 Hi, this is Tracy, Takahama Espinoza. Thanks for the opportunity to talk to you a little bit about mind-brain education and getting rid of neuro myths and teacher practices. We're going to approach this through the lens of the science of the art of teaching, or really the vision that neuroscience 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. I'm also an associate professor here in the Latin American Social Science Research Faculty doing educational research. 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 reflection of an individual's value systems and attitudes and how they think the brain learns, or who can learn, or 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 practice as 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 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. I believe that education really is the path towards development. 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. 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. Please take any piece of paper that you have, fold it in half. On one side of the paper, you're going to draw a happy face. This is what I know. On the other side, you're going to put 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? And 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 bit 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, and 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 outcomes. 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. Education a hundred years ago was very different. 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 were 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. 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. 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 gem, 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 panels 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 used 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 Ansar's work, Antoneko, Van Gogh and Pass' 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 in less than the past 10 years. So all of the research on neuro myths is relatively new. But 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 in 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% 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 neuroimaging studies. But now with greater technology, we're able to see that's just not true. You're not just using 10% 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 overgeneralization 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% 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 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 and 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. 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 neuro myths 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? While established during neuro myth, 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. While established during neuro myth, 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. U-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 during neuro myth, 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 one of 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 overgeneralization 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 intelligent 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 is supposed to do certain things then a two-year-old is 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. Mental capacity is hereditary and cannot be changed by the environment or experience. Totally a myth right? We know now that you are born with a set of genes and they can be potentiated based on your environment. So based on this balance of what you inherit and what you do with it what your environment does is important. We have a real problem though with correlation and causation here because somebody who might be born into a certain social economic situation for example and that fellow doesn't even graduate from high school and then he has a kid who also doesn't graduate from high school so we think that while that kid is inheriting that father's genes maybe he's just inheriting his circumstances. He went to bad schools nobody motivated him to go to college or whatever. It's not that his genes caused him to have that level of intelligence. It's actually the opportunities that were more influential there. So this is definitely a myth. Intelligence is fixed at birth and not fluid totally unsubstantiated. We know none of us would be in education if we actually believe this right? Intelligence is fluid. It changes throughout the lifespan. Most people use about 10% of their brains. Not true as we mentioned before based on old technology we used to think that. We used to say get in the brain scanner okay name all the animals you can think of that start with the letter D okay and then we take this kind of a neuroimaging and we'd say look he's using 10% of his brain to do that when it might have been a hundred percent of what was necessary to say the word dog right? So now that we can see throughout the whole process it's not just in singular take but it's over time we can actually see how those networks work together to come up with that word dog we can see that we're using a lot more than 10% of our brain. The left and right hemispheres the brain are separate systems for learning not true. Brain parts work in isolation from each other not true it's not that you have like spatial abilities and creativity in one side and then logic and math in another just not true okay that some people are more right-brained and others are more left-brained is not true there's actually nothing that you do that only uses one of your hemispheres okay your brain will shrink if you don't drink six to eight glasses of water a day okay it's intelligence speculation because so much of the brain is made up of water you think okay that makes a lot of sense it's just not true okay our brain acts like a video camera we store and make a memory of everything we see just not true we store memories that we have paid attention to so the combination of attention and memory leads to learning but if you have not paid attention to something you will not be able to store it in long-term memory. Drugs make holes in your brain if this was used metaphorically it's okay to give pet talks to kids about this but there are some commercial ventures that literally sell people the idea that drugs are making holes in their brain and they actually show you know doctored up pictures of holes in brains not true not true if you had a hole in your brain you'd be dead individuals learn better when they receive information in the preferred learning styles as we mentioned before not true used a lot to promote and sell products but it's just not true the theory of multiple intelligences is validated by neuroscientific research no it's not good old Howard Gardner even accepts this is a psychological theory applied to education but it's not validated by neuroscience okay drill and kill promotes learning repeating repeating repeating it's important to repeat is to reinforce connections in the brain so that you can retrieve information quickly but drilling all the time does not mean that does not lead to more meaningful learning it can lead to a type of mindless repetition of information a mindless memorization of certain things but it doesn't mean you know it a square plus b squared equals c squared okay you can say that over and over again you can memorize it but it and you can drill it until you remember the formula but it doesn't mean you understand it doesn't mean you learned anything high stakes testing are an accurate measure of what a student knows unfortunately we've put a lot of money a lot of stock into wanting to measure how people grow and learn and unfortunately they are not always the best measure of what people really know humans are born with a blank slate and they will learn if knowledge is simply provided you know sort of this empty vessel and we just fill it up with knowledge not true in fact nobody's born a blank slate you've already had experiences in the womb so you're born knowing things already right and also just exposing somebody information does not mean that they will learn it so just pure exposure doesn't mean that you'll learn it either right everything important about the brain is determined by the age of three not true it's good that you have low levels of stress and good nutrition in the early years but barring high stress and malnutrition people will learn throughout the lifespan the earlier the better in most cases for example in interventions if you want to change things that's great but it doesn't mean that you are doomed if you didn't go to early child stimulation classes from zero to three it doesn't mean you're doomed forever okay violent video games have no effect on behavior they actually do have effect on behavior using the internet makes you smarter or dumber the internet is a tool it's like you know a pencil you know this doesn't make you smarter or dumber it's how you use the tool that makes you smarter or dumber extra stimulation is needed to improve the brains of preschools children no normal stimulation talk to the kid age-appropriate vocabulary that's what we're looking for in kids you do not need to take them to those extra classes and memorize flashcards for them to be success later on in life learning is independent of the learner's history absolutely untrue all new learning passes through the filter of prior experience so we know that the learner's history plays a huge role in what you can potentially learn in the future learning problems associated with developmental differences and brain function cannot be remedied with education yes they can many of them can you're not doomed to the brain that you were born with we know that interventions can make a huge difference in learning achievements individuals are not responsible for behavior associated with developmental differences in the brain this means that oops sorry my 18 year old had a car crash it's not his fault his brain hasn't developed yet that's not on why is it then that most 18 year olds don't have car crashes right and certain ones do so you can't blame your brain and get out of it that's just not ethically correct teens are irresponsible and act out because the prefrontal cortex doesn't develop until the mid 20s the only longitudinal study that exists on teenage brains is done by Jay Geed in California wonderful set of studies but every couple of years there's this revelation wow the teenage brain is still rearranging itself into the late teens and then wow human brain is still developing into the early 20s and then wow the 25 year old brain still isn't settled what we know is that the more you know the more you can know and there's always a rearrangement the longer you study we stopped doing these long-term trajectories of brains because basically there is a decline but it tends to parallel when people leave formal education so long as you keep thinking and studying you're always still you know rearranging your brain when you sleep your brain shuts down nothing could be further than the truth that's the time of memory consolidation and also re-energizing to be able to focus and to pay attention the brain is plastic for certain kinds of information only during critical periods for example you can only learn to speak a foreign language before you are 17 or 7 or whatever not true my 7 year old grandma learned Spanish okay you can learn all the way until you die there's no critical period for anything that you learn in an academic context there might be a critical period for gross mortar skills and for your first language but there's no critical period for any academic subject memory is like an objective recording of a situation and reality exists as an abstract form for all to perceive not true this is not a tape recording we can experience the same things and we can perceive them very differently neurons are never replaced you can't grow new brain cells not true neurogenesis shows and this is in the late 1990s we're able to see this in human brains as well that there is a certain limited amount of neurogenesis that does occur in the brain brain damage is always permanent not true maybe you've lost that one network in the brain or that one area of the brain but your brain can rewire itself to recuperate skill sets in different areas of the brain neurogenesis the birth of new brain cells optimizes learning not true and not even predictable you can't project when you're going to have neurogenesis meaning you cannot optimize learning by sort of timing moments of learning with neurogenesis neuroplasticity is due to good pedagogy no good pedagogy can complement neuroplasticity and lead to learning but it's not only due to good pedagogy the brain has unlimited capacity for memory unfortunately the brain is a physical entity so it is it has a physical limit to it though we don't know exactly what that is memorization is unnecessary for learning and unwanted in modern education memory is needed for learning what we don't want is people memorizing for example the times table or grammatical rules without context then it's not transferable you can't use it in a new context so memorization is vital for learning what we don't want though are just memoristic activities the brain remembers everything it has ever experienced forgetting is due to bad encoding while forgetting might be in some cases due to bad encoding forgetting can also be due to multiple other factors there are multiple reasons people forget and multiple ways that people can remember and so it's not as easy as just what is memory there are multiple subsets of memory that teachers need to be aware of as well learning can be isolated from the social and emotional context myth all learning is emotionally engaging so every decision is based on an emotional context as well reasoning and decision making can be divorced from emotion and feeling and in doing so this improves the quality of thought not true the emotion will still be experienced the way you feel that emotion is something that you can manipulate but you cannot change the emotion which is based on chemical releases and from the brain to the body those things will not change languages are located in the left hemisphere of the brain absolutely wrong in fact there's a huge network should have to do with human interpretation intonation that are far more right hemisphere dependent so this is just not true it's not that there's a left and right division of responsibilities for domain areas like language children must acquire their native language first before learning a second language absolutely not true and I have living proof in my three children who are brought up with four languages you can learn multiple languages at the same time children are sponges and learn foreign languages effortlessly believe it or not it takes a whole lot of effort to learn language we just think relatively speaking it seems like less effort than we put into learning languages so but it is not an effortless task it does take a lot of energy out of those kids okay so this is a look at a couple of the myths there are more than 70 of them still out there so you should be asking yourself now what can you do to eliminate them in your context can you please write down really quickly what is something I can do to get rid of the neuro myths in my school please give us some ideas just write that down really quickly okay so we have to accept that some of the biggest challenges that we have the main barrier to great teaching is actually our own unexamined or unconscious attitudes we think that boys could do something better than girls or that a certain race does something better than another race or a certain person from a certain neighborhood will not achieve as highly as somebody from another neighborhood those are things that we have to think about for ourselves we have attitudes about how students and their families and their makeup influences their ability to learn we have certain perceptions about how learning processes occur do you know enough about how the brain learns to be able to get rid of your own biases about how people learn we also have you know perceptions and attitudes about intelligence how does it occur how does it grow who has it who doesn't have it where does it come from unless we examine those things they can morph into myths in our own minds attitudes about how humans learn best and many people think well I know that I learn best if I do x y and z therefore everybody must learn that same way that's not true different people need different things to learn the same content based on their own personal past experiences so teachers we need to be more critical of the literature that we read and we need to embrace this complexity of the human brain and third and most importantly we have to really look at our own beliefs about how people learn and what could possibly be myths that creep into our own teaching practices this means end of the day it's up to us to up our game we have to now accept the brain is the most complex organ in the universe and that is our professional organ we have to understand the brain a bit more and other people have to appreciate us a bit more if a doctor or a lawyer or a dentist had 40 people in his office at one time and all of them had different needs and some who didn't want to be there at all and who were causing trouble and if that doctor or the lawyer the dentist without assistance had to treat them all with professional excellence for nine months then he might have some conception of what it is to be a classroom teacher so think about that pat yourself on the back being teachers is really, really one of the toughest professions that we have in society but it isn't coming to us to now learn a bit more about our profession including about the brain so what have we tried to do today we looked at the definition of some key terms and what is mind brain education what is a neuro myth and also what are educational competencies and attached to that we looked at competencies as being knowledge skills and attitudes and we talked about how attitudinal things things that are really the long term understandings that we have about the world can be related very closely to neuro mythical understandings about how the brain learns what is intelligence for example then we discussed some of the neuro myths that are still prominent what and why we need to stamp those out in order to improve our own practice so the final task for you today I'd like you to think about three things that you didn't know before this talk today write those down two things you found so interesting you're going to continue to research them or you're going to talk to others about them and at least one thing that you are going to change in your personal or professional practice based on the information you learned today okay thank you very much for the opportunity if you'd like to look at other resources related to bilingualism and multilingualism please have a look at either of my web pages and if you have any questions please don't hesitate to write thanks a lot