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.
- How are you? - It's a spectrum from struggling, to languishing, to thriving
- 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.
- 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."
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.
