 Hi, my name is Tracy Togohama-Spinoza, and this is a video on why it's never been a better time to be an educator. I teach a course at Harvard University Extension School called the Neuroscience of Learning, an introduction to Mind, Brain, Health, and Education, which is a flipped class, which meets synchronously once a week for two hours, and which uses a bunch of really cool tools that we're going to be sharing here today. Before we begin, I would like to extend an invitation. Take any writing instrument or your computer and write down this address, the learningsciences.com, as well as my email. I want to ask you, this is our first point about the brain, why am I asking you to write this down? The big idea here is that your brain needs well-functioning attention systems and well-functioning memory systems to learn. By writing, we extend our fragile memory, so please write this down. I also want you to write it down because I'm going to ask you at the very end to think about what you might have learned. Is there anything that I'm going to say today that's new to you? Is there anything that sparks your curiosity or your interest? And is there anything that you might consider changing about your personal or professional practice based on the information we share today? A second reason that I'd like to you to write this down is because learning involves emotion. There is no such thing as cognition without emotion. That's just the way sensory perception enters into your base of your brain, and to save energy, your brain wants to know if it already knows something about the information. So it does pass through hubs that are important for processing emotional memories. You are not alone in this. So writing down somebody's email and feeling like you can call on a friend when you have questions is a big deal. So do write down my email. What are we going to do today? We're going to look at this changing role that we have as educators, how that's being transformed under the current circumstances. Look at our new profile. And then I want to apply this to a mind-brain health and education perspective. What is this new information from neuroscience that might give us a little nudge into this world of virtual learning? And how can we leverage technology to the best of our abilities to create even better learning experiences than we currently have? I have the honor in 2017 of serving on the OECD expert panel to determine teachers' new pedagogical knowledge. So this was shared with the ministers of education around the world. And what we really put our finger on was the idea that teachers in training, teachers who are becoming teachers nowadays, do not yet receive enough information about technology and they do not yet receive enough information about the brain. And these are two things that are beginning to change. The Deans for Impact, for example, is a consortium of universities in the United States that is trying to incorporate more technology and more information about the brain into teacher training programs. But this is just beginning to occur. Pretty much everybody around the world is in the same spot of trying to get their heads around what kinds of things about the brain and what kinds of things about technology should be a part of teachers' knowledge. And this really is based on the new conceptualization of what teachers need to know to do their jobs best. We all kind of agree that you need to have content knowledge. So if you don't know math, you shouldn't be a math teacher. So you have to know content knowledge, but you also need to know how to teach. And even more than that, you actually need to know how to teach your content because being a good math teacher doesn't necessarily mean you're a good language teacher or a good art teacher. So being able to understand the patterns of errors, for example, that might occur within a math problem is very particular to knowing your content area, but also knowing how to teach it. So content and pedagogical knowledge is now being complemented with technology. We have to learn about what tools are out there, not just what's in fashion, but what can save us time. What are those tools that we can use to leverage the possibility of better face-to-face time with our students and let the machines do what the machines do best and quickly, and let humans do what humans do very uniquely. Your learning platform might have self-graded quizzes, and that saves you a lot of time, so that you can now talk to the student about why he might have gotten certain problems wrong and what the right answer might be, not just giving him a score. In addition to technology now, though, we also have to add this element of the brain. What do we really know about human learning and how the brain functions, and what can be leveraged within our own classrooms to better improve learning outcomes? We have to put all of this then within our context. Without understanding a person's context, their background, knowledge, what are they coming to the class with, it's very, very hard to apply all these other things. So understanding our context and the culture within which we're learning, which includes also the educational culture of our institution. It's not just the nationalistic culture, but cultures as far as schools are concerned or departments within schools. If we can do all that, we end up with a new vision of the educator as a learning scientist. And this is what I did my doctoral thesis on. It was titled, The Science and the Art of Teaching, trying to understand what evidence-based practices we can apply as teachers to leverage information from the other learning sciences to do our jobs better. This creates a different set of new first steps in teachers' professional development. First and foremost, we have to get rid of the myths. There's a lot of junk out there about how we think the brain learns. Like people are right-brained or left-brained or they have learning styles or that you can multitask. Those things are just not true and we have to get that out of the way. We have to clear the stage before we can then get to the few things that are true and good information. The principles, these are the few good things we know about human brains and learning that is true for all human brains across all cultures and all age groups. There's only six things there. We'll mention them in just a second. And then we have to talk about the tenants. Tenants are things that are also true and by the way, there are no truths in science. There's just evidence and lack of evidence. But tenants are things that are true for all human brains, but with a huge range of human variants. For example, we know that motivation is really important in learning. However, what motivates you doesn't necessarily motivate me, right? We also know that sleep and dreaming play a huge role in learning outcomes, but how much sleep an individual needs really varies greatly. So we have to respect that. So principles and tenants are the good pieces of information. So get rid of the myths, add in the good information, and then put all of that in the context of culture. There are different cultural norms, including the cultural artifacts that we gather, for example, our writing systems, as well as customs, which change things related to principles and tenants. After we've done that, then we could probably recommend certain types of interventions or methodologies or strategies that you should use. But the big idea is to have that background information first so that nobody needs to tell you what you need to do. You'd know because you'd have the space information related to the brain and learning. So if we look at this, let's focus very quickly on the principles. The principles are probably not surprising to you. We know that there are no two brains that are alike. We know that individuals are born with different potentials thanks to the genes they inherit from their parents, but also based on the potentiation of only a fraction of those genes based on the context and the culture in which a person grows up in. We also know that prior experience is incredibly important because all new learning passes through that filter before new learning occurs. We know that there's constant changes in the brain, so we just have to be patient because there's a lot of things that happen at a molecular level before you can see it in behavior. And that there's plasticity throughout the lifespan. People can and do learn until they die. And finally, there's a great importance given to memory systems and attention systems without which there is no learning. These are things that are true for all human brains independent of where you live, how old you are, or your cultural upbringing. But we also know that tenants play a big role. There are 21 tenants. These things are true for all human beings, but there's a huge range of human variants. This was agreed upon by a panel of experts from 29 different countries, educational neuroscientists who agreed, yes, it's true. Motivation is crucial to learning, but when motivates you doesn't necessarily motivate me. It's also true that sleep and dreaming is important for learning, but how much sleep a person needs can vary greatly from four and a half hours to 12 hours. Eight might be average, but there's a huge variation there. Same thing, novelty and patterns are very important to the brain and learning, but what is novel or a pattern to you is based on your prior experience, right? So while all of these things are true and important for learning, the teacher has to really be in touch with the students to understand how to use this information to improve better learning outcomes for that individual. So if we put all these things into context and we get back to the educator as a learning scientist, this begs the question then, what types of tools in technology lend themselves to all of those principles and tenants? So we're going to ask you to just think about this on your own for a second and maybe stop the video recording and think for a second. What are the tools I already use? And basically, are any of those really lending themselves to either the principles or the tenants within mind brain education science? But I'm going to fast forward my anticipation of what you might say. And I'm going to choose some of the most common tools that we already have within online learning platforms. So we're going to look at the tools. We're going to talk about the teaching elements that are involved there and understand a little bit more about the neuroscience behind how and why these tools might be beneficial. So let's look at the first one. The first one is something like a large group session where you have tons of people there. Now, if we're using a Zoom platform, for example, or any other teleconferencing where we can see people's faces, we can have two amazing things occur that cannot necessarily happen in face to face. The first is called the disinhibition effect. The disinhibition effect means that people feel kind of protected and a little bit of anonymity when they're online. This allows them to share more than they normally would with a person in face-to-face contact, which is kind of crazy, but it's actually true. The second element that's really important about large group discussions is that social contagion is real in virtual contexts. We know how social contagion exists in face-to-face situations. We know that one person yawns, another person will yawn. We know that if somebody says, oh, it's really cold in here, the other person says, oh, yeah, it is kind of cold in here. We know that there's social contagion of emotional context, but what very few teachers understand and realize is that social contagion in virtual contexts is just as real, in some cases, even more intense than face-to-face. Why? Why would that occur? Number one is because we can see each other's faces. You see everybody in the classroom. You can see their faces, whereas in a real face-to-face classroom, you oftentimes have people looking at the back of each other's necks. You don't see everybody. But secondly, and what's highly beneficial to the teacher, is that we can also see everybody's names and we can call on Jane or Mary or Sam and have them brought into the conversation much more personally than we might do within a large class in which we're not sure exactly what these hundred people's names are. Here, we're able to call them by name, personalize that context, ask them questions on a cold call to make sure that they're staying engaged in the classroom setting. So large group sessions in virtual contexts can be much more powerful than in face-to-face. Second, we have things like breakout rooms and in breakout rooms, you can put people in groups of three, four, five, ten to have a small group discussion which warms them up and consolidates ideas before they come back to the big group to share. Now, while all of you have used this in a real face-to-face class, what's so powerful about the virtual context is that you can do this in a second, whereas it takes a lot of shuffling around and moving people and getting the desk straightened out and have five people over here and five people over there, that takes a long time in a face-to-face setting. But online, we can do this within a second, literally. We can do an automatically distribution of rooms. I want three people in the room and it's done and they're already there. This saves us so much time. The time that we need to organize those small group sessions in face-to-face can now be used actually in deeper discussion. A third thing that is really fascinating that I'm sure a lot of you already use is the chat function within a video conferencing setting. I'd like to suggest an alternate use of a chat, whereas you typically might just be saying, oh, hi, and hey, good to see you, Frank, or whatever it is. We'd like to extend that. Pretty sure that most of you have heard of the chat function or have actually used the chat function, but I want to suggest an alternative or complementary use to the chat. Rather than just using it for salutations, hello, or whatever, number one, we can use this also at the beginning of the class. I just will pull out a first question. Hey, what is something you know and something you want to know about the brain? Put that in the chat. Well, by asking that question, I also get content information, which I can use, feed into our conversation, but I also get a list of all the people that are there so I can take attendance really easily just by using that chat function. But even more importantly, remember we said that memory functions and attention functions are vital to learning, right? Have you ever been in a conference where somebody has said something and they say, oh, leave all your questions to the end? It's kind of crazy, right? Because your brain can't. You have a question and you just you want to ask that question and get it out because your brain cannot focus on the next thing and the next thing because it's still thinking about that other thing that wasn't resolved. So what we do in our class is that we use the chat so that the student will say, hey, what was the name of that person she just mentioned and a teaching assistant will jump in and say, oh, that was Bakirita. This is how you spell it. These are some of the best representative works of this person. And they'll satisfy that curiosity in the moment so that that person can now readjust attention and stay with the momentum of where the class is actually going. OK. So we suggest using the chat as a back channel. Many teachers are totally uncomfortable with this initially because it's almost like somebody's passing a note in the class. And yeah, that's true. But that's OK because the note is about the class content. They're looking for clarity. They're talking more about what's going on in the class. And many students don't want to interrupt the whole class because they're doubting if I'm the only one who has this question. So they don't want to stop the flow of what's happening in the class but they do want an answer. And you'll see once they put that question and many people say, oh, great. Thanks, Nancy. I had the exact same question. So it's really important to leverage the chat make sure it's refined and keeps only focused on what was going on in the classroom setting. Don't let the student go down a rabbit hole but celebrate the fact that they're trying to satisfy their curiosity for your knowledge for the information that's being talked about within the class setting. Quizzes. I'm sure all of you guys use quizzes. We use them differently. There's a lot of terrific evidence now that frequent low-stake testing is fabulous for enhancing memory. Remember we said without memory there's no learning. Well, I use quizzes in order to confirm that all my students come to the live class with a certain level of vocabulary and conceptual knowledge because they've already taken the quiz. We have them take the quiz as many times as they like. They just have to try to get a perfect score so that they can really dominate the vocabulary and the conceptual knowledge that's needed to be able to participate in the class. And we tell them take the quiz before you watch the pre-class video take it after you've watched the pre-class video take it after you came to the live class and after you've done the discussion boards just to see how you grow and our students take the quiz an average of four times they tend to increase their points until they get about a hundred percent on average. So we know that this is a fantastic way to consolidate information and knowledge and we only keep the highest score. This motivates them to really invest time in understanding and getting all of those questions right. We also use discussion boards as I'm sure you do but we don't use them just to test to like sort of a reading check do they do they read this passage and what do they think about it. We use discussion boards to create community. So we have the we put in a pretty juicy prompt that goes with the theme of whatever that week's class is and we say respond to this prompt in 250 words and after you've done so read your classmates responses and reply to at least two people in a hundred word exchange. What is so fascinating to us is that nobody ever replies to just two people and nobody ever just does it once. Most people get a conversation going with one or more people about the way they responded to that prompt and it really creates a wonderful solidarity and a different vision to the information. We average about 11 different countries in the class and we also have students from every single state in the United States and so what's fascinating is that different cultural perspectives really enriched that conversation. So when we have people reply to the prompt they're coming at it with different prior knowledge with a different perspective. Well when my school we never did that or you know this is the first time I've ever heard of formative evaluation or things like that they'll mention things to each other which are really eye-openers and a key idea here is that you know identity is so important in learning and we know ourselves better by knowing the other. So the more chances we have to create a community in which people trust each other and understand their perspectives it helps them understand themselves even better. In addition to the discussion boards we have reflections just like the one I was telling you I'm going to prompt you on a three two one three things you didn't know before two things you're curious about one thing you want to change about your personal or professional life based on this information. This is so important because almost never in education do we give students a chance to breathe you know downtime. Think for a second what does that information mean to you and students are scrambling all the time to get caught up with things or they're trying to pay attention to multiple sources of information at once they struggle with that. When we flip the classroom we give them some of that reflection time. I speak really fast my students really like me a lot more on video than in real life because they're able to stop me make me back up they can re-listen to a part or or understand a concept better or hear somebody's name again or understand the theory even better because they can review the information in real time they don't have to wait to get their questions answered and so in a similar way reflection papers at the end of every single face-to-face encounter ask students to take stock so we say five minutes at the very end of each class and we say okay let's do our three two ones now and they go back and they start to look at their notes and they start to think about well what is it that I really learned today and what is it that I really want to learn more about and what is this why is this important in my life what am I going to do to change and this is very powerful the really cool thing is at the end of the semester we share all the three two ones again that everybody in the class has written with the whole group so they see in this huge excel all the three two ones for all of the different modules and it's a powerful reminder of all the things that we've learned in class together and then after they've looked at their own I say now look at your your classmates are there other things that you remember now that you've also learned that you want to highlight for yourself and it's a fantastic review of the entire semester in their words a seventh tool that we really want to encourage you to use our e-portfolios if there is one thing that is going to change thanks to the problems that we currently have in education and the force to being online it will be evaluation current evaluation systems are far less than adequate a test score is never the equivalent of what a person knows and we've been slow to adopt to this idea that an alternative way of evaluating a student would be better and everybody says but how well there's several movements going on that have to do with 3D transcripts and e-portfolios things that would permit us to have a longitudinal view of what a student has learned what they know and I would highly recommend you do this for yourself personally teachers we all need to create our own e-portfolios and begin to document our practice no longer are we going to have all those little certificates that say that oh yes you attended whatever professional development section now you're going to be able to show the video of what you did and your reflection paper of what you did and all these other artifacts that show that you've actually grown with that conceptual knowledge so e-portfolios are a fantastic way to leverage that and to change the face of evaluation in education finally I want to introduce what I think is probably a new concept because we invented it about five years ago in our course they're called mini libraries these bundles are curated lists of hyperlinked articles videos podcast for each topic and we include these within the course so for every single week we have a specific bundle that has to do with a specific topic of that week and the students get to choose we tell the students if you're undergraduate you choose one and if you're graduate you choose at least two of these resources and read them or watch them or listen to them before you come to class and in this way the students bring and enrich our conversation not only with their own personal perspectives but they can say well you know as we saw in that Carnegie Mellon video or what Kozalino said about the neuroscience of human relationships or whatever it is right and each of these we've taken the time to hyperlink this information directly to the articles so that the students can easily have access to them and for free why do we do this? Because in the Harvard Extension School we allow students who are undergraduate as well as graduate as well as non-credit to take the exact same class we have to be able to differentiate for the needs of all of those learners and so we've created at entry points for example somebody might know zero about neuroplasticity so we can show them a 60 second cartoon of how plasticity occurs in the brain or if they're a little bit better than that they'll watch maybe a 20 minute TED talk or if they're more sophisticated they might want to read a peer reviewed journal article or some of them actually get into it and they'll watch the three hour lecture by the Nobel Prize Laureate as he delivers his own understanding of neuroplasticity so we have a variety of entry points to the same topic what's so fascinating about that is that it allows every student to begin where they are not where my curriculum says they have to be but it begins their starting point and then they build up to it what is fascinating for us is that we can look at the student analytics and we can see that people will spend hours in every one of these bundles and they will get they'll say to us it was a rabbit hole I just went down it and I just found this and that and the other thing and they will always watch more than one or two of the different things sources that are in there they will always go deeper because they're curious and this allows them choice and the autonomy of being able to choose what you're going to do is very important this leads to the last point of being able to differentiate homework so students have to all watch the same pre-class video and they have to all do the same kind of quiz but they get to choose how they are going to supplement their knowledge before they get to class this allows us the differentiation needed to meet every student at their own starting point that is vital which is why we have a higher success rate of students completing the course than I think many others do so think about the use of bundles in your own classroom and if anybody wants a tour of the course that we have in Canvas very happy to give it to you to show you how we use each of those tools and how they balance out to make a really wonderful instructional design we also have additional tools that have been shared with you already I believe related to video examples of how classes are managed in Zoom within this context of a flipped classroom with a synchronous meeting time and we invite you to explore those things and then get in contact with us if you have any questions so in summary for me online learning really saves me a lot of time I let the computers do what computers do best or what technology does best so that I have more time to teach to know my students individually to meet them at their starting points to satisfy their needs as far as learning in my classroom is concerned it also allows me to reach more students I can have you know undergraduate graduate non-credit students all in the same classroom and I can have them from many different countries in the world and many different ages at the same time because I'm in a virtual context this would be impossible in a face-to-face setting to have such a rich community of learners together online also permits me to differentiate for the needs of my students which is something we give a lot of lip service to in education but which we rarely do I have an infinite rewrite policy in my class because I think anybody who can learn from their mistakes should get the chance to do so so within a certain period one week within the time they get feedback on their discussion boards or feedback on their semester project they're able to improve write it again and improve and show us that they've actually learned from their mistakes we have the luxury of being able to do that because we have an online platform that permits us that flexibility of exchange and finally the biggest point the thing that I get the most joy out of when we get evaluations back at the end of the semester is when students tell us things like I never knew online could be so intimate I have never known my classmates as deeply as I did in this particular class I did not know that hearing so many people's stories could help me define myself better so the personalization is powerful it's there the social contagion is there but teachers have to be taught how to use this leveraging the power that exists in online learning is not necessarily intuitive and it is definitely not just taking your face-to-face class and like making PDFs and uploading things onto a different modality there's a whole different way to teach in this online context and we have to begin to learn that in order to take advantage of all of those great possibilities that exist so I will re-invite you to do your three two one think a little bit about the things that we've discussed so far and come prepared with a ton of questions when we need to be able to sort of pull this apart and use this in your context my goal would be to get you to be you know as excited as I am about this wonderful possibility that we have to now fix a lot of the things that have been going on in education with different types of tools and to leverage old tools for new purposes that we've oftentimes given lip service to but which we can now actually see and measure results within an online context so I cannot wait to see you guys if you have any questions before we have our synchronous meeting go ahead and drop me an email I would love to hear from you and also please explore all of the resources on the learningsciences.com as there's a lot of additional information as well as bundles for example that you might want to explore there okay take care looking forward to seeing you soon