 So, third principle, third part of the brain, we're today going to talk entirely about, well, not entirely, but a lot about the very front of your brain, what does the front parts of your brain do. And the principle we'll be looking at is provide multiple means of action and expression. And that's because this part of your brain, this is a slice from the middle. This whole front half of your brain is different than the two that we've looked at. So let me just review. We looked first at engagement, which is these parts of your brain, the whole middle surface, right at the core affect. Then we looked yesterday at the back recognition, the ways in which you take information in and transform it into usable knowledge. And so that's roughly two-thirds of your brain, middle core for affect, this rear part for taking information in. And I should say, just as a locator for you for the rest of your lives, it's always that way. Whatever part of the brain you look at, you'll find that the back part, if you take your spinal cord and look at your spinal cord, the back part will be the place where axons come in from the outside world. The middle part will be the part that sets the tone for your spinal cord, whether it's going to be reactive or not. And the front part will be where axons leave your spinal cord and go out to the muscles and actually move things. So the same is true up here in cortex. So this is the part of your brain that at base allows you to move and act on the world. But it's stronger than that. So let me just explode it a little bit. And it has a really nice, simple progression. Right in the crown of your head here are the parts of your brain that actually send axons down to your spinal cord to make movements happen. So here we have the movements themselves, literally stimulating your muscles to twitch. And if we damage your brain here, you'll have what are called spastic paralysis, what is called spastic paralysis, which is that you're no longer able to voluntarily control your muscles. And you've seen people that have that kind of damage. And it's spastic because the muscles go tight when they lose voluntary control and they go into reflexive control and they tighten up like that. And you've seen people who are in spastic paralysis. So but this is the motor movements themselves at the very base level. If we move a little bit farther, and you'll see it looks very much just like a corporation or a school system or anything, very nicely organized from things that are very simple movements to these parts of your brain are organizing those very simple movements into things that are bigger that we're going to call skills and most people would. So a fluent movement, skill, action that allows you to accomplish something. So here these axons, these neurons with their axons send them over to here to say, OK, here's what we want to accomplish. We want to write the letter B. And here's all the muscles I've got to move in order to write the letter B. So the ability to write is going to be here. The ability to actually move your finger is going to be here. So this part will set this, oh yeah, I've done the B before. There's a skill. Here's the order of finger movements we're going to do. So there's a nice hierarchy from something you've skillfully learned how to do to the way in which you can actually actualize it with your muscles. And you'll see when we talk about the guidelines, we'll be talking about skills. And then the last part is the very most front of your brain. And lots of you've heard of this. We talked about it the other day, in fact. Prefrontal cortex is not about the movements per se and not about the skills per se, but about organizing those skills into something strategic, so that you're actually making a plan to have something accomplished. You want to go to the store and get vitamins or something, not that you ever would. The ability to make that plan and keep to it will be here. But then you'd have to organize a lot of skills, putting on your clothes, getting in the car, driving the car, getting out of the car, going in, buying all of that. The plan gets developed here, which is really a goal, says we're going to the store. And that's going to involve organizing a whole lot of skills that are going to have to happen in the right order. That is, it's not good to drive your car before you put your clothes on. And then those will organize your muscle movements to do each one of those skills. So this is the plan or goal. Here's the skills you're going to use to accomplish that goal. And here's the motor movements that will do those skills. Let me think if I need to say anything else. Maybe I'll just say one thing that will echo back to engagement. In order to make an effective plan, you have to actually want to do it. So this part of the brain is very much interconnected with this affective system, too, because the only way you're going to accomplish any of your plans is that it's your highest priority to do it. So you only want to go to the store to get vitamins if you really want to do it. Because otherwise, you're going to get distracted into doing lots of other things. Any one time there's lots of things you could do. So this part of your brain is the part that says, oh, we need vitamins. Seems unlikely I should have chosen something else. We need food would be easier. And you'd say, OK, well, I'm going to have to do something to get food. So you start to make your plan. And you organize your skills and move your muscles to do it. OK? It's a very nice, simple organization. Because we won't be talking much development today. Just want to say that they develop this way over infants. This part is pretty much ready to go. They can move muscles. This part is much later developing over infancy. And this part doesn't develop actually until adolescence. So it sweeps the same way. The simplest motor stuff happens first. The skill stuff happens second. And then the planning and organizing, the strategy stuff, really it doesn't develop until fairly late in life. So you can look at person's brain and you can see, oh my gosh, this is really an immature brain. But you won't see the immaturity here. And mostly you won't see it here. You'll see the immaturity here. You'll say, oh, it's not really wired up yet. It's not prepared for making good long term plans. Which is why your pre-adolescence in school, we don't have them plan an essay. We don't have them do a long project that's going to take two months. Because in fact, they don't really have the cortex yet that would allow them to do it. So we have to really heavily scaffold them. So much of teaching is going to be scaffolding this. Because for most of kids early school, they don't have this ability. And a lot of them won't have skills here. We'll talk about. And some, of course, aren't able to move their muscles at all. So we're going to have individual differences in all of these. This is just a pause for a second to say that people often mistake the nervous system as an information processing device, that that's what it does. It's really not designed that way. It is really a whole system. This whole thing that we've been talking about is designed for you to get goals, for you to reach goals. It is a goal-driven system. And the more neuroscientists study the brain, they realize, oh, it was a mistake to view it in the way we used to view it. It is a system that is designed to achieve goals. That is, it is designed that you'll get water when you need it. You'll get food when you need it. You'll get sex when you need it. You'll get safe when you need it. You'll get fun things to do when you need it, blah, blah, blah. All of this part of your brain is set up to accomplish your goals. And you've heard Grace talk about goals all the time. And I will talk more about goals today. This is your part of your brain that is going to set those goals. And it's the driver. And I realized that was one thing I wasn't saying. Not surprisingly, this part of your brain, often people call executive cortex. And I think you've heard one of the most common new terms out of neuropsychology when you get your diagnosis is the youngster has executive function disorder, or executive function disability, executive function, weakness, something. So these are the executive functions. Why are they executive? If you think of this as a corporation for getting out widgets, this is where the plan is made. This is the executive. The executive doesn't know how to make the widgets, usually. In fact, I'm an executive at CAST, and I have no idea how to program, for example, things you've seen here. I wouldn't even know how to do. It's not clear, actually, what I do at CAST. But I'm supposed to set sort of long-term plans and give the ideas for where we're headed. And then there are very skillful people at CAST who will be able to do, actually, things. And then there's some people who can actually, like, program and do some really detailed things, or write, or whatever. So this is executive cortex, prefrontal cortex, executive cortex. The executive is the goal driver. The executive is the one that says, this is what we want to accomplish this year. We're going to make clothes for the summer, during the winter, always about plans for the future. So another, I talked about how mostly cortex is a prediction engine. This is the part that allows you to predict where are we going to go? What is our goal? What are we going to accomplish? Just a little wake-up thing. Just to show you this odd part of the way, because it's not often obvious how your brain really works. But what I'd like you to do is most of you have laptops, because this is a problem. All right, I'm going to describe this. Will you go with me and just kind of take my description of it? But you can try it at home. If I were to ask you, and lots of you can do it, to write your signature, but use an entirely different part of your body, don't use your hand. So you can even kind of do a mental exercise. We'll talk about how you would do that. But picture or do it, you can do it right. Put your pen in your elbow. Just hold it with your elbow. Another thing I have my students do is put it in your toes, so it's in your feet. You can put it in your mouth. You can put it in your ear. Anywhere you can put a pen. Don't think about everywhere you could put a pen. And then write your signature. And I'll tell you what happens. Of course, it's hard. You're not very skillful at writing your signature with your elbow or your mouth. But what is striking when you do it is you realize, oh my god, it still is my signature. It's clumsy, but it isn't like you have to relearn how to make your signature. Oh, I have a big D like this. You still write your signature. What does that say? It says that actually you've represented the goal writing your signature is stored in your brain somewhat abstractly, and almost any muscles could actually do your signature. They'll be really bad at it at first, but you don't have to start over to teach your mouth your signature. Your mouth goes, oh, give me the goal. Give me my signature, and I'll do it with my mouth. So this is the beginning of something that Grace and I will talk a lot about. In the nervous system, there is a separation between the goals and the means. And neuroscientists have begun to really get excited about how the brain isn't storing movements or actions here. It is storing these goals and plans. And it separates the means of doing things from the ends. The ends are the goal. And it turns out your nervous system is really good at doing things in another way. Using another means, using your elbow, using your mouth to write your signature, whatever. We see that everywhere in the nervous system. And I think you know from what you've been seeing about UDL, that we're very big on separating means from ends. When we're making curricular, making instructional decisions, we want to keep the means the same. We're all going to, whatever it is, we're all going to make a drawing or represent something visually. But UDL is about what the nervous system is, where you say, well, there are many means by which we could make that illustration. We could do it with a paint and brush. We can do it on an iPad. We can do it by selecting things as dozens and dozens of ways in which we can make illustrations. So UDL will say, separate when you make instructional goals, and Grace did this yesterday, make sure you don't confound it by saying, I want you to illustrate and I want you to use this pen and this paper. The second part is what makes it non-UDL, saying, I want you to illustrate the photosynthesis cycle. Great goal, great goal. Stop there and say, probably there's going to be a lot of means for accomplishing that. Some of you may draw, some of you may use an iPad, some of you, all sorts of things could happen. But separating means from ends. OK. Let me now work our way forward by looking at what kind of variation should we put in? What kind of means do we need to put in a classroom so that everybody can, in fact, achieve high standards, can reach high goals? And again, you've heard this now probably enough from us. But some kinds of differentiation are about reducing the goal. We're not going to try to go as far. And UDL is very much in the opposite direction of give more resources, give more, in this case, give more means to do it. Don't decrease what your goal is. The goal is to illustrate the photosynthesis cycle. Keep that goal constant, but vary the means for doing it. Is where we'll get our ability to have more students achieve. So here's Matthew. I mentioned him in passing. Yesterday, Matthew has a very huge deficit here, in this motor part, so that he can actually move nothing but his chin and his eyes. And when he came to us, he was assumed to be profoundly retarded. And they were preparing for sending him to a institutional school where he would stay for the rest of his life, because that's what would typically happen. The problem was for Matthew that the typical means don't work, that is to say he can't move his muscles in the traditional way, except for the mouth and eyes. And what we needed to do was amplify the amount of means Matthew had. So we attached a little switch here to his chin that went up to these eyeglasses and out to a computer, just to give him more means to act and express. And with a computer at the other end, all of a sudden he had more means to act with. And things started to happen very quickly. And I should say, so all he can do is click this. This is just a little click. But with that, as I said, let's think of some goals. Communicating. He was, of course, not able to talk. And with a switch, he was able to quickly learn Morse code, which was a shock to all of us, because it showed he wasn't profoundly retarded. Because he quickly learned Morse code. We had sweatshirts with our names in Morse code on them. And word walls with Morse code. Matthew was fabulous. So then we realized, OK, this kid's probably not retarded. He just didn't have a way to express himself. So we gave him more means. And then he learned to drive his wheelchair with the same switch, and so on. He's learned to be able to have lots of ways to express himself, to move, do all those things.