 Hi, my name is Tracy Takama-Spinoza. I'd like to give you a brief synopsis of my new book, Making Classrooms Better, 50 Practical Applications of Mind, Brain, Education, and Science. And we do this with a backdrop of some other research or previous research that I've done trying to ground our teaching practice in better information from neuroscience as well as psychology. This means trying to improve teaching by nurturing our practice from other disciplines. What we want to try to do today is to look at this in three different pieces. First, we're going to start off by having a look at how and why teaching practices have actually changed in great part due to technology that's given us better insights about the brain. And then combine that with information from better educational research. Then we're going to have a look at the mind-bin education field itself and then how that combines to actually change our teaching practices. Finally, we're going to have a look at the 50 best practices or changes that we can make in our classroom that would actually have a greater impact on student learning outcomes. As we start this, the first piece then has to do with actually better knowledge about the brain. The improvements in technology have been amazing over the past 20 years. So what we used to think about the brain or ideas about the brain or pictures or drawings we used to have about right brain, left brain things or men, women things or people having pink brains or blue brains or orange brains or whatever or three brains, reptilian brain or whatever or different systems being neatly locked away in specific parts or the myth that we only use 10% of our brain or that teenagers are a little bit crazy. All of these different ideas have now been found to be actually just myths. And we still unfortunately have a lot of these drawings flowing around in public and they do mislead teachers because they're not really sure what kind of information is really true. What they should be looking for what we as teachers need to be looking for is actually better information. Now thanks to wonderful tomography we're able to actually see the brain. So we have better insights as to how different reasons of the brain are receiving blood flow during different types of learning experiences or we can do 3D renderings of brain processing. And then we can actually what is really going out of all of this is showing us that there's not just one little piece of your brain that's responsible for reading or writing or math or spatial abilities or creativity or whatever we're actually being able to now connect and see how these things are actually networks in the brain. So the new information that we have we're going from these old drawings to actually trying to do replicas of connections and modeling to actually being able to map the way that synapses are occurring in the brain and which networks are actually being linked to which pieces of the brain are connected to other pieces when we are in the learning process. And this has actually changed a great deal. It changed the way that we're looking at learning because we're appreciating the more complex processes in the learning process as well as the sub elements for example in reading. It's not that there's a piece of your brain that deals with reading but there's so many different parts of your brain that need to be connected for that to happen. And we're seeing now those things actually relate to distinct learning processes or methodologies. There are things that we do in the classroom will actually have an impact on certain networks and not on others. So it's really important for teachers to become aware of how changes in technology are actually going to change our teaching practice. They're benefited by new changes in educational research. What we've found now is that there's a lot more good, high quality longitudinal studies which compare age-related learning processes as well as international comparative studies. So we're not just looking at what happens in the states but we can actually now almost begin and this is just beginning but to we depart things that are universals that are true for all human beings versus things that are actually very highly culturally bound in learning context. And we've also now, thanks to work by John Hattie, come up with some methodological comparative skills so we can actually compare studies that were done in one context with another to see which of those actually has the best impact on student learning outcomes. John Hattie then has been one of the leading forces in this in educational research to actually be able to come up with some comparative data that helps us as teachers now make big decisions in our own classrooms. Now that we know more about the ring, now that we know more about how people are aware of what is more important then how would we prioritize that in our classrooms. One of the things that he found which is really key is that he was able to identify at least 150 different influences on student learning outcomes which ranged from the obvious things of being low birth weight or poor health in the early years to summer vacation impact on student learning, television as well as several teaching interventions the role of the home. And of those 150 if you take a close look at them you can find that 47 of those are things that teachers can have a direct impact on. So what I did is take those 47 areas and divided them into 10 kind of groupings and these include students self-efficacy reinforcement learning knowing students well as teachers as a personality seen by the students thinking about thinking, helping students develop metacognitive awareness self-improvement, clear objectives group learning, managing and the way that we run certain activities in the class. So when we look at those piece by piece it actually gives us a clear indication of the types of things that we as teachers need to be doing now slightly differently or more or improving in our classroom situations. These 47 things are laid out in my book in the appendix and they are related to how these affect sizes. He basically found that things that are just sitting in the classroom you're going to learn. So there's got to be better than that. So he found basically after a point four affect size is really where we want to be working on. So there's only a handful of things that actually decrease student achievement and those include things like summer vacation and television things that students would do without school versus things about just sitting in a classroom and maturing over the school year as well as the minimum things that teachers can do organizing lessons in an orderly way and so on. But here in the zone of desired effects are really where we want to be. These are the things that teachers can do or change that actually have a greater influence on student learning outcomes than others. And if we look at these things there are some things that are actually counterintuitive because if they're grouped they can be grouped into things that are related to certain actors or influences. For example how does the school like the size of the school the size of classes influence learning or parents versus as well as their home environment the teacher themselves as a personality or the student or influences of the administration curriculum or the way that we teach. If I were to ask you to put these into a rank order very very often teachers mistakenly list things that are not as important as first. It's pretty much natural given the old information we used to have. But given this list if I were to ask you to put it in the correct order many teachers still place or believe very strongly that the role of parents or the home overrides their influence. What's very interesting to note is that due to the time that students spend with us and the direct objective of school the whole goal of school is to actually learn it means that the student learning objectives or student learning outcomes are actually more highly influenced by the teacher and teaching than they are by the home. Number one by far is a student's own self reception as a learner. However if you think about it students think they can learn if and now who makes the student feel that way that doesn't just come out of nowhere. In fact it comes from the teacher. If a teacher believes in a student or if the teacher believes in him then there's a greater likelihood of success. So these are things that are really important to keep in mind because it actually makes us own a lot more of the processes as teachers. We can't just shove it off and say oh well you know have they come from a better home or too bad they don't have as good genes or it's unfortunate that this kid you know whatever if we blame things on their socio-economic status or other things. Right now we have to sort of take that back to our own. You know this is our job. These are our kids and actually we do have a bigger influence than we think on their learning outcomes. So what does this mean for changes in education? This is not a slight influence but it's actually very interesting to note that more impetus for modifications in education have come from the 21st century skills learning movement. Now why is this? Because we have you know an old you know the old story of Rip von Winkle when he wakes up you know everything is changed a hundred years later you know transportation is different. The way we do banking is different and we even elect officials in the different ways we can tweak them into the government. Our supermarkets are totally different but one of the things that's really distressful is that our schools have not kept up with other social institutions even though individual human beings will spend more time in that social institution than before at the time of their 30 years old. So it's really important that we take a look at these things. Unfortunately one of these is in 1910 and the other is in 2010. But guess what? No, they are both in 2010. These were taken in Michigan and Illinois. So what do we have to do? We can either try very slowly to sort of catch up or we can really take some bold steps and actually change some significant things about our teaching practices and what goes on in our schools as well as in our own general life that can make a difference in the way students learn. So one thing that we have to take into consideration and is that there's at least four huge points of change that have happened globally. We've gone from the focus of desiring just equal access. Everybody gets into school to equal quality mainly because most of the OECD countries, most of the well-off countries in the world have already really dominated this minimum objective. So everybody gets into school but now we need to worry about quality education. We're moving away from this idea of teaching in silos. You teach your math class and you teach your history class and we do these things in separate rooms and separate times of day to actually looking towards a greater transdisciplinary integration of skills. Why is that? Because most of the world's problems are more transdisciplinary. They're not just located or isolated to a specific subject area. We've also made this change now from helping our students pass a class to trying to develop lifelong learners. And we've also tried to move from traditional resources like general textbooks to better technology integration. And these things have changed the way that we're really looking at teaching now. Sorry there's a fifth here. We also are now moving very much from instead of just focusing on the individual or betterment of the individual we're looking now towards enhanced collaboration, cooperation, communication, cultural awareness better understanding of communities, greater contextual application of information. So this is moving slightly from the group gets better when the individual gets better obviously. But the idea now is that the world is so interconnected that we have to be able to learn to work together. This general idea of 1 plus 1 is 3 You know I might have a good idea, you might have a good idea, but the minute we join those we can probably have something better than any one of us would have come up by ourselves. So the idea is a focus of general education. The goals are actually changing. So what does all this mean? This means that what are we looking for at the end of the day? If we're going to put through kids through general, formal education what should be our overall goal? And this is really important because depending on our goal we change the way we measure things and based on how we measure things we also will change the activities we do in our classroom. So the first step is coming to an agreement about the type of goal or what is our outcome? What is it we're looking for at the end of the day when we finish formal education? And hopefully we're looking at critical creative thinkers people that look towards lifelong application of their skills. In PISA they look at general competencies, people who are able to identify problems for themselves and use tools to be able to resolve those. People who can work with others and self-starters, people who are autonomous. This leads to people who know how to work with other groups, people who are different than themselves, but that they can be creative and innovative as well and that they're independent they're self-motivated, they show initiative, they're problem solvers and they also understand how and appreciate complexity and problems in the world as well as being able to apply and use technology in a creative way. This leads to, we hope, lifelong learners. These are skills that we're not just wanting them to learn in the school context for school, but hopefully we are helping them cultivate a way of life that they will be able to actually apply this in any job that they might take in the future. This is actually using Wiggins and McTay's design idea. What is the desired result? I'd have to say that we're looking for somebody who is a critical creative thinker and a lifelong learner. How can we measure that? That's a lot more complex than we're used to doing in schools and especially with standardized tests, but then what do we actually do in the classroom? So if all of those pieces come together now if we're going to mix the information we have about the brain, information about changes in these priorities and education and actually information about what we know changes student learning outcomes. This is going to lead us to a different kind of a model. So I want to invite you to consider yourselves if you're teachers to where this had to be a learning scientist. I'm a mind brain education scientist. I'm somebody who actually, instead of just, you know, has some general pedagogical skills or general didactic abilities, you know, sitting on my podium here and imparting knowledge that basically I need to now as a professional nurture myself with information from psychology and neuroscience from the biological sciences because learning sciences are much more complex than we're used to in our own field. However, it's something that's become a necessity based on the new goals that we have for formal education. So in my own personal experience started off as a PhD dissertation. It turned into a basic book by Columbia University Teachers Scholars Press that has to do with the new science of teaching and learning. The screw into a deeper historical review of where mind brain education science came from to now actually a practical application of this. Just most recently I've had the wonderful honor of being on an expert panel on the OECD to help look at or reconsider this idea of teachers' new pedagogical knowledge now that it's nurtured by neuroscience and technology. If you want more information about the general development of the mind brain education field there's a lecture that's shared here that I hope you'll have a chance to have a look at. But we're not going to go into those details in this particular presentation. What we really want to actually look at is a clear understanding. What are the basics that teachers need to know about brains? Leslie Hart said several years ago that designing education experiences without an understanding of the brain and designing a globe without understanding the hand if the brain is the organ of all of our learning then it's something and teachers that's our profession we need to know more about the brain than we actually do right now. This means that taking general educational practices now turns into adding cognitive neuroscience information as well as educational psychology to yield a better foundation upon which we need to begin our interventions in the classroom. And this is harder. It definitely is harder. It's a lot more professional it's a lot more science grounded but it's actually because of this evidence based angle it's a lot more easy to defend our practice. It's just not the gut feeling with what I want to do with Johnny tomorrow in the classroom but it's because I can ground my interventions in evidence and this is very very important I think for re-establishing or giving more value to the teaching profession which I happen to believe is the most important profession in society so hopefully we're able to build ourselves up or build up our practice with better evidence. This means that we can have mind brain education scientists who are teachers or who are psychologists or who are neuroscientists and this is actually a wonderful new field there's a great coordination of efforts now between teachers as well as neuroscientists and psychologists to try to to better the teaching field this doesn't mean that if you know this kind of things still scare you off alright you know you can still work as a purist there are still just teachers and just neuroscientists and just psychologists out there. The main takeaway here is that interventions in our classroom that are supported from all three fields if there's evidence that says this is a great way to teach not only because we say that in pedagogy but we also say that in psychology and also say that in neuroscience and there's studies to back that that just gives us more credibility so I would say that you can be a purist if you want however intervention in the classroom should have support from all three fields if we actually are going to apply them. This comes at a time which is kind of tremendous you know over the past hundred twenty five hundred thirty years of psychology and education studies we've learned a lot about how the brain learns and we have not learned a whole lot about how to teach to take advantage of how the brain learns and that is the biggest challenge of teaching these days. This means that we have a lot of changes that are coming up and these are pushed by actually just history. We've spent a long time trying to figure out the best way to teach and there's an awful lot of books out there that sort of sell you ideas of quick fixes to the classroom or teaching for dummies or whatever it is and that's not the way to go. I mean it's complicated education is complicated the brain is complicated, learning is complicated each kid is a universe to themselves I mean we have to accept and celebrate the fact that we're going to have people with a huge range of abilities in our class and that's life that's humanity and that's our responsibility so we have to improve our practice with more information from the hard sciences in order to actually have better interventions in the classroom. So this means though before there's these traditional ideas that okay we are waiting to be enlightened by the neuroscientists we used to do that, we used to wait and I've gone to many teacher conferences where a neuroscientist will come in and share their knowledge and everybody's just waiting to hear the word from on high now the practice is different we've got to flip this around a bit now we're looking towards the classroom, it goes from the classroom to the labs and back to the classroom again and we inform each other teachers inform neuroscientists mutually and psychologists usually broker those interventions but there are now more interventions that are occurring thanks to collaboration between neuroscience and educators so hopefully we can find support in each other as opposed to neuroscientists inventing things that they think might be interesting to study actually grounding them in real problems that we have in the classroom and instead of teachers just waiting for the answers from neuroscientists we should be in partnership with them to actually develop better interventions based on real life practice and on real science so in summary what does this mean? We're looking at a mixture of what is mind brain education science mixed with the ideas of better educational interventions from Hattie's work primarily and then looking at this as teacher development across a life span this is not a quick fix this is not something you do in a single workshop this is something that is a lifelong practice of improvement so you might be introduced to a very cool concept and throughout your teacher span or your professional development span you're going to go and get deeper and deeper into that concept as you go along so we know that there's different stages of professional development we know that teachers as professionals are modifying their practice continually but we'd like to put some logic into that you know how do you go about doing what what's more basic than something else so that's the idea here is that we're basically proposing that we marry a couple of concepts that before were not connected and look at them in the best way possible to improve our practice as teachers this means that by using the foundations from mind brain education science we actually can try first to get rid of the myths that teachers are exposed to about the brain and then look up things that are actually principles which are things that are pretty much universal for all human brains there's very few of them for example all new learning passes through the filter of old experience so that's true for any brain you know a newborn baby to an older adult so there's a few things that are principles and then there's other things that are tenets which are things that are also true but that they vary greatly for humans for example nobody will argue that for example sleep is important for learning we know that as well as dreaming sleep helps us pay attention dreaming helps us consolidate memories but nobody can really dictate how much sleep you should have some people sleep 5 hours a day and some people sleep 12 and the average might be 8 but there's a wide range of human variants so we can't really say how much you should sleep even though we can say that sleep is very important so anyways if we look at those things then we can actually feed into certain instructional guidelines so this is what we want to look at today are some of the practical applications of this information in your classroom we'll take a look next at looking at the 50 practical applications of mind brain education science