- You can enjoy things you aren't particularly good at, so enroll in that wine and design class or take up knitting. You don't have to perform to enjoy.
- Overtip servers. It won't make that much difference to you, but it may make a huge difference to them. This is especially true if you are a difficult customer. They've put up with you.
- You don't know what you missed because you thought you were too cool to join the chess club (or fill in the blank with a group you think you aren't fit for).
- Keep your promises. People need to know you mean what you say.
- Don't let "self-care" be the reason you don't follow through on a commitment. Let it keep you from making the commitment in the first place.
- "I'm sorry, I can't do it" can be an answer. You don't have to justify it with a reason you think they'll accept.
- Nothing is ever less expensive than when you have a student ID. Use it to try new things like the symphony or the ballet. If you don't like it, you haven't lost much. But it may turn out that you find a new source of joy in your life.
- Don't let the fear of something being hard keep you from doing it. You can do harder things than you realize.
- If you have the option to do something in person or digitally, do it in person. It's a different experience.
- I lived for 47 and a half years quite peacefully without a cell phone. I'm not saying you should do that, but it is okay to leave it behind every now and then. Leave it in the kitchen at night. (Alarm clocks are cheap. Buy one.) Even thought I have a cell phone now, it is not with me all the time.
- Don't just walk over a piece of trash in the hall. Pick it up and throw it in the nearest trash can.
- You don't know more than the experts in their field. Listen to them when they speak within their field.
- Expertise is domain-specific. Don't put a lot of credence when an expert in one field speaks about a different field. Just because someone is smart about rockets doesn't mean they know about viruses, but an expert in viruses probably doesn't know anything about classroom management. Einstein likely didn't say the thing about the definition of insanity; but even if he did, he didn't know anything about psychology, so it is not the definition of insanity.
- Don't use bigger words than needed for the situation. You aren't impressing people.
- Have a morning routine. It could be making the bed or listening to a song. It could be doing a crossword puzzle or reading the Bible. But have something that starts your day.
- Pray in the car - just don't close your eyes to do it.
- Read a lot. Even if you don't like books, read blog posts or articles.
- For most things, the generic version is fine. Equate headache relief works just as well as Excedrin.
- For a very few things, it is worth being brand loyal.
- Keep learning new things. There is so much to learn, so listen to podcasts or read random articles on Wikipedia.
- Eat your lunch outside sometimes. Fresh air and sunshine are nice.
- Life is a good balance between expressing your feelings and pulling it together. Know when and where each is appropriate.
- Don't tell people to smile. If they felt like smiling, they would already be smiling. It's condescending when you tell them how to feel (or worse, tell them they are "so much prettier" when they smile. Uggh!)
- If you ask someone, "How are you," stop and listen. It shouldn't just be an extension of "Hi," so if you don't have time to listen, don't ask. You can just say "Good morning."
- Surround yourself with smart people (at least a few of whom you disagree with).
- While I am at it, find someone who will disagree with you well. By that I mean, neither of you will think the other one is stupid or immoral when the conversation is over. Both of you will have gotten more perspective and perhaps deepened your own thoughts.
- Use the restroom before you leave (I think I got this one from Larry David). You don't know what traffic will be like.
- Sometimes, you can't avoid debt. But pay it off as quickly as you can. Always overpay on your mortgage payment, even if it is just rounding up to the nearest 10 dollars.
- Write goals on a list. It feels great to cross them off.
- If you have the opportunity to be kind to a child, take it. It doesn't have to be big. Smile at them. Tell them you like their shoes. Listen to them count to 100. Laugh at their terrible joke.
- Never resist a generous impulse. Yes, you will get ripped off occasionally, but more often than not, you'll feel good about generosity.
- Small gestures matter. Jostens once sent me a coffee mug, and I walked around with it for months because it made me so happy.
- The hardest thing to live with is regret. Don't do things you know will make you feel guilty later. Do good things, so you don't have to regret not doing them later.
- At least once in your life, find a place with no light pollution and see what the stars really look like. I didn't know how life-changing this would be.
- Everyone is tired. It's not a competition.
- During severe weather, keep your shoes on. (My Oklahoma friends would also say to keep your teeth in and your bra on. If the newspeople come after a tornado, you don't want to be on the news without them.)
- When you find yourself in a no-win situation, choose whichever option is the kindest.
- Don't feed the crazy in other people. If you feed it, it will grow.
- If you can't make what you love a career, that's okay. Work a 9-5 job and do what you love at night and on weekends.
- Don't judge something the first time you try it. Everything is difficult when it is new. Give it at least three chances.
- If you answer the phone, and the person doesn't start speaking right away, hang up. It's a telemarketing call.
- When you call a business to complain, remember that it is not the fault of the person who answers the phone.
- If you can afford it, go see a live performance this year. It's a more powerful experience than streaming a movie.
- If something isn't your business, don't waste brain cells dwelling on it.
- Love your co-workers, and you will love coming to work.
- Make sure the people who are important to you know that they are.
- When someone compliments you, accept it. Don't be self-deprecating just to seem humble. They told you for a reason, so be encouraged by it.
- Mail handwritten notes. They have more soul than an email, and it doesn't take as long as you think to write them.
- In spite of what I just said, send an email to someone this week to thank them for who they are to you. It will make their day when they are in the middle of business emails.
- If someone compliments your friend, pass it on to them; they need to know. If someone criticizes your friend, keep it to yourself; they do not need to know.
- You can't make God love you any more or less, so stop trying. Love Him, and act out of that love, not out of some weird belief that you can earn something from the Creator of the universe!
Sunday, December 31, 2023
A Random Collection of Life Lessons
Sunday, December 17, 2023
Reflections on Learning and the Brain Conference - Part 3 - Well-Being and Happiness
Each year, when I attend the Learning and the Brain conference, I return with a very full brain, and much of what is in it is disconnected. So, in order to process all of it, I look for themes and write about them. This year, there will be three. The first was on thinking and learning. Last week was about meaning and purpose, and this final one is about well-being and happiness.
It's no surprise to any teacher that we are in a crisis of student anxiety. While the pandemic didn't help, it also didn't start this crisis. Reports of unhappiness, loneliness, fear, and worry were on the rise starting about five years before Covid. It seems to line up pretty well with the onset of smartphone ubiquity. A student's ability to have their device on them at all times meant there was no escape from bullying and FOMO and no time to process anything before we were expected to comment on it. According to Dr. Richard Davidson, author of The Neuroscience of Compassion, The Emotional Life of Your Brain, and The Science of Meditation, among many other books, isolation is now classified as an epidemic based on studies from 2003 to 2020.
The bad news is that lack of social connection is a major risk factor for many chronic health problems. From hypertension to obesity to the premature onset of Alzheimer's disease, there are few conditions that aren't exacerbated by the absence of deep and meaningful relationships.
The good news is that well-being is a skill, so it can be learned and practiced. You can train yourself to be present in the moment (Mindfulness doesn't have to mean yoga). You can take a few minutes each week to assess how connected you feel to your coworkers and your surroundings and take steps to improve them by taking a walk with a work friend during lunch (making your more connected to people) or do something to fill a need at work or church (making you feel more of a sense of place). The number one factor in staying connected is having a sense of purpose because it helps you to imagine the future and your part in it. This is the reason why some retired people thrive and others die soon after. Those who use the time to volunteer, care for children, or effect change in their community live much longer than those who view retirement as a time of extended vacation.
Learning new things and making meaning of what you are learning also improves your sense of well being and helps you live longer. Teachers, we have the ability to help our students view their learning as more meaningful than passing a test or job training. We can help them see the awe and wonder that we do in our content. And, if everyone in the class is seeing it, there is power in the feeling of belonging. Their learning schema and their social schema overlap, giving a deeper and more complete understanding of the world.
In an 85 years long (and still running) study on happiness, there were four trends in the people who reported more sustainable happiness. They were
- social support.
- the freedom to make life choices.
- the opportunity to be generous with time, money, effort, or expertise.
- high trust level in those around them.
Sunday, December 10, 2023
Reflections from Learning and the Brain Conference - Part 2 - Meaning and Purpose
Each year, when I attend the Learning and the Brain conference, I return with a very full brain, and much of what is in it is disconnected. So, in order to process all of it, I look for themes and write about them. This year, there will be three. Last week's was on thinking and learning. This second one is about meaning and purpose, and the third will be about well-being and happiness.
If you ask teachers or school leaders to think about what they want for their students, the word purpose is likely to arise. The GRACE vision statement talks about God's plan for our students' lives. Look at the surveys of empty nesters or the recently retired, and you will find that they initially struggle because, unless they are intentional about redirecting, they have lost their sense of purpose (having defined it wrongly in the first place). Professional athletes like Tiger Woods won't retire because they don't know who they are without their sport. It's the only purpose they feel they have. This is not true and represents job idolatry, but that's a rant for a different post.It turns out that research into how we learn also involves a sense of purpose and meaning. According to the work of Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, the way kids make meaning out of the things they witness enables processes of adaptive change in their brains. It influences the white matter of their cerebral cortex and makes more connections between neurons. So the psychology of learning has a biological effect, and biology has psychological effects. Even between people, there is feedback between the emotions of one person and the biology of another. We've all had the experience of a friend's tears or a supervisor's anger making us feel sick. When a baby focuses its gaze on us and smiles, there are physical changes in our heart rate. Petting a dog or cat is thought to lower a person's blood pressure. Since we aren't carved up pieces, we cannot separate physical neurology from psychological change.
What does this mean for my classroom? Quite a few things, actually. It shows us that a teacher's emotional state influences the class' physical atmosphere. If I remain calm, students are less likely to spiral into a hormonal spin. If I let them work me up, we create a dangerous cycle. In past posts, I've called this "feeding the crazy."
It also means that I should carefully approach how to help my students make meaning of their learning. This doesn't mean I am going to ask them how they feel about Newton's Second Law, but it might mean I should put them in the problem. If they can get a physical sense of applying a force (even just in their minds), they can make the meaning of it more real.
In her keynote address, Mary Helen Immordino-Yang showed a poem that her daughter wrote to her baby brother, Teddy. She told him that she loved him "more than the whole earth-size." Having just learned they lived on a very large ball of dirt that floated through space and moved around the sun, this second-grader connected her love for her brother, which she couldn't quite wrap her head around to the size and movement of the planet, which she also couldn't quite wrap her head around. Making these connections is a natural process, but we can leverage it to make better use of it for our lessons. We can connect the slope of a graph to a slowly or rapidly changing process that is common to students (or ask them to suggest a connection).
Daniel Willingham also discusses how having a student connect content to deeper meaning helps their memory. He recommends a relatively slow process for using flashcards. We typically fly through them pretty quickly if we are getting the answer right, but he suggests stopping after each card to ask yourself a why question. So, you have answered the question "What is the relationship between volume and pressure?" with "Inverse." Now, ask yourself why is that relationship inverse rather than direct? Connecting to the meaning creates a more complex story that may involve emotion (e.g. The balloon will pop if the pressure is high enough, which will startle me) and will cause more change in the brain.
Students have long wanted to understand the purpose of what they are learning. This is one of the reasons we get asked the question "When am I ever going to use this in real life?" There are a lot of ways to handle that question, but you don't actually have to convince them that they will use it as an individual. It can be enough that they know this information is used by someone. As John Almarode says, "They just need to know that it means something more than the grade in the grade book." If engineers use it, tell them. If poets, artists, doctors, CPAs, factory workers, or receptionists use it, your students will benefit from knowing that. It will help them see purpose and meaning in what they are learning.
By the way, it is unlikely they will admit it in that moment, so don't get your hopes up for them to say, "Oh, great. Now, I'm cool with doing the hard thing you have asked me to do." Just know that your explanation did have a deeper long-term effect on their brain than what you are seeing.
Sunday, December 3, 2023
Reflections from the Learning and the Brain Conference - Part 1 - Thinking and Remembering
- Proper nutrition - to have healthy blood flow with cell-supporting vitamins and minerals
- Exercise - to get oxygen to the cells and grow the hippocampus and pre-frontal cortex
- Quality sleep - the chemical wash that happens during REM sleep strengthens rehearsed knowledge, eliminates non-rehearsed knowledge, and helps change episodic memories into semantic memories.
Tuesday, November 21, 2023
Thanksgiving 2023 - Thankful for the Alexander YMCA
My annual Thanksgiving post is usually about teachers and schooling. If you look at the posts from previous years, you will find odes to my childhood teachers, current administrators, and colleagues. During the pandemic year, I even expressed gratitude for the supply closet at school.
This year's post is also about teachers, but they are not teachers in the academic sphere. They are my fitness instructors at my local YMCA. Last week, I compared their teaching techniques to those used by academic teachers because it is amazing how incredibly sound their teaching practices are (and I suspect they don't even know it because they are likely not reading books on cognitive science research). This week, I just want to express my gratitude for them and for the entire staff of the Alexander YMCA by telling my story.
When I decided to give up the yearbook, people kept asking me what I was going to do with my time since I wouldn't be photographing every activity and then editing, uploading, and tagging pictures or spending time proofreading pages. I thought about what I would have liked to have done with my afternoons all these years if they had been more flexible, and I realized that I wish I could have exercised more - well, at all. I had an answer - "I'm going to join a gym." Doing some research, I knew that Planet Fitness was the least expensive option, but when I started looking into it, I decided it did not have what I needed, accountability.
I used to be disciplined about working out on my own at home, at least during the summer. Regular readers, do you remember eight years ago when I walked 500 miles in the summer and then 500 more during the school year? For whatever reason, in the last six years or so, all of that discipline evaporated. I'd get about ten minutes in (or whenever it started to become difficult), and I would say, "Well, ten minutes is better than nothing" and just stop. I still walked a lot in the summer, but during the pandemic, it became transportation rather than exercise, and it never went back to being an aerobic activity. Going to a place with a lot of machinery wasn't going to fix that problem. I needed group classes because I knew that I would not leave a class early in front of other people. My friend, Meagan, said that she thought the YMCA would have what I needed. I dropped by and took a tour, and she was exactly right. (I don't think I've ever properly thanked Meagan for this suggestion. Thank you, Meagan.)
By February, the month before I joined the YMCA, I was uncomfortable all of the time. Although I don't weigh myself, I knew my pants didn't fit, and I was insistent on NOT buying new clothes. (My Tuesday pants did their job because I would have had to write myself up for dress code for about a month if I had worn them.) I was tired at the end of every day, so I came home to collapse, but that just made me more tired. At school, if I dropped a pencil on the floor, I went to my desk to get a different pencil rather than bend over to pick it up. By the time the yearbook was finished, so was I. I was just sick of myself.
In March, I started taking classes at the Alexander Family YMCA on Hillsborough Street, and it could not have been a better decision. I knew I was going to be pretty bad at everything for a while as I've never had much physical agility, strength, or coordination and, thus, no confidence about anything physical. The first thing Matt ever said to me was, "Don't take yourself too seriously," and it was the perfect perspective to have as I grew in this kind of learning because I could get the steps wrong, laugh at myself, and just keep going. My original plan was to take as many kinds of classes as possible. I thought I would do something different every day in March and then decide what to repeat. That plan changed when I started falling in love with some of the instructors. (See last week's post for more specifics.) So, while I did try quite a few different types of classes, I fell into a pattern a lot more quickly than I expected because of these lovely people.Before joining, I was a little concerned that I might become one of those people who just donates money to the gym (you know, pays their dues but doesn't go). That might have happened if I had joined just any gym, but after falling in love with these instructors and their classes, I found myself disappointed if I had some other commitment that prevented me from attending one of my YMCA classes. There is such a spirit of love, encouragement, and joy at the Y that I don't think I would have found at "a gym."
Initially, I had only one goal - stay through every minute of a class; I could worry about things like speed and intensity after I was in the habit of not giving up in the middle of classes. I chose positions as far from the door as possible, so I couldn't just slip out without having to take a "walk of shame." While the instructors were pushing my body in some pretty taxing ways, there was only one time that I truly wanted to leave a class. It was a Barre class (no fault of the instructor, but those moves are crazy to me). If there hadn't been people in there that I knew, I absolutely would have left. When I came home that night and called my mom, I said, "Well, I'm pretty sure I hated that." The next night, when I called her, I said, "I LOVE kickboxing! Who knew?!?" Finding what I loved (and didn't) was motivating and joyful. I don't mind that I don't like some things because I love other things so much.
After the first two months, I decided it was time to start setting some real goals. After asking a couple of spin instructors for advice, I stood up on a bike for the first time in May and decided to set a goal that I would stand every time it was cued by the end of summer, and I have kept doing that consistently. The next night, I took Group Power. I had been avoiding classes with weights (and words like power, sculpt, or strength), and I was shocked and delighted to find that I enjoyed choreographed group weightlifting to music. The next morning, I was sore from head to toe even though I had used the lightest weights possible. But I was hooked on taking it again. Now, I'm including the larger-sized weights during warmup and legs and choosing the higher intensity options where we leave the ground. I started to grow, not just physically, but in my level of confidence to try new things and challenge myself. At the age of 47, this was a need in my life, even though I had not known it before.
In the fall, Julie, the group fitness director asked if I would help with their annual fund campaign, and I jumped at the opportunity to give back to this organization in any way. While my efforts didn't raise a ton of money, I learned so much about what the Y does for the community and was very excited to share that with others. My Y story is important to me, but it is small compared to the impact they are having more broadly. I am thankful for what they do for me and for underserved communities and for lower-income families and for people who might otherwise slip through the cracks in the system.
This year, I am most thankful for the Alexander YMCA in Raleigh, and I am especially grateful for the people who teach me and support me there - From the ones whose classes I take most regularly (Matt, Stacey, Jay, and Liz) to those I can only fit in sometimes (Julie, Gwen, Dean, Greg) and some of the classmates I have (David, Ellen, Lisa, Diane, Christie, Alex, Nick, Karen, Steven), you are sources of joy, and I look forward to seeing you every week. I couldn't be happier to have you in my life.
Sunday, November 19, 2023
Learning and the Brain Conference Notes Sunday 11/19
These are raw notes as I take them during presentations. They have not been edited, but they will be in the next few weeks as I turn them into blog posts. They will not only be notes on the presentations, but they will be mixed with my own thoughts and reflections. I will try to note that so as not to misrepresent any speaker.
Keynote I: Extending the Mind Beyond the Brain: Connecting the Body and Movement to Learning and Thinking - Annie Murphy Paul, MS
Science writer who covers research in cognitive science
Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin?
We live in a brain-centric, brain-bound culture. The brain is deified in popular science writing, but the biological brain is a limited organ in what it can do on its own. We transcend those limits by using external resources to enhance our mental processes.
Interoception
- The capacity to sense our internal signals. (Gut feelings)
- Students who learn how to tune into internal cues can use them to make better decisions, muster more mental resilience, and exhibit greater emotional intelligence.
- Body scan (yoga practice) - direct non-judgmental attention to each part of the body
- Interoceptive journal
- Labeling your sensations reduces anxiety and distress
- Cognitive reappraisal - Am I nervous or excited? The sensations are the same.
- Body mapping - What are you feeling where
- Micromovements keep us alert and engaged - sitting still tells our body we are "at rest."
- Fidgeting can sharpen our focus, improve our mood, increase our creativity
- Embodied self-regulation
- Sweat before you sit. Take movement breaks instead of coffee breaks.
- Hypofrontality - Vigorous and sustained exercise temporarily inhibits the prefrontal cortex (the brain's taskmaster and critic). This allows more creative and original ideas to emerge.
- Act out abstract ideas - whole body movement allows us to commit knowledge more firmly to memory. (Actors wait until the scene is blocked to memorize the script because the movement allows them to attach the lines to the body.)
- Move as if you are the thing you are learning about.
- Physical metaphors: "On the one hand. On the other hand."
- Encourage gesture: Could you try moving your hands as you say that?
- Rehearse the gestures just as much as you would rehearse the words.
- Beat gestures (emphasis) and symbolic gestures (represent meaning)
- When choosing videos, choose those in which the hands are visible and gesturing.
- Pay attention to other people's gestures, especially if they are mismatched with the words they are saying. This may be the time when they are most ready to make a conceptual breakthrough.
- Provide objects for them to gesture toward (diagrams, charts, maps, lists, physical models)
- Have students stand up and improvise a description, prompting physical movements in the explanation.
- Give kids spatially-oriented toys and games.
- Pair a gesture with a concept and use it every time.
Keynote II: The Future of Smart: Creating Embodied, Human-Centered Education - Ulcca Joshi Hansen, PhD, JD
What are "human-centered" spaces? Why do they matter? What do we know about creating them?
They focus on relationship, relevance, and reintegration.
Context matters
- The world we will encounter has volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. The human brain is not wired to like those things.
- Technology is changing at a pace that will make everyone need:
- the ability to manage ambiguity.
- knowledge of how to access new learning.
- discernment
- understanding of ethics and values
- Human development is hagged and highly individualized, especially in childhood.
- Adolescence is a time to develop the capacity for complex and purposeful thinking. They crave interdependence.
- Cognition involves the brain, the body, our situation, and social distribution.
- The conversations young kids have form their brains.
- The connections they make shape their brains.
- The way kids think grows their brains over time.
- Engagement with complex, real-world problems, and collaborating with diverse teams leads to transdisciplinary thinking.
- Instructional models start with purpose, which affects the design of curriculum and instruction and the systems we develop.
- Each of us is a constellation of cognitive skills, strengths, and weaknesses. None of those are good or bad. They are just different cognitive profiles (the context has labeled a narrow number of them as good and the rest as bad, but that's just about the context).
Definition of learning - attaching stuff they don't know yet to stuff they do know. We want it there for a long time and have it be really flexible (usually in a new and unanticipated circumstance).
Things that Influence Long-Term Memory - Constantly Interacting With Each Other
Sensory Input
Emotion
Motivation
Working Memory
Attention
I used to think I would come and the researcher would say, "Here's what we did and it worked." I would then go do that and it would work. I now know that is not true. It is context-specific.
Researchers should not tell teachers what to do. They should help teachers think about what we do in a different way. We must then adapt that to our contexts.
Don't Just Do This Thing! Think This Way!
Attention problems are substantially misunderstood. Once we understand it better, teachers usually have effective solutions.
Attention is not a unified mental process. It is a behavior that students do when three other mental processes are in sync.
- Alertness - alertness
- We don't always have control over the causes of alertness problems, but we can influence it somewhat.
- Movement can help, not just theirs.
- Classroom variety
- Visual novelty (throw in a high energy video demonstration)
- Orienting - perception of environmental stimuli (focus)
- We cannot perceive everything until we are oriented to it
- You do not notice the stimuli in the environment until it is made salient by someone pointing it out or it catches your attention in some way.
- We can help students orient by rebalancing classroom stimuli (can't control the snow, the spider, the sound a firetruck driving by). Those things we can control (like classroom decoration) should be thought about carefully.
- Executive Attention - effortful control of cognitive processes
- Color/word mismatch required control of executive attention.
- There is a difference between getting an answer wrong and thinking about the question the wrong way. The second is an executive attention problem.
- Manage working memory (write words related to today's lesson on the board until we get to a place where they don't need that). Choose the first question you ask to be about something typical, not a rare case.
Final Keynote: The Science of Brain Health: Leveraging Lifestyle Choices to Target Brain Health and Functionality - David Perlmutter, MD, FACN
About 74% of US teens are coffee drinkers, and 20.5% are drinking energy drinks. This, combined with screen time and other activities, is affecting their sleep.
How much and how well is a student sleeping?
They must have REM sleep to contextualize and consolidate their learning from the previous day.
Deep sleep is when it cleans itself up.
The impact of sleep deprivation on the prefrontal cortex, which integrates sleep, arousal, cognition, and emotion can cause inattention, emotional instability, and behavior issues in adolescents.
The prefrontal cortex is involved in
- Decision-making that considers future consequences.
- Planning complex behavior.
- Suppressing socially unacceptable urges
- Understanding good and bad
- Empathy
- Compassion
- Impulsivity without regard to consequences.
- Narcissism
- Shortsightedness
- Us vs. them
Saturday, November 18, 2023
Learning and the Brain Conference Notes Saturday 11/18
These are raw notes as I take them during presentations. They have not been edited, but they will be in the next few weeks as I turn them into blog posts. They will not only be notes on the presentations, but they will be mixed with my own thoughts and reflections. I will try to note that so as not to misrepresent any speaker.
When a student is puzzled and trying to figure something out, they are creating a mental model. This makes it easier to pull from long-term memory. Teaching means getting a student's schema synchronized with your schema. Activating their schema might mean they pull a different metaphor from long-term memory. They can also synchronize their schema with that of the person next to them.
When learning art styles, you create an art schema from learning about the individual styles. Each new one you learn adds to the schema, allowing comparison and contrast. You cannot get to the complex and interesting and creative schema without building it from the individual parts. You cannot answer the high levels of Bloom's taxonomy until the schema is built. Don't jump straight to it.
Keynote II: What Makes a Good Life: Lessons From the World’s Longest Study on Happiness and Wellbeing - Robert J. Waldinger, MD
- social support
- freedom to make life choices
- the opportunity to be generous with time, money, effort, or expertise
- high trust level in those around them.
- Mixed messaging from advertising defines "the good life" for us rather than by ourselves.
- We compare our insides (knowledge of ourselves) to other people's outsides (what they post on social media)
- We are told what we are "supposed to" look like.
- Eating well, sleeping well, and getting health care (essentially taking care of yourself) are predictive of happiness.
- People who were more connected to others stayed healthier and lived longer. They were not just happier. They had better blood pressure, better cholesterol levels, less diabetes, lower rates of obesity, etc. It wasn't about the number of people they were connected to but how they rated the warmth of those connections that proved to be predictive.
- heightened cardiovascular reactivity.
- decreased immune function.
- chronic inflammation.
Session: Teaching Students to Teach Themselves: Empowering Children to Get the Most From Schooling - Daniel T. Willingham, PhD
Intent to learn something is not important. There is a lot of stuff in your memory that you did not intend to learn. And there are many things you wanted to remember that you do not.
- 90% of students study for what is next. If you are going to use spacing, you have to plan.
- 66% reread the chapter. This does not help them remember. "Blurting" isn't bad, but you can make it better by organizing it for meaning.
- Students should be taught to use a calendar with all of the claims on their time, but that involves teachers, students, and parents. Plan around the things you know you cannot change. "I won't be available to study on this date" means you can plan when you will be available.
Keynote III: The Psychology and Ingredients for Great Teaching - Pedro De Bruyckere, PhD
Keynote IV: The Science of Teaching - David B. Daniel, PhD
- Question
- Thing to Try
- Operational Definitions (How do you define your variable)
- Design for Context
- Pre-test/Measure
- Try it
- Measure impact
- Look for side effects.
- Keep, Toss, Adjust
- The picture you build in your mind of what it means to do something well (whether making a ham sandwich or playing the piano or teaching or doing math)
- It involves paying attention to what you are doing and what is happening around you.
- Mental models are built in real-time and over time.
- You move from understanding that is low resolution to high resolution.
- Non-examples set the boundary terms. How do we know what something is not?
- (My thought: Craig Barton podcast "Show me a fraction that people might mistake for 1/4)
- They help stop incorrect assumptions
- They highlight critical features
- Is this a . . .? Why or why not?
- New knowledge is a puzzle piece that doesn't have anything to connect to if there is no relevant prior knowledge.
- We cannot engage students in learning without connecting to their prior knowledge.
- The prior knowledge we activate must be accurate and relevant to the new information.
- Pitfall 1: Entirely irrelevant prior knowledge
- Pitfall 2: Partially relevant prior knowledge (knowing just enough to be dangerous)
- Pitfall 3: Relevant prior knowledge that remains iNactivated
- It's like rock climbing. Prior knowledge is a foothold. new knowledge is a handhold.
- Where do you want students to go? Be precise.
- Where are students starting from? What can I reliably determine my students already know that is relevant to this concept?
- How do you plan to get from the start point to the endpoint?
- Select accurately what goes in
- Make it stick
- Store it in a way they can get it out
- Procedural Information - the information we lay out for students that helps them lay out what they are supposed to do. It helps reduce cognitive load for learning.
- Essential Information - necessary background and prior knowledge needed to navigate the task. If prior knowledge isn't there, students can't make it stick.
- The Task - What are you asking them to do? Give it meaning to what you want them to learn.
- Practice - Getting it out after you have stored it makes it store more permanently.
Lessons in Working Memory Challenges
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