 Good evening to all. My name is J. J. Horvitz. I'm from the Moffett Institute and I am, I, I have the honor this evening of being the moderator of this session with Dr. Tracy Takuhame Spinoza. That's quite a name, it's also quite a presentation. As you can see the title there, it's Noral Miss, Common False Beliefs About the Brain and Learning. I personally encounter a lot of myths about learning. I don't know exactly about the brain. I'm not well versed enough to know what is a myth and what isn't. But about learning I pretty much know something about myths and I encounter them often. But I'm glad that we have Tracy with us because she knows quite a bit more than I do about that. And we're looking forward to a very interesting evening. We already have quite a number of us here and I expect that some of you will be joining us as we go along. We won't be saying hello to each person that comes in, we'll just be happy to have them join us. And we're looking forward, this is the first session of the, of this year's online webinars from the International Channel of the Moffett Institute. And there will be more but I'm very happy to get us off to a good start. As you can see, Tracy is a former member of the LACB Expert Panel on Teacher's New Pedagogical Knowledge. That's a mouthful under itself but she's also a researcher affiliated with the Faculty of Social Science Research in Tito Ecuador. She is with us this evening from Ecuador, although she spends time also in North America. And so she also teaches, of course, via Harvard and you can see the name there. And I think that that's enough of my just going on and on. I think we'll close my microphone and allow Tracy to open hers and to tell us about what's happening. Okay, great. Thank you so much today for that introduction. Welcome to all of you. Thank you for coming. It's great to see some old friends here. You've got to eat and some new friends here from all around the world. I'm really looking forward to this session. We have a lot that we want to try to cover. So I'd like to launch into that but just very quickly for some people who might not be familiar with the online format. If you look into on the left-hand side where you see your own name, you're able to raise your hand and there's also a chat box. And I really would hope that this is interactive. There's nothing more boring than just sitting and listening to somebody else talk for a long time. So I will be paying a lot of attention to Deborah who says, yes, she's coming from Israel. And my biggest question was I'm directing this towards teachers. And if there's anybody who's not a teacher, I see there's a doctor in here. If there's any other people, so a sense that he's a neuropsychologist, if there's other people that will try to address comments that are broad enough so that they fit into your professional field as well. So I hope that that works. If anybody has things, and again, I'm going to be paying attention to the chat as best as I can. And Jay's going to help keep me on target with that. So please let's try to make this as interactive as possible so that it does result in some kind of a change in your own professional execution tomorrow. So it's not just something that's theoretical, but something that's really real. We want to begin by looking at a couple of different people. You said there's a doctor and then you said execution. I hope that they were not talking about something which is you're joining those two things together. No, no, no. Not at all. No, I just see that there's Dr. Shoshana Rosmarine here. And then I was mentioning that I wasn't 100% sure that everybody here was teachers. And I think that there are some people who are non-teachers and I'm going to try to address all that. I wanted to also let you know because there's always lots of individual interests and questions that sometimes we might not be able to reach or respond to everybody's individual interests and needs today. So I'd like to invite you. We're very open to have exchanges with people who are serious about incorporating this new perspective of mind brain education or neuroscience psychology and pedagogy all together into your own practice. So if you come up with some ideas or questions or doubts and do want to write to me, I'm very open to receiving emails from you as we go along or forever. Not just today or tomorrow, but throughout your own practice. So please feel free to write that down and to stay in contact. So to look at today, we're going to begin with a broader view of education and why it's changed thanks to neuroscience and technology. And then we want to get into the meat of things. What is the really high quality information that exists? And what is the information that is really tenuous? There's a lot of things that come out in the popular press that we know are just not true. So we want to get away from those myths. And the thinking behind this is that it's very important. I'd say number one important is to get rid of the bad information. Number two would be to adopt the correct attitudes towards what is our role as teachers because these have changed quite a lot over the past decade. And then to be able to apply different types of strategies or techniques or activities. And the problem is that in teaching, I often go to conferences and teachers just want to give me the tools, tell me what to do next. And I really feel very strongly that the professional today in education really has to understand why certain things work and why certain things are good or bad. Not just applying things but actually looking at how they can best improve their practice using evidence from real science. So this is what we're going to try to do over the course of the next hour or so. And I'm going to start by highlighting a bunch of changes that have occurred over the past. I'd say we talk about 21st century skills. I'd say, yeah, it's about 17 years into this or 15 years into this. But we've been talking about some changes that now are actually very apparent all around the world. I have the luck to work with schools throughout Asia, South America, Europe. And now this wonderful debut here with you. And this is something that's quite common all around the world. There are different expectations of schools. These different expectations of schools have emerged mainly because the majority of the world's population now has access to basic education. But what they don't have is access to equal quality. A lot of people, there's a very big variety, even within countries, of what is good or bad educational quality. So here in Ecuador we make a joke. They say educaciones, they tell us, education's for all. And I say, but it shouldn't be for all if it's all bad quality. It has to be good quality, not just quantity. We've also changed the focus of educational goals from considering, which was a very industrial model of teaching kids by math, language, arts, physical education, or whatever, separating different academic fields into these different silos. And now we see with this very bold move, for example, in Finland, of how they're going to get rid of just looking at academic subject areas and actually trying to help kids view things in terms of problem-based learning. How do we resolve an issue in society? Or how do we resolve the trash picked up outside? Or how do we resolve the water delivery or the need for food or whatever it might be? How do we resolve problems using a variety of different tools? And we know that there's no problem that you can just answer with just one domain of expertise, not just through math or just through science, but we know we have to mix a lot of information about history and art into all of our solutions. So we're moving away from silos into a more integrated interdisciplinary view of learning. We're also understanding now that we're not just here as teachers to get the kids to pass our classes. We are meant to be arming them with skills so that they can actually learn throughout the lifespan. We're also looking at a move from not just using books, which we love, we love the smell and feel of them and touch of them. But there's a lot of other resources that are available to us, pretty much for free, that we can actually use to leverage technology in our classroom to actually complement lessons. So the change of resources is also huge. And there's this other view that's very much something embraced by 21st century discussions that has to do with a move away from, yes, I'm here to improve my own learning. But when I do that, I improve my society or the community I live within. And in doing that, then I can improve my country. So there's this idea of education as sort of being a ticket of entrance into the Knowledge Society or moving into more innovation. And so it's not just for the individual, but we see that there's many, many goals that we're sharing in education now that have to do with people who are able to collaborate with one another or who are more creative in their approaches to things or who are culturally sensitive in the way they approach their classes. So these are some big changes that have happened in education. We also know that based on those things, there's new expectations of both students and teachers. So instead of just passing the class, we're looking for people who are, you know, critical and creative thinkers who are autonomous in their learning, who don't need to be told what to do or how to think. And people who can work with heterogeneous groups, people who are different from them, and that they know how to leverage technology in the best way possible. They don't become slaves to it, but they're actually able to use it better. So if we're looking for that in the ultimate goal of our teaching, so we want our students to come out like that, that means a lot for us because you cannot teach what you don't know. Okay? So that means that we're going to actually have a lot of reflection on how we individually, we need to look at these particular skills ourselves and say, where am I weak? What do I need to work on? If I'm trying to help shape this new 21st century learner, what are the skills that I am deficit and that I need to improve upon? The third change has to do with technology and the information that we now have about the brain. Even just, and you can still find all of these pictures online, like I did, they're very easy to find. But starting around the 1990s, the decade in the brain in the United States invested a whole lot of money into actually improving what we know about the brain and how it actually works. So we've moved away from these early caricatures that talked about, you know, left brain thinkers and right brain thinkers. You know, you've got this terribly neat and organized left brain and then you've got this wacko, crazy, you know, free-for-all right brain person, right? Or that men's and women's brains are so drastically different or that you have pink brains and blue brains or that there's such a thing as a three-layered brain. You know, you have a mammalian brain or reptilian brain, sorry, mammalian brain and you have higher order thinking. Or this idea that thinking is actually divided into these really neat compartments or that we're only using 10% of our brain or that teenagers are absolutely wacko because they haven't matured enough. We know that there is some truth to this in measuring hormones and this rewiring of the brain systems throughout our lessons is actually shown to extend far later than we actually thought, you know. And so we have these few longitudinal studies that are showing that your brain is always reconnecting and rewiring, especially when you're studying. And then we have these things about having compartmentalized learning. This isn't true. So most of these characteristics, these caricatures of the brain, if you see some of these, it's kind of your big signal, you know, red light, they'll run away because these things are not really true. We started to improve technology and that actually gave us a better insight into the brain. We know that your brain works basically through chemical and electrical changes and these networks that are formed physiologically speaking, right? So you have to look at the physiology of the brain, which you also have to look at the chemistry as well as the electrical networks. And so we began to have better imaging of the brain and we used to, you know, measure blood flow and see things through that scan. And then we actually had 3D scanners, which gave us a better image. But nowadays, what is absolutely phenomenal, and those of you who are interested, I hope you get a chance to look at the Connectome Project, which is actually documenting real-life healthy brains, not just damaged brains or brains that have had difficulties, and not just coming up with replicas or networks or models of how learning might occur, but we can actually see which parts of the brain get connected when somebody is doing basic activity, basic arithmetic problem, for example. So we now have the technology to be able to be a bit more bold in some of the things we say. We actually know these are typical networks of what's going in the brain. This also confirms for us that we can never say, you know, this piece of your brain does whatever, or these right brain people are creative. When you look at creativity in the brain, you end up seeing all of these wild connections all over the place, left, right, hemisphere. You don't have anything that's just pocketed into a single area. So while we know that there are certain parts of the brain and typical physiology that we all share as humans, the actual networks are all over the place. So we know that there's no such thing as localization. So we know that technology has really changed how we view the brain and what we now know about learning. The fourth big change is what we know is really what influence is better student learning outcomes. And we know this because we now have more longitudinal studies, so we can compare the same person, you know, who's now 6 to 10 to 14 to 16 to 18. We can actually see over the lifespan how they're actually changing what their brain is doing, how it's actually even modified. We also have international comparative studies, which is really, really interesting. This is an area called cultural neuroscience. It's actually trying to pull apart what are the things that are true for all brains all around the world, independent, you know, culture. And then what are the things that are heavily burdened by cultural influences that are changed? So learning how to count in Japanese, for example, that is literally adding and multiplying, like Nijuichi is 10, is 2, 10, 1, means 21. What's the difference between a brain that thinks like that versus a brain that's just said, you know, told 21, right? So we know that there's international comparative studies that help us see when things are similar about all brains and then what things are actually different about different brains based on the cultural context and especially the influence of language. And then we have methodologically comparative scales. And this is actually thanks in great part to John Hattie, who actually helped us compare more than 50,000 studies of more than 2 million, 400,000 students to see what really influences student learning outcomes. So based on these changes in education, now we have some great information that's helping us learn how we can teach better. But you and I know, all of us know that the key to all of this is the quality of the teacher. And one of the biggest failings we have, I think, in teacher formation is that most teachers don't even understand their own prejudices or what they think about how intelligence develops or who has it or how can it be nurtured in our classroom. So these particular prejudices actually influence the way that the teacher interacts with the student. So we know that these things are actually really, really hurtful and they can be positive or they can be hurtful in student learning. So I actually looked at what Hattie had said about teacher attitudes. And it comes down to this. You know that all learning competencies can be broken down into, you know, knowledge, skills, and attitudes, right? So the way most long to teach is actually teachers' changes in attitudes and even students, right? It's much easier to memorize a date or a fact or to learn even how to apply that particular formula or concept. But it's much harder to change people's attitudes. So we know that teacher attitudes actually change learning outcomes. So today a teacher treats a student based on their presumptions of what's going on inside that kid's brain actually change that student's possibility for learning. So what I want to challenge you on right now is to look at a list of 15 key attitudes that are related to the brain and learning. And I'd like to just, you know, just personally, if you could put yourself on this scale between one to four, okay? If you don't believe in this, I highly disagree. Two, I highly agree, okay? I'm just going to read these out loud. And I'd like to see where you personally fall into this scale. And so please think about this. And this is really what I hope that you take away as a personal reflection here. Are there some things that you need to get over or get more information about so that you get away from us? Okay. Tracy, do you want us to add these options and give you a total number at the end? Yes. That could be good. Maybe if we can just have it just with a handful of them just for time's sake. I'll tell you which ones we really need. And these are the ones that are most related to the brain. The one that has to do with the development and human potential if we could do those three together. And so we can tell them that would be fabulous. But before that, let me just ask you to reflect. We know that we're trying to cultivate people who know how to collaborate and work with other people. So one of these things about cultivating teamwork is one plus one is three. When we work together, we learn better. And we all contribute to individual and collective growth. So where do you fall in that? Do you agree with that highly? Or do you think that's actually something you totally disagree with? I'd love to hear about that. A teacher's not paid to answer any more questions. A teacher's job is to get students to find their answers on their own and to develop their own questions. This is one of the hardest things. Teachers think that they have been paid to be a walking encyclopedia and answer every single question. The challenge to teachers now is no. If you want kids to learn to think, then you don't answer any more questions. The third one has to do with evaluating a better culture of evaluation that we enjoy being evaluated. I luckily grew up in Berkeley, California in the 60s. And I love being evaluated because I knew that anytime somebody told me that I had something wrong, it was to help me get better. There was no malice in it. So do we have this correct culture of evaluation? Differentiating. And the first part is true. The second part is a question. Almost everything we do, and this is according to Hattie's study, in the classroom helps learning outcomes. Even if you just sit in the classroom for nine months, you're going to learn something. So here's the question now. Our job is to actually determine what works best for most of the kids most of the time. We have to be much more selective in the way we teach or the tools that we use to teach. Learning how to learn. The objective of modern education is to form lifelong levers of learning, not just to pass the exam. To be a model. You can't get out this from a territory. So if I want all of these types of things, I have to actually already do that or be that because you can't teach something that you don't know. And then here's what I'd like to ask you if you could help me with this. Can you all please, I'd like to get a quick tally just to see what percentage of you agree or would say one, two, three or four to these questions. The first one is differences in learning outcomes based on social economic status. That is poor kids are more related to the access to learning resources and to nutrition and to early stimulation. They are not in any way related to race. Do you agree with that? If you do, please say four. If you disagree with that, you can say one. What would you, what would you say? So the leaps definitely, I totally agree with that. Okay. We've got voice also says the same. Four, four, four. So we've got a lot of fours in here. That is really, really something that warms my heart. I'm very happy to hear that. We have still today. It's unfortunate in Ecuador. We have a lot of teachers who will tell me, yeah, but the indigenous, the indigenous students, the Indians always do worse on standardized tests. And if you say, yeah, because they don't have any support in their native language. They don't have access to the best teachers. Nobody wants to go into the role areas where most of them live. This is the problem. It is not due to race. Okay. So I'm glad that we mostly agree on that one. The next one, the brain cannot not learn. Learning is the brain is undefined. It's it's reason for being. So everyone in my class can and will learn. They're probably not all at the same pace. What do you guys think of that? One, two, three, or four. Do you agree or have some of you just come up against a brick wall and you think, no, there's some kids that just can't learn. You know, they can't learn my topic. Or do you think that truly everybody can learn although they will probably all learn in very different paces? What do you think of that? Four would be agree and one would be you disagree. Three would be somewhere in the middle there too. She's big on the fours. There you go. Okay. Good. So what do you think that? Can you, Boise, if you could please, can you just clarify why you think that's not true? You think that many learning differences are based on, oh no, sorry, that the brain, there are moments when the brain just doesn't learn. And if you believe that's true, why would you say that that's true? That's something that we need to reflect on. Okay. We know that it's a survival mechanism. That's what your brain does. It has to learn, right? But so what the idea is that not everybody's going to be able to learn at the same pace as this caveat here is saying that, yes, everybody's going to get there, but they're not going to be able to get enough. Okay. So this is wonderful. So not having personal contact, you're saying that if there's too many people in the class, it's very hard to reach all of those people in an individual way, which is why it's difficult to guarantee they're learning. That's an excellent point. We're going to talk about that in just a second about how you manage or how groups actually influence and social contagion as well, how one person in the class can actually change the whole mood or learning environment of all the other students. Okay. Three. Just to let you know really quick parentheses, the average size of classes in Japan and Germany who tend to top out on some of these scores in PSA Singapore is 40 to 50. They can have 40 kids in their class as well. So it depends on what you're trying to get at, right? If you're trying to get them to pass this test or you're trying to get to real deep thinking skills. Okay. The next one is vital to our talk today. Intelligence is fluid, not fixed. What do you guys think of that? Intelligence is fluid. That means it's ever changing. It's not fixed. It's not that you hit a certain age and you can't learn anymore or that you are even have a certain type of gene and then you can't learn anymore but rather it is fluid and that there is learning that can occur throughout the lifespan. Four. It also matters of culture and intelligence. That has to do with the previous point. You're absolutely right. What do we think about intelligence being fluid? Are you all? I suppose you wouldn't be sitting here in a class right now if you Right now, if you thought that you were past your prime and you couldn't learn anything and that, you know, intelligence was fixed, most teachers tend to believe that, yes, it is fluid. There is a problem, however, that we do, there is a strain. There are some people who actually go about saying if you hit a maximum age or there is a critical period for certain types of learning. And one thing I'd like to really put emphasis on, and this is a larger discussion for later if you like, there is nothing that is taught in an academic setting that has a critical period. There are sensitive periods, but there are no critical periods whatsoever. And I hope that that's something we can continue to talk about a little bit later. The human spectrum of intelligence is broad and in a typical class will be five to six percent of students with some type of learning problem, including dyslexia, dyscalculia, ADHD, asparagus, as well as giftedness on the other end of the spectrum. The question is, are you responsible for all of them? We have a terrible tendency in many schools in South America where if there's the slightest bit of a problem, they send the kids to the psychologist. They send them out, they say, you know, it's not for me to deal with. This is a very different mindset. It's that I'm not just there to teach the ones that are already there willing to learn. It is on me to be able to manage kids who might be outside of my bell curve of norm. And to the extent, obviously not for extreme forms of retardation or autism spectrum disorder on the extreme, but for most kids, including attention problems, which is pretty prevalent in a lot of countries, these are my responsibilities. Now, we've got a lot less enthusiasm here. We've got some twos and some ones and people saying, no, no, no, send them out. Well, I always tell my teachers or my students who are becoming teachers that I don't measure their success by how well they do with the kids who are already doing OK because they do OK without me. I measure success by what you can do with those kids who are a little bit outside of that curve who do need that extra help or that extra support. And then we'll talk a bit more about this when we get into some of the other myths, mainly because there's a big tendency now, wonderful Swedish model that talks about there's no such thing now as a special needs teacher. You know, all teachers are special needs basically. There are support rules for psychologists. So the kid does have dyslexia so the teacher can recognize this and knows how to work with them within the class. They can have extra exercises outside of the class. But the idea is not to remove that kid from that classroom environment. So let's talk about this because, OK, the Ministry of Education in Israel also disagrees. OK, I'll have to come and talk to you because this is a very big shift in becoming responsible for all of the learners. Why is this? That's society. Society is made up of five to six percent of people on one end of the spectrum which will actually have some difficulties. And then there's going to be another five to six percent who are actually just so brilliant that our class wars them. So how do we manage? How do we as teachers learn skills to be able to manage all of those people? OK, the human brain, the organ of all learning is not simple. Therefore, the teaching learning dynamic can't be simplistic. There are many books out there that are sort of like teaching for dummies kind of thing. And there's even certification programs that tell people they can make them teachers in six weeks. I really take issue with those things because it really shows a lack of understanding about the complexities of what's going on inside the brain. So let's think about all of these different things about where we feel we fall on that particular spectrum. I always draw parallels between educators and doctors and physicians. I think that there's a lot of parallels here. We do a lot of diagnoses each day. We do a lot of intervention. We do a lot of follow-up and evaluation. So I also believe we share the very first rule with medicine which is do no harm. And unfortunately, because a lot of myths out there about the brain, there are many teachers who apply kind of silly techniques. They'll say, let's sit around in a circle and pass around our candle because boys need to touch fire before they pay attention. I mean, that book sold millions and people do that in their class. But it actually does harm because it actually calls attention to things, for example, telling girls. You just don't have the right kind of a brain to be a scientist. Or you have a learning style that's not my learning style, which is why we don't connect, which is why you're not getting it. Those are all myths and those are all things that do harm because they lower the potential of an individual student in your class. In terms of students learning outcomes, the teacher, not the family, has more influence. While the home is vital for good nutrition and responsible for levels of stress and early childhood, teachers have a greater influence over student learning outcomes and academic achievement. This is the one that many, many, many teachers have a hard time swallowing. But they have a very, very important role in influencing student learning outcomes. Most teachers deflect and say, well, no, it's always, it's a home thing. You know, had I been given, you know, better behaved kids or better genes or whatever, I'd have better kids in my classroom and I could do miracles. Well, actually, the truth of the matter is you publicly spend more quality time focused on learning than the parents do. And parents tend to also, you know, my kid is wonderful, perfect always or the opposite. But within the context of school, it is the teacher that has a greater influence on student learning outcomes. And finally, students reach the level of expectations that teachers place on them. This means as a result that if I have mixed ability learners in my class, which we always do, the goal is to aim high. You should not aim low if the lowest come a denominator or average, but kids will respond to what is expected of them. The last one is that I am the decisive factor in the class. So these are some basic attitudes. I just wanted to throw out for further reflection. It's not things that we're going to be able to go into tons and tons of depth on. But I just want to emphasize the key role of the teacher in having good information and being able to be successful in this 20% context. In order to get a little bit more grasp on this, and I hope you all have something to write with. Does anybody know why you take notes? Why people should write? If you don't write, you will not remember. If you have no memory, you have no learning. So you need to write in order to have extended memory to be able to remember any of this in 24 hours. So I'd like you to grab a piece of paper, and I would like you to just quickly jot down. We have literally 60 seconds. What is something you know about best practice teaching in the 21st century? Maybe move this beforehand, or it's something we just talked about. And what is something that's just nagging on you right now? It's like, well, this was said, but I don't agree with this. There's something needs clarification. Can you please write that down? Typing is also good. Golly, just get some ideas on paper. At least one thing you know and one thing you'd like to know about teaching in the 21st century. And then we're going to move on. Take 60 seconds to do this, please. This is only for yourself, but it's to keep as a point of reflection. Because when we get to the bottom to the end, I'm going to ask you to call back on these papers. So just take a quick minute to do that. And I'm going to stop this for one second. Nothing's going to happen. It's just I'll take care of some things in the background. OK. Does everybody have at least one thing on each side? Something you know and something you'd like to know. OK. We're going to move on now. And I want to just put this into the last commentary about the context of teachers. Unfortunately, while I believe that teachers are the most important profession in society, sorry to my doctor friends out there, while I believe that teachers are the most important profession, we don't do a very good job of professional development. We have people who become teachers, and then they can spend a couple of years being novices in advance, and then become proficient in excellence, and you might end up being a master teacher at the end of your day. But it's by experience, and we don't have a formalized structure of deepening our knowledge about certain areas. So what I'd like to suggest is that we have to rethink the way we go about doing it and obviously those of you in the classroom are thinking about this because you are trying to add onto your past professional knowledge. OK. So who, what, when, where, how does this type of thinking occur in 21st century skills in schools? We know that the who is very different. Remember, we talked about the school, parents, home, teacher, students, the administration of a school, the curriculum you have in teaching. What had these research found, which was phenomenal, is that if we asked all of these actors, if you asked parents, if you asked teachers, if you asked administrators about these things, the parents, the teacher, sorry, the parents and the administrators coincided in their answers and the teachers did not. But what the research is showing is that the individual student, if the student believes he is a learner, I can learn, I will learn, then that is the number one most important factor influencing student learning outcomes. But if a student, now this is the key part though, who makes the student feel that he's a learner or not? It's the teacher. It is not the parents. It's the teacher that will make the kid feel like he's empowered. Yes, I can learn. So the big problems come in here is when if a kid thinks the teacher thinks he's not going to do well, the kid doesn't even try. And this is independent of whether or not that's true or not, whether or not the teacher did think this or not. So the messages that we send to our students, do they believe in us, do we believe in them, do they feel that we at the minimum believe that they will be able to learn, that they will all have the capability of learning to learn, even though they're going to have different potentials in my subject area or whatever I'm doing, but they will all be able to learn is key. If anybody has a question about this particular ranking, please do send me a mail afterwards and we can talk about this in more depth afterwards. What are the types of skills? We did talk about this. It's not only subject area skills that we need to learn. It's not just Hebrew or Spanish or English or math or science or art, but we're trying to get people who actually compose greater questioning and be more innovative throughout the lifespan. And so this is a very different kind of a learner than we've had in the past. The type of teaching, what do we have to teach? I'd like to ask you. Do you think it's more important what we teach or how we teach? If our goal is to get kids to learn how to think better, does it really matter our curriculum design? And if you recall in this last slide, we realized that the curriculum is actually the least, one of the least important factors influencing student learning outcomes. There are some different filters that we can talk about at the very end that have to do with questioning or ordering the presentation of materials in different ways. But all of these things are influential in teaching, but it's mainly how we teach. Do we have a detective method? Do we have a questioning method? Is there time for reflection on the part of the students? Or is it just a bombarding of a lot of information? How many of you know Rip Ben-Winkle? Ever heard of him? He's a fellow who fell asleep. And he went to sleep for 100 years. And when he woke up, he found that transportation had changed. He found that banks had changed. That the way we tweet people in and out of government changed. Our supermarkets look different. But our schools, which one of these is in 1910 and which one of these is in 2010? Sadly enough, they're both in 2010. One is Michigan, one is Illinois. I know that your schools don't necessarily look like this. But the idea is that we have to really leapfrog in changes. We have to catch up with other social institutions and society. So this has a lot to do with where learning is taking place now. We know that there's a lot of information that's just free. So schools don't necessarily have to spend so much time teaching dates, facts, formulas. But they actually have to think a little bit more about the dynamics of higher order thinking. We know that we can physically change our classes, but there's also access to a lot more information in the technological world that we're living in. Why do we need to change? We know that this is a very old graph from 2006. This actually is. The curve has actually gone up even more for creative. But we've gone from being agrarian societies moving through industrial revolution to now moving on to the society that's based on knowledge, how we build up knowledge and learning. And we also know that that's where the money is. So being creative in your response to things is not going to come from schools that actually only do multiple choice tests or that test traditional subject areas. But we need people who can combine information and look at things in a very different way. So how should the teachers be changed? This comes from the study that we did with the OECD panel, which said we have to move away from the old education styles to learning sciences. And this means that we have to mix and learn, nurture our craft of teachers from neuroscience. We need to have the information that's embedded in how the brain learns. And in psychology, we have to learn from these other fields in order to respond to these questions in a better way. This is what my research has been on since I did my doctorate in the books I've written. And the last was the OECD's recommendation to the member countries of the teacher's new pedagogical knowledge based on technology and on neuroscience. So if you care about that particular historical field, please take the time to look at this video, which has a long explanation of where did mind brain education come from. So this is the premise here. Designing educational experiences without an understanding of the brain is like trying to design a glove without understanding the hand. So the big question is, do teachers know enough about the brain? I would like you to ask, I'm going to ask you again now, at least one thing and this I do want you to share. What is one thing you know about the brain and learning? And one thing you wish you knew, or that you're a dinosaur, or you think it would improve your practice if you did know. Please do type in here. So one thing, I know that the brain has two hemispheres. Okay, that's great. I want to know how to enhance my student's ability to memorize or whatever. That could be an example. Okay? So please think of one thing you know and one thing you want to know and jot that down immediately. So nobody knows anything, or nobody wants to know anything. What's something you know and something that you still think you want to know, or something you think teachers should know that they don't know yet. I want to know if affective filter can affect how the brain learns and also in what ways. Excellent, Evelyn. We know that you cannot separate emotional processing from decision making and decision making is related to learning. So they are definitely, definitely connected. And in fact, in physiologically speaking, all new learning passes through the filter of prior experience. And the first check on that is at an emotional level. So we know that there's a huge area now called cognitive or affective neuroscience. A wonderful new book is coming out by Mary Helen Emerginger Yang, which I highly recommend, which talks about the great length between affective learning and cognitive development and cognitive learning. The brain in women is different than men. You know that, or you think that, or you want to clarify this. There are only five small areas that have been documented that are different between men and women's brains. Women have a generally larger corpuscular oceum. Men have a generally larger right. Maybe a lot of there's a few things that are noted as being different. The only there, and there's just about no study that correlates these physiological differences to behavior patterns. There's a ton of literature on hormones and how hormones do change learning patterns. And those definitely are in different balances. In men and women, we have the same hormones, but we have different proportions of them. So yes, there's a lot there. But there is research being done by some related to spatial orientation in small children. There is a little bit of evidence there that there might be a different use of different networks to call upon for rehearsed facts about forms. But aside from that, there isn't any other difference. So it would be really shameful to say to a little girl, for example, you just don't have a head for math or something like that, because that's just not true. Or to tell a boy, oh, it's too bad you're not good at languages like the girls are. That would be doing harm because that's just not true. There's a long one here and I'm missing this. The relationship between brain capacity and hormones. Can you clarify that, Iris, a little bit more? Sebastian, I want to know how the specific learning methods affect learning process in low-income children. Sebastian, there's some really wonderful literature talking about what are the strongest. The short answer to your question is that everything that helps anybody always helps kids from lower social economic backgrounds more. For example, Lauren said he does work looking at how early biliteracy skills improves a child's own understanding of their first as well as second language and actually ameliorates the effects of poverty. So introducing a poor child who only knows English to Spanish when he's eight years old and doing biliteracy skills is actually shown to make such changes in the brain and increase executive functions which are enhanced by bilingualism to the extent that she says this ameliorates effects of poverty. So all interventions will always be always good for low-income kids. If you want to talk about specifics, I'll give you a lot more concrete examples, especially related to executive functions which is working memory inhibitory control and cognitive flexibility. There's a lot of research being done on that right now. I want to know the reasons you're using the delete. I'm aware that the brain is flexible and able through the live and my question is how do best teach adults? Excellent. Okay. So Billy wants to know, is there a great difference? We know that there's plasticity throughout the lifespan. So in what way then should our methodologies change with the adult learning brain? And this is a huge point because we know that adults have a wealth of experience. Remember, I said that one of these victims in mind brain education science is that all new learning passes through the filter of prior experience, which means that if you have lots of prior experience, you have a lot to call upon. And one of the big differences of teaching adults versus kids is to actually know what they already know. So for example, in this particular activity, I'm looking at a bunch of adults who know a lot about the brain and they have some very sophisticated questions about the things that they want to know. So they don't need to know the basic things, but they're actually looking on how to improve their techniques and teaching. There are some specific examples that we're going to give you as an optional homework at the very end, which will give some very concrete ideas of things that you could actually apply. And I can also send you some bibliography, some information about flight differences between adult brains and then certain techniques that can be used at any age level. I want to know how to be in the class of 21st century. My class looks like pictures. Oh, no. So what is kind of the classroom that looks like the ones that we had in pictures here? Here's the wonderful. The happy news is that it doesn't matter what your class looks like. You can be drawing pictures in the sand if you want and be a great teacher. We know that, of course, things are facilitated when you have wonderful resources, but it doesn't mean that you have to have excellent resources. The quality of the teacher of you is the most important thing that's out there. So it's very hard to leapfrog in this way, but if you apply some of these 21st century techniques related to the brain, you've already done a great service to your students, independent of the kind of desks that they have. Deborah, what kind of disabled? When you say disabled people, how do they learn? It really depends. For example, if you talk about dyslexia, dyslexia is a disruption of a normal route that your brain takes to get information into certain circuits. And if that circuit is blocked, then you have to rely on plasticity to retrain the brain to get the same type of information through a different circuit. So there's typical natural circuits that would be easier to travel, but most people, all people, have to learn through and would normally follow these typical pathways. But if that pathway is blocked, then you have to find a new way to do that. And that's why it takes a little bit longer, it takes different types of techniques to reach those individual people. Do hominins motivate certain types of learning? No, they motivate certain types of behavior, not necessarily certain types of learning. Is there a difference between the brains of babies? Okay. This is a wonderful... This is a big question of the nature versus nurture, right? Are we all born identical? No. We are born with the genes that we inherit from our parents, which can be potentiated to fulfill certain things. So not everybody is born equal. You get some good genes or you get some bad genes or whatever. However, having said that, there's a huge stock in the experiences you have throughout your life. So if you have the right kinds of experiences to potentiate your genes, then you're able to actually do things. So having said that, there's a great exception that has to do with your first language. So all normal brains, all people that are born without any type of disability, yes, have the potential to learn all languages from the get-go. But having said that, now, do you have stimulation? We know that there's some kids who look like they're retarded and their language goes, but it's because nobody's ever talked to them. So we know that there's differences there. The lead things, the cages, not ringing, thank you. Okay. So we're going to move on. These are some good things. So we're going to talk about all of the things that you guys brought up, and we're going to try to get... Is behavior one part of learning? Behavior? A sub-element of behavior. Human behavior is to learn. A sub-behavior is to sleep or eating patterns or the way people react to a funny joke. All of those are behaviors. And anything that's a behavior can be learned, can be learned. So just to throw that in there for Iris. And executive functions and literacy acquisition. Okay. So last time we'll talk about executive functions and literacy acquisition. If not, in this particular forum, I will send you a whole lot of information because that's an area that I've been actually researching a new book on. Okay. So in general, can you guys just give me a thumbs up, thumbs down? Do you think the average teacher in your context actually knows a lot about the brain or knows the things that you know or knows at least the basics about the brain? No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Okay. This is really scary, right? Because the brain is the organ of all learning, right? So going back to the metaphor of the glove, if you don't know about the brain, how do you possibly do the job teaching and tailoring your lessons to that brain? One of the big problems here is that in education, we're used to looking at methodologies or developmental practices or how to plan or how to evaluate. Whereas in neuroscience, they're looking at the level of the brain or how synapse is functioned or neurotransmitters or the chemicals to the brain. So they look at different types of things. And psychologists are looking at, you know, the role of emotions or group behavior or perceptions. So they're all, they're kind of different fields. The idea is that those of you daring to sort of move into this field will have to get into a comfort zone which is actually joining all of these different areas, which is a very distinct formation that we've had in the past. So this means that a mind-brain education scientist can be a teacher, it can be a psychologist, it can be a neuroscientist, but it's managing, it's somebody who manages the discussion in this intersecting field. And I have to tell you this is a booming and growing field of education. There's new programs all over the world. Harvard has a new PhD program in this. There's a lot of programs that are growing out of this because we realize that you cannot answer a lot of the questions about how kids learn. We know a lot about how people learn, but we haven't talked about how we should teach in order to take advantage of that. So the idea is that we have to now use, I'm sorry, we have to use different tools. We have to add information from neuroscience and psychology to better our practice. So this means taking this mind-brain education field, the information that we have from, say, Hattie's work on what really influences student learning outcomes. And think about this in a developmental trajectory. You know, where am I at as being a teacher and what can I add to my practice to become even better? So now we're going to get into the meat of the whole brain stuff here. There's things that we believe about the brains and there's things that it just myths. And from that, we actually get information that are universal. There's only a handful of them, but things that are true for all brains. And then there are things that are called tenants. These are things that are, so the principles are things that are true for everybody and tenants are things that are true, but they have huge human variance. For example, how many of you think that sleep is important for learning? Is it important to sleep to learn? Yes, no? Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. So all these tired people, yes, yes, yes, yes, of course, okay. So we know that sleep is really vital to learning. In fact, sleep is good to help us rest and be able to pay attention. And then we have memory, which is enhanced by memory consolidation through dreaming. So we know that sleep and dreaming, which are two different things, are both necessary for learning. But I can't dictate to you how much you should sleep. Anywhere between four and a half and 12 hours is normal, according to the research at Harvard by Hobson. At age is an average, so we know that tenants are things that are vital to learning, but you cannot say, you know, do it this way or one way or another because there's a huge human variance, okay? So once we know these things, this actually tells us how we should actually teach to take advantage of this. So what we use like quick little game about what we know to actually pull out the myths here. And this comes from a categorization scheme that was built up by the OECD into four categories of information. There's information that is well-established. Yes, there is plasticity throughout the lifespan, okay? Then there are things that are probably so. Like we know that they're sensitive periods, but we can't really name them all. We know that there might be a critical period for your first language and gross motor skills in the first few years of life, but you can't really prove it, right? Then there's intelligence speculation, okay? Boys and girls, men and women, they look different from the outside, so they must be different on the inside, too. That's intelligence speculation, but there's no evidence behind it. There's very little evidence behind it, or it's of mixed quality. And then there's just the stuff that are just wrong. It's wrong. It's nervous. It's lies about the brain, okay? Over generalizations about the brain. So what I'm going to ask you is I'm going to ask you to do what I did with an Adelphi panel, which is a panel of experts, including people like Michael Posner and Howard Gardner and John Brewer and a bunch of the big top guys in education psychology and neuroscience. And I asked them to read the many concepts that teachers are exposed to, like water is vital for learning. Kids should drink, you know, eight glasses of water while they're in school or something like that. I had them read these statements and separate whether or not they're well-established, probably so, intelligence speculation or neuroness. And unfortunately, most of the things that teachers read are mythical. They are not real. They do not have scientific backing in them. So what we want to do is to look at these and have a little quick quiz here. And all I want you to do is to tell me which of these four categories you think the information falls into. Is it well-established? Probably so, which means that probably so would mean it's true, but there's huge human variance. Or is it just speculation or is it a myth? And then I want you to also reflect on this. How does that really change your teaching? Human brains are as unique as human faces. What do you think? True, false, lots of evidence. Myth, what do you think? One, what does one mean? That it's a myth or that it's true. True, true, true, true, true. It's definitely true. We all have similar parts, right? To do it with the check mark, so you can see who says yes and who says no all together. Okay. With the next one, no part. Okay. Sure. I'll explain that then. Okay, great. Okay. Great. So we know that human brains are as unique as human faces. This means that we all have the same parts, right? You have two eyes, I have two eyes, two years, two years, you know. But we don't have the same looking faces, right? So we know that brains have the same parts. You have similar lobes. You have frontal lobes. You have occipital lobes. You have hemispheres. Those parts are the same. But there are no two brains that are exactly identical. Why? What changes the brain? What makes even identical twins? Why are their brains different? What makes their brains different? What makes your brain different? Is that a question you're being asked? It's not a hormone. It's not hormones. Not what you study necessarily. Epigenetic. What else? What else? Give me an easy, daily word. Not your genes. What would make two identical twins' brains? When they're born, their brains are actually different because of the experiences they have. Okay. Their different experiences will change the way that different parts of the brain are connected and potentially can be connected in the future. Okay. Now, this has a huge impact on whether or not we decide. If you know that there's no two brains that are identical in your classroom and that all this hinges on past experience, do we know enough about our students? Do we know how to differentiate? Do we know this concept of universal design for learning where we hit a common denominator but we're trying to let every child maximize his own potential in our classroom? We're not going to tend to talk about the flipped classroom, but there's this idea that if you create the space with the resources so that people can rehearse the things that they don't know so that when they come to the class and more people will be at the same level for starting, there's a way around this, okay? Number two, all brains are equally prepared for all tasks. Can you please vote? Where is that, Jayne? Just under where it says participants, there's a check that you can either check green or do the red X. The yes would be checking the green and X would be checking the three people have already voted. Please, some more of you will check, either click the green check or the red X and then we'll see what's happening. Four of you have voted. A few more maybe. Okay, so we have a good number of people who say, brains are not all equal for all things. And this has to do with all of you who are listening when we talk at the very beginning. Not everybody is born ready to do the same thing. Basically you inherit a set of genes and different people are born with different abilities based on the potential to maximize the use of what you're born with. But not everybody is born, you're not born on equal playing field. And here is where you do have big differences with kids who are undernourished, mothers who are poorly nourished during pregnancy or children who are not given basic stimulation in the early years. The brain architecture is just not ready to go. Barring those types of things, you are still not born equally because of the genes that you inherit. So you get some big ones from your mom and dad and that's your starting point. But if you know that not all people are going to be ready to do all things at the same moment. For example, we know that some kids are ready to learn to read when they're three and some people are ready to learn to read when they're seven. And that's okay because if you test those people when they're nine, there's no difference in the level of their reading. So we know there's... People are ready at different times and we have a hard problem now with these testing requirements that are forcing everybody into sort of a package deal. Everybody has to respond at the same time at the same age. And we know that's just not something that's actually fair or realistic. Next one. Past information influences how we learn something new. Can you quickly vote? True or false? Yes, you agree with that or no, you don't agree with it? Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Very good. Definitely. All new learning passes through the filter of prior experience. Why? Because your brain is incredibly efficient and wants to know to relate something new to something that it could know, something new, all right? So it always looks for patterns. What do I already know about this? Or it looks for things that would be novelty, something that's different than what I already know. So we know that this is absolutely true. But if you're in a classroom, how do you take most advantage of that? You can only do that if you know your students. And this gets back to, I think, Iris' comment. If you have 40 kids in your class, how do you really know what they already know and if you're at a good starting point with them? Well, there are several techniques that you can use to do that and gather information. And I'd love to, if large classes are a problem and you want to write me, I'd love to give you some very specific things you can do. One thing is what we're doing here, a one-minute paper. So you gather in the information, see what is my starting point with this group, and where should I take it? The brain changes constantly with experience. True, false, maybe yes, no. Good, yes, yes, yes, yes, absolutely. Hopefully you guys are going to go to bed tonight with a different brain from the one you woke up with this morning if you learned anything through this context. The very interesting thing, however, is that the brain, the connections at a microscopic level, actually occur before behavioral changes. This is true if any of you have ever taught a small child to read. You know, you can spend weeks or months, you know, practicing, reading out loud, doing things. And then in one day, that kid seems to read. It's not that he learned to read in that second. It's that he was slowly priming all of the networks that are necessary to be ready so that he could then learn to read. So we know that this is absolutely true. But you actually, you know, you have to take advantage of this by being more patient. You have to know that not everybody has all of the same prior experiences. And they'll need to build that up before they can actually learn new things. This goes to Galit's question. The brain is highly plastic or flexible? What do you think? Yes, no? Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Very good. There's a high degree of plasticity. And this goes throughout the lifespan, as we mentioned before. And it's not just in the extreme cases of damage. We know that some people who have suffered stroke, for example, who then learned to speak. And so they learn how to reconnect. Paul Batirita did experiments with congenitally blind people, people born blind. And you learn about your world through your senses. And through your five senses, right? You learn about your world. Well, if one of your senses, like you're seeing, your sight is gone, then he said, why don't we use the other senses to teach? So he taught these blind people to see through pulses on their tongue. They said it was kind of like learning foreign language. The same was naturally looking for a network to be formed in one way, but that way was damaged. So what do we do? We look for another way to get the same information to bring to different sensory tracks. So these are just the five things. Remember I showed you there's only five things that are true for all brains, independent of culture, independent of the age. Those five things are true for all brains. That makes this question, what about the rest of the information? And what do you think about this one? Do you need attention and memory for learning? Yes or no? Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Most of this comes with a confusion. Let me ask a prior question. Is your brain always paying attention? Yes, it is. It just might not be paying attention to what you wanted to be paying attention to as a teacher, right? This is too simplistic of a formula, but keep in mind, this is definitely true. If you don't have memory of something, you can't learn it, which is why I tell my students, always take notes, even if you don't think it means anything, this will trigger a memory for you. You need to memorize in order to learn. But you also have to be paying attention to learn. And if you're not, if you're missing attention or you're missing memory, there is no learning, okay? So based on that kind of information, those are maybe five and a half real truths. And you can learn to be a great teacher just based on those five things. But then there's some other things that we think teachers should know about the brain as well. Remember, we talked about sleep very briefly. Do you remember? We said that sleep is important for learning, right? Does anybody remember why it's important for learning? We said that sleep is different than dreaming, right? This comes from Robert Stickles' work at Harvard that shows that your brain, when you're sleeping, you can get your energy up, so now you can pay attention. But when you're dreaming, there's a unique combination of neurotransmitters at that moment that allow memory consolidation. And you can actually test this in class. If you've ever had a student who comes and said, oh, they stayed up all night and they studied for your test, and they take the test and they do okay. But if you ask them the exact same question 24 hours later, they don't remember a thing because they did not dream. They did not consolidate that memory into long-term memory. It was just there in a form of working memory for the short term, right? So if you really want people to learn, you have to allow them a good night's rest. Okay. Next one, making decisions. And this was connected with a question that came up with a cool head, okay, without emotions. That helps you think better and make better decisions, true or false. It might sound wonderful in an ideal world. However, physiologically speaking, it's impossible. Why? Because remember we said all new learning passes through your senses, right? What does it do? It travels up your, I don't know if I can draw this, am I drawing right? Yes. It travels up your spinal cord, and the very first stop it makes, it double checks with the medial lobes and it says, hi, is this something that I should be afraid of or run away from? And in less than a split second, it goes from a lobe and then back to the hippocampus for confirmation. But physiologically speaking, everything that we sense will first go through an emotional memory filter. What do I remember of this? Is it dangerous, right? And then the second thing will be a real confirmation with the hippocampus. So we know that it's impossible to make decisions without emotions, but we also know that they're actually complementary processes and very beneficial. But teachers can only go cognitive and they forget that they are actually having emotional reaction from their students and the way they teach, the way they look at the students, how they interact with them, how much encouragement, whether or not they scream or yell or if they discipline them in a nicer way or if they give feedback or don't. All of those things are emotional influences on cognitive learning. This means that we have to be designing better classroom environments, that keep kids stimulated enough but not freaked out that they are so anxious because we know that high anxiety students also have this level of hormones that prevents the neural connections that are necessary for new learning. So we have to manage the emotional aspect of learning in a much better way than we have been in the past. For example, people judge each other's spaces in tones of voices immediately and almost unconsciously. Is that true? We judge each other's spaces in tones of voices almost immediately and unconsciously. You agree with that? Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Most of us do. It is definitely unconscious and it is definitely something, even if the teacher doesn't mean to transmit something, that doesn't matter. What matters is what the student perceives. I've had students come to me, you know, whining and crying, and they're like, oh, teacher hates me. I don't think the teacher hates me. I say, hello, Eduardo, do you hate her? And he goes, no, no. In fact, I told her she was doing really well. But what did he say? He said, you're doing just fine. Now, in doing it in that way, his tone of voice and his facial expression sends a different message from the words. So actually, your facial expression and your tone of voice actually are carrying different and more powerful messages than even the real words you say. So do we help teachers manage their body language? Do they know how to recognize these, you know, seven basic emotions on kids' faces? Do we know how to manage our own facial expressions? These are things that we really need to be taking into consideration in new teacher training. Okay? Do irises, do you detach emotion and senses from behavior? Absolutely not. There's an integrated process there. Your behavior is based on your emotional reaction to different things. But it's cyclical. For example, iris, are you happy because you smile or do you smile because you're happy? Both. Both things are true. Okay? So we know that there's a reciprocal process here. The way we express something and the way we process an emotion and be clear on this, emotions are different from feelings. Emotion is a physiological change. You know, the hormones, this is a different, this is a physiological change. Feeling, what you feel is your interpretation of that emotion. Okay? So one psychological, one is neuro-physiological. Okay? Human seek out novelty as well as patterns. Absolutely and always. Okay? It is a human instinct to look for what is slightly different. But you can take this to your advantage when you teach. You can tell a kid, okay, you know what 2 plus 3 is. That equals 5. What do you think 5 minus 3 is equals 2? So they can see what is different. But then they also, your brain is forced to look for novelty as well as patterns. It tries to see what it already knows about something so that it can conserve and economize learning by actually extending that based on what it already knows in the past. What about nutrition? Does nutrition influence learning? Yes. But not all calories are created alike. We know that your brain uses about 20% of your calorie consumption. That means the perfect diet is just, you know, think. That will help you lose weight. But we know that there's no perfect diet related to the brain. But we know that your brain is like another important organ in your body. What's another important organ that you have in your body? Your heart, right? So a good diet, a good rule of thumb is basically, what's good for your heart is good for your brain, okay? Going back to the emotional thing. Stress impacts learning. True or false? What do you guys think of that? Stress impacts learning? We have one person, two person, three, three, four or five. Everybody says yes. Stress definitely impacts learning. But is stress always bad? No. There's such a thing as good stress. This helps us be alert and focused and paying attention, right? That too much bad stress definitely influences learning because we mentioned before. Different emotions release different types of hormones or vice versa. Different hormones cause us to feel differently about things, right? In a high-stressed environment, high anxiety environment, we'll have higher levels of neurotransmitters that block others so it does not permit the new connections for learning. So a highly stressed kid is not going to learn, okay? So it's good to keep them on their toes but not make them panicked because once they're panicked, they will not be able to learn, okay? Oh, we've gone back to this. We lost the myth. We lost the myth. Okay. Let's take a minute. Well, Jake, can you put up the... Okay, I'm going to take care of that. Okay. I'm not looking into this. We have no... Okay, so we know that emotions impact learning. Hold on a moment. Are we on to the next one? You want to take care of that now? I'm sorry, I'm... Just be careful. One moment, we'll be ready. Okay? Okay. So as many of you are acknowledging, there's a huge connection between affective states, emotional states, and cognitive achievement, okay? So that's hopefully a very big takeaway that you'll be able to apply in your classroom. And this has to do with the way we relate to our students. Remember the very first point we talked about was being able to make sure that students believe at a minimum. They don't have to love us, but they should think that we believe in their ability to learn. That is at a minimum in order to lay the groundwork for a student to be able to learn. Okay, now we're going to get into the very last section here. Humans use only about 10% of your brains. Have you guys heard of that one? Is this an answer? I'm going to clear this because it says that there's seven people who think that's true. Oh, no. People are changing their answers. Okay. Humans use only 10% of their brain. Half of you think that that's true? I hope not. Okay. This is total false. This is very false. Probably Tracy. Tracy, you came here to learn. If we knew all of this before, then why would we come? Well, this came from, and this makes sense, because before we used to have such poor technology that we thought that we would take pictures of it. We would tell somebody, name all animals that you can think of that start with the letter D, and then we'd take this image of the brain, and then we'd say, look, less than 10% is being illuminated, right? And we had this generalization come up that, yes, humans are using very little of their brain, and it could very well be that was 100% of what your brain needs to name animals with the letter D, right? So now that we have better technology, we know that that's absolutely untrue. How about this one? Some people are more right-brained, and others are more left-brained. What do you think of that? There are right-brained people and left-brained people. Somebody says, yes. Some people are more right-brained than left-brained. The people who said that this is true, I'd like you to look at the source of that information. This is a really catchy and sexy way to sell brain literature to teachers. You know, to take teaching to the right brain or to the unattended right brain learners or something like that. Unfortunately, we're not teaching to this wacko-crazy group over here in the right brain, and we're only doing lined-up teaching on the left brain. This is just not true. There's absolutely nothing that you do that is isolated to a single hemisphere. And by the way, you only have one brain, so you can't have a right brain and a left brain, right? You have one brain and they're intricately connected through different networks. Before it was fashionable even 20 years ago to say that, you know, language is definitely a left hemisphere because we found a broken and vernacular area and most people was there. However, when you look at when humans think about humor or metaphors, huge right-central lobe connections there. So there's a whole lot more to things that we can now see with better technology. So this is definitely false. There's no such thing as right-brained and left-brained learners. Please, please get away from that in the literature. Okay. Students can pay attention for 90 minutes or an hour and a half. Let's see if anybody answers this question. This will tell us if anybody's heard that. Most people can only pay attention for about 10 to 20 minutes. However, what teachers don't realize is that they can extend there in charge of changing the person, you know, who's the focus, the place, the physical place, or the activity. And you can change those things every couple of minutes so that you can keep up the attention span. What we try to do here is that every 15 to 20 minutes we try to get you to stop and vote on something or write something so that we change the person, right? So that you can maintain attention for the length of time we have here. Which is why at the beginning, and this is primacy and recency, humans remember best what happens first, second best what happens last, and then the stuff in the middle might get lost, right? So what did we try to do is that we framed this lesson by saying, you know, education has changed. We need to nurture our craft with things from neuroscience. And then we're ending with things about myths so that you can keep that in mind because that was the main focus of this particular talk. This means in practice all this middle time has to be spent on students actually doing or applying the information or reflecting on it in a meaningful way so that you can actually use your time with the students in the best way possible, okay? So much of what we hold to be true does not have scientific foundation. And I'm only going to highlight a few of them in order to, for those of you who find the things that I read out loud, if I read something and you totally disagree and you say, wait, I need clarification, I've lived by that, but I can't be a myth, please write it in the chat box or turn on your mic because we need to hear from you. Some of the neuro myths that exist, that mental capacity is hereditary and cannot be changed by the environment or experience. False. Intelligence is fixed. You can't change the brain. False. Most people use 10% of their brains. False. The left and right hemispheres are isolated. False. Your brain acts like a video camera and we store and make a memory of everything that we experience and see. False. Your brain will shrink if you don't drink six to eight glasses of water a day. False. By the way, these things come from popular press literature that is bought by teachers like Quantities Based on the Volume of Books Sold in on Amazon. Alcohol kills brain cells. Drug use makes holes in your brain. That's true. Brain, yes, do this and get to kill some brain cells, but it's not like you're going to be, it's the death of you if you drink a glass of wine. It has to do with proportion. Like Socrates says, everything in moderation. Brain is hard to work in isolation. False. Individuals learn better when they receive information in the preferred learning style. There is no such thing as learning styles. Investment in this is a waste of money. All people learn through all of their senses all of the time. You might have a cognitive preference for something. Most people say that they visualize things better than other modes, but you cannot turn off one of your senses. You are always using all of your senses when you learn. The theory of multiple intelligences is validated by neuroscientific research. False. Howard Gardner has started this himself with an idealized panel. Forget the music. The arts. Pee. Spend more time studying. Wrong idea. Bad idea. You lost the same time to master it. There was a teacher strike in Oregon just ended about a month ago. And the teacher is demanded among other things that there would be time for recess, which I think is one of the greatest things that we've, with everything that's happening in the States, that was one of the, and they just got it. Recess was returned to elementary schools. Wonderful. And this has to do with our working environments. If you guys just saw, Sweden has decided to go to a six-hour work week, right? Right? The idea is that you need downtime. You need time distant from just cognitive behavior in order to process and decide what you really know and don't know. You said a six-hour work week for me. You said a six-hour work week. I think you made six-hour work day. Oh, six-hour work day. Sorry, sorry, sorry. Yeah, right, right. That was really good. That would be fabulous. High-stakes testing are an accurate measure of what a student knows and their intelligence, wrong. Humans are born a baleen slate. This is what we thought in the 1800s. All we have to do is fill up their empty vessels, so that's not true. Everything important about the brain is determined by the age of three. This is false. I'd like you to read John Brunner's book about the myth of three years of age. Violent video games have no effect on behavior. They do have an effect on behavior. Using the Internet makes you smarter or makes you dumber. It's a tool. You know, it's how you use it. It's not what it is, okay? Environments rich in stimuli provide the brain, improve the brains of preschool children. Problem is the definition of what is rich in stimuli. What's rich to one kid is not rich to another. Vaccines cost autism, false. Learning is independent of a learner's history, false. Learning problems associated with developmental differences in brain functions cannot be remedied by education. Not true. There are many things that we can do in formal education settings to remediate problems that a kid might be born with. Individuals are not responsible for behaviors associated with developmental differences and different functions in the brain. That means it's, you know, oh, I'm born with it. You know, I'm born to be a mass killer. There's nothing I can do about it. That's not truly easier. Kids are irresponsible and act out because the prefrontal cortex doesn't develop until the 20s. That's a hot topic if you want to get into it. The next one is people can multitask. There's no such thing as multitasking. If we do brain scans, when somebody tries to divide their attention, you can actually see it is literally divided. What people can look like they're able to do many things at the same time. It's because they maintain things and working memory, but it's not that they're actually getting attention at the same level. When your brain sleeps, you shut down wrong. As we saw, it's vital to learning. People who are brain dead are still unconscious. That's not true. The brain is plastic for certain kinds of information, only during specific critical periods. We no longer talk about critical periods in formal education settings. There may be a critical period for your first language and for gross motor skills in the early years. Those are the only two things. There's no critical period for learning foreign language. There's no critical period for learning how to do art, math, history. Okay. And then let me see. I'm going to jump because we have very few minutes left and I just want to expose you to a bunch of these different things. I experienced myself. The brain remembers everything it's ever experienced. Forgetting is simply an absence of recall. There's a huge area of study which has to do with forgetting, not just memory, not just how we put it in. But your ability to retrieve is actually influenced more by why we forget than why we remember. And that's something that should be looked into more. The range of the spirit is in a special sense. I'm going to skip this. Learning can be isolated from the social and emotional context. Absolutely not. All learning is an individual learns based on their entire context. Based on the mom and dad fighting at home, the violence they might find in the street, based on what they eat for breakfast. So learning in your classroom is highly influenced by many things you have no control over. And you have to be aware of those things and you have to leverage your own teaching in the best way possible. There's many myths about bilingualism, which is a favorite area of mine if you'd like to talk about it. There's myths about gender and race. And there's myths related to commercial ventures. Neural and linguistic programming, brain gym, if they've made it to your country, please kick them out. There's no evidence for those things either. I'd like to end with this one and a half minutes that we have left to actually try to make this a bit more concrete. Those of you who feel like staying for more questions, I will stay as long as you want to. But in order to have a takeaway, there's been a lot of information. And this will serve you, you know, maybe it was interesting or fun or you were listening to me in the background while you did other things. But if it's really meant to do something to improve your practice as teachers, you have to take the time to reflect a teeny bit, which means downtime. This is kind of like the white space you have in a magazine. You need to have something that lets your eye rest. You need now to just look back. All the things you might have jotted down or ideas that are floating in your head, please give me right down for yourself. What are three things that you learned today that you didn't know before? Two things that are so interesting that you're going to actually research some more or talk to somebody else about them. And one thing you will actually do to change your practice, to improve your practice as a teacher. If you're all able to do that, then I think that this has been a successful encounter. If there's anybody who says, oh, no, I knew all of that, then I'm sorry, we need to get you into the advanced class and we can go into greater depth in this information. But please take the time to really think. What is it that you're going to take away from this that will actually improve the way you teach? As a general invitation again, I told you there's an optional homework that we're going to be assigning to you. So is this up here already, Jay? The homework isn't there. We did too big for me to get in there. Okay, so the homework is... I'll describe it to you. Everyone who is registered will be receiving a link both to the recording and to this presentation and to the homework presentation. And so what... You'll be able to download that. And you guys can choose to do this or not, but it has to do with those really dedicated teachers and say, yes, I want to do something different and I want to do something better. The homework is an extended explanation in far more detail of 50 different interventions that have been proven to... They improve student learning outcomes with an explanation of the neuro and the psychological elements behind it. Why does Socratic Questioning, for example, work in a classroom? Why does spaced versus mass practice improve learning? So there's explanations of 50 different things that you could actually do in your classroom. And what you're invited to do is to identify. One, two, two of those things you'd like to try in your own classrooms this year. And I'm very happy to accompany you on that. If you say, listen, I've decided I'm going to apply this. I teach adults and this is my challenge with it. I will be happy to accompany you in that change that you'd like to apply in your classroom settings. But I do ask that you look at the videos first, which the link will be sent to you so that we can make sure that we're all on the same page with this. So we have just three minutes left on my clock. I'm not sure how much time we have here, but I do want to go back now to the boards and see some specific questions, especially on this three-to-one thing. What we try to do is to look over our new discoveries thanks to technology that we have about the brain and their influence on learning. I ask you to imagine changing your approach, not just from what we do in pedagogy and what we've always done, but can you incorporate some new information about the brain and learning? We look at some of the things that influence successful practice, and then I asked you at the very end here to think about did something come up that we talked about, about the influence of prior learning or about emotions or about memory or attention or things about special needs, something that was different that was important to you and things that you want to continue looking into and then things that you might be able to apply to change your practice, okay? So anybody brave who wants to share something or to lay something out, who wrote no, like you got nothing out of it? No, I hope I'm looking at the wrong time. Sure, you were. The microphone's open, so if someone wants to take a microphone, it's possible. Okay, I see that Leo Madain has said that as a question about is there a predominancy of certain hemispheres and certain people? There is not. Save the people that have only one hemisphere, and there are some people, we had actually in our university, a kid who had half of his brain removed, hemispheres removed early in age, and they don't see, they can't see very well because that part is missing in one side, so they can't see in one half of their brain, but it's not that individuals are more dominant right hemisphere or left hemisphere. In fact, if you'd like a good example of that, please go on to the Connectome Project, C-O-N-N-E-C-T-L, right here. The Connectome Project is actually showing, it shows the human brains that are doing different things, and you'll find that there's not one thing, nothing that you can ask a brain to do that only uses one hemisphere or that somebody is dominant for one hemisphere or another. And if you're asking this question, it's because you believe that there's isolated abilities in those hemispheres, like we're more creative if we're right hemisphere. That is also not shown to be true. There's at least 33 different definitions of creativity, and when you look at the neuroscience behind people being creative in those ways, they're using all kinds of cross-references between the hemispheres. It's never just one thing, okay? So left-handed people makes no difference. 95% of right-handed people and 70% of left-handed people do tend to have this one thing. This is Broca and Vernike's area in the left frontal and parietal cortex. However, it doesn't seem to make a difference. Left-handed people aren't necessarily, you know, automatically more creative or better with foreign languages. So that's sort of out there. So, okay? Oh, thank you, Jay. That's very helpful. Okay? So other questions that are up there. Continues for attention. G, J, J. Is there any other question that's coming up now? Anything that you'd like? One thing I will do, pay more attention to the middle of the class and my students more time for reflection. I think that is an excellent promise. I think that we have very little time in our classrooms and we feel very pressured to fill every second with content, content, content. But if you'll look on the videos that you have for optional homework, there's a whole section on activities related to reflection, taking, you know, a bit of downtime, assessing, doing self-assessments. For example, a very successful thing that they've implemented in the International Baccalaureate in math class is that kids keep a journal. They actually, at the end of class, write, what do they feel, what worked for them, what was the stress, you know, just by getting that out on paper and not letting it bang around in their heads, they found that students develop a better sense of metacognition. What worked for them and what didn't work for them. So taking the time, you know, to breathe a little and to think, what did I really get out of this, is very helpful in consolidating new learning, okay? So thank you for that. Anybody else? One, do you know any specific tests for learning styles for applying with students? I will tell you, do not do learning styles. Please. I will send you an article by Pashler in which they were charged by the National Science Foundation to see if there was evidence for learning styles and they did a huge literature review of everything that has ever been done on learning styles and came to the conclusion that it's a waste of money. Don't try to box people into this idea that they're kinesthetic or they're visual or they're auditory learners. There's a lot better ways to use your time and your money to do that. Having said that, in vocational education, we use a lot of tools that help kids identify their strengths. What am I really good at and what do I love in order to do what? To align their passion with their talents and that's a positive thing. I think that identifying your strengths is a really good thing. Boxing kids into a whole and telling them that you're obviously an auditory learner and I'm a visual learning which is why we didn't connect or why you didn't learn as much in my classroom or this activity is only for kinesthetic learners or whatever, that's really out the window. That is definitely something that I would highly discourage you to get away from. Not good, don't go there, don't go there. Yeah, Dell's kind of experience is not true. It doesn't exist. In fact, they try to go back and try to figure out who actually did, where was the original research and people can trace it back more or less to about 1969 is the first publication but nobody can find a real study. So there is a group of researchers. It's in Chicago and in Harvard who are actually trying to repeat this to see if this makes any sense. For those of you who want to understand this better, there's this cone that says that people who actually, if all you do is listen or just one single mode of learning, you're going to retain like five percent and if you see a visual, like a PowerPoint, you might get five to 15 percent more and if you had some supplementary reading or follow-up homework afterwards, you might get a little bit higher. But the true learning comes into play when you're actually, you are asked to give an example or to teach another. And those things nobody disagrees with. Those things definitely are right. What they disagreed with is this is five percent, 10 percent, 15 percent. They don't agree with that because it's just too neat and it doesn't seem to be right. This goes to the idea that the more what is true and not learning styles, but what is true is that the more ways you learn a similar concept, the more distinct modes of learning that are used, the higher the probability that you'll be able to recall it later. This is what Howard Gardner says is why he's great contribution. He's encouraged teachers to teach the same concept in multimodal ways and different ways. So if you have the same idea of, for example, if I tell you that the number three, if you write the number three or you write the word three or you write three dots, those are stored in three different neural networks in your brain. So your concept of three is embellished each time you have a new way of thinking of that concept. So the idea is that the more ways you put things in, the greater probability of recall. So we know memory is important for learning so that's why you should be encouraged to do things in many different ways. Not just reading about it, not just, you know, doing it, but multiple ways of doing it will increase the way that you can retrieve information. Okay? Thank you, Zoroastrian. Yeah, one of my favorite things. Okay, so what I will leave you then with all of you with this last idea of, I can't remember, it's not even here. I'll put it on the very first slide. For those of you who are interested or do or would like to have any kind of a follow-up, I'm very, very happy. It's gone now, it's already gone. I'll put it down in the lower part. If you'd like to send me an email, it's just my name at Gmail. I'm very happy to support you in exploring some of these concepts further. So if you do have questions or things that you'd like to talk about, I don't think the email is there. But anyways, it's there for any kind of follow-up you'd like to have. And I thank you guys for taking the time to be in the fashion to stick it out and I apologize. If you ever met me in person, I don't always talk that much. I much prefer a dynamic exchange and I know we're limited in the ways we could do that today, but I hope that it was worth your while. Thank you very much. Tracy, thank you very, very, very much. I have to admit, I also have a tendency to speak quickly and you have outclassed me totally. And I'm coming up for breath. So it must be exhausting for you. Seriously, thank you very, very much. I think that all of us were very, very pleased. I have checked the applause icon. Definitely don't know where it is. No problem. We filled up this time very, very quickly. Thank you for showing. I understand that's not... If you want to say something, you can take the microphone if you watch for Shana. But we're looking forward to closing down finally because, well, frankly, we're exhausted. And as I said, everyone will be receiving a link to both the recording, to a PDF, both of the presentation and of the homework that we received. And in that way, all of us will be able to follow through. And in the PDF is Tracy's email. So it's not a problem to reach her. She seems to be more than happy to engage all of us with what we've learned today. I've encountered many of the myths from teachers and even from teacher educators. And so I'm more than happy to have the opportunity to have someone with a doctorate in front of their name telling us that this is not the way it is. Sadly, there are people who do have that in front of their name who think it is the way it is. But we're not going to get into that at the moment. I'm going to say that this was very, very informative, very useful. Thank you very much, Tracy. And there are more. This was our first webinar in English this year. The next one will actually be in Spanish. And the one after that in December will be about the use of Wikipedia in education. It'll be conducted by the head of Wikimedia in Israel in English. And we will be having more. So please, we have your addresses. I won't go into all of these. Just to let you know that we're happy that you were here. Some of you already got date 30 and said, I don't have the strength for this anymore. But very seriously, Tracy, this was a wonderful presentation. We're very, very pleased that you did this. And we're looking forward to more from all of us. So thank you to all of you. Really, thank you. And I'm closing the recording. OK.