from Research Ed St Louis

If you picture the average classroom or just remember the classroom of your childhood, you can imagine the interaction with teachers and students. The teacher asks a question. A few hands go up. The teacher calls on one of them. That students answers, and the class moves on. Almost all teachers have taught that way at some point. I did. Many still do. But, if there was one theme of ResearchEd this weekend in St. Louis, from Tom Sherrington's keynote to the way every session I attended was conducted, it was that we should not be answering questions from volunteers.

So, what's the problem with it?

There a few, actually.

1. Allows most to stop thinking - The most obvious reason not to call on a volunteer is that it limits participation. When everyone knows that you will call on one of the kids who is raising his hand, the kids who would rather not do any intellectual work that day just won't. "As long as someone raises their hand," they reason, "the teacher will be satisfied by the lack of silence.  I'll let Wyatt take care of that while I do other things." At that point, there are only two or three mentally active people in the room. Allowing that just because the other alternatives are uncomfortable is not fulfilling our professional duties.
2. Inhibits the Insight of Introverts - I didn't mean for that point to be alliterated, but here we are. Introverts are, by nature, unlikely to volunteer to speak out loud. But they will usually answer if asked directly. When using methods like cold calling, you will hear from them but in ways that make them deeply uncomfortable. I found that giving kids mini-whiteboards allowed the introvert to participate in a way that was not so intimidating for them. (For those of you saying they should just get out of their comfort zone, ask yourself if you ever require that from extroverts.) Introverts are usually thinking about the material more deeply than most, and if you only call on the volunteer, you will prevent the class from the benefit of those thoughts. You will also reinforce the culture narrative that the loudest ideas win. That's not helping anyone.
3. Misleads you in formative assessment - This is the first thing I noticed after I placed a mini-whiteboard on every desk. All of the sudden, misconceptions were revealed that I had not previously known were present. Once, I asked a question in a room with twenty-four students, and six of them had the same wrong answer. One fourth of my class had the same misconception, and I didn't know. The kid who raises his hand usually does so because he confident. If you only get correct answers from confident students, your formative assessment will produce misleading results at best.

There's more than one way to change this habit, but it requires energy and intention. Otherwise, it is so easy to fall back into the trap of calling on volunteers. I had two methods - popsicle sticks and mini-whiteboards. These may not be appropriate for every setting, and there are counterarguments to their use (see Adam Boxer's Twitter feed where he regularly hates on "lolly-sticks"), but I'll give you my reasons for using them.

• Popsicle Sticks - Popsicle sticks were the least expensive and least tech driven method I could find for randomizing participation and making sure I included everyone. Many opponents to this method (including Adam) would advocate for cold-calling instead as it is a more thoughtful way of selecting each student. I agree, but a lot depends on the culture of your school. In many places, parents and students might view cold calling as the teacher targeting a student. As a teacher, I recognize my own bias and ability to slip into calling on the kids I'm most comfortable with. When the kids see you are pulling names at random from a cup, they are more likely to "blame the cup" than me. (Note: I was a bit sneaky, pulling about three sticks up at a time and choosing more selectively from that grouping, but the kids didn't see that.) I'm not saying it is for everyone, but in my particular context, it worked well.
• Mini-whiteboards - This is the change I made after finding the science of learning that I most wish I had made earlier. I had a classroom set of whiteboards in my room, but I pulled them out on review days. Putting one on every desk allowed me to engage in retrieval, formative assessment, and diffuse mode more than any tool I ever used (and the only drawback was that I went through a lot of markers). Mini-whiteboards are adaptable, can be used for many question types, and can be employed on the fly if they are already on their desks. Once I found the power of getting an answer from every single student, it became my go to method. They might not work for everyone. If you have students who will whack each other over the head with them, they may not be for you. But, if you don't have a strong reason not to use them, I couldn't recommend them more highly.

Other methods include digital response boards, clickers, cold-calling, thumbs up/down, multiple choice cards, give me five, choral response, and on and on and on. There is no one right way to do it. Find the one that works for you, gives you the most participation at the least cost to your time. 

But, stop making calling on a volunteer your default.

Research Ed St Louis Conference Notes

These are raw notes taken in real time during the presentations. Some of my own thoughts are blended with those of the presenter. I make an effort to separate them, but I am not always able to. So, if you read something you don't like, don't automatically blame the presenter; it might be me your are upset with.

Research Ed Intro - It is evidence based, collaborative, cultural, practical to classroom the classroom, and for educators. The science of learning becomes an art when you are employing it with 28 8th graders who are running around and not listening to you.

Keynote: Inclusive Teaching: How Do You Teach 30 Students at the same Time? by Tom Sherrington

He has been at 53 ResearchEd conferences, starting with the very first one. 

If you don't understand the problem, you have no chance of being part of the solution. Knowing all of the research doesn't make someone a better teacher unless we can translate it into what it looks like in the classroom. 

We need to be certain that every single student in our classrooms is learning. "We aren't just doing our best with most of them." How do we support vulnerable learners? It's not primarily through taking them out to do special interventions. It starts with the way we teach the things from the very start. If you aren't doing that well, the kids with special challenges will suffer the most. 

The stuff that works isn't new and groundbreaking. We don't need to do new stuff. We need to do the stuff we know really, really well. Explicit instruction improves learning outcomes for everyone, especially for those with additional needs. Show them what to do. Don't ask kids who haven't learned yet to guess. Don't be afraid to give the answer to kids who don't know; don't just say, "Have a think about it." Most kids (but especially vulnerable learners) don't have the background knowledge it takes to make that work.

• Break complex things into simpler steps. 
• Use clear and unambiguous language. 
• Explicitly teach vocabulary. 
• Deliberately involve EVERYBODY in answering questions and checking for understanding. 
• Don't just call on the kid with his hand up or make kids compete to answer - plan in a way that you get an answer from the full spectrum - from the shyest child to the most confident child. The quiet kid's ideas don't matter less. The loudest kids ideas aren't always the best ideas.
• You can't say you believe in equity if you are reinforcing the culture of dominance.

An opinion doesn't matter if you don't have enough background knowledge to explain the thing you have an opinion about. We need to know things because it affects our understanding of the planet (Personal note: This is different from "using this in real life."). Knowledge matters to being informed citizens. 

Dan Willingham is the Godfather of evidence informed education and the most quoted at conferences. In Why Don't Students Like School, there is a chapter called "Why do students forget everything I say?" It's where he provides the model of the learning mind. 

Think Pair Share - If you want kids to talk about their learning, assign them a talk partner. It is the most efficient way; three is possible but requires additional structure. You also must have an accountability structure ("I will select people to respond, and it might be you."). Don't skip the "think" step. You choose which partner will go first. Ask them to generate. All students must practice, not just complete. Whatever method you use, always ask everybody rather than asking for volunteers.

In behavior management, communicate, "I love you dearly, but don't mess with me." Signal. Pause. Insist on compliance before moving on. 

Kids don't have poor attention spans; they have human brains. "Some of you, since we started today, have thought about other things. Outrageous." It is your job as a teacher to redirect their attention.

• Is everyone thinking? 
• Is everyone making sense of this?
• How do I know?

The ways NOT to do it - the veneer of learning

• Did that make sense?
• Any questions?
• Everyone good?
• Yeah? Yeah.
• Getting a response from only one student
• Asking them to think when there is nothing to think with (If they don't have the base knowledge, it doesn't matter how long you give them to think.) You can't think with knowledge you don't have.

You may have to create an experience for students who don't have prior knowledge to activate. If they have never seen coastal erosion, you may need to show a video. If they have never seen a curveball, you might need to have a baseball player throw one. Build from concrete to abstract deliberately.

You don't need them to practice getting it wrong (which is what happens when you ask them to speculate). You want them to practice getting it right after you have given them correct information to practice with. You cannot retrieve what you have not encoded.

Session 1 (103) Making Good Activities Even Better: The Power of Cognitive Alignment by Elida Laski 

Number Comparison: Give two numbers and ask which is more?

Number line estimation: Give them a blank number line and ask them to estimate where the number would be. When you give them a new number they cannot use their others for reference. 

Kids who do well on the comparison task do not necessarily do well on the number line task. Yet, a preschooler's performance on a number line estimation is predictive of their math performance for the future. The number line task has more context and more relationship. A preschooler's relational reasoning maps out to their algebra performance later.

When we plan a task, we need to :

1. Identify the desire mental representation. (e.g. Build a mental number line)
2. Select material that provide instances of the properties of that desired representation. (e.g. 0-10 board game rather than two number card game) Make sure you materials more closely align with the mental representation (e.g. a spiral game board doesn't match as well as a square with lines)
3. Structure the instruction and procedures to promote the processing of the key features of the materials. (e.g. Is the way they play the game forcing them to process the numbers? If they spin 3 while they are on 15 and they just count 1,2,3 to move, it won't develop their number sense as much as if they have to count from where they are 16, 17, 18. It leads to more encoding because it requires more thinking about meaning.)

Learning materials will be most effective if their format, procedures, etc. are aligned with the mental model and the learning goal. The teacher's comments should also align. In the case of comparing numbers Don't say, "You are on 87 now." It's not comparative. Instead, say, "You are two rows ahead of me. You are 5 squares behind her." These are comparative statements. The more aligned the whole experience is to the learning goal, the more likely the goal will be achieved. 

How do you go from concrete to abstract in a task?

• In a pattern, rather than saying colors in a pattern (red, green, green), abstract it in a way that will fit any pattern (A, B, B)
• Teacher gestures support equivalence. It aligns abstract processing to concrete behavior.

None of this requires no resources or monetary investment. It's about thinking deeply and intentionally about how to represent what is happening in their minds while learning. 

Session 2 (100) - Routine, Retrieval, and Relationships by Amber Haven

STEM teacher 5th-8th graders

Intentionally minimize distractions to prepare young minds for learning - Don't make your welcome slide distracting with extraneous information. Make your agenda slide show your agenda. What is the purpose of a welcome slide? To draw attention to the objective or agenda or give an instruction. Making it busy just strains their working memory. There are already so many distractions you cannot control; for the ones you can, don't compete with yourself.

Audit your opening routine. Do you have your desks facing you? Is your decor a distraction or an aid to learning? Do kids know where to sit? Do they have some things that should be automatic by the end of week one?

"When students consistently find themselves in a predictable learning environment, they can let their guard down and engage."

1. Identify the learning objective (the What)
2. Call upon what they have already learned (Retrieval)
3. Plan the lesson (the How)
4. Gesture where appropriate and have students gesture too.
5. Repeat the same activity with a variety of examples.
6. Remove scaffolds as it becomes appropriate
7. Change context as it becomes appropriate

End your lesson in a way that you can confirm students have met the learning objective.

• Exit ticket (WITH verification to prevent encoding whatever they did even if it was wrong)

Relationships are not built before instruction; they are built THROUGH instruction.

Consistent success through well designed instruction will increase your credibility with the student, making them have a relationship with you. Playing hacky sack with them is not relationship building. Doing your job with them leads to success, trust, engagement, feeling good about progress, and then relationship.

Session 3 (107) - Masterful Modeling: Making Thinking Visible by AJ Pettway

Showed a video from Schitt's Creek of trying to follow a recipe with no knowledge of the what the term "fold in the cheese" means.

Albert Bandura - "Learning would be exceedingly laborious and hazardous if they had to rely solely on the effects of their own actions. Fortunately, most human behavior is learned observationally through modeling . . . later , this coded information serves as a guide for action."

Don't be afraid to show students how to do things rather than having them figure it out for themselves (my note: and encoding all of the misconceptions they have along the way).

Mondeling conditions

• Attention - Are student attending to the salient features of the model?
• Retention - Is the model understandable and memorable?
• Reproduction - Students need an opportunity to make the model for themselves.
• Motivation - Are students willing to take the action? Do they see its purpose? Are they seeing that their actions lead to their success?
• Trust - Are you a credible source for your students?

Strong modeling - an expert demonstrating something to novices

• Unpacks expert thinking
• Makes the abstract concrete
• Sets the bar for quality work
• Provides cognitive support that prepares students for independence

Four ways to use models

1. Worked examples - a completed or partially completed example, showing the steps involved
2. Live modeling - reveals expert thinking while demonstrating in front of students
3. Comparing models - Show students multiple model responses and have them compare and evaluate which is better
4. Student models - displaying student work to show how it meets success criteria

Preparing to model

• Clearly define success criteria
• Carefully select CLEAR examples/non-examples
• Anticipate common mistakes
• Script your thinking "The first thing I do is . . . I make sure I have considered . . . I don't want to forget to . . ."

Delivering a model

• Communicate broader context
• Signpost what to notice - direct attention
• Talk through your thinking out loud "I know I'm on the right track when . . . I used to find this part challenging, but I overcame that by . . . "
• Link to success criteria

Faded example - Start with a fully worked problem on the first one. Leave the final step out on the second one (the same type of problem). Leave out a couple of more steps on the third one (same type of problem). Students solve the fourth problem (same type of problem) on their own.

Using student models helps build efficacy because students see themselves represented in their peers. "Someone like me can do this" is a powerful motivator.

One of the challenges of student modeling is building a culture of error - Make sure you are creating conditions where mistakes are honored, considerate behavior is primed and sharing how the student's example succeeds.

Session 4 (213) - Behaviour by Design: Designing Scaffolds to Improve Student Decision-Making by Richard Wheadon 

Sometimes, even when we know better, we just make stupid decisions. How do we get them to make better ones.

Judges make more lenient decisions early in the morning or just after a food break. They are harsher when they are hungry (a study of 1000 parole hearings). Conclusion: External factors influence our behavior and decision making.

There is a gap between knowing and doing. Insights matter, but there needs to be more to produce effective change. Srah Cottinghatt wrote about the Adaptive Expertise Framework. 

Understand. Do. Decide. Improve

Behavior Question - Why did they do that?

Behaviorism -  (Positive reinforcement) - based on Skinner's work with rats - Pressing a lever produced a food pellet reward, reinforcing the behavior of pressing the lever. A consequence is an event hat occurs after a behavior and affects the likelihood that the behavior will happen again. (We associate the word consequence with negative penalty, but it is actually about efficacy.) 

Punishments stop behaviors, but they don't start new behaviors. You need a reinforcer for that.

What should teacher action look like if we want to change behavior? Often, calling out poor behavior reinforces poor behavior by giving it attention. Calling out good behavior reinforces good behavior. (Note: This is not the same as the advice we used to get about ignoring poor behavior; it is about drawing the attention of the misbehaving student to the right thing to do, not ignoring them.)

• Student is talking. Teacher shouts students name - Student stops talking but doesn't engage in task. 
• Student is talking. Teacher praises the engagement of the student near them. Student returns to task.

Evolutionary Biology - Animals that were trained using Skinner's method resulted in some animals not behaving as expected. Conclusion was the reinforcement doesn't always override innate, biological behaviors. This is even more complex with humans because they will have their own values and concerns. In 2003, an experiment was done in which a game was played between two computers and human (the human didn't know they weren't playing against other humans). The computer was programmed to exclude the human after a few minutes. The social exclusion activated the part of the brain that is associated with physical pain. 

Getting praise from other students is more likely to reinforce behavior than anything a teacher does. If a student doesn't turn in homework, gets praised by peers and punished by teacher, they are still more likely to neglect homework again. The peer acceptance is more powerful than the teacher punishment because it is more biologically driven. 

Observing a veteran teacher with great behavior management is likely to be ineffective because there is so much that is invisible making strategies work. 

Engagement - Kids see someone else do something; they are likely to do it too if they believe they can do it. Modeling matters.

Kids saw adults smash a doll. They put the kids in the room with the same doll, and they smashed it too.

If the kids don't think they can do it (efficacy), they won't even start. You must provide the sweet spot of giving them a reasonable chance of success. 

• Mastery - Start with an easy win and build difficulty. 
• Vicarious - Seeing someone similar to you doing it makes yo ubelieve you can do it
• Social persuasion - Everyone else is doing it

Sessions 5 and 6 (103) were my presentations, so I have no notes for the here. However, if you would like the slides, you can find them in pdf form at my website thelearninghawk.com 

Brain Myths: Part 4 - Learning Styles

This is the big one, y'all. 

It's the myth that will not die. 

Not only to 90% of teachers in surveys espouse this view, the general public views it as a given. It shows up in the most unlikely places, from casual conversations to group fitness trainer certification videos. People have decided what their learning style is and believe they will learn better if they are taught in that style. One problem, 40 years of research have not found any evidence for it. In every study, there is no improvement in performance if the teacher uses the students' preferred style, even if every student in the room believes themselves to be the same style and the teacher exclusively uses it.

So, how did we get here? As with many of the myths we have discussed in this series, it comes from a well meaning person who didn't know the difference between conclusion made from observation and conducting science.

It starts with a New Zealand government official named Neil Flemming. Neil had the role of Chief Faculty Inspector for the country of New Zealand, a job I would love. He traveled the country observing as many classes as possible and making recommendations to the government based on what he observed. 

In observations of 9000 classrooms, he noticed something that isn't exactly groundbreaking. Some teachers were able to reach more students than others. He went to his notes and notice a correlation - those teachers who were more effective taught in multiple modalities, pairing visuals and hand motions with their verbal instruction.

Now, if this led him to contact a researcher and say, "I see something here. Can we test it?" we might be onto something. After all, in any scientific study, 9000 would be an awesome sample size, and he had an interesting hypothesis. But that's not what Neil did. He went straight from proposal to conclusion and made recommendations for policy changes. 

What was his conclusion? Students must have an individual style in which they learn best. He laid out four styles - Visual, Auditory, Reading/Writing, and Tactile/Kinesthetic.  If we start having teachers plan their lesson in all of those styles, we could reach all students. Because he was in a position of advising a national curriculum, it took hold.

To make matters worse, this was all taking place in the 1980s, the beginning of the "everyone is special" era, so people liked the idea that they had their own style. It's also a handy way for parents to blame the teacher when their child wasn't doing their work. "He can't do it because it isn't in his learning style."

We all took learning styles assessments (sometimes in every class period on the first day of school) and "discovered" what our style was. Teachers started wearing themselves out in the attempt to make differentiated lesson plans, which isn't possible. 

As I said earlier, this is one sticky myth. That is, in part, because we still like the idea of being special. But it is also because teachers did, in fact, get results when they added visuals to their instruction.  Herein lies the kernel of truth behind the learning styles myth, a concept known as dual coding.

In all of our brains, there are two pathways for the processing of incoming information - a verbal pathway (words, whether heard or read), and an image pathway. It absolutely helps to pair high quality visuals with verbal instruction, but it is not because some kids are responding to the visuals and others are responding to the sounds. It's because we ALL learn better when the two pathways support each other. 

Teachers, this is good news! You can stop beating yourselves up for your inability to plan the same lesson in three ways. You can start focusing on the creation of one high quality learning experience that includes visuals (including hand motions - they are a way of creating a visual with your hands) that support the instruction. 

NOTE:  Not all visuals are created equal, so it doesn't mean to just throw an image on the screen and call it a day. If I am teaching about velocity, little will be accomplished by adding a picture of a race car to the screen. But a position v. time graph that I can reference and point to while I'm teaching will be useful. A labeled diagram of a flower will do more good than a photo of a daisy. You are looking for visuals that support the content you are teaching.

Teachers, when. you show your work, students learn about themselves. If you say, "I know some of you believe you are visual learners, but in reality we all benefit from a strong visual image because we all have that pathway into our brains, you stand a better chance of having an impact on their learning. 

Brain Myths: Part 3 - Left Brained/Right Brained

I went to school through the 80s and 90s. Then I started teaching at the turn of the century (1998) and continued until 2024. I tell you this so that you will understand how many fads I have seen in education. As sure as the return of bell-bottom jeans as "flared-leg," some of those educations fades have faded and then returned under new names. Fashion has to have fads, or the fashion industry would die as we all just held onto our clothes until they wore out. Education doesn't have to be that way. The education curriculum and product industry needs it to be that way, but actual teaching doesn't. We can find out what works - there's tons of research available - and do those things.

Some of the things that prevent us from doing that are out of our control. We can't prevent administrative initiatives. But there is one that is in our control - our own wrong beliefs. Teachers often hold myths about the brain that prevent them from doing what works. I'm not judging them. Many of these myths were taught to us by trusted sources - some even in our teacher preparation classes or professional development sessions. Additionally, when you start looking into the history of these myths, you find that there was a certain logic at the time they were proposed. As G.K. Chesterton wrote, "All heresy is a truth taught out of proportion," most brain myths begin with a kernel of truth.

I'm developing a presentation for conferences on myths that are popularly held about the brain, looking into how their kernels of truth ballooned into myths and what that means for our classrooms. I have to fit 3-4 myths into a 40 minute presentation (Let's be real; I'll never get to the 4th), so I thought I would do a deeper dive into each of them on the blog. This is the one I see the most online. This is also the one I won't be able to get to in my presentation.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

You have, do doubt, seen at least one of these images roaming around your social media feeds. They claim to be tests of which of your brain hemispheres is dominant based on no more than what you see in an abstract shape. 

They are, of course, just click bait designed to make you comment because no one can see any of the things described in the text. 

These are quite clearly (moving clockwise) an ostrich with bulging eyes, Michael Myers from the Halloween movies, a bird singing to the Lord, and Godzilla. There's nothing else to see here people.   ;^)

But comment people do - a lot. They comment in droves. The popularity of these memes reveal something about us, and it is not which hemisphere is dominant. It's that we desperately want to fit into a category - whether it is a "learning style," and Enneagram score, hemisphere dominance, or which Disney princess Buzz Feed says we are. We like thinking we are special and that we belong to a group of people who are special in the same way as we are. 

I hate to burst your bubble, but it just isn't true. You do not have a dominant hemisphere that changes the way you think about things. If you are creative person, it is not because you think with the right side of your brain more than the left. Likewise, if you are good at math, it is not because you have a stronger left hemisphere. 

Like all of the other myths I've addressed in this series, there is a kernel of truth that got blown all out of proportion. How did we get here?

In the 1940s, neurosurgeons began cutting the corpus callosum as a way of treating some severe forms of epilepsy. For those who may not know, the corpus callosum is the tissue that forms a bridge between the two hemispheres of the brain. It's the red area in this image. It has many purposes, but one of them is communication between the two sides of the brain. The reason it worked for the treatment of some kinds of epilepsy is that those types involved sending a signal from one hemisphere to the other. But this surgery also revealed some things we had not previously known about the responsibilities of each hemisphere.  Because it was the 1940s, however, the tools we have for examining brain activity now did not exist. So, the information they got was painted with a broad brush. 

All of our brain's functions are in some way controlled by parts scattered throughout both hemispheres and the communication between them. The right side of the brain does control more of the areas responsible for spacial awareness and big picture thinking. The left side tends to have a higher hand in perceiving details and language processing. Because they did not yet have MRIs and PET scanners, the nuances of where electrical activity was distributed while doing certain tasks or thinking in certain ways, the very broad understanding became "logic on the left, artsy-ness on the right."

I wasn't able to track down exactly how the idea that you had a dominant hemisphere entered the public consciousness, but I imagine it had some relationship to handedness. If I am right handed, perhaps it stands to reason that I am left-brained. But just because something is logical or reasonable doesn't always mean it is true. 

The truth is that sensory perception, thoughts, memories, emotion, and various types of thinking don't just reside in one particular part of the brain. For example, your ability to recognize the face of a loved one involves several areas across both hemispheres. If you were to damage one of those parts, you might lose some of that functionality, but you wouldn't stop knowing what a face is. Much of your language processing happens on the left side, but I taught a girl whose left hemisphere was removed; with a great deal of work and rehabilitative therapy, she learned to communicate again within months. 

I'm not saying the hemispheres don't matter or even that they don't have separate responsibilities, but I am saying it is more complex and interesting than we give it credit for when we take an online quiz. I am saying that, no matter how artistic you are, you are not "right brained." The ability to do art requires structures from both sides and the ability for those sides to communicate to each other. You may be a math genius, but it does not mean you have a stronger left brain. Math requires both detailed thinking (left) and the ability to fit parts into a whole (right), particularly when it comes to complex problem solving.

Stop trying to fit yourself or your students into a category (more on that next week when we address the myth of learning styles). Appreciate your brain and its 85 million neurons in all of their glorious complexity. 

Brain Myths: Part 2 - We Only Use 10% of Our Brains

I went to school through the 80s and 90s. Then I started teaching at the turn of the century (1998) and continued until 2024. I tell you this so that you will understand how many fads I have seen in education. As sure as the return of bell-bottom jeans as "flared-leg," some of those educations fades have faded and then returned under new names. Fashion has to have fads, or the fashion industry would die as we all just held onto our clothes until they wore out. Education doesn't have to be that way. The education curriculum and product industry needs it to be that way, but actual teaching doesn't. We can find out what works - there's tons of research available - and do those things.

Some of the things that prevent us from doing that are out of our control. We can't prevent administrative initiatives. But there is one that is in our control - our own wrong beliefs. Teachers often hold myths about the brain that prevent them from doing what works. I'm not judging them. Many of these myths were taught to us by trusted sources - some even in our teacher preparation classes or professional development sessions. Additionally, when you start looking into the history of these myths, you find that there was a certain logic at the time they were proposed. As G.K. Chesterton wrote, "All heresy is a truth taught out of proportion," most brain myths begin with a kernel of truth.

I'm developing a presentation for conferences on myths that are popularly held about the brain, looking into how their kernels of truth ballooned into myths and what that means for our classrooms. I have to fit 3-4 myths into a 40 minute presentation (Let's be real; I'll never get to the 4th), so I thought I would do a deeper dive into each of them on the blog. This one remains prevalent in popular culture.

We have all heard someone reference this myth. "Just imagine what we could do," they say, "if we could access the unused parts of our brain." Meanwhile, every part of our brain is busy processing sensory input, interpreting the meaning of smells and sounds, and aiding us in making decisions, all while sending signals to our heart to beat, our diaphragm to contract and relax, and our motor neurons to pick up objects and write things. Our brains work hard, and we talk about them like they are lazy, only doing 10% of their job.

So, how did we come to believe this? It's history is a bit convoluted.

This is William James. He was a Harvard psychology professor at the turn of the 20th century, specializing in prodigies - you know, those people who could perform a symphony at the age of three or could carry out complex math procedures long before most children. In a lecture, he said a fairly obvious fact - "Most people only live up to a fraction of their mental potential." Notice that he did not connect it to neurology and he did not use a number. He was generalizing about the motivation of the general population as compared to the passionate practice of prodigies. But, it planted a seed.

We associate a lot of thing with the roaring twenties - flappers, jazz, parties, and women's suffrage. We likely don't think of self help, but they certainly did. Self help was huge, especially in publishing. Many people read books about how to improve themselves, and some of them latched onto the idea that we had unlimited brain capacity that we weren't tapping into. 

But the book that turned a kernel of truth (we don't live up to our potential) into an epic myth (we are neurologically limited to 10%) was Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People. Nearly everyone in America read this book, and it remains one of the best sellers of all time. It's preface was the first to state the myth in explicit terms, that we only use 10% of our brains. The massive popularity of this book embedded the idea into the population. 

And it seems to be a particularly sticky idea, with movies using this concept as a plot device as recently as 2013 (Lucy - not a recommendation, not even Scarlett Johansson could make it good). This is in spite of concrete evidence from MRIs and PET scans showing that we use our entire brains. There is, in fact, competition for real estate in the brain. If you lost your sight and were taught to read Braille, that data from your fingers would be processed by the area previously used to interpret data from the eyes. There are no abandoned amusement parks in your brain.

So what's the truth? Is your brain limited? Or is there no limit to your brain's potential.

Yes.

Seriously, knowing the ways in which your brain is limited and the ways in which it is not can be super helpful in your classroom.

• Working Memory - The simplest definition of working memory is information and process that are held in active consciousness at any given moment. This is limited. How much varies by individual, but the generally agreed upon average is four. This limitation makes multi-tasking impossible, and it means the presentation of class content must be done carefully and in manageable doses. Knowing that means we can plan for it. Knowing this also means we can reduce cognitive load that is not related to what we are teaching. Classrooms are often a continuous stream of sensory input. While we can't do much about some of that input (the humming of the student next to you or the aroma that is carried by those who just left PE), there are some that we can. We can reduce the number of items on our classroom walls. We can stop playing music in the background of lessons. We can refrain from using scent diffusers. Those are just inputs we don't need to have competing with our content in a student's working memory.
• Long Term Memory - As far as we can tell, there is no limit to how much can be stored in our long term memory. Furthermore, information that is stored in long term memory is not a strain on working memory. What does this mean for your classroom? It means asking students to memorize things will INCREASE their ability to perform higher level task with it. Do they have to memorize everything? No. But they should memorize things you will want them to use or think carefully about. Don't be afraid or ashamed of asking kids to commit things to their long term memory (Yes, even in the age of Google and AI. A fact in the student's mind is more useful than a fact held external to it.)

Achieving our potential is a life goal for all of us, but it doesn't equate to using our whole brain. If it did, we would have been successful from the moment we were born. It equates to showing up every day, using our limited working memory 

Brain Myths - Part 1 - It Doesn't Change Much After Age 10

I went to school through the 80s and 90s. Then I started teaching at the turn of the century (1998) and continued until 2024. I tell you this so that you will understand how many fads I have seen in education. As sure as the return of bell-bottom jeans as "flared-leg," some of those educations fades have faded and then returned under new names. Fashion has to have fads, or the fashion industry would die as we all just held onto our clothes until they wore out. Education doesn't have to be that way. The education curriculum and product industry needs it to be that way, but actual teaching doesn't. We can find out what works - there's tons of research available - and do those things.

Some of the things that prevent us from doing that are out of our control. We can't prevent administrative initiatives. But there is one that is in our control - our own wrong beliefs. Teachers often hold myths about the brain that prevent them from doing what works. I'm not judging them. Many of these myths were taught to us by trusted sources - some even in our teacher preparation classes or professional development sessions. Additionally, when you start looking into the history of these myths, you find that there was a certain logic at the time they were proposed. As G.K. Chesterton wrote, "All heresy is a truth taught out of proportion," most brain myths begin with a kernel of truth.

I'm developing a presentation for conferences on myths that are popularly held about the brain, looking into how their kernels of truth ballooned into myths and what that means for our classrooms. I have to fit 3-4 myths into a 40 minute presentation (Let's be real; I'll never get to the 4th), so I thought I would do a deeper dive into each of them on the blog. This is the first one that I was taught.

Myth 1 - The brain doesn't change much after the age of 10

The first person to tell me this was a middle school teacher. Even then, I thought, "If that's true, what are we doing here?" And if I, a curious child who loved school, thought that, the school resistant kids must have thought they had found the ultimate excuse. I mean, seriously, if this is true, it puts a lot of pressure on elementary teachers; and secondary and college professors can just go home - not to mention all of the adult learning centers. How did anyone come to believe this?

It comes down to the misinterpretation of a ground-breaking discovery and the over-interpretation of some common observations.

• Discovery of "sensitive periods" - Quite a few studies from the 1970s and 80s revealed that the human brain has windows of opportunity - dubbed sensitive periods. According to this article,  sensitive periods "refer to the developmental time windows during which experiences have an especially strong impact on brain organization." Language, for example, is most easily acquired between 6 months and 3 years, which makes sense as that is when we are learning to speak. Lots of new vocabulary is attained, and the patterns of our language become ingrained.
• Observations of the differences between adults and kids - You know the expression "You can't teach an old dog new tricks." It comes from observing that adults are fairly ingrained in their habits and that there is a significant decrease in their rate of learning new things.

If you put these two things together and ignore the entire scientific method, you can see how people jumped to the conclusion that our brain development really slows down as we reach adolescence. I'm being a bit facetious; there's a little more nuance here. If you are interested, let me recommend the book, The Brain That Changes Itself." 

So, where did we go wrong with these kernels of truth? How did these facts become a myth?

Well, first of all, sensitive periods are just that - sensitive. The definition I referred to earlier said that it is the time when experiences have "an especially strong impact." But, as education world is prone to do, we took it too far. That's only surprising if this is your first year teaching.

We decided these were the only times students could learn specific content. Spanish classes got moved from middle and high school into kindergarten. (May I point out that still puts it outside of the sensitive period - no, no time to worry about that while we redesign education over here). Math classes got moved earlier and earlier until we had 6th grade students taking Algebra. Their brains were absolutely not ready, but we read that the sensitive period for logic was 7-10, so we had to do what we had to do. It wasn't for a few more years that we realized the damage this had done because we had sophomores and juniors taking AP Calculus who didn't belong there, but we were out of math classes for them to take. I think it has gotten better since then, but given how long it takes to see the effects of a change on students, we need to think through changes a lot more carefully.

Okay, I hear you saying, maybe we were wrong about the school age parts, but you can't deny that adults drop off in their rate of learning new things. Surely, the brain of a 50 year old is less malleable than that of a child. Let me give a few examples that might change your mind.

• Me - I'm 50 years old, and I am learning about new things all of the time. At 47, I joined the Y and learned new skills in fitness. I got certified to teach cycle (and my friend is his early 60s got a personal trainer's certification, which is more or less a college anatomy course). I changed jobs and had to learn entirely new systems. Was it difficult? Yes. Did it take practice? Yes Was I exhausted at the end of the day? You Bet  Guess what? That's true for kids too. Learning is difficult, uses a lot of energy, and takes practice at any age. Two years later, I can fly through processes in seconds that took me lots of time and effort when I started.
• My Granny's sister, Grace - Grace is the person I want to be when I grow up. After she retired, she found out that senior citizens were allowed to take free classes at the local university where she lived. She enrolled in a course on Ancient Greek so she could read New Testament manuscripts. You know how your minister might say, "This word means . . . in the original Greek." She could tell you if he was right. Grace drove the same VW Passat for 28 years. While it is a very reliable car, she did have to maintain it in order to drive it for that long. And when I say she had to maintain it, I mean that SHE did it. She took a class in rudimentary vehicle repair. After that she changed oil and performed basic maintenance. This was woman was in her 70s at the time - far outside our myth's window.
• My co-worker, Kathy, is 62. Every Monday night, I hear her practicing French because she has friends in France and wants to be able to communicate with them when she visits. She practice a lot because that's what it takes to learn a new language, at any age.
• My 74 year old teacher friend - He's been teaching 25 years - long enough to rest on his standard past procedures, but he doesn't do that. He keeps reading about current research and how to best implement it in his classroom.

Even if you considered those examples to be outliers, we would have to admit that one of the reasons adults drop in their rate of learning new things is time. As children, there are 6-8 hours of every day set aside specifically for the learning of new things - for free if that's what their parents want. That's just not the case with adults. We spend our days earning a living, driving children to soccer practice, doing laundry, and figuring out if the call we just got from the bank is a real or a scam. If adults want to learn something new, they have to find and possibly pay for an evening class as well as put off doing something else with that time. Their brains have not changed; their opportunities have.

So, teachers, what does knowing this mean for your classrooms? It means recognizing that, at any age, learning takes practice, effort, and time. You can't teach the students something today and expect them to remember it for their test two weeks from now. You have to give them multiple repeated opportunities, spaced out over time, to practice retrieving the information or using the skills you have taught. Otherwise, there will be no myelination of the neurons and know change to the synapses at the dendrites. 

Go forth, and change your students' brains - no matter how old they are.