Reflections on Learning and the Brain 2022 - Engaging Lessons

My raw notes are posted earlier on this blog, but they don't do much for me unless I mush it all together in my head to summarize and synthesize.  With that in mind, this is the fifth in a series of my own reflections of some sessions.  This is the last one, and it is very practical.  This is from the presentation of Dr. John Almarode, but he liberally references others, so the book you see pictured here is not his but one that he recommended.

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If you are a teacher of more than one year, you know we have an engagement problem going on with students.  You might know that if it is your first year as well, but you have nothing to compare it to.  If you can compare pre-pandemic, mid-pandemic, and post-pandemic classes, you know that we have lower engagement now than in any of the other two times.  It's weird, right?  One would think that we would have observed the lowest engagement during the fearful, hybrid, masked, socially distanced time, but one would be wrong.  This year, the one that should be "back to normal" is the one where we are struggling.  I wrote a little about this in my post on Chronic Stress Recovery, so I won't repeat it here.  But the point is, students are disengaged for a number of reasons, but teachers are also so tired it is hard to implement the tools we used to have for increasing their engagement.  So, we need some simple things from research that we can use to help our students engage.

Let's start with clarity.  Teacher clarity combined with student clarity has massive potential to increase student achievement (effect size 0.84 and 0.75 respectively), but it will also increase engagement.  Both students and teachers should be able to answer the questions:

• What are they learning?
• Why are they learning it?
• How will they know they have learned it (success criteria)?

We have all been in meetings or professional development seminars where we didn't know what we were supposed to be doing, and we definitely checked out until the leader came near our table when we bluffed some vague answers.  Is it surprising our students do the same if they don't know what they are learning?  I've also been asked to do tasks where I knew what to do but found it absolutely pointless.  I worked in a real estate company where I was meant to collect data and put it into a bar graph.  While it wasn't a difficult thing to do, I was not at all motivated to do it because I knew it was going to be stuck in a drawer and never used for anything.  And since success motivates, students will be more likely to keep at something if they can see at each step whether or not they have been successful.

In the early 2010s, researchers John V. Antonetti and James R. Garver wanted to study the aspects of a lesson that create sustained student engagement.  Rather than choosing one aspect to study and controlling for everything else, they performed walkthrough classroom observations.  They performed 17000 classroom visits before publishing their book, but they have continued the work and are now at about 24000 visits.  John Almarode, who was the presenter of this particular session, said that no book has changed his teaching more than this one.  (Considering how many books he reads, that is a big statement; so I ordered it from the conference, and it is sitting at the top of my "to be read" pile.  He said that every time he turned the page, he had an aha moment.)  They found 8 things that cause a lesson to be engaging.

1. Clear and Modeled Expectations - What does the target look 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?  Can they write about it as a response?  Can they tell you what they think?
4. Sense of Audience - Is it valuable to someone other than the teacher?  This could be knowing that the work will be hung in the hall or posted to the web.  It could simply be that their partner cares about their part of the activity.
5. Social Interaction - Can they tell someone else what they know?
6. Choice - Perception of choice, or appropriate and limited choice (Choose from a menu that the teacher has designed), not a student coming in and telling you what they want to learn about.
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 an exotic animal and design a habitat at the zoo where you live that will let them live in your climate.). They need to know someone uses this knowledge, but you do not have to make it apply to their current lives.

In case you are concerned about incorporating eight things into every lesson, simmer down.  Take a deep breath.  According to the research, having only three of these will result in 87% sustained engagement.  If you have only two, you will get only 17%, so that third one is huge.  And, let me quote John Almarode.  "If you have bought into the clarity thing, you already have #1.  If you are a halfway decent person who doesn't hate children, you should already have #2.  So you really only have to choose one more."  He advises looking at your goal to decide on the third.  There are times when "turn and talk" is great (social interaction), and there are times when you need quiet reflection.  There are times when choice is appropriate, and there are times when you need them to do exactly one thing (choice in the lab can be dangerous).   Trying a new tool is sometimes what you want (novelty), but it can also tax their working memory if you are simultaneously introducing new and challenging material.  The ones you choose should be based on your professional judgment in accomplishing the goal.

As you head into this new year, you are planning lessons for next week.  Be ready to communicate clarity and care.  The plan your learning experiences using this list.

Educational Book Recommendations to Start the New Year

If you are a teacher, there are a lot of books available to you for professional development, but it's hard to know which ones are worth your time.  Some of the most popular ones should not be, and there are some gems that you might not ever hear about.  I read a lot of these, and I will soon be reading even more, so I thought we might wrap up this year and start the new semester with a few recommendations.  This is by no means a complete list of great education books, but you don't have time to read about my complete list.  I'll do another recommendation post in May, so you can read something great over the summer.

Learning Begins by Andrew Watson
If you want a very practical book about working memory and attention, this is the book for you.  Andrew Watson is an incredibly nice guy, and that comes across in his writing.  He was a high school English teacher before going into consulting work, so he understands the challenge of balancing curriculum requirements with student needs and understands this particular part of how the brain works better than anyone I know.  (Bonus recommendations:  Andrew has two other books:  Learning Grows is about growth mindset and stereotype threat.  The Goldilocks Map is a book I have not yet read, but I plan to read it this summer because it is about how to evaluate which research is valuable for implementation in your classroom.)

The Architecture of Learning by Kevin Washburn
This was my introduction to the world of brain science (except for some seminars on Brain-Based-Learning, which seems to have disappeared).  I saw Kevin at an ACSI conference and found him both credible and fascinating.  I bought this book and became Facebook friends with him.  He's another super nice guy, and this book will change how you view lesson planning.  It's not something you can do with every lesson; even he says you wouldn't have time for that.  What it is great for is to have a structured approach to those topics you always struggle to get across, the one that every class seems to have difficulty with.  I learned a lot from this book, and it primed me for my future love of cognitive science.

How We Learn by Stanislas Dehane
I picked this one up because my Learning and the Brain friend, John Almarode tweeted that he could not put it down.  At first, I wasn't sure how I would feel about it because there is a lot of stuff in the first quarter of the book about Artificial Intelligence and how it compares or contrasts with human intelligence.  That's not bad, but it wasn't what I was looking for.  Once you get past that part, however, this is a fabulous book on how our brains work.  There were parts that stopped me cold, and I had to post the quote right away.  If you want to understand your brain and how this collection of cells between your ears acquires and assimilates information, then 75% of this book is for you!  

A Mind for Numbers by Barbara Oakley
Of all the books on this list, this is the best one for learners.  Barbara Oakley has a great story of believing that she wasn't good at math. Don't let the title confuse you, though.  This book isn't actually about learning math; it's just about learning.  She figured out how to learn so well that she is now a professor of Engineering and teaches a MOOC on Coursera called Learning How to Learn. (Another bonus recommendation:  If you think the title of this one would put a student off, she also has a book geared toward teenage students that is also called Learning How to Learn.)

Why Don't Students Like School by Daniel Willingham
Teachers, if you are going to read only one book about education, make it this book.  While I have found great value in every book on this list and many others, this one floored me.  There are valuable books that are hard to read, and there are easy-to-read books that aren't that valuable.  This one is the best of both worlds.  For years, I had seen it on lists of must-read books for teachers, but I let the title put me off.  I think I believed it would be about personalized learning, but when a trusted friend told me "Run. Don't walk" to read this book, I ordered it.   I read it over a three-day weekend, and I found myself stopping every few minutes to post notes from it.  It explains cognitive science and its impact on student learning better than any book I have read. 

Reflections on Learning and the Brain 2022 - Engagement Myths, Enemies, and Solutions

My raw notes are posted earlier on this blog, but they don't do much for me unless I mush it all together in my head to summarize and synthesize.  With that in mind, This is the fourth of five posts that are my own reflections of some sessions.  This one is mostly out of a presentation by Drs. Andy Hargreaves and Dennis Shirley, but there is a little from Dr. Jessica Minahan in here as well.  I will take the week off on Christmas weekend, but we will start the year with a very practical post about John Almarode's session on how to construct an engaging lesson.

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We tend to think of engagement as a binary situation.  You are either engaged or not, but if you think about your own level of engagement with things in your life, you know that isn't accurate.  I have been half-engaged in many meetings, with one eye on my email while I nodded along with the presenter.  Even as I write this, I'm also watching the Thanksgiving Day Dog Show, so I look away from what I'm writing frequently to ooh and aah over a cute dog.  That said, there are sort of three categories with a spectrum between the first two.

Full engagement - The student is thinking about the lesson you are teaching.  Note that even researchers can't always agree about how to measure this because it is hard to visually observe when they are thinking.  Some measure eye contact with the teacher, but then they have to recognize that we often look away to think about something.  Some measure note-taking, but others recognize that this act might be taking their attention away from the lesson for a moment or that some people doodle as a means of engagement.  Chances are, you can recognize full engagement from your students if you know them well.

Not engaged - This is when the student is simply not thinking at all about the lesson.  Perhaps they are daydreaming or staring at the floor.  I was once in a meeting so boring and so right before lunch that I just put my forehead on the table and looked at my shoes (sorry to the guy leading that, but it was rough).  In one of your students, it might be that they are looking at a website that sells shoes.  It can look like a lot of things, but all it really means is that they are not thinking about what you are teaching.

Actively disengaged - This one doesn't have to be defined for you because you absolutely know it when you see it.  The student is taking action to not think about your lesson on purpose and inviting others to join him.  He kicks the chair in front of him, pokes the kid next to him, says off-topic things out loud, flips his water bottle, and just generally finds any way he can not to pay attention.

As teachers, we are given a lot of advice, and one of the most common is "make your lesson more engaging."  What we are not given, outside of books like the one Drs. Hargreave and Shirley wrote, are realistic ways of doing that (except that my next post will be some very practical ways, so keep your eye out for that).  Worse, some of the advice we are given is wrong; so here are three common myths about engagement.

Students will only be engaged if you make the lesson relevant to THEIR lives. - Well, first of all, if you teach 120 students a day, that's just exhausting (actually, even if you only taught 12 students a day, that would be difficult).  They don't all have the same interests or values.  According to Daniel Willingham's great book Why Don't Students Like School, most attempts to make a lesson relevant by tying it to pop culture will lead to the student only thinking about the pop culture thing you referenced instead of the thing you were trying to connect it to.  So your attempt at engagement paradoxically results in lower engagement.

Trying to do it by trends may also be a problem as it will lead to stereotyping.  For example, if you try to tie your math lesson to something you think girls will relate to, you are alienating those girls who aren't "girly."  And, those who do like the thing you are trying to connect with may feel that you are being cheesy or condescending.  Kids can tell when you aren't being authentic, so don't try to make something fit where it doesn't.  That doesn't mean your content doesn't naturally relate to their lives.  I teach physics, so I often say, "Where are my runners?  My swimmers?  My baseball players?  My musicians?" and ask them for expertise about their field because it is an example of the concept we are covering.  A history teacher is naturally going to end up addressing rights or injustice that connect to students' lives, but it fits there anyway; you aren't shoehorning it in to "make it relevant" while hoping to increase engagement.

Students like technology, so you MUST include technology to get engagement. - I teach in a one-to-one laptop school, so I am not against the use of technology in lessons.  There are things your students can accomplish with technology that they could not have without it.  BUT the idea that technology has to be involved for a lesson to be engaging is wrong.  Students engage in outdoor lessons that don't use tech at all.  They are engaged in physical activities whose only technology is shin guards.  I have found that sometimes, students are happy to have a breather from their screens.  One thing I have loved about my school since the adoption of our one-to-one program is that we were encouraged not to use technology for the sake of it but to match it to the goal of our lesson.  Sometimes, technology provides a better way; and sometimes it does not.  Use it to meet your learning goals, not to increase engagement.

Learning is only engaging if it is fun.  This may be the myth we have been told the most.  Students won't engage in a lesson if it isn't fun.  Good luck to the history teachers who teach about the atrocities, environmental science teachers who address climate change, and geometry teachers who teach proofs.  Even as a science teacher, I have to remind my students that, while I hope the lab is fun, that isn't the purpose.  There is a scientific principle to be gleaned from the observations I'm having them make.  Chasing engagement through fun is a fool's errand anyway as you can't compete with their entertainment sources.  You don't have Marvel's budget or Disney's Imagineers.  Your goal isn't entertainment; it is learning.  You may succeed with engaging them in an activity while still failing to teach them.  

So, now that I've told you what is not going to lead to more engagement, let me depress you a little more.  There are five "dis" words that can be considered the "enemies of engagement."  And we are seeing them in high numbers post-pandemic.  They are disenchantment, disconnection, disassociation, disempowerment, and distraction.  The good news is that there are antidotes to these enemies. (Wow, did I ever mix metaphors there.  Let's say there are superhero rivals to those enemies.)  Let's look at them one at a time.

Disenchantment - It's hard for students to see the magic in much these days.  Some of that is a result of their brain chemistry after returning from lockdowns, and some of it is because we are grieving the loss of over a million people without really acknowledging that grief.  We are recovering from chronic stress, and they are having difficulty seeing their place in the future.  Learning about the periodic table seems a little thin and pale to them.  Not surprisingly, the rival of disenchantment is . . . enchantment.  This comes from you.  You teach chemistry because there is something you find magical about it.  You didn't go into teaching math for a living because you hate it; there is something in it that you find really interesting.  When you read books to young children, you communicate through your demeanor that you just LOVE books.  When I was in middle school, history wasn't my thing, but I adored my history teacher, Mr. Watkins.  His favorite thing to study and talk about was the Russian Revolution.  I learned a lot about Czar Nicholas and Alexandra and Rasputin.  I read the 640 page book about them for no other reason than Mr. Watkins loved it.  Over a decade later, I stood in an art museum 1200 miles away, with tears running down my face because I was standing in front of Alexandra's crown.  It's going to take some time to re-enchant students, but it starts with showing your enchantment with it.  Be authentic about it, but realize you may need to push it harder than you did in the past.

Disconnection - It's hard for students to feel a connection with some of our material.  As I already addressed above, the answer is not necessarily to connect it to their lives.  What is important is that they see a purpose.  In his session, John Almarode said, "They need to know that this information is used by SOMEONE."  They need to see that there is meaning in the material for the world.  This generation is able to see a broader context better than past ones have been at their age, so if you can show them that what they are learning has meaning and purpose in the world, you can help them connect with it more.

Disassociation - There's no surprise here.  The social media that was supposed to connect us has left us disconnected and polarized.  Add two years of limited interaction to that, and the news isn't good for students feeling connected to their peers, the future, or your material.  Well, teachers, this is what we are good at.  We know how to connect kids to each other.  Surveying a class to find common ground, giving them a short collaborative activity that requires them to connect, and asking students to turn and talk to their neighbor about what they just learned are all ways of providing connection and belonging.  We got this if we just think about it for a minute.

Disempowerment - "Empowering students" and "giving students a voice" are so overused that they are now little more than faddish buzzwords.  While both of those things are important, we are addressing how to get kids to engage with a lesson, so think a little smaller.  WITHIN your lesson, how can you provide students with a choice?  Construct activities in two columns and allow them to decide which one they want to do.  You're making the columns, so you can still accomplish what you want, but they feel a little more in control of their lives.  "Would you like to write this down now or wait until the end?" is a way to give students a sense of choice.  Where the choice has to be yours, taking the time to explain why you made the choice you did honors the student as a human being because you cared enough to explain your thinking.  

Distraction - This is the big one.  If you asked most teachers why their students aren't engaged, this would probably be the reason they give.  They would likely blame technology, but ask an experienced teacher if kids were never distracted before they had computers.  I have watched kids read their pencils and play with their own fingers.  The rival of distraction isn't sensory deprivation.  It's to give them a challenging task that requires all of their focus.  Have them build something, engage in a scavenger hunt, make the goal big enough that it requires a lot of thinking.  And, of course, recognize that you are going to need to redirect from time to time.

Engagement can also be different in kids with high anxiety and those who have experienced trauma.  The amygdala in their brains is sometimes hypervigilant, and that can result in inaccurate self-thoughts when they are stressed.  In everyone, stressors are likely to distort our perception (assuming someone is looking at us when we have a zit or spilled coffee on our shirts, walking into a room where people are laughing and assuming that they are laughing at us).  In the anxious student, the presence of a pretty normal stressor can result in a complete shutdown, with inaccurate thoughts like, "I just can't do any of this (even when there is evidence to the contrary, like having done well yesterday or having a good grade). They may decide a teacher just hates them (even if there is evidence of much love from them).  You will not be able to get them engaged in a class until you have turned down the amygdala by giving them something incompatible with the negative thoughts (today's Wordle, a small Sudoku puzzle, a trivia question on a card).  Once their distorted thoughts have calmed down, they may be able to re-engage with the class.

As I said earlier, my next post will contain practical advice on how you can make your lessons foster engagement, so next week, look for some very practical advice.

Reflections on Learning and the Brain 2022 - Activating Prior Knowledge

My raw notes are posted earlier on this blog, but they don't do much for me unless I mush it all together in my head to summarize and synthesize.  With that in mind, the next few posts will be my own reflections of some sessions.  This is almost entirely from the presentation of Dr. Jim Heal.

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Like any issue, EduTwitter is polarized over the two extremes of classrooms being either teacher-led or student-centered.  Proponents of the research on direct instruction come out strongly in favor of teacher expertise.  More progressive teachers are all about students making meaning for themselves.  In reality, both of these camps are reflecting only a caricature of their ideology.  If you listen to the "teacher-led" people, the image you have in your mind is of a teacher lecturing non-stop for 45-90 minutes with no interaction whatsoever from students as they silently create a transcript of the lecture.  Outside of a college lecture hall, this isn't happening much in reality.  Listen to the student-centered crowd, and the image you have in your mind is a teacher setting some materials in the center of the room and saying, "1, 2, 3 Learn" without any input from the teacher for a few weeks.  I feel like even the most ardent proponent of the Montessori method hasn't gone quite this far.  The truth is that good instruction is both teacher-led and student-centered.  I don't mean, lecture one day and free play the next.  The truth is best represented in this quote from Jim Heal:

"Students are the center of learning as the primary beneficiaries of it, but that doesn't mean they should be responsible for all of the learning that needs to happen."

He offers a resolution to the paradox through teachers designing learning experiences that activate the prior knowledge of the student while being taught the new knowledge by the teacher.

If we look at Daniel Willingham's model of what is happening in our minds while we learn, we see that there is a reciprocal relationship between encoding and retrieval as we put things in and retrieve things from our working memory.  Anything not involved with this "merry dance" (Jim Heal is quite British) is forgotten.  This is why remember we the stories we tell and forget what we ate yesterday.  We are retrieving one and not retrieving the other.  

What had not occurred to me before this session is that we don't have to be talking about the same information in those arrows.  We can be encoding one thing while retrieving something else - and if that something else is relevant to the new information, the encoding will be stronger, like velcro hooks (new knowledge) being attached to the loops (prior relevant knowledge).

There's good news and bad news here.  The good news is the brain very naturally retrieves prior knowledge that it deems to be in the same category as the new knowledge.  It has to.  Your brain is like a categorizing machine.  The bad news is that the brain doesn't always do this correctly.  It may activate irrelevant prior knowledge, so we should be careful about trying to connect new learning to something from pop-culture just to make it interesting (then they are thinking about the singer instead of the point you were making).  It can activate relevant prior knowledge that the learner doesn't realize is connected, so we should help them make those connections.  Most dangerously, it can activate prior knowledge that is only partially relevant, leading us to encode some very wrong conclusions. 

There is another piece of good news, though.  We have some control over which prior knowledge they retrieve.  We do it by cues and questions.  The higher quality the cue, the better thinking we get from our students.  Say, for example, that you want to teach about spiders after your students have already learned about insects.  You can put up a picture of a spider and ask, "How many legs does a spider have?"  While valid, it only retrieves one piece of relevant knowledge - the number 8.  If, instead, you point to the picture and say, "In what ways is a spider different from an insect?" you will get a variety of answers.  You may want to do this with several spider pictures to create a schema because spiders can be different from each other.  

Creating a schema is both a natural and a complex task.  When a child sees a new kind of dog, they are naturally tagging it with a number of categories (things with fur, things with four legs, things that pant, things I'm afraid of for some).  But it's easy to go wrong because things that are very different can have some things in common.  There are some ways in which a plane is like a bird, but they don't really belong in the same schema when you see a photo of a chickadee.  This is why teacher-led instruction matters so much.  Left on their own, students may encode the information incorrectly, so it is important to design the learning experience well.  You might give the a set of cards with words and pictures and ask them to categorize, but it will then be important to have a full class discussion on those categories.  A student might be able to defend why they put something into a certain category or you may have the chance to address misconceptions.  This can only be done if the teacher has carefully crafted the experience, not just said, "Google images of this."  They need the schema to be explicit, and that cannot happen accurately without a teacher-led process.

So should classrooms be teacher-led or student-centered?  The answer is yes.  Researcher Sam Sims published this on November 17, 2022 - "Researchers found little support for the arguments made by either side and concluded that 'the debate has largely been an unhelpful distraction for the field.'"  Don't figure out what side you are on.  Figure out what goal you have for a lesson and decide what works for those students for that lesson in that context.  You can use art and science to craft the right experience for your lesson.

Reflections on Learning and the Brain 2022 - Kids Who Can't Start

My raw notes are posted earlier on this blog, but they don't do much for me unless I mush it all together in my head to summarize and synthesize.  With that in mind, the next few posts will be my own reflections of some sessions.  This one is from a session with Dr. Jessica Minahan.  Warning:  This is a long post.

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Do you have a student who just can't seem to get started working?  A student with emotional regulation issues?  One who reacts weirdly when you ask them to do something you think is minor and reasonable?  If that student is dealing with high anxiety, acute depression, or trauma, there may be a reason for all of this.  Those things are interfering with their working memory, which is needed, not only for the acquisition of information but also for remembering the strategies they would normally use for coping with small stressors.  And it will also interfere with their ability to initiate any kind of work.  

Let me start by telling a story about a mistake I made.  In my class, we do a fair amount of retrieval practice using something I call the BBQ (big basket of questions).  I do it a number of different ways, but on this particular morning, I was calling on students by calling their names from a pile of popsicle sticks.  When I do this, a student cannot just say, "I don't know" and expect me to move on.  If allowed that, I would get seven "I don't knows" in a row.  We talk about the purpose of retrieval and why it is beneficial even if you are wrong.  I've done all the setup to create a culture of trying, so this isn't just a mean rule.  On this day, I called on a young lady whose first language is not English (although she has lived here for several years and speaks very good English).  She said, "I don't know" to which I replied with a smile, "You know you have to guess."  She completely froze up and couldn't give me any answer.  Her mother contacted me later to tell me that, at that moment, she was so stressed, she couldn't figure out how to say anything in English.  I now have better strategies for a moment like this (thanks to the Craig Barton Tips for Teachers podcast).  I can ask someone else and return to the original student to say, "Can you summarize what he said?" or "Do you agree with that?" or ask them another question to avoid the presumption that you are off the hook if you say you don't know.  At that time, I did not yet have those strategies, so I unnecessarily stressed this girl.  (Fortunately, I had a good relationship with both her and her mom, so we moved forward without difficulty.) This is an example of how stress causing a decrease in working memory can prevent a student from even starting to answer.

Dr. Jessica Minahan is a behavior analyst who conducts interventions in schools.  She is also a wealth of ideas that would work with any student, and I will look forward to reading her book, The Behavior Code.  She used an interesting metaphor to exemplify why some students react differently than others to the same stimulus - soda bottles.  If you came into a room where there were two soda bottles, and you opened one without incident but opened the other with an eruption, you would know that something had happened to the second bottle.  You didn't do anything different by opening them, but one reacted differently because of its past.    Sometimes, a minor comment or instruction might be fine for one student but cause another to erupt.  It's a "soda bottle" moment, triggered by your requestion combined with whatever has happened to them.  

This session was, specifically, about how to get them over the inertia of starting an activity.  Many teachers were trained in the use of incentives, punishments, rewards, moving a clip down a chart, or a million other motivational techniques.  Those may increase motivation, but they do not teach a skill.  If I can't do something (or believe I can't do it), it doesn't matter what the incentive is.  If you offer me ten thousand dollars to only speak French for a week, I'll be highly motivated, but I won't know how to speak French.  Adding another zero won't even help.  Punishing me for not doing it won't teach me French either.  You just can't start with a skill you don't have.

Perhaps you have the skill, but there is something preventing you from believing you have it.  Kids who struggle with anxiety and depression sometimes have distorted perceptions of reality.  They get rattled by the stressor and their amygdala says, "Don't even worry about passing this into your prefrontal cortex; just get out of here."  If you have one of these students, it is worth your time to learn about their perceptions of pretty normal requests.  

• If you tell them to do something while standing across the room, they perceive you as trying to embarrass them in public.
• If you walk straight at them while repeating a request, they sense danger.
• If you stand in front of their desk looking down at them while making a request, they find you threatening.
• Public praise makes them super uncomfortable, and they will do the opposite of what you ask to avoid it.

If you can figure out how to make your requests to these students non-verbal, you will get much better results.  Mime taking off the hat.  Squat down next to their desk, so you can talk quietly to them while not making direct eye contact.  When you want to praise them, write it on a post-it, drop it on their desk, and walk away.  Use gentler words, like "pause" rather than "stop."    

Whenever possible, give the rationale before your request BEFORE the request.  For example, modify a request from, "Move your backpack.  I'm going to trip over it." to "I don't want to trip, could you move your backpack?"  Some limited choice is also a powerful way to bring down their amygdala activity, so you could say, "Hey, I don't want to trip.  Would you rather move your backpack to this spot or that spot?"  All of these are the same request, but you will get better results from the less demanding ones.

Because stress reduces working memory, some of them may have trouble interpreting your instructions, making it difficult to initiate action.  It may be helpful to write instructions on the board or project them on a slide.  Even better, use a photograph to show what you mean.  Instead of repeating, "take out your calculator and pencil and math journal" over and over as kids enter the room, you can project a photograph of a calculator, a pencil, and a notebook with the words "time for math journals."  This won't just help those with anxiety; it will also help English language learners, students with processing disorders, kids with ADHD, and pretty much everyone because words are more powerful in memory when paired with pictures (dual coding), so eventually you could fade out the explanation and just have the cue "Math journals" because the picture will be in their mind.

Sometimes students say, "I don't understand" when all they really want is reassurance.  This is a type of inaccurate thought that should be a yellow flag for you.  Your natural instinct to rescue them will not help them learn to recognize it for themselves.  Don't become their pre-frontal cortex.  Ask a few questions to find out if they do understand, and if you have deemed that they probably do, ask them, "Do you need help or do you just want to check in?"  Often, that's all it takes for them to realize that is what they are doing, and you can say, "From now on, you can just say you want to check in."  They may need to repeat directions to you just to reassure themselves that they heard you correctly.  I had a student many years ago who routinely stopped me about halfway through lessons to say, "I don't understand" and then proceed to summarize my lesson perfectly.  One day, I said, "It seems to me you do understand and you just need to hear yourself say it."  She agreed that was probably true, so I said, "You're welcome to keep doing it (everyone was getting taught twice!), but just leave off the part about not understanding it."  I hope it taught her that she was more skilled than she thought.

Another form of inaccurate thought is "all or nothing" thinking.  Watch this sequence from Patricia Heaton on Who Wants to Be A Millionaire.  Aside from Regis being more patient than I have ever seen a game show host with anyone, notice that it takes her less than half a second to decide she cannot answer this question.  She could have eliminated 90 pennies without doing any math, but her brain was telling her she couldn't do anything with numbers.  Regis does exactly what every teacher should do - start with the easiest thing and show them that they can do it.  Again, our job is not to become their surrogate prefrontal cortex, it is to calm their amygdala down enough to allow the thoughts to get to their prefrontal cortex.  Getting them to recognize that they can do any part of the task will help break them from the idea that it is all or nothing.

Writers sometimes talk about "blank page syndrome," and I've seen it in yearbook students as well.  It can be hard to start something completely out of nothing.  You can have trouble overcoming the inertia, and it can feel vaguely threatening.  The idea of continuing is much less intimidating than starting, so one thing that may be helpful when doing a list of problems or sentences is to do the first problem together as a class and then begin the second problem and say to the class, "continue."  

It is also important to give students strategies for what to do when they get stuck.  We, as teachers, have been bad in the past about using vague instructions, like "Try your best" or "concentrate" rather than teaching them skills or jumping in to rescue them ourselves.  You can try other things that they can use in all classes, not just yours.

• When a student needs help, pretend you aren't as smart as you are.  Say something like, "Why do you think you're stuck?"  If they say they don't understand a word, slowly repeat, "Hmm.  You don't understand the word." They will likely come to the conclusion on their own, "I guess I can look it up."
• Teach them to chunk a big thing into parts.  Often, we do that FOR them, but if we take the time to do it WITH them, we give them the tools to apply it elsewhere.
• Pair a negative with a positive.  The example she gave was a class in which the students didn't like writing because they thought it was hard.  The teacher had students sit on pillows while they wrote and would introduce it with, "Let's get comfy. It's time to write."  One day, a student came to the teacher and said, "Can write today?  My back hurts."
• Chunk time, not just process.  You can say, "We will work on this for three minutes."  At the end of three minutes, ask them to pause their work and then say, "Continue."
• Allow students to practice on whiteboards.  I've been confused about why kids prefer them until very recently, when someone on Twitter quoted one of their students saying, "Mistakes don't feel permanent with these."  At the conference, Dr. Minahan asked us to recall a time when we saw a student erase a mistake until they erased a hole in their paper.  You have to really have some hatred for a mistake to want to obliterate it that way.  With a whiteboard, you can easily wipe the mistake away.
• I love crossing things off of lists.  Part of that is the sense of satisfaction and completion, but for the kid who has trouble with perseverance, it also shows them a diminishing amount of things left to do.  Consider including a way for students to check off what they've completed.  This could be a list for them to cross off, boxes for checkmarks next to their problems, or a rectangle divided into the number of boxes you have problems (students can fill in a box after completing each problem, and it will remind them of an internet downloading bar - she said she started hearing kids use language like "well, we only have three left" when she implemented this strategy.
• Make a poster of a variety of strategies for your classroom with ways to get around getting stuck.  You can refer to it or tell kids to refer to it when they get stuck.

Overcoming inertia is hard for everyone, so it is easy to empathize with students when they have it.  Share that with them, tell them ways in which you address it, and teach them strategies to overcome it.  It will help them in more than just your class.

Reflections on Learning and the Brain 2022 - Resilience

My raw notes are posted earlier on this blog, but they don't do much for me unless I mush it all together in my head to summarize and synthesize.  With that in mind, the next few posts will be my own reflections of some sessions.  This one is mostly out of a presentation by Dr. Deborah Gilboa, but there is a little from Dr. Jessica Minahan in here as well.

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Mental health is a spectrum, from healthy to coping to struggling to unwell.  There is a wide range of what is acceptable for physiological conditions (between dehydrated and overhydrated, for example).  There is also a wide range of what is acceptable for mental conditions.  Being sad for a couple of days, dealing with some changes, and having a day where you overreact to small annoyances is still within the range of acceptable.  The same is true for students.  Don't overinterpret one off day here and there, but if something surprises you, match your level of surprise to curiosity about the cause.  All change is stressful (even very good changes), so the surprising behavior may come from a minor cause or a major one, but it is a good idea to ask some questions.

There's a reason all change is stressful.  Your brain has a lot of functions, but it only has one job - to keep you alive.  Right now, sitting here, reading this, you are alive.  Your brain likes this state, so it says, "Why don't we just stay this way?"  When a change happens, no matter how good, your brain responds with, in the words of Dr. Gilboa, "Okay, cool.  Could ya die, though?" While she was speaking, my mind also remembered listening to the book Peak over the summer.  He talked about homeostasis as our reason for growth.  When you exercise, for example, the demand of your muscles for oxygen remains the same, but you are trying to distribute it to more places.  Your body grows capillaries to maintain the amount of oxygen the muscle gets.  So, paradoxically, your body changes in order to keep things the same under changing conditions.  

In order to keep you "safe," your brain preserves the status quo through three safety mechanisms, recognition of loss, distrust of those causing change, and avoidance of discomfort.  If you look at the trends of the pandemic, you can definitely see this.  In the spring of 2020, we all cried about lost events and opportunities (lost proms and plays and graduations and wedding ceremonies and family dinners).  After a few weeks, you begin to see distrust replace the loss.  People started, not just questioning the experts, but calling them evil and threatening them.  But where we got stuck was in avoiding discomfort. We were all at varying degrees of discomfort with masks or social distancing or plexiglass (the one I hated most), so we complained about them, petitioned against them, or just gritted our teeth until they went away.  To get beyond these mechanisms without getting stuck in them, we must build the skill of resilience.

First, it is important to define resilience.  Many of us would use some kind of phrase like "bouncing back" from a challenge as defining resilience.  The problem with that is that we are not elastic, and we should not expect to return to the exact same shape we were in before the change happened.  We need a definition that helps us understand adaptation as opposed to returning to the previous state.  Dr. Gilboa's definition of resilience is

"The ability to navigate change and come through it the kind of person you want to be."

It's about character goals.  Define what kind of person you want to be in your life, not what circumstances you want to have.  Then, build the skills necessary to maintain those qualities even as the circumstances change.

So, how do we do that?  There are things we can teach students to do (or do ourselves when we are stressed) to help break the loss, distrust, and discomfort cycle.  

• Storytelling - I'm not talking about teaching kids to write (although that could certainly help).  This is about having students state the truth from their perspective.  Can they accurately describe what is happening?  Sometimes, when we are stressed, we can have distorted perceptions and inaccurate thoughts.  When a student says, "I just cannot do anything right," having them list a lot of things they do well will make them better truth-tellers, and having a more accurate picture of reality will help calm the amygdala stuck in the fight, flight, or freeze response.  I once watched a colleague do this with a student.  She was going to speak in chapel and was understandably nervous.  He said, "What's the worst that can happen?"  She said, "I could freeze up and not be able to speak."  He replied, "Will I stop loving you?  Will your parents stop loving you?  Will Jesus stop loving you?"  As she answered "no" to each question, she started to giggle and recognized that her reality was not as scary as she had previously thought.
• Problem-solving - Most secondary teachers do teach kids to solve problems all day long, but they are math problems, physics problems, tech problems, and writing problems.  We need to look to elementary teachers to help our students continue to develop their ability to solve their life problems. Helping a student identify something they can actually do helps them figure out how to navigate the change in their lives.  Dr. Gilboa talked about her friend who teaches first grade.  For those who don't know, first graders ask for help with a problem 478 times per day.  Multiply that by 20, and you can make a teacher absolutely crazy.  So, she asked her friend how she handled that.  She said, "I look up from what I am doing and say, 'You're a good problem solver. What do you think?'"  That's brilliant, and I will be using it on Monday.   
• Asking for Help - We give students mixed messages about asking for help.  Kids will do something outside of their capabilities and make a huge mess, and we will say, "Sheesh, why didn't you just ask for help?"  However, sometimes, when a kid asks us for help, we will respond with, "Well, have you even tried?"  Understandably, they are confused about when they should ask.  I loved Dr. Gilboa's criteria.  She said, "If someone is in physical danger, they should ask an adult for help immediately.  That's above their pay grade, and they should not attempt to solve it first."  If that does not exist, they should try two things before they ask for help from an adult.  That causes them to develop problem-solving because they have to come up with a couple of ideas and see how they work.  It also helps them identify the right people to ask when it comes to that.

So that's what the stressed person can do.  How can we respond to stressed people to help them build resilience?  First, respond with

• Empathy - Don't stop reading (looking at you, Ben).  We have badly defined empathy over the years, calling it "feeling with them" or mirroring.  That's a terrible idea.  Empathy really just means communicating that you care about them and what they are feeling.  Even when instituting a consequence for poor behavior, you can validate a feeling.  You share humanity, so communicate that.  Dr. Jessica Minahan gave a couple of simple examples:
• "You seemed stressed.  How can I help you?"
• "I hate it when that happens."
• "I have some ideas. Would you like some advice?"
• Transparently sourced information - As teachers, we spend a lot of time trying to teach kids about the credibility of sources and where they get their advice.  We need to model that as well.  When kids ask why we are doing something different, it's not disrespect; it's engagement.  They are trying to participate in the thinking process.  If we say, "Just do it because I said so," we rob them of understanding why the change is happening.  If we read an article that says something will improve learning, we should tell them that.  If you just saw it on Pinterest, own it with some humility, and then get your information from better sources.
• Processing time if possible - Sometimes, we can't give students time to adjust to change.  If the fire alarm goes off, we have to respond immediately, and we'll deal with the stress it caused later.  But, if we can give them some warning, we give them time to adjust.  "Hey guys, I'm going to change the seating chart next week" gives your anxious student time to anticipate it and deal with their stress about it.  Elementary teachers often give five-minute warnings before a transition; it isn't going to hurt secondary teachers to do the same.  One thing we need to consider, though, is that screens are so absorbing, time tends to slip.  As a result, our students don't have an internal sense of what five minutes means.  Consider adding an interpretation of five minutes - like "We only have five more minutes on the playground.  That means you can go on the slide three more times."  
• Reasonable autonomy - Giving kids a choice, any choice, even small ones will give them a sense that they can adjust to change.  You can say to a kid, "Would you like to go get some water before we talk about this?"  Have your class vote on whether they would like to learn their new seats at the beginning of class or at the end.  We do not give them unlimited freedom (that would actually cause more stress), but when we give just a little bit of control, it turns down the amygdala and gets them back into their prefrontal cortex, where thinking happens. 

Resilience is a skill, not a character trait.  Teach them the skill.

Bonus Episode: Notes from Disengaged Brains and Motivation by Peps McCrea

My intent the week before the conference was to attend this session as I had just finished his book, Motivated Teaching (highly recommend - packs a lot of punch in a short number of pages).  Then, the organizers moved John Almarode's session to the same time slot.  When John is an option, I opt for John.  His magic is not something that translates to video; you have to be in the room to get the most out of it.  Thanks to the recordings on the conference app, I can watch this session (and any other that I want) today.  

Option 3 - Disengaged Brains & Motivation (K-12): Motivated Teaching: Harnessing the Science of Motivation to Boost Attention and Effort by Peps McCrea

This is based on as strongly-evidenced research as possible.  

Remember Brain-Gym?  It was supposed to connect the left and right sides of your brain and make your students learn more.  Sadly, it didn't work out, but it can be good activities for waking your students up.

1. Motivation is a system for allocating attention.
2. It is a specific response to a situation, not a general trait.
3. It is not a given.
4. It is a heavily unconscious process.
5. Intrinsic drivers are more sustainable than extrinsic drivers.

Motivation is a system for allocating attention.

There are so many things competing for your attention.  Your brain needs a way to triage the opportunities as it looks at all the options.  

It is a specific response to a situation, not a general trait.

To describe a student as unmotivated isn't really fair.  They are motivated about some things and not others.  Motivation levels differ massively depending on the situation you find yourself in.  It's not a character trait.  The good news is that means we have some influence over that by changing the condition

Motivation is not a given

Longitudinal studies find that academic motivation declines over a student's career, especially low between 11 and 14.

It is a heavily unconscious process.

Deciding whether to pay attention to the teacher, the phone, or something else in the room is not really a conscious decision.  That's why sometimes, you find yourself looking at something you didn't realize you were looking at or catch yourself daydreaming.  You didn't say, "I'm going to daydream now.  Let's turn that on."

Intrinsic drivers are more sustainable than extrinsic drivers.

Stickers, candy, etc. may work for a moment, but it is not a sustainable source of motivation over the long term.  Motivation return to baseline when the extrinsic driver is removed.  For those who had an intrinsic motivation to begin with will become even less motivated when the extrinsic driver is removed.  Their brain has exchanged the original motivator with the candy, and it doesn't come back when the candy is removed.

Practical Strategies

• Secure Success - Get students a win as early as possible on something that was difficult enough to make the success valuable.  What students perceive as success may not be the same as what we perceive it to be, so it is good to help them understand what success looks like.  We can't necessarily adapt to their vision of it (because it may be a toxic thing like beating their peers or never getting anything wrong on the first try), but just telling them what we would view as successful upfront may help.
• Run Routines - This may not seem like it has anything to do with motivation, but it helps the brain have fewer things competing for attention if they already know what to do because it is automated.  There is now more attention available for what they are learning instead of how.  Project directions on any new routine.  (My thought:  This is a working memory issue.)
• Nudge Norms - Norms are more powerful than rules.  (Remembering the Brain games video from one of the keynote speakers)  Getting your whole class on the same page allows the brain to take a shortcut - just do what everyone else is doing.  This is why some kids behave better at school than at home because social norms work only in groups.  The more groups the better.  (Safety in numbers). It's why we stand in line and don't drive on the shoulder.  It's why after the first person asks to go the bathroom, suddenly everyone has to go.  Raise the visibility of students participating in your desired behavior.  Talk more about what you want them to do than what you don't want them to do (Don't say something like, "Most of you didn't do your homework" because you establish the undesirable thing as a social norm.)  Teachers having consistent social norms will cause them to be amplified.
• Sense of Belonging - The social norms are only powerful if a student feels they belong in that group.  (Recycling example:  It works better if the stated statistic is closer to you because you identify with that group more.  Finding common ground in the classroom increases the feeling of belonging.  Find something small that DEFINES you as a group (it could be as simple as being "the red team" or something deeper like "we all love . . ."
• Building Buy-in - This doesn't mean you have to ask them what they want to learn; you wouldn't trust a doctor if he said "What do you want your diagnosis to be?"  We can work in small choices, but we will make the big decisions about how they learn and then invest our energy in building buy-in.  Explain why you have made the choice you made and then ask for assent.  

Metamotivation - a person's monitoring of their own motivation along with some skills of how to boost it when it is flagging

Thanksgiving 2022 - 18 Years of Yearbooks

The call came during the summer of 2005. "Keep an open mind while I tell you this," said Kathie Thompson.  She told me that she wanted me to take over the yearbook.  "Does it bother you that I don't know what I'm doing?" I asked.  She felt confident I could do it, and I promised two years before we would revisit whether I should continue with it.  That year, I learned more about computers, organization, planning, and guiding students than I had in the rest of my life before (or since).  

At that time, GRACE had about 342 students and only 14 athletic teams.  We did not yet have regularly scheduled theater productions or any clubs to cover.  With a graduating class of 7, every senior got their own page. We had a limit on how many photos could be stored on the Jostens website.  If I recall correctly, it was the number of pages in the book times 14, not including portraits.  That was okay, though, because I could only upload one photo at a time.  The yearbook that year was 84 pages long.  The dedication was read in a faculty meeting.

This year, eighteen years later, we have an enrollment of over 850.  We have 27 athletic teams, two theater productions each year, more fine arts classes, more clubs, an active student council, and bigger graduating classes.  Last year's book was 176 pages long.  During that time, we also developed the ability to track who was placed in the yearbook, which led to my biggest goal - getting each student K-12 pictured in the book a minimum of three times.  Others appear more, of course, because they may be involved in many school activities - (The record remains Alex Dolwick.)  After several years in the high 80s and low 90s, Harrison Huntley said we should try to get 100%.  I declared that to be impossible, but then we did it.  We've done it every year since, even the hybrid year (well, we were 2 people shy of 100% that year).

The yearbook is more work than I ever knew was possible.  From photographing events to assigning pages to emailing senior parents and teachers for the photos we need to guiding students in page design to marathon proofreading sessions to sorting books for distribution, the book you hold in your hands is much more than paper and ink.  There's love in those pages, and there has been for the past 18 years.

Last spring, I started feeling that it was time to pass The Torch to someone else.  I emailed Mandy Gill and told her what I had in mind (more on that in a future post), and she replied, "Sounds great. I'll start working on it."  That was at the end of April.  At the beginning of May, the fine arts department was having a meeting, and Wendy Warlick said, "I'd love to the yearbook someday, but I'd never take it away from Beth."  Because the fine arts chair, Elizabeth Walters, is my friend, she knew my plan and said, "You're going to want to go talk to her right now."  It's funny how God just lines things up like that.

Throughout this year of lasts, there are a few things that I'm happy to give up, thinking "Whew, I won't have to do that again."  There are also some more melancholy moments, in which I think, "Oh, man.  I guess I won't get to do this again."  There are definitely some mixed emotions, which will only increase as the year goes on and I get closer to my last distribution.  But my overriding emotion is thankfulness.  I'm thankful for what the yearbook has given me over these last 18 years.  Here's a short but very incomplete list.

• Connection with teachers and students from TK through 12th grade - I sometimes creep out students when they come to the meet and greet before their 8th-grade year r I already know their names.  "How did you know?" they ask, and I have to stop myself from saying, "Do you know how many hours I have stared at your face in order to match your name to it?"  There are students that I look forward to teaching from the time they are in kindergarten because they have been fun to photograph for so many years.  I had a girl come in one year, look at me, and say, "Finally."  I knew exactly what she meant.  I've had very young kids approach me in public, to the confusion and apprehension of their parents.  Trust me when I say it does not bring down their alarm level if I say, "Don't worry.  She knows me because I've taken her picture a lot."
• Tangible contribution to legacy - Teachers sometimes don't get to see their legacy.  The seeds we plant can take a very long time to grow.  Sometimes, we see the fruit, and sometimes we just have to trust that seeds will grow eventually.  The day the books arrive and the day they are distributed, I get an immediate sense of gratification that this work we have done is in our hands.  Sometimes, I walk through the lobby and see prospective parents and students in the lobby, looking through a yearbook to get an idea of what the school is like.  It always makes me smile to see the work I have done meaning something to someone else.
• A complete picture of GRACE - It's easy for teachers to get tunnel vision about their schools.  I teach 8th-grade science and physics, so it would be easy for me to lose sight of the fact that there are younger kids and other subjects and that kids have extracurricular involvement if I hadn't been the yearbook advisor.  Everyone knows how much I love GRACE Christian School, and one of the reasons I love it is that I know it so deeply from top to bottom. 
• Jostens Staff - I know there are other yearbook companies out there, but for me, Jostens is the only one.  I began this job with no idea what I was doing, and Jay, my Jostens rep was so kind as he walked me through everything.  He even asked me for suggestions for changes they could make to the site like I wasn't as green as grass.  When he came to visit, we would always end up talking for an hour or more after school got out.  At that time, my plant rep was Anissa (now married to Jay), and she was so good about helping me solve problems after a page was submitted or emailing to say they had put a page on hold because there was something they found that they thought I might like to deal with before it went into production.  I have different reps now (as Jay and Anissa moved at the end of the hybrid year), but they remain the high-quality partners I've come to expect from Jostens.  My relationships with them aren't just business relationships; they are part of my community.
• My yearbook staffs - The first year that I took over as advisor, the majority of my class didn't really want to be there.  They had signed up for electives late and gotten their third or fourth choice. I did, however, have a core of people that I knew to be responsible and creative.  Those four met with me on separate days and ended up being my first editorial team.  Every year after that, I have been able to recruit great staff members.  I have had people join as freshmen (even 8th graders back when our electives met all together) to prove themselves dedicated and insightful and become editors by their junior or senior years.  It takes something special and quirky to be great at yearbook editing, and of course, quirky is my defining quality, so these students have often been those I developed the closest relationships with during their time at school.  I have loved getting to know them and seeing what they pursue after high school.  Some have stayed in touch long after they left me.  Part of me wants to list them here to specify how thankful I am for them, but I fear I would leave someone out, and I don't want to do that.  

If you had told me at this time last year that I would be thinking of giving up the yearbook by the end of the school year, I would have thought you were crazy.  But I am excited about the things I will do with the time this frees up in my life (I promise, I'll post about it in the spring).  I am happy to watch the new advisor take the yearbook to a different place than I was taking it and to support her in any way that I can.  I am grateful to my principal, Mandy Gill, for reading my rambling email in which I nervously approached this idea and saying, "Sounds great" rather than resisting change.  I'm grateful to know this is my last book, so I can feel all the feelings of each last time.  And I'm grateful to Kathie Thompson for that 2005 call in which she encouraged me to "keep an open mind."

Most of all, I'm thankful for how God has used the past 18 years to develop something in both students and in me.  

2022 Learning and the Brain Conference - Sunday

I always take notes on my blog, so check back here periodically as I will update after each speaker/session.  These will not just be what the speaker says.  It is also how I process the content, so some of it will be my thoughts.  I'll try to note that when I can, but sometimes, I don't notice when I've switched from what I heard to what I thought.

Keynote I: The Stolen Years: How COVID Changed Children’s Lives and Learning by NPR Correspondent, Anya KAMENETZ

Wrote Fulfillment, The Test: Why Schools are Obsessed with Standardized Testing, and The Stolen Year

There may be a difference of opinion about online vs. in-person learning, but those of you here in the ballroom are probably those who believe there is something valuable about being face-to-face.

1. How are you? - It's a spectrum from struggling, to languishing, to thriving
2. What happened? - We had schools closed the longest because other countries either had the pandemic well under control or because some countries kept schools open while closing everything else.  
• We also had the second-highest mortality rate after Hungary.  
• She put up a lot of quotes from her reporting with people about their Covid experience.  
• Public school enrollment has dropped more than any time since WWII when teen boys were enlisting in the military.
• Academic inequities that already existed before the pandemic were amplified.
• Only 51% of GenZ teens are considering a 4-year degree, a 20-point drop since May 2020.  While we have said for years that we should be opening them up to more options, this quick drop shows a lack of dreams for the future, especially since one in six 18-24 year olds are neither in school nor working.  The drop in community college enrollment is even higher, so this is not a transfer from 4-year university to other programs.
3. What's next? - Recognize both the good and the bad.  Math skills went down, but writing and problem-solving skills went up.
• Successful schools organized around a North Star - their vision of success.
• Successful schools were flexible, warm and trusting, and widely distributed agency (people weren't waiting to be told what to do - they made decisions on their own).
• Parents are rejecting extra tutoring and teachers are burnt out.  This is a bad prescription for the perceived problem of learning loss.  Kids have social deficits.
• Recovery will likely take 5-15 years.
• Some solutions will be to make the standards timelines more flexible and less age-based.  Targeting instruction through partnerships.
• Some solutions are to put intentional effort into relationships, mentoring, and figuring out place in the community.  Things need to be physical and embodied, place-based, and experiential.
• Individually, we must work on resilience and post-traumatic growth.

(My thought:  These quotes are making me feel grateful, as I always do, for GRACE.  As hard as it was, we had so much support from both parents and administration that I don't even know how to put it into words.  the part about warmth and trust and widely distributed agency made me tear up.)

A blade of grass doesn't grow by itself.  All the stuff going on at the root level is how an individual blade of grass is able to be resilient.  Kids are not resilient by virtue of being born.  They are resilient because we give them the resources to make them able to be resilient.

Planning for the future is one of the best ways to foster resilience.  

Post-traumatic growth involves relating to others, recognizing new possibilities, personal strength, spiritual change, and appreciation for life.  It can be fostered through education, emotional literacy, storytelling, and acts of service.

There is a false dichotomy between academic rigor and honoring relationships and kids' feelings.  You can have both.  In fact, it is essential.  Kids want to know what they can accomplish.

So many people who powered through the pandemic are now exhausted and experiencing "restraint collapse."  (Personal note:  Is this term I've been looking for to describe what we are going through without using the term PTSD?)

Keynote II:  Just One Educator Can Completely Alter the Trajectory of a Child - by Principal Baruti K. Kafele, MA

This man has "preacher voice."  

Was just at a conference Friday about how to increase black male representation in teaching:  Black men represent less than 2% of the teaching population.  Saturday, he was at a meeting about how to rescue young black learners.  He was now at Learning and the Brain, an organization he had always assumed wasn't for him until they invited him to speak.

We hear a lot about how children have lost their way, but we don't talk much about how we lost our way, our joy, and our passion.  We were out of control about the big decisions.  

We didn't lose our way; we lost our why.  Because we lost our why, we got lost.  Finding our why may involve going back and remembering what gave us zeal before and now has to be folded into our new context.

When a kid is lost, they are saying, "Hey teacher, don't quit on me.  I've lost my focus, drive, ambition, and purpose for living.  Help me find it again."  "Hey teacher, don't quit on me because I've stopped believing in my ability to be successful."  "Hey teacher, don't quit on me because I don't believe there's anyone in my school who cares about me."  All of these (and a few others I couldn't keep up with to type) were about him as an 18-year-old.  "Hey teacher, don't quit on me because who knows?"

Had been a good student until his mom started being abused by his stepfather.  He lost interest in school because there were bigger things in his life that he couldn't talk about or do anything about.  He started drinking and smoking weed.  He got kicked out of four high schools, and was put out by both parents.  He moved to a different neighborhood about found himself in a school with 4 black students.  He thought he was failing because he was not white and that his place was on the basketball court, not the classroom.  He thought he couldn't learn.  Spent 5 years in a junior college without graduating.  Went to Cain University because his friends were going to school and he realized it was time.  He went to the library to find smart people.  He was walking the aisles, and there was a book that wasn't pushed all the way in, and he started reading it.  The title of the book was To Kill a Black Man, a book about Malcolm X and Martin Luther King.  It motivated him to learn because he realized black men could accomplish things.  

He felt that he stood on broad shoulders and was responsible to bring this history to others so he became a teacher who taught with culturally relevant instruction.  He's still grappling with his trauma issues.  He becomes a principal who knows about pedagogy (because of his experience) but not content (because of his academic history).  He wanted to learn content through observing his teachers, but he felt he couldn't.  He looked around at students and saw they didn't understand the content either.  

If I have prior knowledge, I can learn a lot of ways.  If I don't, I need a higher amount of concentration or a variety of methods to learn it.  

Questions Students Have Whose Answers Can Alter Their Trajectory

• Am I welcome here?
• Do I belong here?
• Am I somebody here?
• Do you see me?
• Do you hear me?
• Do you like me?
• Do you know me?
• Do you appreciate me?
• Do you respect me?
• Do you value me?
• Do you believe in me?
• Do I matter to you?

Equity Mindset - utilizing a variety of developmentally appropriate strategies that consider the needs of each of the learners, treating every student as a human being with a culture that deserves dignity and respect.  

Option 4 - Discouraged Learners & Science of Learning (K-12): Teacher-Led Instruction vs. Student-Centered Learning: Why Can't We Have Both? by Jim Heal, EdLD

Teaching is a paradoxical act.   Some paradoxes of education.

• Teachers make things difficult but in a good way.
• What's good for performance often isn't good for learning
• Activity isn't always productive
• Experts aren't always good at teaching their domain of expertise
• Good teachers know what to do when they don't know what to do.
• Teacher-led instruction can be student-centered.

There are some misconceptions and caricatures about both teacher-led (Drill and kill, My way or the highway) and student-centered instruction (Here's something interesting. I won't tell you what success looks like.  See you in a week).

Don't be afraid to take on the paradox.  Don't be paralyzed by it.

• Students are the center of learning as the primary beneficiaries of it, but that doesn't mean they should be responsible for all of the learning that needs to happen.

What goes on in our minds when we learn?

• Pay attention to something in the environment.
• Put it into working memory.
• Encode into long-term memory ↔ retrieve (remember) ↔ working memory.
• There's a merry dance (the presenter is British) between working memory and long-term memory.

What role does prior knowledge play in acquiring new knowledge?

• New knowledge must be built on and attached to prior knowledge.
• Ask about experience and knowledge to activate the brain before introducing the new concept.
• If the new idea has nothing to link to, it cannot be learned.  It's like velcro, the new hooks latch onto the prior loops.

What happens when we apply an understanding of prior knowledge to our instructional practice?

• Schema Theory - I sense something, and I recognize it as part of a category.  I generalize it.
• The cues we give will determine what prior knowledge the student accesses and how sophisticated that schema is.  (e.g. Asking "How is a spider not an insect?" will activate more hooks than "How many legs does a spider have?"
• Avoid these pitfalls.
• Irrelevant prior knowledge can get in the way.
• Relevant prior knowledge the learner doesn't realize is connected is what you need to cue.
• Partially relevant knowledge can be a problem because they can use it to encode inaccurate information.  (e.g. Hurricanes and tornadoes have this one thing in common, so they must have all things in common.)
• Learners will activate prior knowledge whether you ask them to or not.  Plan your prompts to activate the prior knowledge you want them to.

What does it take to make teacher-led, student-centered instructional decisions?

• As you introduce a lesson, think about what prior knowledge you want them to activate and what the best way is to activate it.  Elaborative questions will work better than definitions.  Writing synonyms works better than giving an explicit definition at first.  Select only the vocabulary you need for that day.
• Make schema explicit - More specifically have them make schema explicit.  Give them cards with examples of your content and have them put them into categories.

When teachers take prior knowledge and schema into account, it puts students at the center of the learning.  Activating prior knowledge in students requires an intentional, teacher-led process.

"Researchers found little support for the arguments made by either side and concluded that "the debate has largely been an unhelpful distraction for the field."  Instead of asking whose side you are on, ask "What works in your context and why?"  

Books by Deans For Impact - The Science of Learning, Deepening Meaning and Learning, The Science of Early Learning, and Practice with Purpose.

Option 3 - Discouraged Brains & Struggling Learners (K-12): Understanding Cognitive Diversity: Applying Science-Based Learning Principles to Help Struggling Learners and Maximize Their Potential by Javier Arguello and Rasario Bernabeu

"I was the student you did not want in your class.  When I was in the 10th grade, they told me that I had broken the school's all-time detention record.  The idea that I would be presenting to educators is like when the FBI calls in a criminal to help them understand and catch other criminals."

Link to handout.  You may need to request access and then make a copy.  https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SNJE92DCN82AwrVR8KsrtcktK24E-ugqxVAlYuQGS6o/edit 

A thousand years ago, a highly educated person consumed about 77GB of data in their entire life.  That is now the average amount for the average person in an average day.  

Your mind is trying to hold a ton of information.  Students' minds are trying to hold a ton of information.  How do we make them hold on to the right information?

(There are some rude people attending some of these sessions.  There is one lady who feels the need to argue with everyone.  She has been either right behind me or right in front of me in three sessions.  In this one, there are a few people calling out every time there is an instruction given.)

Learning styles are a myth - If you think you are a visual learner, you should actually be using everything but that because we don't learn the way we think we learn, and we would learn better by challenging our brains to learn outside of our preference.

We got our teaching degrees from schools of education, but the department of cognitive science is the one who studies learning, but they are small, technical, and only read by other academics.  Should schools of education absorb schools of cognitive science?

Our intuitive approach to learning leads to the least effective learning.  We don't learn the way we think we do (My thought: so we should stop asking students how they think they should learn).  Students use ineffective techniques because they like them, not because they work.

Experts are often the most ineffective teachers because they talk so much and use so much jargon and ask so few questions.  

Learning is different from academic performance.  Learning is internal, and everyone is learning (the delta is against my former self).  Academic performance is often about rule-following, playing the game, and getting points (the delta is against a standard or against my peers).  Rote learning can lead to high academic performance but not reflect a lot of learning.  This is at a surface level.

To apply learning, it must be durable and flexible.  It must be deep and transferrable.  Knowledge builds on prior knowledge.

Emotional well-being is critical to learning success.  Some of the academic measures peak in fourth grade and go down after that are related to the emotional states that change at that time.  If you are failing, you feel bad, which may lead to more failure.  

Robert and Elizabeth Bjork are among the world's most published cognitive scientists.  Conditions of instruction that appear to create difficulties for the learner, slowing the rate of apparent learning, often optimize deeper learning and transfer (desirable difficulties).  Conditions of instruction that make performance improve rapidly often fail to support deep learning and transfer.

No amount of learning will prepare anyone to succeed in the ever-changing skill requirements of tomorrow.  Learning how to acquire new skills will.  (My note:  The content matters, but it is more deeply a vehicle to learning how to learn.)

You graduate from school, but you never graduate from learning.

Memory will always matter to learning.  You cannot google your way to problem-solving skills.  You cannot work with the information you don't possess.  You don't possess it if you have to look it up.  

We don't learn by putting stuff in.  We learn by taking it out.  Students don't like that because it is uncomfortable, but it is the discomfort that makes the brain respond.

We have neurodiversity.  Cognitive skills are invisible.  Trying to plan for that is like turning out the lights and being expected to put your hand on the head of all the kids even though they are different heights.  Some of the things we can see as problems with executive function come from things we can't see (problems with working memory).  A problem with an invisible cognitive skill could be the domino that derails my learning (mixing his metaphors here) while others may not.

We make and prune synaptic connections in the first two years at a very high rate, but we continue to do it for our entire lives.  The future will be a product of the past without intervention.  If we don't learn fractions properly, it will lead to enormous problems with the rest of math because it won't correct by itself.  

Thinking we can look up everything we need rather than memorize it is preventing neural growth.  You must memorize what you want to use later.  (Polyatomic ion example.)

Generating suspense, changing activities, and asking students to predict sustains attention.  Humour reactivates attention.  

Anna Karenina quote "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."  In the same way, all successful students are alike; all struggling students struggle in their own ways.

Don't worry if you don't do it perfectly.  If you get even 10% of the science of learning right, you will see enormous gains.  Then, you can improve by another 10% later.

Process, managing, applying, and metacognition are the pyramid of learning.

Inclusion plus personalization is morally elegant but impossible in practice.  

Evidence that is old is not outdated unless it has been unable to be replicated.  

Be careful with correlations.  About half of the population of imprisoned people are dyslexic.  About half of Ivy League students are dyslexic.  What makes the difference?  Some other exceptionality.  We call it being twice exceptional.  

Attention does not work if it is Alternating and Divided - No you cannot multitask.  That's not how brains work.  You aren't special.  The fact that you like it means you are chasing dopamine, not learning.

It does work if it is sustained and selective.  You must carefully select what to focus on and do that.

If you ask students to come up with a metaphor for what they learned, they have to process it through their own prior knowledge.  It elaborates the encoding of the knowledge.

(I swear, this lady behind me. It's a good thing there are only 9 minutes left because there is a limit to the amount of self-regulation a person can have.)

Boost metacognition as you introduce a lesson by asking about any prior experience with parts of that lesson.  Ask them about what they learned.  Was there anything confusing about it?  COGx has a Metacognitive Reflection workbook.  There are questions that could git across different disciplines.  Ask students to predict what they got right in a list of questions.  Then, when they get the answers, have them write down how far off their prediction was.  If you do this often, their predictions should get better over time.