Learning and the Brain Conference Notes Friday 11/17

These are raw notes as I take them during presentations.  They have not been edited, but they will be in the next few weeks as I turn them into blog posts.  They will not only be notes on the presentations, but they will be mixed with my own thoughts and reflections.  I will try to note that so as not to misrepresent any speaker.

Keynote I: The Science of Wellbeing: Teaching and Training for Healthy Minds, Brains, and Bodies - Richard J. Davidson, PhD

Bad news:

- Our well-being is in rapid decline.

- Loneliness and isolation are now classified as an epidemic by the US Surgeon General, tracked between 2003 and 2020; so the trends began before Covid, but they have been increased by Covid.

- Lacking social connection is more of a risk factor for dying prematurely than smoking 15 cigarettes a day and obesity.

- Increased social media use is a risk factor for multiple mental health disorders.  The average social media usage of teenagers is 3.5 hours per day.

- Teacher mental health is declining.  The majority of symptoms of modern to severe stress, anxiety, and depression.

Good news:

- Having a dream of a different way of being is a powerful part of creating a solution.  (There is a reason Martin Luther King's speech was not "I have a nightmare.")

- Well-being is a skill that can be learned.

- The same mechanisms that encode suffering can be harnessed for good.

Pillars of a Healthy Mind (that can be trained)

1.  Awareness (Being Present) - Mindfulness, attention, and self-awareness

    - Most of us have little knowledge of what our mind is doing at every moment.  

    - Meta-awareness can be trained.

2.  Connections (Feeling Connected to Other People and to Our Place) - Appreciation, kindness

3.  Insight (Accurate Self Narrative) - Get curious about yourself and what your mind is doing.

4.  Purpose (Staying Motivated) - Clarifying our sense of direction.  How can we find meaning and purpose in what we are doing (no matter whether it is big or small, big activities or daily chores)

Awareness

- In The Principles of Psychology, Williams James extols the value of voluntarily bring back our wandering attention, calling it an act of character.

- Attention is the building block of all other forms of learning.

- EEGs during meditation show high levels of gamma wave activity

Connection

- In a randomized controlled study, some people brought to mind various categories of people (love one, associate, person who pushes my buttons) and thought about a challenging time. They then repeated affirming words ("You'll get through this," etc.) to that person in their mind.  The control group was taught basic behavioral modification techniques.

- The experimental group had higher compassion and were more pro-social and more likely to act in helpful or altruistic ways.  They also had more connectivity in the parts of the brain associated with altruistic behavior.

- Connection training has also been shown to decrease implicit bias in school teachers substantially.

Insight

- When you say something like "I am sad," what is your understanding of the "I"?  Is it your entire self?

- Resilience (the rapidity of recovery from negative events) is increased by those who train in self-insight.

- A tone is played 10 seconds before a painful stimulus.  A non-meditator begins to show pain activity in the brain with the tone and takes a long time to recover after the stimulus.  The long-term meditator shows no reaction to the tone, has an equal or higher response to the pain initially but comes back down very quickly.

Purpose

- In people 75 and older, mortality risk is lowest in people with a high sense of purpose in life.

Healthy Minds Program showed dramatic improvement even when participants used it for 5 minutes per day and with activities that didn't require active meditation.  (My question:  Do people who pray get the same kind of benefit?)

Meditation should not be about stopping our thoughts.  If we become more aware of our thoughts, we can make better use of them.  

How we recover from stress is more important than reducing stress.

Keynote II: Building Meaning Builds Brains: The Science of Emotions, Brain Development, and Effective Teaching - Mary Helen Immordino-Yang

Teaching and learning is more complex than laboratory science.  Lab science is super technical, but the real world is dynamic, which creates a different set of challenges.

The ways kids make meaning out of the things they witness enables processes of adaptive change for them to grow, make more meaning, and show up as adults.  We can predict it via the steps of the work they are doing while their brain is growing.  It influences the actual fiber connections, not just the psychology.  (My summary:  Adapting grows the brain, and brain growth makes us better adapters.)

"Aqueous" by Margaret Lazzari attempts to communicate the interdependence of biology and self and the world around us.  The white lines are the white matter fiber tracks from an MRI brain scan.  

Meaning-making shapes the networks of the physical brain.  

Teaching and learning cannot be separated from the relational context in which we learn.  

Infants come with innate inborn capacities, starting as reflexes.  The biology is set for helping the mother (or other adult) know what to do to optimize the learning environment.  (e.g. The baby engages at a specific distance and not others.)

"Emotions may be automatic, but we need to learn how to feel."  

Feeling emotions involves brain systems for feeling and regulating the body and for constructing a sense of self.  Everyone CAN do it.  The more interesting question is DO YOU?  Reacting to the here and now has value, but it doesn't grow the brain over time.  Engaging purposefully and making meaning does.

We are whole people, not carved-up pieces.  We cannot separate physical, mental, and emotional.  When we hold an infant, our digestion calms, our heart rate lowers, and our blood pressure lowers.  The baby senses those changes and responds to the relaxed state differently.  How can we do that in a classroom?  Can we make math FEEL different?  As we build the skill, we understand the world differently, and the skill will feel different.

The brain and mind are not organized in the leveled way we learned in the 60s.  It is all interconnected from top to bottom.  

"Teddy, we love you more than the whole earth size."  I don't understand the size of my love for Teddy.  It feels the same as not understanding when my parents told me that I live on a giant spinning ball of dirt.  I can't wrap my head around either of them, so they are connected.

If the medulla (just above the brain stem) is damaged, you can't even be kept alive on life support.  Brain scans show that it is repurposed to process emotional engagement.  The same part of the brain that tells you your heart is pumping faster when you run up the stairs is engaged when your heart beats faster because of your attraction to the guy across the room.  The same part of the brain that makes you feel unsettled if your lunch isn't digesting properly makes you feel butterflies when you are nervous about your math test.  The "Salience Network" relates the physical with the emotional/mental.

Training in this involves connecting what you are thinking about to the meaning of being you learning and feeling about what you are thinking about.  Thinking deeply involves telling complex, emotional stories to yourself.  Transcendent thinking predicts future development of tracts that allow efficient communication across the brain.  (Ask kids how they feel about what they are learning more frequently.  Ask them questions that cause them to make meaning.)

What "kind of brain" you have is not predictive.  How much change your brain shows is predictive.  What matters is that the brain is growing.

Teachers show the same activity described here when grading their own students, but they don't show it when grading the work of students they don't know.  

Whatever you have emotion about, you are thinking about.  Whatever you are thinking about, you will learn about.

Session A:  The Science of Memory: Why We Forget and How to Remember Better - Elizabeth Kensinger

Ways we forget

1. We can have an intention set without it leading to action that we follow through on.  (I meant to put my adapter in my bag, but I forgot to actually bring it.)

2.  Recognizing a face without remembering who that person is or remembering their name.

3.  A slide comes up that we are supposed to teach, and we forget what it means or what we are supposed to say. 

Memory is not one thing.  It is a constellation of abilities.  One system might be working well in a moment while another is not.  It could be dependent on nutrition, time of day, and how much caffeine you have had (or not had).  There can be obstacles to some parts of memory but not others (Alzheimer's patients who can still play the piano but can't remember people or scenarios.

Short-Term Memory

- Sensory memory lasts about two seconds.  You heard words, but you only hang on to a snippet for a few seconds.  You look around the room and hold on to what you just saw for just long enough to make it seem like you are seeing the entire room at the same time.

- Working Memory - When you pay attention to something long enough to hold it in your consciousness and work with it.  Can stay in your mind for as long as you are actively thinking about it (Repeating a phone number over and over until you have a chance to write it down).

Long-Term Memory

- Episodic memory - a story, reliant on the learning experience, includes all of the sensory information and feelings associated with it.  In the hippocampus.

- Semantic memory - facts that we know independent of the learning episode.  Doesn't rely on the hippocampus, so it can be retrieved faster.

- Implicit memory (We aren't aware of it) - how to ride a bike, the well-practiced path to work, most motor skills, tying shoes, conditioned triggers 

It takes effort to build memories.  Memories have to go through an encoding cycle to move from short-term to long-term memory.  Every time you retrieve a memory, you rebuild the structure by going through that cycle again.  It is an effortful, active process.  Because of this, a memory isn't static; every time you rebuild it, it can be embellished with new information.  

This also gives the opportunity for errors to creep in.  A person then actually remembers it that way, even if it is not true.  

Memory exists as a source of data to help us deal with the current moment and make plans for the future.  It is a shortcut our brains use to avoid thinking.  

Remembering Better (FOUR)

Focus attention

Organize

Understand

Relate

To do this, you constantly use the prefrontal cortex, providing a rich scaffold for encoding the memory.

- Spaced rehearsal of information in different places and at different times helps because it becomes less context-dependent.  

- Sleep is critical to memory.  It helps with storage.  You must go through both slow-wave sleep and REM sleep to rehearse and connect your memories.  It helps transfer them from episodic to semantic memories.

- Exercise causes cellular and molecular changes that create functional brain changes that lead to better cognitive functioning.  Wendy Suzuki's studies show that people who engage in cardiovascular exercise immediately after a class help them remember what they learned in that class better.

- Retrieval is harder during stress, and the stress then makes a vivid memory of the inability to retrieve.  Breathing control helps; so does thinking back to a time when you successfully retrieved.  Don't try to think of all the possible answers because your brain will inhibit all of the similar answers, meaning if you pulled up a close answer, you will have a much harder time getting to the right answer.

Keynote III: Making Schools Work: Bringing the Science of Learning to Active “Minds-On” and Playful Classrooms - Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, PhD and Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, PhD

These are very fun women, but they are losing me a little in talking about "the factory model."  That's not quite an accurate representation of the history of education.  Also, I get a little lost when people use "21st century" as an adjective.  These notes might be shorter than the others.

It is possible to have joyful teaching again and at the same time get deeper learning.

Education is a surround sound endeavor that happens everywhere.

What is success in education?  Do we want them to be able to do reading, writing, and math?  Do we want them to be happy, healthy, thinking, caring collaborative thinkers?  

Play for learning should be active, engaging, meaningful, social, interactive, and joyful.

Providing a goal turns free play into guided play.

Play and social regulation lead to more executive function.

Children choose more difficult options when playing for fun than when they are in "work mode."

Look at your lesson plan and ask yourself, "Can I make it more active, more engaging, more social, more meaningful, more interactive, more joyful?

I like what they are doing in public spaces.  I'm on board with that.

Some of My Favorite Teachers (They Don't Teach in School)

When I joined the YMCA in March, I knew I was going to be a novice learner in a way I had not been in quite some time.  I've been teaching the same things for 25 years, and even the learning I've been doing about cognitive science was a form of learning with which I am quite familiar (academic learning from reading and listening).  Learning about physical things was going to be very different, and it's not an area in which my klutzy self has ever had much confidence.  I was excited to try new things and learn, but I also knew I was going to be pretty bad at things for quite a while.  (I will talk more about this in my  Thanksgiving post, but one of the great things was the first time I walked into Cardio Kickboxing and asked Matt if there was anything I needed to know.  His answer was "First of all, don't take yourself too seriously.  That was very helpful.)  

So, I knew this would be a learning challenge.  What I did not know was what an exceptional group of educators I was about to meet.  

As a person who reads educational research, listens to evidence-based education podcasts, attends Learning and the Brain conferences about cognitive science, and then teaches teachers how to improve their teaching, my brain is always noticing HOW I am being taught, not just WHAT I am being taught.  Seeing these concepts applied to non-academic teaching has been especially interesting, so let me tell you about those whose classes I take regularly.

 

Liz K - Meet the Queen of Clarity.  According to my friend John Amarode's book, Clarity for Learning, students should know three things at the outset of a learning activity - what they are doing, why they are doing it, and how they will know when they have achieved success.  I take Liz's spin class on Monday nights, and she tells us what each challenge will involve and how it will help us.  She gives feedback as we do it, so we know exactly where we are.  She explains where the pace is most important and where the tension is most important.  She uses the tools on the bikes to help us set a standard for ourselves and then match or beat it on the next challenge.  I always know exactly what benefit I will get from each thing Liz asks us to do, which is motivating because what she is asking us to do, climbing a hill on high tension or sprinting at over 100rpm, is usually kind of painful.

Liz also exhibits and instills a Growth Mindset.  Most of the instructors at the YMCA do, but I have noticed it in Liz's class at a particularly high level.  I even have her quoted on my classroom bulletin board.  She says, "Don't say, 'No, I can't,' until you have said, 'Yes, I'll try.'"  (By the way, teachers, if you want a great book on growth mindset, please pick up Andrew Watson's Learning Grows. He does a great job of making a readable summary of the history of this research;  it is more than just Carol Dweck.). Liz gives us a chance to beat our own best during each class, but she supports us even if we don't. She'll say, "Did you meet your goal?  If not, did you stay motivated the whole time?  That's what the goal is for."  Every class starts with the same speech, "If you've got something to sweat about, go ahead and crank up that level. Go for a PR. If, however, just getting here was a workout, guess what? You are already cycling. You've achieved that just by being here."  

I frequently think back to a day in May when I had experienced a particularly rough day as a yearbook advisor, and I came to Liz's class feeling pretty low. I beat the crap out of the bike that night, putting every frustration of my day into the pedals.  When I met her 4-minute challenge, I got to end a day where I felt like I had not done anything right with a serious win.  Since then, I have pushed myself harder in spin classes than I previously had because I realized what I could do when I really wanted to.  I think about that day frequently because it was so helpful to me, so I try to think of ways to provide my students with a way to win as well.   

Jay C - I don't have a book to recommend on the Communication of Care, not because there isn't a lot of research on this very human aspect of education, but because no one has written a very readable book on the subject.  We all know that it is important for teachers to care about their students, but not all teachers (particularly teachers of older students) know how to communicate it that well.  Those teachers should come to the Y and watch Jay. When Jay starts teaching, we know that he cares about us. We know it even more than we know what speed we should be pedaling. He calls us by name and asks about our lives.  I ran into him at the water fountain a couple of days ago, and he said "I've been thinking about you this week" and told me how glad he was that I was in his class.  He frequently tells the class, "You all inspire me."  He shares stories about the music he is playing, and the stories are all about the humanity of the artists.  While you are in the toughest part of the workout, he shouts, "You are strong.  You are healthy.  You are a gift."  I have often thought that people walking by in the hall would get contact encouragement from this man.  

In April, I was still experimenting with classes and trying to figure out whose I wanted to take regularly.  I had taken Jay's classes 3 or 4 times when I came one evening feeling a little emotionally raw from the events of the week.  Near the end of the class, Jay told us an incredibly touching story about his son, who had witnessed a car accident that week.  He then played "Bridge Over Troubled Water," a song that has a 97% likelihood of making me cry on a normal day.  So, I am pedaling and sobbing and wiping sweat and tears from my face simultaneously.  Then (I'm not done), he said, "You know, there are a lot of people who feel like they don't have a bridge.  If that's you and you need a bridge, come up after class and we'll exchange numbers.  I'll be honored to be a bridge for you."  I knew then this was someone whose class I would never leave.  One evening, I asked him if he would pray for me about something, and he said, "Yes, let's do it right now" and pulled me aside to pray with me. I'm not the only one he has this effect on; a couple walked into class one afternoon with t-shirts that said "Jay's Jammers" and said they had taken his class when he taught in another city.  Imagine loving your exercise instructor so much that you have shirts made and then, when you happen to be in his town, you come to his class.  That doesn't just happen because an instructor teaches the technical aspects well or plays good music.  That happens because he communicates how much he cares in a genuine way.

Stacey A - Stacey is an exercise machine.  I take her outdoor spin class every Saturday, but I have also taken her cardio step class a few times, and she teaches a strength training class.  Although she says this isn't true, I feel like she would work out in the red zone for an hour if she weren't teaching.  She is a force to be reckoned with, and so is her class.  Whether it is an endurance ride or a challenge ride, I know she is going take me right to my maximum ability.  Just when I think I can't take one more minute at this pace, she'll say, "20 more seconds until recovery."  To educators, this is known as Desirable Difficulty - keeping people in the sweet spot where it is difficult enough to be worth doing but not so difficult that they give up.

For those who take her class regularly, Stacey remembers what we have said and checks in.  If she knows a person's dog has been sick, she will ask about it the next time she sees them.  If they've been on a trip, she asks about it.  One day, I told her I would leave 5 minutes early because I was going to experiment with taking two classes back to back.  The next time I saw her, she asked me how it went and whether I thought I would do it again.  Two months later, she asked me how it was going.

Stacey's great strength as a teacher is, not only pushing us to a place of "desirable difficulty," but giving us an intuitive sense of what that is.  (Teachers, if you want to know more about desirable difficulties in the classroom, see this list of research articles by Robert and Elizbeth Bjork on Google Scholar.) Our bikes come with color zones that are meant to let us know how hard we are working out, but if we haven't set the numbers accurately or don't know what it should be, the colors won't mean anything.  She describes what we should be feeling at each stage.  Because of Stacey's descriptions (Green should feel like work, but you can still breathe; at yellow, your mouth will be open.  Red is all you've got; if you don't feel the need for a break, you weren't in your red zone), I could know how hard I was working on any bike, choreograph my own workout, or adjust my input number if I don't feel the way I should feel in each zone.  I have adjusted my input number twice as I've gotten stronger based on her descriptions.

Matt M - I don't have words to describe what an incredible teacher Matt is.  He has an extraordinary ability to accept me exactly where I am with whatever I have the ability to do (or not do) while simultaneously challenging me to do more.  That's a pretty special gift.  I also just enjoy watching him teach because he gets all lit up inside in a way that shines through his eyes, so it makes me feel happy, like I'm sitting in a window with sunlight coming through it.

I assume Matt doesn't spend his free time reading books about Cognitive Load and working memory (teachers, the best one you can read is Learning Begins by my friend, Andrew Watson), yet he manages cognitive load like a professional educator by teaching each part of a move in slow steps before speeding it up.  I'm willing to bet he hasn't studied up on the last decade of research into Modeling and Scaffolding, yet every kickboxing and weightlifting class is filled with those exact techniques. Every week, in his Cardio Kickboxing class, Matt stops and watches us do a combination without his cues, joking that we won't need him anymore.  He doesn't know it, but this is our most powerful educational tool, Active Retrieval Practice (teachers, pick up Pooja Agarwal's book Powerful Teaching or go to her website, for more on this important concept).  Matt is a joy to learn from, so I take his classes whenever I can, hoping he doesn't get tired of seeing me.

These four aren't the only teachers I have had at the YMCA who use sound educational practices.  Gwen tells us "Get your mind right" to remind us of the purpose of what we are doing.  Greg uses imagery like "your feet should feel like you're scraping gum off your shoe" and "it should feel like you've got half a Snickers bar under your tire" to make these abstract concepts into concrete thoughts in our minds.  Julie takes up space in our working memories by telling dad jokes, so we don't have room in it for thoughts of quitting (distraction is just filling working memory).  Thomas gets off his bike and walks around, an act of formative assessment. There are more, but I didn't want this post to be a mile long, so I only thoroughly discussed those whose classes I take every week.  These outstanding educators may not teach in school, but they are amazing and impactful teachers nonetheless.  

Want to Grow? Do the Harder Thing Now

In his excellent book, Why Don't Students Like School, Daniel Willingham discusses the difference between performance and growth.  A lot of students use study techniques that are ineffective for learning because they seem good at the moment.  As teachers, we all know that cramming is not good for keeping things in long-term memory, but students feel that it is effective because they do well in the short term (even though they know they have forgotten that information a few days later if you press them on it).  Parents have sometimes told me they didn't understand how their student performed poorly on a test because they went over their flashcards many times the night before, and they knew them by the end of the study session.  They don't realize that the student has recognized the material from seeing it a few minutes ago, and that they suffer from the "Illusion of Knowing." 

You can learn more about recognition/familiarity vs. knowing in Willingham's book Outsmart Your Brain.  In it, he uses an analogy from the world of fitness.  He asks the reader to consider a situation where your goal is to do as many pushups as possible.  He suggests that most people would be inclined to do the easiest pushups possible.  After all, you can do them relatively quickly, so it seems like you are reaching your goal, at least from a short-term performance standpoint.  What is not happening, however, is growth.  If you want to get stronger, you have to do the hardest pushups you can accomplish and then slowly make them even harder.  It will feel ineffective because you will end the session with jello arms, but it will help you accomplish your long-term goals in a way the easy thing won't.  You should do the harder thing.

I am in a class called Group Power at the YMCA.  It is a choreographed group weightlifting class, and I love it.  The first night I took it, I was afraid of injury, so I used the lightest weights I could, but for some of the moves, I realized I could do a lot more.  Over the next few weeks, I added more and now have "a normal weight factor" for each muscle group.  The instructor changes up the routine every six weeks or so, giving me the opportunity to experiment.  Right now, we are using an inclined bench.  During the core portion of the routine, we have the option to fight gravity or let it help us.  I thought of Daniel Willingham and chose to do situps and crunches against gravity, knowing it would help in the long run.  That long-run mindset is important because the first week, I looked like a dying cockroach, legs flailing everywhere.  Another member of the class showed me how to grip the bench risers with my feet, which helped a lot.  I still run out of core and leg strength a few reps before the end, but I feel stronger and can feel that I have improved.  Next week, I will talk about ways in which an understanding of cognitive science has helped me in group fitness classes, but the idea of doing the harder thing despite the feeling of ineffectiveness is definitely one of them.  I wouldn't be pushing myself as hard if not for Willingham's analogy.

Two weeks ago, in a parent-teacher conference, a mom came in and said, "My daughter has changed how she studies because of your advice."  I have spent a lot of time explaining effective study methods to my 8th graders.  Some of them neglect the advice, believing that they know what works for them in the face of contrary evidence.  ("No, listening to music doesn't affect my working memory," said one young lady as though she was qualified to know that.)  I want students to understand the reason for the advice we give them, so I have explained the difference between performance and learning.  Some continue with the ineffective strategies that make them comfortable, and some only care about performance (which is hard to change in our current culture).  But those who care about learning adapt, and I know they will find it satisfying at some point if they stick with it through the times when it feels ineffective.  

As teachers, it is easy to send mixed messages.  I know have been guilty of talking to them about keeping a long-term perspective on learning while also communicating with them more about their performance when grading them.  It's a tension I don't know we will ever fully reconcile, but we should be aware of it and try to keep them focused on growth over grades, learning over performance, and the important over the immediate.

Inconsistent Thoughts

Have you noticed how inconsistent people's beliefs are?  Maybe it is the result of people living pragmatically rather than out of religious conviction.  Perhaps it happened when we started treating political power as the ultimate end, so whatever means it took to get there became acceptable.  Maybe we just don't think enough about whether our opinions are consistent with our other opinions (most people don't reflect as much as they should).  I don't know if it was like this before since I didn't live before, but it bugs me.  Here are a few examples I have noticed in the past few years. 

Botox v. Vaccine - During the pandemic, all the armchair epidemiologists came out of the woodwork.  People looked at graphs they were not qualified to interpret and called it "doing their own research."  They insisted that people who followed recommendations were ignorant while they were informed.  When the vaccine came out, they insisted that it was putting "poison" in their bodies.  Meanwhile, many of those same people had been injecting actual poison in the form of botulinum toxin into their facial muscles for years.  Botox for the sake of vanity was fine; vaccines for the sake of protecting immunocompromised people were not.  They'll try to tell you these situations are different; but, in reality, it is just inconsistent thinking.

Pro-Life, Baby on Board v. Death Penalty - I've been pro-life for as long as I can remember, but I have to confess I was always weirded out by "Baby on Board" signs in cars when they were ubiquitous in the 80s and 90s.  I always wondered if there was an age at which I could drive recklessly without the worry of endangering the 14-year-old on board or the middle-aged adult in the car.  The new version of this is a yard sign that says, "Drive like your children live here."  I don't have children, so I guess it is fine if I just plow through the neighborhood at 90mph.  What really confuses me, though, is that the same people who protest abortion and caution you about driving are the quickest to advocate the execution of criminals or "turning Aghganistan into a parking lot."  Again, I don't know what age you have to be before the "human life is sacred" people (of which I am one) start thinking it is okay for the government to take lives.  I'm conflicted about the death penalty because of people like Timothy McVeigh, but I'm about an inch away from believing it should be abolished completely.  It should, at the very least, be used as little as possible.  But I don't understand the inconsistency of pro-life people celebrating the destruction of a human who bears the Imago Dei.

Gender Isn't Real v. Gender Reveal - If there is anything more annoying than gender reveals, I don't know what it is.  For no reason other than social media posts, we decided we couldn't just answer the question, "Do you know what you're having?" anymore.  Instead, we had to come up with a dramatic way to announce it to hundreds of people at once.  Yet, we live in a time when some are trying to convince us that gender doesn't exist.  Even weirder, these are often the same people.  People who believe gender is literally not a thing will still make their first question, "So, is it a boy or a girl?"  I always wonder if any parent says, "I don't know.  I guess we'll find out in a few years."  These are weirdly inconsistent positions.

Eliminating Grades v. What's In It For Me? If you aren't in education, you may not know how many weirdos on Twitter want to eliminate grades.  I'm sure they mean well; they want students to learn for the sake of learning without extrinsic motivation being necessary.  Yet, they teach students who regularly compete for prizes.  These same teachers tweet a lot about their own pay, so apparently they need some extrinsic motivation in their lives.  The other day, I saw an ad for an app called Healthy Wager.  Apparently, weight loss, feeling better, and living longer are not enough internal motivations to eat well and exercise, so this app incentivizes users with money.  We can have a real discussion about the over-emphasis on grades, but if you are going to talk about eliminating them completely, I'm going to ask you to be honest about your own motivations.

Teachers Have an Agenda v. Arming them - At the beginning of the pandemic, there was a lot of love for teachers.  Parents were having to deal with their kids during the day for the first time since they were toddlers, and they didn't like it.  When they imagined multiplying it by 30, they decided teachers were saints.  It didn't last long, though, and the whiplash was strong.  As teachers and students returned to school buildings, it became popular to accuse us of having an agenda.  Teachers have been accused of everything from teaching white supremacy through math to recruiting kids to be trans.  Laws have been passed to prevent teachers from having normal conversations with students, choosing books, and deciding our own grading policies.  Parents' organizations have demanded to see lesson plans in July (not curriculum mind you - lesson plans).  We are no longer the angels we were in the spring of 2020; we are untrustworthy agents of the state.  But pay attention next time there is a mass shooting in a school.  The same people who don't trust me to do the job for which I am trained, certified, and experienced will immediately advocate that I be armed, something for which I am not remotely prepared or inclined to do.

This blog is supposed to be about education, so here's the connection.  Cognitive dissonance causes anxiety.  We talk a lot about student anxiety, but this fact is never addressed.  Helping them resolve their thoughts can only be good for them.  When students say things that reveal inconsistent thoughts, call them on it.  When they say that everyone should accept themselves just the way they are while also talking about New Year's resolutions, ask them whether they think that is consistent.  When they insist on fairness for themselves and not others, ask them what fairness looks like and guide them to recognize fairness isn't fair if it doesn't include the people they don't like.  Model consistent thinking in front of them, and own it when you have been inconsistent.  They won't recognize it for themselves.  They need us to guide them.

This is Your Brain on Change

"Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change." 
- Mary Shelley in Frankenstein

Change is stressful.  All change.  Even good changes are stressful.  Knowing why the brain reacts to change the way it does won't prevent it from being stressful, but it might help you deal with it.

A few years ago, Dr. Deborah Gilboa said this at a Learning and the Brain conference. - "Your brain has many functions but one job, to keep you alive.  Whatever difficulties you may be going through, you are alive.  Any change, no matter how good, might change that.  So you could be ecstatically happy about a marriage proposal, and your brain will respond with, 'Cool, but could you die, though?' That is why change is stressful."  Your brain prefers to keep things the same as much as possible.

And yet, that's not how life works.  The Greek philosopher Heraclitus is credited with the idea that the only constant in life is change.  You change as you learn; so do others. Friends get married and have children, changing both their lives and yours.  Students graduate, and co-workers leave the company. Bosses change, and inflation happens. You get the idea. 

So, if the reason for the stress is that your brain is trying to maintain your current state of "aliveness," it makes sense to trick your brain into thinking of changes as smaller than they are. No matter how irrational it sounds, in terms of your brain, the bigger the change, the more significant the chance of death.  The reason most New Year's Resolutions fail (aside from them being stupid, as I've discussed before on this blog) is that we set goals requiring huge and immediate change. In the misguided belief that dropping a ball in Times Square will renew us overnight, we suddenly take our calorie intake from Christmas level to third-world level; and our brain freaks out.  The popularity and success of smoking cessation helpers like nicotine gum and patches show that stopping cold turkey is expecting too much change too fast.  

Small changes are more doable because they scare your brain less. A smaller change might carry a smaller risk of death with it, so your brain doesn't cause you to fear it as much.  Adding a nutritious item to each day or removing one serving of junk food won't make your brain think you are experiencing a famine, making you crave every calorie you see.  That change is sustainable, so it will soon stop feeling like change.  If you have decided you spend too much time on social, your brain will accept it more if you go down by 15 minutes every day this week and then 15 minutes again every day next week than it will if you go down by 30 minutes overnight.  The less "change-y" it feels, the less anxious your brain will be.  Unless your bad habit is immediately dangerous, stepping down is better than a sudden stop.

I teach a study skills class, and two weeks ago, we talked about the organization of study materials and environments.  Some of them are natural organizers and others are a hot mess.  I told those who were a hot mess that I wasn't asking them to become like "the color-coded matching folder" people; I was just asking them increase by one level - perhaps one folder for things to hand in tomorrow.  This is a small change that can last the rest of the school semester.  Perhaps, then, you can step it up one more level in the future.

Some things, of course, cannot be done in steps.  If you are moving from one house to another, having a baby, or leaving a job, you cannot really do that in small doses.  In those times, it would be most helpful to remind yourself of the things that are not changing, no matter how small or to focus on the ways in which that change will improve your life (to remind your brain that you aren't likely to die).

Change is inevitable, but you can, as the great Daniel Willingham put it, "Outsmart Your Brain."  So, be realistic in your goal setting, and give your brain time to adjust and remind it that some changes are good.

I Literally Just Told You

I spend a lot of my day repeating myself.  I repeat information.  I repeat student's names to get their attention.  I repeat directions over and over and over and over.  While part of this is an issue of attention and listening (particularly when they are just ignoring their own name), some of the problem is also with the mystery of our memories.  The combination of our working memory and how we encode information creates a challenge for teachers as we try to put things into their long-term memories.  

During the pandemic, I discovered a love for British game/panel shows on YouTube.  There's one I am not sure will last long, but it has an interesting premise.  It's called "I Literally Just Told You."  All of the questions in the show are being written live and are about the episode you are watching.  For example, they introduce each contestant as you would on any show, and then the first question might be, "How many children does Darren have?" or "What does Lisa do for a living?"  You would think that, knowing the premise of the show, the contestant might pay really good attention during those introductions.  They might, but they certainly don't remember it sixty seconds later when they are asked.  

Our memories are complex and often paradoxical.  We can be singing an 80s song in our heads, flawlessly remembering every lyric from four decades ago, while walking into the bedroom, only to realize that we have no idea why we walked into the bedroom.  Did I need shoes?  Was I going to make the bed?  Is there a book in here that I want to take to school with me?  I have no idea, but I am still singing "Secrets stolen from deep inside, the second hand unwinds . . ." from Cyndi Lauper's early career while I can't remember the thought I had just twenty seconds ago.  Clearly, recency alone is not what our memories need.

If you attend church, can you summarize last week's sermon?  Your minister worked hard on it.  He structured it in such a way that he hoped would help you remember.  Chances are, it was filled with really important things that struck you upon hearing them.  What about last night's news broadcast.  There was an awful lot of important stuff in there; big things are happening in the world.  Yet, the importance of those story details is not enough for your memory to store it.

For a while, researchers thought memory was related to emotion because of the involvement of the amygdala and because we obviously remember emotional moments vividly (weddings, funerals, where you were when you heard of a tragedy).  Yet, most of what we want to remember and want our students to remember is not inherently emotional.  How would I attach emotion to balancing chemical equations or the quadratic formula?  And, even if I could, is it good for kids?  They are already walking around in an emotional soup, and it may not be ethical for me to add to that.

Could it be frequency?  Maybe I remember the song lyrics because I've heard them so many times.  TV commercials certainly rely on that.  Maybe all the repeating I do is valuable after all, even if it drains my energy.  But . . . ask anyone who has been in a play, having read and heard the lines at every rehearsal doesn't help them on "crash and burn day," the first rehearsal where they are required to be off book.  

This example from the great Daniel Willingham's book, Why Don't Students Like School? shows that frequency is also not enough for your memory.  Which drawing of a penny represents the way an actual penny looks?  There are a few I am certain are wrong.  I know Lincoln does not face left.  But is the year on the left or right?  Yikes!  I am far less sure of that.  I think the motto is on the top, but aren't there some coins where it isn't?  If you are interested, the correct one is G, but the point Willingham is making is that seeing a penny thousands of times doesn't mean you remember its details.

So, how does memory work?  I'd encourage you to read Why Don't Students Like School for the best explanation (or watch Daniel Willingham's TikTok videos (you know I saw them on YouTube) in which he talks about study skills.), but I'll summarize it with this sentence.  We remember what we put effort into thinking about.  As he says it, "Memory is the residue of thought."

Asking your students to think about the material means asking questions.  "Family VIIA is the most reactive non-metal family" is much easier to remember if you understand that each member of that family has 7 valence electrons and only needs one more to fulfill its stability requirements.  So, when I ask students this question in a retrieval activity, I should follow up by asking, "Why is that true?"  Why questions automatically require students to put thought into the meaning of the fact.  It is also helpful to put a fact in the context of relationships.  If family VIIA is the most reactive non-metal family for that reason, what would be the most reactive metal family?  Is the reason the same?  Sort of, so now let's think about the difference.  

This takes a lot of time, and you can't do it with everything you teach.  But if there are things that are going to come up again that you want them to remember and use, invest the time.

As for the directions you keep repeating, write them on the board.  Then, just point back to it when they ask you to repeat it again.

A Teacher's Faith

If you are not a religious person, please don't close this post yet.  While I am a person of deep Christian faith and would love to write about it all day long, that is not what this post is about.  The faith I am talking about here is the faith teachers have to possess in order to accomplish our jobs.  We set very long-term goals, and we sometimes don't see the payoff as quickly as we would like.  Sometimes, we don't ever see it because the student has moved out of our lives before the fruit grows from the tree we planted.

At the beginning of each year, it is always easy to think that this year's students are less mature and less skilled than last year's students, but it is rarely true.  The problem is that we are comparing students at the beginning of this year to the students at the end of last year, forgetting what it took to get them there.  We train them in procedures and then have to start over again the next year.  As an 8th-grade teacher, I turn 7th graders into high school students and then give them away, just to start all over again.  (Okay, I know why I am so tired now.)  But here is my point.  It takes faith to look at the kids in front of you and believe that they will become something different by the end of the year.

It has long been my contention that band teachers have the most faith of all people.  What comes out of instruments at the beginning of the school year is NOT music.  It is a cacophony that would make any other teacher crazy, but a band teacher hears potential because he's been here before and he has the skills to turn that discordant melee of noise into recognizable songs.  And they do - every year.  Other arts teachers have similar faith needs.  I've attended a number of play rehearsals over the years, and the most interesting one is the day they are required to be "off-book" for the first time.  Students affectionately and accurately refer to this as "crash and burn day."  As a brain enthusiast, I can explain why this is the most important rehearsal day of the year because it is the first time they are engaged in active retrieval practice. As a member of the future audience, I cringe every time I see it.  The theater teacher does not.  Just like the band teacher, she's been here before so she does not fear that the final production will be like this.  She has faith that continued practice will turn this stuttering, struggling mess into a play that will entertain ticket buyers.  

I could go on.  Early elementary teachers who listen while students sound words out know that someday they will read with great fluidity and acquire knowledge from what they read.  Math teachers whose students struggle with the concept of the number line know that, at some point, these students will internalize algebraic thinking enough to believe they aren't using it.  I would love for my PE teachers of the past to know what I am doing at the Y today because it doesn't seem possible that they would have imagined me attempting to lift heavier weights, but maybe they did have that kind of faith.

Teachers, it can be difficult for us not to see the results of our work right away, so here is my encouragement to you.  Build your faith by reflecting on the times you have seen results.  Build your faith by remembering the impact your own teachers had on you, and know that you are doing the same work.  Build your faith by keeping thank you emails or drawings from students in a box that you can return to when your faith is weak.  Even if you are not a Christian, you can take heart from this verse.  

 And let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up. So then, as we have opportunity, let us do good to everyone . . ." - Galatians 6:9-10a