Keynote I: The Science of Wellbeing: Teaching and Training for Healthy Minds, Brains, and Bodies - Richard J. Davidson, PhD
Bad news:
- Our well-being is in rapid decline.
- Loneliness and isolation are now classified as an epidemic by the US Surgeon General, tracked between 2003 and 2020; so the trends began before Covid, but they have been increased by Covid.
- Lacking social connection is more of a risk factor for dying prematurely than smoking 15 cigarettes a day and obesity.
- Increased social media use is a risk factor for multiple mental health disorders. The average social media usage of teenagers is 3.5 hours per day.
- Teacher mental health is declining. The majority of symptoms of modern to severe stress, anxiety, and depression.
Good news:
- Having a dream of a different way of being is a powerful part of creating a solution. (There is a reason Martin Luther King's speech was not "I have a nightmare.")
- Well-being is a skill that can be learned.
- The same mechanisms that encode suffering can be harnessed for good.
Pillars of a Healthy Mind (that can be trained)
1. Awareness (Being Present) - Mindfulness, attention, and self-awareness
- Most of us have little knowledge of what our mind is doing at every moment.
- Meta-awareness can be trained.
2. Connections (Feeling Connected to Other People and to Our Place) - Appreciation, kindness
3. Insight (Accurate Self Narrative) - Get curious about yourself and what your mind is doing.
4. Purpose (Staying Motivated) - Clarifying our sense of direction. How can we find meaning and purpose in what we are doing (no matter whether it is big or small, big activities or daily chores)
Awareness
- In The Principles of Psychology, Williams James extols the value of voluntarily bring back our wandering attention, calling it an act of character.
- Attention is the building block of all other forms of learning.
- EEGs during meditation show high levels of gamma wave activity
Connection
- In a randomized controlled study, some people brought to mind various categories of people (love one, associate, person who pushes my buttons) and thought about a challenging time. They then repeated affirming words ("You'll get through this," etc.) to that person in their mind. The control group was taught basic behavioral modification techniques.
- The experimental group had higher compassion and were more pro-social and more likely to act in helpful or altruistic ways. They also had more connectivity in the parts of the brain associated with altruistic behavior.
- Connection training has also been shown to decrease implicit bias in school teachers substantially.
Insight
- When you say something like "I am sad," what is your understanding of the "I"? Is it your entire self?
- Resilience (the rapidity of recovery from negative events) is increased by those who train in self-insight.
- A tone is played 10 seconds before a painful stimulus. A non-meditator begins to show pain activity in the brain with the tone and takes a long time to recover after the stimulus. The long-term meditator shows no reaction to the tone, has an equal or higher response to the pain initially but comes back down very quickly.
Purpose
- In people 75 and older, mortality risk is lowest in people with a high sense of purpose in life.
Healthy Minds Program showed dramatic improvement even when participants used it for 5 minutes per day and with activities that didn't require active meditation. (My question: Do people who pray get the same kind of benefit?)
Meditation should not be about stopping our thoughts. If we become more aware of our thoughts, we can make better use of them.
How we recover from stress is more important than reducing stress.
Keynote II: Building Meaning Builds Brains: The Science of Emotions, Brain Development, and Effective Teaching - Mary Helen Immordino-Yang
Teaching and learning is more complex than laboratory science. Lab science is super technical, but the real world is dynamic, which creates a different set of challenges.
The ways kids make meaning out of the things they witness enables processes of adaptive change for them to grow, make more meaning, and show up as adults. We can predict it via the steps of the work they are doing while their brain is growing. It influences the actual fiber connections, not just the psychology. (My summary: Adapting grows the brain, and brain growth makes us better adapters.)
Meaning-making shapes the networks of the physical brain.
Teaching and learning cannot be separated from the relational context in which we learn.
Infants come with innate inborn capacities, starting as reflexes. The biology is set for helping the mother (or other adult) know what to do to optimize the learning environment. (e.g. The baby engages at a specific distance and not others.)
"Emotions may be automatic, but we need to learn how to feel."
Feeling emotions involves brain systems for feeling and regulating the body and for constructing a sense of self. Everyone CAN do it. The more interesting question is DO YOU? Reacting to the here and now has value, but it doesn't grow the brain over time. Engaging purposefully and making meaning does.
We are whole people, not carved-up pieces. We cannot separate physical, mental, and emotional. When we hold an infant, our digestion calms, our heart rate lowers, and our blood pressure lowers. The baby senses those changes and responds to the relaxed state differently. How can we do that in a classroom? Can we make math FEEL different? As we build the skill, we understand the world differently, and the skill will feel different.
The brain and mind are not organized in the leveled way we learned in the 60s. It is all interconnected from top to bottom.
"Teddy, we love you more than the whole earth size." I don't understand the size of my love for Teddy. It feels the same as not understanding when my parents told me that I live on a giant spinning ball of dirt. I can't wrap my head around either of them, so they are connected.
If the medulla (just above the brain stem) is damaged, you can't even be kept alive on life support. Brain scans show that it is repurposed to process emotional engagement. The same part of the brain that tells you your heart is pumping faster when you run up the stairs is engaged when your heart beats faster because of your attraction to the guy across the room. The same part of the brain that makes you feel unsettled if your lunch isn't digesting properly makes you feel butterflies when you are nervous about your math test. The "Salience Network" relates the physical with the emotional/mental.
Training in this involves connecting what you are thinking about to the meaning of being you learning and feeling about what you are thinking about. Thinking deeply involves telling complex, emotional stories to yourself. Transcendent thinking predicts future development of tracts that allow efficient communication across the brain. (Ask kids how they feel about what they are learning more frequently. Ask them questions that cause them to make meaning.)
What "kind of brain" you have is not predictive. How much change your brain shows is predictive. What matters is that the brain is growing.
Teachers show the same activity described here when grading their own students, but they don't show it when grading the work of students they don't know.
Whatever you have emotion about, you are thinking about. Whatever you are thinking about, you will learn about.
Session A: The Science of Memory: Why We Forget and How to Remember Better - Elizabeth Kensinger
Ways we forget
1. We can have an intention set without it leading to action that we follow through on. (I meant to put my adapter in my bag, but I forgot to actually bring it.)
2. Recognizing a face without remembering who that person is or remembering their name.
3. A slide comes up that we are supposed to teach, and we forget what it means or what we are supposed to say.
Memory is not one thing. It is a constellation of abilities. One system might be working well in a moment while another is not. It could be dependent on nutrition, time of day, and how much caffeine you have had (or not had). There can be obstacles to some parts of memory but not others (Alzheimer's patients who can still play the piano but can't remember people or scenarios.
Short-Term Memory
- Sensory memory lasts about two seconds. You heard words, but you only hang on to a snippet for a few seconds. You look around the room and hold on to what you just saw for just long enough to make it seem like you are seeing the entire room at the same time.
- Working Memory - When you pay attention to something long enough to hold it in your consciousness and work with it. Can stay in your mind for as long as you are actively thinking about it (Repeating a phone number over and over until you have a chance to write it down).
Long-Term Memory
- Episodic memory - a story, reliant on the learning experience, includes all of the sensory information and feelings associated with it. In the hippocampus.
- Semantic memory - facts that we know independent of the learning episode. Doesn't rely on the hippocampus, so it can be retrieved faster.
- Implicit memory (We aren't aware of it) - how to ride a bike, the well-practiced path to work, most motor skills, tying shoes, conditioned triggers
It takes effort to build memories. Memories have to go through an encoding cycle to move from short-term to long-term memory. Every time you retrieve a memory, you rebuild the structure by going through that cycle again. It is an effortful, active process. Because of this, a memory isn't static; every time you rebuild it, it can be embellished with new information.
This also gives the opportunity for errors to creep in. A person then actually remembers it that way, even if it is not true.
Memory exists as a source of data to help us deal with the current moment and make plans for the future. It is a shortcut our brains use to avoid thinking.
Remembering Better (FOUR)
Focus attention
Organize
Understand
Relate
To do this, you constantly use the prefrontal cortex, providing a rich scaffold for encoding the memory.
- Spaced rehearsal of information in different places and at different times helps because it becomes less context-dependent.
- Sleep is critical to memory. It helps with storage. You must go through both slow-wave sleep and REM sleep to rehearse and connect your memories. It helps transfer them from episodic to semantic memories.
- Exercise causes cellular and molecular changes that create functional brain changes that lead to better cognitive functioning. Wendy Suzuki's studies show that people who engage in cardiovascular exercise immediately after a class help them remember what they learned in that class better.
- Retrieval is harder during stress, and the stress then makes a vivid memory of the inability to retrieve. Breathing control helps; so does thinking back to a time when you successfully retrieved. Don't try to think of all the possible answers because your brain will inhibit all of the similar answers, meaning if you pulled up a close answer, you will have a much harder time getting to the right answer.
Keynote III: Making Schools Work: Bringing the Science of Learning to Active “Minds-On” and Playful Classrooms - Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, PhD and Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, PhD
These are very fun women, but they are losing me a little in talking about "the factory model." That's not quite an accurate representation of the history of education. Also, I get a little lost when people use "21st century" as an adjective. These notes might be shorter than the others.
It is possible to have joyful teaching again and at the same time get deeper learning.
Education is a surround sound endeavor that happens everywhere.
What is success in education? Do we want them to be able to do reading, writing, and math? Do we want them to be happy, healthy, thinking, caring collaborative thinkers?
Play for learning should be active, engaging, meaningful, social, interactive, and joyful.
Providing a goal turns free play into guided play.
Play and social regulation lead to more executive function.
Children choose more difficult options when playing for fun than when they are in "work mode."
Look at your lesson plan and ask yourself, "Can I make it more active, more engaging, more social, more meaningful, more interactive, more joyful?
I like what they are doing in public spaces. I'm on board with that.
No comments:
Post a Comment