Learning and the Brain Notes Spring 2025 - Saturday

These will be raw notes taken in real time and undergoing very little editing.  They will be words from the speaker blended with my own thoughts as I process what is being said.  While I will try to note the difference, I can't promise that will always happen.  Don't hold a speaker responsible for anything I put here.  

Keynote Address I: Creating a Culture of Innovation and Engagement by Thomas C. Murray

"You need to smile and laugh because the work you do is ridiculously challenging."

What is it that you intentionally do to build the culture where you work?

Are you making the situation better or adding to the cycle of negativity?  When you walk into the faculty

room, do you build the energy up, or do you suck the energy out of it?

Culture is built 30 seconds at a time.  It's the small moments, the quick interactions, the high fives, the greetings, etc. that create the environment of your school.  You are sharing with people that you love. Academic standards are imperative, but it's the human side of the work that matters most.  Also, organizations with good atmospheres tend to perform better.

Your brain is wired to make connections and that is why it is constantly judging.  It's part of your safety mechanism.  Part of engagement is making connections too.  If you judge and make decisions based on data without understanding someone's story, you can make very wrong decisions. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPsiLi89PQ4 ) 

A key to building culture is having empathy of the hidden stores inside of others.  Don't let your lens get in the way of seeing something differently.

A child's story defines the context in which his or her learning occurs.  High expectations are needed for EVERY child, but some need more support to reach those expectations.  

You can be in the exact same place at the exact same time and have two very different experiences based on your past (an adult and a child on a roller coaster may be having very different experiences).  Fear vs. joy makes the experience different. 

Communication chalenges 

• Curse of knowledge - An expert has trouble communicating with non-experts in their field because they forget that the thing that seems simple to them do not seem simple to others. They assume knowledge the listener doesn't have, so they skip steps the learner needs.  
• Absorbing something different from what you take in from your environment.  You can see or hear the same things, but interpret it differently.  You can get something from non-verbal communication that wasn't intended.  Your brain makes things up to try to make sense of the world, but it isn't always accurate. (https://www.tiktok.com/@therockfm/video/7278009993918532871?lang=en)
• Priming - You get more out of things you are prepared to focus on.  You are more prone to recognize something you expect to see. (Personal experience:  I never knew how many people drove Mini Coopers until I started driving one.  All of the sudden, they were everywhere.) "We get more of what we are looking for."

Maintaining poise when things are messy.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXuc7SAyk2s 

Remind yourself of the impact you get to have.  Your legacy matters. The greatest environments only happen when you are intentional about it.  The greatest impact is only positive when you are intentional about it.

"Your fingerprints of impact will remain in the people that you serve for generations to come."

Keynote Address II: Timeless Principles for Learning, AI, and Emerging Technologies in Education by George Couros with Katie Martin

Started with George Couros

"You can fight change, adapt to change, embrace change, create change, or lead change.  No matter your choice, it's not going away."

Oh, my!  He just said my name.  That's fun and terrifying simultaenously.

Credit to the AV team - they are killing it.  He's right!  I've noticed that at every conference I have been to.

We all say kids are better at technology than we were at their age, but that's not true.  We had to work harder to operate our technology than kids today have to in order to operate theirs.  Technology isn't hard; developing the habit of using it in meaningful ways is.

What are we doing that couldn't have been done before we did it on the computer?  (Shout out to Laura Warmke for asking that question at GRACE many years ago.)

The world doesn't care how you learned what you know; they care what you can do with it.

"Research and evidence become irrelevant if you don't consider a new context." - Katie Martin

Nothing is more true than this.  Every person sitting in this room right now, someone hates you.  That's just true. 

Technology doesn't make us dumber.  How we choose to use it does.

"Risk is moving from a comfortable average in a pursuit of an unknown better." 

(Personal note: Inertia is powerful.)

If you are doing something in your classroom that people did 100 years ago, and it is working for your kids, absolutely keep doing them.  Don't just throw it out because it is old.  BUT if it isn't working, do something new.  Recognize that you are bound to make mistakes with new things with technology (like the time he had his students search for the band Bare Naked Ladies).

Switch to Katie Martin

Do students leave my classroom more curious than when they started.  (Personal note:  YES.  This was the primary experience of students in my classroom.)

The smartest people in the world are always curious.  They want to keep learning.  

"Curiosity is a form of wisdom for no one can know all things, but those who are curious know much." - Seneca

Curiosity should keep us from mindlessly turning our brains over to technology.  Even when asking things of Siri or Alexa, the better questions you ask, the better answers you will get.  Teaching students to ask good questions is key.

"AI should be a thought partner, not the thought leader."  (Personal note: Everyone knows how resistant I am to AI and how I won't voluntarily engage with it.  I'm still not sold on the idea that it won't be a net negative in education, so I will have to think about this A LOT more.)

If you think all your students/children care about is getting good grades, check to see if that is all you talk to them about.  Do you ask them about what they have learned or just what grade they got on a test?  Do you ask them learning oriented questions or performance oriented questions?

Kids in a one to one initiative said, "We miss our teachers. They only want us to communicate with them online."  That's not how we were meant to teach with technology.  It should help us engage with and communicate with students more, not less. 

Back to George Couros

We are social creatures.  Don't outsource your human connection.

Screen time isn't the issue.  What are you doing with the screen time?  What are you using it for?

Instead of having ChatGPT write your email response to a parent in a nice way, call the parent on the phone and have a real conversation.  Use the tech to create connections, not replace them or sever them.

As the world becomes more digital, it is crucial that we become more human.  Use the technology to facilitate that.  

Session:  Teacher Quality and Impact: Why It Matters and How to Get More of It by Dylan William

(Personal Note: I've been excited to see Dylan William for a long time.  In the world of evidence based instruction, he's a big deal.  He's one of those names that people almost genuflect when they hear it.  I expect this to be amazing!)

The biggest determining factor to how quickly children learn in the characteristic of students themselves.  

School organization has some impact but far less than we think.

Instructional quality is what we have control over, so let's look at the correlation between teacher quality and student achievement.  Teacher quality has more impact on math than reading because math instruction happens almost exclusively at school while reading instruction may also be happening at home.

Students who have effective teachers perform 400% better than those with ineffective teachers.  What makes an effective teacher effective?  We don't know.  We can see the impact as an average, but we can't identify it in individuals.  It's like dark matter; we know it's out there, but it is hard to find.  It depends on quality of curriculum, class size, time teachers have for planning, content knowledge, resource availability, and skills of the teacher.

Can we do it by removing ineffective teachers?  Likely not.  Some proposals:

• Raise the bar for entry into teaching (SLOW progress could be made)
• Identify better teachers during hiring (How? There is little correlation between education school courses and student achievement.  Observation doesn't seem to show much either since we don't know what we are looking for.)
• Students often give higher ratings to less effective teachers because they rate them well if they are easier and don't necessarily know until much later if they are being better prepared.
• To get even reasonably good data, we would have to observe a teacher multiple times with five different observers for 9 years.  So, that's not happening.  We can't statistically model teacher effectiveness, so trying to remove ineffective teachers at scale is impossible. 
• People are bad at identifying the secret of their own success.
• If you are struggling to recruit anyone, the tools for selecting the best are irrelevant.  You may just be trying to put a sentient adult in the room.

Evidence based is not a category; it is a continuum.  What works will still have a lot of variation based on context.  Things that work in the short term might be harmful in the long term (e.g. Reading Recovery).  Performance is not the same as learning.  Teachers who teach kids in AP classes are often rated higher than those who teacher special needs students whether or not they are better teachers because context can mislead our conclusions.)

Unless you control for variables, effect sizes are meaningless.

More effective curriculum is a cost effective way to improve because bad textbooks cost about the same as good textbooks.

Benchmark testing has lots of fatal flaws - There isn't time to do anything with the results, and the results are too vague for instructional decision making. Profile scores are completely useless.

Help teachers become coaches of their own colleagues rather than hiring instructional coaches.  They can be across content. PD doesn't need to be course specific.  

Don't try to figure out who the good teachers are.  Say instead, "No matter how good you are, we can all get better."

In class formative assessment is the best way to improve teaching.  It costs little and takes very little of the teacher's time to train for and implement because it is so simple.

Panel Discussion: Creating a Science of Teaching with Dr. David Daniel, Daniel Willingham, Carl Hendrick, Shana Carpenter, and Dylan William

Let me just say that if you are going to put together a panel, these are the people you want on it.

Q:  Do we need a science of teaching?  

A:  Yes.  (Also, yes, but we may not get one because there is too much craft involved for it to have scientific certainty.)

Pushback:  Most people have a wrong idea about what science is.  It is more about probabilities than certainties.  We also have to consider context because what works on Tuesday at 9AM doesn't always work on Thursday at 3PM.  Teaching may not be scientific because it is so complicated.  The changes may not be based on measurable and predictable things.  It won't have the precision of physics, but it may still be scientific in reaching high probabilities.

Q:  Where do we start?

A:  Subject specific application - Retrieval practice will look different in six year old spelling lessons that it does it high school discussion of Othello. 

Being able to characterize classrooms is essential, and we don't currently have a theoretical vocabulary for that. Characterizing the content matters too.

Classrooms are not labs; they aren't pristine environments. The principles of the lab are valid, but they have to be adapted to work in the field.  Start with the most predictable things that are most likely to work with adaptation. 

If you don't know how learning works then anything can look like it is working.  We have to start with the science of learning to know how to make a science of teaching.

Q: How can a teacher prove what they are doing works?

A:  Self reflection and assessment should be a requirement of teachers.  They don't necessarily need to be able to create their own data, but they need to be able to have a framework for saying whether it works.  It's hard to be excellent if you don't know what it looks like.  We need to show teachers what it looks like so they aren't trying to re-create things for themselves.

Session:  Lessons Learned: What Cognitive Scientists Around the World Say About the Science of Learning by Bradley Busch

(Personal Note: One of the best books a teacher can own is The Science of Learning: 99 Studies Every Teacher Should Know.  I've been following him on Twitter ever since I picked it up.  I got to meet him last night, and he is delightful.)

Topics to be Addressed:  Questions, Answers, Feedback, and Powerpoint

Questions:  We tend to make retrieval too easy.  Students love easy questions because they are fun and you can feel good about yourself.  They rate them a the most effective way to improve learning because they confuse getting everything right with learning.  The reality is that they result in less learning.  The sweet spot is difficult enough to make the brain have to work to get the answer, but not so hard that you have too low of a success rate.

Order of difficulty.  Would it work better to start with easy questions and go to hard ones or do it the other way around?  Hard questions first results in a higher drop out rate (students giving up on answering at all). Easy questions first results in getting a higher percentage of the questions correct.  

Personal note:  I'm having a little trouble paying full attention because I am getting nervous about my own presentation, which is in an hour.

Answers: Eager students, those who participate both vocally and in silent engagement perform very well.  Chatty students, those with high vocal participation but low silent engagement are next.  Diligent students, those who engage silently but not vocally are second lowest.  Aloof and disconnected students, those who don't participate either way (crickets), are obviously the worst performers.  We must prompt to student frequently to participate verbally.

To maximize cognitive engagement:  Students need to respond verbally frequently, but they should be given time to process and think first.  If it is all verbal participation but low thinking time, it will sound good but the learning will be shallow.  They need to be thinking and verbally participating.

How can we get more people to both think hard and participate?  Classes with high levels of cold calling (the teacher selecting students to answer) results in more voluntary answering by a high amount.  We think cold calling will cause more stress for shy students, but by not cold calling, we may reinforce a student's fear of answering. We may inadvertently send the message, "You're right. You are not the kind of person who should answer." Self selection only benefits those with the confidence to answer, so the achievement gap widens.  Collaborate, loving cold calling creates an invitation to join the discussion a deliberate way.  It creates a sense of belonging.

Cold calling done well:

• Ask the question
• Pause for a few of seconds (average now is 0.7s)
• Say the student's name

After 3 seconds, the quantity and quality of answers improve and the number of "idk" answers drops.  

Why do we tend to rush?  Action bias, good intentions, low impulse control, curse of expertise, and the misconception that good learning looks snappy.

Feedback Nothing accelerates student learning more than high quality feedback, but 1/3 of our feedback hinders their learning because we aren't doing it well.  When feedback and grades are given simultaneously, learning was hindered.  When feedback was given first and grades given a couple of days later, the feedback was more likely to be read and more effective.  This had an even bigger impact when done consistently over time.  

Personal note:  I have to go get set up for my talk now, so I can't take notes on the end of this awesome session.

How Will I Know What They’re Really Learning? Improving Instruction Through Formative Assessment by Beth Hawks

This is my presentation.  I can't take notes on it while I am presenting.  My slides are on my website.  Go to www.thelearninghawk.com and download freely.

Keynote III: How Learning Happens: What Teachers Need to Know by Carl Hendrick

Carl Hendrick is focused on bridging the gap between research and practice.  

The Science of Learning: A Brief Overview

• Working memory doesn't work very well.  It's limited in load and time duration.  Asking kids to hold lots of pieces and work with them simultaneously in active consciousness.  The more robust their long term memory is, the better they will be able to process.
• Ebbinghaus was interested in how long we can remember things, but we have misused the forgetting curve because he used 3 letter nonsense words.  We don't learn that.  We learn things in relationship to each other.
• Cognitive load = task demand / available resources
• When we talk about meaningful learning, we talk about connecting the dots.  That's difficult to do if you don't have any dots.  We talk about critical thinking, but we have to give them something to think with and about.
• The most important single factor in what a student learns is what they already know.  Teach accordingly.
• Motivation might lead to achievement.  Achievement ALWAYS leads to motivation.  Getting a small taste of success makes them want more and then it is cumulative.  Once they think, "I can do this," they want to do more.
• Growth mindset is an important way to think about motivation and intelligence, but it is being reduced to a poster in schools.  Neils Bohr had a horseshoe hanging above his door.  He said, "I don't believe in it, but I hear that it works whether you believe in it or not."  That's how we treat growth mindset.
• 
  Skills are domain specific. We can't teach "critical thinking."  We have to give them something to think critically about.  Knowing the definition of something doesn't mean you know how to use the word.  

There is an interaction between knowledge and understanding.  Knowledge without understanding leads to nonsense.  Understanding without knowledge isn't possible.

We are bad at knowing what works.  Students say things like, "I learn better when I . . ." while the evidence is very much to the contrary.

We have an extraordinary amount of evidence that shows what things work, but little of it is carried out in classrooms.  It is done in highly controlled lab environments while our classrooms are anything but highly controlled environments (scientifically controlled - meaning isolating variables).

We aren't communicating this evidence to teachers as evidenced by the fact that 90% of them still believe students learn best when taught through their preferred learning styles.  Imagine if you found out that 9 out of 10 brain surgeons believed in blood letting or healing crystals.

Where do teachers get these wrong ideas?  Most of them learned it in education school or at an inservice training.  Only 21% of education departments are teaching cognitive science.  

The science of learning isn't painting by numbers.  It's about empowering teachers to make decisions in their classrooms.  It's pointillism because each of those tiny decisions add up to a detailed exquisite whole.

The Semmelweis Reflex - The tendency to reject new evidence or new knowledge because it contradicts established norms. (He asked young obstetricians to wash their hands between patients. Fewer women died after childbirth.  The medical community was outraged. Older doctors said, "Doctors are gentlemen and a gentleman's hands are clean.")

Be responsive to the kids in front of you.  Be authentic with them (Mr. Sandberg).  Be passionate with them about your content (Mr. Watkins).

Keynote IV: Enhancing Learning Through "Pretrieval": Why It is Useful to Ask Students Questions Before They Learn by Shana Carpenter

(Personal Note: There were two options for this session.  I didn't know either name, so I asked two of my friends which one I should attend.  One of the friends said "Shana is a rockstar," and the other said, "RUN, don't walk, to see Shana.")

You don't remember minor details (what color shirt someone had on, what day of the week something happened on, what you had to eat for dinner longer than a day ago, etc.) even though those are easy things to remember.  You don't remember the exact layout of a penny even though you have seen them thousands of times.

Not being able to remember something doesn't mean that you didn't learn it.  It means you forgot it.

We only remember a small fraction of what we encounter.

Forgetting is most rapid soon after learning something.  

When you relearn things, it takes far less time than it did the first time because you forgot it, but the ability to learn it has been strengthened.  Education is an act of mitigating forgetting.

Nothing works perfectly.  Why might retrieval practice not work?  If you hadn't learned it in the first place, you had nothing to retrieve.

Pretrieval = Answering questions before you learn something

What effect do pre-questions have on learning?  Do they enhance the benefits of retrieval practice done later?

Studies into pre-questions.  The question was asked and answered, but no feedback was given.  Then, they were given a paragraph about the topic which addressed the answers.  Questions were asked again with both content that had been asked in pre-questions and stuff that was in the paragraph that wasn't in the pre-questions.  The control group was not given pre-questions.  The experimental group did dramatically better on prequestioned information than non-prequestioned information. The control group did significantly better on the non-prequestioned information than the experimental group did.  Does the benefit to prequestioned information come at a cost to the non-prequestioned information?

That study was done with reading passages, so it could be that students were skimming and skipping things that hadn't been covered by pre-questions.  A lecture wouldn't work this way, so Shana Carpenter and her research partners repeated the study with a video rather than a reading segment.  The pre-questions benefitted the experimental group in both the prequestioned material and the non-prequestioned material.

Prequestions benefit learning during lectures. There is no benefit but also no harm to non-prequestioned information.

Prequestions seem to be a lure to their curiosity so they attend to things more during the lesson.