 Hi, this is Tracy Takahama-Spinoza. Welcome to part three of Making Classrooms Better. What we're going to look at now are a bunch of classroom practices that have been around for a while, but they've lasted for a good reason. There's a lot of good evidence, not only in education, that would also neuroscience and psychology that supports their use in application in the classroom. For example, the Socratic Method. Basically, you know, never tell what you can ask. The idea of the Socratic Practice is to get students to think more about their own gaps of understanding. You answer questions with questions. You know, but wow, what's wrong? What is the answer to X? You say, hmm, did you, at what point of the process do you think you got stuck? You know, asking students to reflect on their own practices to identify their own areas of problems instead of giving them the answers. This is very closely related to the general art of questions. Students would love to ask questions. If they give in more space to ask questions, they really will. But this is great because curiosity leads to new connections between ideas. And there is a space then for kids to be more creative in the way that they approach learning in their own environments. So instead of, and one of the ways to actually help filter good questioning activities, is to look at all the ways you can start a question and to avoid the ones that are closed. If I ask you, you know, what is the answer or who did whatever or when did this occur or where did this happen? That is really kind of limited. Much broader and much more open and much more deep in thinking is to ask how and why. For example, you know, when did the Gettysburg address occur or who gave it is, you know, not as cool of a question as how was it delivered or why was it delivered? So if you think about changing questions, developing this art of questions and then getting students to develop even better questions, that is the art of questioning and that's something we really need to be cultivating more in the classroom. Best Classroom Practice 26 has to do with using specific activities. For example, problem-based learning has been around for a while and it's really taking education by storm more recently because it naturally leads to more authentic learning on the part of the students. So helping them attack a problem that doesn't have a solution yet and taking different approaches on how to reach that solution is really excellent in any field and for any job that a student might have in the future. The idea is that students approach problem-based learning on an individual level, but it's a collective process. It's really collaborative learning at its best. So this is the idea again of one plus one is three. Get each student to add their piece to the puzzle to actually come up with a better answer. This is very, very closely connected to cooperative learning, but basically it's when students work together towards a common goal. So this can be something as simple as like, you know, doing jigsaw in the classroom where you divide the students up, you know, A, B, C, D, A, B, C, D and then with all the A's you divide them up 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4. So that the job that the group A did versus B, C, D, when they're finished with their job, they split up again into these groups of 1, 2, 3, 4 and then each person brings or contributes something to the answer that that group is going to have generated. A very key element of cooperative learning, and this is something that's also a huge life skill, is that it relies very heavily on a student's ability to listen to other students. And this is something that will serve a student well, you know, not only in school, but throughout the rest of their lives. Link to this is also the life skill of, you know, appreciating teamwork or being able to work in groups or being able to, you know, carry your level of responsibility and contribute to the overall outcome. Best Practice 28 has to do with incorporating reciprocal teaching. This has to do with an exchange. A student becomes a teacher, the teacher becomes a student, but there's an exchange back and forth between the two so that there's a equality in there. We know that one of the best ways to learn is to teach. So allowing the student to take on the teaching role at certain points in the process is really key in consolidating their understanding of the information. Reciprocal teaching has four pieces. The student has to learn how to question, clarify, summarize and predict. This is an iterative process. It's not that they, it stops there. Once there, then you test that, and then you start all over again. So this goes back and forth, back and forth, and it can be done with something as simple as a child's book, you know. The pig in the brick house, you know, what's going to happen to that pig since the other one's also, you know, got blown down. What happened to the brick house? Will the same thing happen? Will something different happen? And getting them to predict what's going to happen next. This is wonderful for developing better higher order thinking skills as well. My classroom practice 29 has to do with the use of case studies. Before we used to think that case studies were things that were limited to law or business. We now know that in general classroom practice in almost any field you can use case studies. Case studies just have to do with things that are already done. You know, they already have had a resolution. They've already been closed. Unlike problem-based learning, which is open, case studies have already happened. But the idea is to create a kind of intellectual empathy and to get students to look at different angles of the case. You have people play different roles. So for example, let's say that the mayor ran the platform of cleaning up the streets and better trash collection. So somebody can be a homeowner. Somebody can be the man who runs the trash machines. Somebody can be the recycling company. Somebody can be the mayor. You know, you have them approach the same problem from different angles so that they can actually learn to see, you know, broader than their own visions, but also be able to develop debating skills, in fact, gathering skills. Analogies are really key because remember we talked about how the brain always has to compare new knowledge with past experiences. So when you don't know something, the best way to help explain it is through an analogy. So it's a way of introducing content knowledge in a context they might be more familiar with. So the closer the fit of the analogy, the more the learning is facilitated according to Cacic and Negan. Very much based on the idea that the brain is always comparing what already knows with what it could know. So filling in the gaps of information that might exist. Analogies can be based on words, shapes, forms. They can be in patterns of things. They can be in comparing, you know, parts to holes or cause and effect or person to situations or geography. By using analogies, you're actually strengthening and helping students develop their own thought process. If you don't know one thing, you can actually show a parallel situation so the kids can be a little bit closer in their understanding of the new information that's about to come. Best Classroom Practice 31 has to do with implementing the five E's, which are now actually expanded to the seven E's. The idea of creating classroom experiences which always have at least these five steps, if not these seven, really reinforce learning. Why? Because they enhance attention and they are more memorable. So again, attention and memory keys to learning. So what do you do? Instead of starting off a class in biology by just showing or even a third grade science class, instead of talking about genetics, you show them a two-headed snake and you say, wow, what happened, you know? So you've got a hook there. You've got them engaged in the information and then you allow them to explore the information. What do you think caused that, you know? And have them come up with their own ideas. Then they should explain it to you. They have to tell you, well, I think that might have happened because maybe they got, you know, they were born that way and they were born that way because maybe there's something wrong, you know, with their genes or whatever. Then here comes the teacher's role is to actually elaborate using appropriate vocabulary to clarify. You know, yeah, that's a genetic mutation and that happens, you know, sometimes, you know, go into details of the science behind it and then you can evaluate and start all over. If you have the 70s, you basically do the same thing, but you elicit prior knowledge beforehand. Do you remember when we talked about how normally reproduction occurs in this way, you know? So stimulate prior knowledge and at the other bookend of it that you actually extend this, you actually decide, well, now that we know about the snake, do you think that that could also be true for people or sort of help them see how that information can go even broader than the information that they had before? The 5E's work basically because they allow the students to have definite discovery learning, but it's highly supervised by the teacher. So they don't go really off and wrong and on tangents. The teacher is always there to help narrow and refine and clarify vocabulary and redefine terms and elaborate in the right spaces. So there's a really nice balance there, but if you use the part about eliciting prior knowledge, you're also helping stimulate the use of memory and the engaging part also helps with the attention aspects. This is also one of those methods been around for a long time, highly successful, originally only used related to science classes, but we now know this can be used for really any subject area. Okay, now we're going to get some things that could work and we want teachers to sort of adopt, at least, you know, marry yourself to a one, two, three, or four of these to sort of work on this next coming year because these are fundamental to good teaching. Teachers need to have these types of habits, you know, stuck in their own minds all the time. First of all, they need to improve student efficacy. If we know a student's self-perception as a learner is the most important factor influencing future success. The student thinks he will learn, he can learn. The student thinks you don't think he can learn, he's not going to learn. If we know that that's the most important influencing factor in student learning outcomes, then why don't we do that as the first thing in our classrooms all the time? We need to remind ourselves of that. We need to work on how to develop student self-efficacy all the time. In the best classroom practice 33, we need to maintain high expectations. Study after study after study since the 50s have shown that the higher the expectations, the better the students do. Even students who come in, you know, maybe with a low level of aptitude or whatever, if you hold them to higher expectations, if you help them believe in themselves, think that they will learn, they do. So shooting high is not bad at all. What we need to be doing is to actually help each other. As teachers, always remember that we should be setting, you know, high enough objectives. We should not be shooting for the lowest common denominator. If you have a mixed group of kids in your class, you know, you shouldn't be shooting for the bottom because, oh, they'll all have to achieve. No, you have to shoot high because they will stretch themselves. It's very, very important that we convey that to teachers and help encourage each other to actually do that, to hold people up to higher, higher level expectations. This is really clear because you can have students mixed group ability, of course. You can have low, middle, high students, but that doesn't mean I change this. You know, when you have, when you set objectives in a class, they're for everybody. If you're going to differentiate, then you can differentiate in the way you evaluate and the activities you do. But you don't lower your standards for anybody. You keep those expectations for everybody. So everybody has the same objective. And that, that's the way to pull the whole group up. Best Practice 34, we need to always remind ourselves. And this is something that's very much grounded in attitudes and prejudices. Learning is fluid. Kids can change. Great teachers never label their kids. They understand that learning is fluid. It happens throughout the lifespan. Different kids are going to learn at different paces. And that we have to actually accept that they are going to be able to get better. So we don't ever, you know, put a stamp on them. Oh, you've got an attention problem. So you're limited to X or whatever, right? We need to allow for the space or the belief that the brain is dynamic, ever changing, and that kids will learn. 35 has to do with going back to this really key role of affect and learning. Before we used to think that when we talked or discussed about concepts of learning, we were really only in the cognitive domain. And now we have really so much evidence that shows that the way a student feels about learning moments about the teacher, about the subject or about himself, highly influences potential to learn in our classrooms. So we need to remind ourselves, you know, it has to become habituated in our heads. Am I, you know, communicating the right message? Am I, you know, managing this relationship in the right way in that classroom where the student feels at a minimum that I believe in him. Sending that message is really vital to success. We know the kids who have high stress, you know, whether it's caused by us, or they came in the classroom because they just had a fight with their, their girlfriend, or they had a fight with, you know, their, their mother, or they didn't eat something or whatever. We know that kids can come into the classroom with different emotional states, but it's up to us to change the mood of that classroom. Part of this is really connected to studies in neuroscience that have to do with levels of threat. And unfortunately, threat is one of those things that's a tenant. It is something that we know influences learning, but it is very, it's highly individual. What's threatening to you might not be threatening to me and vice versa. So we have to understand to what level do you, do you push kids, some kids work great, you know, under high levels of pressure and other kids don't react so well. Some kids need information or pushing from peers while others need pushing from teachers. And when we have to find that really delicate balance, and again, that is the, the art of teaching, you know, finding that right balance, because we know that having a good level of stress is positive for learning. It primes you for learning, but going overboard just shuts you down. And so there are no connections. So you really have to be careful of finding that perfect balance with students. Mary Heleny Mordin and Yang has been really influential in this field related to emotions, cognition, and their overlapping areas and how they influence one another. 36, which is highly related to the role of emotion, has to do with social contagion. You have to accept as a teacher that you control the environment. It's on you. You know, I don't know if any of you have ever had a bad day, you know, and you go into your class and you, you know, you start off bad and you have just changed the mood of every single student in that classroom, because you actually are sending out the messages to that student. You are changing the way that they feel about their classroom experience. And so we have to be very conscious and that has to be something habituated into every single one of us. We have to take the lead in social contagion. If we go in and the kids look like they're indifferent or angry and then we let them influence us, that's really terrible. We have to take the lead in social contagion and we have to change them. If we allow ourselves to be changed by them, then we're definitely going to end up on the floor on the tubes there and everybody's feeling negative about the class. We know that the, and this is, you know, totally hypothetical at the stage, because we don't have enough evidence, but it's a very complex mirror neuron system under scrutiny right now, which shows that, or we perceive the other, the way we're perceiving the other. We know that there's a lot of imitation that goes on. There are neurons that fire in the brain when we watch somebody doing something, even though we ourselves are not doing that. So we know that there's this big give and take in the social contagion area and that we have to take the lead ourselves and setting the right mood for good classroom experiences. 37, we have to award perseverance and celebrate error. As we mentioned before, you know, making mistakes is a part of learning. This idea of persevering, that will serve you throughout your life, you know, for kids to learn that they can't just give up the first time that they fail and that failure is a part of learning. If they can get that into their heads, then we're good. However, if we only prize people who get it right, then we're sending the wrong message. We're sending the totally wrong message and that they will not develop that habit for themselves. So we have to remind ourselves constantly that we have to be awarding perseverance. I would say that we should take on a new mantra in education, which is dare to err. You know, we should be okay with making mistakes because that's really a strong part of motivating class participation and getting kids to experiment with their own thought processes. So we should be very much open to that and we have to remind ourselves, you know, it's not just like, you know, the good answer, the right answer, the wrong answer. It's really the quality of the attempt, you know, that we should be giving prize to. 38 motivation is a key element in learning. The teachers have to remind themselves that it is part of our job. Of course, it's the students responsibility to learn, but it's our job to actually incorporate, you know, motivating moments so that they feel that they are being pushed, you know, externally as well as intrinsically to actually gain new knowledge. And we know this is a wonderful cycle of motivation. But what can we do as teachers? We can support, we can offer understanding, we can build that good rapport, that exchange between the students and we can keep good classroom management so that we don't let, you know, kids who are answering things incorrectly and the other kid who snickers at them, we have to balance that so that we can be encouraging this kid and getting this kid to stay on task and not to divert the rest of the group into making fun of those efforts. We know that we should never work harder than our students, okay? And we all wish we could live by that. Jackson actually wrote a whole book on this, never work harder than your students. But the idea is basically that we know it's human nature to do the minimum to get by. So the idea would be if we know that if you just tell them you can answer between, you know, five and eight questions, most of them will do the five. Unless you can target, you know, your expectations more clearly, it's going to be very hard to convince them. So related to working out, working as hard as your students, we know that students themselves are really savvy about their energy levels. And so they will not exert energy in places where they don't think it's worth it. And that's why a lot of kids, I mean, learning is hard. A lot of kids feel that it's not worth their effort. But you see the same kid, you know, who go to video games or something he considers fun and he'll spend, you know, hours doing that. So we have to find some way to leverage things like technology gaming, other things like that, and modes of learning so that we can actually stay on top of this. Kids are not doing anything different than we did when we were younger, you know, they're going to exert the just the right amount of energy needed to actually do as much or get as much out of the experiences they possibly can. We know that by withholding information, we can actually push higher order thinking. The idea of not working harder than your students would actually be going back to this whole idea of questioning as well, help students develop their own questions, never answer a question. That's not your job. Your job is not to answer any more questions. Your job is to help students think about their own thinking processes. So that might mean in many cases, asking them better questions. And that pushes up the level of thinking. This kind of dissonance that's created by that is wonderful, but it does ensure that they are working harder than you are. Be passionate. We know, again, social contagion. If you love what you're doing, you transmit that to your students. So showing your love for what you do is really important. Hattie actually writes that this is by far the most important thing that we can ever tell teachers or help teachers understand or help them develop a habit about. You have to really love what you're doing. This is one of those few professions where you can't fake it. You really, really have to show that you're engaged with your students. And if you don't have that passion, if it's just a job, you know, maybe you need to find another job because teaching can't afford people who aren't passionate about what they're doing. This gets to designing engaging classrooms. Management would be unnecessary if we had, you know, totally engaged classrooms. But we need to keep kids on the edge of their seats. You know, we need to keep them wondering about what's coming next. You know, these terribly predictable classroom situations where everything's the same day after day after day. And there's no, there's no surprise in there. And we're not engaging them. Remember the seven E's there. We're not getting them off their seats. You know, no wonder kids find school boring. So we have to find some way. It's not to say that the teacher is an actor, but we have to really get inside their heads. You know, what would catch you? What would make you want to be connected to the material? How can you physically design your classrooms in a way that you can keep track of everyone? If you have, you know, kids, you know, just you have the back row kids and you never reach them. If you have a way that you can actually engage all of them at the same time and make sure everybody's focused on the same place, then you can, you have far fewer management problems. And we know that sometimes kids just totally find what's going on in the classroom way more boring than what, what they want to do in real life. So part of the solution, you know, you're not going to be able to beat them. So you have to join them, I think, on this one. We have to find real life, authentic experiences that engage students in the classroom and make learning real, alive and transferable to other situations. Connected to engagement is management. We know that you can have, you know, the best design, the best plan, the greatest activities going on, and that one kid can throw everything off. So teachers have to have this wonderful balance, this great art of being able to, you know, quell those disturbances when they pop up, take advantage of kids who are maybe barking up because they're looking for attention, you know, re-channel that energy, come and be my assistant, whatever you need to do. But you need to find ways that you can actually manage the group in the best way possible so that the whole, the majority can learn. The teacher has to be in tune with that. Classroom management is a key part of being an excellent teacher. You often think, well, I've planned a great activity. I have every, all my materials down or whatever. I know I'm going to evaluate this. And then it just goes down the tubes because you don't have to manage. So you really have to incorporate this into part of the skill sets that you're developing. We would also like to encourage the use of thinking routines. Richard and colleagues have done a fabulous job of developing deeper thinking skills in the classroom through a series of 21 different or routines that they like to encourage in the classroom. I regrouped them into things that are related to interpretation and articulation, hypothesis development, decision making, synthesizing and summary, understanding ones on perceptions, metacognition, the role of empathy and limiting ones on presumptions. But these activities, I would highly recommend that you have a look at their book. They've done a wonderful job of actually showing how you can get far deeper into subject areas by just throwing back questions or structuring lessons around their routines. Flipping the classroom and leveraging technology in the best way possible is something that is highly encouraged. There is a lot of evidence now. There's a wonderful study now by University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and their medical faculty where they spent about three years trying to see what differences flipping would make. They found really overwhelmingly positive results. Instead of having your traditional lecture classroom and sending kids home to do homework by themselves, the idea is that they get the lecture at home and then when they come to class, everybody's on the same page and can discuss things and and debate things and apply things and do experiments. That is so much more cool than just coming to class and like, you know, who didn't understand number three or one guy doesn't understand number three. So you do that. You spend your time, you know, redoing things for a minority number of students. You should try to maximize your face-to-face time by doing activities that are really engaging as opposed to, you know, teaching the material. The idea is that a lot of the information, things that can be memorized, purely memoristic dates, facts, formulas, should be, you know, put on video and you allow the students to look at that before they get to class so that when they get to class, we can actually apply that information. Going to the greater question of technology. Technology is not good or bad. It's what you do with it. It's like TV beforehand. I don't know. TV is really terrible. Well, there's some, you know, there's educational TV that's really quite good. And there's some really a lot of junk out there. So it's not whether technology is a whole as good or bad. It's actually how we use it. And so we have to try and leverage technology in the best way. Having said that, we need to recognize and accept that technology does change the brain. Your brain adopts to what it does most. And so if you've got a kid who's like constantly, you know, doing quick changes on a video game, obviously that's going to reduce, you know, what would be his normal attention span because he's used to things happening in a faster pace. So we have to find a way to sort of balance that out. We know that technology is changing the brain. We don't know exactly how and to what extent this is going to have implications for regular classrooms. But we do know that there are some good hypotheses out there that it changes the tension spans and it changes the mode or the way in which kids like to learn, which gives more credibility even to the idea, for example, flipping something kids naturally like to do would be to watch videos. So it's one way to also use technology to our advantage when we teach. There are other ways of technologies influencing learning. There are some groups with mixed research behind them to show that they have neuroscientists working together with educators to try to come up with interventions that actually work. And a lot of these work on the premise of general gaming algorithms, you know, they don't like Mario works because you don't really fail, you know, every time you start to miss a bit, if you get less than 70% correct, it lowers the level so that you keep playing, right? So the idea is when you're trying to, you can use that to your benefit when you want to reinforce learning skills or certain reading things or reading patterns or if you want to reinforce some general number sense repetition as we saw before is really important. So if you can create a gaming structure that reinforces those things, that can be really positive. Unfortunately, there's not a whole lot of studies out there so far because not a lot of gaming interventions going on. Paul Howard Jones is doing some great work in Bristol on this area. Hopefully we'll have some more information to share soon. We know that language, for example, is processed differently in the brain when you're reading on screen versus when you're reading in a book. We know that it's processed differently when you're hearing something than when you're reading it. And so different technologies, for example, there's these technologies that are voice to text, right? You can have a whole anything that's in the text can be read to you in a proper British accent or an American accent or a male voice or female voice. So a lot of people are using these things as time-saving mechanisms, right? They'll be on the bus or the train and they don't want to lose time. So they will listen to the book. But there's studies, there's not a lot of studies out there that actually show, we know it's processed differently, but we don't know how that actually is helping memory or hurting memory. Does that actually, is that is, because our traditional way of teaching is through a textbook or orally. Now, a lot of people are getting their information auditorially. Now, is that a good thing or a bad thing? We just don't know. But it's important to recognize and we teachers have to understand that there's going to be new technology out there all the time and we have to be abreast of all of those changes that are happening. One area of study that's really fascinating right now has to do with technology and literacies. There's some very interesting studies that are going on that are actually showing the balance of things. This is not a bad thing. This is just different, but it's definitely not a bad thing. And you're getting kids who have advanced concepts of literacies and communication at very young ages, because they're able to process perspective, voice, things that we, we would only have done, you know, on a flat way through a book. They're now actually being able to take pictures and create their own stories. They'll tell a story and the words will come out. So they have an enhanced sense of language earlier than we had in our generation. So there's still, you know, the jury's still out on this, but we think that there's a lot of very interesting things that we can do with technology, but we as teachers have to really be open to this and stay abreast of this and not sort of, you know, box ourselves in and say, we're not going to go there. It's here. You know, we either adjust to it or we don't, but technology's here to stay. You know, maybe you're not, but the technology will be. So we have to learn to adapt. So because the brain adapts to what it does most, this is how I've always told my kids, you know, for every minute that they're on any screen, I don't care if it's a computer, a TV, if it's video games, they give me a minute of reading just so that we can balance out, you know, that sustained attention in your, in the brain. We know that the flipped classroom then, for example, has been used by several organizations, Harvard Baxit, University of North Carolina. There's a lot of university programs that I have integrated this. There's a lot of literature. I'd leave it to you to put this in the balance for yourself. But again, it really has to do with the proper selection of what gets flipped and what doesn't. The things that are memoristic, the things that need lots of repetition, probably are good to flip, to leave in videos. And then when you're in the class to actually enhance experience with that information and real life experimentation or debate, that's the best use of that time. But each teacher is going to have to reflect on that point for themselves. If you'd like this information about this from the International Society for Technology and Education, there's a lot of studies that talk about the benefits of flipping and how it's much more personalized and how feedback can be enhanced by this and that it actually helps us be more individualistic in our teaching with students because each student is actually going to have the resources they need to fill in their own gaps of knowledge. Okay, so finally, now there's some school design choices that impact student learning. I throw these out here not because teachers necessarily we have an influence in some of these things, but because I think groups of teachers together can influence administrative policy on some of these points. I would need to consider ages and stages. And this is really important because when modern education came into play and education became free and obligatory for all at the end of the 1800s, we would stick everybody in a one-room schoolhouse and whoever needed to advance at whatever stage, that was fine. We didn't make a discrimination of ages. If you were seven and needed to learn to read, that was great. And if you were 17 and you needed to learn to read, that's great too. We just advanced by the stage you were at. Well, what's happened now? More kids started coming into our classes and we had to begin to decide how to divide these guys up. We chose age, which seemed logical at the time. However, it didn't take into consideration that not all kids are ready to do all things at the exact same time. There's going to be different stages of development. This is due to developmental maturation, but it also has to do with experiences. You might have some kid in your classroom who is just, like, raring to go. You know, since birth he's been read to, he has had lots of experience, his brain is ready, he gets to school and he wants to do pre-literacy schools, boom. That's fine. But you might have another kid who will need to be three, four, five, six, seven, eight years old before he's at the same stage because he hasn't had the same experiences or he's not, you know, ready developmentally to do that. So we really need to rethink this idea of ages versus stages, or at least to keep those things in mind when we plan learning activities. It's not fair or helpful to expect that everybody advances at the same age or stage at the same moment at the point of the school year. Do I only shoot towards mastery learning then, as opposed to all these different milestones that we're looking for? Do I just hope that over time students will get this information or at their own pace? We really have to think this out because this is a very big school policy issue and it does cause a lot of strife in different countries that actually oblige students to pass all of their subjects or they don't pass a school year. So if you're not advanced in one area, you could be held back for a whole year. Now, is that fair? Is that right? We know that that kind of failure of a kid will change his own self-perception as a learner and the likelihood of dropout is higher. So we really need to think about those things in educational policy. We need to think more about nutrition. I think that a lot of families spend a lot of time with their newborns and they check their weight and they make sure that they're, you know, eating the right things and they get a bit older and, you know, you've got some habits and we're kind of strict. But then, you know, we as adults, we know that about 20% of your body's energy is spent learning, thinking. Your brain is using about 20% of the energy, but not all calories are built alike, you know, so they're not all going to do the same thing for your brain. Not everybody needs the same exact diet, obviously. However, there are some things that we need to use as general guidelines and the bottom line related to learning is that, you know, your heart is an organ, right, as is your brain. Okay, so general rule of thumb, what's good for your heart is good for your brain. Just use that as a general guide related to nutrition until we have better information. Another suggestion related to schools has to do with rows, rows of seats, you know, lining kids up in spaced rows. Why do we do that? Well, generally, we used to do it to keep order, you know, it was easy. And because since we were the focus of attention, you know, it was good for us to be able to see who was goofing off and who wasn't and all the rest of it. The only thing that they need to look at was us anyways. Now that we know that we're, you know, trying to construct knowledge with the students, and we know for a fact that people react to each other's comments more if they can see each other's faces, then actually creating semi-circles or ways that people can facilitate viewing each other is better if what we're trying to do is stimulate discussion. If the only thing we're trying to do is to, you know, deliver information, then you can deliver it in a straightforward way. That doesn't matter how you said. But if you're trying to stimulate debate, discussion, if you want people to interact with each other, which is what I hope we're trying to do when we're looking towards, you know, stronger collaborative of learning activities, then we have to think about how we seat people in classrooms. Number 48, we should consider seriously your around schooling. I think that there's a large increase of schools that are actually adopting this. What's the idea? The basic idea is that you have the same number of vacation days, but they're more evenly distributed. We know from Hattie's work that there's only five things out of 150 that are negative influences on student learning and one of them is summer break. Why? Because while spaced versus mass practice is good, too much space between learning moments leads to forgetting. So there's lack of reinforcement. We know that many more schools are doing this. There's a lot of research going on behind year on schooling, but the bottom line idea is that we began to have school calendars the way we do with long summer vacations because we needed the kids to help with the harvest. And only 1%, at least in the United States of kids, you know, still, you know, work on the farm and maybe 2% live on farms, but most of the kids in our classrooms are not helping with the harvest. And so the reason or the need to have a summer vacation kind of goes against what we know about the brain and learning because the brain is telling us that we shouldn't have these long breaks in between time. We also know that this is actually even worse for low-income kids because high-income kids go to summer camps and they can do all kinds of other informal learning and that's really great. But low-income kids have fewer opportunities and that means that their downtime actually leads to greater losses in learning than for rich kids. So we should really rethink this. I know of some school districts that do this and people love it. I mean, the kids forget less, their test scores are higher, they're less miserable, there's less teacher burnout, there's less cost during school. Parents enjoy it because no parent can take off 3 months. You know, maybe they can take off 2 weeks if they have distributed in this way. So there's a lot of things that we could benefit by. When you ask people why they don't do it, they just say, well, we've done this for 125 years, why should we change? We should change because society has changed, needs have changed. And if we know that it's better for your brain, if you learn better, if it's less costly, if there's less burnout, all those positive things, I think we should really take this into deep consideration and at least have a good debate on the information. 49, this is school day. We know that early school starts can be very negative for some students. Early starts, especially for teenagers, have been shown to actually detract from their ability to perform basically because of the different sleep rhythms based on changes in hormone. And then we know this, there's lots of evidence out there. In fact, even pilot studies to change school hours to change school start times to slightly later have shown that kids learn better, their test scores are higher, there's less classroom disturbances and problems. Parents report that their kids are more pleasant to be around. It seems like it works. So you say, and let's just change it. Let's start school a little bit later. Let's start it at 9 instead of at 8 or 7.30 as it does in Ecuador. Why don't you do it? Because parents need to get to work. Bottom line, it's really unfortunate that there's so many benefits to learning and to the brain and to just general human relationships to have this change. But we don't do it because mom says, I love this, but you know what? I have to drop off the kid at school and get to work on time. And I have to be there at 9. So this late start doesn't work for me. So this is a real, a real big issue because we know that these are policy changes that require bold decisions by administrative leaders, but they could make a huge difference in student learning outcomes. Finally, my favorite, it's reached a kind of a point, almost a little bit ridiculous of high stakes testing and pretending that that's a reflection of what we hope to achieve in education. If as we said at the very beginning of the first video when we were looking at what is the ultimate goal of formal education, if we're hoping to develop creative and critical thinkers who are lifelong lovers of learning, who know how to work with each other and leverage technology and are autonomous in the way that they do things, I don't think a multiple choice test does that. In fact, multiple choice tests, if you think about knowledge, skills, and attitudes, the only thing multiple choice tests can do is test knowledge. Dates, facts, formulas, skill, you know, it doesn't really get that deep. So why do we still use them? We, you know, we want something in our educational system, but we don't have tools yet to match that. But we, or the tools that we do have tend to be rather complicated. In order to test higher order thinking, yeah, we can do that. It involves a lot of observation, rubrics. It involves taking a lot of subjective data and interpreting it. It involves a lot of individual assessment. And that costs more money than a multiple choice test. So we know that it's, you know, cheap and fast to do, you know, multiple choice tests. But do we really want to marry our educational outcomes to that? Because I think that it's quite dangerous because it keeps us, it prevents us from actually developing the skills that we know will benefit the kid most in the long run as lifelong learners, you know, not only in school success, but outside, and for the rest of their lives, they will be able to use certain skills. The things that they can test on a multiple choice test probably are not the things that we really care about, you know, ideal citizen we want to live with. So assessment tools, number one, we don't use the variety of tools that are out there. So we should, you know, become more savvy about that. But at the same time, we should actually rethink our whole mentality about high-stakes testing. One way to consider this, I mean, for Maddox is a really smart way of thinking, these are Bloom's taxonomy and reaching a level of expertise and knowledge. But the types of evidence or tools that might be used or better used than the high-stakes testing that we use right now. Okay, that's my pet peeve. Now, in summary, what do we try to do? In the first video, we reviewed new discoveries about the brain thanks to technology. We consider the most recent research in education that indicates what influences student learning outcomes. And then I challenge you to consider whether or not you could move from being an educator to being a learning scientist. In the second video, we began to look at things related to visible learning and to mind brain education science. And in the last three days, we were looking at the best classroom practices. Now that we have that, I'm going to challenge you three, two, one. Are there three things that impacted you with this information? Are there at least two things that were so cool you're going to tell somebody else? And then one thing, one thing that you're going to change about your own practice to improve your teaching based on the information we just shared today. That would be my goal. This would be my evidence that this was a worthwhile exchange. I hope that this has been useful. If there's any questions that are lingering, I look forward to hearing from you. Thank you very much.