Research Ed Notes - Saturday October 19

These are raw, unfiltered notes.  More intelligent processing to come later.

Professor Pamela Snow - Reading Instruction and Professional Accountability: Challenges and Opportunities for Classroom Teachers

Reading is important for individuals and for society.

• But it has long been contested.
• Whole Language sold us a story in more ways than one and had a hidden curriculum.  It relationship with evidence was problematic (as much of education has been - but is slowly changing).

Preservice teachers have been exposed to wrong information, leading to poor knowledge translation and the creation of echo chambers.  This leads to poor academic outcomes and pervasive harm, not only to students, but also to the professional standing of teachers.

Kenneth Goodman's teachings were about whole language but had an impact on teacher professionalism.  He said things like, "teachers know what they are doing because they are professionals" and shouldn't be beholden to "academic gurus." Teacher agency was valued above evidence or outcomes.

Teacher Knowledge - You as a teacher cannot give what you don't have (the Peter Effect), so if a teacher doesn't have knowledge of language constructs, it will be difficult for them to teach students to read. Yet, there is an inverse relationship between knowledge and confidence.  Do elementary school teachers have an understanding of the history of the English language?  If not, they won't understand the tiers of vocabulary.

"Teachers, not programs, teach children to read." - Dr. Louisa Moats

But HOW should teachers teach?  Unlike the general atmosphere of "guide on the side," the evidence supports explicit instruction. 

Professionalism means:

• high accountability.
• ethical commitment to practice according to the best available evidence and adapt as the evidence changes.
• respect children's time.
• using high quality materials rather than making our own and hoping they'll be good.

In other professions, we expect accountability and sanction when professional standards are violated.  Reading instruction is key because reading is the way students access every other part of the curriculum.

The science of reading is not a pedagogy; it is an evolving body of knowledge that needs to be thoughtfully and carefully applied.

Just as the tallest trees in a forest flourish because they receive the most light while those below don't get resources, teachers and students often get less exposure to evidence because school leaders, policy makers, and education academics are not sharing.

David Daniel - Usable or Just Interesting: How Relevant is "The Rearch" to Those Who Actually Educate?

Teachers under attack. They are called indoctrinators, liberals with an agenda. How do we defend ourselves?  We paint ourselves as saints and martyrs.

We need a way to generate evidence of our own practice.

It is often difficult to translate the research evidence into the classroom. We need to generate evidence rather than just consume it.

It's all hypothesis until YOU put it into practice.  Everything works somewhere, and nothing works everywhere.  "Let's try it in my classroom."

Studies that were working to generate data didn't work once the researcher left.  There is a difference between evidence inspired and evidence produced in the classroom.

The idea of skin to skin contact being critical to bonding was 100% taken from goats.  This did harm to women whose babies had to be taken to the NICU or were adopted.  It's still taught even though we now know it is not true (unless the mother believes it because she changes her behavior based on that belief).

Research needs to be done "in the classroom."  Applying the principles of cognitive science is harder than knowing them.  When learning them, put on a critical thinking hat that makes you ask how it could be applied realistically in your classroom.  Create a science of teaching rather than just a science of learning.

We need a better model for moving promising findings from research into actual practice in the wild.

What if you developed your own experiments from hypothesis to data collection?  It needs to be natural and fluid within the practice.  If it comes from the outside, it will make teaching more difficult.

Other professions have agreed upon processes that take promising findings to ubiquitous practice.  Education doesn't have one.  Without a system of proof, it's not a profession; it's a faith-based calling.

Look up "Scholarship of Teaching and Learning."

A statistic is not significant if it isn't relevant to your practice.

Sometimes side effects are more damaging than the problem you were trying to solve.

Research is clean and uncomplicated; teaching and learning is messy and complex.

The comparison of "team based learning" to lecture is only significant if you choose a bad lecture.  If you have a typical or excellent lecture, you have two things that work.

Solutions can come from a lot of places.  It doesn't have to be from the primary literature.  But the literature could inspire ideas for things you want to try and test.  It takes the pressure off of trying to "be right" of the time because you are "trying to find out."

Steve Hare - Pullting Themsevles Up: Self Remediation in the Math Classroom

Story about a boy with a number of strikes against him.  How he worked slowly and self-motivated at home.  His aid was reassigned because he didn't need her anymore.  He learned that "slow and right beats fast and wrong."  He learned he loved math.  He found out later that he had accelerated in subsequent years.

Putting examples frequently throughout the practice problems (rather than a couple at the beginning) allowed him to cover all potential sticking points, nuances, and exceptions.  Got emails from students and parents saying that they had work they could actually learn from.  (And they were doing it during lockdown, when there was little incentive to do things and little penalty for no doing them.)

Self paced activity sequences with frequent worked examples allowed each kid to self-remediate.  Using pre-worked examples make the activity self explanatory.  (You will likely have to make them yourself.)

You Teach You has many self paced math activities.

It is self-differentiating, and there is no shame because no one knows what anyone else is working on.

Don't underestimate how much work students will do when they know it isn't pointless.

M-J Mercanti-Anthony - Combatting Skepticism and Finding Entry Points for the Science of Learning

The Bronx broke up giant schools.  A large building that used to be one school is now three different schools that share only a cafeteria.  Students can't get lost, falling through the cracks large numbers create.

Causes of Skepticism:

• Initiative Churn - Too many new fads require too much time and attention to implement.  This may just seem like another one.
• Unfamiliarity - If your training involved other things, you may not know about the research findings.  Most teachers are still holding onto educational myths (learning styles, left brain/ right brain, etc.) because it was in their college courses.
• The Sincerity Problem - Trying to make everyone happy, promising a particular outcome, and not addressing people's fear of direct instruction can make them question the sincerity of the presenter.  The Faux Inquiry process results in confirmation bias.

Possible Entry Points:

• Give a scenario and ask a question to prompt conversation about the answer before presenting the concept.
• Just ask, "How do people learn?"

Three Tools to Support

        Having a strong professional environment allows teachers to grow.  It must be peer-led, trust-based, 

        slow and deliberate, and simple enough to respect teachers' existing work.

• Small group modeling - Weekly meetings in which teachers are presented with new techniques and encouraged to try it and report back.  It's low risk; we're just sharing.
• Lesson study protocol - Teacher shares a plan for a future lesson to implement a strategy and gets feedback from others in the meeting.  She then reports back after doing it in the classroom.  Everybody hates protocols because they are unnatural, but they work.  Medium risk because you are opening yourself up to criticism.
• Intervisitation - People come and watch a teacher implement a strategy.  Then, there is a debrief on the visit with positive and negative feedback.  Highest risk

Cynthia Nebel - Creating Learning Equity with the Science of Learning

Host of the Learning Scientists podcast

To get to long term memory, new information must pass through working memory.  Working memory is finite in both space and time.

For students with high anxiety, low working memory demand problems are fine.  They do not perform well on those problems that require high working memory.

Applying cognitive psychology to instruction is about building teaching and learning strategies that harness attention, memory, and perception.

Reduce working memory requirements for any given task

• Spaced practice:  Instead of reviewing things all at once in a short period of time, space that out over time. (Study 1 hour for 5 nights rather than 5 hours in 1 night.)
• Forgetting is essential for learning.  If you try the same problem again too quickly, you will believe you got better and faster at solving it.  Really, you just haven't lost it from your working memory yet, so you don't know if it is in your long term memory.  If you test immediately, everyone will do well.  BUT that is not learning.  
• If you can't remember it later, you didn't learn it.
• Spacing helps with vocab, facts, texts, problem solving, motor skills, surgical skills, etc.
• Spacing is usually coupled with retrieval practice, but it doesn't have to be.  It can also be spaced presentation.
• Retrieval practice - bringing information to mind
• Retrieval provides opportunity for feedback and reteaching.  It also has an impact on motivation and a direct impact on long term learning.

Background knowledge is one of the most important aspects of reducing working memory demand.  While a good reader will always get more out of passage than a poor reader, a person with more background knowledge on the passage's topic will get more out of it than a good reader with low or no background knowledge on the topic.

Reduce cognitive load associated with anxiety

• Allowing students to write about their anxiety before a test allows their brain to offload it from their working memory long enough to reduce its impact on their assessment.
• Taking away stereotypical environmental factors can reduce working memory load as well.  (Computer science study - remove the nerdy stuff from the room, and women are more interested)

Andrew Watson - The Surprising Science of Classroom Attention

We want to move things from the outside world into a student's long term memory, but it turns out that is a really complicated process.

Research cannot tell you what you must do.  It can only inform how you make decisions.

"Don't do this thing; think this way."

Why do students have a hard time paying attention?  (This is not a hard question to answer.)

We fundamentally misunderstand what attention really is.  Once we get that right, the solutions are easier.

Attention isn't a thing.  Attention is a set of behaviors that students exhibit when three other mental processes are present.

• Alertness - Too much alertness is equally problematic as too little alertness.
• Orienting - There are a lot of stimuli in the environment.  Orienting is choosing which one to attend to.
• Executive Attention - Effortful control of cognitive processes (Example: Showed words and asking us to say what color the font was.  The word RED was in blue, so it required us to control our mental processes.)

Getting a question wrong is different than thinking about a question the wrong way.

If you say, "Pay attention," you aren't telling the student which of the three things they need to fix.

Alterness solutions

• Create or allow movement
• Create visual novelty

Orienting solutions

• Address the bug in the room or firetruck driving by or weather at the window
• Don't over decorate your classroom
• Use technology judiciously
• Address the immediate usefulness of the content - have them do something with it now.

Executive Attention solutions

• Assume working memory overload and reduce cognitive load

Kristen Simmers - Adaptive Expertise in the Science and Art of Teaching

Teaching is a scientifically substantiated art.

What is Mind Brain Education (MBE)?

• The interaction between multiple fields (neurology, psychology, health, etc.) and classroom practice
• The bridge between education and our understand of the brain has often had gaps.  It's getting better, but it still has a way to go.
• MBE enhances your lens on what is happening in your classroom.  It gives a better understanding of the complexities of your situation and helps fill out your toolkit.

What is Adaptive Expertise?

Master teachers make it look seamless.  They are constantly noticing, assessing, changing, pivoting, and adapting in subtle ways based on their experience and expertise in both their content and pedagogy.  

They have a deep enough knowledge to flexibly address new and unforeseen challenges.

Routine expertise is like conducting and orchestra - everything has a specific place and role and everyone does what they are meant to.  Adaptive expertise is like playing jazz.  You understand the goals and can improvise with them.

"All new knowledge passes through the filter of prior knowledge.: - Dr. Tracey Tokuhama-Espinosa

Neuroplasticity

When you learn something new, your brain grows new connections.  New connections are typically weak, so purposeful repetition and practice are needed to strengthens it.  Your brain won't waste metabolic resources on connections you don't use, so it prunes the connection by weakening the synapse (forgetting).

Emotion and Cognition

"It is literally neurobiologically impossible to think deeply about things that you don't care about." - Drl Mary Helen Immordino-Yang

Emotion and cognition are all interconnected in ways we didn't understand before.  Nothing works in isolation.

An emotion is never inherently positive or negative.  How it impacts learning and action is context dependent.