 Hi, my name is Tracy Takahama Espinosa, and this is a video on best practices and online pedagogy. 40 different teaching interventions that work equally well online as face-to-face. I'm a professor at the Harvard University Extension School, and I'm also associate editor of Nature Partner Journal Science of Learning. And over the past decade and a half I've been diving deeply into this idea of how is what we know about the brain influential and how we teach, and how should we leverage that information to be better at what we do as teachers. This brings a different emphasis on what we believe teachers should then know. Not just content knowledge, not just knowing how to teach math or language or science, for example, but also pedagogical knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge. How different teachers, for example, specialized in early childhood mathematics know and can anticipate the types of errors that students might have in that field. So pedagogical content knowledge is also important. But we now also see in a modern vision of teachers that they have to also understand the brain and how it works. So mind-brain education, looking at psychology, neuroscience, as well as best practice pedagogies influence student learning outcomes. As does the leveraging of great technology to let machines do what machines do best and let humans do what humans do best. This is the new science in the art of teaching. Today we're going to be looking at some key terms. I just want to explain where this information comes from, where the evidence comes from. Talk about these core principles and tenets and how we can get rid of some of the neuro-myths that still plague our field, and then talk about 40 best practice interventions. The field of mind-brain, now we say health and education, emerged in the early 2000s as the integration of information from psychology, neuroscience, and education that would bring together this transdisciplinary vision of how we should approach problems in education. Rather than just look at it as an educator or from a curriculum point of view, also take into consideration perspectives that come from psychology and educational psychology, neuropsychology, as well as from neuroscience to leverage the best evidence possible to understand the best teaching interventions in order for our students to have the most success. Initially, the information from the field was gleaned from separate studies from mind-brain health and education from these different subfields. However, now there is an emergent professional in mind-brain health and education that actually approaches all problems from this transdisciplinary vision, and there are new publications that are now coming out in this combined field. These terms now fall under this global umbrella concept of the learning science in which you find mind-brain health and education as subfields of this really wider look at the learning sciences, which include things as diverse as linguistics to computational neuroscience, to data and artificial intelligence. The main added benefit of this vision is that instead of approaching problems through these siloed visions of a molecular vision of how learning occurs or a social interaction vision or versus classroom practices, you're actually trying to approach all of that together. And this leads to a kind of new first steps in the way we want to help teachers develop professionally. First and foremost is to get rid of the neuro-myth. There's a lot of garbage out there that we have to get rid of before teachers can clear the decks for things like principles and tenants. Principles are things that are true for all brains. They pretty much function the same way. There's only six things there. We'll talk about them in just a second. As well as tenants, which are also true. By the way, there's no truths in science. There's just evidence or no evidence. But true for people based on a range of human variants. So while we know that things like sleeping and motivation are important for learning, just how much when, how it's delivered varies by individual as far as maximizing one's potential. We also know that the role of culture and context has a huge impact on student learning outcomes, which all need to be taken into consideration before we can talk about instructional guidelines or best practice. And so we're going to quickly go through those first four steps in order to try to reach these 40 pedagogical practices. So number one is get rid of these neuro-myths. And this is my very serious book about neuro-myths, which believe me is a lot more academic inside than maybe the cover would lead you to believe. This tries to debunk most of the neuro-myths that still plague our literature as teachers. And I invite you all to see the other video on neuro-myths in the series from the LearningSciences.com. There are no such thing as learning styles. People cannot multitask. These and 70 other neuro-myths are debunked in that video and in the book. All of this is, of course, due to far better technology than we've ever had. And so this is allowing us to, rather than just have these drawings or computational models, we're now actually looking at neural networks within the brain and how different hubs and nodes are stimulated further. And then this leads to these hundreds of thousands of neural pathways in the brain that underpin different knowledge skills and attitudes that are stored in the brain. And so this more refined look at healthy brains is helping us dispel these neuro-myths. And one of the things the OECD has tried to do as a union of different national perspectives on this is to try to clarify the role of neurosciences as well as technology within teacher education. And I'd like to invite you to have a look at their publication that makes a strong recommendation that new teacher education has to include these two fields in a stronger way. They were also the ones to suggest in 2002 that there be a division of the way we consider teacher literature. There are some things that are printed that are actually well established, a lot of high quality information, robust evidence. And then there are things that are probably so, which has rather mixed evidence, but it does lean towards indications of things that have human variants. For example, those ideas about sleep and motivation. Then there are things that are intelligence speculation of which there's really, you know, it's a logical presumption, but there's very little evidence and then those outright neuro-myths. And so what we want to focus on in Principles and Tenants is looking at what is well established and those things that are probably so that are true for human variants with a lot of human variants that we can use as platforms upon which to design new teacher interventions in the course room. This is based off of three different studies that we conducted over the past 11 years that increase the number of experts that we had involved from around the globe that participated. So we had experts from 29 different countries participate in the 2019 study, which was published in 2020, and that reviewed not only what the experts thought, but also considered the evidence that they supplied to see the weight of the evidence as supported by their opinions. And this led us to these six basic principles about how humans learn. The first is that the human brains are unique, you know, while there are very typical neural pathways where the way someone might learn to read or write or do language or math, there are no identical neural pathways for that. And that's mainly because the uniqueness of the human brain is really grounded in our own personal and individualized experiences. And since no two individuals have identical experiences, their neural pathways are not identical. However, the networks appear to show patterns of how someone may typically learn how to learn new competencies. The second principle has to do with different potentials. Sadly, people are born on an uneven playing field. We know that genes as well as your environment play a huge role in learning outcomes, but different people are born with different possibilities of potentiating different types of skill sets throughout their lifespan. The third idea is that all new learning passes through the filter of prior experience. We know that your brain is incredibly efficient and doesn't want to try and spend the energy to learn something completely new. It tries to look for what it already knows about something before it goes on and takes on that new learning. And so all new learning passes through this filter of prior experience. We also know that the brain is in constant flux. Its interaction with its environment changes with every single new experience that we have, which then changes potentially what will happen the next time you're exposed to the exact same stimulus. And so we know that some of these changes occur before, during, or after a stimulus. So the majority of these things appear to happen after there's a molecular change. You will see a behavioral change. So as the brain is constantly changing based on its interaction with the environment, we need to take into consideration that as teachers we may have certain teaching interventions and wonder why isn't this sticking. But we have to be patient, realize that each of those slow changes may be creating those neural networks that are necessary for that eventual observable behavior. The fifth point is one that's become common knowledge these days is neuroplasticity. The brain is neuroplastic throughout the lifespan. You learn until you die. So potential for new learning really expands beyond what we thought of this, you know, maybe newborn to 18 years old or 24 years old stage to the extent that some universities such as Harvard have suggested that there should be something called a 60 year curriculum, that we are always going to continue to learn and should learn because the use of those neural networks is really a protective factor for healthy aging. And finally we know that all learning depends on well functioning memory systems and well functioning attention systems. If you're missing memory or missing attention, you don't have learning. And so while this equation is overly simplistic, what's very important to know is that there is no learning that occurs without both memory and attention. And memory is broken down into multiple subsystems as is attention. We know that memory has short working, long term sensory components to it, emotional components to it. And attention also has orienting, sustaining, alerting systems. These subsystems of memory and attention need to be in the forefront of teacher's minds because different types of attention are needed for different types of learning. And when we did this study we were confronted with a lot of comments from the participants that suggested things like, hey, you're missing certain principles, these things are actually fundamental. So there were a lot of comments that said that the emotional state of an individual should be a principle. This is something that's absolutely true, that learning is really social, why isn't that also considered here, that learning is a behavior and as such could be modified, why isn't this included or that adaptation is the natural state of the brain or that the executive functions need to be primed for learning to occur or this relationship between the mind, body, balance. All of these things were very important but we found that given the evidence that was offered they didn't follow the same kinds of consistent neural patterning that the principles did which is why these were all taken into consideration, all of those additions but they were considered tenants. These are things that are true for all human brains but they have a huge range of human variability. So as we said before, motivation and sleep. So let's look at those 21 tenants that should be considered by teachers as very important as far as the teaching and learning dynamic is concerned but that they will vary for individual. Different people will need different things at different times. So in terms of motivation, we know that people can be motivated positively or negatively, intrinsically and extrinsically but what motivates one person may not motivate the next person and it may not motivate them the same way in different contexts or related to different subjects. So while motivation is hugely important in learning it has a huge range of human variability. We also know that emotions are vital. There is no cognition without emotions. This becomes very, very clear. However, the things that trigger those emotions are highly individual. Different people will react to different situations with emotional output that does influence their cognition in different ways and so while emotions are important they are largely unique to the individual. While there are some things that are common among all human beings reactions to very fearful situations for example other things such as what makes someone happy or feel good are very relative to the individual. We can say with a little bit more degree of certainty due to neurochemical measurements stress is very important to look at when we think about student learning outcomes but there's good stress and there's bad stress. Now there's you stress which is positive. You need to be a little bit stressed in order to learn something but a little too much makes you fall into distress but what tips you to that negative is very personalized. Similarly with anxiety which is considered separate from stress it's a different set of neurotransmitters. We know that anxiety prolonged anxiety has a hugely negative impact on student learning outcomes but what makes someone anxious may not make the next person anxious so we have to consider the individual root causes of anxiety in individuals that impacts learning. We also know that depressive states prevent people from learning but what tips someone into depression is very different from what might tip another person into depression this is why it's very individualized and needs to be analyzed on a case-by-case basis. We also know that while it's very clear that challenge and threat influence learning most humans love a great challenge and most humans hate to feel threatened what a person considers challenging and what they consider threatening varies by individual. Facial expressions was one that was debated a long time amongst the panels because it seems that there are very primary facial expressions that are interpreted by all humans in a similar way such as happiness, surprise, contempt, sadness, disgust, anger, fear for example there are other subtle emotions for example, intrigue, curiosity that are very very hard to read on people's faces as they are combination of these different facial expressions we also know from the research that people recognize emotional states and facial expressions on faces that look very much like their own they do not see the subtleties for example of someone of a different gender or a different race as easily as they see people who look exactly like themselves. We also know that tones of voices have a huge impact on student learning outcome and the meaning of precise words can be interpreted very differently depending on the intonation that is used telling a kid you're doing just fine doesn't carry the same weight as giving this encouraging you know softer voice of hey you're doing great you know you're doing fine in my class there's a lot to be said about intonation and it's one of the few things that teachers are not really trained in how to manage their tones of voices with students and again this is interpreted highly individually based on students prior experiences kids who have been yelled at a lot believe it or not become kind of you know immune to the shouting whereas kids who have never been yelled at you know react disproportionately fearful in front of threatening voices we know that reaction to tones of voices is also highly individualized it's very clear that learning is a social endeavor that individuals learn from and with each other and that most individuals would choose to learn with others we also know that this works in the positive as well as the negative and we also know that this is very separate from the content so people can learn the wrong things together as well as they can learn you know correct information together so this differs by individual however in the amount and context in which people enjoy those social interactions so this has a lot to do with how we devise small group learning within our classroom settings for example which we'll talk about in just a second as we mentioned before there's different attention systems but not only that what's key is that we know that it's impossible not to pay attention when you are the focus of attention so practices such as metacognitive and self reflection activities mindfulness meditation these things that help students hone in on their own personal ways of paying attention is also very important but also again very individualized it's also clear that most learning is not a linear process I teach A and the student learns B but we rather we see that there are learning cycles that each individual has that also have this unique and very personalized steps to them that has to do with understanding rethinking relearning unlearning learning again the new concepts that are presented with based on those personalized memories related to that topic at hand it's also very clear that there are conscious and unconscious processes that are involved in learning this does not mean you can learn new things in deep sleep but it does mean that taking the time to do things like going to different levels of consciousness for example mind wandering can be very positive for creative insight for example as is reflection but we know that there's different levels of consciousness that different people will leverage more or less and that we can actually create the circumstances for within our own classrooms to give students the opportunity to have that down time with the information to be able to bounce it around in their own heads and hear their inner voices you know whisper which direction they should take the information it's very important to know that we cannot just bombard people with lots of information presumed that they're going to learn as we know that people need that down time as well we also know that learning is developmental as well as experiential this is that big nature versus nurture question right if I were to ask you what's the most important thing age cognitive stage or prior experience when it comes down to new learning by far it's prior experience and the least important factor there is age you know person's chronological age has far less to do with his potential to learn than the experiences that they've had in life you can see this very clearly with a kid who might have been read to from birth ready to read at three years old where somebody who never had books in their home it's a totally new concept may not learn to read until they're seven, eight or nine so we know that prior experience plays a much bigger role than chronological age but we also know that there's other things involved in this developmental nature versus nurture concept with have to do with genetic factors as well it's also very clear that learning engages the entire physiology it's not just the brain on the shoulders working all by itself but it has to do with its interaction with the world and the environment so that we know that decisions made by the brain that impact the body also have a reciprocal effect the body's use of nutrients and sleep and physical activity for example the impact on the brain's potential to learn and this is seen most clearly in three areas one has to do with sleep and dreaming we know that sleep helps us focus attention and this dreaming state of sleep has a combination of neurochemicals that doesn't exist in any other stage of sleep that permits the consolidation of memories but we know also that the amount of sleep an individual needs varies greatly anywhere from four and a half to 12 hours is normal maybe eight is average but those other things are not abnormal so you cannot dictate how much sleep an individual needs we also see that nutrition has a huge impact on learning and a lot of new research coming out in this gut brain access studies trying to understand how the balance the basic nutritional needs of all humans is very similar but how this balance of nutritional intake varies by individual given your genetic makeup and so we know that that has an impact what you eat has an impact on this gut brain access which sends back a different kind of a chemical balance and changes your potential to learn we also know that physical activity is necessary for good learning it's pretty clear that there is a disproportionate amount of studies that show how sedentary activities like not doing anything are very negative and far less information about exactly what kinds of physical activity are best for the individual and this is primarily to the idea that different people need different types of physical activity to reach their peak performance in terms of intellectual activities 10-8-18 has to do with a very classic concept by Donald Hebb he talked about use it or lose it and this has to do with your brain's ability to make these neural connections throughout the lifespan those are strengthened with use and if they are not used it becomes harder and harder to retrieve the information and so we also know that those neural connections depend on repetitive usage for continued retrieval and application in the future we know that feedback is hugely important to learning but different people like different types of feedback in different contexts in different moments and maybe even different times of day they'll want different types of feedback for the same subject so we know that feedback is much more complicated than we once thought hearing how you're doing and getting motivated to do better the next time are things that are very important within our classroom settings but how and when we deliver feedback is something that is still under new investigation a study that came out in 2021 February from the OACD pointed to the idea that teachers who spent that an additional hour of giving assessment by a teacher had a much greater impact than an additional hour of instructive practice so we know that we've short changed feedback within typical school settings and we have to reintegrate those ideas and give it more prominence, more time for that evaluation and feedback within the classroom setting we also know that authenticity, relevant and meaningful context makes learning easier it's really hard to memorize a mathematical formula with no context but it's much easier to relate it to your own personal life or the measurement of this doorstop or how do we build a bridge that's necessary for your community or the time it might take if the average trash collector takes 10 minutes to run a block and we have 30 blocks how long will that take well if you've walked outside and seen the trash in your street you're more likely to take that mathematical formula use it in a meaningful context and that goes into a different type of a memory track than just simply rote memory that's really beneficial for deeper learning and finally we know that novelty as well as patterns play a huge role in learning outcomes as we said before all new learning passes through the filter of prior experience and so your brain naturally is looking for what it already knows about something and naturally gets peaked in curiosity when it sees something that's a little bit out of the ordinary so this novelty of effect has a benefit for calling our attention to new things but it's not necessarily positive it can learn to leverage nobilities and patterns within their classroom structures to teach in a way that continually has the students engaged based on their prior experiences so in summary the principles have to do with the uniqueness of the human brain the different potentials we have the role of prior experiences in learning the fact that the brain is constantly changing and is neuroplastic throughout the lifespan as well as that memory systems and attention systems are vital for learning and the tenants have to do with this idea of understanding the role of motivation emotions and cognition how stress, anxiety and depression can influence learning outcomes how having more challenge than threat can improve learning outcomes the role of facial expressions as well as tones of voices how the important role of learning as a social construct how and when students choose to pay attention the fact that learning is non-lungier and that it involves conscious as well as unconscious processes and that it's developmental as well as experiential it involves entire physiology including sleep and dreaming nutrition and physical activity and that in order to maintain a fit brain we actually have to use those systems or we will lose access to those neural connections the importance of feedback and learning outcomes as well as teaching within authentic, relevant and meaningful context and finally leveraging an individual's perception of novelty and pattern to teach better we took all of these things we took the neuro myths, got rid of those we took the principles and tenants and then we tried to look at them within various cultural contexts and we looked at these within 21 different cultural contexts in the last study to see if they had an applicability across human-ness, not just within one cultural nether to come up with certain instructional guidelines and these particular goals were matched with the principles and tenants and we found these mantras that came from education that were related to this many of them that we've invented over the years and working with schools around the world in 40 different countries and the core pedagogies that had evidence behind them that were applied and so in the sense we took the conditions or the goals for example mastery learning or having deeper learning or a metacognitive awareness growth mindsets the ability to dare, to err, to learn how to reach optimal performance and the role of relevant curriculum differentiation and student autonomy as well as these ideas of social contagion and learning communities and how we strive to personalize learning and the role of communication we took those conditions and goals we matched them with the principles and tenants we looked at these different mantras that come out of education and we created these 40 different pedagogies that have a lot of support and evidence that are well established within the literature and so now we want to share those 40 different pedagogies with you and we'll do this by reviewing, by looking at these groupings of mastery learning, deeper learning, metacognitive awareness and those related pedagogies so we start with mastery learning many schools and many individual teachers have as a goal mastery not just performance goals on how to pass a standardized state test but what does it really mean to master the material of a course and to reach mastery one way is through universal design for learning we know that some people can do steps and everyone can do ramps so why don't we just build ramps the idea here is to look with that basically that lowest common denominator of entry point and then build from there so that everybody can scaffold up and learn as they need to so they have their own types of entry points to reach the exact same goal differentiated entry points to the material is really clear because we know that different people need different things at different stages of learning processes to reach that exact same objective a concrete tool that you could use is through differentiated homework so the idea of creating bundles with these different entry points so that everybody gets what they need this gets down to a real fundamental mantra in education that treating everyone fairly does not mean treating them equally and we can leverage technology in our favor to actually structure this even better in online context we know that mastery learning also lends itself to the use of long-term e-portfolios electronic or digital portfolios and the use of product process and progress rubrics because learning can and should be measured in terms of these product process and progress measures not just by the end product alone mastery is also really facilitated through formative evaluation so frequent explicit formative evaluation serves both the student and the teacher to really put the finger on the pulse of where that kid is at in relation to those learning objectives and helps do a quick gap analysis of where they need to be in order to achieve the goals of the class one of my favorite ways to get to mastery is by feeding forward this is a term we coined a few months back just loving the idea of instead of lamenting the past the mantra becomes what can I do better the next time and helping kids just have a look towards the future as opposed to just you know anguishing about what didn't work well and this means that teachers have to really reshape the way that they give that feedback primarily through questioning and helping them reach their own level of understanding of what it is that they need to do differently in order to achieve those objectives a second goal we might have in our schools is deeper learning not just the superficial knowledge but going deeper into having long-term changes in the notions we have in our minds and part of this begins with starting with the end in mind and one of the best ways to go about doing this is flipping flip the classroom this permits us to offload this lighter or superficial or Google-able knowledge dates facts formulas to a video content so that when we are together we can go much deeper into exploring those concepts another way to get to deeper learning is to just make time for different levels of consciousness for reflection and to accept that mind wandering is not a waste of time we are bombarded in schools constantly with a lot of information about this idea and the other idea rarely give kids a chance to really breathe or to mentally digest all that information they took in and it's not infrequent that when they finally do have that free time when they're just walking home from school or they're helping cut vegetables or if you're weeding a garden all of a sudden that aha moment comes to you basically because you have a lot of stuff shoved in your head but you're not allowing for those natural connections to occur so giving yourself that space at that level of consciousness is really important and there's some wonderful studies about the default mode mechanisms the mind wandering the brain and their relationship to creative insight deeper learning is also really rooted in this idea that the brain adapts to what it does most one way to reach deeper learning is by leveraging culture by understanding those contexts and by taking advantage of what that kid might have as prior knowledge based on the cultural context in which they live as well as the school context in which that learning is taking place also related to the brain adapting to what it does most is is to have high expectations expect the best from your students and we know from the pigmaline effect from decades ago that holding kids to higher expectations actually leads to better learning outcomes so rather than shooting for the middle or the lowest level of what you think your students can achieve hold them to higher expectations deeper learning is also achieved by understanding how heuristics work in the brain how your brain does have a natural go-to place when it's judging information but if you understand that so that you can expose bias and help kids understand how their preconceived notions of the world might be wrong and that they need to be open to that new learning and finally another powerful way to apply this idea that the brain adapts to what it does most is to use interleaving interleaving is not teaching things in a blocked time frame but rather teaching little bits over time so that you're continually returning and going slightly deeper into the information so rather than a blocked schedule at school for example you might have conceptual knowledge and core notions spread out over time and return to repeatedly throughout the semester deeper learning is also connected to this mantra of success be getting success and we also know unfortunately that failure begets failure a student who naturally presumes that he will eventually figure this out finds much more success than a kid presuming he's going to fail so one of the things that we might be able to do to help kids along that way is to help them see their own little successes day by day and this kind of harkens back to the prior idea of using your portfolios or the product process progress rubric you might not have the product you want but you can actually show them how far they've come along as far as progress so that they can retain the level of motivation needed to then eventually finally achieve the goals of the class we also know that it's always harder to ask a good question than to answer one so deeper learning means using questioning skills within the classroom asking you know how do you learn best asking questions using the acocratic method key concept never tell what you can ask because that journey towards the information on your own consolidates the information in your brain we have a third goal of metacognitive awareness in many schools or in many classrooms thinking skills of our students not just content and area knowledge but how to think better one way to do this is to assume that learning how to learn is a lifelong goal you might try using the metacognitive awareness inventory this is a great way to sort of bring some things very explicitly to the forefront to get a habituated self questioning going on in your head about how to approach problem solving you can also approach metacognitive awareness by training executive functions that include things like inhibitory control we know there's a great mantra in education that self regulation is more important than innate intelligence in predicting learning outcomes according to Moffat's study in 2011 so we know that just deciding to buckle down and focus do the work can have an even greater impact on just simply being born smart so do take advantage to train executive functions others of you may have the goal of developing growth mindsets in kids helping them understand that they are not fixed with the brain that they were born with that there is such a thing as no plasticity and that they can and do learn based on their decision and choices kids who think that if they work hard and were not just born with certain skill sets actually do better than those who think that all intelligence is inherited this gets to the fundamental mantra that attitude is often more important than aptitude we like to think that they should love what you're doing or you learn from it so you might not have been so happy with that terrible test score you got but let's learn from that and let's see how we can improve upon that the next time so if you're lucky you can actually do both you can love and learn from everything that's going on face the world with wonder and awe that's one of those wonderful approaches that is part of a growth mindset not seeing learning as a burden but seeing it as an opportunity to but I get to learning limits are often self-imposed we also know that if a student who says well I'm not going to be good at math because you know my dad wasn't good at math and so I guess that's my fate that really sets you up for failure helping students understand that many of the limits that they've imposed are not supported by the evidence and that if they can get over it then they can actually do better within the classroom setting and learning across the lifespan in general learning objectives how to learn better also contributes to this growth mindset we also know that teaching very explicitly teaching risk and protective factors about brain health letting kids know that they are more than just the sum of their genes and their zip code it's not just what happened to them by having certain parents or where they live but they get a choice they get a chance to decide they have free will they can decide just the genes and the zip code so growth mindset is very heavily connected to helping kids learn how their brains actually learn this is also related to the idea that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts and that we have to be educating the whole child the students in your class are not just brains on bodies they are a whole wealth and history of personal experiences tied up emotions relationships with their world and themselves in context and we have to take that into consideration when we're teaching the child this is why generically saying let's use X textbook to meet the needs of all kids it's kind of wrong because the kids might not see their own reality reflected in some of those examples within the textbook so attending to the kid on all levels physical, social, emotional as we seek to support them in a societal context as they learn another goal many of you might have is to get your kids to dare to err we all know those teachers that a great part of learning is making mistakes but a lot of times kids are very hesitant to make mistakes and so one of the ideas is to create structures which allows them to make mistakes this goes along with a mantra that anyone who can learn from their mistakes should be given the opportunity to do so and one of the great failings we have in our current education system is our evaluation structure the way we choose to measure is woefully deficient a recent OECD studies has pointed out that just adding on a single hour of evaluation on the part of a teacher on assessing the learning on giving feedback on helping the students understand where they made mistakes has a much greater impact than an additional hour of instruction so we know that we have not given the evaluation process enough of our time in educational structures and we really need to think about how we can redesign and maybe leverage technology for example to offload some of those basic TDS tasks like correcting an exam so that we can have more time to talk to get about why they made those mistakes and so let the machines do what the machines do best let humans do what humans do best but this also means making more time for those do-overs and second and third opportunities within our classrooms one way to encourage daring to err and to make mistakes accepting that mistakes are a natural part of learning is to use frequent low stakes testing we know that this enhances memory systems if you give students the opportunity to retake the test over and over and over again because after all the only thing that a multiple choice test can measure is knowledge dates, facts, formulas, definitions conceptual understanding if the objective is that they understand that basic knowledge so that we can then come to the class to use it then having frequent low stakes testing makes a lot of sense a test score should not be the end game but it could very well be a path to helping students strengthen their conceptual understanding of certain core knowledge others of you might have the goal of optimal performance how do I get every kid in my class to maximize their own potential and a huge part of this has to do with understanding that sweet spot that Goldilocks space on the curve of learning of the stress and the optimal performance that students are able to achieve and a lot of this has to do with getting kids to know themselves what is it that they need to learn best and helping them just take the time to reflect what are the things that really stress them out what are the things that are protective factors in their own learning moments and so helping them identify their own best learning is a key part of our job as educators another thing we have to remember is that learning classroom dynamics it's a moving target right so we have to learn to adjust on the fly many teachers get frustrated because they plan a specific lesson and then something happens and it derails your own whole plan but that's what classroom teaching is like you know you'll never know exactly what's going to happen or who's going to say what that will change the focus of the conversation and that's okay we have to learn to be flexible based on what those current student needs are you might have the perfect lesson planned some kid comes in you know from recess crying or somebody shows up to your zoom room in distress and you have to attend to that you have to attend to that social emotional need first before you can get them to a place where they can actually think about the information and so we have to adjust and constantly so and we have to use world events and the daily news to integrate and to create those kinds of authentic lessons that students can use as jumping off points for their own classroom learning so marrying what happens in the outside real world and the students lives with our own classroom context is part and parcel of our jobs several of you might be questioning especially in this time of the pandemic what is relevant curriculum as mentioned before we've been pretty deficient on evaluating what we think kids know we spend a lot of time on language and math but now we're realizing that's only part of the whole picture of what it is we need to learn and know understanding how to decide what it is we teach and why we do that what do we value is really important and so once we've decided yes we do want them to have some things about language yes we do want them to have some things about art or science or civics well we have to also understand that there's a natural hierarchy and a learning trajectory for each subject many of you are familiar with constructivism this idea is neuro constructivism the idea of building these core and basic notions about information upon which you can build higher or deeper order concepts and that is something that many of us have taken for granted comes in the order of a textbook it's just not true anymore so we now have to go back and really think through what it is we choose to teach and then also making sure that what we do choose to teach is taught with that logical hierarchical order that respects the way the brain is constructing those neural networks relevant curriculum is also based on a really fantastic phenomena that occurs in your brain with neuroplasticity and that's the more you know the more you can know so once you've created these synapses these neural connections in the brain they have these little dendrites that stick out and that has a potential to connect to new things so we know the more you know the more you potentially can know so if we can habituate a more trans disciplinary approach to learning and thinking this would be fantastic learn a lot about a lot of different things so that kids can actually connect those ideas and see patterns in their world and understand the symbolic relationships that are occurring between things and how the world can be categorized in distinct ways rather than siloing things off into the language unit the math unit, the science unit which we know is not necessarily reflective of the real world some of you may have the goal of better differentiation in your classrooms and also giving students more autonomy in their work if there's one thing we've really learned throughout this pandemic is that there are many paths to roam once teachers settle on their greater objectives social emotional learning the things of attitudinal changes that they're seeking in their students the value systems that they want to reinforce as well as the content area knowledge once they've done that they can point out the objective they can tell the kids well guys by the end of this year I need you all to be able to analyze you know multiple genres of literature how are we going to get there how do you want to do this I have thought about doing it in this way what are other ways that we might get to that information and you will be very surprised one thing that we found as we went through the pandemic is that the teachers who are willing to sort of let go in that way they take the time to identify the objectives but then they let go and say students help me out here were overwhelmed with the wonderful creative and intelligent responses of their students let students drive the curriculum if you know your objectives there are many ways to get there and you do not necessarily have to follow what the textbook says to do that you can figure out how to teach chemistry or literature or geometry or primary colors in multiple ways by pointing out your objectives to the students and then allowing them to backwards engineer that towards what should we do in class to get there one of my favorite mantras in education is that the person who does the work is the person who does the learning we know that any teacher who is working harder than their student is not letting the students do the learning if you are killing yourself writing that test you are getting really smart but would it be better if you just had students write the test tell them 10 question test that is going to come up on Friday everybody submit 3 questions if I use your question on the test you get an extra point the person who does the work is the person who does the learning the teacher should not kill themselves making the test of the crossword puzzles or whatever it is because the actual learning, the opportunity to learn comes with the developing of those questions as we saw before it is harder to come up with a good question than it is just to answer it many of you also have a goal of creating good social communities in which to learn and social contagion is a big part of this we know that people can and do affect each other's emotional states and since there is no cognition without emotion this is huge as far as learning is concerned so prioritizing small group work whether online or face to face is very very important because it allows for each individual to listen in here to a smaller number of big ideas and then to shape their own understanding of the world based on what they're hearing from their peers we can also help kids learn to do this by teaching how to address and recognize emotional cues through facial expression there is no cognition without emotion and most emotion is transferred either through facial expressions or through tone of voice and reviewing this both for ourselves as teachers as well as for the students allows students to be better at picking up those social cues from their peers so learning this as teachers and how this affects students but also helping students understand how to read these social cues from their peers is also really important a very big lesson that we have learned through the pandemic is that launching straight back into the textbook or trying to cover the material really wasn't going to do it and one thing that was very very apparent is that we need to prioritize social emotional learning over that content memorization at the end of the year well guess what they won't get there if they are socially vulnerable we have to attend to those social emotional needs before trying to launch into cognition so helping teachers understand the messages being conveyed by students tone of voice is also very important and helping students understand each other as peers using these cues is also very important asking the kid you know well how is everything going he goes well I'm fine not the same as saying everything is going great I'm fine understanding how tone of voice is a reflection of emotional states is very important for us to know in these social context of schooling as well as in life in general so many of us are out to build strong learning communities it's clear it takes a village to raise a child so we need to have input from multiple actors one thing we can help kids understand is that we know ourselves better if one of our goals is to know thyself understand your needs as a learner one of the ways you do that is by knowing more people the more people you know the better you can self define if we leverage this theory of mind how do I know myself I know myself because I'm constantly comparing myself with other people you can leverage that and teach kids explicitly how they are coming to know themselves as compared with other people in their communities that gives them ways to incorporate maybe some positive traits that others may have that they would like to have in themselves I also love the mantra of one plus one is three right you have a good idea I have a good idea but the minute we talk about it we're going to have something superior to what either you or I would have come up by ourselves so we know that collaboration yields more than just individual efforts alone in you know 99 out of 100 cases so learning to collaborate learners is key in helping our students understand how they benefit from working with each other for example mixed ability groups putting a strong kid with a weaker kid both of them are going to learn in that process but the person who actually learns more is the person who already knew because they're having to re-explain and teach another right and so as teaching is one of the best ways to learn we know that these collaborative activities actually have benefits for all learners and so helping students understand why going it alone is not necessarily and usually not the best path is really important within our classrooms but to facilitate this in kids we as teachers also have to buy into this idea some of the most successful education systems work in a way in which they do much more collaboration than we typically do in the west or in the United States in the United States you know my classroom is my kingdom I shut the door I'm on my own whereas in other cultures it's a much more collaborative effort people are invited to come into the classroom help be my critical friend and let me know how I can continue to improve so being a model of collaboration is also one of the best ways to help our students embrace those characteristics as well we also know that we build community through sharing helping other people know us telling personal anecdotes about ourselves and how that might relate to the new information and as people share their experience with the information or as they share their reaction to certain prompts or ideas or frustrations or to how things happen at home it really can open their own eyes to understanding how perspective taking is a very valuable part of building that community when we can appreciate the different ways to approach problems or the different factors that are influencing problem solving skills and different settings it helps us as a class to build that community strong learning communities are also built through a pedagogy of basically just cold calling we know that there's a real big problem in asking a question and waiting for a handful of kids to raise their hand at the front of the room to answer it typically it's the same kids over and over again right in order to be more democratic in the way we approach learning we have to find a way to call on everybody and what's fascinating and that we've come to learn is that there is a real dis inhibition effect and a protection of this anonymity that students might feel for example in online settings or in classroom activities that are designed to request information from the whole group and everybody gives input and then there's a way to debate and discuss those things so having that certain level of anonymity in being in an online setting even if you're looking at the kid face to face they sense protection because they are distant they're not sitting right next to somebody else so there's some benefit of doing this in an online setting and it might be counterintuitive to think this but people actually share more in an online setting than they might share in a face to face setting personalization is a really big goal of many teachers and it's actually shown to be one of the strongest factors the student-teacher relationship is one of the strongest factors in influencing student learning outcomes we know that a person's self-perception as a learner I can do this is shaped heavily by teachers and those self-perceptions do influence learning outcomes I didn't think I could do it but they think I can do it so I guess I can do it is kind of the thought process there so this collective teacher self-efficacy the way that teachers show their belief in the students ability to learn is really important and a lot of that is transmitted simply by showing you care hey you're a little off today in class is there anything you want to talk about or I know that this is something you're able to do but today you weren't really on your game can you let me know if you want to talk about something just showing you care and that you are willing to invest in the student plays a huge role in that student then beginning to believe in themselves as well if the teacher is going to believe in me maybe I'll believe in me many times there are teachers who may treat their classroom experience as a transaction whereas we know that true learning is really embedded in that personalization and the student-teacher relationships this gets to the idea and the mantra that you can't teach them if you don't know them right and the pedagogy of listening that's really important this was first espoused by this big idea that students often times know what they need they just don't know how to get it and one of the things that we can do for them as opposed to just playing with content is actually taking the time to listen to what they are saying, what they need and to a certain extent this is kind of also this student driven curriculum you're allowing them to tell you well I get frustrated because people always tell me I just need to get a little more organized but I don't know how or I'm told you need to shore up your basic skills but I don't know how so taking the time to listen to their own and to the students of where they're at and what they need is a huge part of being a great teacher finally the last category of goals that we have has to do with communication and many of you already know that without clear line of communication education doesn't really work so how does that work on a personal level as well as at an institutional level one thing to think about at a very individual level is that people have a lot of questions and in classrooms we tend to bombard information with a lot with not as much downtime as we need to what's really important to understand at least from a neuroscientific perspective is that the brain can't let it go if it has a question about something and you said wait wait have questions at the end that's really kind of crazy because your brain can't do that really this means that communication immediacy really smooths the flow of learning processes in online context some people invite people to put questions in the chat or raise their hand immediately but it's really clear that having that immediacy getting your question answered permits the brain then to now refocus on the next idea and to move forward so finding mechanisms for communication immediacy is really important in great classroom settings we also know that it takes a lot of energy to learn and we know that that energy goes into paying attention and into memory systems one way that you can enhance good communication is by being predictable communication regularity lowers anxiety and it also lowers cognitive load so the energy that would normally be spent like trying to figure out where do I do this where's the information how do I upload something can then now be spent just learning so having that intuitive instructional design within an online platform for example or a routine within a general classroom setting goes a long way into channeling the use of energy for attention and memory to the right places for good long-term learning so in this video we had a very quick review of looking over teachers new pedagogical knowledge that includes information from the learning sciences as well as technology we began by trying to remind people to not fall into the belief of neuro myths negative untruths about the brain and learning but rather use the good information that comes from principles and tenants and use that as a platform upon which to talk about what teachers really do best those pedagogical interventions that actually have evidence behind that show learning results and now to close I just like to invite you to take some time to reflect do a three two one reflection where the three things we said that you didn't know before are there two things that you think are really interesting you want to keep researching them you're curious about them now and there's a one thing you might consider changing about your personal professional practice based on that information by doing that we will have a much better jumping off point when we get together to sort of go deeper into the information and in the event that you're feeling brave and interested please send the questions on and I promise to address them when we are together face to face in our synchronous encounters thank you and take care