Reflections on the Science of Focus with Barbara Oakley

The Learning and the Brain conference is an overwhelming experience.  That’s not a complaint.  It’s the best professional development I’ve ever participated in.  It’s overwhelming in the way a magnificent artwork is overwhelming, just too much to take in.  It’s overwhelming in the way meeting a beloved public figure would be overwhelming, just wanting to remember every part of the moment but also knowing that you won’t.  I have attended this conference twice now, and I have come away both times with the same mixture of feelings.  First, I feel mostly affirmed that much of what I and my colleagues are doing is in line with how student's brains work.  Even though much of it has been developed through trial and error or intuition, we seem to have done a lot right.  Second, there are some changes we need to make to some of our practices.  Holding those two thoughts simultaneously weighs down my luggage on the trip home.

The only way I have found to deal with the sheer volume of information I get from this conference is to reflect on parts of it a little at a time while I figure out how I might like to apply them.  Since this blog is for me to reflect and process my thoughts and let you read them if you wish, I’ll be dealing with those here for a while. They might come out in weekly posts or I might post several over the course of a few days.  Who knows?  If you just want straightforward notes (with a few personal thoughts because that’s how I take notes), you can find them at these three posts (Friday, Saturday, Sunday).  These posts will be both more and less than the notes.  More because I will be working out my own thoughts but less because I will likely choose small parts to reflect upon.

When I was a kid, I was on a car trip with my mom and brother.  I don't remember how it came up, but, at some point in the trip, we were trying to remember the names of the seven dwarves.  No matter how many times we tried, we came up with six.  This was before cell phones, so there was no looking it up.  It's a three-hour trip, so at some point, we gave up and moved on to other things.  During dinner, I clapped my hands together and yelled, "Bashful!"  This is one of the most satisfying experiences you can have, so don't always look things up on your phone.

When my dad was in college, he was an engineering major.  He would often spend a very long time on a problem only to go to bed with it still unsolved.  Then, according to my mom, he would sit bolt upright in bed, spouting long lists of equations.  His brain had solved it while he was asleep.  Dmitri Mendeleev dreamed the periodic table after 3 days and nights of solid focus on the problem of organizing the elements.  

Why do we figure things out, not when we are focused on them, but when we have moved on?

Barbara Oakley, in her keynote and subsequent session at learning and the brain, gave us the rundown AND how to take advantage of it in our classrooms.

When you try to focus for a long time, your brain is in a focused mode where it keeps rehearsing the same patterns.  This is why you get stuck.  You can't get the pattern out of your head.  It's what keeps you from solving a problem that doesn't quite fit the pattern.  At some point, you give up because focused mode requires a lot of energy.  That causes your brain to go into the diffuse mode, where there are fewer established patterns.  The information can now explore your brain more freely and draw in ideas that the other patterns didn't allow.  This is why you have "Aha" moments in the shower or while driving or just before falling asleep.

Focus mode is great for doing something we already know how to do.  Those patterns are what allow us to become good at things.  Diffuse mode is what allows us to find solutions we didn't already have.  Here's the cool part, after the brain finds a solution in diffuse mode, it establishes a pattern in focused mode.  Practice the solution a few times (by repeating it, writing it down, drawing a picture of it, etc.), and you have learned a new skill.  

Two pieces of classroom advice:

1. While teaching, take a 30s break.  Telling a joke, having students stand for a stretch, or asking them to doodle something will allow the brain to switch modes.  
2. On a test, encourage students to solve the hard problems first (if they have studied - If they haven't, solving the easy ones allows them to get points where they can).  Tackling the hard problems first has value because, if they get stuck, they can move onto an easier one, letting the brain go into diffuse mode, which will likely lead to figuring out the harder one.

Advice for studying (or staying focused for any task):

Set a timer for 25 minutes.  After a few minutes, your brain will start screaming at you that it cannot sustain 25 minutes, but it can, so just let that thought float on by and refocus.  After 25 minutes, take a 5 minute rest.  Do anything during that rest except for studying and going on your phone.  You can drink a glass of water, go to the restroom, have a snack, or lie on the floor and stare at the ceiling.  Then set the timer again and repeat.  At the end of the last cycle, make sure you take the rest time.  It is an important part of the process, so don't just dump it at the end.

Input creates links, but they are weak.  Retrieval practice strengthens them.  The power of retrieval practice comes from making the myelin (fat insulation) on your neurons thicker.  This is the one place you want fat.  Myelinated neurons work faster and make the next thing you have to learn in the same area more efficient.  Metaphor strengthens neurons in the part of the brain that is learning and in the part of the brain that is visualizing the metaphor, so it creates even stronger links.  

Sleep matters for more reasons than we think.  While you are asleep, chemical reactions happen that break weak links and strengthen others.  It's when your brain decides what to forget and what to keep.  These are actual images of the effect sleep has on neurons.  Those little growths that the arrows are pointing to are growth points on your dendrites, and dendrites are what communicate with other neurons.

Exercise (movement) matters too.  Check out these images.  The BDNF they refer to is a neurotransmitter (or maybe hormone - I don't remember) that is released in the brain during movement. 

There's so much going on while you are learning.  The energy it requires is massive.  Nutrition, exercise, and sleep aren't just good ideas for a generally healthy life.  They are also very important to the learning brain.

Reflections on Student Engagement with John T Almarode

The Learning and the Brain conference is an overwhelming experience.  That’s not a complaint.  It’s the best professional development I’ve ever participated in.  It’s overwhelming in the way a magnificent artwork is overwhelming, just too much to take in.  It’s overwhelming in the way meeting a beloved public figure would be overwhelming, just wanting to remember every part of the moment but also knowing that you won’t.  I have attended this conference twice now, and I have come away both times with the same mixture of feelings.  First, I feel mostly affirmed that much of what I and my colleagues are doing is in line with how student's brains work.  Even though much of it has been developed through trial and error or intuition, we seem to have done a lot right.  Second, there are some changes we need to make to some of our practices.  Holding those two thoughts simultaneously weighs down my luggage on the trip home.

The only way I have found to deal with the sheer volume of information I get from this conference is to reflect on parts of it a little at a time while I figure out how I might like to apply them.  Since this blog is for me to reflect and process my thoughts and let you read them if you wish, I’ll be dealing with those here for a while. They might come out in weekly posts or I might post several over the course of a few days.  Who knows?  If you just want straightforward notes (with a few personal thoughts because that’s how I take notes), you can find them at these three posts (Friday, Saturday, Sunday).  These posts will be both more and less than the notes.  More because I will be working out my own thoughts but less because I will likely choose small parts to reflect upon.

The first one that I will tackle is the one I think might be easiest to implement.  It was a session on creating engagement in your classroom and how to design engaging tasks.  The session was given by John T. Almarode.  If I believed in spirit animals, I would want him to be mine.  He is a quirky, fun, sassy Southerner who so obviously loves his job that you can’t help but be drawn in, and what you are being drawn into is valuable, smart, research-based information that you enjoy learning.

This session could be broken down into these sections:

1. Assessing the level of thinking students are at so that you can teach them one level above that.
2. The characteristics of an engaging task
3. Differentiation of lessons to provide equity to students

I am going to focus this post on that middle section because I think it is the one I can start implementing immediately.  The other two will require more time to make some design changes in my lessons.  I may blog about those as I deal with them as well, but here’s a good place to start.

According to John Almarode, there are 8 characteristics of engaging lessons.  This list was developed as the result of observations made in 20,000 classroom observations.  This is a credible sample size, and the methodology is strong.

1. Clear and Modeled Expectations - Imagine the frustration you feel at a faculty meeting if you are given a task and told to get started, but you aren’t really clear yet on what you are supposed to do.  Now imagine that happening at least once a day.  A lot of the misbehavior in classrooms comes from student frustration with not being sure what they are supposed to be doing.  If you want an engaged classroom, you have to be clear about what they should do. Be clear about what the target looks like.  
2. Emotional Safety - Your classroom must be a safe place to learn.  Students must not be allowed to laugh at someone giving a wrong answer or make fun of them.  That is not, however, the only component to emotional safety in your classroom.  It also means having the means to recover after having made a mistake.  Is there a way to get feedback, revise their work, and do better?  (Don’t get crazy, y’all.  I’m not talking about retaking summative assessments. I’m talking about daily tasks and work-in-progress check on projects.)
3. Personal Response - Students, if you haven’t noticed, care a lot about their own opinions.  That’s not unusual.  We did and do too.  Can students bring their own perspective into a task?  If so, they will be more likely to be engaged in it.
4. Sense of Audience - Have you ever had a job where you had to look busy?  It’s more exhausting than actually being busy.  I had a job once where I got done with the daily tasks by about 3pm, so if the phone wasn’t ringing much, I had little to do for the remaining two hours.  If my boss saw that, he would give me “busy work.”  Making a graph out of data was something I was happy to do if we were going to use the graph to analyze advertising trends, but we weren’t.  He was giving me the graph task so that I wouldn’t be sitting at the desk waiting for the phone to ring.  I started making up interesting and productive tasks for myself just to keep this kind of nonsense from happening.  The educational equivalent of this has to be doing something just to get a grade for it.  Students want to know that the task is valuable to someone other than the teacher.  If there is a way to provide a real audience (parents coming in to hear a speech, other students or staff members to ask questions about the project you did, or bringing in a community member that works in the subject area of the task), please make a way to do it.  
5. Social Interaction - The adolescent brain is developmentally social (See Inventing Ourselves by Sarah-Jayne Blakemore).  They will learn more if they can tell someone else what they know.  This can be as simple as think-pair-share.  It can be as complex as finding an expert to present their findings to.  At least once per task, your students should be explaining their thinking to SOMEONE.
6. Choice - I do not mean completely free choice because that is dangerous and not educationally sound, but where you can work in limited choice, you will get more engagement and better work.  Create a menu of ways students can choose from to show their work.  (You can write a song, record a podcast, or draw illustrations showing the trig identities.)  You could give them list of topics to do a project on.  (You can learn about electrochemistry equally well by studying batteries, electroplating, or electric eels, so let them choose which one they want to learn about.)
7. Novelty - The human brain craves familiarity, which is why we watch TV re-runs and listen to old songs, but it also craves novelty, which is why seek out new restaurants.  Sometimes, when we find something good, we use it too much.  (When GRACE teachers discovered Kahoot, kids got sick of reviewing for every test in every class with it.) Just because something is good doesn’t mean you want to do it 180 days in a row.
8. Authentic - Authentic doesn’t have to mean that it is actually happening.  (This was good to hear because I have had trouble trying to connect everything to actual situations and feeling guilty about it.)  It doesn’t mean real-world.  In fact, you may not want it to be.  If you have a student whose home life is that of an alcoholic parent who has to get their siblings ready for school, you don’t want to ask them to write about something fun they do with their parents.  It means it COULD happen.  John Almarode's example involved an elementary ecology project.  The teacher had given students the assignment to create an imaginary creature and then figure out what habitat it would have to have. (Now, I do have to say I think that might be a fun creative writing or art assignment because of the imagination it involves, but it wouldn’t be a great ecology project the student isn’t learning about real ecology.)  Instead, give them a project in which they are zookeepers who have to choose an exotic animal and design a zoo habitat that will keep that animal alive in the climate where you live.  That’s authentic without being real-world.  

If you are thinking that there is no way you could have all 8 of these every day, take a deep breath.  You are right.  You can’t.  The point isn’t to get them all every day.  The point is to work in as many as you can where you can.  What the walkthrough data revealed is that having at least three of these will result in 87% sustained engagement (and the first two should already be a normal part of your practice).  Having only 2 of them resulted in (are you ready for this) only 17% engagement.  Isn’t that crazy?  Just the difference in one of these items makes that big of a difference.  By the way, having only one of them results in zero engagement.  

This seems overwhelming, but if you have created a positive classroom climate, you should already have #2, and if you are a teacher who cares enough about your practice to read educational blogs, you probably already communicate clear expectations, so #1 is a given.  Working in one or two more of these should be the first thing you do when designing new projects.

As I sat in this session, I tried to think of the topics I have the hardest time making engaging.  As much as I love the periodic table, it isn’t the easiest thing to get 8th-graders to love.  There aren’t a ton of hands-on ways to teach it.  At the end the session, I thought, “Well, I’ve identified a problem, but I still don’t have a solution.”  During the next morning’s keynote, it suddenly clicked. I think I got it.  I can put in novelty and social interaction by having the kids be elements and move (oh, yeah, in another session with Marcia Tate, we were encouraged to have students move) according to properties.  Something along the lines giving each child an element to be and making the room the periodic table.  Determine if you are a metal or non-metal and move to the part of the room where you should be.  Raise your hand if you have low electronegativity.  Who has the highest electronegativity (one of them will have to be fluorine)?  Who has 8 valence electrons?  I’m still working this out in my mind, but I think it could be a great way to make some of what I am doing more personal (and Marcia Tate also encourages role-playing as a technique).  If I put the elements in a google doc and let them each choose the one they want to be (but remove it from the list because we can’t have two of the same element), then they will also have choice.

As John had us do at the conference, turn to your neighbor and say, “We can totally do this.”

Thanksgiving 2020 - The Forgettable Conversation

As I thought about what to write for Thanksgiving this year, I looked back through some prior years and realized that I have written about the same five teachers pretty frequently.  One day, I was telling a story about my chemistry teacher and realized that I have never written about her on this blog.  

There’s a good reason that I haven’t.  She wasn’t one of “those teachers.”  I didn’t have particularly strong emotional attachments to her.  She didn’t open my eyes to the wonderful world of chemistry.  There are only about three things that I can specifically remember learning from her.  Nevertheless, the story I was telling my colleague made me realize that she is responsible for changing the trajectory of my life, and I am thankful.  Let me explain.

The high school I went to had a well thought out plan for registration in classes for the following year.  You were required to have a conversation with your current teacher about the next level course you wanted to take in their discipline, and they were required to sign off on your choice.  A student in 10th grade English could not simply decide they wanted to take AP Lang the next year or go to the office and enroll in honors.  The teacher had to sign your registration card (This was before there was an internet - I mean, there was one, but it wasn’t yet used by normal people).  If you or your parents wanted to override the teacher’s advice, there was a procedure for that, but it meant that you were not allowed to drop the class once having overridden the judgement of the professional.  This process made everyone take their choices and their decision to override advice very seriously.

Having finished Chemistry, I had several options about which science to take next.  I had decided not to take AP courses, saying I would wait until I was in college to be in college, thank you.  Back then, no one would have pressured anyone into an AP course, and colleges were not yet using them for admissions.  I wasn’t particularly interested in life sciences or earth science, which left me with two options, regular and honors physics.  Not knowing much about physics, it sounded a little scary (and the regular level teacher was incredibly attractive - I was a high school girl; cut me some slack), so I chose regular physics.  When I sat down with Mrs. Demby, she said, “No. You should take honors physics.”  I attempted to argue for a minute, but she said, “I will not sign your card unless you sign up for honors.”  I was an extremely cooperative teenager and believed strongly in the judgment of teachers (Yes, I was annoying to my classmates), so I complied and would never have dreamed of going through the override process.

When I got my schedule during the summer, my honors physics teacher was listed as Jim Barbara.  My brother had been in his class two years earlier.  He said, “You’ll like him.  He’s kind of crazy.”  

If you don’t know my brother, it would be hard for you to fathom what a ringing endorsement those two sentences were.  My brother did not like teachers.  They loved him, but it was rarely mutual.  In the dividing up of our genetic material, I got all of the enthusiasm for school, love for authority figures, and faith in the judgement of experts.  He had none of that, so teachers were mostly necessary annoyances to him.  If he said a teacher was good, that meant most students would find them amazing.  In fact, I’ve only ever heard him say that about one other teacher.

So, I started my senior year in honors physics with my brother’s endorsement of Mr. Barbara and Mrs Demby’s belief that I would do well.  About four days into the school year, I realized that I not only liked physics; I adored it.  I found out that math wasn’t just math.  It expressed relationships between aspects of the world.  Mr. Barbara was, in fact, a little crazy - in the best possible way.  I believe he would have stood on his head if he thought it would help us to learn better.  

I’ve written about Mr. Barbara many times before, so I don’t want to focus on his role in my life.  You can read previous posts for that.  What I realized recently was that I would not have been in Mr. Barbara’s class if Mrs. Demby had not been willing to say, “I won’t sign your registration form if you put regular.”  She didn’t want me to take the easy way out.  She may have even known that part of any girl’s motivation was having the good looking teacher.  Whatever she knew, her willingness to insist that her judgment was better than mine put me on a path I might not have otherwise been on.

I haven’t seen Mrs. Demby since I graduated.  I’m not even sure I saw her during my senior year because I didn’t have any classes on her floor.  I don’t even know if she is still alive, so I cannot ask if she remembers this.  If I had to guess, I would imagine that she has no memory of this conversation.  She had similar conversations with every student every year.  As a teacher, I don’t have specific memories of these conversations for more than a few days (except for the times when they override my advice and it goes poorly).  The conversation that changed the direction of my life was likely the most mundane conversation she had that week.

The other physics teacher at my school said that one of her inspirations for majoring in physics in college was a video her high school physics teacher showed.  While it is possible that teacher had chosen that video very carefully because he believed it to be powerful, it is also likely that he was just tired that day and chose to show a video rather than teach (come on, now, we’ve all done it).  Either way, it sparked her interest in the world of physics.  These stories make me think about the power we have as teachers.  What conversation do I not remember having with a student that has stuck with them for years?  What did I do or say in class that changed a student?  Was it a good change or a bad change?  I speak hundreds of thousands of words each day.  Each one of them has some degree of impact on my students.  Some are minimally impactful, carrying influence for only a few minutes.  Others may change the path of a students’ life in a way I will never know.  This is why the Bible gives a strong warning In James 3:1 that “not many should presume to be teachers because they will be judged more harshly.”  While it is referring to those who teach the Scripture, I believe the principle applies to all teaching because of the potential we have to build up or tear down.

While I thank God for Mrs. Demby’s insistence that I take a higher level class, I also pause to pray that God gives me wisdom as I have similar discussions with my own students. As far as I know, Mrs. Demby did not believe in God. It's possible that my friend's teacher didn't either. That'd didn't stop God from using them. Surely as people whose mission is to spiritually equip, challenge, and inspire students, he can use us in similar ways.


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Learning and Brain Conference Fall 2019 - Sunday Notes

Keynote: The Secret Life of the Teen Brain
Sarah-Jayne Blackmore PhD

(British accents always make people sound smarter and more credible.)  

(She looks like Jaime Hartley.)

• Studied schizophrenia for seven years before changing her field of study to the adolescent brain because symptoms of schizophrenia start between 18-26.  
• As little as 20 years ago, we believed the brain stopped developing in childhood.
• Almost 75% of mental illnesses and disorders start in adolescence.  
• The onset of adolescence is well defined by hormonal changes in the body, but the end is a more social definition - when an individual establishes an independent life.
• Adolescence is the time when you figure out how you define yourself and the way you want the world to view you.  It’s why they become so self-focused during this time.
• It is when their brains are the most social.
• Societal expectations of adolescents vary wildly from culture to culture.
• One thing they have in common in all cultures is that “sensation seeking” and risk-taking peaks in the late teens. (The leading cause of death in people 10-24 years old is preventable accidents caused by risk-taking.)
• We can’t learn without taking some risks.
• The social component is strong.  They are much more likely to take risks when they are with their friends.  The risk of fatal car accidents increases exponentially with the number of passengers for drivers under 21.  The opposite is true for drivers over the age of 26.
• Young adolescents’ perception of risk is influenced more by the opinions of other teenagers.  For every other age group, their perception influenced more by the opinions of adults.
• For 10-14-year-old students (5th-9th grade), peer-led interventions are more effective than adult-led interventions.  (Study led by Pauck teal. PNAS 2015)
• Being excluded has an outsized impact on adolescents as compared to children and adults.  This impacts their decision making to avoid taking social risks by taking the real risks that their friends are taking.
• MRI studies have changed much of our understanding of how the brain works and develops.  Myelination happens into your 40s, not stopping at puberty as we once believed.
• There is a part of the brain (or four interacting parts) that activate when you think about what other people are thinking.  Even toddlers are able to understand other people’s minds and what they want to do.
• Grey matter volume decreases in adolescents, but it is not a mental decline.  It has to do with the development that increases efficiency is processing.
• Social deprivation has more damaging effects on behavior and brain development for adolescents than it does with children or adults.  They need social interaction to learn.  Time out is a terrible idea after the age of 9. 

Personal note:  Almost every study she cites was done by one her of Ph.D. or post-doc students.  She tells the sample size and summary of the methodology each time.  This is credibility.

Keynote Address: The Science of How We Learn 

John Gabrieli, PhD

(Studies the neural basis of memory, thought, and emotion.  I’m sorry the original speaker has the flu, but I am very interested in this topic, so I’m happy to hear him.  It’s a very technical speech.  It’s more about MRI research than practical application.)

• All babies born are participants in a large neurobiological study.  They are born with different genetics, environments, and brain structures.
• What happens in a child’s brain and mind (both cognitively and socio-emotionally) while learning? His studies were with 4-6 year-olds.
• Socio-economic status influences the thickness of the gray matter.  High cortical thickness of gray matter correlates with higher test scores.  Those who qualify for free/reduced lunch have a lower thickness of gray matter.  This has to do with nutrition as well as access to developmental materials and people you spend time with.
• More advantaged families tend to be the first to volunteer to participate in studies, so much of what we know is based on studies of high socio-economic students. We are now working harder to include those in less educationally supportive environments.
• Brain differences do NOT indicate fixed biological or cognitive differences.
• Early exposure to adult language (parents speaking to their children) correlates to higher IQ and higher academic success in school.  This is likely because hearing more words gives more advantages in language development.  Parents should talk to their children a lot when they are very young.  Back and forth talking (even when the child is babbling) increases development in the language and social parts of the brain in addition to increasing their vocabulary.
• Forward and backward speech was played for 4-6 year-olds in an F-MRI.  Kids who had had more conversational speech at home had more language areas activated by both kids of speech, no matter what their socio-economic status.  Kids of the same age who experience 1200 conversation turns per day have MUCH more activations than those who experienced 600 conversational turns, no matter what the socio-economic status.  This is because conversation grows white matter between the two parts of the brain that are most involved in language development.  
• They increased conversational turns in 4-6-year-olds and measured them 9 weeks apart.  In that short time, it increased their vocabulary.  Imagine if this were happening over months or years.  It also increased the activity in Broca’s area of the brain.
• It’s not just about the number of words.  It’s about the conversational turns.
• (Personal thought: It seems to me that the best way to have conversational turns is to ask a lot of open-ended questions.  That will ensure turns.)
• This is something ANYONE can do.

• Mindfulness:  Are more mindful students better learners?  The answer seems to be yes based on self-reported mindfulness surveys correlated with grades, test scores, attendance, and suspension rates.  It has about the same amount of impact as growth-mindset and grit.  
• (There are so many programs for mindfulness that it is hard to know which ones are good, so be careful.)
• The Amygdala (the part of the brain that determines what you fear) responds to fearful facial expressions with high activity in children who are at risk for depression (have at least one parent with a history of depression).
• Mindfulness training (Calmer Choice) and coding training (Scratch) were done every day for a class period fo 8 weeks.  Students filled out perceived stress scales before and after study.  The more stress they self-reported, the more response the amygdala had to fearful faces.  Mindfulness training resulted in less self-reported stress and made the amygdala less active in response to fearful faces.
• Helping kids to put the past and future in perspective and focus on the present moment will have an impact on their stress and their performance.

It seems like I didn't write much of his talk down.  It wasn't because he had less to say.  It was because he had so many pictures and brain scans that it would be harder to communicate as text.

Session 7 –  The Learning Brain, Lessons for Education - Sarah-Jayne Blackmore 

• An increase in awareness and a decrease in stigma is part of the reason for the increase in reporting of adolescent mental health issues, but it is also a reflection of a real problem.  We don’t know what the proportion is, but it involves both.
• The entire cortex changes in massive ways during adolescence.
• Gray matter decreases y about 1.5% each year (but not uniformly, back develops first, the frontal brain is last) between 10 and 25 and increases after 25 but not quite back to the level they had at age 10.
• Losing this grey matter happens at the same time that white matter increases (about 1% each year).  The loss of grey matter doesn’t mean loss of function.  It has to do with functional development.
• The prefrontal cortex is bigger in humans than other species.  It is also the latest to develop.  It involves judgment, short and long term planning, inhibitions of inappropriate actions, self-control and problem-solving.  It doesn’t become fully matured until the early to mid-twenties.  

My question:  Does asking kids to solve problems help develop the prefrontal cortex or are we unfairly asking them to do something they are neurologically unable to do?

• When you think, learn, or do anything, the axon grows in diameter and the myelin becomes thicker.  Both of those things make signals travel faster.  (This starts in the second trimester of pregnancy and continues through your late 30s.)  This process shows up in MRI scans as increases in white matter and decreases in grey matter.
• We also undergo synaptic pruning, a process in which energy and resources are conserved by taking away unassigned connections in the brain to reallocate the energy and resources to the connections that are actually used.  This is why the environment is so critical to brain development.
• A lot of these studies are done on animals because it requires depriving them of certain factors and studying the effect on the brain.  This would be unethical to do with humans.
• Using the Matrix Reasoning Task (non-verbal pattern games) shows that daily training for 20 days works better in older adolescents and adults.  This means learning reasoning improves with age.  We should not be accelerating kids in complex math classes.  The 14-15-year-old brain is not ready for it.
• Since there is no average person, it is important to look at individual differences.  
• ABCD study (NIH study on adolescent brain cognitive development)

Wrap Up Session – Putting it All Together - John T. Almarode

(I have no idea how these notes turned green, but I can't get them back to black.)

I actually got to talk to him before the session started.  

- We talked about Southern stuff.  

- He high fived me when I said I taught physics.  - He was even patient enough to take a picture with me and Talon.  

- He's the best.  I follow him on Twitter now.

Every technique must be adapted, depending on local context and timing.

1. We remember what we encode.

• Rote encoding (just knowledge)
• Elaborate encoding (explanations of meaning)
• Individuals need multiple ways of representing information
• Encourage students to FIND patterns, not repeat patterns.
• Emotional engagement (can be achieved with something as little as providing choice)

2. We remember what we retrieve,

• The place for a worksheet is retrieval practice.
• Spaced retrieval practice (Use professional judgment to decide when)
• Right when they are about to forget it is the best time to do retrieval practice.  A forgetting curve becomes a remembering curve if we space out retrieval practice.
• Make thinking visible:
• Ask students to observe and describe what they see.  
• Have them build examples.  
• Don’t let them just give an answer without a reason. 
• Have them make connections.  
• Promote asking questions.
• Note-taking should short and followed up with a question that requires them to retrieve from their notes.  Turn to a neighbor and make adjustments to your notes based on the answer to your question.

3. Learning takes time.

• Play $100000 Pyramid - Students have to describe what something is and get someone else to guess.
• Interleaving (distributed practice) is more effective than blocked practice, but it is also more uncomfortable.  This is a desirable difficulty.  The struggle is real and valuable, and helping them get through it is part of the instruction.  It causes them to discriminate between characteristics, which helps them understand it better and have it stick around a lot longer.

4. Give and receive feedback.

• None of this works without feedback.
• If a person slips and falls, you will help them up and then go around wherever they just walked.  You live every day on feedback.
• Where am I going?  Prompting is feedback for students.  “Remember, today we are doing . . .”
• How am I going?  Can you give me an example?  Can you show me how you . . .?”
• Where do I go next?  Give some guidance about what they can do to make it right and then bring it back to you.  Sometimes it means giving them the answer, but usually, it means pointing them in the direction where they can find the answer.

Learning and the Brain Conference Fall 2019 - Saturday

Keynote: Deeper Learning for EVERY Student: Neuroscience, Technology, and Universal Design for Learning - David H. Rose, EdD

(The introduction for this man included a couple of dozen awards and honors.  He’s a delightful speaker in a way that notes cannot reflect.  He was genuine and vulnerable.)

• Flunked the first five assessments he took at Harvard (which, according to him, is hard to do because they'll usually "give you a gentleman's C").  The Dean told him he belonged and that he was important to him and chose his admission.  He called the professor and investigated why he was flunking and helped him work with the professors to be successful. (This Dean was John U. Monroe, and I want to look him up.  He left his dean position at Harvard to teach freshman English in a low performing HBCU in the South.  Then he left there to do the same at an even lower-performing college.)
• Worked with BF Skinner in 1966. They underfed the pigeons (to 85% of their body weight) so they would care about the reward for the task.  The Skinner studies weren’t about learning; they were about control.  (Personal note:  We should stop basing educational practices on his findings.)  This was where he learned about motivation.  
• Research on people with perfect pitch has given us a roadmap for how to study the relationship between anatomy and ability.
• Context determines whether something is a “disability.”  If it is interfering with a goal, we call it a disability.  If it helps get you to a goal faster than others, we call it a gift.  If the goal was different, we might reverse them.
• Neuroanatomy matters
• Phylogeny matters
•  Genes matter
• Culture, language, instruction, timing, technology, and context also matter. (It’s not just the biology)

• These same issues can be applied to the autism spectrum.  The goals they are trying to achieve determine whether autism is an advantage or a disadvantage.  Autistic people have hyper-connected brains (Newton, Mozart, Einstein). It can even make them hyperlexic.  At the other end of the spectrum, people with hypo-connected brains (like Tim Berners Lee, creator of the World Wide Web) have trouble paying attention, perhaps even in the middle of their own sentences.
• Most of what we call symptoms (motor and verbal tics, etc.) are ways of managing the anxiety that comes from frustrated goals.
• Neural networks: There are three parts to the simplest ones.  Motor, sensory, and interneurons.  They determine reflexes.  In more complex systems, there are still three parts, recognition, strategic, and affective (setting the priorities)
• Provide multiple means of representation, multiple means of action (expression), and multiple means engagement to get the most out of the different kinds of brains.
• The old way is to teach from the bottom up (e.g. phonics, words, reading sentences for meaning).  We now know that there is a lot of reciprocal connecting going on, so the levels can be interleaved.
• Kids with reading disabilities are operating in a threat state when asked to read.  That keeps them from comprehending what they read.  ALL parts of the brain are involved in effective reading.  
• It is easy to present digital text in multiple formats so different brains can decode it better.  Different colors on different backgrounds appeal to some brains better than others.  Having them give the same answers in different ways.
• StayFocused - an app that allows you to shut down things for a predetermined amount of focus time.
• He has a mild cognitive impairment, which is causing him to move a bit on the spectrum.  His hearing is declining.  He has a hearing aid app that allows him to control his hearing aids (as granular as “only listen to the person I’m looking at”).  He has to take a number of medications, and there are digital pill dispensers that track what meds he has taken when.  It's not all downside.  He has more anxiety, but it allows him to enjoy music more because he’s more emotionally open.  He has a heart rate monitor that will tell him to sit down if it reads he is getting anxious because his heart rate is too high.

Keynote: The State of the Onion: Peeling Back 20 Years of the Science of Learning and Instruction - David B. Daniel, PhD

(This guy reminds me so much of Ben Inman.  He looks a little like him, but his mannerism and speech patterns are exactly like him, even the way he is dressed in jeans and sport coat.)

• He gives a history of the development of the Learning and the Brain Conferences, of which he was skeptical.  He said, “I can’t write a book because I don’t even believe myself.”
• Brain research was originally designed to only be available and useful to researchers.
• There were scientists.  There were communicators.  These were not the same people, so people left conferences with bad science because they had only been impacted by the great communicators, who didn’t know what they were talking about.
• Learning and the Brain was developed to get the researcher information to classroom practitioners in a way that could be used in the real world.
• How do we take all of these threads and start weaving them together to knit the sweater and then give feedback to make better yarn?
• Medicine had a problem with researchers continuing to research, which made it chemistry rather than medicine.  They finally figured out how to get it into the hands of doctors and patients.  The same was happening with education, so Mind, Brain, and Education (Now Learning and the Brain) started putting them together.  
• Don’t be evidence-based.  Be evidence-generating.
• Most research had nothing to do with the classroom in the research phase.  Now, some will go to a classroom to find problems and base their research on solving those problems.
• Classroom teachers would get a summarized headline of research findings and run with it rather than realizing it required adaptation and contextualization  We are getting better at this, but we still have to be careful.  Research is narrowed and limited.  Teachers must understand and communicate the nuances of the research to their situation.

Eras in Education:  

• Learning Styles - 20,000 books about it even though the science shows they DO NOT exist.  There are individual learning differences that vary at different times of day and how hydrated you are in the same person, but an individual does not have A learning style that they are born with.  They all benefit from rich teaching in multiple modalities based on the content you are teaching.
• Multiple Intelligences - 2,000 books available even though it is being misinterpreted and terribly misapplied.  Even the author hated the way it was being applied.
• Brain-Based Learning - 4,000 books, most of which take an old idea and lay a brain diagram on it to make it relevant again.  Learning is more complex than the “brain-based” manipulators made it out to be.
• Evidence-Based - 7,000 books, which got people talking about evidence but never addressed what was good evidence.  It came from the No Child Left Behind days and was based on things people said “should work,” not things that had been tried and did work.  
• Everything works, even if I have to talk about it in terms of mice, goats, rabbits, and starved pigeons.  
• (Our skin to skin contact practice in hospitals came from research on goats.  It was “evidence-based” but led to a lot of damage for adoptive mothers or those who needed to be put in the NICU.)  
• You can be informed without becoming a zealot about it.  
• Figure out what is proof.  Is it credible or just persuasive?
• Current Era - Science of Learning - Bring together experts from different fields that impact learning.  Be careful because most research assumes a motivated learner.  When good science is used incorrectly, it doesn't work. That’s not the fault of the science.  

• It’s easy to get proof of concept (plants in a greenhouse), but it’s hard to design it to be used by other people (apply that to everyone’s yard).  You are getting the parts, but putting them together is harder.  As we learn from Frankenstein, putting good parts together in the wrong ways can lead to a whole we were not anticipating.
• We have a Science of Learning, but we do not yet have a Science of Teaching.  This is where we need to go next

• We are translators - translating research into practice. 
• Don’t run away from complexity.  Honor it.
• Best practices don’t exist because there is no such thing as a practice that works for everyone all the time.  Again, don’t run away from the complexity of learning, students, and teaching.  It’s Moneyball (putting what we need where we need it), not a silver bullet.
• Like weather prediction, it is complex and changes as it is applied.  Weather changes the weather as it passes over.  Teaching will change your students which will change your teaching.  
• All of the sciences provide ingredients.  The teacher is the person who puts it together to make something nutritional and tasty for their students.

Session 3 - Educator’s Guide to Teaching Students How to Maximize Memory - Nina Dibner, MEd and Tricia Taylor, MEd

• Strategies for talking to students about memory are important.  If they do the techniques without understanding why they do them, they will be less effective.

• What is thinking?  Gave a list of numbers (remembered in short term).  Asked to add one to each digit (takes place in working memory).  It won’t become part of long term memory unless it is revisited, retrieved, and/or practiced.  
• Cognitive Load:  If you put too much into working memory at once, you cannot process it.  You cannot learn any more.
• What is memory?  It’s a little like trying to find something in a messy closet.  If you take the time to organize it, things are easier to find.  Every time you find something in the closet, you organize it a little.  Reviewing 3 times (spaced over some time), is ideal for less forgetting.

The Bad News:  Your thinking space is limited.  We remember things that we work hard at, NOT things we learn easily.  We remember things we have recalled spaced out over time.

How effective are the strategies we use?

Re-writing notes - LOW                       Re-writing without looking - HIGH

Highlighting - LOW                              Highlighting to make flashcards - MEDIUM

Re-reading notes - LOW                     Checking after getting an answer wrong - HIGH

Retrieval Practice - HIGHEST             Spaced practice - HIGHEST

A few things need to be right at the forefront of the mind (drilling basic facts matters) so that you aren’t taking up cognitive processing space while doing higher-level skills.

The Good News:  Pictures have power.  Pair your definitions or concepts with images.  Words give you information sequentially.  Pictures give it to you all at once.  Dual coding brings in input through the ear and the eye simultaneously.  (Be Careful:  Words on a page are processed by the same part of the brain as spoken words, so it does not count as visual input.)

Steps to use Dual Coding for new vocabulary

1. Question whether you have heard the word before or if it sounds like other words.
2. Show (or tell) the definition
3. Use the word in a student-created sentence.
4. Draw something that will help you remember
5. Explain to a neighbor
6. Label the image

• A tutor should not explain things to students.  More input isn’t helpful.  Students should explain to the tutor and the tutor stops and explains where they have misconceptions.  
• Keep pictures simple.  Keep words and images together.  Be selective about which and how many images you include.  
• Having a hard time focusing may just be a sign of a smaller working memory, so their cognitive load gets met more quickly. 
• Grouping information by similarities allows more of them to go into working memory because a chunk counts as one item.  (Mind maps and graphic organizers can help with this.  So can having them categorize.)

Oliver Caviglioli - Dual Coding

Session 4 - Engaging Brains:  Increased Student Engagement in the Classroom - John T. Almarode, PhD

(Can this man be my spirit animal?  Oh, wait! I don’t believe in that.  I just love him so much. He's hysterical, but it is just to make all of his deep thinking charming.)

How do we get them to engage them in what we want them to engage in and give them permission to check out when they need to? He said about 40% of what he says can be tuned out.  He tells students they just have to listen to figure out which 40% it is.

The progression of ALL learning goes through the following steps.  It will be at different paces for different students, but all people will go through all the steps for all learning.

• SOLO (Surface Learning)
• Prestructural Thinking
• Unistructural Thinking - Yes and No, Up and Down
• Multistructural Thinking
• Deep Learning
• Relational Thinking - How the pieces fit together.  If we try to do this before we have done the first three, there will be nothing but frustration.
• Abstract Thinking - Applying learning to similar situations.
• Transfer
• Extended Abstract Thinking - Application of learning to things unrelated to the classroom.

Surface learning doesn't mean easy or simple things.  It means the introduction, the foundational pieces that they will then put together.

• To engage them, we have to first figure out where they are at the moment.  Then, we can teach where they are plus one.
• You can’t think until you have a conceptual understanding of the parts of the problems.
• Depending on your students, you will likely spend some time in surface learning (strategic, purposeful, introductory information) and the bulk of your time in deep learning (connecting analyzing).  Transfer will happen quickly once deep learning has occurred.  

Task design - 8 Characteristics of an Engaging Task

1. Clear and Modeled Expectations - What does the target looks like?
2. Emotional Safety - Can they recover if they take a risk and make a mistake?
3. Personal Response - Can they bring their own perspective into it?
4. Sense of Audience - Is it valuable to someone other than the teacher?
5. Social Interaction - Can they tell someone else what they know?
6. Choice - Perception of choice (Choose from a menu that the teacher has designed)
7. Novelty - Just because something is good doesn’t mean you want to do it 180 days in a row.
8. Authentic - It doesn’t mean real world.  It means it COULD happen.  (Don’t build an imaginary creature and design an imaginary habitat.  Instead, have them be zookeepers that have to choose and exotic animal design a habitat at the zoo where you live that will let them live in your climate.)

You don’t have to have all 8 all the time.  If they had 3 or more, there was 87% sustained engagement (in a sample of 20000 classroom walkthroughs).  If there was only 2, there was only 17% sustained engagement.  If there was only 1 of these, you have 0% engagement.

How can I make tasks related to the periodic table involve at least three of these?

• Rigor is the interaction of complexity and difficulty.  
• We differentiate by altering difficulty, not complexity.

Example of differentiation:  

• Make a brochure for the school’s nature center which will be sent to schools who want to visit on field trips.  It should tell what they will learn, what they will see and do, and give examples about what they will learn about adaptations.  Individual writing prompt:  Create a list of 5-7 questions that people might ask to be added to the brochure.
• For some students (English language learners), we will give examples of brochures, a graphic organizer, video resources, and a template.
• For some (students with processing difficulty), I will give guiding research questions, a selection of reading materials, and examples of FAQ for something unrelated.
• For some, I will provide only the library and the internet.
• If you are concerned about the perception of fairness, mix the groups and assign the tasks based on your knowledge of student needs.  We can differentiate based on the materials they give them as resources.  
• Keep the goal the same for everyone.  Adapt the support.
• (Personal thought - You probably know who will need the extra support.  Instead of giving it them right away, hover near them and listen for when they get stuck.  Then, provide the support materials.  That would also make it less likely for others to think it wasn't fair.  They won't see you planning to treat people differently.  They will see you giving people what they need when they are already past that point, so they don't need it.)

None of this works without feedback from the student and our response.  

• Remind them of goals.  
• Give a couple of steps to reach it.  
• Show me where you are stuck, so we can talk about ways to get around it.  
• Feedback should not be “Gotcha.”  It should be “I’ve got you.”

Session 5 - Science of Motivation in Learning - Christopher S. Hulleman, PhD

• Learning is hard work.  It requires energy.  How do we get energized to do the work?
• Motivate Lab Mission - To improve people’s lives through rigorous motivation research.
• We want to help you do what you already do but do it better (not change it with new curriculum).
• Teachers are the best resource for each other to get ideas.
• Both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation drop as kids get older.  
• Can you make your class something you don’t want to miss?
• If you can see your phone, you learn less.

Motivation = (Expectancy x Value) - Cost

• Value is estimated by their connection of the material to things they are interested in.
• Values tell us what is meaningful and worthwhile and what is not.
• People have different values, based on the culture of their home.
• Values are something we eventually must define internally.
• Top 4 Motives for Attending College (based on survey of 12571 Georgia college students)
• Prepare for career (#1, with all the rest tied for number 2 - in white students)
• Learn about interests
• Make family proud (#1 in minority groups and students in poverty)
• Provide a better life for family

Finding or Developing Passions

• The passion isn’t out there somewhere, waiting for you to discover it.  It is something you develop by getting better and diving into something.  
• You are pretty bad at most things when you first try it.  You can’t “find the passion” by deciding after only doing things once.

Utility Value Intervention 

(This works best with students who enter the class with low confidence or expectations.  It has little effect on those who already have high confidence or expectations.)

• Select a topic that is being covered in class.
• Write one paragraph that applies the topic to your life (or the life of someone you know)
• Repeat 3-5 times during the semester.
• Sending a briefing to parents about the relevance of the topics covered in your class had an even bigger impact on the students grades. (Probably because it was being supported at home in addition to school)
• Motivation is increased if it is:
• Personalized
• Specific
• Meaningful

Google "Build Connections Character Lab" for a template that allows students to connect their interests to their learning.

Session 6 - Instructional Strategies for Deeper, Unforgettable Teaching and Learning - Marcia L Tate

(I almost went to a different session.  I’m so glad I stayed at this one.  She is awesome!)

• Greet your students when they come in - no matter what age.
• Music sets the tone as they enter
• Start every class with something positive.

• The brain learns best when it is not in high stress. Low to moderate stress is good for the brain.
• Laughter has more impact on your health than nutrition or exercise.  It releases T-cells, which build your immunity.  Fake laughter has a similar impact, so if you don’t feel tickled, fake it.

• Teach once and review twice because the brain must hear something 3 times at minimum to remember it.
• People had brains before there were schools.  Its job was to keep you alive.

Warren Phillips - Sing Along Science

20 Strategies to create deep and unforgettable learning

1. Writing - The brain remembers what it writes, but you cannot take copious notes while listening to a lecture.  Give time to write before moving on.
2. Storytelling - The brain remembers stories, especially ones that contain emotion.
3. Mnemonic devices and hooks
4. Visuals - Dual coding
5. Movement - The human body was designed to move
6. Roleplaying
7. Visualization 
8. Metaphor, analogy, simile
9. Reciprocal teaching and cooperative learning
10. Music - Changes mood, content related music helps memory
11. Graphic Organizers
12. Drawing - Causes brains to engage in analogy
13. Humor - allows the brain to go from focused attention to diffuse attention
14. Discussion / Brainstorming - One student’s idea triggers another student’s idea
15. Games - Like humor, it let’s the brain go into diffuse mode
16. Project-based or Problem-based Learning
17. Field Trips
18. Manipulatives - There’s a strong connection between the hands and the brain
19. Technology - appropriately timed
20. Work-study - apprenticeships and internships

• Don’t try to work as many as possible into a lesson.  Choose the right strategy to match the lesson.  
• Use your professional judgment.
• Everyone needs purpose (a reason to get up in the morning) and laughter.

www.developingmindsinc.com

www.drmarciatate.com