 Hi, my name is Tracy Takahama Espinosa and this is a video on best practices and online pedagogy. 40 different teaching interventions that work equally well online as in face-to-face setting. I'm a professor at the Harvard University Extension School and I'm also associate editor of Nature Partner Journal Science of Learning and over the past decade and a half I've been diving deeply into this idea of how is what we know about the brain influential and how we teach and how should we leverage that information to be better at what we do as teachers. We took the neuro myths, got rid of those, we took the principles and tenets and then we tried to look at them within various cultural contexts and we looked at these within 21 different cultural contexts in the last study to see if they had an applicability across human-ness, not just within one cultural nether, to come up with certain instructional guidelines and these particular goals were matched with the principles and tenets and we found these mantras that came from education that were related to this. Many of them that we've invented over the years and working with schools around the world in 40 different countries and the core pedagogies that had evidence behind them that were applied and so in the sense we took the conditions or the goals, for example mastery learning or having deeper learning or a metacognitive awareness, growth mindsets, the ability to dare, to err, to learn, how to reach optimal performance and the role of relevant curriculum differentiation and student autonomy as well as these ideas of social contagion and learning communities and how we strive to personalize learning and the role of communication. We took those conditions and goals, we matched them with the principles and tenets, we looked at these different mantras that come out of education and we created these 40 different pedagogies that have a lot of support and evidence that are well established within the literature and so now we want to share those 40 different pedagogies with you. So we start with mastery learning. Many schools and many individual teachers have as a goal mastery, not just performance goals on how to pass a standardized state test but what does it really mean to master the material of a course and to reach mastery one way is through universal design for learning. We know that some people can do steps and everyone can do ramps, so why don't we just build ramps? The idea here is to look at that, basically that lowest common denominator of entry point and then build from there so that everybody can scaffold up and learn as they need to so they have their own types of entry points to reach the exact same goal. So differentiated entry points to the material is really clear because we know that different people need different things from the learning processes to reach that exact same objective. A concrete tool that you could use is through differentiated homework so the idea of creating bundles with these different entry points so that everybody gets what they need. This gets down to a real fundamental mantra in education that treating everyone fairly does not mean treating them equally and we can leverage technology in our favor to actually structure this even better in online contexts. We know that mastery learning also lends itself to the use of long-term e-portfolios, electronic or digital portfolios and the use of product process and progress rubrics because learning can and should be measured in terms of these product process and progress measures not just by the end product alone. Mastery is also really facilitated through formative evaluation so frequent, explicit formative evaluation serves both the student and the teacher to really put the finger on the pulse of where that kid is at in relation to those learning objectives and helps do a quick gap analysis of where they need to be in order to achieve the goals of the class. One of my favorite ways to get to mastery is by feeding forward. This is a term we coined a few months back just loving the idea of instead of lamenting the past the mantra becomes what can I do better the next time and helping kids just have a look towards the future as opposed to just, you know, anguishing about what didn't work well and this means that teachers have to really reshape the way that they give that feedback primarily through questioning and helping them reach their own level of understanding of what it is that they need to do differently in order to achieve those objectives. A second goal we might have in our schools is deeper learning not just the superficial knowledge but going deeper into having long-term changes in the notions we have in our minds and part of this begins with starting with the end in mind and one of the best ways to go about doing this is flipping, flip the classroom. This permits us to offload this lighter or superficial or Google-able knowledge, dates, facts, formulas to a video content so that when we are together we can go much deeper into exploring those concepts. Another way to get to deeper learning is to just make time for different levels of consciousness for reflection and to accept that mind wandering is not a waste of time. We are bombarded in schools constantly with a lot of information about this idea and the other idea. Rarely give kids a chance to really breathe or to mentally digest all that information they took in and it's not infrequent that when they finally do have that free time when they're just walking home from school or they're helping cut vegetables or if you're weeding a garden all of a sudden that aha moment comes to you basically because you have a lot of stuff shoved in your head but you're not allowing for those natural connections to occur so giving yourself that space at that level of consciousness is really important and there's some wonderful studies about the default mode mechanisms the mind wandering the brain and their relationship to creative insight. Deeper learning is also really rooted in this idea that the brain adapts to what it does most. One way to reach deeper learning is by leveraging culture by understanding those contexts and by taking advantage of what that kid might have as prior knowledge based on the cultural context in which they live as well as the school context in which that learning is taking place. Also related to the brain adapting to what it does most is to have high expectations. Expect the best from your students. We know from the pygmaline effect from decades ago that holding kids to higher expectations actually leads to better learning outcomes. So rather than shooting for the middle or the lowest level of what you think your students can achieve hold them to higher expectations. Deeper learning is also achieved by understanding how heuristics work in the brain how your brain does have a natural go-to place when it's judging information but if you understand that how do you curtail that so that you can expose bias and help kids understand how their preconceived notions of the world might be wrong and that they need to be open to that new learning. And finally another powerful way to apply this idea that the brain adapts to what it does most is to use interleaving. Interleaving is not teaching things in a blocked time frame but rather teaching little bits over time so that you're continually returning and going slightly deeper every time into the information. So rather than a blocked schedule at school for example you might have conceptual knowledge and core notions spread out over time and return to repeatedly throughout the semester. Deeper learning is also connected to this mantra of success be getting success and we also know unfortunately that failure begets failure. A student who naturally presumes that he will eventually figure this out finds much more success than a kid who already begins presuming he's going to fail. So one of the things that we might be able to do to help kids along that way is to help them see their own little successes day by day. And this kind of harkens back to the prior idea of using your portfolios or the product process progress rubric. You might not have the product you want but you can actually show them how far they've come along as far as progress so that they can retain the level of motivation needed to then eventually finally achieve the goals of the class. We also know that it's always harder to ask a good question than to answer one. So deeper learning means using questioning skills within the classroom. Asking, you know, how do you learn best? Asking questions, using the asocratic method. Key concept, never tell what you can ask because that journey towards the information on your own consolidates the information in your brain. We have a third goal of metacognitive awareness in many schools or in many classrooms. We're trying to develop thinking skills of our students not just content and area knowledge but how to think better. One way to do this is to assume that learning how to learn is a lifelong goal. You might try using the metacognitive awareness inventory. This is a great way to sort of bring some things very explicitly to the forefront to get a habituated self-questioning going on in your head about how to approach problem solving. You can also approach metacognitive awareness by training executive functions that include things like inhibitory control. We know there's a great mantra in education that self-regulation is more important than innate intelligence in predicting learning outcomes according to Moffitt's study in 2011. So we know that just deciding to buckle down and focus, do the work can have an even greater impact on just simply being born smart. So do take advantage to train executive functions. Others of you may have the goal of developing growth mindsets in kids, helping them understand that they are not fixed with the brain that they were born with. That there is such a thing as no plasticity and that they can and do learn based on their decision and choices. Kids who think that if they work hard and were not just born with certain skill sets actually do better than those who think that all intelligence is inherited. This gets to the fundamental mantra that attitude is often more important than aptitude. We like to get our students to think that they should love what you're doing and you might not have been so happy with that terrible test score you got but let's learn from that and see how we can improve upon that thing the next time. So if you're lucky you can actually do both. You can love and learn from everything that's going on. Face the world with wonder and awe. That's one of those wonderful approaches that is part of a growth mindset. Not seeing learning as a burden but seeing it as an opportunity. Not I have to but I get to. Imposed. We also know that that if a student who says well I'm not going to be good at math because my dad wasn't good at math and so I guess that's my fate that really sets you up for failure. So helping students understand that many of the limits that they've imposed are not supported by the evidence and that if they can get over it then they can actually do better within the classroom setting and learning across the lifespan in general. So teaching lifelong learning objectives is a growth mindset. We also know that teaching very explicitly teaching risk and protective factors about brain health letting kids know that they are more than just the sum of their genes and their zip code. It's not just what happened to them by having certain parents or where they live but they get a choice. They get a chance to decide. They have free will. They can decide that they're going to be more than just the genes and the zip code. To helping kids learn how their brains actually learn. This is also related to the idea that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts and that we have to be educating the whole child. The students in your class are not just brains on bodies. They are a whole wealth and history of personal experiences tied up emotions relationships with their world and themselves in context and we have to take that into consideration when we're teaching the child. We're generically saying let's use X textbook to meet the needs of all kids. It's kind of wrong because the kids might not see their own reality reflected in some of those examples within the textbook. So attending to the kid on all levels physical, social, emotional as we seek to support them in a societal context as they learn. Another goal many of you might have is to get your kids to dare to err. We all know as teachers that a great part of learning is making mistakes and a lot of times kids are very hesitant to make mistakes and so one of the ideas is to create structures which allows them to make mistakes. This goes along with the mantra that anyone who can learn from their mistakes should be given the opportunity to do so. And one of the great failings we have in our current education system is our evaluation structure. The way we choose to measure learning is woefully deficient. A recent OECD studies figured out that just adding on a single hour of evaluation on the part of a teacher, on assessing the learning, on giving feedback on helping the students understand where they made mistakes has a much greater impact than an additional hour of instruction. So we know that we have not given the evaluation process enough of our time in educational structures and we really need to think about how we can redesign and maybe leverage technology for example of those basic tedious tasks like correcting an exam so that we can have more time to talk to get about why they made those mistakes and so let the machines do the machines do best let humans do what humans do best. But this also means making more time for those do-overs and second and third opportunities within our classrooms. One way to encourage daring to air and to make mistakes and to accepting that mistakes are a natural part of learning is to use frequent low-stakes testing. We know that this enhances memory systems if you give students the opportunity to retake the test over and over and over again because after all the only thing that a multiple choice test can measure is knowledge, dates, facts, formulas, definitions, conceptual understanding. If the objective is that they understand that basic knowledge so that we can then come to the class to use it then having frequent low-stakes testing makes a lot of sense. A test score should not be the end game but it will be a path to helping students strengthen their conceptual understanding of certain core knowledge. Others of you might have the goal of optimal performance. How do I get every kid in my class to maximize their own potential? And a huge part of this has to do with understanding that sweet spot, that Goldilocks space on the curve of learning, of the stress and the optimal performance that students are able to achieve. And a lot of this has to do with getting kids to know themselves. They need to learn best and helping them just take the time to reflect what are the things that really stress them out? What are the things that are protective factors in their own learning moments? And so helping them identify their own best learning is a key part of our job as educators. Another thing we have to remember is that learning, classroom dynamics, it's a moving target, right? So we have to learn to adjust on the fly. Many teachers get frustrated because they plan a specific lesson and then something happens and it derails your own whole plan. But that's what classroom teaching is like. You know, you'll never know exactly what's going to happen or who's going to say what that will change the focus of the conversation. And that's okay. We have to learn to be flexible based on what those current student needs are. You might have the perfect lesson planned and then some kid comes in, you know, from recess crying or somebody shows up to your Zoom room in distress. And you have to attend to that. You have to attend to that social emotional need first before you can get them to a space of where they can actually think about the information. And so we have to adjust and constantly so. And we have to use world events and the daily news to integrate and to create those kinds of authentic lessons that students can use as jumping off points for their own classroom learning. So marrying what happens in the outside real world and the students' lives with our own classroom context is part and parcel of our jobs. Several of you might be questioning especially in this time of the pandemic what is relevant curriculum. As mentioned before, we've been pretty deficient on evaluating what we think kids know. We spend a lot of time on language and math but now we're realizing that's only part of the whole picture of what it is we need to learn and know. So understanding how to decide what it is we teach and why we do that what do we value is really important. And so once we've decided yes we do want them to have some things about language, yes we do want them to have some things about art or science or civics. Well, we have to also understand that there's a natural hierarchy and a learning trajectory for each subject. Many of you are familiar with constructivism. This idea is neuro constructivism. The idea of building these core and basic notions about information upon which you can build higher or deeper order concepts. And that is something that many of us have taken for granted comes in the order of a textbook. It's just not true anymore. So we now have to go back and really think through what it is we choose to teach and then also making sure that what we do choose to teach is taught with that logical hierarchical order that respects the way the brain is constructing those neural networks. Relevant curriculum is also based on a really fantastic phenomena that occurs in your brain with neuroplasticity. And that's the more you know, the more you can know. So once you've created these synapses, these neural connections in the brain they have these little dendrites that stick out and that has a potential to connect a new thing. So we know the more you know, the more you potentially can know. So if we can habituate a more transdisciplinary approach to learning and thinking this would be fantastic. Learn a lot about a lot of different things so that kids can actually connect those ideas and see patterns in their world and understand the symbolic relationships that are occurring between things and how the world can be categorized in distinct ways rather than siloing things off into the language unit, the math unit, the science unit, which we know is not necessarily reflective of the real world. Some of you may have the goal of better differentiation in your classrooms and also giving students more autonomy in their work. If there's one thing we've really learned throughout this pandemic is that there are many paths to roam. Once teachers settle on their greater objectives, social-emotional learning, the things of attitudinal changes that they're seeking in their students, the value systems that they want to reinforce, as well as the content area knowledge, once they've done that, they can point out the objective. They can tell the kids well guys, by the end of this year I need you all to be able to analyze, you know, multiple genres of literature. How are we going to get there? How do you want to do this? I have thought about doing it in this way. What are other ways that we might get to that information? And you will be very surprised. One thing that we found as we went through the pandemic is that the teachers who are willing to sort of let go in that way they take the time to identify the objectives, but then they let go and say students, help me out here were overwhelmed with the wonderful, creative and intelligent responses of their students. Let students drive the curriculum. If you know your objectives, there are many ways to get there. And you do not necessarily have to follow what the textbook says to do that. You can figure out how to teach chemistry or literature or geometry or primary colors in multiple ways by pointing out your objectives to the students and then allowing them to backwards engineer that towards what should we do in class to get there. One of my favorite mantras in education is that the person who does the work is the person who does the learning. We know that any teacher who's working harder than their student is not letting the students do the learning. If you're killing yourself, you know, writing that test, you're getting really smart. But wouldn't it be better if you just had students write the test? Tell them. So we're going to have a 10 question test that's going to come up on Friday. Everybody submit three questions. If I use your question on the test, you get an extra point. The person who does the work is the person who does the learning. The teacher should not kill themselves making the test or the crossword puzzles or whatever it is because the actual learning, the opportunity to learn comes with the developing of those questions. As we saw before, right? It's harder to come up with a good question than it is just to answer it. Many of you also have a goal of creating good social communities in which to learn. And social contagion is a big part of this. We know that people can and do affect each other's emotional states. And since there's no cognition without emotion, this is huge as far as learning is concerned. So prioritizing small group work, whether online or face-to-face is very, very important because it allows for each individual to listen in here to a smaller number of big ideas and then to shape their own understanding of the world based on what they're hearing from their peers. We can also help kids learn to do this by teaching how to address and recognize emotional cues through facial expression. There is no cognition without emotion and most emotion is transferred either through facial expressions or through tone of voice. And reviewing this, both for ourselves as teachers as well as for the students, allow students to be better at picking up those social cues from their peers. So learning this as teachers and how this affects students, but also helping students understand how to read these social cues from their peers is also really important. A very big lesson that we have learned through the pandemic is that launching straight back into the textbook or trying to cover the material really wasn't going to do it. And one thing that was very, very apparent is that we need to prioritize social emotional learning over that content memorization. Well, they still have to pass the test at the end of the year. Well, guess what? They won't get there if they are socially vulnerable. We have to attend to those social emotional needs before trying to launch into cognition. So helping teachers understand the messages being conveyed by students' tone of voice is also very important. And helping students understand each other as peers using these cues is also very important. Asking the kid, well, how's everything going? He goes, well, I'm fine. It's not the same as saying, yeah, yeah, everything's going great, I'm fine. Understanding how tone of voice is a reflection of emotional states is very important for us to know in the social context of schooling as well as in life in general. So many of us are out to build strong learning communities. It's clear, you know, it takes a village to raise a child. So we need to have input from multiple actors. One thing we can help kids understand is that we know ourselves better by knowing the other. If one of our goals is to know thyself, understand your needs as a learner, one of the ways you do that is by knowing more people. The more people you know, the better you can self-define, right? So if we leverage this theory of mind, how do I know myself? I know myself because I'm constantly comparing myself with other people. You can leverage that and teach kids explicitly how they are coming to know themselves as compared with other people in their communities. It also gives them ways to incorporate maybe some positive traits that others may have that they would like to have in themselves. I also love the mantra of one plus one is three, right? You have a good idea. I have a good idea. But the minute we talk about it, we're going to have something superior to what either you or I would have come up by ourselves. So we know that collaboration yields more than just individual efforts alone in, you know, 99 out of 100 cases. So learning to collaborate as learners is key in helping our students understand how they benefit from working with each other. For example, mixed ability groups, putting a strong kid with a weaker kid, both of them are going to learn in that process. But the person who actually learns more is the person who already knew because they're having to re-explain and teach another, right? And so as teaching is one of the best ways to learn, we know that these collaborative activities actually have benefits for all learners. And so helping students understand why going it alone is not necessarily and usually not the best path is really important in our classrooms. But to facilitate this in kids, we as teachers also have to buy into this idea. Some of the most successful education systems work in a way in which they do much more collaboration than we typically do in the West or in the United States. In the United States, you know, my classroom is my kingdom, I shut the door, I'm on my own. Whereas in other cultures it's a much more collaborative effort. People are invited to come into the classroom to help be my critical friend and let me know how I can continue to improve. So being a model of collaboration is also one of the best ways to help our students embrace those characteristics as well. We also know that we build community through sharing, helping other people know us, telling personal anecdotes about ourselves and how that might relate to the new information. And as people share their experience with the information, or as they share their reaction to certain prompts or ideas or frustrations or to how things happen at home it really can open their own eyes to understanding how perspective taking is a very valuable part of building that community when we can appreciate the different ways to approach problems or the different factors that are influencing problem solving skills and different settings it helps us as a class to build that community. Strong learning communities are also built through a pedagogy of basically just cold calling. We know that there's a real big problem in asking a question and waiting for a handful of kids to raise their hand at the front of the room to answer it. Typically it's the same kids over and over again, right? In order to be more democratic in the way we approach learning we have to find a way to call on everybody and what's fascinating and that we've come to learn is that there is a real disinhibition effect and a protection of this anonymity that students might feel for example in online settings or in classroom activities that are designed to request information from the whole group when everybody gives input and then there's a way to debate and discuss those things so having that certain level of anonymity in being in an online setting even if you're looking at the kid face to face they sense protection because they are distant they're not sitting right next to somebody else so there is some benefit of doing this in an online setting and it might be counterintuitive to think this but people actually share more in an online setting than they might share in a face to face setting. Personalization is a really big goal of many teachers and it's actually shown to be one of the strongest factors the student-teacher relationship is one of the strongest factors in influencing student learning outcomes we know that a person's self-perception as a learner I can do this is shaped heavily by teachers and those self-perceptions do influence learning outcomes I didn't think I could do it but they think I can do it so I guess I can do it is kind of the thought process there so this collective teacher self-efficacy the way that teachers show their belief in the student's ability to learn is really important and a lot of that is transmitted simply by showing you care hey you're a little off today in class is there anything you want to talk about or I know that this is something that you're able to do but today you weren't really on your game can you let me know if you want to talk about something just showing you care and that you are willing to invest in the student plays a huge role in that student then beginning to believe in themselves as well if the teacher is going to believe in me maybe I'll believe in me many times there are teachers who may treat their classroom experience as a transaction whereas we know that true learning is really embedded in that personalization of the student-teacher relationships this gets to the idea in the mantra that you can't teach them if you don't know them right and the pedagogy of listening that's really important this was first espoused by this big idea that students often times know what they need they just don't know how to get it and one of the things that we can do for them as opposed to just bombarding with content is actually taking the time to listen to what they are saying what they need and this is to a certain extent this is kind of also this student driven curriculum you're allowing them to tell you well I get frustrated because people always tell me I just need to get a little more organized but I don't know how or I'm told you need to shore up your basic skills but I don't know how so taking the time to listen to their own self-assessments of where they're at and what they need is a huge part of being a great teacher finally the last category of goals that we have has to do with communication and many of you already know that without clear line of communication education doesn't really work so how does that work on a personal level as well as at an institutional level one thing to think about at a very individual level is that people have a lot of questions and in classrooms we tend to bombard people with a lot of information information information with not as much down time what's really important to understand at least from a neuroscientific perspective is that the brain can't let it go if it has a question about something and you said wait wait have questions at the end that's really kind of crazy because your brain can't do that really this means that communication immediacy really smooths the flow of learning processes in online context some people invite people to put questions in the chat or raise their hand immediately but it's really clear that having that immediacy getting your question answered permits the brain then to now refocus on the next idea and to move forward so finding mechanisms for communication immediacy is really important in great classroom settings we also know that it takes a lot of energy to learn and we know that that energy goes into paying attention and into memory systems one way that you can enhance good communication is by being predictable communication regularity lowers anxiety and it also lowers cognitive load so the energy that would normally be spent like trying to figure out where do I do this where's the information how do I upload something can then now be spent just learning so having that intuitive instructional design within an online platform for example or a routine within a general classroom setting goes a long way into channeling the use of energy for attention and memory to the right places for good long-term learning so in this video we had a very quick review of looking over teachers new pedagogical knowledge that includes information from the learning sciences as well as technology we began by trying to remind people to not fall into the belief of neuro myths negative untruths about the brain and learning but rather use the good information that comes from principles and tenants and use that as a platform upon which to talk about what teachers really do best those pedagogical interventions that actually have evidence behind that show learning results and now to close I just like to invite you to take some time to reflect do a three two one reflection were there three things we said that you didn't know before are there two things that you think are really interesting you want to keep researching them you're curious about them now and is there one thing you might consider changing about your personal professional practice based on that information by doing that we will have a much better jumping off point when we get together to sort of go deeper into the information and in the event that you're feeling brave and interested please send the questions on and I promise to address them when we are together face to face in our synchronous encounter thank you and take care