"I've never seen so many people in one place at 8:30 on a Saturday morning, so even if this talk is bad, I've seen that."
Primary Motivation
The people who are smart in unusual ways do not test well. The goal of instruction and assessment should be to reach all students equitably. We mistakenly emphasize memory and analytical skills when the skills needed for life are creative, practical, and wisdom-based. They need to have ideas of their own and an interest in the common good.
Secondary Motivation
Traditional testing emphasizes skills that kids from high socioeconomic status have but not those that kids from low socioeconomic status have, trapping them in a cycle.
WICS model - Wisdom Intelligence and Creativity Synthesized
This should supplement, not replace, traditional techniques. Memory and analysis still matter; they just shouldn't be overemphasized to the point they are today.
"I got into this business because I crapped out on standardized tests. They put me into stupid classes where they asked me to do stupid work. I did stupid work. They were happy. I was happy. Everybody was happy, but it wasn't right."
The world is changing so fast that there must be creative skills to adapt all the time. You need creative skills and attitudes to come up with ideas. You need wisdom to ensure your ideas achieve a common good over the short and long terms through the infusion of positive ethical values.
Creativity Intelligence
- Coming up with ideas that are both novel and useful. It's partly an ability but it is also an attitude. - Creative people defy the crowd, themselves, and the zeitgeist. There is often pressure on teachers to NOT develop that because creative people can be kind of a pain. We typically try to fit in with the crowd because we don't want to be embarrassed and then regret it and are embarrassed by it later.
- Creative skills can be taught and assessed using words like create, design, invent, imagine, and suppose. Use these in your projects and test questions. (e.g. Suppose what it would be like if . . . and write what you think the solution would be).
- Creative people redefine problems in order to analyze solutions and are willing to overcome obstacles. Recognize that the more creative idea, the less people are going to like it, so you have to believe in and sell it yourself.
- You can learn as much from your students or more than you can from yourself because you may have become entrenched in certain ideas because of your own expertise. It's hard to be creative in a hyper-analytic world.
- If you want to foster creative thinkers, you have to tolerate ambiguity, help them find what they love, and create an environment in which outside the box thinking is valued.
- To assess creativity, ask yourself to what extent the product is informed, novel, compelling, and task-appropriate.
Analytical Intelligence
- Ability to makes sense of or see order in complexity or even chaos.
- Important, just shouldn't be focused on at the expense of other skills.
- In the real world, unlike test items, analytical thinking comes in problems that are not predefined, unstructured, and have no multiple choice options. There isn't one correct answer, and they sometimes come with emotional stakes. Is there another way you can ask the question that will allow the kids to show the same skill? Ask how they can see this in their own life and how they would handle it.
- The research shows that those who are good scientific thinkers are not good at the SAT and ACT.
- skills can be taught and assessed using words like analyze, compare and contrast, evaluate, explain, judge, and critique. (e.g. Critique the ethics of a certain experiment, discussing why you believe that the benefits did or did not outweigh the cost and why.)
Practical Intelligence
- Common sense has almost no correlation with IQ.
- Based on informal and intuitive knowledge
- "You don't have to be the best student in the class to have something to contribute to the world."
- Most of what is important that is learned in a school is not the curriculum or what is directly taught, but the skills of being in an environment like a school
- Practical skills can be taught using words like use, apply, implement, convince, put an idea into practice.
- Teach students to ask these questions to develop practical intelligence. How can I make this work? Whose help do I need? What resources do I need? What are the obstacles to making this work? Who will benefit? Assess based on feasibility of the solution and its persuasiveness. (Personal note: Remember this for the Global Solutions Project in Physics.)
Wisdom
- You can be smart but unwise through unrealistic optimism, egocentrism, the belief in our own omniscience, omnipotent, or invulnerability, and lack of ethical engagement. (Personal note: I cannot help but think of President Trump through this description.)
- Wisdom is the use of our knowledge, skills, and attitudes toward a common good, balancing the interests of all. It must involve looking at the bigger picture.
- A wise person considers the long and the short term. Sometimes you have to take a short-term loss for a long-term gain.
- A wise person seeks an ethical solution to complex problems.
- Dialogical thinking - Understanding other's points of view and how they are similar and different from your own.
- Dialectical Understanding how what is viewed as true or acceptable changes over time and place.
- Wise people seek to understand others and their points of view, feel compassion toward others, and understand all sides of a problem. They seek to understand not only what they know, but what they do not know and what cannot be known. They are open to new and possibly uncomfortable experience.
- The increase in emphasis on standardized tests, multiple choice problems, and memory and analytical thinking has led to a generation of leaders who can do those things without wisdom.
- Measurable and objective standards aren't everything. College admission standards aren't based on height, even though it is measurable and objective.
- To evaluate wisdom based products, look for how the solution was arrived at. Does it take into account the common good, positive ethical values, long and short-term consequences, and the interests of all?
Successful intelligence is figuring out what you want to do, revising as needed, moving on with new solutions.
Take the same material you already teach and adjust the questions you ask to assess creative, analytical, practical, and wisdom-based thinking skills. Any teacher can do this.
(Personal note: This has been my favorite speaker so far.)
Keynote 4 - Yong Zhao, PhD - Personalizable Education for All Children
(Disclaimer of bias: I am not a fan of personalized education, so I am likely to be skeptical.)
"In my village in China, the IQ test was to ride water buffalos. I was a terrible water buffalo rider, so I ended up in school."
The "7 keys to college readiness" only make you ready for something that doesn't exist. It matters what kind of college or what major. We have these things because we want them out of our basement. We might as well call it "out of our parents' basement readiness" but it doesn't mean anything. Yet, we let it drive our education today. We are still thinking about education as training for more schooling.
First, there was ELA and Math. Being good at those (SAT) would make you successful. Then we added social studies and science (ACT). Then, there were the 4Cs. "If you don't know the 4Cs, you do not deserve to live in the 21st century. You didn't have to communicate in the 19th century. No one in the 14th century had to be creative." (Obvious sarcasm) Then, there was IQ v. EQ. We keep adding things. If we discover something that's good, we decide everyone should have it. If all successful people have a certain trait, we decide we have to teach it to everyone.
What makes a person successful? (not people, A PERSON)
- There is no one human trait that makes a person successful.
- That means there is no curriculum that works in all settings, all the time, for all people. You can prescribe the future.
- "I'm thankful that my father didn't try to give me tutorials on riding the water buffalo to make me more successful."
- How you react to the randomness matters.
- Learning can happen outside of schools. If you really wanted to learn the equivalent of a college education, you could do it without going to college. Schools are just the ones who credential that.
- A child does not walk into a future (that we have made them ready for). They create a future.
- They are all different. We should stop trying to make them the same in the name of readiness. "When you throw a dead bird, you can predict its trajectory. You can't do that when you throw a live bird." Kids are live birds, so let's stop treating them like we can predict their trajectory.
- When we prescribe something because it is useful, we are ignoring the fact that other talents could also be useful to that person. (Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer) Not everyone relies on the same set of skills or talents to succeed.
- The achievement gap cannot be closed by trying to make everyone the same (the problem with percentiles - someone has to be worse than me). Human nature is to be involved in a community, but the SAT is set up to make you selfish. The way to do well is to have people worse than you take it at the same time, not necessarily to do well yourself.
- Mass Mediocrity vs. Unique Greatness
(Personal note: Anyone who tells you to teach to the middle should be slapped.)
If our job is to cultivate unique talents, how do we do that? We can personalize the learning by giving multiple options, content, time constraints, locations, and perspectives. You must learn X, but you can decide how and when. They should be co-owners of their education.
(Personal note: I don't know how you fit this into daily, quarterly schedules. I am also skeptical about letting the child lead because they have an even more limited perspective than we do. I am on board with some choice and some agency, but there is still value in having the teacher create parameters. There are things that they won't learn because they don't even know it is out there.)
Traditional school is like making a garden. If I want to grow roses, I get rid of tulips. We should be a nature preserve, cultivating and protecting each thing that grows.
Keynote 5 - Ransom W. Stephens, PhD - Your Pursuit of Greatness, Author of The Left Brain Speaks. The Right Brain Laughs and ebook Your Pursuit of Greatness
(co-discover of the Top Quark - How am I in the same room with these people?)
If I can corrupt you (teachers), it's like exponential growth because the corruption will spread.
Time is like a river. Your accomplishments, whether they last a few minutes or few millenia, will wash out to sea. You have about 31000 days in your life. What will you do with them?
Timescales of existence
- Second - awareness
- Day - action
- Month - billing cycle
- Season - sowing and reaping
- Year - evaluation and perspective
- Decade - accomplishment
- Life - all you get
Personal note: This is amazing. I've never thought of time in this way, but it is going to change the way I think about it from now on. Each brings a different perspective. If you are worrying, you will be able to change that by looking at it on a different timescale.
"Paradise is easier to find than it is to recognize." This is why we often look back at a time and remember how great it was and wish we had enjoyed it more at the time.
Ask these questions: What matters to you? Why do you NEED money? What will you do?
- How do we acquire ambition? Ask a 10-year-old. (When you are 10, you care less about what other people think than you will again until your 40s.)
- Our brains construct reality by using past context and present pattern recognition to make future predictions.
- A pattern is any experience we can realize in less than .2s unless it is something we have never seen before. This creates one problem: We tend to recognize patterns even when there isn't one.
- Nature's dilemma - Good, fast, or cheap - Pick two. Nature chooses fast and cheap because assuming the worst is best for survival.
- Recognizing patterns before we are aware of them leads to prejudice, whether racial, gender, or ideas. We aren't even conscious of the thought we are already having.
- Two extremes - People who only recognize black and white and aren't burdened by nuance have much prejudice. People who see everything in shades of gray and find nuance in everything have post-judice. They are subject to more danger because they are still trying to find the nuance before they make a judgment. Most of us are in the middle.
The education miracle
- 250000 years ago, people were aware of only months and seasons and only about 30 miles
- 25000 years ago, people were aware of only abou 50 years and only about 100 miles
- Now, peopl are aware of billions of years and about 500000 miles
- K-12 conveys a quarter of a million years of human knowledge
What do we do every day? Lead a herd of horses to water. Repeat. Repeat. Occasionally, we push their heads down toward the water.
Developing talent into ambition.
Education leads to talent. If they like it, they want to learn more, looping it back to education and increasing talent. If you do that often enough, it drives them and becomes an ambition.
Bliss, Blunder, and Fear
We put off our passions and ambitions for fear of failure, believing there is a time when all the resources will be in place to keep us from failing. When you decide to go for it (or when your students decide to go for it), the worst case scenario is that culture would be better. No matter what level you get to in the process, even if you ultimately fail, it is a higher level than you are currently at.
Do you have what it takes? The people who have what it takes have two things in common. Determination and resilience, the ability to survive and overcome failure.
- Resilience comes from failing gently
- The ability to delay gratification overcomes IQ deficits EVERY time.
- Resilience is a skill that can be developed by reflecting on and analyzing success and failure (How did you get there? How does it inform the next time?) and obstacles.
Be probabilistic, rather than realistic. You can't do everything you set your mind to, but the odds are you won't set your mind to something you cannot do.
Parent problem: They say they want their child to "go for it," but they really want them to be safe. They encourage them to take safe, money making jobs so that they won't have to worry.
Recognize the challenges you have overcome before. Apply that to the challenge you face now. Whether you are 8 or 80, you have experienced success at some level before. Mine the lessons learned from that to tackle the next thing. List your top 20 greatest accomplishments (dig deep), your 5 worst failures, your top 5 fears and the safety nets you want. Analyze how you succeeded, got through the failures, used (or are likely to use) the safety nets. Is our mode of making money going to be our aspiration or just support the pursuit of our aspiration? Don't think so much about the most catastrophic worst-case scenario. Think about the most probable one.
Then ask what you are waiting for. Are you ready? There will be times when it seems like you don't have a snowball's chance in the Mojave desert, but sometimes it snows in the Mojave.
Concurrent Sessions B
Part 1 - Being Human: Genes, Skills, Values, and Settings - Jerome Kagan, PhD
All negative outcomes require a pattern that involves genetic and experiential vulnerabilities, triggers, and immediate circumstances. For 90% of the outcomes scientists study, the biggest predictor is the socioeconomic class in which you were reared. It influences everything from your peers to the quality of food you eat to the books and music you were exposed (or not exposed to).
Children automatically identify with those of their own class. The exception is that a very few very poor kids can live without recognizing their poverty. Some who do become successful suffer from imposter syndrome.
The local circumstances in which you live at the moment a trigger occurs will make a huge difference in the outcome. The murder rate in Manhatten is slower than that of Chicago because the rich and power mingle more in Manhatten. The alcoholism rate is high in Russia, so you are more likely to turn to that when you encoutner stress than if you live somewhere where there are fewer alcoholics. Japan has a high suicide rate, which continues to create more suicidal people.
Humans' strong frontal lobe allows us to suppress and hide our animus (natural and perosnal feelings, personality traits, and tendencies that come from our biology) so that we will appear normal to others. Some genetic vulnerabilities result in desirable outcomes, like math, music, or language. Others result in undesirable outcomes, like cognitive compromises or a low threshold for uncertainty.
Triggers and stressful circumstances create feelings that we may not know how to interpret, so we decide they are anxiety, depression, or shame. We are actually choosing the language. It does not represent the biology.
Each developmental stage is marked by particular talents, emotions, and beliefs.
- Younger than 8 months, they have poor memories for the immediate past. They don't really know if something is unusual because they don't yet have a pattern for usual.
- Infants older than 8 months are vulnerable to uncertainty (which is when they start crying when they see a stranger or are separated from the caregiver they are accustomed to).
- The second year is when humans start showing uniqueness. They can start making inferences about the thoughts and feelings of others, start using language to interpret the world, develop some sense of right and wrong, and have awareness of one's feelings, plans, and thoughts. This is the result of brain growth in the neurons between the halves of the brain.
- Between age four and puberty, children improve at integrating present and past, experiencing guilt, identifying with family members, class, ethnic group, or religion.
- Puberty is accompanied by the ability to think hypothetically, separate possible from less possible causes, and the belief that they have exhausted all solutions to a problem. Testosterone quiets the amygdala, so boys start responding to stress more calmly than girls do.
(The sequence of these changes are universal, but the timing changes across various societies and historical eras. You can't stop them from acquiring the skills, but you might delay or accelerate them.)
Most adults refuse to accept that this progression is a result of accidents without meaning but don't know how to interpret their desire for meaning and struggle to make sense of their life script.
Kids are confused because they have no meaning attached to their existence. We went from a belief in something metaphysical as a source of meaning to a belief in authorities. Then, authorities failed us and we became disillusioned. Then, evolutionary science made us think we were meaningless accidents. This generation doesn't have a reason to get out of bed. This is a crisis. (Note: This is not my interpretation of what the speaker said. It is what he actually said.)
Part 2 - What Makes the Human Mind Special?: Insights from Non-Human Animals - Laurie R. Santos, PhD
(Disclaimer of Bias: This talk was extraordinarily based in evolutionary psychology. The phrase non-human animal makes me crazy. Humans are not just another kind of animal. Humans are special creations.)
Comparitive cognition: Studies primates and dogs to compare with human cognition.
- When first meeting someone new, you will likely ask, "Where are you from?" because we think it tells us something about that person.
- Rhesus monkeys have a strong social structure.
- Humans have a cultural environment that other animals do not have (except for domesticated dogs because they experience human culture).
Humans are really weird: We do things that no other species does. From the arts to marriage ceremonies to pedagogy to stock trading. What cognitive capacities allow us to be so weird?
- Most proposals are that there's some human unique smart congitive capacity (like use of language or tool usage).
- She proposes that there's some human unique glitchy congitive capacity.
- Humans want to get what is going on our heads into someone else's head. We are the only species that have that. Just at the end of the first year of life, kids start pointing to get you to look at what they are looking at. Chimps that sort of point, but it is to get something, not to share an experience.
- Both humans and animals have behavioral contagion (fish schooling, mirroring behaviors, picking up or losing an accent, unconscious peer pressure).
- Humans and some animals have emotional contagion that come from behavioral contagion. We are typically happy around people who smile or act excited. Yawn contagion and getting the giggles from someone else's laughter seem to come from this. This is why sit-coms use laugh tracks. (Personal note: I have observed this in movie theaters recently. I had watched Casablanca several times, but there were lines I had not found funny before watching it in a theater with other people who laughed.)
- Chimps have contagious yawning. Dogs don't really yawn but do mimic the behavior by opening their mouth. Chimps don't truly laugh but have a heavy breathing that can be heard while they are playing. They do seem to make these sounds more when another chimp is doing it as well.
What is unique to humans?
- Mental contagion (like a Vulcan mind meld). Do we pick up the beliefs and mental states of someone else? We can mentally represent someone else's thought but keep it separate from our own thoughts (but it can affect what we think as well).
- There can be interference of your perception when you can tell what someone else's perception is.
- There can also be interference of your belief if you can tell that someone else believes differently than you do.
- This happens in the prefrontal cortex of the human brain as well as the areas of the brain in the parietal lobe that represents the thoughts of others.
- Primates can use the perception of others against them. Rhesus monkeys will steal food from someone who isn't looking because he can tell the person won't know. A complicated experiment that is too difficult to describe in notes shows that rhesus monkeys do not seem to have their beliefs influenced by the beliefs of others.
- There is, of course, a cost to this. Other people's bad information might make you unable to solve a problem when you could have solved it on your own. Teachers must be careful of their bad information because it could be passed on to the student. In an experiment, children did something they did not need to do when they saw someone else do it, but chimps cut to the chase and skipped unneeded steps even if they saw someone else do them. Dogs also skip the irrelevant steps.
- Mental contagion allows us to experience culture and like the same books other people do, but it can also make us trust people we shouldn't.
The frightning implications of this are the effects of movies, the internet, and other media may cause kids to absorb the beliefs of what they are seeing represented on a screen.
The positive implication is that your content is probably pentrating more than you think it is.
(Apology for Previous Bias: I got more out of this than I thought I would. There was a lot of interesting information in spite of the worldview conflict.)
The frightning implications of this are the effects of movies, the internet, and other media may cause kids to absorb the beliefs of what they are seeing represented on a screen.
The positive implication is that your content is probably pentrating more than you think it is.
(Apology for Previous Bias: I got more out of this than I thought I would. There was a lot of interesting information in spite of the worldview conflict.)
Part 3 - The Superhuman Minds: How the Science of Savants Shows Us How to Free the Genius in Children - Berit O. Brogaard, PhD, DMSci
Divergent thinking - Synesthesia
An unusal mixing of the senses. Link color to numbers or sounds. Link words to tastes. Runs in families.
- Grapheme-color synesthesia - The person has very specific colors and brightness associated with numbers that are unique to that individual. The pop out effect - If shown mixed numbers, they can find the different ones quickly because they appear to be in different colors.
- Number pattern synesthesia - More likely to choose codes in patterns
- Calendar synesthesia - The calendar is projected in front of them mentally.
- Fear-color synesthesia - Things that present a danger cause your visual field to become clouded. Serves as a warning system.
- Sound-color synesthesia can be so extreme that it leads to legal blindness in noisy places because it interferes with the visual field.
- Sound-taste synesthesia can make food taste different if you hear certain sounds.
- Person-smell synesthesia - Associates a smell with a person.
- Word sound-shape - a type of synesthesia we seem to all have (Bobo Kiki Question)
Savant - A perosn with a radically enhanced cognitive ability in a narrow subject area. Occurs in 105 of people with autism and some people with brain injury.
- Kim Peek is lacking the three main connection between the two sides of his brain. No knowledge defects were apparent. He was known as a megasavant or human encyclopedia.
- Human computers Kay and Fro could tell you exactly what they ate and were wearing or what the host of a game show was wearing on a specific date.
- Daniel Tammet knows Pi to 23000 digits and can calculate at high speeds.
- Card counters can sometimes keep track of 8 decks at the same time in a game of blackjack.
- Derek Amato - a salesman who had never played the piano. He injured his brain diving into a pool. When he woke up, he had an intense desire to play a piano, so he went to a piano store and started playing. A year later, he had released to albums and was on a world concert tour.
Colored refrigerator magnets where different letters are different colors could actually induce synesthesia in some children.
Perfect pitch is strongly correleated with Sound-Color Synesthesia.
Personal note: This lady seems to be interested in causing kids to have synesthesia.
Use of color can use learning and memory even if your brain is neurotypical.
- Red draws attention. Marking mistakes in red draws the child's attention to them and may reinforce the mistake. Write key points in red. Write homework lists in red.
- Green and blue produce calm because of their short wavelength.
- Orange and yellow lift mood. Orange tinted glases have made depressed people feel better.
- Use blue paper for especially complex information because it enhances understanding.
Ask kids to write with word pictures. Instead of saying, "She is afraid," write, "Her eyes were wide, breath quickened, every muscle in her body felt tight."
Give kids prompts of things that don't typically belong together (internet, skiing, your teacher's desk) and have them write a science fiction story.
In case you are having trouble following these notes, she was a little jumbled and her slides had conversion problems, so I had a hard time taking coherent notes.
How can we create flow in the classroom? Playing a game
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