 So, our first presenter is going to be John Ristofi with the UCAR Center for Science Education, giving you a new way to look at how learning can happen with anyone around, and John is one of my favorite people. So it's an honor to welcome him to NCAR at night. So with that, take it away, John. Thank you, Tim. I understand you could talk for a long period of time if I just do it. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is John Ristofi. I'm the director for the UCAR Center for Science Education. And today, my night talk will be about the attitudes we have when educating people at all levels, whether it's communicating your science or climate change. The content of this talk is stems from research from a former colleague of mine, Ann Tweed, who wrote a book published in 2009 called Designing Effective Science Instruction. It really summarized the research by horizons around looking into the classroom, and is based on the acronym Q, content, understanding, and environment. If you get those three things right, then students will do well. Believing all children can learn is one of the environment strategies. What you see on these two slides are suggestions from the research for creating a culture of learning. This strategy is one of the most difficult to implement because it asks you to take a deep look at your own beliefs and consider their implications on what you can do to create an environment conducive to learning. I know that changing your beliefs can be challenging, but I believe you can make such changes. This in a self-fulfilling prophecy, you form expectations of a learner which is communicated nonverbally through your behavior. The learner then responds to your behavior and then reacts in a way that conforms to your expectation. This becomes a reality. The self-fulfilling prophecy can be positive or negative. These 30 students that you see are a representative sample of this year's U.S. kindergarten class, reflecting its racial, ethnic, gender diversity. Here's what we know from the research and the statistics. If nothing changes in our system by the year 2027, when these students would normally graduate from high school, several of them will have dropped out of the picture. In part by believing that people can learn and finding new innovations when no solution exists, we can bring all students back into the picture and improve odds for all to be successful. But many educators say, yes, all children can learn, but under certain conditions. If they all have the right background, if they all have the right support from home. But let's examine your beliefs. In this activity, what are your thoughts that come into your mind when you think about the following kinds of people? Be honest, no one but you will know what you think. Think about the people you speak with when communicating to the public or speaking in educational venues. The beliefs and biases that are revealed in this activity are part of an unconscious build up over many experiences from your own environment. You probably don't want to hold these biases, but being unconscious about them, the experiences that are not subject to rational logic or suppression. This doesn't mean that you shouldn't work on changing your beliefs or your biases. On the contrary, by making them conscious, you take the first step to liberation. So let's bring this closer to home. In this activity, we're looking at the six Americas. Think about the people on each of those circles and what comes to your mind and reflect on the reasons why you believe, what you believe about these groups. There are certain people who benefit from your practices or your policy. Who are they and why? Are there some learners negatively influenced by your policy or procedure? Who are they and how are they affected? What would you do differently if you could help everyone to learn? Take steps to determine a policy or practice that you can change. Implement an action or policy where the change supports access for all to learn and gather some data on the effect of those changes. If the change supports learning by all, continue to do that. Think about your change in practice and its impact on the learning environment. Discuss your beliefs with your colleagues. Plan a change in practice or survey others about their effective policies or practices. Take a systematic approach to planning how you would interact with learners to show them that you believe that they can learn science. Create a positive climate that fosters camaraderie, collaboration by attending to both procedures and interactions. We begin to create a positive climate by teaching procedures that foster questioning, risk taking, collaboration, and mutual focus on learning. So with that I will end by sharing with you some of the resources that I gathered in pulling this talk together and I'd like to thank you for your attention and hope that you can take this back with you and believe that all children, all people can learn. Thank you.