 And my talk is evidence-based studies, neuroscience and the crossover into ELT, which is quite a megful and so I'm going to just narrow the focus down to how we can use this to develop or to train independent learners. And in order to just explain, so what I'm going to do in the talk is I'm going to tell you why I use this, why I use psychology neuroscience in my own teaching, how I've used it and what the outcomes have been for me, my experience, and probably give you some examples as well. So if you're interested to be able to use it in your own classroom and see how it works for you and your students. So first the why is really based on my own background. So before I became an English language teacher, I studied science, so I've a master's in science and biology and then I took a wrong turn and I ended up with a delta. Anyway, but what that has allowed me to do, I've been teaching English, I did myself in 2005, so a long time and I've married the two of them really and what it's allowed me to do is I've become a course designer really in the last eight years because I was in language schools that then wanted academic English and I started teaching international students science and engineering at the academic level for them. So I've designed courses in Cambridge for schools in Oxford and also science for boarders in Trinity College. Because of that then I have given up working everywhere instead of my own company which is called Hippo Educational Technologies. So our main focus is to help international students at the academic and professional level of English. So really the guys that are intermediate or above that need that extra push for their studies and career. And then we do this in two ways. First is our online school, Hippo Campus, not the neuroscience there, and we have a vocabulary builder as well, app that's coming in. So our biggest challenge, my biggest challenge as an online, with an online school is student motivation. OK, so motivation in the classroom anyway is tough but from an online perspective it's even worse. So the questions I get every day on social media, when will I be fluent? How can I improve my reading? How can I get a high score in IELTS? Not a typo, OK? So I get this every day. Every day. So what I'm trying to bring into my students is that they need to be independent learners, they need to have autonomy. But they need to be shown how to be independent, OK? And then a lot of them, you know, they still can't be independent whatever you do. And I want to foster this in the students so that they can go into their professional careers, but also use these tools that I'm giving them through these courses in any field or discipline they go into. Because our ethos in our company is we give the fishing what. You know, I'm not handing people the fish. You know, it's really about giving them the tools and it doesn't matter if it's English language or whatever it is. But I want it to be to give them transferable skills. So I'm going to begin with a question for you. This is just a question in your head. OK, so just take the first answer that comes to your head. When you were 10 years old, your brother was half your age. Now you're 50 years old. What age is your brother? Yeah, yeah. How many said 25 in their heads? You just, right? Very bad. Ah, OK. This is right. So that was a very quick question. Now you said you're very bad at math. I'm going to disagree with you. And I'm going to say that the reason you got the wrong answer was because of the language in this question. I said half, and I said 50. And straight away, your brain went to what is half of 50? Nothing to do with math, OK? What this is is cognitive bias, OK? So what is happening is that our decisions are influenced by our psychology, our decision-making processes in our brain. Nothing to do with your math. And I realized this. So thank you. It goes to our brain. I realized this on a Sunday afternoon. OK, I'm a bit of a science nerd as well. So on a Sunday afternoon, I'm in a cafe reading Daniel Cahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow. He's a psychologist. He won a Nobel Prize for this book. Everyone should get it. I read one chapter of this book. I'm not an affiliate. I read one chapter of this book on a Sunday afternoon. And straight away, I designed a new course. Because I had this question. We all recognize this student. So my question was, what if it's cognitive bias causing the students to get the wrong answers and not their language capabilities? OK, so, and especially any IELTS teachers, you know, use of English and Cambridge exams, time pressure, OK? They want to get that answer quickest. And what this book talks about is just even watching this video. It talks about our decision-making process. And we're encouraged by our intuition to go for the first answer. If I had it giving you just an extra 10 seconds for that question, nobody would have got it wrong. OK, so it talks about systems. And so that's what I'm interested in. And because of that, one chapter, I designed this course in a week. Brain training to improve your reading skills. Because I was recognizing that it's the reading skills of students that are really struggling at. And so I designed a five-week course for the online school. And again, it was about the fishing rod, giving them this. So this is the hair. Then I had to think, well, how am I going to use studies, evidence-based studies, from neuroscience and psychology, to show the students how they can develop their autonomy and give them the tools as well? Because this is really their question a lot of time. What do you want me to read? I have to read a book? Oh, good. I want to be better at this, but I don't want to work at it. So my answer is no. I want to maximize your learning potential across all of the skills, across all of the disciplines. Well, we can only do that if I can get you thinking about your own learning. So within this, the metacognition. And for me, this is the most important thing. And it kind of comes down to columns top as well. This is what I want to develop. It's not really just about moving away now from grammar and just those things. Because I'm trying to push out the students at the upper level. And so it has been recognized that when we bring in metacognitive instruction into text, structure, and in reading, then we can get more advanced reading from our learners. But we have to tell them this. So the way I view being able to develop this and is to bring them into the process. We all learn in the delta and the delta and all this that we have different procedures, declarative procedural learning. We activate schematic. We don't tell the students any of this. But I do. I changed all that. And I told them all the reasons why I was doing something. So Aristotle said knowing yourself is the theme of our wisdom. But I would add to that, saying knowing your weaknesses is the beginning of progression. And so what you have to do or what we have to bring into the classroom with the students is reflection. So we need to first assess. And only when we assess our own abilities and behaviors then we can progress. And asking, why did I get this wrong? So a lot of students have a strategy. Or they think they have a strategy. But a lot of the time it's wrong. Or it's not working in the best way for them. This is what a lot of students do. I'm not just talking about IELTS exams or English language exams. I mean learning in university for essay exams. Because this rereading is really a waste of time. And it has been proven. I follow a lot of the studies by this guy, Jeffrey Carpighe. He's a professor of psychology. He works on cognition and learning. His studies are really, really interesting. And so I used a lot of what he found in my practices and training. So I was looking at the students' learning strategies. And what I want to do or what I did do was bring the testing into improving their learning and memory. So not testing in the form of assessment, summative or formative at the end of the course. The testing in the learning at the time of learning. So when students are just reading or reading over something the night before an exam, this is called study study, this strategy. And 84% of students engage in this. 59% of them believe it's the best strategy to use. But it's really a waste of time. Whereas if we engage students in a study test strategy at the time of their learning, so retrieval practice, concept mapping, short answer questions, better than CQs, then we're going to improve their learning. So 11% of students use study tests. And only 1% think it is the best method. And that's probably because they don't know about it. So that's what it was to bring into the classroom. Because when we test during the learning process, it can increase their memory over a longer period of time when we have retrieval practices and things like that. So I brought all of these in to the course. We did each of them, then we evaluated them, headed that and helped me approve what was good, what works for me, because everyone's different. And I broke it down into pre-reading strategies while reading and post-reading. And I had a week for each of those. So we really looked in-depth at all of these things. Just for an example, in a pre-reading strategy I ask questions like this, what do you think this article is about? How do you think people will react to it? It didn't matter to me what the answers were. Because the next activity was me asking them to identify what I was trying to get them to do with these questions. And so what I wanted them to identify, that this question is about predicting. This is about visualizing. These two are about forming a relationship with the article in a text to yourself and then related to the world. And it's about identifying strategies in the students. That's what I wanted. So this is what I'm trying to do is bring them into the process. Because when you bring them in, you bring in respect. And as well, like I'm dealing in the online community and also with adults. So if we can bring respect in and show them that level of respect in the process, then I feel that it allows them to have the fishing rod as it were. Because a lot of the students are at the plateau. And if we can use neuroscience and psychology, then I think we'd be able to help students break through the plateau. And the outcome was for one student that before the course, he was getting banned five in reading. This wasn't an IELTS course, but I showed him how to use the strategies in IELTS. He was getting banned five before and in five weeks, he was getting 7.5 and eight. Now he is in the interest of science and Ebblier. He was the only student on the course doing IELTS. So it wasn't an IELTS course, as I said. Plus, he did all of the homework, okay? So not everyone does that before he can see that dramatic increase in just five weeks. Because this is really the overall key and if we can tell students that, maybe you're not getting things wrong because of language, because of this, that it is just about your decision-making processes. But your brain is so diverse and valuable that it can change and help improve your skills. And if anyone's familiar with Carol Dweck and the Grote Mindset, then this is also using psychology to improve the student's learning, to give them control. So I don't really believe in given IELTS tests or Cambridge tests on Fridays, test on Monday and spend the week looking back at why they got the questions wrong. Don't just teach them, say 32 out of 40, okay, good, have a nice weekend. We need to bring in the testing and we need to assess the learning themselves. So we have the reflection in it. And in that way, then, we'll be able to help them overcome obstacles and hopefully get them to achieve success in whatever it is that they need to be successful. So thank you for listening.