Learning and the Brain Notes Spring 2025 - Sunday

 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: Leading with Learning in Mind: Putting the "Education" in Educational Leadership by Jim Heal

(Personal Note: If you ever have a chance to hear Jim Heal, take advantage of it.  He is delightful.  This is the 3rd time I've gotten to hear him since November, and I couldn't be happier about it.)

Evolving Role of Leaders in Education

• What have we expected teachers to know and be able to do over time?
• 150 years ago, we expected them to know content and pedagogy.  50 years ago, we expected them to have pedagogy and behavior management. Then we started expecting tech, social emotional and became too interested in what Finland is doing.  (Personal note: In the 25 years I have taught, I have seen culture shift to making teachers simultaneously the source of and solution to all of society's ills, but the preparation for teachers in college is still about pedagogy.)
• Very few of the standards for teachers are related to the science of learning.  We are teaching the donut, but the science of learning is the hole.  We need to put the donut hole back into the donut.
• Do we have a mental model of what effective instruction looks like?
• How many of your daily activities are administrative vs. educational?
• Why does it matter that educational leaders ground their decisions in an understanding of how learning happens?  The way we frame a problem shapes the way we address it.
• Why do we used standardized tests? Administrative framing says it allows us to work ithing the system to get students into top colleges.  Educative framing says it helps us ot align learning goals and instruction to better support student learning.  
• If you get the educative framing right, you'll automatically get the administrative outcomes.

What Do We Mean by the Science of Learning?

• A set of principles representing out best understanding of how people learn.
• Backed by evidence
• Applicable to instructional context.
• There is a pendulum swing between overcomplicating or oversimplifying pedagogy in relation to the evidence.  Overcomplicating leads to collapse under the weight of the details.  Oversimplifying leads to no one really knowing if they are applying evidence based practices because everyone thinks they are.

How do we Manage Cognitive Load?

• We can't learn what we don't attend to.
• Our long term memory is infinite, but our working memory is limited. We have an almost unlimited ability to store things but a limited ability to put it into storage.  (Personal note:  I think this is a feature not a bug.  We are designed with a slow down mechanism to prevent us from trying to do everything everywhere all at once.)
• Thought experiment:  Try to mentally alphabetize the days of the week (difficult but doable).  Try to do it with months of the year (overloads your working memory).
• Discovery learning massively overloads students' working memory.  They cannot hold that much new information in mind and work with it at the same time. 
• We have thrown massive amounts of money at discovery learning without positive results.
• Applying the principles of cognitive science allows for gradual and strategic introduction of new practices that will be effective without taxing teacher's cognitive load.

How Do We Activate Prior Knowledge?

• The best way to manage load is to build their schema on content over time.
• Having content knowledge is required for reading comprehension.  You cannot give an American child a story about cricket and expect them to remember much.  It's not because they have poor reading skills or comprehension skills.  It's because they don't know anything about the passage they are reading.  
• Without prior knowledge we are presenting students with a redacted view of the content.
• New knowledge needs a place to live within the prior knowledge.  As the puzzle evolves, you are able to see a rich picture and find the beauty in what you are learning.  
• As you become more expert at something, everything you learn comes in not only in isolation but in connection with other things you know that are related, it connects ideas and allows innovation.
• Hansel and Gretel example - solving a riddle in which a path must be marked is easier to figure out if your grow up with this fairy tale than it is if you didn’t.  
• Activate what is relevant and accurate.  Make schema explicit by giving them an opportunity to show what sense they are making of the content. Meet learners where they are.

Implications for Teachers and Leaders

• Knowing how to teach by understanding how students learn is a matter of instructional equity.
• Context matters.  Just because something worked in another school doesn't mean it will work in yours.
• We can't assume what other people (students, colleagues, administrators) know and don't know.
• Make everything you do explicit.

Keynote Address II: Powerful Teaching: Practical Tips to Unleash Learning in Your Classroom by Pooja Agarwal

(Personal Note:  Pooja is another one of those names that is met with awe by people in the evidence based education world.  She was presenting a session at the 2018 conference, but that was back before I knew who she was, so I didn't see her that time.  I'm so glad to get to rectify that today.)

retrievalpractice.org/latb 

She invited us not to take notes, but I take them for you to get them, so I'm disobeying right now.

Cramming "works" if all you care about is the test itself.  It doesn't result in long term learning. You forget all of it because it is all input and no retrieval.

Encoding:  Getting the information into our heads happens in a lot of ways.  We typically focus on that, and it matters.  We obviously need to do it, but . . . 

We need to spend more time getting information out of our students heads because that is how we remember it.  If we only encode, they forget.  If we encode and then give opportunities to retrieve, we get better encoding.

Four minute brain dump (Personal note:  My students thought this was a gross way to put it, so we called it "Brain Bomb" in my class. I used this in my study skills class frequently.  Students hated doing it, but it does work.). I like the four minute timer.  Putting here so I can find it again.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEs2zUCrALI 

Forgetting is completely normal.  If we didn't forget things, there would be too much in our minds.  Forgetting is important for learning because it helps us prune what we need from what we don't.  Pruning a plant helps them grow, not just more, but better.

We have focused a lot on what you should know and do.  Let's talk about what you already know and do.

You already review.  Tweak it to retrieve.  

• Instead of saying "this is what we did yesterday," ask them, "What did we do yesterday?" 
• It doesn't have to be a full brain dump; you can ask them to retrieve two things.  
• Entrance tickets or exit tickets
• What did you learn yesterday?
• Tweak Think Pair Share to put more time on Think.  Maybe, even change it to Write Pair Share

You know your content best.  Apply your judgment to applying strategies to your content area.  A brain dump might not work well for AP Calculus, but another technique might.

You don't have to take up more prep time or class time.  You can adjust things you are already doing to make them more retrieval based.  You aren't meant to grade it because it is not assessment.  Doing it with paper and pencil gets around the AI issues.

An AI can't really answer these prompts:

What would you like to remember about this topic, and why is it important to you? 

What is what one thing I didn't ask you about that you learned

What is a Question you have about this topic that you would like to discuss during class?

Blocking and Interleaving

Blocking is easier to implement, but interleaving results in more learning.  Students don't love it because it is harder.

• Mix up similar concepts
• Mix up the order of steps
• Shuffle flashcards
• Start with questions about the middle of the story.

retrievalpratice.org/scientists for contacts

Session: Understanding the Teen Brain: Multitasking, Memory, Sleep, and Motivation by Bradley Busch

(Personal Note:  Bradley Busch twice in one weekend?!?!  How is this my life?)

There is so much amazing research out there, but teachers have a hard time accessing it because of paywalls and jargon.  Inner Drive exists to bridge that gap.

Why do teenage brains seems so mysterious to us.  Whey do the decisions they make seems so crazy to us.

Impulse Control - the ability to delay gratification

Sensation Seeking - the desire to experience things RIGHT NOW

The reason teaching is so hard is that the gap between those things doesn't start to close until after high school.  When a student comes back to visit, and you think "Wow, you seem like a different person," it's because they literally are.

Multi-tasking:  

Your brain is terrible at multi-tasking.  What you are actually doing is task switching, which takes time, effort, and energy, resulting in reduced performance.  Fact:  You cannot conscious action two things at once.  People who have had access to phones since birth have tricked themselves into believing that it enables them to multitask.  If accuracy matters, do on thing first; finish it; then do another. The detrimental impact of phones on learning in schools is dramatic.  

Perham and Currie (2014) Students believe music will help them study, but the research does not back them up.  The study compared students who studied in silence, students who listened to music of their choice, students who listened to music they didn't like, and students who listened to music with no lyrics (heavy metal instrumental).

All sound interferes, lyrics interfere the most. (Exception: For students with ADHD, white noise can be beneficial.)

Emotions and Stress:

The teenage brain isn't great at recognizing emotions.  Giving them "the look" might not be effective for that reason.  

We sometimes identify sticks and hoses as a snake because we are always on the lookout for threats.  Negativity gave us a better chance of survival, but we developed a "better safe than sorry" glitch.  Students catastrophize just before exams because their brains are wired to protect themselves with negative thinking.

Peer Pressure and Decision Making:  Students and adults were put in a pych lab and played a car driving video game.  In the game, they encounter traffic lights.  You might get a better score for faster time or you might get crashed into.  When adults are alone, they take slightly fewer risks than if they are with others.  Teenagers, on their own, make the same number of risky decisions as adults on their own.  In the company of other teenagers, they made almost twice as many risky decisions.  Teenagers have a different calculation of risk.  The risk of smoking is lung cancer, but teenagers might view the risk of not smoking (social isolation) to be a bigger risk.

The Bandwagon Effect:  Let's just go with the group because they have probably made a good decision.  it's easier to go with the flow, and also, from an evolutionary standpoint, separating yourself from the group has been historically dangerous. 

People will conform to social norms whether it makes sense or not. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6kWygqR0L8).  Don't send messages that say a lot of people are doing something wrong because it makes people feel more permitted to do it even when you are trying to prevent it.  Don't publicly criticize bad behavior; publicly praise good behavior. (98% of people obey the speed limit.  75% of people re-use your towel. 18 of you are following instructions. Thank you to the 20 of you who turned the paper in on time.)

Studying

Future deadlines or test dates are so far in the future that the teenage brain views it as a fictional foreign land there is no point in even thinking about.  (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4P785j15Tzk). 

The planning fallacy - we are bad at estimating how long something will take to complete, so we start it too late.

Dumlosky et al (2013) - The most common ways students tend to study (re-read), quizzing, highlighting, and doing a little frequent studying - Re-reading and highlighting were the least effective by a mile.  Retrieval and spacing are the most effective.  Students are unlikely to do spacing when they don't have much time, and because they are bad at estimating how long it takes, they are always short on time. 

They don't need to do more work; they just need to start it earlier.

Sleep

The average teenager gets about 6 hours of sleep per night. When asked how much sleep they think they need, they say 8 hours, but the reality is they need is about 9 and a half hours.  They operate on about a thousand hours of sleep deficit per year, which impacts their learning.  They also become sleepy at different times than adults do because of melatonin rhythm differences.  Adults at about 9PM, teens at about 11PM.

REM sleep, which refreshes your brain, happens between the 7th and 9th hour of sleep. Students who get seven hours may be physically fine, but they will have less optimal brain performance.  They are 40% less efficient at learning and recalling.  All nighters are detrimental. Any benefit you may get from the extra study is cancelled out by the reduced performance. (van der Helm and Walker (2009)

Final Keynote: How Learning Works: How Schools Should Work by John Almarode

(Personal Note: I first met John at the 2019 Learning and the Brain conference. I came home, found him on Twitter, and badgered him into being friends with me.  He is one of the people who has helped me most in the efforts I am making now, and I am grateful to call him my friend.  There could be no better way to end this conference than by having John wrap everything up.  There will be few notes here as I will likely just be absorbed in the presentation.)

In a study of many types of learning strategies, no matter where students started, their rate of growth was suprisingly consistent.  (In other words, not only do we all learn in remarkably similar ways (not uniquely or in learning styles), but we all seem to learn at the same rate.  There are no fast and slow learners.  

What matters is the amount of opportunities we give students to learn.

Research tells us the potential of a particular influence to impact student learning.  It is also context dependent, so the impact depends on implementation.  

• We should strive to build learners who know what to do when they don't know what to do and we aren't their teacher anymore. What does it mean to be a learner in your classroom? Does your practice match your answer to that question? Are you doing the things that promote what you say you value?  Intentional design of the learning experience has a 0.95 effect size.  The amount adults talk WITH children correlates with their linguistic, cognitive and academic abilities. Do we give them appropriate productive struggle.  Seeking help from peers has an effect size of 0.68!
• Know Your Impact - How do you know what you are doing is effective?  Your pedagogy must be evidence based (visible), not faith based (meaning you just hope it works). You have to check for understanding.  (A chef has to taste the soup frequently during the cooking process long before it goes out to the customer.). The very act of taking a formative assessment is beneficial if students have to select, organize, and integrate new learning.  
• Climate first, Learning second, Achievement third The actions you take send a message.  Be careful to send the message you intend to.  Solving one problem might create a climate issue if you aren't careful about how it is done. Is there a shared understanding aout what makes a good teacher?  Is there a high degree of relational trust amongst staff? Are teachers prepared to take risks and ask for help? Are decisions evidence based and research informed? Do teachers use data to paln learning experiences and next steps?
• Collective Responsibility Positive interdependence (If you don't succeed, we don't succeed.  If I don't succeed, we don't succeed), cultural inclusiveness, collective responsibility (a shared commitment ot each student's success, not just the ones on your roster) has an effect size of 1.01.  That's massive! We are such social beings that we had better make it part of the culture of our schools.