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.