 Hi, this is Tracy Takahama Espinosa. Thanks for the opportunity to talk to you a little bit about mind-brain education and getting rid of neuro-myths in teacher practices. We're going to approach this through the lens of the science and the art of teaching or really the vision that neuro-science psychology and education together have of neuro-myths and how we can get rid of them to improve teacher education. I teach a course at the Harvard University Extension School called the Neuroscience of Learning. It's an introduction to mind-brain health and education. I had the honor of serving on the OECD expert panel looking at teachers' new pedagogical knowledge and I currently serve as an associate editor in Nature's Partner Journal of Science of Learning, which is a peer review online journal. We'll begin by defining a few key terms so that we're all sharing the same vocabulary on the same page. Then I want to talk about how beliefs and neuro-myths are actually a reflection of an individual's value systems and attitudes and how they think the brain learns or who can learn and who has the potential to learn different things at different times in their lives. Then we're going to look at some of the common neuro-myths that are still prevalent and talk a little bit about each of our own roles in getting rid of those myths and making sure that our practices, professors, teachers, educators, is as professional as possible. Just to be transparent, I do have some very clear biases. Based on this idea here, the designing educational experiences without an understanding of the brain is like designing a glove without understanding the hand. I believe that the brain, yes, it's the organ of our endeavors. I also think that I'm teaching is perhaps the most important profession in all of society. I'm also biased in that I know that schools are the single most important social institution in which individuals spend most of their time and I believe that education really is the path towards development. So these are my own particular biases. You don't have to buy into those, but it's good that you know where I'm coming from when I share this information. So before getting into the definitions, it's time for you to go to work. I want to see what you know already and compare that with the evidence that comes out of current research. So please take any piece of paper that you have, you know, fold it in half. And on one side of the paper, you're going to draw like a happy face. Okay, this is what I know. And on the other side, you're going to put like a big question mark and you're going to say, well, these are things that I've heard of. I'm not sure, but I'd like to know more about this. So on the left side, something you know about the brain and learning. And on the right side, something that you want to know or something that you heard or doubt or suspect may be a neuro myth. Please take a minute to do that. Pause your video and we'll come back in one minute. Okay, so keep your papers to yourself and we're going to be looking at that later. What I want to do now is to define some of these key terms that we're going to be using throughout the presentation. First and foremost is to understand what I really mean by mind, brain and education science. And that's that little sweet spot here right in the middle, in between the neurosciences, the psychological sciences and the educational sciences. This idea of mind, brain and education is different from educational neuroscience or from this idea of the learning sciences, because it looks at a focus of balanced contributions from education psychology and neuroscience and how they add to our own knowledge about how humans learn and how we can teach better based on that information. This means that it's focused on understanding this teaching and learning dynamic, not just on how humans learn, but rather what occurs during this exchange, this back and forth between the teacher and the student that finally reaches this aha moment of I get it, I understand. So understanding all the intricacies of teaching, not just learning. And this is really important because these other fields, educational neuroscience, for example, is very much focused on how humans learn. And that's great. How do we know that people learn understanding the neural mechanisms, the psychological influences, what really helps people learn. That's important. But even more so, I think, is taking that one step further and understanding now how do we leverage that to teach better. So there have been multiple publications recently talking about this whole new field of mind, brain education or understanding the influence of neuroscience and psychology in education. And one that recently came out in February of 2017 has to do with the pedagogical knowledge and changing nature of the teaching profession. How do we have to adjust the way that teachers become teachers in the future so that we can leverage the information we now have about mind, brain and education science. This is needed more than ever because basically solutions to today's problems really need to be supplemented or nurtured from multiple fields. Education on its own has not been able to resolve all these problems. So we need to have a much more sophisticated approach to this. And after about 125 years of formal education, we still haven't figured it all out just with educational loans. So we really have to use the other sciences to help us out here. And finally, I think we've reached a stage where we can accept, you know, the brain is very complex. It's perhaps the most complex organism in the universe. And that is the organ of our profession. That's what we have to know. And so part of teacher education has to include a better information about the brain and learning. So the next big word that needs defining neuro myths and neuro myth, it basically comes from these two pieces, right? Neuro is related to cells that are in the nervous system or in the brain and myths which are widely held false ideas. So this basically means together, these are false beliefs about the brain and or the way the brain works or functions. And the Center for Educational Neuroscience at the University College of London takes this one step further. It's not just what people might read in the press, but it also leads to teaching practices or ideas or techniques that do not actually have a scientific basis. And so that's what a neuro myth is. And that's what we're trying to get rid of today. Okay. The second big word to understand has to do with competencies. When we talk about objectives, when somebody says, Okay, give me the objectives for this class that you're about to teach. We really disaggregate that into pieces and call them educational competencies. And educational competencies are just the sum total of all of the knowledge, the skills, and the attitudes that you want to teach. The reason it's important to break this down in this way is because, you know, you can oftentimes teach, you know, dates, facts, formulas, theories, concepts, grammatical rules, for example, that is purely knowledge based. And that's a lot of things that you can generally get from Google, for example, you can learn that off of recordings from other people on the internet. But being able to use that knowledge, that's a skill set. And that skill is something that you really need teachers for. But even more importantly, in the things that are actually long term and significant learning has to do with the change in attitudes. And attitudes are really value sets. It's what students will remember about you long after your course is done. So do understand yourself a bit better through the discipline that you're learning. Okay, so the key reason that we want to define competencies and to understand the difference between people learning knowledge or people learning skills or people learning attitudes is that which of these do you think is the easiest to teach and the easiest to evaluate knowledge, right, and which is the hardest to actually cultivate and to measure? Definitely attitudes. Attitudes take a very long time to form. And the key thing about attitudes is that they also can be, for example, unidentified prejudices. As John Hattie cites teacher prejudices about intelligence influence students learning. So this is if I ask you, for example, do you think what the teacher thinks of your ability to learn influences your ability to learn? Absolutely, right. So what a student thinks a teacher thinks of him, whether or not it's correct or not influences a student's learning outcome. So this is very important to understand because our attitudes, the way we think about, for example, the brain and learning are the things that grow into myths. So these unconscious prejudices can be anything from, you know, if only the children were better behaved, you know, as if, you know, social contagion had no role in teaching. If you know better, if you know about the brain a bit more, you understand that you have a lot of control over that, right? Or if only the parents were more responsible, or if only the parents had passed on better genes, right, as if intelligence was fixed by hereditary factors alone, or if only the kids would eat better or sleep better, presuming that no one has taken the time to explain the role of sleep and nutrition and learning, which it could be possible. That is also true, right? If only kids spent less time on computers, as if technology in and of itself hurts learning, not always. It actually can help learning in some cases, right? Or if only there were more boys in my class or more girls in my class, as if genders determined superiority in different learning situations, then I would be a great teacher. These kinds of unconscious prejudices are things that are born, they're actitudinal, they're things that you embrace over time, and they influence how you interact with the students in your class and what they can potentially learn. So there's a big link now between those attitudes, a teacher's attitudes about things, what they value, what they believe, and the birth of neuro myths. For example, if a teacher doesn't have the right attitude, if a teacher does not accept that intelligence is fluid, it's not fixed, if a teacher doesn't have that right attitude about his approach to teaching, he can become a good teacher, but he will never be a great teacher. These are important to recognize and understand because in many cases these are what fuel neuro myths in society. So teacher attitudes is another topic for another day. I hope we have the chance to talk about this a bit more later on, but these 15 teacher attitudes were born of all of the literature from John Hattie's research and supported by Neuroscientific Evidence. So we know that great teachers would always score a top four. I totally agree with this statement. You might want to take this test yourself and see how you actually score. Finally, it's important to define the context of education. You know, education a hundred years ago was very different. You know, the resources that we used were very different. The methodologies that we used in classrooms were very, very different. The way we disciplined people was very, very different. All of those things have changed a lot, but probably the thing that's changed most is our understanding about the brain. Old models of human learning or how brains work really promoted neuro myths. Every single thing you see here, right, left brain, men's women brain, teenage brains, 10% of brain use, the triune brain having three different brains, all of those are myths. Okay? So it's very important to know that without good technology, we weren't able to actually envision the brain. Therefore, we were imagining how things worked. Now this is okay if you've been in teaching for 20 or 30 years. You shouldn't know better. You just shouldn't know better. But now there's new technology. You know, we've gone from just basic autopsies to understanding things about the electrical and chemical changes in the brain and being able to overlay these things into 3D models and going even further. Now we can actually see how there are total networks involved in every type of learning. There's at least, for example, 16 neural networks that have to be primed and perfectly ready before a kid can learn to read. So we know that we're talking now not about, you know, right and left brain things or that creativity is in one part of your brain and spatial abilities are in another and math is in another and language is in another. Now we talk about networks and we can really see how these networks are formed and the hubs, the main areas that information passes through multiple times when a person is learning something. Okay? So we have new technology now and this is helping us get rid of some of the myths. But the problem is some of the myths have just been around so long that people have them repeated over and over again. They believe them. They still believe them even though we have evidence that they're not true. We also have further evidence outside of neuroscience in education. We have better longitudinal studies we can actually compare over time whether or not a kid who does brain gym, for example, ends up being any better 13 years down the line than a kid who does not. They do not. So we can look at these longitudinal studies and they can help us now shape our better understanding about what types of methodologies to invest in or to use in classes. We also have better international comparative skills so we can look at things and we can see while it's a myth that, for example, Asians are better at math than North Americans, we can see that there are subtle differences in the way that numbers or symbol systems are processed in the brain and it does make a difference depending on the methodology applied in the class. So we can look at international comparative studies and those also help us get rid of some of those myths. We also have methodologically comparative skills so before we used to look at quantitative or qualitative data and we used to have to look at them very very differently or unless we replicated the precise study we weren't able to compare results. Now thanks to some of these newer studies we are able to compare and see what effect sizes certain interventions have or different types of interventions have and this leads us to a new model of teacher education right. We want to combine mind-brain educational science with information from visible learning. John Hattie's work that has to do with what we know influences student learning outcomes and put this onto a different type of teacher formation over the lifespan. This is very important to acknowledge because when we give a hierarchical concept of how teachers should be trained it's really clear that one of the first things that teachers have to learn and reflect upon are their own attitudes and their own prejudices about learning. For example think to yourself now and just write this on a piece of paper for yourself do you think that certain kids from certain social and economic status learn differently or do you think that kids of a certain race learn differently or that boys and girls learn things in different ways. Think about that to yourself. What are some of the prejudices that you might already have that are so ingrained in you that they color the way that you work with your students in class? Just write that down quickly for us. Okay so now let's turn to this idea why is it so hard to get rid of myths? To answer this I want to share some of the information that I have from a recent Delphi panel with experts from around the world. I invited 42 experts from 11 different countries to comment and to look at questions within the mind, brain and education science field. What are things that we can say are true about the brain and then what are these things that are mythical about the brain? And the really big scary thing is that from 10 years ago when I first did the study on this there has been an increase in the number of myths that exist out there unfortunately. You would think that over time we would reduce the number of neuro myths that people believe in. Unfortunately because of this echo chamber we hear these things over and over again we believe them when we really shouldn't believe them. So of all the different things we talked about on the Delphi panel one of the key things had to do with what is real what is good information and what are neuro myths. And once we could do that we have this great foundation of how to give instructional guidelines what should we then do in a classroom. So the final point related to the Delphi panel is that when we asked the Delphi panelist what are the biggest challenges for mind brain education in the future they listed a lot of things but one of the top ones was that teachers aren't explicitly taught about neuro myths. Okay so let's look at those neuro myths and we use the categorization scheme that was developed by the OECD countries back in 2002 and they agreed on criteria for information that teachers receive. In general there's information that is well established we know that there's plasticity in the brain for example that lasts throughout the lifespan. There are things that are probably so like for example sensitive periods as opposed to critical periods. What's intelligence speculation it sounds good like for example men and women look different from the outside therefore they should probably be different on the inside well that's intelligence speculation but there's very little evidence to back that up right. Or what is a neuro myth and so this D category what's a neuro myth are really the bad things to avoid and these A and B categories are the things that we say okay these are things that we could really apply. So I'm going to ask you now we're going to play a little game here I'm going to ask you into which category does information follow the information that is categorized in the Sway from the Delphi panel is actually supported by the literature not only by expert opinion. So there's been a lot of research on neuro myths over the years right Daniel answers were Antoneko, Van Gogh and Passe's work, Bailey, Decker's article very very influential all of these people have been writing about neuro myths over the years and most of these things have come up only over unless the past 10 years so all of the research on neuro myths is relatively new. What's important to see is that there's over 200 different articles that have been written in recent years about neuro myths but that still hasn't gotten into the regular teacher training track so neuro myths continue to persist and they persist mainly because you know these are hypotheses which are invalidated but they capture the imagination they make you think oh somebody is a right brain person or a left brain person and that's why they sort of groan and persist for some really clear reasons. Number one we are all guilty of wanting things to be easy and to be clear in general in teacher training complexity is rejected we prefer the quick you know sound bite to the deep explanation or to a lot of reading that's on us we have to decide if we're going to up our game and teaching right and the second huge reason has to do with popular press reports that sort of give this echo chamber we're talking about it just is repeated over and over again and sometimes these are things that are true for you know rats but there's no such thing related to humans since that's kind of sketchy there right or they use old technology for example oh humans use only 10 percent of your brain well that's what we thought before when we had you know pretty lousy technology in the in the 80s when we began to do neuro imaging studies but now with greater technology we're able to see that's just not true you're not just using 10 percent of your brain right or there are things that we hear over and over again for example they're based on good evidence but it's really sparse there are other times that we confuse you know there's a correlation two things happen at the same time therefore we think one thing caused the other thing so for example there are fewer women in science therefore we say oh that means that women don't have brains for science totally not true then there's other studies that have to do with absence versus existence so we used to study stroke patients and we'd say oh look he lost his ability to name objects when he had a stroke in this particular area therefore that area is responsible for that skill set which is not always true then there's things like over generalization of findings so you get a small number of studies and they're used to make a blanket statement about all people for example if we have a handful of studies on gifted populations or autistic people and then we say okay so all people with autism have brains that do x y or z not necessarily true have to be very careful about that so in many cases we have studies on adults but not on school age children so we do have a lot of studies for example on mathematical reasoning tons of things but 85 percent of them are done on adults not on kids so can we really generalize that information and apply them to kids that leads to myths as well and then we have finally these this group of studies which are true in the lab context but is it really true in real life in real classrooms right can we say things about the information based on those studies that happen in the labs so what are some criteria for identifying myths you can have confidence in studies that are more recent look for studies that have been replicated it's not just a one-off that they found this thing once for example the mozart effect the guy finds it the mozart effect seemed to work and then he tries to replicate it and it doesn't work so he retracts but by the time he's already published the first study there's a billion dollar industry going out there so studies that have been replicated are worthy of your attention studies that look at school age populations or that appreciate the complexities of learning it's not just a simple lab experiment they measure real skills that are done within academic settings classrooms not just lab design okay so here's the quiz tell me whether or not you think that this is well established probably so intelligence speculation or a neuro myth true or false true meaning there's no such thing as a truth in science by the way there's just more evidence or less evidence so is this well established or is this something that's a neuro myth teaching to a person's learning style improves learning outcomes totally mythical in fact the research on investing in teaching towards learning styles really shows that it's kind of a waste of money to do this okay so don't go into that maybe if you're referring to the word like style like somebody's unique way of being there's not that much harm in this however if you think about this it's really an assault on our understanding of how the brain really learns think about all learning all learning think about Aristotle here all learning passes through the senses right you learn about your world through all of your senses and your brain is so efficient that it's always trying to get as much information from all of its senses as possible in order to understand and make decisions about the world around it and so pretending that you could actually turn off one of these senses for a moment or be primarily using one sense and not another is not really the way the brain works the brain is very efficient tries to get as much information from all of the senses as possible and you can sort of put this to the test when you think about if you tell somebody oh yes i'm a very visual learner but then i change your context i take you to a musical concert um you will shift your modality of preference will be based on the context in which you can gather the most information so please try and stay away from these things the main reason that these neuromiths are problematic is because they do harm telling somebody that they have a learning style x and then well you know i teach to a different type of style which is why we don't get along and why you're not learning my class is really not right and it does harm so please stay away from that how about this one well established or neuromith each individual's brain is differently prepared to learn different tasks learning capacities are shaped by the context of the learning prior learning experiences personal choice and an individual's biology and makeup pre and perinatal events and environmental exposures all influence learning do we agree that all those things influence learning yes not all brains are prepared to do all things this means that you cannot just take any joe and say okay this guy is going to be a genius at math or whatever all of those things prior experience interest for the topic genetic makeup all of those things influence whether or not that person will be successful in that okay so it's a myth that brains are all equal in their ability to solve all problems that's just a myth well established during neuromith stress influences learning but what stresses one person may not stress another in the same way this is absolutely true it's well established that stress does impact learning but both negatively and positively there is such a thing as good stress you stress is actually a very good thing to have it's good to be a little bit stressed when you're in a learning situation well established your neuromith the brain changes constantly with experience absolutely true it's well established that the brain changes just about every day and hopefully tonight you're going to go to bed with a different brain than you woke up with this morning because you've had new experiences okay the brain is plastic neuroplasticity exists throughout the lifespan absolutely well established you have plasticity until you die okay so it's there it exists all the time so what are our main challenges that much of what we hold to be truths in our own teaching tend to be mythical so myths are created because of over generalization or they're based on partial truth or sparse evidence all of these are reasons that things could be a myth okay so let's look at the reasons for certain myths that are out there right now we're going to look at 40 quick myths and we're going to look at why they are myths in the first place people can multitask that is a myth this is based on new information but it's also based on unsubstantiated beliefs or misconceptions about how the brain really learns male and female brains learn differently this is based on a partial truth you know it's intelligence speculation to think this but we don't have a lot of evidence to show this there's only five physical differences in the brain between men and women and there are almost no studies that show that any of that translates into behavioral differences there are a handful of studies about spatial differences but again there are so few of them that it's really hard to say that that's true so in general male and female brains do not learn that differently they might have different neural pathways but they do not have different levels of potential cognitive development progresses via fixed progression of age related stages that means that like a one-year-old supposed to do certain things then a two-year-old supposed to do different types of things and a three-year-old is that true or not this is a real overgeneralization of the information and it is a misinterpretation of the data it's good and maybe helpful criteria to divide people by ages but all of us know that not everybody at the same age is ready to do the same thing sometimes you have people who begin to read when they're three years old and sometimes you have people who are nine years old and they begin to read it's not that a certain age fixes in their brain says okay it's time to read at the stage much more important are prior experiences to the actual age of the individual