Thanksgiving Post - Learning and the Brain

It was 2018 when a humble flyer appeared in my school mailbox.  I was prepared to throw it away as I do with all uninvited mail, but I am so glad the tiny photo of a keynote speaker caught my attention because that little flyer has changed my life.  

Every Thanksgiving, I write a post of gratitude for someone or some group that has influenced my educational life.  I've written about teachers, administrators, group fitness instructors, and even the school supply cabinet (find those links at the bottom of this post).  This year, I'd like to express my gratitude for an organization that first changed my classroom, the influenced my colleagues, and finally changed my career.  This year, I am incredibly thankful for Learning and the Brain.

 

When I got that flyer in 2018, I knew this was something special.  From the fact that every presenter was a heavyweight to the extra event that you could attend at the MIT brain scan lab as part of the conference, I was amazed.  When I asked my administration to send me, I was in full-scale begging mode.  And since I usually didn't want to go anywhere for PD, they knew this conference must be special too.  That year, I learned from a variety of researchers and psychologists and educators about creativity, talent, innovation, and the role of neurodivergence.  I ate it up and presented once or twice in GRACE faculty meetings about what I had learned.  

That year was my gateway drug, but my addiction to the science of learning started in 2019.  I can't pinpoint exactly why that year was special. Perhaps the theme or the combination of keynote speakers or the flow of the session choices I made played a role, 

. . . but I suspect it was because that year I first met John Almarode.  

If you don't know John Almarode's work, please stop reading right now and put his name into YouTube.  Come back after you get a sense of this delightful, passionate, and energetic man.  Just reading his books won't do it; you have to see him in his bow tie, watch him bounce around a stage, and hear his lovely Virginia drawl to get the full picture.  I quickly developed a non-romantic crush and then found him on Twitter and badgered him into becoming my friend.  Every year at the conference, he knows what things I will find amusing and turns to make eye contact with me at just the right moments.  He is a treasure and someone I reach out to for advice and prayer and encouragement.  I could not be more grateful for his kindness.

Speaking of Twitter, Learning and the Brain has a presence there.  When a colleague asked me a question I didn't know the answer to, I sometimes asked @learningandtheb if "it" knew of any research on the subject.  Once, I asked something complicated on behalf of a former student and got the reply, "That's too long of answer for Twitter. I'll send you my email address."  This is when I got connected with Andrew Watson, who moderates their social media accounts, among the dozens of other things he does.  (If you don't know Andrew's work, please allow me to highly recommend all three of his books, but especially the one called Learning Begins.  It did more to change my lesson planning than any book I've read in the last decade because understanding how working memory overload impacts learning made me look at my practice very differently.)  When he replied to my email, he didn't just send me an answer; he sent links to all of the relevant research on my question.  He offered more help whenever I needed it.  We finally met, masked and distanced though we were, at the 2021 conference.  Since then, he has been a source of wisdom and encouragement and has walked with me through the process of applying to and presenting at conferences.  He even spent an hour on a zoom call with one of my 1st grade teacher friends when I couldn't help her with a big problem she was having post pandemic.  I could not be more grateful for his generosity.

David Daniel will likely not see this post as he spends little time online and none on social media.  Until last year's conference, I had only known him from a distance, seeing him introduce people and giving a keynote address as well as a couple of emails after I sent him a thank you note.  When I went to introduce myself to him last year, he stopped me and said, "I know who you are."  We had a nice chat.  After an email thread with John and Andrew, David said he wanted to call and give me some advice.  (This was, by the way, the first phone call I ever got on a cell phone, so he'll always be special for that.)  We talked about the direction of my changing career, and he gave me excellent things to think about.  When I saw him a few months ago, he said, "John will give you the practical details.  I was speaking to your soul."  That's how he talks, and that's how he is.  David is fun and quirky, but he takes the work of education very seriously.  Give him a few minutes, and he will cut right to the heart of a conversation and change the way you view it.  I could not be more grateful for his wisdom.

Kelly Williams chooses the speakers for Learning and the Brain conferences.  I have met him only once, but when I decided I wanted to apply, this was the man I contacted.  We had a lovely phone conversation, in which he asked me to send him a proposal for a session.  When he accepted it, I cried and then texted my friends and posted about it on Facebook. Everyone knew this was "the big one" and celebrated with me.  I could not be more grateful for his willingness to take a chance on me.

Thank you to everyone in the world of Learning and the Brain, especially the unnamed person who mailed the flyer to my school mailbox.  You have changed me as a teacher, as a learner, and as a person.  

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Links to prior Thanksgiving posts are listed below because I'm still thankful for those people too.

My many influences 

Mr. Sandberg

Mr. Watkins

Mr. Freeman

School Supply Cabinet

GRACE parents

GRACE administrators

The Alexander Family YMCA

My YMCA Instructors

My Colleagues

The Misleading Hierarchy of Numbering and Pyramids

This week, I took a training for the Y because I want to teach some of their adult health classes.  In this course, there was a section called "levels of awareness."  Level 1 was simply being aware of yourself.  Level 2 was focused on one other.  Level 3 was focused on the room you are in, and level 4 is global awareness.  

Let's set aside that there should probably be several levels between the room your are in and the whole world. The instructor asked what our level of awareness should be during group problem solving sessions.  One of the participants answered, "Ideally, anything level 2 or above."  I resisted slightly because if you are thinking globally in the moment, you will not be able to pay attention to the people in the room with you. There are times for thinking globally, but that time is not DURING class.  Part of the reason this woman initially answered the way she did is that we all accidentally misinterpreted level 2 to read "one another" instead of "one other," a problem easily solved by adding a word to the end of the sentence - person (or individual).   But the other reason is our strange interpretation of numbered hierarchies.  As soon as we attach numbers to something, we all want to race up to the highest levels.

Enter all of the educational books.  Whether it is Bloom's taxonomy or Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs or the SAMR model, you have seen diagrams of pyramids or rows with numbered levels and been told to aim for the highest levels on the list.  I don't know if this is a natural human trait or a cultural Western one, but as soon as we see rankings, we want to be at the top as quickly and as frequently as possible.  

The problem with that thinking is that we tend to think less.  What was meant to deepen or lessons makes them shallow because we stop thinking about what our class needs.  We stop planning for a solid foundation.  We stop being responsive to formative assessment.  Instead, we take the mental shortcut that the higher level of challenge must be good for them and that all struggle is "productive struggle."  

It is worthy to note that we don't do this in other areas.  When I began taking weight lifting classes, my instructor did not say, "Load up that bar and struggle through it."  Instead, he said, "Go light until you get the form." and "See how it feels. Perhaps, you add an XS next week."  When a parent is seeing their child take their first steps, they don't immediately jump to, "Now, honey, here is the proper form for running marathons."  That would be absurd.  

When you are doing your lesson plans, don't take out all of your pyramids and choose activities that are all at the top.  Take the time to ask yourself some questions.  "Do my students have the knowledge required to think deeply about this topic?"  If not, you need to teach an introductory lesson to equip them with that knowledge.  (You can also blend this during class with interactive direct instruction in which you teach them some facts and then ask them to analyze something with them.). Ask yourself "How am I going to require my students to use this knowledge?"  If it is going to be plug it into one equation, it is likely worth putting it on a list.  If it is going to be use for problem solving the rest of the semester, it is worth having them memorize it.  As we have seen with the recent reading controversies, students needed to understand how words work before we set them loose on reading books on their own.  

This requires more thought than the mental shortcut of getting them to the highest levels of the pyramids, but it provides for better learning because you are giving students what they actually need.

Notes from Research Ed Denver

I am at the Rocky Mountain Mind, Brain and Education conference put on by Research Ed in Denver.  These are my raw notes.  They may be mixed with my own thoughts, but they will not be in a coherent form until I have a chance to process them later.  Also, the 3:30 session will be missing because I am speaking during that session!  If you want notes for that, you can got my website, thelearninghawk.com and find them under the Presentation Resources tab. 

Keynote:  Dr. Jim Heal - Mental Models: Cognitive Keys to Effective Teaching

Book coming out in the spring of next year on this topic.

What do we mean by mental models? 

• A cognitive blueprint for how to do something 
• What does success at this thing look like
• What you draw upon when making decisions in the moment

Mental models are developed in real time and over time.  When a soccer player scans the field (average 150 per game - Messi 680 per game), he is putting together a picture of what the game looks like at that moment.

Teaching is complex - "The only time medicine ever approaches the complexity of an average day for a classroom teacher is an an emergency room during a natural disaster." - Lee Shulman

All techniques can be done at on a spectrum of fidelity.  Are you doing retrieval practice in a low resolution way or a high resolution way?  Low resolution is just carrying it out.  High resolution is knowing what you are doing, but also how and why you are doing it on a deep level.

Schema Theory - a network of interrelated concepts of ideas that we make more robust and useful over time.  Example: A four legged creature that is furry and goes woof approaches.  Your mind accesses your schema of things that fit into those categories and determine it has more dogginess than other things. Your schema then informs your response.  If your schema of dogs includes fear, you will run away.  If it includes love, you will pet the dog.  

Don't skip from the simple to the complex too quickly.

Students can't build a schema for something if they have no point of reference or background knowledge or if it is presented in a distracting way.  There is a difference between understanding the words and understanding what the words mean in a specific context.  You have to know enough to access what you need to access.  For example: if you didn't grow up watching baseball, it may feel like this.  With missing items in your schema, you are reading a redacted document, but because our minds are wired to make meaning, we fill in with guesses about what we think we are seeing.  This corrupts the schema for the future.  

The less a student knows, the harder it is to acquire more knowledge.  The new knowledge MUST fit meaningfully in what you already know.  

Chess board study - Three groups of people (Chess masters, quite good chess players, and chess novices) were shown a collection of chess boards in mid game and asked to remember the placement of the pieces.  The chess masters were able to remember significantly more than the other two groups.  Then, the boards were changed to a random arrangement, not like something that would happen in actual game play.  Then, all of the groups remembered the same low amount.  In the first scenario, people with more knowledge remembered because they weren't seeing pieces, they were seeing something with meaning.  Once it had no meaning, prior knowledge didn't help.

Even the stories we grow up with influence our schema.  A scenario was presented about a treasure hunter going into a cave with many branched tunnels who had nothing with him but a flashlight and a bag.  Students were asked to predict what was the best way for him to make sure he didn't get lost on the way out.  American students correctly answered 75% of the time (vs. 25% of Chinese students) because they had grown up with the story of Hansel and Gretel.  When a scenario was presented with a corresponding Chinese fairy tale, the numbers reversed.  

How do we expect students to think?    Do we expect them to have the parts of the knowledge they need to make meaningful and robust connections?  What do we do if they don't?  We can change the way a question is asked to reduce the cognitive load required to make meaningful connections (or have them memorize the fundamentals ahead of time).

If you want them to move from their current state to the desired state, you must given them the information so they can guess and check along the way.  Otherwise, you aren't teaching; you are giving them a riddle without hope of an answer.

How do we ensure they activate the right kinds of prior knowledge for the content we are teaching?  It's not guaranteed in your classroom, which is why you need a sophisticated mental model for teaching.

Rock Climber Model - Prior knowledge is the foot hold.  New knowledge is the handhold.  Teachers bridge that gap.  When climbing, the handhold becomes the new foothold.  This is also true in learning.

1. Where do I want my students to end up?
1. Do this with precision by doing the activities you want them to do and see what is important about it.
2. Where are they starting from?
1. What can I reliably assume my students already know that is relevant?
3. How do I bridge the gap?
1. Make analogies or connections from what they already know to your objective.  What is the underlying structure you can reveal even if the surface features are different?  (Division vs. dealing cards equally). You aren't "meeting them where they are at" by making it cool or fun but by making an actual deep connection between something they know.  One is the outward illusion of relevance and the other is connecting new knowledge to prior knowledge.
4. How can I avoid pitfalls and slips along the way?
1. Make sure your connections are accurate and relevant.

The book will have multiple mental models.  The rock climber is just one of them.  

Session 1:  Andrew Watson - Thinking Creates Learning, The Essentials of Working Memory

Learning happens inside the human mind, so educators have a lot ot learn from those who study mental functions.

"Memory is the residue of thought." - Dan Willingham 

You cannot say, "Research says this, and therefore you must . . ."  What you can say is "Research found these principles. Use them to inform your decision making about your practice."

Working memory - A temporary system that selects, holds, reorganizes, and combines information from many sources.

Pulling from multiple streams of informations (alphabetizing the days of the week means pulling up the days, the order of the alphabet, and English spellings) requires a lot of working memory just to select and hold before you even get to reorganizing.

Students using working memory ALL of the time.  Very few things (only things that are firmly in long term memory with no other demand) don't require it.

Working memory is obvious crucial, but it is also limited and cannot be increased with training (the only thing that makes it bigger is aging from 4 to early 20s).  Play Lumosity games for enjoyment, but don't think it will increase your working memory; they were fine for false claims.  Teachers must be relentless about managing working memory demands.

Ask questions:

1. Can I predict working memory overload before it happens?  If so, I can prevent some.
2. Can I recognize working memory overload while it happens?  If so, I can address it in real time.

Session 2: Helen Reynolds - Three Research-informed Strategies that have been Game-changers in My Classroom

The Big Picture - The Brain and the Landscape

• Talking to students about their brains.  Help them to understand learning in a way they can apply.
• Advance organizers - Help students know where they are going.  Map out the terrain so the student can see it the way you see it.  Hang the "objectives" in the room, but not in the curriculum language - in language that helps them understand why they are doing what they are doing.

Breaking it Down - Explicit Instruction

• Explicit instruction is not lecturing because you are interacting with students and pausing to check for understanding all of the time.  Rosenshine and Sweller provide good research on why these work.
• Explicit instruction creates fewer working memory demands than other forms of instruction.
• Whiteboards for brain dumping, turn and talk, teacher organizes what they are producing on the board and asked them to consider why she organized it the way she did.
• Chunking into small steps
• I do/we do/you do guided practice
• Novices are NOT little experts
• Stop to ask questions

Building it Up - Spaced Retrieval Practice

• Retrieval practice - Pulling it out of your brain helps you to "cement it" in your brain.
• Shed Loads of Practice (SLOP)
• Weekly retrieval quizzes - low stakes (either don't grade it all or let them correct it for 100%) with questions that are spaced over time.

Be explicit about what you are doing, why you are doing it that way, what you are thinking while you are doing it.

Panel Discussion - Using the Science of Learning for Equity

First, we have to want to reach every single student.  We must design for the students at the margins.

The way you were taught is not necessarily the best way to teach.  Find out about the science of learning so you aren't perpetuating errors from the past.  (Personal note:  That doesn't mean you have to throw out things just because they are traditional.  It means do the work to find out why things work so you can choose from old and new thoughtfully.)

Start your lesson plans from the standpoint of those who need the most support rather than adding them on after your "normal" plan.

You have to show up and learn what works.  It's a moral imperative.  

If you are sharing research, you have to find digestible books and articles.  Not every researcher is a writer, and most people aren't trained in interpreting scientific studies.  Find authors that people will be wiling to read.  (I suggest Daniel Willingham, Andrew Watson, Barbara Oakley, John Almarode, Bradley Busch, and Peps McCrea.)

This should not be an initiative.  It should be the heart of what we do.

Invite policy makers into your schools and classrooms.  They need to see what works and what doesn't.  Amplify the stories of your students.  Advocate for what works publicly.  

Session 3: Mary Fran Park - Transforming Student Learning - Strategies from the book Making It Stick

You have to be careful what you assume they know.  Teach the essential basics at the beginning of the year.

Make It Stick:  The Science of Successful Learning by Brown, Roediger, and McDanil

Illusion of Knowing

• Memorizing, Rereading, highlighting the book, and rewriting notes are ineffective strategies.  They lead to the illusion of mastery, but it is a poor example of metacognition.
• Retrieval practice allows them to check their own knowledge and reinforces, moving things from short term to long term memory.
• Turn think, pair, share into write, pair, share.  If they start talking right away, they haven't taken time to think.
• Low or no stakes quizzes.  Call it something else if it helps, but you must have them retrieve.
• Shuffle your flashcards for spacing and interleaving
• Distribute practice to give time for myelenation.
• IF you don't allow for some forgetting, they won't move it into long term memory.
• One page summaries - Having them translate it into a picture form makes them have to analyze and summarize

Session 4:  Paige Jennings - Cognitive Load Theory: What Every Educator Should Know

Dylan William says Cognitive Load Theory is the single most important thing any classroom teacher can understand.

Tapping into the already existing schema (accessing prior knowledge) decereases cognitive load.

Cognitive Load Theory is an information processing model in three parts

1. Sensory memory - what we take in
2. Working Memory - holding onto what we are paying attention to in the moment
3. Long Term Memory - Encode, retrieve to strengthen encoding

When you start to forget, you go through retrieval practice and "interrupt the forgetting."

Recommended Making It Stick

Reduce Extraneous Load - Consider how many other things may be in a student's working memory than just your content.  This is extraneous load.  It can come from room decorations, hunger, anger, the crush one of your students has on another, or instructions with two many steps.

Intrinsic Load - These are things we can manage, not eliminate.  Explicit (direct) instruction puts less demand on working memory.  Worked examples, chunking, and graphic organizers can help if used well.

Germane Load - This is the load you want.  It is one connects to your learning.  It's in your long term memory and giving your working memory a break.  Retrieval, spacing, interleaving, elaborative interrogation, and problem solving will help make the content stick.

Feedback is Essential - for Everything

If you are around my age, you might remember getting assigned all of the odd problems in a math book.  Why odd?  Because, in the appendix, you would find the answers to the odd problems.  Not the solutions, mind you, just the final answers.  

And, that was better than nothing, but if you got the problem wrong, it didn't really help you much with knowing what you did wrong or how to do it better in the future.  It wasn't really feedback.

Since feedback is valuable, we should define it.  Like a lot of educational terms, it sort of depends on who you ask.  Let's look at a few.

• "Feedback is a game plan for getting better.” - Todd Zakrajsek, book The New Science of Learning,
• "Feedback answers the questions Where am I going? How am I going? What do I do next?" - John Hattie and Helen Timperley, article “The Power of Feedback,” in the Review of Educational Research
• "Feedback and adjustment means additional tries increase accuracy.” - Kevin Washburn, Uprise

There are other definitions, but they all have one thing in common: Feedback isn't just telling you what you did wrong. It's tell you how to improve.

Feedback is cyclical and builds into a whole that is greater than the sum its parts. Think about feedback from a microphone and speaker that are improperly positioned. Sound coming out of a speaker enters the microphone, comes out of a speaker combined with additional sounds, and goes back into the microphone again. That combination produces the awful sound we have all heard in a conference, concert, or church service. In education, we should get a more pleasant result, but the effect is still a combination of input and output building on each other for a different result.

Think about non-academic forms of learning - sports, weightlifting, doing chores, trade jobs, etc. A basketball coach explicitly teaches his players how to properly shoot a free throw, assesses their performance while they practice it multiple times, and provides feedback for improvement.  Personal trainers show their client proper squat form or how to execute an effective hammer curl and then stand by and provide feedback while they do it.  An apprentice mechanic is carefully taught and monitored by a mentor who provides feedback along the way, so he doesn't destroy someone's car.  Students of cosmetology are first taught principles and then practice on wigs with detailed feedback before being allowed to apply a pair of scissors to the hair of a human client; and even then, they are closely watched by an instructor and provided with feedback throughout the process. 

Teachers, this means "grading" homework. I don't mean it has to actually have a score in the gradebook, but it means they can't just get credit for doing it. You may not be able to do that with every problem, so you might need to select a couple of critical ones from each assignment. It might mean providing the key and allowing them to check it themselves or going over it in a full class. It will mean doing more than putting a line through a wrong answer on a quiz. That may look different for you than it does for me, but it has to be more than "this is wrong;" it must include a way to be right in the future.

I can hear you saying, "But that takes a lot of time." Yes, it does. And I know the pressures of trying to fit everything in by the end of the year. But the heart of teaching is student learning and improvement, so it is worth eliminating something else to fit in proper feedback. After all, it doesn't matter how much of the curriculum you "cover" if they aren't getting what you are covering. We all have something we could probably leave out if we have to. Effective feedback is worth making that decision for.

If you want to know more about doing feedback well, this website has some good advice.

You may not be a school teacher, but if you are teaching anyone anything, take the time to give feedback to show them how to improve.