 Hi, this is Tracy, Tokahama Espinosa, and this is a video on leveraging technology to personalize learning to save time in educational planning. Remember, this is a flipped conference, which means you're going to watch this video, take some notes, get curious about things, and send me information about the questions you might have so that I can devise our face-to-face encounter around your questions, okay? Then we all extend this. We'll make sure that you have a reflection time and also use some deeper dives into bundles, which are personalized resources so that you can deepen your knowledge in your personal area of interest and hopefully be able to then transfer this into new contexts in your life. I also want to invite you to pull out paper and pen and go ahead and take notes in this, and I propose to you that we do this on some fundamental elements about the brain. If I ask you why people should take notes, I'll give you a hint, and the core element is that there's no learning without the elements, the key pillars of memory and attention. So all learning hinges on good memory systems and good attention systems. And so writing basically extends your fragile memory, but also helps you focus in on the things that are most important to you. So please take notes and think about the things that might be new to you, things that are piquing your curiosity, and maybe things that you'd even consider changing in your personal and professional life. Today, we're going to be looking at some of these different priorities in education, why educate, and basically consider the use of three different types of design, backwards design, universal design, and instructional design, as we consider these overall objectives of mastery learning, as well as what we know about the brain and learning. So we're going to put all those pieces together into several different elements, several different ideas, or ways to approach this concept of personalizing learning while simultaneously saving time through the use of technology. If I were to ask you, what is the goal of education? Why are you teaching? What is the point here? Hopefully, some of you are going to say that it's to learn, but then that itself begs its own question. You know, what does that really mean? What is learning? And if you look at all these different definitions, it comes down to basically knowledge, skills and attitudinal shifts that occur through formalized processes, you know, so with clear educational goals. So while many of us in education think about teaching and learning and that whole dynamic process, it's if we break it down to its smaller pieces, this definition, it helps us when we come down to the planning elements of how to teach and learn. OK, one way to think about this is through the definition of learning from the OACD, which basically breaks down all learning into one of three components. Learning is either knowledge based, dates, facts, figures, formulas, things that are Googleable, for example, right, things that you can know, skills, which is the application of that knowledge, being able to use or do something with the knowledge. So knowing the formula A squared plus square squared is C squared is one thing. But actually knowing when and how to use it is another thing. So that's a skill set. And the third element, which is really at the heart of all teaching, has to do with attitudinal shifts and attitudinal changes. And these are the most important things, but also the things that don't come up in written curriculum. When we get a curriculum passed down to us in generally, they're telling us to teach a lot of knowledge and a lot of skills. But we sort of have to think about on our own probably what kind of attitudes we're out to shape. We want people who persevere or who show resilience or who are good at collaborative learning. Those attitudinal shifts are kind of a secondary curriculum, but they play a huge role in what kids do in our classrooms. If we take knowledge, skills and attitudes, then the combination of knowledge, skills and attitudes are really what are the objectives in education. And sometimes we call these learning outcomes or educational competencies. But once we have those objectives in place, we can then think about backward design or understanding by design, which means we need to know our objectives first. What is it that we're trying to teach? What knowledge? What skills or attitudes? So that we can then think about how we're going to evaluate that and then what activities we do. So when we talk about time saving activities or personalizing activities, we really have to first be clear on what are the objectives. And that's the hardest step actually is deciding what are those core objectives. So in our three-step process then understanding the objectives or being able to articulate them is really key because without that we're not able to do the second step, which is to decide what we're going to use as criteria for achieving those objectives, the evaluation criteria, right? And then finally, what activities we do in class. Oftentimes teachers are after a lot of good activities without having that clear objective. And so I'd like to challenge you a little bit on that and to think about the objectives before we dig into any kind of activity planning. And so we will get to a long list of activities. We have more than 600 tools that we're going to be sharing with you, but we want to first have you think about this at a more macro level to make sure that we're all on the same page here. When you have any kind of objective planning, it's good to think about, you know, the who, what, when, where, why, and how of all of those pieces, right? So when we think of who, it's really important to take into consideration the variety of students that we might have in our classroom. What is the spread or the range, the lowest, the highest of those students? Are there kids who are coming in really behind with a lot of gaps and prerequisite knowledge? Are there a lot of high flyers who are really, you know, gifted in this area and who need to be challenged as well? So what is the range of students I have? Then we have to think about the priorities we want to set here. During COVID, we were really challenged to think a lot about, you know, our, our department goals or that, is that really the most important thing? Or do we really need to look at basic access to services? And some kids couldn't go online because they didn't have good internet at home or devices at home. Some kids were kind of an emotional trainwreck, right? So did we have to change or prioritize social-emotional goals as opposed to just academic learning, right? Or were there government standards that were really driving our curricular design? Or was a school mission one that really led our choice or the priorities of what we did in classroom settings? Or were things like standardized tests what was really driving our curriculum? So thinking about these priorities is really important to stand back a little bit and not sort of roll with the punches or do what is the flavor of the month, but actually have a conscious awareness of what our objectives are and where they come from. Then we have to think about the when and where of education. And that shifted a lot with COVID as well, right? We have online, we have hybrid, we have blended situations of learning. So all of those things came into play. And that's really important to also take into consideration because depending on your objectives, they can be met in different types of platform situations or learning environments better than in others. And having to pivot so often from one modality to another actually shifted a lot of people's objectives as well. So think about that as well. And this will give us a clearer focus on what we mean by the mastery learning goals for our particular subject areas. So we might be able to say something like, by the end of the second year of university, these students will be able to do whatever or value whatever. That would be one way to articulate those mastery learning goals that we have for the entire semester. And then we can do that at a meso level and a micro level as well. Around those goals, around those key objectives then, we can plan and that would be designing our classroom experiences. And I'd like to propose that we do that through universal design for learning. And I'll get into that in just a second so we can break that apart and see what pieces we've already done and what pieces we still need to do in order to save time in the long run. And then finally, looking at the instructional design for our actual classroom settings. How does that work? What can we offload things that are done asynchronously by students in their own time and as homework, for example? And what are the things that we need to prioritize within our face-to-face class settings? So let's get back to our agenda here. So if we think about mastery goals, what are the final objectives that we have from our schooling? Some of you might think of mastery goals and think of good old Benjamin Bloom. And he contributed at least three big ideas I want to share with you that are important in discussion today. One is that there's this hierarchy of cognitive concepts and they're very important. We don't usually see them stacked up like this anymore. We usually see them more in a circular way because in order to be able to apply something, you have to first understand and remember it. So we have a dependency on what are these fundamental ideas and definitions that are at the base of this pyramid here. But all of these pieces rely on each other, right? You can't create things if you don't remember them. You can't remember things if you're not able to then creatively apply them to other new contexts and transfer that learning. So we know that all of these things are interdependent. However, it's really important to understand that in the past it was okay to really rely on a curriculum that only asked us to memorize a lot of facts and dates and figures and formulas. But now we have technology in our hands and everybody can Google just about anything and we're able to now offload some of those memoristic types of activities and decide that that is not really what education is all about. We have to get to these higher levels of thinking. And obviously, this is different for different types of classes and different types of learning objectives. For example, in many introductory courses, it's vital that you memorize a ton of vocabulary and grammatical rules, for example, in order to be able to use the language in a later situation. But then we get to this higher order use of this information where you can actually analyze text or evaluate information in that foreign language, for example. So we know that there's a hierarchy there as well and that we should take this hierarchy into consideration when we're designing our mastery learning goals. But secondly, we also have to think about this idea that one of the key reasons that mastery learning is such a clear objective, such a big goal in educational theory is because it's superior to other types of learning. When you try to do things to scale, it's really hard. We know that nothing beats one-on-one tutoring. If I teach you individually, you're going to learn faster. But if I have a typical class, I've got about half of that amount of learning taking place when I have a class of 20, 24 people in it. So the next best thing to a one-on-one tutorial would be to have mastery learning objectives. And so clarifying those objectives from the start is actually half of the battle of getting to this greater learning for the greatest amount of students. So setting those clear objectives, what are the knowledge skills and attitudes that we're after, is really key. And the third huge idea from Benjamin Bloom has to do with this idea of time. He basically wrote in a paper in 1974 two different things about 90%. The first 90% is that people have to master at least 90% of the information that's presented to them in order to be able to move on to the next level and use that as prerequisite knowledge to some higher-order thinking. So if you don't have that basic level of information, you're not going to be able to move on. But the second 90% was really interesting. He also hypothesized that 90% of the kids in our class would be able to dominate, to learn, to master the objectives we set forward to them if and when they're given enough time to do that. And so basically the main challenge that he put up is that we don't give kids enough time in class. Teachers don't feel they have enough time to actually devote to that individualized support system. So in order to get away from that one-on-one kind of tutorial to make sure that kids have enough time, we have to design our class in a slightly different way where we can guarantee that everybody gets what they need. But at the same time, we don't have to spend time at a one-on-one level. That how do you massify that? Well, you have to design your class in a different way. And the big question is if this idea was sort of out there since 1968, how is it that it has not worked its way into our educational system up to now? And that's because it's a little bit complicated to wrap your head around. And few people have actually proposed a way to do this. And so we're going to look at one of those ways of actually doing that. And so parenthetically, it's worth noting that one of the reasons he said that 90% of the people in your classroom are going to be able to do this has a lot to do with general intelligence. So in the United States, for example, we have about 13.7% of people have a learning difficulty. Right? We are pretty over the top in diagnosis, right? If you ask the same question in Europe, it's only 4.53%, right? And if you look at global international studies, it says about 10% of the population has a specific learning disability, which will prevent them from actually learning what's on our curriculum agenda here, right? So basically, the main idea is that 90% of the people in your class can get it if and when they have the right amount of time to fill in their prerequisite needs. And so part of that is, again, in designing a learning situation, a learning environment, leveraging technology where you can allow people to fill in those gaps in their own prerequisite knowledge to be able to advance towards your objectives for that class, for that semester, or that particular topic. And this is precisely chapter four in my book, They're Bringing the Neuroscience of Learning to Online Teaching, was this question of time and space. How has time been changed by putting people online through this COVID experience that we've had? And so technology can actually save us a lot of time, but we have to know what's out there and what is good information to use. And so when you ask teachers about time, they never have enough of it. Teachers work probably 60 hours a week around the world, which is pretty fascinating. And they do complain a lot that they don't have enough time to talk to individual kids or to do what they really know they need to do in order to get everybody to learn their best. Why? Because they're up against the pressure of a department saying, you have to move on to this next topic or there's three other classes that are teaching the same thing. How come yours is behind in this? And so they feel time pressured and they aren't able to prioritize what they think is most important for individual student learning. And so trying to find this balance here using or leveraging tools is really a key objective, right? So if I were to ask you right now, just think for one second. You know, what is the best use of your time? When you have those kids face to face, when you have your students in that either online synchronous class or in a face-to-face setting, what is the best use of your time? Should be you be using that to cover the curriculum or are you out to get to know your students as individual people? Are you out to teach the test or are you trying to get them to love your topic, you know, so that they actually self-teach because they're interested? Are you trying to just get through the semester or reach that weekend milestone? Are you out to get deeper learning? A lot of teachers start off with all of the right intentions and then they get just sucked into the pressures of the daily classroom experience. And this has been very, very apparent during COVID because we did lose so much time and there was a lot of catch-up to do. But then when people came back, we had all these other issues that were more important, for example. There is no cognition without emotion. So if you've got emotionally distraught kids, you can't get to the learning piece. And so there was a lot of things that came to the forefront here. So time was on a lot of people's minds. And so education is now thought of now more as time as opposed to space. And this is a huge leap. If there's a before and after COVID, you know, 2020 watershed moment in education, it was definitely realizing that before we used to think of education as being a place, the classroom, then you went and did homework, right? It was a physical thing, right? We thought about that very differently. Now we think about it in terms of time. You know, what are the activities you do asynchronously? And what are the things you do synchronously? So what are the things we do together, you know, in a synchronous moment? And what are the things you do out of time asynchronously on your own time? Things that you might need more practice than the next kid, right? So you do asynchronous homework. Maybe you have more time or less time than another kid. But synchronous versus asynchronous timing is more important than space these days. So if we look at this, there's at least for examples, and that's the change in the school calendar, how we've leveraged or begun to learn about synchronous and asynchronous learning, how we've used the time for communication, how we've realized how vital that is in real educational learning. And then the time that we had traditionally given to activities like evaluation, how that has changed dramatically. So planning and valuing, evaluation time, has become much more important than just standing in front of the class. Any teacher will tell you, for any hour they spend in front of their class, they're probably spending at least three hours preparing for that and at least three hours evaluating it. But we've never valued that before. We had COVID, which is one of those benefits that we've had. So many schools are thinking about changing the school calendar for a more balanced way of having education. So having more regular days off, which would be beneficial for mental and physical health and well-being. So there's a lot of things going on there at the institutional level. But at a synchronous and asynchronous learning level within a classroom structure, many teachers are understanding that there's different types of benefits to doing some things face-to-face, like collaborative activities in a synchronous setting is wonderful. But giving students time to reflect or time to do research or time to do rehearsal of activities asynchronously is much more beneficial when they're on their own time, right? But there's also limitations of each. So that means that both of these things, synchronous and asynchronous activities, have to be worked into our planning. What do we think is the best use of our face-to-face time? And then how should we use our at-home time or asynchronous time, which is more self-paced? And what types of activities are most important there? And one thing that really came out is that there are certain social interactions that can be done synchronously or asynchronously. There's many more social interactive activities that can be done synchronously. And that's something to take into consideration. And then content rehearsal, there's a lot going on there. They can both be done synchronously and asynchronously, but there's actually a benefit to allowing people to have more or less rehearsal time on their own at their own pace asynchronously. So there's a lot of things to take into consideration here. So understanding our objectives. What are our mastery objectives and how will we plan around that? What activities should be synchronous and asynchronous is vital to that new type of planning that we've come to understand. So this means once you have your objective, should this be done, is it best achieved? Is that particular objective, that learning objective you have, best achieved asynchronously or synchronously? If we want all of our kids to have perfect pronunciation in a foreign language, probably the best kind of rehearsal is not going to be done face to face in a live class where everybody's embarrassed and freaked out, but actually asynchronous rehearsal time. So we have to decide, you know, what is our objective and can it be best to met either asynchronously or synchronously? Then we have to decide, is this something that could be best supported by more technology online or is it an offline activity? And then we have to think about the pedagogy. Should we have implicit instruction or explicit instruction? Should it be, for example, an online gaming activity to rehearse a grammatical structure, for example? That's very implicit. We're not saying we're teaching you this, they're just rehearsing it so much that they're actually able to learn it, right? Or am I going to say the objective of today's class is to learn irregular verbs in the past tense. So I'm explicitly laying that out. So when do we do implicit learning, gamification types of things, or explicit teaching? That has to also be thought about, right? Then do we use digital technology or something analog? So thinking about those things planning a little bit more, it takes a little bit more headspace in the pre-planning of a class, but once it's sought out, you almost guarantee the learning objectives can be met, right? So this moves on to the second big point, second idea of universal design for learning. One of the main ideas of the benefits of universal design for learning has to do with differentiation. Our classrooms are full of people who are different, which is really, really cool and wonderful, and they have different needs and they come from different backgrounds and they have different values. They have different levels of prerequisite knowledge, and their interests are different, which means that motivational activities aren't the same, right? For every person, they're going to have different types of motivational activities, and they have different language abilities and so even our explanations of information or ideas in class may be misinterpreted sometimes, so we might have to have multimodality in explaining things, right? So these different cultural backgrounds can also add or they can take away from a kid's ability to learn within the time frame that we've set up for that, okay? So if we think about this, universal design for learning is one of the few attempts at using information from educational neuroscience. How does the brain actually learn things? And putting it into a design context, how do we create educational opportunities for all? And one of the beauties of this is that it basically appreciates, deeply appreciates human variability. This is why there's not one single way to be a great teacher, right? Because there's no single way to be a great student. Students are going to come to us with all kinds of differences and we need to appreciate that, right? And different people will need different things at different stages of this learning process and the same person might need different things on different days, you know, just by their mood or whatever is going on in their own lives, right? So we have to be very careful to bake that into our equation. And that is the one thing that is missing from all textbooks. People do not think about human variability very much. They set up an educational goal. They say do these activities. This amount of homework should do it. And then the person, you know, manages to learn this. Not always. And that's the one beauty of universal design for learning. It's taking that understanding of the human variability and understanding that range, that scope, that spectrum that humanity is on and basically appreciating that that's going to occur in your classes. This means valuing one of the basic principles of mind-brain education is that, you know, human brains are as unique as human faces. We all have the same parts. There's basic elements that are the same. But no two people have identical brains and that's all based on their prior experiences in life which are not identical. So we have to value that. I'm putting that into the concept of universal design for learning. I hope you'll be able to watch this brief video on universal design for learning which talks about the key ideas of multimodality learning and getting a baseline. Who are the students in my class? What is my range? What is the person who has the most gaps to fill before they can actually get prerequisite knowledge to learn my new objective? And where are my high flyers? And what do they need in order to stay engaged and interested in the class? Understanding my range of learners and then being able to cater to their needs. And one of the ways we do this very specifically we recommend that people instead of having or marrying yourself to a textbook that you devise things called bundles. Bundles are basically multiple resources where you can leverage technology not just your same old textbooks but you can get those digitally but also videos and podcasts and other things that are prerecorded lessons from other groups or gamification or other things to be able to have a mix of resources that will allow the learner to come to your class have your learning objective and be able to have as many resources necessary to fill in their prerequisite knowledge so that they're ready for your new learning objective. And so the idea is to understand the scope of your learners and to come up with some variety of resources and we will give you some sample bundles seventh grade math classes for example or we have a third grade bundle that covers all of the curriculum. There's pre-existing bundles that exist using multiple types of resources. We use the term bundles forever in our course at Harvard but other people have called these things playlists you know personalized playlists that students can choose from. So think about that because that is one way to actually meet learners at their starting point so that you can assure that everybody's going to meet the same objective at the end of the day. And since we have this range of learners the idea of universal design was basically borrowed from architecture and the concept is that you know some people can do stairs that would be your basic curriculum right but everybody can do ramps so why don't we just build ramps so the idea is designing a classroom full of ramps as opposed to those stairs right. If you look at Marzano's work and you say well how many times does a student need to see a new concept before they know it you know how many times do I have to teach the conjugation of this particular verb or something like that. Well depending on their prior knowledge this is the whole answer in education it's always it depends right. Somebody might just need you know one repetition and they know it right. Some people an average of 10 times is pretty good but some people without that prerequisite knowledge might need 20 30 40 50 repetitions of the information before they know it right. So since we know that there's going to be this variety of needs within our classroom the key is designing for that. How do we design and create and have those resources available that will not take away time for me. It takes me time to prepare that initially but then each year all I do is tweak and add to those bundles allowing for students to have different entry points so that they get what they need which would assure that everybody in my class gets what they need so that they can all meet my objectives for learning. So there's multiple tools that we can use at an institutional level and you might have an IT department that is really attuned to what you need and has created or bought a learning management system that allows for example grades to automatically be uploaded that would be some way to save yourself time right or that takes attendance in class right or that allows people to do multiple quizzes and records that into the grade book all by itself. There's some things that can be done at an institutional level that do save people a lot of time. There's other things that teachers can do so some teachers have decided to flip their classrooms you know this would allow for a lot more time for student collaboration and the application of the information and deeper learning student exchanges in the synchronous meeting time because you offload the dates, facts, figures conceptual knowledge to a video so that when you come to class you can actually use it which is what we're doing in this exchange right now we're offloading some of the dates, facts formulas the fact based information so that when we're together we can debate it discuss it use it see the applications in our own real life right. Other teachers have taken the time to do these self-graded quizzes that's wonderful because they've realized that multiple-choice tests don't do anything more than measure knowledge you know things that you can get off your telephone anyway so you might as well allow them the space to rehearse that and to dominate certain vocabulary and conceptual knowledge before they come to the live synchronous class so they can use it right and the development of bundles the bundles that they do take some time at the initial stage of planning but once they're created all they have to do is be tweaked the next time you teach so it's definitely a worthwhile investment and to create bundle material basically all you have to have is a clear objective what is the goal I want students to be able to correctly use the subjunctive in Spanish language okay for example all right great if I have a very clear objective then I think of the keywords the synonyms for that then I decide on the format that I want do I want to use the synchronously or asynchronously I enter those keywords in a google search and then I add to that you know free resources I get rid of all the ads that might come up there and then I prioritize these and other evidence based resources and then I choose based on the objective that I have I choose the ones and I play with them a little bit to make sure that they're the right types of bundle resources for students that I have that year so basically here's an example if I have an objective that students will know all the major body parts and human anatomy okay so what are my keywords I have to come up with that I have to decide if the format should be synchronous or asynchronous or digital or analog I put those words into the search engine I add free resources and if you do that free resources human anatomy okay you're going to get about 569,000 options of these types of resources now get rid of all the ads you can add the words for example gamification or you can free apps or things like that to that and you will come up with a really great list of things that you can play with give yourself a day to goof around with this and then you'll basically have a range of resources that would meet multiple students' needs this allows you then the opportunity to differentiate your homework what we do in our courses we tell students go to the bundles choose one or more of the resources and then come to class prepared to do x and we give them the objective the class is going to be about whatever it is right that means that they have to come prepared and that means that they get to choose whether or not they play the game or they look at the infographic or they do the worksheet that's there or they just read or they watch somebody's video they choose but then they come prepared so this differentiates the homework as opposed to differentiating instruction okay so finally there's other tools at an activity level that can be used or applied in universal design for learning which has to do with using digital educational resources and we are going to be giving you a list of more than 600 free resources that exist for different levels of education and different types of subjects but the idea would be to incorporate some of those into your own bundles for the students okay now there's some resources that are there for teacher use that do something like for example documentation when students are doing collaborative work so that you get to see their notes and things like that but there's other things that facilitate student rehearsal of use with the information so depending on the actor that's going to use the resource you get to choose them in that depending on the actor whether it's synchronous asynchronous whether it's something that's going to use for individual rehearsal or it's something that's used to facilitate a group activity in a live class for example depending on your objectives you can choose and sort out which of those activities would best meet your needs we also want to encourage those of you who are using zoom to use the power of the group leveraging breakout rooms is fantastic and it's one of the best things that we've figured out how to do technologically speaking it's far superior than face to face any of you who've tried to organize kids into groups you know okay let's divide into groups of five you know move to these tables shuffle shuffle shuffle 10 minutes later you might get everybody settled down what's fantastic and zoom is like zoop you send everybody off to the breakout room and boom they have to start working and so you save a whole lot of time by leveraging technology in that sense as well so if you are going to do collaborative work in your synchronous classrooms we highly recommend that you leverage the use of the zoom breakout rooms and there's many other ideas right this leads us to the third point then which is instructional designs and this is the key I think to all of this in order not to confuse people is to know the difference between remote emergency online learning and quality online classes there's a huge difference between remote learning and and we call attention to that in in my book as well and we give you a whole rubric that sort of says that big difference between having a MOOC where nobody gets a lot of support and everything's on their own versus a webinar or having a really great class there's a huge difference there and the level of learning is drastically different and so you can do a lot of things with online tools with MOOCs with online apps but learning with other people has a very different field to it so how do you do that on an online setting or in a face-to-face setting and so just make a the big difference here is we're not talking about an emergency thing you slap together that's kind of sloppy we're looking for something that's really a high quality class and this goes back to using understanding by design once again what are the objectives and what is best done in that online format what are those best things that are done in face-to-face formats and what can be done within the classroom structure that we have inherited within our institutional structure and when you do understand by design when we decide our objectives we talked a lot about you know knowledge skills and attitudes but that has to be thought about at a macro level at the end of the semester by the time they graduate long-term planning kind of things right as well as at a meso level by the end of this unit or the end of this particular topic we've decided or we can pinpoint what the objectives are and that these are transparent to the learners they know what the expectations are you should be able to do X by now or on a daily basis you know by the end of class today you know the students should be able to do whatever or value whatever or know whatever all of this is very important to think through now we began by talking about how to save time and I know a lot of you think well my gosh I'm adding all these other layers share this means I'm adding time to my process the truth of the matter is you're saving yourself time because you are guaranteeing learning through this structure and you're creating the safety nets so that all students will be able to learn so by having and sharing those clear objectives you're making sure that all of the students get what they need in order to reach those learning objectives that you've identified through this thinking process beforehand so for those of you who are interested we do have another video that's 12 steps to designing a successful online course if that's what you're interested in but it basically means deciding what are my objectives by the end of semester what should they be able to do and then taking each week's objectives and breaking it down into its smaller parts what are the knowledge skills and attitudes of each of those weeks and now how does that build up to create a successful end of year class each of those weekly pieces how does that all add up to being the final semester right so breaking that down into its smaller parts and the key to all of this is flipping which many of you have decided to do which I think is fantastic because it's a much deeper way to think about things it offloads content to prerecorded video situations um you can build then your quizzes and discussion boards based on the video that you make and then you can use your class time to dig deeper to clarify things to get students to share information to learn from one another to collaborate to actually apply the information far far deeper learning can occur with flipping when flipping is done successfully and again this takes advantage of asynchronously letting students get those date facts and figures that knowledge based information asynchronously so that synchronously we can work on skill sets together as well as attitudinal changes and so if you're interested please do watch the video on 12 steps to a successful instructional design which sort of breaks it down piece by piece and allows you to sort of construct your own classroom we do this with teachers over the summer basically giving them several weeks to pull everything together but it saves them so much time when you're actually in the class because what do you do when you show up to class the next semester you don't scramble where are my materials what are the activities you go deeper into what the students need so that is truly student-centered education so class activities including evaluation in our course if you look at a work model we have pre-unit quizzes so they watch the video and if they watch the video they should get 100% on the quiz but if they don't they can take the quiz 100 times we don't care we just want them to know the dates, facts, formulas, concepts that are in the quiz then they watch the video they reply to a discussion board prompt that's based on the video and then in the synchronous class we meet together you devise slide deck that guides a basic conversation that's focused on what the students had as questions during their discussion board so you will use those ideas as the core elements of what happens in the live class right and after every single live class we have them reflect three things they didn't know beforehand two things they're interested in learning more about and one thing that they might change in their personal or professional life based on the information that's been shared and so in our class we also have semester long projects give space for that as well right and then asynchronously we encourage the students to do their homework their differentiated homework to do over in order to learn more and deeper anything that's graded in our class we allow students to resubmit they lose some points for punctuality 10% of their grade is gone just because they're doing it a second time but if you can learn from your mistakes you should be able to do that and so it gives us the luxury this kind of planning gives us the luxury to have the space to be able to do that for students which improves their learning outcomes this means that evaluation is ongoing it's embedded it's continual and it's mostly formative and it's also extremely well documented so you see your own progress as you go and so students really appreciate being able to see how they have learned throughout this entire process so these types of graded or evaluative activities occur throughout the semester and they can be redone in order to improve the grade but also more importantly the learning is enhanced but this means we've had a real good think through about the balance of asynchronous and synchronous activities within the classroom structure and finally we couldn't end this presentation without talking a teeny bit about the brain and I'm just going to pull up that first concept we talked a little bit about attention systems and memory systems as being vital pillars in learning so what's really clear now in modern neuroscience is that there are multiple attention systems in the brain there's orienting there's alerting there's sustained attention there's also multiple memory systems in the brain there's short-term working multiple types of long-term memory all of those have to be combined so it's kind of simplistic to say that memory plus attention equals learning it's obviously more nuanced than that but without well-functioning memory systems or well-functioning attention systems there is no learning so this also gives us a clue as to what kinds of things should be prioritized in our synchronous and asynchronous activities as we're planning what things enhance memory what things enhance attention the big question is if we know so much about this how come it's not applied more in schools we know that practice, familiarity, and repetition enhance learning and we know that it enhances learning because it improves memory systems your ability to retrieve information so getting information encoded in your brain is one thing getting it out is another thing so we need those different stages of practice, familiarity, and repetition to be able to pull it back out and be able to use this again and we know that the more practice and familiarity and repetition we have the greater the strengthening of the smiling chief is and that means the speed this is basically impact and glial cells which are fatty cells that sort of speed up this transmission the more practice and repetition the faster we're able to retrieve that information in the brain okay so that's really key to remember activities that enhance memory or enhance attention are actually beneficial so for example a concrete example is interleaving and this is something that we knew back in the 60s Jerome Bruner talked about this idea of having a spiral curriculum you know which is basically what we now know of as interleaving interleaving means that you basically you know progressively repeat information so this is a teacher will walk in a room and say hey listen okay guys we've got a problem getting groups of four use anything that you've learned in the past month to resolve this problem or to answer these questions right basically forcing them to go back in memory what did I already learn about information and interleaving can also be broken down into the sub elements for example language has multiple sub elements this is an example of music music has pulse rhythm pitch dynamics tempo tendra structure texture notation there's multiple ways of teaching music the idea here is that you don't spend all your time and do that in a block way you're teaching a little bit of each piece and returning to it over time to go deeper into the information this is very vital it's vital in language learning for sure another element about learning and memory systems is that there's a memory enhancement effect that's caused by emotion we know that there is no cognition without emotion so it's vital that we take emotions take into consideration as we are teaching so what are activities that are highly engaging emotionally this is one of the reasons that things like gamification or repetitive learning getting you know different levels of language acquisition through something like duolingo are super successful and very fun for learners they get a prize or a celebration or applause as they advance and that is an emotional hook for a lot of people so including these emotional elements is really important and can be achieved a lot through gamification for example or other types of learning dynamics that engage a learner emotionally so this just means that bruner's idea back in the 60s is still true today basically we are spiraling up and returning and re-enhancing different levels of learning as we go so that the higher we go really the deeper we get into the information or to the knowledge what's cool about this is that it's really based purely on neuroconstructivism you basically have to have some very core elements established before you can construct on top of that and to get higher level knowledge and so the main idea marrying now all of these ideas of universal design for learning and instructional design and this big idea here of neuroconstructivism is that we have to understand that students have to have core elements core knowledge in place and some of them might not have it and one of the reasons some kids are slower than others is that they're having to fill in these gaps of prerequisite knowledge before they're able to have that firm foundation on which they can scaffold higher order conceptual knowledge right so we have to be able to create things like bundles multiple entry points for the information so students can fill in their own gaps strengthen that and then go on to those higher order objectives that we have for them so I'm going to ask kind of an obvious question I guess a lot of you think a lot about your students long after classes ended right you wonder you know what worked what didn't work how come I'm not getting through to this kid or this other person or why did most of the class react well and why why did this lesson fall flat for this other kid right I just want to suggest that this is one of the worst ways to use our time rumination is so bad but reflection is good so instead of getting to this negative spiral you know pulling your own self down about things I'd like to suggest that you save yourself some time and you also learn from these experiences by doing something really simple just give yourself you know five points of reflection every day what did I plan to do what did I actually do did it work why or why not and then what will I do better the next time this is a feed forward process not feedback this is not lamenting what didn't work it's actually saying what am I going to do better the next time and so try to make your reflection time as positive as possible and contributing to new learning in the future as opposed to sort of worrying about this you've set we're talking about you know backward design you've set these great objectives and then human variance kicks in and life happens and the lesson doesn't go as planned how do we grow with that this makes teaching one of the most complex professions in the world because every single day even despite having clear objectives things can go wrong and they do and we just have to learn to adapt to that and that is one of the greatest parts of the art in the science of teaching how do you adjust to those individual student needs on a daily basis okay so think about those five different steps try to incorporate that into your reflection time as opposed to just you know dragging yourself down and kicking yourself when you're down after something doesn't work okay so as a general overview there are multiple tools there are tools that are multi-platforms that you can incorporate into your own teaching and learning teachers for teachers teacher tube there's a bunch of video repositories that exist there are also websites that actually support teacher learning in different ways and teacher tips or repositories visits to museums or exchanges with native speakers or things like that if it depending on what what the focus is of your class and there's also a whole websites that's voted specifically to subject areas or methodologies then there's apps there are apps for every single subject area that can exist and some of them are absolutely amazing and teachers need to learn to leverage the use of apps because they also have embedded in them this fantastic cognitive algorithms that basically don't allow somebody to do too well because they quit because it's boring or due to poorly because they become demotivated and they stop wanting to play they basically create structures that keep people hooked long enough to learn things so apps and games are fantastic and they have not been used enough in our educational institution so far podcasts people have a lot of time on their hands to listen to things while they are cooking doing other things they can listen and hear information and they can be inspired to have different types of reflective points to bring to class the next day and there's all kinds of software that's out there to test for plagiarism or to do surveys or to enhance collaborative work or things like that do take into consideration this taxonomy the different ways that you can use information that I think that any teacher can create bundles on their own mixing and matching information and you do not have to rely on the IT department or a big budget to be able to do that okay if you're interested we also have a rubric available to judge the quality of these digital educational resources and how well they've been researched what is the evidence behind them that actually stands behind them that's one of the things that a lot of teachers don't have time for they get bombarded so the person who does the best marketing gets the attention of the teachers as opposed to the things that have the highest quality information so try to look for the high quality things okay some examples of high quality tools that have been vetted very carefully and have a lot of research behind Duolingo, Geochibras, Fantastic GarageBand, MyHistro there's a bunch of great apps that are out there Gemification the number of races a lot of things about it NASA Kids Race is fantastic these are aimed at younger learners but if you are interested we can definitely sit together and talk about how to devise bundles for university level learners in your specific topic area there are also great tools as we mentioned before if you're using Zoom for example or if you would like to do collaborative learning with students in a synchronous way even if they're sitting face to face in a real live classroom you can still have them do collaborative activities in Google Docs or using other formats to document they're learning and to actually have a record of that that can be shared with a larger group you can use other types of thinking routines that are fantastic for synchronous activities depending on the objectives that you have there's multiple thinking routines that have been used from kids as young as five and all the way up until adults that are very very successful and there's other tools that also give teachers a place to lean on if they need extra help differentiating their evaluation activities or things like that there's prepared lessons there's prepared topics that already exist and there's prepared subtopics for example a Khan Academy breaks down a concept of calculus into multiple sub areas and so you can watch these shorter videos to be able to show up particular subskills right there's also software out there that helps save you time for things like checking for plagiarism or for designing surveys or things like that or quizzes so in conclusion I know this is kind of a whirlwind tour of just generally you know a good practice that a lot of you already do but sticking to your guns and sort of deciding you know what are those main objectives what is mastery for me in learning not just how do I get through the curriculum or get them to get a high test score and by the way students who learn to think critically about their topic and learn do well on those tests but students who just you know learn for the test don't learn to think deeply about their subject so you're always better off spending the time going into that deeper learning objective so just quick recommendation you know take advantage of how the brain learns best use some of these activities that we've suggested and remind yourself you know let technology do what it does best to save you time to do what you do best we all know that that individual connection with the student makes all the difference in the world and their motivation do we have the time to do that can we create more time and space for them to be able to do that by offloading things onto flipped videos for example that gives me more time in class to be able to go deeper with what the students really need at an individual level rather than just a checklist of activities that might generically meet this middle group but might not attend to those kids with gaps in prior knowledge or those high flyers so trying to take into consideration that individual and human variability that's important in planning think about that stay in touch and if you have questions beforehand do send them to me so that I can make sure that I incorporate those into our synchronous discussion and we can go deeper into the areas that are most interest to you this video and other information can be found on the learningsciences.com under resources and you can write me at info at connections.com.uc looking forward to hearing from you guys and wishing you all the best in this most important job you have as educators thanks