 Good morning. How are you guys doing? Everybody got their coffee in hand. Ready to go? Yes. Okay. Today we're going to be looking at the general idea of the science and the art of teaching. But I'd like you to turn this around and think more about the art in the science of teaching. A lot of you already are very wonderful artists in this craft of ours and the science of education. But what we want to try to do today is link that into the science. Where is the neuroscience perhaps behind some of this information? Before I start, I want to extend an invitation. I'd like you to write down my email address and this website in case you want the slides. You can take all the pictures you want, but if you want slides, go ahead and just write me. And also for follow-up. Hopefully this is a partnership. This is an alliance. We're all trying to do the same thing, reach this high quality education. And sometimes along the way we have questions about different parts of our jobs or the way that we can apply certain types of methodologies. What I'd like to do is extend the invitation that if you are willing to take the time to write and explain things to me, I always write back. And if I don't have the answer, I won't lie to you. I'll tell you. Here's some information. Can I point you in the right direction? So hopefully you'll take me up on that invitation. But I also want to use this as a teaching moment. Can anybody know why I'm asking you to write something right now? Why do human beings write? I'm going to give you a really big hint. A nice idea to start the morning off. There is no learning if you don't have well-functioning memory systems and well-functioning attention systems. Those are two vital pillars to all of learning. So now if I ask you, why are you writing? Why did I ask you to write something? Hopefully it gets you to pay attention, but mostly it's going to extend your memory. Our memories are very fragile. And so if you write nothing down, you probably don't pass it into long-term memory. Therefore you're probably really not going to learn very much from the experiences you have. So please do write this down. I hope that that's something that's now intuitive to you. And I'm also going to ask you to keep those pencils out or those tablets out because at the very end I'm going to ask you to do a bit of a reflection. In order to sort of see, did this make a difference? I want to challenge you to see or think about, is there anything I'm going to say to you that would be new? Something you haven't heard before? Perhaps three things that you didn't know before? And then also two things that you're curious about now that you want to know even further, you want to know a lot more about this. And that's what I hope you'll write me the email on, right? But perhaps the most important thing is are you willing to do something differently based on the information that we talk about today? Would you actually change your practice as a teacher to do something slightly different based on the information we share? So it's sort of a heads up. I'm going to be asking you this at the very end so hopefully you'll be able to write these things down. In the course that I teach at Harvard University Extension School, it's called the Neuroscience of Learning. It's an introduction to mind, brain, health, and education. We do three, two, ones after every single encounter. And it's a really powerful thing because at the very end of the semester we pull all of these things together and share them. And people realize, wow, I did learn a lot. And yes, I am so curious now about these aspects about the brain and learning. And these are things, these are promises to myself about how I'm going to better my practice. So I just want you to know this is one of those very powerful tools. I hope you guys can also incorporate that into your own courses as well. So I'm going to start by saying thank you so much for the opportunity to come back to Oahu. Some of you might have known. My dad grew up in IAEA. And so basically we came back here every single summer ever since I was really little. And so I thought I would be nostalgic and take the opportunity to show you a couple of pictures. It's also the chance for me to also sort of publicly call out my cousin. And it's publicly embarrassed here. And also my auntie, public school teachers here on Oahu who are really exceptional. But the other thing I want to do with this picture is tell you a little bit about my dad who is probably one of the best teachers I have ever known. I get the chance to actually observe literally thousands of teachers around the world. So I wanted to tell you a little bit about him because it's going to help us illustrate what we really mean about the art in the science of teaching. Before we start into my dad, the first thing we're going to talk about is values that have sort of transcended going into the science, understanding neuroscience. What's going on in the brain really and how it learns. But what does this do about the things we already value in great teachers? The second thing I'd like to do is to share six principles, just six small things that a large group of neuroscientists have agreed this is good information for teachers. Because unfortunately in general settings and through popular press books and sometimes in professional development teachers receive a lot of information about the brain that doesn't have evidence behind it. And there's actually a group of people 41 different experts from 11 different countries in reflecting upon this they actually could only agree on six things that we should tell teachers and that's what I want to share with you today. And then additionally I want to leave you with four ideas hopefully big ideas that might be a little bit more transformative and to think about how you might incorporate that into your own life. We talk about my dad. My dad was a teacher for years but he began not as a teacher. He actually left. He was given a scholarship to study nuclear physics from ROTC scholarship in UC Berkeley. What he didn't realize is that when you get to Berkeley nuclear physics in the 60s was not like the thing to do. So there was a bit of protest and things like that and about in the second year of college, you know, love child we were born, my sisters and I and he shifted gears drastically. He had a real change of consciousness. He started to think what does it really mean to serve your country, to be part of the greater fabric of society, to contribute, to give. So a lot of his friends were off to Peace Corps and stuff like that but he said, no, I'm gonna do something bigger and bolder. I'm gonna be a public school teacher. And not only that, he decided that he was not only gonna be a public school teacher, he was gonna teach math in public schools and not only was he gonna teach math in public schools, he was gonna go to some kind of crummy neighborhoods where kids had a lot of trouble. Broken homes, drugs, gangs, things like that. So he's gonna be a public school teacher teaching math in a bad neighborhood. But to top it all off, to make sure he set himself the biggest challenge possible, he decided to do this in middle school. So he took on this very big challenge and I watched him develop. I mean it was a beautiful thing. He actually developed beautifully as a teacher and I can say that because literally we were born when he was 19, right? So I watched him grow into his career and to see how he really developed in that. And some of the highlights that I'd like to point out because when he finished being a teacher I kept thinking, what made him so great? What was it that got kids to stop on the street when they were adults to say, hey, Mr. Tocque, Mr. Tocque, good to see you again. Yeah, that's what they called him. I know, 60s, anyways. So they would come up to him, they would send him wedding invitations and they would say things like, you changed my life. And I thought, that is the greatest profession on earth. You get to actually change people's lives. So if I were to sort of list out some of the things that he did that were really important, I'd have to say I'll give you a handful of them, right? And you guys tell me if you agree, this still makes a great teacher. He really believed that his students could learn. He believed in them. He also had a personal connection with them. He never stopped knowing everybody's name and talking to them very directly. He also let everyone in that whole classroom feel like they mattered. This group matters. It's not just the individuals. It's the collection, right? He also understood their backgrounds and their histories. He knew that they didn't come from some easy households and he took the time to understand where they were coming from. Some of them were immigrant families. At that time it was mainly Vietnamese immigrants that were coming into the country, but they were coming into Mexican American neighborhoods and so there were all these clashes with the gangs and stuff like that. He also knew that different people were bringing different gifts into that classroom. In addition to that, he also knew he came to know. He didn't know this immediately, but he realized that they could not learn if they were highly emotionally stretched, if they felt anxious or depressed about anything. He knew that these strings, or these really extremes of emotional feelings wouldn't allow them to learn. But he also knew some other things, that the kids who had to work two or three jobs after school to help their families, when they hadn't slept or eaten very well, they also couldn't learn, right? He has a spinger in the pulse there. He also knew that different kids needed different interventions at different times or stages of their growth, which means he didn't just say, oh, we're all going to do problem-based learning or we're all going to do this kind of motivational activity. He realized different kids reacted to different things at different stages of their own development. But probably the biggest thing is that he knew that he had this power in the classroom. He could get these kids come in and all spaced out and all over the place, but he had this way of capturing them and getting them to focus, right? So if I look at all of these characteristics, I thought, this is really fascinating because when I began to look into more about what is going on in the brain, it all sort of fit really cleanly. So one of the things I want to share with you is if we talk about the art in the science of learning, the title is the science and the art, but I want to look at from the artistic part going to the science, is there a connection here? So when I say he really believed in his students, well, today you might hear a bandit about this idea of a growth mindset. He believed that they would be able, that learning was fluid, that they were going to be able to learn. And when we talk about this now in terms of the brain, we talk about neuroplasticity. Your brain can and does learn throughout the lifespan. So he basically intuitively knew something that we now are calling one thing, but we can actually prove and have evidence at another plane about looking at the brain. When I say that he also had this personal connection with the students. Many of you have heard in some of the presentations about Hattie's work and the effect size. Well, one of these stronger effect sizes is basically student-teacher relationships, right? But this is actually manifested as understanding that learning is completely social as well as cognitive. You just don't have those things isolated from one another. When I say that this fellow transmitted to everybody in the room, you matter. You are an important part of this learning community. He was being very inclusive for the kids that had all kinds of different difficulties, he was being very inclusive in what he did. He was also, I told you as a math teacher, this is the best formula he ever taught. One plus one is three. You have a good idea. And I have a good idea. But the minute we exchange those ideas, we're going to have something even more powerful than any one of us could have come up with by ourselves. And he let the group know that. And he also took advantage of what we now call theory of mind. The way people begin to know who they are is by knowing the other. The more I know you, the better I understand myself. So these things are maybe common terms you've heard of now, but this is actually manifested in this general concept of understanding that all brains are unique, but in addition to that, a great appreciation for human variance. Different people are going to be bringing different things to the table, and that's really important because each of those different kinds of pieces is going to help us create that bigger vision of what it is in our learning dynamics of the classroom. When we talk about the idea that he valued the histories and the background of those kids, he didn't lament that they're not all the same. This kid is coming from this background, this other background. Some other kids, this kid has lost two years of school already. This other one still doesn't speak enough English to be in his class, but he's got to now learn higher math or whatever it is. He understood their backgrounds, and this is when we talk about understanding the kids well enough to be able to teach an authentic learning context. He was able to create math problems that fit their reality. That's authentic learning. But this also means from a neuroscientific perspective that we understand and appreciate that all new learning passes through a filter of prior experience. There's nothing that you will learn that's new, that your brain doesn't first say, oh, it's a lot of energy to learn. Let me first figure out, do I already know something about this? And all of you who are grade teachers, you all really realize that if a person doesn't is learning something totally new, the best way, if they can't really grasp or relate it to something that's prior experience, you use an analogy. An analogy, something that's an analogous situation, something that parallels the new concept, that's the number one best way of helping a brain learn that doesn't have any idea about what you're talking about, especially related to math. So he understood that. He also understood that different kids needed different things. This is now called differentiation in our schools, right? But this also goes to this idea of grit, of helping kids understand and realize it's not just your starting point. Man, stick with it, perseverance. You're going to be able to get to it. It's just that right now it's easy for this guy because he's had a lot of prior experience with this, but you're going to be able to do this. Hang in there, right? So this is understanding that different types, different people have different types of potentials because of what you're born with. But how many of you have heard of this concept of nature versus nurture? Nature versus nurture? We don't say that anymore. We now say that you are who you are because of the genes you inherited. That's nature, right? You have this genetic potential, right? But only a fraction of that is actually potentiated by your environment, okay? So you are nature via nurture. But here's a very big finding that's coming out of resiliency studies. There are some kids who are born with, like, not too great genetic makeup and also in a really bad zip code. And they still make it. So in resiliency studies, the big idea was to try to figure out what is playing there? It's not nature. It's not nurture. What's going on? So now we say nature via nurture plus free will. You get to choose what's going to happen. You get to maximize your own potential. And this is one of these very big, powerful things that maybe back in the 60s wasn't naturally intuitive, but I think it's something that my dad really had his finger on. In addition to that, he knew that students could not learn if they had these really extreme emotional states, if they were sad, if they were angry, if they were depressed, if they were anxious, or if they felt bullied and intimidated. If we understand that, we also understand that there's a very big connection between the mind-body connection, right? You guys know the difference between emotions and feelings? And an emotion is something you can't really control. It's of the body. It's a hormone, a neurotransmitter, a chemical that will release, that will make your body have that tight knot in your stomach or your fist feels like punching somebody out or whatever. Whereas the feeling is of the mind. You get to choose how you react to the emotional state, right? So understanding this balance between mind and body was important, but he also had his finger on the button there of understanding social-emotional learning. And this gets to a very big point that we now understand in neuroscience is that cognition and emotion are inextricably linked. There is no learning without emotion. So if we know all of these things now, now that we can actually measure that and show that. But the very powerful thing is if you can help teachers understand what is that exact kind of trigger that makes that kid feel that, or have that emotion, how can you now help him feel in a different way? And he also knew that he could not, the kids could not concentrate if they were distracted with something, or and or if they had not slept or eaten well. So also of the mind and of the body. And this leads to a very interesting idea which I hope is filtered to your schools. We think we have an epidemic of ADHD in our society. What I think is we have a real big problem with sleep hygiene. When you look at a kid and you diagnose and you say, what are the symptoms of ADHD? And then you look at the symptoms of not sleeping enough? Identical. So we quickly diagnose and say this kid has an attention problem. Well, he can't pay attention because he hasn't slept well, right? So this gets us to sort of rethink the way we diagnose things. And the big idea is to begin with the physical. Has the kid eaten well? Has he slept well? Number one. Then from there, if you could say, yeah, he has. Okay, now let's go to the psychological. Are his parents fighting incessantly at home and he's totally distracted because they're about to get divorced? Is it psychological? Then if none of that's in play, then think about the neurophysiological. Could it be as a chemical imbalance that's actually causing him to have some kind of an attention problem? But you don't start with drugging that kid. You start off scaling it up. This is a different way to think about how we diagnose things. And this is because my dad really understood something that I tried to express to you about writing, that there is no learning without attention and memory. And attention and memory systems are extremely fragile and they're impacted by a lot of things in the environment. How well we sleep, how well we eat, our emotional states, all of that influences whether or not we're able to learn or not, okay? He also knew that they had to be totally focused to learn. Learning math problems, especially out of context, how does the quadratic formula fit into my life in the barrio was really hard for a lot of kids, right? So he understood very clearly about concepts of mindfulness, of being centered and focused and being able to use attention systems to their best. But this also is now being measured through something called the default mode network or the default mode mechanism. We can actually see in the brain what happens when it's slightly quieted and it's focused. So we can now measure some of the things that were intuitively part of the way people teach. And he also knew that different tools were helping different kids at different moments was what we talked about as far as differentiation is concerned. But he also understood the cycle. Learning is not A to B, and it happens really quickly, okay? It's almost like taking a step up a spiraling staircase where you do two steps forward and one step back and two steps forward and one step back because there's something happening in your brain. It's called synaptic pruning where you're actually refining neural pathways as you go forward with the information. So this means that appreciating the general cycle of learning. It's not just that a kid, oh, but he knew how to do this yesterday. What's wrong with him today? The truth of the matter that's totally normal. A consolidation of the information as you go along, reconfirm it, use it in a new context, solidify it, prune it. Now I have this refined neural pathway. It makes it quicker to be able to react, right? So we know that there are constant changes in the brain. How many of you have ever taught a little kid how to read or an adult? Have you ever taught anybody to read? A room full of 2,000 educators and nobody has taught anybody to read? That's what's going on in Hawaii? Oh, no, okay. Okay, we got a couple of you there. You weren't the parent? Yeah, okay, so have you ever noticed that you teach somebody to read, right? You teach them symbol to sound. You sound out words. You animate stories. You put your fingers on the words. You do all this days and weeks and months and one moment, he reads. Did he learn to read in that second? No, there are at least 16 different neural pathways that need to be primed before that kid can actually read. And when they are all ready, then he can read. So one of the bigger ideas that we have here is that appreciating this learning cycle and also understanding there are constant changes in your brain, but most of them are invisible as far as behavior is concerned. So some of us get totally frustrated, right? It's like, oh, I tried this. I tried that. I tried the other thing. This kid's really dense. He doesn't get anything, right? You think, oh, what is wrong with him? The truth of the matter is you are making headway. You are slowly but surely creating what's necessary to have all of those neural circuits ready so that somebody is able to then execute a behavior or an activity or understand how to add or read or whatever it is. But it's very complicated. It's not just like I do one thing, it results in something else. I have to reinforce, reinforce multiple pathways before that kid will learn to read. So this is understanding and appreciation that there are constant changes and to understand that cycles are not A to B. They are very much sometimes going backwards and that's totally normal, right? I guess the big and final point is that he knew he could change the mood. He knew that he could have kids that came in sad or angry or ready to beat each other up and then he could have them in the same room and he could make them work together. He knew, I'm going to ask you guys a quick question, do you think that you smile because you're happy or are you happy because you smile? Yes. Both things. So interesting. We know that even like blind babies will smile so it's an innate thing. When you feel a pleasure, you'll smile. But your brain is now so connected to the idea when this combination of muscles is happening, that means I'm happy. So basically you can make yourself a little bit happier by smiling. But the other thing we know is that when I smile at you, the likelihood is you're going to smile back and when I see you smiling at me, that makes me even happier, right? So he knew this without anybody telling him the neuroscience. He knew that his mood was contagious. And this gets to the point in, as far as the brain is concerned, it's called contagion or incognition. First you have to know what's going on in your brain, what's going on as far as the atmosphere and then you have to be able to manage it. Am I aware of these social interactions and what it is that is happening here? And then can I actually manage that? Can I change that? And that's really at the heart of all of emotional intelligence or social emotional learning is actually understanding what is the social dynamic that we have? How is it that we interact with each other and the dynamics of the classroom? So standing back from that, basically it's sort of like maybe an over-analysis of what I think was great teaching. My dad was a great teacher. You can leave it at that. But I believe that teaching is teach a bull. And so having people understand what leads to what is actually happening in your brain is a very powerful tool for teachers to have. Okay? So why should we over-analyze this? I want to ask you, how do you start questions? What are the words you can use to start a question? How, why, who, what, when? So if all of these are the types of words we use to start questions. I think Sugata said this yesterday. There's some level of questions that if Google or Siri or Alexa can answer it, it's kind of low-level information. It can be found somewhere, right? The joy of learning really comes in being able to tackle these more complex questions, things that are more critical and creative. And so actually getting to the theory of why, if we can ask why and how things work, how is my brain really doing that? I was just at the Punahou Schools and coming to the schools and loving when you have interactions with kids, they ask the best questions. They've asked questions. And usually it is. I want to know just how sometimes the memory gets in there and sometimes it doesn't. Brilliant. How does my brain make a memory? Brilliant question. Because they figure if, now I know how to do that, what would I do better the next time? How will I approach that learning a different way? So, when we talk about the past, maybe 50 years ago we really were acknowledging this is great teaching, what we do and what we call it. That's important and that's telling us basically what works, right? So if I say that my dad believed in his students and we now call that understanding and fostering both mindsets, that's very good. And a lot of you are going to be happy to stop there. But I'm going to extend this invitation to some of you who are willing to sort of go beyond just tell me what to do next in the classroom. Tell me an activity. And those of you who want to go to the why questions. If you know how your brain works, then you understand why it works. And once you know why it works, it empowers you to now make better choices about the activities and the interactions you have in classrooms, okay? So this is kind of the push to get you to why ask why. This is a very philosophical debate. We have all these articles from the 80s, talking about the heuristics of attributional research. My own personal theory is much more aligned to Elmo. You ask why because that is what the brain does. It's insatiable. It's always a three-year-old mentality. But why, but why, but why? That's brilliant. And if we can sort of recapture that in our own formation as teachers, that's really the essence of why we all became teachers, I think, at least for me. I became a teacher because it's the closest thing to being an eternal student. It's so cool to learn new stuff, right? So hopefully we can recapture that and I can convince some of you guys to tip in this direction. So in summary, then I'd say basically, the essence of great teaching has not changed that much. I think that my dad would still be a great teacher right now if he was still teaching because the things that he did, that artistry, I think are still valued. What has changed is our better understanding of what influences student-learning outcomes. So we now have more longitudinal studies. For example, education is only about 150 years old, but now we can actually compare whole cohorts of kids who grew up and some who did something and some who didn't do another. For example, those who did Brain Gym and those who didn't. We follow them for 14 years and we realize there's absolutely zero difference in their abilities after they've gone through that program. So this informs decisions about what we choose to do and how we spend our time in our classrooms. We also now have internationally comparative scales. This means that we can look at and understand what is true about all human brains and then what things are changed due to cultural influences, especially things like artifacts like writing. For example, how many of you know what that says? Ni ju ichi, right? That's 21. In Japanese, very interesting. If you write in Japanese, you have two, ten, one. Totally logical, right? Very interesting. It's kind of like the way we used to write Roman numerals, right? You have the two tens and then you have the one. But these days when we use the Arabic numerals, sometimes this doesn't make the same logical sense and actually it's a distinct neural pathway in your brain that is hanging on to that piece of information. Which is very interesting because stylistically it's changed. But did you know that original Arabic numbers actually were totally logical? You just had to count the number of angles. Do you see two angles? Two has two angles and one has one angle. So think about three, same thing. So the numbers used to be more logical than they are now. But this changes the way that you have neural pathways in your brain for sort of storing things like numbers and letters, okay? And we also have information that is methodologically comparative. We can now compare skills before we used to think, oh, that's qualitative research, that's quantitative, or that has to do with developmental trajectories of a kid or that's a classroom intervention. But now thanks to this wonderful work of John Hetty, you're able to actually compare very different things and look at their effect sizes. What is really worth doing in classroom settings? So the idea would be to understand the things that do harm, try to stay away from the things that are just developmental. If you just sit there you're going to learn something because you're going to mature and your brain cannot not learn. Your brain is going to take in something even if you do anything else. We're having just, you know, an average teacher are really having exceptional teachers. We can now look at this and make decisions about the types of things we incorporate into our classroom activities. So this means that I'd like to propose to you now a change in education that incorporates mind, brain, and education science. And I say that we need to do this now because we've been trying for about 150 years to figure this out and we haven't quite mastered it. Is there anybody here who is really sure that they maximize the potential of every single kid in their classroom every year? We haven't really mastered this craft yet, right? And so my suggestion is that we actually have to embrace a slightly more complex way and a more comprehensive way of understanding the brain and how it learns and that is offered by mind, brain, and education science. The brain is the most complex organism in the universe and it's your organ of work. We have to know a little bit more about it. Answers to education cannot be simplistic, which is why I wrote a book. It's on neuro myths, it's really a fun book. It actually talks about, you know, well why do we think people use 10% of their brain or why would you think that there are different types of abilities in the right and left hemisphere and why would you think that boys and girls are different? Well it has a good history. We understand why we used to think like that but now we have some new information. Now how should we think about that? So this tells us that we have to learn a little bit more about the brain as teachers and teacher education so that's sort of my pitch to you is that we've evolved a bit in understanding and it will make us better practitioners. So silently read this, soak it up, take a bunch of pictures, make it your screensaver. Leslie Hart recommended in the early 80s that if you are going to pretend to design an educational experience, help another learn. This is almost like saying, go ahead, can you please sew me a glove and if you don't understand how hands are made or structured, it'd be impossible to make that glove. He suggested back then that teachers who pretend to design educational experiences without a better understanding of the brain are going to be handicapped. You might sort of by descriptive idea get some kind of an idea, make some kind of a glove or you might create some kind of a lesson that hits some kids sometimes but you're not going to be able to maximize the potential of all those kids in your room without a better understanding of the brain. So bottom line unfortunately after looking at worldwide studies from 2009 all the way until the present around the world, unfortunately most teachers do not know a whole lot about the brain. In fact most teachers have never had an official course for example about the brain and learning and that's very unfortunate because most of them would actually say they want to have a course on this. So back in 2017 the OECD countries I was lucky enough to be on this panel there was making recommendations to all these governments including the United States that said teacher education has to include more information about how the brain works and that's sort of the change that's happening right now. So if we look at this from a other perspective people usually buy into this. Most teachers if you ask them and this is a recent survey that was done about there was 10,000 teachers it was done online and they asked do you want to know more about the brain? And most teachers say oh yeah I do, I do. But they don't know what to believe and they don't know what should be taught. So we decide okay yes teachers should know more about the brain but what should they actually learn? What is the information that would be good to start to share with them? And by the way just parenthetically if you see things that are brain based learning and all the rest of it and it sounds a little bit too easy there's a really high probability it is not founded in evidence nor will it work unfortunately. So I'll talk a little bit more about the study that we did but if we created what was called the Delphi panel which is a panel of experts right in a field. So we asked a lot of educational neuroscientists we asked people in cognitive psychology from educational experts we asked them to review information and the reason we used a Delphi panel is because it's not just my idea it's not just your idea it's not one author's vision it was basically saying here's a bunch of really smart people who know a lot about this topic let's see if they have consensus about what we should tell teachers okay and that's why we use a Delphi panel because it seeks consensus and we compared information from a Delphi that was done 10 years ago to one that was done now to see what they believe what we wanted to ask them is is there anything that is really true about all brains and human learning that we should tell teachers and then are there things that are also true tenants but that might have a huge range of human variation for example do you guys think that motivation is important for learning? Yeah but what motivates you does not motivate him so saying let's do a motivational activity it's like for who? for who? because different people are motivated by different things so we know this is very important in learning motivation is very important but what motivates one person might not motivate another there's a huge range of human variance right so there's some things that are true for everybody all the time in all contexts and there's some things that are true but have a huge range of human variance so those are principles and tenants in addition to that then we also ask them a bunch of other questions so it's time to go into that right now but if you want on the website there's a video summary of all of the findings that are there and also the 600 page report if you want some light reading over the weekend okay so what are the things that came out of that we sent a hundred and nine invitations to all continents and 41 people responded and participated from 11 different countries and they were some really tough cookies like some of think of the greatest names you've ever thought of some of the experts on childhood development the experts Jack Schoencoff at the Harvard Center for the Developing Child Mary Helen and Mordina Yang people who are great on emotions we got all of these really tough cookies to get together to see if there was anything they agreed on and we looked at all of the things that teachers were exposed to in teacher literature and professional development things basically the children had to drink a lot of water right or their brains will shrink or that mental capacity is hereditary and it can't be changed by experience or that children have attention spans equal to their age plus one interesting or that listening to classical music would increase their reasoning ability or that people use 10% of your brains or that brain development hasn't finished by the time somebody is in puberty or when we sleep the brain shuts down or that some people are right brain or left brain and we asked them this we asked them more than 100 different things and they couldn't just say I agree or disagree they actually had to provide evidence so they say well here's my evidence we do not use 10% of our brain that's just due to poor brain imaging back in the 90s here's my evidence looking at neural networks you're using so much more than 10% of the brain here's my paper my research and we created these nice folders here's my evidence and then we sent it back to the whole group well 98% of you believe that neuroplasticity exists and here's the evidence do you agree on how it's worded and how we should share it with teachers and so we went back and forth to get consensus unfortunately what we found out of those 100 different things is that there were more more myths being floated in teacher education than there were truths and there was a lot of stuff because unfortunately a lot of people believe in myths because it makes it easy we like to be told just paint your room a light green we have evidence in prisons when they're painted like green there's less fighting therefore paint your classroom that way it's like no if it sounds too easy or too good to be true it usually is not true so coming through with that we have now some published reports we're going to look at that that summarizes this but understanding the myths is a really big part of teacher education getting away from those myths and then hanging on to those few good things so over the past 10 years teacher education has evolved a bit what's fascinating is that the science has only been confirmed 10 years ago we thought there were only 5 things we should tell teachers now there's 6 which is very interesting but 10 years ago we only had 29 myths we have more than 70 myths this means like a little knowledge is a dangerous thing people know a teeny bit and they start to run with stuff and they make stuff up so this leg is too a kind of a pathway how should teachers be formed in the future number one we have to get rid of the myths we have to get rid of this right and left brain discussion and then we can teach the few good things that are true these handful of things that are true and we can get into the subtleties this is also true motivation for example sleep all these things are important for learning but guess what there's a huge range of human variants so I can't dictate exactly how to do it right then we must take into consideration the cultural context in which this is occurring because of those things like the cultural artifacts I was mentioning to you that do slightly change things a little bit right and after we've done all that then we can talk about okay this is a great activity for your class or something like that but we shouldn't jump to say what should I do I want to do brain based stuff tell me what to do again a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing we're going to talk about some of those myths in just a second but this means actually embracing things that come from all of the learning sciences this means understanding a little bit more about how nutrition influences learning or how sleep can change potential to learn and also understanding things about what's going on and people's brains are working a little bit differently every single person's now what's going on in this kid's brain right understanding a bit more about neuroscience and psychology and actually reaching this midpoint everybody is studying how the brain learns mind brain and education science tries to study how we should teach to take advantage of what we know about how the brain learns okay so it's a slightly different vision of how we should undertake teacher education the beauty of mind brain and education science from my perspective is that different researchers are doing things at different levels so there's some people who are really looking at this molecular level how are cells changed how are neural networks built right but other people in mind brain and education science are looking at a kid why is this kid why is this kid who's got a twin so different from his twin we look at individuals and how that works but mind brain and education science is very complex and it takes on actually things like the classroom which are lots of groups of people individuals with billions of neurons and all kinds of firings and tries to understand the dynamic of that space for example the brain and behavior institute in Queensland in Australia is now doing this amazing study looking at a real lab situation so they create a lab school where they observe these kids and they come for six to seven weeks to do things like study science seventh grade science with their real teacher but they're wired up they have something on like a fit bit that measures their blood pressure heart rate their microphone up so that they can hear all the conversations and every once in a while they'll lick a little piece of paper and so you can get a picture of cortisol to see what level of stress they might be experiencing based on what's happening and this huge analysis is helping us understand the messiness of a classroom and how one kid can tip all these others into doing something wrong or whatever how does this dynamic work and that's all part of mind brain and education science as well but then there's this additional field that looks at global comparisons and it's called cultural science we're looking at seeing how different groups of people whole societies might differ from others in the way their brains are actually taking on information so mind brain and education science is beautiful and broad it's got a lot of different angles to it but this would be part of the start here and this means basically asking us to have a new model it means taking mind brain and education understanding information for example that comes from visible learning good concrete educational research and then coming up with a different way to think about teacher formation a teacher is a teacher is a teacher unlike every other profession on the earth that sort of has a hierarchy you can be somebody who's a newbie like you just got out of teacher college and you're called a teacher and you can be somebody like Robert who's been teaching for 45 years and you're still a teacher what do they do in England now a five tiered approach they say look you're newly qualified that's interesting but then we want you to become more proficient and then you're advanced and then you might become hopefully someday you'll be an expert and a handful of you are going to become master teachers and that's really cool because then they recycle the master teachers when they're about to retire they keep them on for two more years to accompany the new teachers because we lose a huge amount of excellent teachers in the first one two years of teaching because it's like oh no they didn't teach me that they get to the real classroom and the reality is so hard but instead this idea is that you accompany them throughout their profession so you go deeper into your profession you learn more about the brain you learn more about techniques but you don't learn more stuff you also go deeper you become more deeply understanding of your field from things moving from education to actually now becoming learning scientists and I just want you to take one second to think to yourself am I willing to go there many teachers say look I'm happy I'm a teacher just you know I don't want to get into that whole brain stuff and that's okay but I just like to put out the plea at this stage of the game we really need at least a handful of brave people who are saying I am willing to become a learning scientist because I understand that education alone has not been able to answer all of the questions I have about how to tackle all of the kids in my class and help them learn to their best potential it's moving on it's a different vision of how we think of education and this means a teacher of education programs there's a new kind of a curriculum teachers will learn a bit more about things related to neuroscience and psychology not just how to do a lesson plan but actually how do people become motivated and what is consciousness how do memories get solidified in your brain you say I did this perfect activity how come they just didn't remember it how does that happen in the brain when and how our attention spans you know called upon all of those different things have to now become part of new teacher education and there are groups doing this if you haven't heard of the Deans for Impact it's a powerful group it's teacher colleges that a consortium of teacher colleges that have decided to embrace more information about the brain for their teachers they realize this is a necessity so going back to this looking at neuromess looking at principles and tenets I just want to mention a handful of each of these things so that we can be a little bit clear using the OECD criteria some things that have good evidence some things that are probably so but mixed evidence some things that are intelligent speculation and things that are just myths we come to the conclusion that everything you see on the screen right here is a myth and these things are myths because back in the day maybe in the 80s early 90s when we only had these little cartoon drawings of things it was a good approximation of what we thought we knew and it's also it sells books there's a a fellow I've presented in similar conferences very interesting his books sell like hotcakes because he suggests you do things like sit in circles and pass around a candle because boys need contact with flame or fire before they are focused okay cool but guess what I bet every kid in that room is really like cool you know so I don't think it's the flame thing but anyways people promote all kinds of very interesting things okay everything here is a myth and if you want the research on every single one of these we have volumes discrediting things that are up there because we begin to know a slightly more about the brain we know that the brain is also cannot you don't have a learning style guys everybody is visual auditory and kinesthetic but if you are a kid when he's 10 years old oh yeah and you are totally an auditory learner and I'm visual that's why you didn't learn very well it does harm to that kid but if you tell him he's an auditory learner actually he will spend the rest of his life looking for auditory cues and he will actually become better at that because he's sort of narrowed in on that modality but if you give your brain the chance it really wants to learn through all of the modalities it's always trying to get all the information it possibly can so there's no such thing as learning styles you cannot multitask tada all of you who think that you are now correcting homework and listening to me you are not your brain can only do one heavy cognitive load thing at a time okay if something is habituated like chopping the vegetables and talking to your sister on the telephone you can look like you are doing multiple things because it's low energy on your brain it's a habituated task but if even one single high cognitive task occurs like your kid runs in with a bloody finger or your sister starts to tell you something really traumatic on the telephone you have to stop everything because your brain pays attention to one heavy cognitive load task at a time multiple myths that occur so multitasking does not exist the reason we want to get rid of them is basically neuro myths simply do harm when you tell a girl she doesn't have the right pen of a head for science or logical or mathematical things you do harm okay when you tell a kid you only use 10% of your brain and oh you're full oh well that does harm okay so we want to get away from this because of the reason they do harm and now we have this more complex understanding you can measure the brain how it works electrically or chemically or by oxygenation or different types of increases in white matter track all of these different things are ways that we can measure the brain and this kind of beautiful complexity even if you're not attracted to brain scans makes you appreciate just one thing I want you to the brain does not work by saying oh let's stimulate the reading part of your brain or something like that or math or logic is in this part of the brain or whatever it's actually composed of incredibly complex networks there is nothing your brain does that's only one hemisphere or another it's always an integrated system always so now I don't know if any of you have seen these newer scans from the connectome project but the connectome project actually combines all of these different types of neuroimaging it shows you the electrical the chemical the white track it puts them all together so that we can have a more complex appreciation of just how the brain really works and based on all of this information we can now say okay maybe there is a node a node means a place in the brain where the signal passes through multiple times during a specific activity maybe there are specific nodes but that's not where language is that's not where reasoning is it's not in a single part of the brain that's called localizationalism and it kind of went out of style in about 1895 okay we don't talk about this piece of your brain does X it's a much more complex system of different types of networks and one of the brilliant things that we've been working on for example with the Punoho teachers in literacy is if teachers can understand there's at least these 16 networks that have to be primed when the teachers understand that they become better at analyzing and diagnosing what the problem the kid has so they realize is this really a working memory problem or is it semantic recall he doesn't remember the meaning of the word or is this a problem that he doesn't he's not able to combine all of the symbols correctly so he's not a fluid reader but what does that mean right so breaking those down into their smaller parts we can make more accurate interventions in our classrooms okay so based on this information I want to ask you guys some quick true or false and they're not really true or false because there's no such thing as truths in science there's just more evidence or less evidence so it's really is this really strongly evidence based or is this probably so or is this intelligence speculation for example it's intelligence speculation to think that men and women's brains are different because from the outside they look a little bit different but there's just not enough evidence to say that there's any difference there's only about five physiological differences in the brain and there's no studies that show that that actually manifests itself into different behavior there's a lot of studies on hormones definitely that changes behavior and men and women share the same hormones but in different proportions but it's not because their brains can't do something so maybe there's only one study on children showing that there's a slight advantage to boys learning spatial activities but if you give girls four repetitions of new training they do it better than the boys so it doesn't really matter there's no dominance of skill sets based on gender it's an intelligence speculation but it's just not true okay so I'm going to give you a couple of questions and I'd like you to tell me where it falls is this true or false so test your own knowledge about the brain okay human brains are as unique as human faces first of all what does that mean ask the person at the table next to you if you think you agree on an answer to that human brains are as unique as human faces the bottom line idea is this right you have two eyes and two eyes and two eyes one nose you have two ears and two ears everybody's got the same parts right same thing about the brains we all have the same parts of our brains does anybody have the same face in here no way and this is the same thing about your brain what changes the brain what makes the brain unique what makes the brain unique let's just even put it farther if you have two identical twins their faces look the same are their brains the same why are their brains different experience development experience changes the brain okay so the uniqueness of the brain this is the wording by the way I didn't have this confluted the experts agreed it was very hard to parse words to come to something that 41 people would agree on but this is the statement that these 41 neuroscientists agreed on this is true tell the teachers this and if you tell the teachers this it has implications doesn't it what does this tell you about teaching if you know that brains are unique what does this tell you about sort of like testing requirements or think about standards instead of mastery or using other things like universal design for learning as opposed to other curriculum structures it tells you a lot and makes you think what does this change based on that single idea about the brain how about this one all brains are equally prepared for all tasks no this goes to the point based on the different potentials right thanks to the good genes you got from your parents thanks to the wonderful environment you grew up in some of those genes are potentiated and thanks to your own decisions about what to do in your life you have different potentials now if you know that's true what does that tell you about teaching what does that tell you about differentiation or inclusion learning or does that tell you anything about how we send homework should all kids do all kids need the same thing one of the easiest low hanging fruits that we can do in schools is differentiate homework how many times does a brain need to see something before it knows it if you dare to answer this it means you've listened to a neural myth the answer should always be in education whenever somebody asks you a question about the brain what should it be it depends it depends it depends on prior experience if this kid has a really strong foundation in addition I can probably teach him to do subtraction in ten steps you know he sees a new thing he sees the difference between subtraction in addition he has past knowledge he can do it fast but if this kid is weak in addition I'm trying to teach him subtraction it might take him ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty reviews of the same concept differentiating homework for those kids is probably one of the lowest hanging fruits that we have to be able to attend to different potentials how about this one past information influences how you know something new absolutely your brain is so smart it does not want to expend energy where it doesn't need to so the first thing that your brain will do is that we'll look and try to understand what do I already know about this before it tries to learn something new it first passes through the filter of prior experience and this is huge if you write nothing else down write this down the more you know the more you can know because things pass through the filter of prior experience the more experiences you have potentiate different types of connections which means at some point you could connect things to other things that you might not have connected before the more you know the more you can know and all new learning passes through the filter of prior experience we need to know our students well enough though to take advantage of that how about this the brain changes constantly with experience do you believe that absolutely and usually this occurs though it can occur beforehand at a molecular level before you see it in behavior remember the example of the kid reading a lot of these changes are slowly occurring in the brain before you actually see the kid has done something that shows you an activity that he has actually learned something okay what about plasticity you guys all buy into the idea that your brains are plastic yes when does your brain stop learning when you die very good yes you learn until the day you die okay and this is a really big and an important idea to take into consideration many people think oh no it's all downhill after adolescence right oh no it's too hard to learn when I'm an adult guess what there's some truth to this the energy it takes to learn something new when you're older is slightly more because you basically have to unlearn an awful lot of things before you have to learn so it's almost twice as much energy because you're having decouple things so it's always better to learn it the best the first time around if a kid has learned through habituated behavior that it's okay that his dad hits his mom and he begins to hit his girlfriend in order to break that you actually have to unlearn a behavior to learn a new thing which takes more energy than just doing it right the first time right okay there's no learning without some form of memory and attention that's the very first thing I was hoping you guys would remember today okay so memory and attention are vital to learning okay so we talked about these well established things we mentioned some of these neuro myths and just so that you know this idea of the tenants the tenants are things that are true for all human brains except for there's a big range in human variation we all have bodies but they all are a little bit different right we all sleep but we all have slightly different patterns right those things are totally normal we found 21 things with the experts that are true but there's a huge range of human variants which is why you can't dictate you can never tell oh you're a 9 year old therefore you should sleep let me do the calculation X amount of time doesn't work it is normal for a human being to sleep between 4 and a half and 12 hours that's normal the average person might sleep 8 but it's normal in this range know thyself people have to understand themselves to be able to measure what's correct so these are the 21 things and we don't have time to go into them but there are some summaries about this information on the website if you'd like to look into these things and the implications they have for teaching and learning right the big idea is that if anybody tells you oh I have an attention getting activity or I have a motivational activity I'm going to teach you tell them it's like throwing spaghetti at a wall some of it's going to stick with some of those kids and some of it's not different kids need different things at different times remember that okay okay so looking at these different tenets and motivations the only thing I just wanted to share with you is a couple more myths read and weep there are more than 70 I'm just throwing up a couple of the more common ones just so that you're clear on this and if anybody wants to talk to me afterwards we do have a Q&A session I'm very happy to go deep into the research on each of these points but just sort of want to call this to your attention because these are things that we see in the popular press these are things that we see all the time but we have to break that before we can actually get to the good information okay that's isn't that I'm sorry I told my editor it's like oh my gosh what kind of it what are you doing they said no no this is for millennial teachers they really will like this whole like comic book angle like oh this is the cover of my very serious book okay anyways okay and we said that myths do harm because we know that one of the greatest influencing factors in student success is what a student thinks of his own ability to achieve and all myths do harm they lower that potential they lower the ability the thought process of the kid I can do this okay so we have to get rid of myths because of that okay so I can see a lot of you here a little bit of nerves or whatever hopefully most of you I mean what are the possible outcomes many hopefully most of you are gonna say terrific I feel totally vindicated I'm doing this right and that's great we're gonna have a lot of happy teachers that's pretty good I think that's gonna be the majority of this group right and then some of you though are gonna feel a little confused and maybe some of you are gonna feel even attacked because if I tell you something like brain gym doesn't work and you are brain gym representative you're probably feeling really bad right now right and then there might be some of you who are actually feeling a little bit panicked because you're about to present something you have to run out right now and change some slides ha ha ha ha ha presume this is gonna happen but I really hope happens and I was always taught instead of saying the word but you should always say and and it doesn't really change the meaning it's much more positive is that true I don't know and I hope that everybody leaves a hundred percent of us are gonna leave with this kind of tickle about feeling oh this is cool but I don't really get it and that's a healthy confusion right and that it leads to intellectual curiosity and that hopefully that intellectual curiosity will lead to better knowledge but the whole idea is this it doesn't stop at knowledge there's a big saying in Latin right to know is not enough right knowing stuff is cool but it actually means nothing in our profession you can know a lot of things but unless you operationalize it unless you use it unless you take advantage of it it makes no difference to our profession so to know is not enough you have to go beyond knowing and actually buy into doing something and I would recommend if you guys have the chance this is the penultimate slide here there's a very simple thing that all teachers could do and I don't think we realize this did you know that teachers do more experiments in one day than a neuroscientist does in their entire life did you know that this is the most important profession in society but if we come to move into this field of learning scientists instead of educators learning scientists I'm now using evidence we have to become better at documenting things and I know you do this in your head already but just get a notebook what did I plan to do what did I really do did it work why or why not just that small piece of reflection at the end of the day will make us all better teachers okay so remember I promised you I'm going to make you go to work here I don't know if I did or not but I will feel successful if you can tell me I learned these three things at least I learned three things okay and there's two things I want to know more about and there's one thing I might change can I give you one minute of silence before I wrap this up I would like you to do it now because if you stand up and walk out of this room without writing it down I promise you it's gone by lunchtime please write it down right now three two one three things you didn't know before two things that you're curious about now and one thing that you think you're going to change about your professional practice based on the information we shared today and then I'm going to give you my four big ideas and we can compare notes okay and it's totally not cheating to talk did she really say whatever did you get the same thing it's okay to talk that's part of learning one plus one is three I would like to motivate you to do the same exercise on any of the sessions you go to today and this is kind of like putting your finger on the pulse was this worth going to I learned something new I'm curious about something now and I'm going to do something different that's a big deal okay so in summary I told you I was going to leave you with four big ideas this is the last slide here education is very cool and in general it confirms best practice teaching for the most part we can actually find direct correlations between what we know goes on in the brain and what teachers do in this beautiful art that they have of teaching okay mind-reading education is also a transdisciplinary vision it sort of trains you to always look at things not only just from an educator's perspective of what's going on from a biological perspective or a nutritional psychological perspective it's superior than just looking at one one vision there's no problem you will ever face in life that is better attended to by just looking at it like a mathematician a historian an artist transdisciplinary thinking is really much more superior okay the third idea is that I'd like to challenge you to take on this idea that you are learning scientists and this moves our work into being not only art but also evidence based and the fourth idea is to not just come to conferences like this to ask what should I do next but ask why does it work get to the why okay I hope those are things that are that have also jumped out at you today I will leave you with the same kind of an invitation please write to me if you have any doubts or questions I love talking to people who care about this topic I hope you have a great rest of your day thank you very much