 Hi, my name is Tracy Takahama Spinoza and I am really thrilled to be able to join you guys again and to talk about something I am very passionate about your brain I want to talk about this from the perspective of teachers because I really agree with Leslie Hart that Designing educational experiences without an understanding of the brain is like designing a glove without understanding the hand This changes the shift that we have about teaching and learning this idea of this Dynamic process of how we teach how we learn how the teacher learns from the student then teaches in a different way This means that the way that teachers are going to be formed in the future really takes into account all of the learning sciences So the life and natural sciences like understanding how biology or your genetic makeup How does that influence your learning as well as the natural sciences? Neurosciences education psychology, but we want to focus on though when we're together It's this really sweet spot of mind brain and education science because while everything else is trying to look at how the brain learns This is actually trying to look at how to take advantage of that and teach differently to take advantage of how we know how the brain learns so this means a very different kind of teacher Formation in the future which is going to include not only things that come from education But other things that come from neuroscience and psychology understanding the role of emotions for example in cognition or understanding how You know plasticity works. How are those connections made in the brain? How does learning really manifest itself? What does it look like in the brain? This changes this new vision of how we see teacher formation across our professional lifespans We're going to begin by talking about attitudes. How do we think we know things because? As Paul Howard Jones has noted in his research, you know more or less when we're really little We spend a lot of time wondering how does my brain work? How do I learn? What is easy? Why is this hard? But more or less around eight or nine years old We think we figure it out and then we spend the rest of our lives just sort of confirming what we think We know about how we think other people learn or how we learn and that can be kind of dangerous because some of those attitudes about how we believe the brain works turn into neuro myths and those things do harm So we have to get rid of some of those things. There are no right and left brain people people Don't just use 10% of their brains boys and girls aren't that different. We have to get rid of things, right? Then the idea would be to understand what really is true What do we really know about the brain and there are only a handful of things and a big study that was done in 2017? 41 neuroscientists from 11 different countries. We're trying to figure out What is it that we can tell teachers that really deserves to move from the lab and be used in classrooms? And there are only six things and we're going to talk about those six things For example, your brain is plastic throughout the lifespan. You can learn until you die, right? Or that all-new learning passes through the filter of prior experience So we're going to talk about those six things because they are wonderful Foundations about how we should learn and teach in not only our classroom situations, but throughout life Then we're also going to talk about tenants, which are 21 things that this Delphi panel this expert panel identified Are also true, but there's a really big range of human variation Which means you can't really dictate to someone how to do it For example, we know that sleep and dreaming are really important for learning processes One helps you pay attention by going to sleep and then dreaming consolidates memories and both of those things attention and memory are vital for learning, right? But I can't tell you how much you should sleep some of you can sleep four and a half hours and some of you need 12 and That's normal eight might be the average But we can't really dictate how people should sleep in order to maximize their learning potential because there's a lot of human Variations, so we're going to talk about those tenants as well Finally what we hope to integrate and it's very very important and what I think you guys are very very sensitive to is that the influence of culture is Huge on learning processes So even though there might be principles things that are true for all brains and all cultures There are other things that are hugely influenced by cultural artifacts For example the way we write or the way we write numbers or sleeping or eating patterns that we have in our cultures Influence student learning outcomes, so what's really important is to understand these foundational information about the brain and learning But also understand how that is changed colored modified by the cultural context in which we learn and teach And then finally if we have all of those things in place then then we can say okay Here's some good instructional practices or we can justify the things that we already do well in our classrooms For example, if you take on project-based learning, why is that such a great and successful process? Well, we can look at that and we can say well based on certain principles that memory and attention are vital for learning For example, we know that project-based learning works because people pay attention because it's authentic learning and Because they remember it because it's actually done in real-life contexts that are not necessarily schoolbook learning But that are done in real communities for example So we can justify certain processes and choices in instructional guidelines So this is the global overview of what we hope to work on and I am really looking forward to working with you guys again And if you have any questions before we start go ahead and send them to me in emails Otherwise what I hope to do when we're together is really deconstruct all this information in a lot more detail So that you can see how it's actually going to be usable knowledge within your own classroom settings. Thanks a lot