A Random Collection of Life Lessons

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you know that I do not care about New Year's resolutions or New Year's at all.  But, I am always ready to reflect.  A few months ago, I listened to an audio recording of Amy Pohler's memoir, and there was a section in which she just threw out statements of things she has learned in her years on this earth. There is no explanation or context, just a list of thyougts.  I thought that seemed like something I would enjoy doing, so you will find my list below.  While it is not an exhaustive list, these are the things that came to mind when I started typing.  They are in no particular order.  Feel free to add your own lessons in the comments.

• 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!

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.  

Notice that money is not on this list.  It did show up in reports of loneliness, which did correlate with those making below $24,000 per year.  (My conclusion - not those of the researchers - from that correlation is that people making very low amounts of money are probably working a lot of hours and perhaps at odd times and, therefore, have less opportunity for social connection.  It's not caused by lack of money but by the circumstances.)  Money spent on experiences rather than stuff is a better investment in well-being.  Being curious is a free way to gain social interaction.  If you go to a free event at your local museum about something you find interesting, you will also find other people there who find it interesting as well.  You could strike up a conversation with someone about that shared interest and find well-being in the process.  That may be the only conversation you ever have with them, or you might find that you share so much you start a club.

The other good news is that you don't have to make a major life change to make this happen.  You can take small repeated actions.  Text a friend you haven't seen in a while.  Have a weekly lunch with a colleague.  Donate to a cause (a small amount monthly might be better for you than a larger one time donation); if you don't have money, make a point to volunteer one day per month.  Visit the free or low cost events in your area (museums and libraries and churches hold a lot of them) on weekends.  

The point is that we can structure our lives in such a way that we combat isolation with small sustainable changes.  Take one action today.

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.

Reflections from the Learning and the Brain Conference - Part 1 - Thinking and Remembering

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 is on thinking and learning.  The second will be about meaning and purpose, and the third will be about well-being and happiness.  

Teachers have a thousand goals each class period.  We are responsible for the safety and well-being of our students, charged with knowing and valuing them as human beings, and on our best days, are meant to inspire them to love learning.  Obviously, though, our primary daily function as teachers is to have our students learn the content we are teaching them.  We want them to remember, not just long enough to take a test, but to really remember.

Encoding - Learning begins with the process of encoding sensory information from our environment by connecting it to the network of things we already know (schema).  Your schema is the interrelated knowledge you have on any given subject.  It could be as simple as everything you know about dogs to something as complicated as all of the knowledge you have about math.  A good teacher knows what they

want to connect to and begins their lesson by activating the schema in the minds of their students.  It is obviously impossible to know what all of their prior knowledge is, but we can make fair guesses about common knowledge.  Also, the benefit still exists even if the student pulls up knowledge that is different than we expect them to in order to use it as a metaphor.  (A physics teacher, for example, may compare electrical current to the flow of water droplets in a river, while a student may think instead of the flow of students down the hallway.  Both work as analogies, so both can be powerful ways of encoding the knowledge of electrical current in a student's mind.)  

Because working memory is limited, building an extensive schema in long-term memory is useful.  Because it is interconnected, it might take up only one space, providing a foothold for the reach to new concepts.  Experts in any field are simply people with extensive, complex, and overlapping schema.  We don't encode things that are too easy to learn, so find the sweet spot known as "desirable difficulty."  Hook students in with a challenging problem or a curiosity-provoking question, and the dopamine release that comes later will help to cement the encoding of the content.

Examples and non-examples are also your friends when it comes to encoding.  "This is a triangle" should be firmly rehearsed through multiple, varied examples.  But it should also be followed up with "This is not a triangle" with a discussion of the ways in which that example doesn't fit the definition.  There should also be a "close call" example because it will define the boundaries of the concept.  

Making it Stick - Once information is encoded, your brain has to find a way to store it in such a way that it can be retrieved.  There are a number of ways to make this happen, from connecting it to symbols like hand motions and pictures to creating stories, which Daniel Willingham calls "psychologically privileged" to asking students to relate personally to concepts.  Essentially, making meaning makes learning sticky.  As an example, understanding multiplication as a system of repeated adding will make it easier to learn a multiplication table than rote learning it without that understanding (Note that I did not say a student shouldn't learn a multiplication table; I'm just suggesting that making it meaningful is a way to make it easier to remember.).   

The most powerful tool for making information stick is the practice of retrieving it.  Think of an actor learning lines.  They don't do what students most commonly do when they study - rereading the script according to student surveys.  They run their lines.  They put the script down and try to remember the next line.  I also learned at the conference that most of them don't start trying to learn the lines until the scene has been blocked because they can then connect the lines to their physical movement as well.  My theatrical students told me that the day they first go off-book is called "crash and burn day," a piece of information I love knowing because it allows me to talk to them about how powerful the experience of trying to remember, getting it wrong, and getting feedback can be.

Did you know that the brain is part of your body?  The latest research confirms that to be true, so if you want to do things that are good for your brain, do things that are good for your body.  These include 

• 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.

Speaking of your body, you can offload some of your brain's mental processes by using your hands and body movements to help you think.  I already mentioned actors memorizing lines that have been blocked.  Having students act out abstract ideas can also make them feel more real and give the mind something to connect to.  Teacher gesturing draws student attention to both emphasis and meaning, so use it liberally.  Point to physical objects, like charts, graphs, and maps, and have students point to them as well.  Connecting movement and knowledge is a great way of helping them remember it.  It's also a great way to increase their alertness level when you know their attention is flagging.  

Designing lessons in such a way that we can accurately encode the right procedural and essential information, ask them to perform a learning task with meaning, and practice retrieving across time will grow our students' brains, improve their performance, and help them to remember content longer; so we must be thoughtful about how we construct each day.

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.

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

Physical Movement

• 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."

Gesture

• 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.

Learning Environments

• 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).

Different worldviews create different kinds of systems.  The Cartesian-Newtonian worldview is less human and therefore creates less human systems (unrestrained capitalism).  Holistic indigenous worldviews lead to more humanity.  But this must be both/and because we must understand the relationship between them in order to move anything forward.  We focus often on the what, but we must be driven by the how and the why.

Session: The New Science of Learning: Understanding How We Learn - Andrew C. Watson, MEd

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.

Figure out which of the three is the cause of not paying attention before advising the student.  

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

The amygdala is involved in 

• Impulsivity without regard to consequences.
• Narcissism
• Shortsightedness
• Us vs. them

The amygdala is not all bad.  It allows you to react quickly when a child runs out behind your car and you need to take immediate action.  

Disconnection Syndrome - the prefrontal cortex in dysfunction.  The adult has left the room, and the amygdala is in control.  Non-restorative sleep combined with a sedentary lifestyle and inflammation along with inappropriate internet usage leads to disconnection syndrome.  We make bad food decisions the day after non-restorative sleep.  We react more aggressively to perceived threats.  We don't self-regulate when sleep-deprived.  We pay more for things and buy more foolish things when sleep-deprived.  

Because we have higher inflammation, our brains are less internally connected.  That causes us to behave in fear-based (amygdala) responses. 

Are you willing to make changes in your behavior to sleep better to make your life better?

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.

Keynote I: The Science of Learning: Building Memories and Effective Learners - Barbara A. Oakley, PhD, PE

Full disclosure:  I LOVE BARBARA OAKLEY!  She was a keynote speaker at my second Learning and the Brain conference, and she is one of the reasons I fell in love with the science of learning.  

What is learning?  Creating a set of neuron links through the growth of dendritic spines.

You need to have foundational connections in your brain in order to think.  To do that, you must have practiced skills and memorized information in your long-term memory.  The reason metaphor is a powerful teaching technique is because it uses the underlying neuron structure of what we already know to make the learning sticky.

Retrieval strengthens the dendrites.  Without it, the links are broken.

Working memory pulls things from long-term memory and helps us manipulate conscious information so we can work with it.  It manipulates a mental model.

What is a schema?  It is a mental model of connected information.  And the schema for one thing can overlap with other schemas and support each other.  Small changes in the schema will add up to big results.  Putting all of the schema together becomes your identity schema (how you think about yourself and your strengths and weaknesses and place in the world).

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.

A student with high working memory can pull a lot from long-term memory and make more connections between them.  

Having a smaller working memory doesn't have to be limiting.  It may take longer to relate the "chunks," but the chunks can be handled by each arm of the working memory.  The schema will still build.  

A good schema can serve as the equivalent of a bigger working memory capacity.  (Prior knowledge is critical to learning.)

The size of working memory capacity doesn't matter if there are already links in long-term memory.  Learning becomes easier as the schema expands. (My thought:  Weights become easier to lift with the arms as you strengthen the core.  Kickboxing moves become easier to combine in different ways after you have learned them in multiple routines.)

The people who have struggled know how to study and how to overcome challenges when they meet them.  Those who have had high working memory sometimes don't know how to get around obstacles when they inevitably meet 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.

People who cannot frown (because of Botox) were found to be happier.  What you do with your face influences your emotional state as much as your emotional state influences your face.  You also pick up on the facial expressions of others, so the teacher's facial expression can affect the motivation and emotional states of the students.  Then, everyone's mirror neurons get in sync.  Gesturing also activates mirror neurons.  The more they see your face, the more trusted you will be.

Sometimes, reducing stress too much is bad for learning.  There is a sweet spot of stress that helps you remember better.  

Mice with dopamine systems de-activated cannot learn anything new.  Hook students with a challenging problem they will want to solve.  Getting to the solution after a few failed attempts distributes dopamine around the successful pathway.  Tell them a story at the beginning that makes them a little curious to have dopamine hanging around to help with memory. 

We used to think you had all the neurons you were ever going to have.  We now know that new ones grow throughout our lives.  The newer ones help you learn better, and they also make you feel better about the new learning.  

Keynote II: What Makes a Good Life: Lessons From the World’s Longest Study on Happiness and Wellbeing - Robert J. Waldinger, MD

The study of happiness was not considered a legitimate field of scientific inquiry when he started tracking this study.  The assumption was that successful people who were making money were happy.  Then, they started seeing happiness flatlining in developed countries.

The World Happiness Report shows that economic security is important to happiness (in that your basic needs for food and housing must be met).  This levels out when you achieve the level that pays your bills.  (A person making 75 million a year is not substantially happier than one making 75 thousand.)  Other needs are:

• 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.  

Yet, surveys of people's goals remain getting rich, famous, and/or attaining career achievement.  

What is the disconnect?  

• 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.

Most research is done by asking people about the past, but our memories are too malleable for that method to give us accurate data.  Taking snapshots of people of different ages can lead to false conclusions about the progression of life.  

The Harvard Study of Adult Development is the longest-running study of humans.  The subjects were separately studied.  One group was young mean recommended by their deans from Harvard.  The other was a group of juvenile delinquents with multiple police interactions.  Because it started in Boston in 1938, every subject is white and male.  Spouses and children were added later, so there is slightly more diversity now.

The Harvard men almost all served in WWII.  The other group was too young.  They were interviewed and followed for the rest of their lives.  The 30 that are still alive are in their late 90s, so now they are studying their children.  They studied mental and physical health, work life, family life, etc.  Methods have changed as science has progressed (they can study DNA now and put them in MRIs, and they couldn't in 1938).

Conclusions: 

• 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.

People who are more socially connected have later onsets of slower rates of cognitive decline.

The loneliest groups are ages 16-24 and people with incomes below $24 thousand per year.  

How does social connection get into your body and affect your health?  Stress and loneliness hormones cause

• heightened cardiovascular reactivity.
• decreased immune function.
• chronic inflammation.

Does what we spend discretionary income on influence our happiness?  People who spend money on experiences are happier (and have more durable happiness) than those who spend money on things.  So spend money on a concert rather than a TV, a basketball game rather than a new outfit.  

In the last 25 years, people's social interactions have dropped significantly (58% drop in clubs, 43% drop in family dinners, 35% drop in having friends over).  As many as 25% of people say they have no one to confide in.

Because of screens, we have continual partial attention to our surroundings.  Our closest relationships are easy to neglect.  It takes our attention away from the natural world.  

Loneliness at work is a huge problem.  Only 30% of people said they have a best friend at work (someone they can talk to about their personal lives).  People with a work friend are better employees.  Half of CEOs report feeling lonely.  

Leaning into relationships requires giving undivided attention.  Have face-to-face meetings; eat meals with people; volunteer time; engage in the community.

"Attention is the most basic form of love." - John Tarrant

Small repeated actions of connection will do more than infrequent big ones.  Just text someone and tell them you are thinking of them.

Social and emotional skills can be taught (to kids in SEL programs but also to adults).  We can structure our lives to combat isolation.

Session:  Teaching Students to Teach Themselves: Empowering Children to Get the Most From Schooling - Daniel T. Willingham, PhD

Full disclosure:  I LOVE DANIEL WILLINGHAM!  This was the person I was most excited to see added to the schedule, and I am hoping to meet him today.  I read Why Don't Students Like School? a little over a year ago, and it has turned my world upside down.  I used it and his book Outsmart Your Brain and Barbara Oakley's Learning How to Learn to create my study skills class.

We don't expect pre-schoolers to bring any skills to the table about how to learn.  By high school, we have high expectations about a student's ability to regulate their own learning.

We expect them to learn from reading, take notes, avoid distractions, set priorities, study efficiently, take assessments, know whether they actually know something, etc. 

Avoiding Distraction

Situation -> Attention -> Appraisal -> Response

It is easier to intervene early in the cycle.

People overestimate the effect of their own willpower.

Tip:  Select your place.  If you can't, arrange your space.  Turn off phone notifications.  Where noise-canceling headphones or wear earplugs, face a wall.

Tip:  Don't choose distraction.  Turn off attention-draining options (TV, music, phone).

Tip:  Plan breaks.  You can stay on task better after a break.  

Reading to Learn

Learning to read involves choice and pleasure, and the writer is trying to entertain you with a narrative structure.

Reading to learn involves no choice.  The purpose isn't pleasure but understanding.  Authors are concerned about getting the school to adopt their book and whether it aligns with standards, not whether the student likes the book.  The structure is hierarchical rather than narrative.

The structure makes it difficult to make connections.  Children evaluate their own understanding one sentence at a time.  They won't notice conflicts between sentences.  The linear experience of reading makes it difficult for them to know what to look for.

Tip:  Be explicit about the structure.

Tip:  Pose questions to yourself every few paragraphs.

Tip:  Think about the structure after you have read.  Rebuild the tree diagram.

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.

We remember what we focus on in the way we focused on it.  Pulling out the memory the same way it went in is very beneficial.  If you want them to commit the sound to memory, focus on the sound (foreign language pronunciation).  If you want them to think about meaning, focus on meaning.

"Memory is the residue of thought."

Not all repetition is created equal. Repetition of deep thinking about meaning works.  Just parroting does not.  Delay between repetitions if you want to remember it later.  The amount of delay is hard to optimize, but don't worry about that.  Just have some delay.  You want kids to sleep between sessions.

• 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.

How Do You Know Whether or Not You Know Something?

- Students are shocked to find that they might not know whether or not they know something.

- Familiarity is not the same as recollection.  Familiarity happens immediately but has no depth.  Recollection may take longer to construct, but it involves a story or context.

- Partial access is the belief that you know some part of it, so if you thought about it for a while, you could come up with the answer.  That feeling is not reliable.  This is the second reason why rereading the chapter or notes is a terrible way of studying.  

- Self-testing is the only way to overcome these, but students believe they have self-tested when they have just looked up from the book and answered while it was still in working memory.  Wait at least 30 minutes.

- What does "knowing" mean?  It should mean being able to explain, not just understanding it when someone else explains it or when they read it.

Keynote III: The Psychology and Ingredients for Great Teaching - Pedro De Bruyckere, PhD 

The problem with the psychology of teaching is that there is a replication crisis.  Some results from fraudulent research, but it is also due to publication bias.  They only publish studies where the hypothesis is confirmed.

My note:  Much of teaching is so complex that it is difficult to replicate results even if everything were done well.  

Growth Mindset is an example of a study that was difficult to replicate.  Some studies showed a small effect; others showed no effect.  But these are averages.  There is nuance, and that matters because we shouldn't throw out something without analyzing why the results are what they are.  (My note:  Again, teaching is complex.)

Phonics is the most replicated practice in educational history, and we spent years going the other way, which shows that we do no show respect for highly replicated studies.

Babies know the difference between 5 and 10 at 5 months old.  Piaget was wrong about many things (but to be fair, he didn't have the technology he would have needed).

He's giving a lot of good examples, but they won't translate to text.

By teaching kids to recognize cognitive biases, you can help them deal with fake news and misinformation.

Resilience does not mean never being sad or hurt.  It means being self-managing.  You can recognize your own feelings and deal with them in appropriate ways at appropriate times with social awareness.  Teach them to recognize fallacies and to seek help.

Keynote IV: The Science of Teaching - David B. Daniel, PhD

I love David Daniel.  He is a fixture of Learning and the Brain, and we have communicated through email a few times.  Friday was the first time I got to talk to him in person.  As I introduced myself, he said, "I know who you are."  I'm not sure how that is, but I'll take it.  

Teaching is under assault from politicians.  Be careful not to swing back the other way and think teachers are all angels either.

What is evidence?  How do we know if something is working?  

Studies that are carried out in a lab may not generalize to the classroom.  Be careful just swallowing advice wholesale.  Studies are greenhouses with lots of control and isolated variables.  Classrooms are gardens where the principles still apply, but there are a lot more variables.

Research needs to be carried out in classrooms.  They are not the same as labs.  

- The idea of needing skin to skin contact right after birth comes from observations of goats.  It was assumed that, since we were mammals, it worked the same.  It is dangerous to believe it and damaging to adoptive parents and those whose children are rushed to the NICU immediately.

Just because research is true doesn't mean it will work in the context in which you want to apply it.  It may work in the classroom next door and not work in yours.  You are being presented with hypotheses here, not guarantees.  

How the data is presented depends on the observer's biases and theoretical models.

We have a science of learning, but we don't have a science of teaching.  And we need one.  What if we evaluated our own practice, generated our own data, and developed our profession around our own findings?

What is our system of proof?

Evidence Generating Teaching

• 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

It doesn't matter where the idea comes from.  What matters is how it is vetted.

Teaching and learning is messy, but that's okay when studying teaching because that's part of the design.  We can all identify the side effects of curriculum to bend it around the parts that don't work.  We can redesign.

This doesn't have to add substantially to the workload of the teacher.  In fact, it might make them happier because they know what works or what they need to work on instead of it being nebulous feelings.

Questions to Ask Yourself

Does this address a problem I actually have?  

Is it better than what I am already doing?

Is it worth the amount of workload?

Do I have the resources to implement it?

What is the likelihood that it will work in my specific context?

Does it work with who I am?  If not, can I adapt it without losing the benefit?

What do I want them to do or learn?

What am I doing now?  Is it working?  How do I know?

What am I going to try?

How will I implement it?

How will I measure it?

Did it work?

Was it worth it?

It is a dynamic system, so there is going to be a lot of change that results from any change you make.  

My thought:  There is a butterfly effect to how what we do changes things.

If you are a reflective practitioner, you are always a work in progress.

Session:  Mental Models: How Cognitive Science Can Transform the Way You Learn and Teach - Jim Heal, EdLD

I saw Him Heal last year, and I liked him very much.  He is part of Deans for Impact, always a good source of evidence-based information.  His lovely British accent doesn't hurt either.

Mental Models

• 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

• 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?

Prior Knowledge is Critical

• 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?

Move from "Are they picking up what I'm putting down?" to "What do they already know that will enable them to pick up what I'm putting down?"

Session:  The Science of Learning - John T. Almarode, PhD

If you don't know that I love John Almarode, you just aren't paying attention.  I consider John a friend, and am always thrilled to attend his sessions.  However, there may not be a ton of notes because he always makes us get up and go across the room so we are nowhere near our notes.

• Select accurately what goes in
• Make it stick
• Store it in a way they can get it out

Attention, emotion, acquisition, retrieval, cognitive load are principles, but what matters most are the practices we use to implement the principles.

Lesson Design (effect size of 0.70) - Doing the right things at the right time.  Doing something that works well at one stage can be detrimental at another stage.

1. 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.
2. Essential Information - necessary background and prior knowledge needed to navigate the task.  If prior knowledge isn't there, students can't make it stick.
3. The Task - What are you asking them to do?  Give it meaning to what you want them to learn.
4. Practice - Getting it out after you have stored it makes it store more permanently. 

The only way to make teaching sustainable is to integrate findings with what we do.