 Thank you to talk about a big idea that has to do with Meaning-making and many of you will think well, what is the difference between meaning making and learning? I'm gonna pull that apart a little bit before I do that though I want to invite you you all receive these beautiful Backpacks inside the backpack our beautiful notebooks and pieces of paper I know the one thing I noticed that was not in there was a writing instrument So I know many of you might not even have pens on you anymore because everybody carries digital things But if you could would you please pull out a notebook or a piece of paper? Anything that you should all have them because you were all given them right and I want you to write down at least Write down my email because if anything happens and you have a question that you didn't get a chance to ask You can go ahead and send it to me, but at the same time, I'd like to ask you think about your brain for a second Why would I ask you to hand write down? information Any ideas? Any thoughts there? I'm gonna give you a really big hint all learning depends on great Systems that work well especially cognitively your memory and your attention and writing down something is going to Facilitate that a bit right do you know what some of the oldest things that were ever written down? Do you know what they were? They were debts Because you lent me Three three euros and I wrote it down, but you come back and you say oh here's the euro I borrowed and I said no no no it was two it was three and he said no the only way we can have a common and shared Understanding is if we documented So do write things down okay write them down for your own good But for everybody else is good because I'm also gonna ask you at the very end If you feel so inclined and I would encourage you to do this reflection in all of the sessions you're in today Can you think if there's anything that I say that's new to you? Are there three things that were that you didn't hear before you didn't know before that were new are there at Least two that you're curious about and you want to know more about and if you want to know more about them Go ahead and write me an email and say you know you mentioned X I'd like to know how that applies to my context of teaching chemistry in Germany to university students If you give me that specific example I'm very happy to facilitate more resources and I'd also like you to think about one thing you are willing To entertain or think about changing You've come to this conference today for a lot of reasons Many of you to network many of you to learn new things But the whole idea here is to learn new things get curious and then be better be better professionals And so hopefully you take this reflection to all of the different conferences that you go to today Okay, so I just want to do four things. I want to share a story about our structure of our course I want to give you a framework to think about meaning making and then I'm going to introduce a word that many of you might know But some of you it just blew me away to hear this How many of you already know what a hole in is? Okay, this is going to be really cool then, okay, so we're going to talk about a new favorite word I hope we all have at the end of the day then I'm going to introduce another concept of radical Neuro constructivism to sort of bring this all together to talk about really practical ways that we can create or enhance Meaning making in our own classrooms. Okay, so that's the set agenda I'm going to use this working definition that comes from the encyclopedia of the sciences of learning That means that meaning making is what people do based on their own understanding people Interpret the world based on their own headspace where they've come from their past experiences and this includes things like identity and Emotions It's not just teach X and Y is learned. It's not just the tools that we learn It's how we interact with humans with other people, right? And we talk about identity issues if you're looking at the learning sciences We have things that we now say anybody know this term nature versus nurture We don't say that anymore Let's talk about nature via nurture Plus free will you get to choose some things that you do right? So you're born with a set of genes only a percentage of which are actually Potentiated by the environment you live in but then you also choose Your football team or the music you like or other things that are choice Who you decide to be friends with whether or not you take the step to introduce yourself to the person sitting behind you to say So what do you do and try to connect with each other? You choose to do certain things in your life. So we know that your identity is very important Why because identity changes learning outcomes the way you see yourself Changes your learning outcomes. So when we go back to this idea of working and our working definition of meaning making I'd like to modify this a little bit. We have this kind of black box of learning, right? I teach and then they learn What's going on inside here, right a lot of this has to do with the ways we think of ourselves The memories we have all new learning passes through the filter of prior experience The interpretations we have of information. How many others I know we are constantly defining ourselves By knowing other people it's compare and contrast. What are the patterns of my life? What's novel about you? How are you different from me? How does that help me? Define who I am by knowing the other knowing more others helps us know ourselves better, right? And all the emotions that are charged with that this means that this black box of learning I'd like to call this meaning making. Okay, there's a lot more to this process So some of you might be here because you said oh, I want to find the perfect strategy or digital tool That's gonna help me reach my students, and I'm here to tell you it's not that simple There's a lot more going on in there that I hope you'll accept So I want to share the story that I have of the way we structured our course at Harvard Which was it's called the neuroscience of learning. It's an introduction to mind-brain health and education Sorry, and this course was actually It's in the Extension school But all the courses at Harvard there's 12 different colleges and universities that give degrees So ours comes out of the faculty of arts and sciences But different courses in the extension school the extension school is a division of continuing education So it was the night school if you look at their The shield it has a lamp for people burning the midnight oil and working and studying afterwards, right? So Harvard has had this school for many many years But what was interesting during COVID is it nothing caught any of us by surprise? Because we were already doing stuff online, and so some of the challenges of the of the extension school are that It has different levels of degrees that offer undergraduate graduate non-credit We offer to the whole world the age range and the online online modality So I want to tell you 12 challenges that I had in creating my course During this whole COVID epic, but what yet we'd actually prepared for many years before One was that in my class I have to have undergraduate graduate and non-credit students all in the same classroom And I have to figure out how to differentiate for their needs. I also have on average last year I had 24 different nationalities, which is really really cool because you get lots of different perspectives It's not like here. We have 60 different nationalities But at least that exchange that dynamic exchange is absolutely fascinating for studying any topic that we have I also had students who are just graduating from high school and People in retirement our biggest increasing age group of attendance in our courses are retired people Because now they're getting the message use it or lose it keep your brain active and so they're attending lots of our classes Right, so we have a huge number of students one of my students last year was 77 And I've been teaching this course since 2012, but in 2016 they came to us and said Would you be willing to try to teach your course a hundred percent online? Because the students demand it We had students who lived right next door to the classroom and on the first day of class because they had the option About half of the students would show up, but by the fourth class. It was the teacher and two or three students People chose to be in their dorm rooms Because they wanted to be in their pajamas or have their coffee at the same time They were in the classroom or whatever it was, but there was a choice when we were able to do that We were able to expand offering to people around the world not required that they only be there Right, so then we had additional design challenges because of the way our courses structured One is transdisciplinarity one is translational thinking another is this multiple levels of analysis that we use We have an equal focus on teaching and learning and also we value very much student diversity So as far as looking at transdisciplinary thinking is concerned we use all of the learning sciences in our class so when we talk about Thinking of how people learn we look at things from neuroscience Cognitive psychology from education linguistics philosophy from AI all of these different things Contribute to how we approach the class and the way we do this is that we have Mind-brain health and education as these main cornerstones, but we teach the students to think about How do you learn best? But now think about this question How do you get motivated? How do you pay attention? How do you memorize things? How do you do that best? But now can you think about this from a transdisciplinary lens? Not just as how a neuroscientist would think about this or a psychologist or a teacher But how do we learn best of using these multiple lenses at the same time and Transdisciplinary thinking is a lot harder than you need disciplinary thinking if you just think about one dimension Okay, if I only taught the classes if it was Psychology we'd only get a certain amount of literature in there a certain amount of perspectives But when we do transdisciplinarity, we get lots of different viewpoints on how do you motivate people? What does it really mean to motivate? What does it really mean to get them to pay attention, right? So we use this different kind of a lens and when we do this It means we can also have different levels of analysis from the molecular to the individual to the classroom to also do international comparisons so The molecular level. Yes, we do look at synapses and neural networks But we also think about kids in classrooms the individual kid and then the dynamics of the classroom How is that kid a great kid by himself and a bully in the group? How does that happen, right? So trying to get that basic How does group dynamics change individual behavior and then we look at international comparative studies, so We also pick up on the idea that Udyphrith and Sarah Jane Blakemore had which was that we spent about 200 years Thinking about how people teach, but we've only spent like a fraction of the past maybe 25 years Thinking about how I'm sorry how people learn and we've only just began to think about the science of teaching How does the design and many of you are instructional designers here? How does the design the choice of tools the timing of what we do? Change how different people learn that's a very big idea And then Herbert has a very big a strict and a very open Diversity policy as far as gender ethnicity special needs in my class I have had in the past a blind deaf People with muscular dystrophy who needed other kinds of needs every year. We have several people with dyslexia at HD So we have to accommodate all of these different kinds of Needs in our classroom. So this adds on a lot of other things that we do that challenge meaning making But then our third the third final challenge is that we're teaching about the brain which changes all the time We know very little and so every time we learn something new we have to add that on and because it's an overview course I have 15 different topics. So every week we're switching topics, right and then finally My personal belief because I did graduate from the Graduate School of Education We have this we embrace this idea that things should be usable Knowledge knowledge for knowledge sake those of you who are philosophers is really cool, too I like knowledge for knowledge, but we want things to be practical We want people to be able to take the information from our class and use it So if we look at this idea of the brain is always changing Professor Lickman at Harvard tells us, you know, if we have trout Learning about the brain is is a mile. We've traveled three inches We know very little about the human brain and how it learns and every single year we add on more things Which is why we have we don't have a set textbook We have what we call bundles which are mini libraries and every year we hyperlink to updated articles in the field So we've got 92 going on now that have to do with memory attention Diversity language emotion so we update those and that's in the QR code that was on the first slide And it'll be on the last slide if you guys want to see those bundles But the key is to stay up to date in the field and also when we cover these 15 different topics in the class Each one of these has to be updated every single year So we're about to start the course again in January So we're gonna spend all of December making sure we have the best and most up to date and Representative information from all around the world about each of these different topics So this means that our premise here is that we want the information to be usable knowledge We know that the best way to test if somebody has really learned something is if they can use it in a new situation Transfer okay, so I see that nobody's writing down anything at this moment except for this lady and this lady over here Which means that you all knew all this information beforehand. Is that true? That's very good Okay, so I can leapfrog into a little bit. I'll go a little bit faster So this means that all of this Transferability depends on the meaning making how did that person interpret what was being taught to them? Okay, so learn via meaning making means that people have to construct the realities It takes time to do it Which is why a semester-long course is actually one of the best ways to do it Which is one of the arguments against a new trend right now which responds to one need Students do not like long semester-long courses anymore. We're doing micro certificates But we have found in our own personal study that the best way for them to actually learn anything is if their micro certificate is at least Six to eight weeks long if not a whole semester because otherwise they really don't have enough time to actually Embrace and change they can learn the knowledge and the skills, but they don't change their attitudes in such a short amount of time And finally that we have to actually understand each individual bridge between our information and each student That means personalizing a lot of the information and getting to know our students a lot better So our challenges are these 12 kind of big challenges This is what we face when we're trying to make meaning in our classes We have a diverse amount of subjects. We have a lot of different types of students in our class How do you reach everybody? How do you get them to make meaning out of what's going on? So this is a question for you guys What is the short answer? What is the oldest classroom strategy? That is also a tactic in war. Oh Very good. I hope that's not from personal experience But definitely divide and conquer if you are able to break down Your objectives your learning objectives into smaller parts Make sure that those are understood. That's great You divide and then you have to bring them back together again And our main problem in higher education is that we tend to be very good, especially in our syllabus, right? We're really good at breaking down the individual objectives But we almost never come back to the big picture at the end and That is one of the biggest problems with meaning making. How do you come back? How do you put all those smaller pieces back together again into that bigger idea of what your whole course was about? Okay, so combining that information at the end is something that we absolutely have to do okay So here I wanted to do my new favorite word, which I hope is your new favorite word Really nobody here has heard of a hole in It is the best word ever the best word you're gonna love this a hole in is something that is at once apart and a hole Okay, does that make sense so a leaf is a thing. It's a whole thing right, but it's Also, it could be part of a tree. Does that make sense a piece of lettuce could be a whole thing But it could also be in your salad Does that make sense kind of get the idea here? Okay, so a piece of a chair That's a whole thing all by itself but it could also be part of your living room set right or you could have a Color and a color is a whole thing by itself, but also could be part of a painting Right or a house could be part of a neighborhood you guys getting the idea a Part in a hole a hole on is something that is at once a part in a hole Is anybody seeing something like an aha moment right now like this lady who's got this like light bulb going on on top of her head Everything is a hole in okay So basically the idea here this little girl is Herself, you know all by herself. She's a thing, but she's also part of a family And she's part of a school and part of a soccer team. Okay, and your hand is part of your body Right, but it's all it's a hole by itself. So when we talk about things We need to remember that they can always be broken down into their smaller parts and they can also be made into bigger parts Does that make sense does that blow your mind? That's such a cool idea, right? So if we think about this This is one of the ways that we've used to learning thinking to remind ourselves everything can be a part in a hole All right, but reminding ourselves How do you break this down into its smaller parts for easier understanding by the students? But then how do I bring it back into the hole and put it into context of bigger problem solving? That would be the bigger goal. Okay of how do we make meaning? So the idea around Holonik thinking is that? Everything is a part and everything is a whole all right So if we use this and if I want to try to explain the brain to the students right you say okay Yeah, you have a cool brain you can talk about you know Hemispheres or we can talk about lobes and we can break it down even further Look at networks or how synapses are formed or how neurons exist But the chemical and then also the electrical exchanges it goes smaller and smaller and smaller But then we remind them that you can also go up bigger Right your brain is also inside of a kid. We're not just teaching brains on shoulders You're teaching a whole person that lives in a community of other people whose learning is changed by other people So we have to study learning within group contexts as well and also do international comparisons So we try to bring it full circle from the very smallest to the very biggest pieces. Okay, so with that in mind Oops am I pushing the wrong thing here we go Going back to this let's look at a framework if we have meaning-making there's at least Three parts to this whole at least three parts One is mentalizing one is a social emotional aspect and one is context Mentalizing means do I have any idea about how this person is thinking about what I am doing? Okay Social emotional learning empathy thinking of others has to do with something very different. Okay Mentalizing is thinking social emotional learning is the feeling. All right, so on this level and Utifrith is amazing in making this big distinction and she did this basically in studies with Autistic students. It's very different neural structures What's going on in your brain when you're thinking about what somebody else is thinking versus feeling what somebody else is feeling That's a very different kind set of neural networks, which is fascinating, right? So being able to manage that dynamic and understand what people are thinking Actually shows us very different things about how mentalizing occurs and it develops over time It's not something that oh all of a sudden as a teenager You know how other people are interpreting their world. It's something that we have to continually try to Understand by knowing more and more people I'm getting the sense of where you might be going with this how you are interpreting this information That's something very vital for all of us as teachers to do as far as social emotional learning is concerned Understanding how that person is feeling about the information that we're sharing is also very important It might not seem important. Oh, we're teaching people cognitively information. Well, but there's no separation There is no cognition without emotion so understanding How somebody is thinking about the and feeling about the information and also being able to self-regulate on our own Has a huge amount to do with whether or not people are going to learn in our class Mary Helenie Mordini Yang was a wonderful friend has also When she gave election my class last semester She made the point that social emotional learning are not two separate systems And in fact, there's this parallel Processing that's going on and where people are thinking and feeling and feeling about how they're thinking all the time It's this huge negotiation to create meaning How do I use the thinking and the feeling to understand what's going on around me? So we know if you look at how people are thinking or feeling about things how people are thinking about things and then you can get to Mentalizing and then you can compare and contrast that over time We know that these skills are things that we develop in our life But we only do that in contact with others So the big idea here about being able to integrate with others to network to talk to other people Well, how did you take away that information about Holon's that Tracy shared talking to each other? Refines your own thinking and understanding about the information. How do you make meaning of what is shared? Okay? Last idea is much bigger and harder and has to do with context It's very very hard to teach things in a vacuum. Well, I teach basic biology How come nobody understands this and I used X examples or whatever it doesn't always work my children Luckily grew up all around the world and when we were in Lima Peru and the in the German school in Lima Peru they got their textbooks for English from England and the kids there were trying to learn about the weather and They were learning about sleet and slush and rain and all kinds of snowy stuff Lima doesn't even get an inch of rain a year. The kids who live there had no context for the information So the big idea would be are the tools that you're choosing in your universities? Actually relevant to the context that other people are using This comes from Ron Fender's work that has to do with understanding how people's Self-understanding when I say who are you your identity? You're a different person in different types of your life, right? You're a different person based on your cultural norms What do you want to highlight to other people? Where are you from right normally? I say oh, I'm from California But sometimes I say oh, yeah, I'm half Japanese. I am not Latina at all even though a spinosa. That's my husband's name I try to put that into context depending on who I'm talking to I'd assume different identities My relationships change that who I am within a family context all of these different things who you are in your social media All changes the way you perceive yourself and identity does matter We know that if people there's studies since the 70s Beautiful ones from the 90s and more recent ones that tell us that if a person an Asian woman thinks of herself as Asian when she goes into a math test She does much better Then if she thinks of herself as a female when she goes into the math test all of the different identities We have play into how well we are able to learn in different contexts, and we know that there's no such thing as a neutral educational context everything is charged with cultural input and We have to be much more sensitive to that if we want meaning to be made of the information that the students are taking in Somebody who's doing great work in this field right now is Zareta Hammond who has written about culturally relevant pedagogy She's not the first person by far to do this But she's somebody who's tried to link this to the brain with pretty good success in doing that I highly recommend her work so if we think about mentalizing plus Social-emotional understanding as meaning-making that's a really good place to start. So what would we recommend in the up until for the first couple hundred years that we had formal education Since about 1850 or so. We just thought if you knew a lot of stuff, you'd be a great teacher You know stuff teach it. You're gonna be there in a room. You're gonna be able to share now your phones know a lot So knowing stuff is not how you become a great university teacher or any teacher for that matter So about 1989 Shulman made our suggestion that you had to have pedagogical knowledge How do you teach and not only that pedagogical content knowledge? How do you teach? history To undergraduates in whatever context, right? So do you have pedagogical content knowledge? And only recently in about 2003-4 we began to see the value and importance of everybody understanding technology If you do not know your tools You can't save yourself time to now be more human if I can offload the grading of all my quizzes to to the program Then I can now spend more time explaining what you did wrong and giving you motivation about how you can do better The machine can tell you what's wrong, but the person can motivate you There are things that machines do better than us and there's things that we do much better than machines, but only about 2007 did we add this idea of having mind-brain education or learning sciences? teachers need to know more about the brain in the 2017 on an OED CD expert panel of which I was a part there was a recommendation teachers need to know more pedagogy and More about the brain because they just are working off mythical information when it comes to how people really learn So if we are able to do that and put that into context, then we're able to find the sweet spot of meaning-making Meaning-making is occurring at the intersection of being able to mix all of these things together, okay? So meaning-making is how people pull things together based on their prior experiences And we do this in education to make sense of the world and the world and how it works Not just in your class for your subject. It's a much bigger idea here and Imardina Yang spent a lot of time Telling us that when people are in your classroom, they're not just thinking about your topic They're thinking about what does this mean for me? How does this work in my life? What kind of problems is it's gonna allow me to solve and I think that we all hated COVID we can agree But COVID was the best thing ever to kick us into a new way of thinking about education Especially higher education, which has been the slowest, okay? The last big idea I want to share with you is radical neuro constructivism Radical means the process of teaching and learning is dynamic. It's iterative When I say something to you you change the way I think about it by the way you react Okay You also are changed by the information. This is why somebody who might have read a very powerful book when there were 14 If you read the diary of Anne Frank at 14, then you read the book again when you're 30 It's different and you read it again as a retired person. It's easy. The book is different. No, the book isn't different You are different because your world has changed a lot. Your memories have changed The way you will interpret the book has changed your meaning making has changed over time Neuro is because it's based on neuroscience. So there's thousands of theories about how the brain learns everybody understands Constructivism how people construct their own realities construct learning well the concept of neuro constructivism was introduced by von Glasserfeld Which was a really clever idea basically neuro radical constructivism Sorry radical constructivism is how the dynamics of your living change your understanding. That's very cool Seartos added to this Western and added to this idea, but this is also Neurologically based if we pull out that piece of your basic conceptual understanding of addition and then I tried to teach you Subtraction you can't do it because there is a hierarchy of understanding and those networks So as educators we have to take into consideration the teaching and learning thinking and feeling are all intricately involved that Moving I mean teaching is a moving target different kids are going to need different things in different moments And on different days what motivated this group what drives me crazy is when teachers say I just want to know the best way to motivate my group Well, what motivates one person isn't going to motivate the next and what motivated that same person yesterday may not motivate them today So we have to be able to go with the flow Just outside the market as you say in Spanish you have to be able to to change with the dynamics of that particular Encounter, okay, so this is a dynamic process and it's hard Teaching well is one of the hardest things we can do. This is why educators are the most important profession in society Basically, we think that people if we think about the teaching learning dynamic We have accepted that students will come to our class with baggage. They come with cultural norms They come with certain expectations of us They include media groups and all the rest of that their family influences. They come to our classrooms And that's the students experiences, but then we say okay, but I come with my baggage But I also have my curriculum and I know how to teach so this is how learning occurs The main thing we forget is that there's not just one learner in that classroom There are oftentimes dozens or hundreds in our classroom And we have to be able to understand how to use all of that information to create meaning for all of those students So radical means the teacher has his idea. I'm going to walk in the classroom This is how I'm going to teach things and his message resonates with students in one way But then the student will say something back to the teacher and that will change the way the other students will think about the information Right, so the idea is to accept that that's part of meaning making that dynamic exchange. All right So to conclude this that big idea is that there's a lot that goes on in teaching and learning But all of this really hinges on the individuals Perception of what's going on and how we've ledge leveraged that So if I were to say how did we react to all of these different challenges that we had In order to create or enhance meaning making we basically have to accept that that is Part and parcel of what learning is made up of it has a lot to do with the students different contexts And its ability to transfer is how I'm going to be able to prove that that happened and the only way I can do that Is by knowing my students And I know that blows our mind in university education where we're used to walking into a classroom and you see 400 people and you're trying to get all of them to learn How do I begin to know my students? The first thing I asked them is why are you here? Some of you were around when I walked around this morning and I said I just sat down in front of you and I asked you Why are you here? If I don't know why you're here and what you want It's very hard for me to adjust what I'm doing to make sure it fits into your context and becomes long-term knowledge You have to know them. You can't know them if you don't teach them, okay? So in summary, I tried to share a little bit about my course I gave you sort of this framework of thinking and feeling in order to create meaning making within context We talked about this very cool word of Holans, which I hope you'll use forever This idea of radical neuro constructivism and this bigger idea that you have to know yourself well enough To be able to integrate the information from others and you have to help them know each other So that's relationships and I would like to ask you and that piece of paper and all of those copious notes You were taking Could you look back and tell me? Is there anything that was new that I said today? Are there any things that are sticking with you like woof? I wish I knew I could dig into that a little bit more and Most importantly for yourself. Is there anything you would consider changing? Improving in your own life. I think the next speaker is going to help us understand. There's a new concept That's called feed forward. What will I do better the next time? You know, I don't want you to think about what you've been doing think about the future This is where we're going with education today And I thank you very much if you would like more information or if you'd like to have this power points Presentation or other information you can just click the QR code and you have access to all the presentations. Thank you very much