Research Ed St Louis Conference Notes

These are raw notes taken in real time during the presentations. Some of my own thoughts are blended with those of the presenter. I make an effort to separate them, but I am not always able to. So, if you read something you don't like, don't automatically blame the presenter; it might be me your are upset with.

Research Ed Intro - It is evidence based, collaborative, cultural, practical to classroom the classroom, and for educators. The science of learning becomes an art when you are employing it with 28 8th graders who are running around and not listening to you.

Keynote: Inclusive Teaching: How Do You Teach 30 Students at the same Time? by Tom Sherrington

He has been at 53 ResearchEd conferences, starting with the very first one. 

If you don't understand the problem, you have no chance of being part of the solution. Knowing all of the research doesn't make someone a better teacher unless we can translate it into what it looks like in the classroom. 

We need to be certain that every single student in our classrooms is learning. "We aren't just doing our best with most of them." How do we support vulnerable learners? It's not primarily through taking them out to do special interventions. It starts with the way we teach the things from the very start. If you aren't doing that well, the kids with special challenges will suffer the most. 

The stuff that works isn't new and groundbreaking. We don't need to do new stuff. We need to do the stuff we know really, really well. Explicit instruction improves learning outcomes for everyone, especially for those with additional needs. Show them what to do. Don't ask kids who haven't learned yet to guess. Don't be afraid to give the answer to kids who don't know; don't just say, "Have a think about it." Most kids (but especially vulnerable learners) don't have the background knowledge it takes to make that work.

• Break complex things into simpler steps. 
• Use clear and unambiguous language. 
• Explicitly teach vocabulary. 
• Deliberately involve EVERYBODY in answering questions and checking for understanding. 
• Don't just call on the kid with his hand up or make kids compete to answer - plan in a way that you get an answer from the full spectrum - from the shyest child to the most confident child. The quiet kid's ideas don't matter less. The loudest kids ideas aren't always the best ideas.
• You can't say you believe in equity if you are reinforcing the culture of dominance.

An opinion doesn't matter if you don't have enough background knowledge to explain the thing you have an opinion about. We need to know things because it affects our understanding of the planet (Personal note: This is different from "using this in real life."). Knowledge matters to being informed citizens. 

Dan Willingham is the Godfather of evidence informed education and the most quoted at conferences. In Why Don't Students Like School, there is a chapter called "Why do students forget everything I say?" It's where he provides the model of the learning mind. 

Think Pair Share - If you want kids to talk about their learning, assign them a talk partner. It is the most efficient way; three is possible but requires additional structure. You also must have an accountability structure ("I will select people to respond, and it might be you."). Don't skip the "think" step. You choose which partner will go first. Ask them to generate. All students must practice, not just complete. Whatever method you use, always ask everybody rather than asking for volunteers.

In behavior management, communicate, "I love you dearly, but don't mess with me." Signal. Pause. Insist on compliance before moving on. 

Kids don't have poor attention spans; they have human brains. "Some of you, since we started today, have thought about other things. Outrageous." It is your job as a teacher to redirect their attention.

• Is everyone thinking? 
• Is everyone making sense of this?
• How do I know?

The ways NOT to do it - the veneer of learning

• Did that make sense?
• Any questions?
• Everyone good?
• Yeah? Yeah.
• Getting a response from only one student
• Asking them to think when there is nothing to think with (If they don't have the base knowledge, it doesn't matter how long you give them to think.) You can't think with knowledge you don't have.

You may have to create an experience for students who don't have prior knowledge to activate. If they have never seen coastal erosion, you may need to show a video. If they have never seen a curveball, you might need to have a baseball player throw one. Build from concrete to abstract deliberately.

You don't need them to practice getting it wrong (which is what happens when you ask them to speculate). You want them to practice getting it right after you have given them correct information to practice with. You cannot retrieve what you have not encoded.

Session 1 (107) - Does Mastery Learning Still Work? Revisiting Bloom's Claim with New District Data by Emmanuel Del Rio 

Session 2 (100) - Routine, Retrieval, and Relationships by Amber Haven

Session 3 (107) - Masterful Modeling: Making Thinking Visible by AJ Pettway

Session 4 (213) - Behaviour by Design: Designing Scaffolds to Improve Student Decision-Making by Richard Wheadon 

Sessions 5 and 6 (103) were my presentations, so I have no notes for the here. However, if you would like the slides, you can find them in pdf form at my website thelearninghawk.com 

Brain Myths: Part 4 - Learning Styles

This is the big one, y'all. 

It's the myth that will not die. 

Not only to 90% of teachers in surveys espouse this view, the general public views it as a given. It shows up in the most unlikely places, from casual conversations to group fitness trainer certification videos. People have decided what their learning style is and believe they will learn better if they are taught in that style. One problem, 40 years of research have not found any evidence for it. In every study, there is no improvement in performance if the teacher uses the students' preferred style, even if every student in the room believes themselves to be the same style and the teacher exclusively uses it.

So, how did we get here? As with many of the myths we have discussed in this series, it comes from a well meaning person who didn't know the difference between conclusion made from observation and conducting science.

It starts with a New Zealand government official named Neil Flemming. Neil had the role of Chief Faculty Inspector for the country of New Zealand, a job I would love. He traveled the country observing as many classes as possible and making recommendations to the government based on what he observed. 

In observations of 9000 classrooms, he noticed something that isn't exactly groundbreaking. Some teachers were able to reach more students than others. He went to his notes and notice a correlation - those teachers who were more effective taught in multiple modalities, pairing visuals and hand motions with their verbal instruction.

Now, if this led him to contact a researcher and say, "I see something here. Can we test it?" we might be onto something. After all, in any scientific study, 9000 would be an awesome sample size, and he had an interesting hypothesis. But that's not what Neil did. He went straight from proposal to conclusion and made recommendations for policy changes. 

What was his conclusion? Students must have an individual style in which they learn best. He laid out four styles - Visual, Auditory, Reading/Writing, and Tactile/Kinesthetic.  If we start having teachers plan their lesson in all of those styles, we could reach all students. Because he was in a position of advising a national curriculum, it took hold.

To make matters worse, this was all taking place in the 1980s, the beginning of the "everyone is special" era, so people liked the idea that they had their own style. It's also a handy way for parents to blame the teacher when their child wasn't doing their work. "He can't do it because it isn't in his learning style."

We all took learning styles assessments (sometimes in every class period on the first day of school) and "discovered" what our style was. Teachers started wearing themselves out in the attempt to make differentiated lesson plans, which isn't possible. 

As I said earlier, this is one sticky myth. That is, in part, because we still like the idea of being special. But it is also because teachers did, in fact, get results when they added visuals to their instruction.  Herein lies the kernel of truth behind the learning styles myth, a concept known as dual coding.

In all of our brains, there are two pathways for the processing of incoming information - a verbal pathway (words, whether heard or read), and an image pathway. It absolutely helps to pair high quality visuals with verbal instruction, but it is not because some kids are responding to the visuals and others are responding to the sounds. It's because we ALL learn better when the two pathways support each other. 

Teachers, this is good news! You can stop beating yourselves up for your inability to plan the same lesson in three ways. You can start focusing on the creation of one high quality learning experience that includes visuals (including hand motions - they are a way of creating a visual with your hands) that support the instruction. 

NOTE:  Not all visuals are created equal, so it doesn't mean to just throw an image on the screen and call it a day. If I am teaching about velocity, little will be accomplished by adding a picture of a race car to the screen. But a position v. time graph that I can reference and point to while I'm teaching will be useful. A labeled diagram of a flower will do more good than a photo of a daisy. You are looking for visuals that support the content you are teaching.

Teachers, when. you show your work, students learn about themselves. If you say, "I know some of you believe you are visual learners, but in reality we all benefit from a strong visual image because we all have that pathway into our brains, you stand a better chance of having an impact on their learning. 

Brain Myths: Part 3 - Left Brained/Right Brained

I went to school through the 80s and 90s. Then I started teaching at the turn of the century (1998) and continued until 2024. I tell you this so that you will understand how many fads I have seen in education. As sure as the return of bell-bottom jeans as "flared-leg," some of those educations fades have faded and then returned under new names. Fashion has to have fads, or the fashion industry would die as we all just held onto our clothes until they wore out. Education doesn't have to be that way. The education curriculum and product industry needs it to be that way, but actual teaching doesn't. We can find out what works - there's tons of research available - and do those things.

Some of the things that prevent us from doing that are out of our control. We can't prevent administrative initiatives. But there is one that is in our control - our own wrong beliefs. Teachers often hold myths about the brain that prevent them from doing what works. I'm not judging them. Many of these myths were taught to us by trusted sources - some even in our teacher preparation classes or professional development sessions. Additionally, when you start looking into the history of these myths, you find that there was a certain logic at the time they were proposed. As G.K. Chesterton wrote, "All heresy is a truth taught out of proportion," most brain myths begin with a kernel of truth.

I'm developing a presentation for conferences on myths that are popularly held about the brain, looking into how their kernels of truth ballooned into myths and what that means for our classrooms. I have to fit 3-4 myths into a 40 minute presentation (Let's be real; I'll never get to the 4th), so I thought I would do a deeper dive into each of them on the blog. This is the one I see the most online. This is also the one I won't be able to get to in my presentation.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

You have, do doubt, seen at least one of these images roaming around your social media feeds. They claim to be tests of which of your brain hemispheres is dominant based on no more than what you see in an abstract shape. 

They are, of course, just click bait designed to make you comment because no one can see any of the things described in the text. 

These are quite clearly (moving clockwise) an ostrich with bulging eyes, Michael Myers from the Halloween movies, a bird singing to the Lord, and Godzilla. There's nothing else to see here people.   ;^)

But comment people do - a lot. They comment in droves. The popularity of these memes reveal something about us, and it is not which hemisphere is dominant. It's that we desperately want to fit into a category - whether it is a "learning style," and Enneagram score, hemisphere dominance, or which Disney princess Buzz Feed says we are. We like thinking we are special and that we belong to a group of people who are special in the same way as we are. 

I hate to burst your bubble, but it just isn't true. You do not have a dominant hemisphere that changes the way you think about things. If you are creative person, it is not because you think with the right side of your brain more than the left. Likewise, if you are good at math, it is not because you have a stronger left hemisphere. 

Like all of the other myths I've addressed in this series, there is a kernel of truth that got blown all out of proportion. How did we get here?

In the 1940s, neurosurgeons began cutting the corpus callosum as a way of treating some severe forms of epilepsy. For those who may not know, the corpus callosum is the tissue that forms a bridge between the two hemispheres of the brain. It's the red area in this image. It has many purposes, but one of them is communication between the two sides of the brain. The reason it worked for the treatment of some kinds of epilepsy is that those types involved sending a signal from one hemisphere to the other. But this surgery also revealed some things we had not previously known about the responsibilities of each hemisphere.  Because it was the 1940s, however, the tools we have for examining brain activity now did not exist. So, the information they got was painted with a broad brush. 

All of our brain's functions are in some way controlled by parts scattered throughout both hemispheres and the communication between them. The right side of the brain does control more of the areas responsible for spacial awareness and big picture thinking. The left side tends to have a higher hand in perceiving details and language processing. Because they did not yet have MRIs and PET scanners, the nuances of where electrical activity was distributed while doing certain tasks or thinking in certain ways, the very broad understanding became "logic on the left, artsy-ness on the right."

I wasn't able to track down exactly how the idea that you had a dominant hemisphere entered the public consciousness, but I imagine it had some relationship to handedness. If I am right handed, perhaps it stands to reason that I am left-brained. But just because something is logical or reasonable doesn't always mean it is true. 

The truth is that sensory perception, thoughts, memories, emotion, and various types of thinking don't just reside in one particular part of the brain. For example, your ability to recognize the face of a loved one involves several areas across both hemispheres. If you were to damage one of those parts, you might lose some of that functionality, but you wouldn't stop knowing what a face is. Much of your language processing happens on the left side, but I taught a girl whose left hemisphere was removed; with a great deal of work and rehabilitative therapy, she learned to communicate again within months. 

I'm not saying the hemispheres don't matter or even that they don't have separate responsibilities, but I am saying it is more complex and interesting than we give it credit for when we take an online quiz. I am saying that, no matter how artistic you are, you are not "right brained." The ability to do art requires structures from both sides and the ability for those sides to communicate to each other. You may be a math genius, but it does not mean you have a stronger left brain. Math requires both detailed thinking (left) and the ability to fit parts into a whole (right), particularly when it comes to complex problem solving.

Stop trying to fit yourself or your students into a category (more on that next week when we address the myth of learning styles). Appreciate your brain and its 85 million neurons in all of their glorious complexity. 

Brain Myths: Part 2 - We Only Use 10% of Our Brains

I went to school through the 80s and 90s. Then I started teaching at the turn of the century (1998) and continued until 2024. I tell you this so that you will understand how many fads I have seen in education. As sure as the return of bell-bottom jeans as "flared-leg," some of those educations fades have faded and then returned under new names. Fashion has to have fads, or the fashion industry would die as we all just held onto our clothes until they wore out. Education doesn't have to be that way. The education curriculum and product industry needs it to be that way, but actual teaching doesn't. We can find out what works - there's tons of research available - and do those things.

Some of the things that prevent us from doing that are out of our control. We can't prevent administrative initiatives. But there is one that is in our control - our own wrong beliefs. Teachers often hold myths about the brain that prevent them from doing what works. I'm not judging them. Many of these myths were taught to us by trusted sources - some even in our teacher preparation classes or professional development sessions. Additionally, when you start looking into the history of these myths, you find that there was a certain logic at the time they were proposed. As G.K. Chesterton wrote, "All heresy is a truth taught out of proportion," most brain myths begin with a kernel of truth.

I'm developing a presentation for conferences on myths that are popularly held about the brain, looking into how their kernels of truth ballooned into myths and what that means for our classrooms. I have to fit 3-4 myths into a 40 minute presentation (Let's be real; I'll never get to the 4th), so I thought I would do a deeper dive into each of them on the blog. This one remains prevalent in popular culture.

We have all heard someone reference this myth. "Just imagine what we could do," they say, "if we could access the unused parts of our brain." Meanwhile, every part of our brain is busy processing sensory input, interpreting the meaning of smells and sounds, and aiding us in making decisions, all while sending signals to our heart to beat, our diaphragm to contract and relax, and our motor neurons to pick up objects and write things. Our brains work hard, and we talk about them like they are lazy, only doing 10% of their job.

So, how did we come to believe this? It's history is a bit convoluted.

This is William James. He was a Harvard psychology professor at the turn of the 20th century, specializing in prodigies - you know, those people who could perform a symphony at the age of three or could carry out complex math procedures long before most children. In a lecture, he said a fairly obvious fact - "Most people only live up to a fraction of their mental potential." Notice that he did not connect it to neurology and he did not use a number. He was generalizing about the motivation of the general population as compared to the passionate practice of prodigies. But, it planted a seed.

We associate a lot of thing with the roaring twenties - flappers, jazz, parties, and women's suffrage. We likely don't think of self help, but they certainly did. Self help was huge, especially in publishing. Many people read books about how to improve themselves, and some of them latched onto the idea that we had unlimited brain capacity that we weren't tapping into. 

But the book that turned a kernel of truth (we don't live up to our potential) into an epic myth (we are neurologically limited to 10%) was Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People. Nearly everyone in America read this book, and it remains one of the best sellers of all time. It's preface was the first to state the myth in explicit terms, that we only use 10% of our brains. The massive popularity of this book embedded the idea into the population. 

And it seems to be a particularly sticky idea, with movies using this concept as a plot device as recently as 2013 (Lucy - not a recommendation, not even Scarlett Johansson could make it good). This is in spite of concrete evidence from MRIs and PET scans showing that we use our entire brains. There is, in fact, competition for real estate in the brain. If you lost your sight and were taught to read Braille, that data from your fingers would be processed by the area previously used to interpret data from the eyes. There are no abandoned amusement parks in your brain.

So what's the truth? Is your brain limited? Or is there no limit to your brain's potential.

Yes.

Seriously, knowing the ways in which your brain is limited and the ways in which it is not can be super helpful in your classroom.

• Working Memory - The simplest definition of working memory is information and process that are held in active consciousness at any given moment. This is limited. How much varies by individual, but the generally agreed upon average is four. This limitation makes multi-tasking impossible, and it means the presentation of class content must be done carefully and in manageable doses. Knowing that means we can plan for it. Knowing this also means we can reduce cognitive load that is not related to what we are teaching. Classrooms are often a continuous stream of sensory input. While we can't do much about some of that input (the humming of the student next to you or the aroma that is carried by those who just left PE), there are some that we can. We can reduce the number of items on our classroom walls. We can stop playing music in the background of lessons. We can refrain from using scent diffusers. Those are just inputs we don't need to have competing with our content in a student's working memory.
• Long Term Memory - As far as we can tell, there is no limit to how much can be stored in our long term memory. Furthermore, information that is stored in long term memory is not a strain on working memory. What does this mean for your classroom? It means asking students to memorize things will INCREASE their ability to perform higher level task with it. Do they have to memorize everything? No. But they should memorize things you will want them to use or think carefully about. Don't be afraid or ashamed of asking kids to commit things to their long term memory (Yes, even in the age of Google and AI. A fact in the student's mind is more useful than a fact held external to it.)

Achieving our potential is a life goal for all of us, but it doesn't equate to using our whole brain. If it did, we would have been successful from the moment we were born. It equates to showing up every day, using our limited working memory