 Hello, everyone. So just so you know, I also spent many years in higher ed as a faculty and dean at the University of California. So my first interactions with Moodle were in the higher ed space. But I'm also aware of many applications that are happening in corporate and nonprofit and private sectors. So excited to talk to you today. Just a little bit about me. I've been at lynda.com, where I have seven courses in the online training library. I've also written some articles on brain science and learning and also how to create a growth mindset culture. So what I'd like to share with you today is some of my own findings. So I just want to be really clear. I do have a doctorate. My doctorate's in leadership, organizations, and education. I am not a neuroscientist. I'm a practitioner. But what I found when I was designing learnings and working in the field with people was that some of the stuff around brain science was really piquing my interest. So I feel like I went and got a second doctorate just based on the number of hours I spent reading the academic journals and talking to the scholars. And what I was looking for was, as amazing as these researchers are, they're not necessarily talking to each other. And there's certainly not someone translating for those of us who are in the field actually creating learning experiences for people in the classroom, whatever kind of classroom that is. So my own research led to me having some aha moments. And I started sharing it with my professional colleagues. And then people wanted more. So we recorded a course at lynda. And then I turned it into the book Wired to Grow. So I want to share with you kind of my findings and how they shaped my own learning design. Because I know you're in a very influential role. The way that you consult with the faculty or the leaders of your organizations, you can help them understand how people learn and leverage the many wonderful features of Moodle to make that more effective. So that's what our journey is about today. The pathway we're going to walk through is understanding neuroscience and potential. We're going to look at some research on growth mindset I'll introduce you to the three phase model I came up with and how that relates to the brain and how the brain learns. And we'll end by looking at what are the key takeaways for those of you who influence learning design. So what's the neuroscience of learning? Well, the neuroscience, what neuroscience really is, is a study of the central nervous system. That's our brain and spinal cord. And the peripheral nervous system, which is everything else. And particularly, we're focusing in on how they work together to create and retain new knowledge and skills. That's what we're in the business of. It doesn't matter what we're designing for. We're trying to change the human that we're working with in some way. And what we're really talking about is potential. We're trying to help everyone operate at their highest potential. So potential is the capacity to become or develop into something in the future. It's the unrealized ability in every single person. It's the unrealized ability in our organizations. And learning is the only way to get there. It is the pathway. So this taps into some of the research by Dr. Carol Dweck. She's a Stanford psychologist. And she studied people who were successful compared to those who weren't. And she found that the differentiator was their mindset. And what she identified was that people have one of two mindsets. So this is essentially a belief about yourself. There's fixed mindset folks who believe that you're kind of born with a set of traits, and after you become an adult, you got what you got. You're only so smart, whatever your IQ is, that's what it is, your people's skills are what they are. And now you just have to use what you have the best that you can. The folks who are most successful had a growth mindset. And what they believed was, oh no, I can always get better. I can always do something to sharpen my skills. I can always learn a little bit more. I can always practice a little bit harder. And so they're always looking for ways to get to that next level of mastery. And when we compare how this plays out in any organization, whether we're talking a classroom or a professional setting, what we find is that they have very different orientations. So fixed mindset folks see effort as unnecessary because you got what you got. Where growth mindset believes, absolutely have to put the time in. It's the only way I'm gonna get to mastery. Their relationship to challenges and feedback is also differentiated. Fixed mindset folks see challenges as something that could reveal a lack of skills so they tend to avoid challenges. And they often are very personally threatened by feedback. Though this is the person who gets triggered on a performance review. Growth mindset embraces challenges and see them as an opportunity to grow and they are always hungry for feedback. Tell me so I can get better. How can I learn so I can do this differently the next time? And their relationship to setbacks and also the success of others is also different. Fixed mindset feedback, sorry, see setbacks as discouraging so they tend to blame others. They look for someone to throw under the bus where growth mindset folks see it as a wake up call. How can I learn from this experience? And then fixed mindset folks are threatened by the success of others to the point where they sometimes go as far as to undermine others to make themselves look better. Where growth mindset actually finds inspiration. Bob did awesome. What can I learn from Bob's experience so I too can be awesome? So the difference that this plays out in any organization and even our classroom settings is that fixed mindset folks tend to stall out. They don't achieve their potential because they're blocking themselves from the path that would get them there where we know that growth mindset folks achieve higher and higher levels of performance and potential because they're willing to put in the time. And what's so funny is whenever I do this talk everyone immediately knows who in their office is on which mindset, right? Here's the amazing news. The truth of our brain is that it's growth mindset. All the research is showing that we have this thing called neuroplasticity which means new neural pathways can be formed all the way up until death. And so we can grow new skills. We can grow new understanding. If you think you're terrible at calculus you just probably didn't have the right teacher and if you get the right teacher and you put in the time you can be great at calculus. So it's blowing the myth that we cannot get better. The problem is we gotta help fixed mindset folks see that about themselves. So a lot of the work that I do when I do corporate leadership training is first introducing these concepts because if I can show fixed mindset folks that the brain really has that neuroplasticity they can shift to the belief that's holding them back and then we can get them on board. Lots of studies have paired this research out and if you're interested and I know some of you love to read the studies like I do so if you wanna geek out on it get my book I've got all the references in there but I'm gonna give you some highlights. So one is this study by Ruth Butler and she took college students cause they're the easiest subjects to get your hands on and she said all right I'm gonna divide the class in half and half of you are gonna be compared to each other so how you do on the test you're gonna be ranked in comparison to your peers and the other half of the class you're gonna be compared to yourself and we're just looking at how you do in relation to yourself. So by reason of that they had to break the test in half first part of the test second half of the test and on the first half of the test both groups did the same statistically insignificant difference. The group that was told they were compared to their peers when they took the second part of the test showed really no change in their performance. The group that was told improvement matters and what we're looking for is improvement improved by a little not just a little a lot. This is potential this is growth mindset and actually a lot of performance review systems are being revised based on this model because it turns out if you measure improvement people step up and improve. So interesting things to check out. The most important word in the growth mindset vocabulary is yet. I'm not good at it yet. I'm not yet mastering this. I can get there. And so I have worked with some corporations where we've changed the performance rating system so that the poor performance is rephrased to be not yet doing X, Y, Z because that creates so much more opening. It's not your label does this. You're not yet performing at this level. We believe in you we can get you there. So after looking through the neuroscience I came up with this three phase model because there's actually three phases when we're designing learning that we need to take a human through. The first is they have to learn. So right now you're in a learning mode. You'd have to actually grok and understand what I'm saying. Then we got to get it into your memory because if it's gone by tomorrow morning kind of a waste of effort, right? And ultimately what we're after is behavior change. As a result of the learning event you got to do something different, right? And there's no learning that we put out anywhere where we're not ultimately after behavior change whether it's compliance, whether it's mastering some information to earn a degree, whether it's around being a better leader or after behavior change. So I find that this material is most valuable if you try it on. So I'm inviting you to try it on for the time that we have together. And I'd like you to pair up, introduce yourself and take one minute each to share something that you personally really want to learn in your life. So I'm asking you to set aside solving your workplaces problem right now. I want you to take this on for you. Do you want to learn to bake bread? Do you want to learn to surf? Is there a new piece of software that's really fascinating you? Money management, pick something that's real to you and try it on and just share that with your partner and then we'll come back together. So we're gonna jump into the first phase of the learn model and there's three things I want you to know here. Two of them you probably are already familiar with. Learning happens in levels. There's a cycle of learning and focus is the key to the beginning of it. So who recognizes this? What is it? Bloom taxonomy. So it turned out Bloom was brilliant before they even had MRI machines. He tapped into some aspects of how the brain works and that's why the model works today, right? It stands the test of time. So we know that there's different kinds of learning that ask your brain to work with material in different ways and we know that in order for particularly today's professionals, adults, adult learning requires most people to work through multiple levels, right? So when I think about when I do learning design, I teach change management for example, I have to make sure that the people in my classes learn those models of change, that they understand them correctly, that they can go out immediately and use them with a team or project that they're involved with on a day to day basis. They can recognize a problem and adjust. So no training rolls out in the real world like we think it does, right? So I need my folks empowered to go, how do I tweak this model? How do I combine two models? How am I going to innovate? And that takes them to the innovation, right? They know something's not working, they have to get creative. And ultimately, evaluation might be determining the ROI on a change that they rolled out. I won't necessarily hit all six levels in one learning event, but over the course of that experience, I'll make sure I hit all six levels. And so making sure that we're blending that in. And then another one that has stood the test of time is Colb's learning cycle, which talks about the perception continuum going from abstract concrete and the processing continuum, which goes from active to reflective, and that ultimately you need to walk people around the model and have them do diverging activities, assimilating activities, converging activities, and accommodating activities. Again, if we apply teaching change management, the learning models of change is gonna come in as the abstract level. Using with a team or project is the concrete. Recognizing a problem and adjusting is on the reflective side, innovating is on the active experimentation, and when we get back to ROI, we're back to the abstract. So both of these models are things you're probably already using, but when we wanna think about how the brain works, we'll come back to this, but we're hitting here as different kinds of connections or schemas, and I'll tell you more about that when we get to phase two. The three structures that are involved in the brain with learning is the hippocampus, the amygdala, and the basal ganglia. So what I wanna do is kinda let you know what each of these features are doing, and the one on the learning side, the first phase of the model is the hippocampus. So the hippocampus, if you take a 3D MRI rendering of it, is a pronged structure, and it actually unites the left and the right hemisphere of the brain, and the knobbly, grape-like-looking thing at the front of it is the amygdala. It's physically attached to the hippocampus, and I'll tell you why in a little bit. Essentially how the hippocampus works is it's our data drive, and it literally works like a data drive. It starts recording information, and then it eventually shoves that information into short-term memory and then long-term memory. So if your hippocampus doesn't record information, there's nothing we can do with it after that. And people who have, if you've ever seen the movie 51st Dates, that's a hippocampus injury, okay? So what's interesting about the hippocampus is what turns it on, the on button for the data recorder is when you focus on something. So when your eyes and ears attune to something and you do that little thing that you do and you focus in, the hippocampus starts recording. So focus is a really important part of what we need to create in our learning experiences. Richard Davidson from the University of Wisconsin calls it phase locking, and Daniel Goleman has written a whole book that just came out last year on the importance of focus. Turns out it's not just good for learning, it's good for all kinds of stuff. But what the research is showing is that the myth of multitasking is truly a myth. So when we're learning, we cannot multitask, period. Full stop, okay? Because what happens is the hippocampus cannot record more than one set of information. If let's say you're paying attention to this presentation, but you look down at your computer and you start checking your email, what your brain really does is it goes back and forth between those two activities. It doesn't track both simultaneously. So it's called switch-tasking. I've renamed it swiss-tasking because what it means is you've got two recordings and holes in both of them. So when you're reading your email and I become the Peanuts teacher, wah, wah, wah, in the background, you're not capturing what I'm saying. And when you're kind of listening to me and you're reading your email and it says do not send Bob the email, your brain drops the word not and you send the email and get in trouble. So we know that we cannot multitask when we are learning. And in fact, it's really interesting is that, let's say you're all in a classroom experience together and 90% of you are focusing. If a couple of you are playing games on your computer texting your friends or whatever, the focused learners focus is impacted. It's actually brought down by the distraction of the non-focused learners. I call that secondhand distraction and it's as damaging as secondhand smoke for the learning experience. So when we're focusing, what's the max amount that the hippocampus can take in before it has to process that information? How many minutes do you think? Shout it out, people. 50, 15, 20, three, five. Answers 20, okay? 20 minutes max. Now you can keep paying attention, but what happens is the recording starts to drop off the front end. And this is why, why are we still doing hour-long lectures? I don't know. But what you can do is take 15 minute learning or 20 minute learning experiences and string them together. So I'll still do a half-day training for a group of people, but everything is broken down into 15 minute chunks. I never go over 15 because I figure there's some variation in hippocampuses. And then I always do a processing activity. Now the cool thing is our processing activities are a range of things, and they can be done online, they can be done in group experiences, but you have to give the brain something to do to push it into short-term memory so it's fresh to record again. So let's give you a chance to try that on. Take a couple minutes to see how you can think about the thing you wanna learn, baking bread, learning software. How can you break it into 15 minute chunks and then process and then do another chunk? And is there anything you need to be thinking about around bloom or coal that would enable you to be more powerfully engaging in that learning experience? Try that on for two minutes. Okay, so that's the learn part. We have to focus, we have to take it in. Now the tricky part comes. We gotta get into people's memories, right? So that they can use it down the road. So we're onto the remember phase. There's three things here, connections, emotions, and retrievals. So let's first look at connections. Our brain actually grows memories. It doesn't just make them out of the blue. How our brain works is when you're learning something, it takes that in, and if it can hook it on to something you already know, those are called schemas. We have all these little file folders in our head. If we can hook on to a schema that already exists that information is nearly unforgettable because it's already attaching to a brain structure. So what's a schema? Well, when I say the word banana, your brain has already offered up some information. Fruit, yellow, do you like brown spots or not? Is it affiliated with baking with your mom? For me, it also is attached to traveling in Venezuela where they're called Camburis. I went to UCSB, Jack Johnson saying banana pancakes. He was an alum, he lives in Hawaii. I had my honeymoon in Hawaii. I'm now divorced from my first husband but my second husband loves banana pancakes. So you can kind of see this file folder, right? And what's awesome is it's infinite, right? We can cross reference. So something to get pulled into multiple folders. When you've had a really great instructor in your life, particularly in an abstract field like math and science, what they were great at was taking something abstract and hooking it on to a schema that you already had in your brain. So we want to help instructors be great at that. And there's some things that we can do. So these are the types of connections that exist in the brain and we can play with all five of them in our learning design. I'm gonna talk to you about each one. First is metacognition, wordplay, insight, social and music. Metacognition is just a fancy word for thinking about thinking, right? It's just taking that meta perspective. Right now we're thinking about how we learn. So we're having a meta experience right now. Another one is just memories. Asking people to think of a time they learned really easily or a time when they were their best self as a leader. So activating their memories. I don't need to know what your memories are. I just ask you to go to your memories and then I'm gonna hook something on to them. We certainly can have self-reflection or an assessment. So having people do some self-reflection, taking an assessment, all of those things are new information about themselves. And one of my favorites is appreciative inquiry. So we can take people to good memories or stressful memories. And it turns out that taking people to good memories are more effective. So if you were in my leadership class, I could ask you think of a time you failed miserably, right? And I'm sure we can all think of one, right? But I've now also activated any embarrassment, shame, fear, and all of those emotions that go with that memory, right? And I've turned on the failure part of your brain. Instead if I say think of a time when you were your best self as a leader, you totally crushed it when you were leading. What did that look like? I've now activated a different part of your brain. And appreciative inquiry says let's go there and harvest what made that different than wallowing around in the failures. You can still do that, but you're activating the failure schemas. All right, so word play. Word play works because you're tapping into the language centers that already exist. So fill in the blank. I before E, every good boy, that's fine. April, June, and November. No, wait, 30 days has September. Okay, I just gave you the answer, oops. So I use this image because I took AP Bio many moons ago, and I can still tell you what the fungi are because me and my friend, Ian, we were studying together, came up with orange zebras always bite dried fruit. And that reminds us that it's, oh, oh, my seat, zygomyces, asking my skis, the cityomyces, et cetera. This is why acronyms work because you're taking something complex and turning it into a little package. And if you can remember what the letters stand for, you can unpack it again. Pneumonic devices, same thing. So word play works, have fun with it. It's one of the ways you can play with a connection. All right, what do you see in this image? Who sees a young girl? Raise your hand. Who simultaneously sees an old lady? If you don't see it, lean to a neighbor who does and ask them to help you. I'll see if I can help out here. So the young lady is wearing what looks like to be a fur coat. She's looking away and that's her jawline. And we're seeing the side of her face, her hair, and she's got a white scarf on. To look at the older woman, this is her chin and these are her lips. So that's her mouth right there, that's her nose. And the ear of the young girl is the eye of the older woman. See that? Okay, so one you probably haven't seen before. What animal do you see? Who also sees a horse? Okay, horse people keep your hands up. As you see the horse, raise your hand. People who see the horse start helping out your friends. Requires a shift in perspective. See it? The head of the frog is the nostrils of the horse. The horse is 90 degrees sideways, it's main is the water. So turn your head 90 degrees. Ah, yes, we see it now. Okay. So what sound did you all make when you saw it? Ooh, ah, right? That is actually the sound we make when the neurons connect, right? It's a moment of insight. And what we have found neurologically is when people have a moment of insight and they see something in a new way, it is unforgettable. You could see that image 20 years from now and you'd be like, it might take me a second, but I know there's a horse in here somewhere. So some scientists are saying that learning should be defined as something that creates a permanent change in the brain because that moment is not undone. It's kind of like when Neo took the red pill in the matrix, right? You could never not see it. And this is what great education is about, right? We take people to moments of insight. Instead of telling them, we set them up to have the aha moment. And as a learning designer, that completely shifted the way I designed. Instead of telling somebody something in 15 minutes, even if it takes me 25 for them to get there on their own, I'll choose them getting there because it'll be unforgettable. So how do we induce insight? Well, there's some ways that I have found that work. One is to introduce a range of concepts. When I teach anything, I almost always pick three theoretical models, not just one. And I'm doing that for two reasons. One is I've set people up to have the connections between them, right? There's aha moments as they see the connections between those models. The other thing is, because I don't know what people's schemas are, I've hedged my bets that one of those models is really gonna resonate for someone's experience and beliefs and knowledge. So we can leverage that. Letting people learn on their own. What they have found is, and this is, you all know adult learning theory, that adults, when they need an answer, that's when they're most primed to learn. And so when we can go find the answer at the moment that we're seeking, really powerful learning experience, it's why I work for lynda.com, it's why we have online training available. It's the power of Moodle, right? People can get information 24-7 wherever they are. So having that ability to find the information when you need it. And really interestingly, it's giving people time for reflection. So where do you have your best ideas? When you're having those flashes of insight and those big aha moments, where are you? What are you doing? Showering. Showering. Sleeping. Sleeping. Reading. Reading. Going for a run. Cooking. Gardening. No one has ever said sitting at my desk thinking. Not ever. And I've done this around the world. So there's something about, what we know is when we're truly focused and thinking about something, we activate the prefrontal cortex. There's a lot of measure of energy there. But it's when we relax and we let that energy dissipate that some of these connections can be made, these moments of insight. So I argue that we should be spending less time in long learning events, set them up in smaller chunks and intentionally use those times between as setting people up for those moments. And the time away they spend away from your learning experience can be just as valuable as the time they spent in it. So going on to the fourth type of connection, social. We are wired to be social beings. Our survival depends on us living in packs, okay? So many parts of our brain are designed to read emotion and others decide who's friend and foe, form loving relationship, et cetera. We can activate this in our learning events just by bringing together people as long as they're not with fearful enemies, learning becomes a more joyful experience just because they're in community. And so when we have people learn together, what happens is we not only create those positive emotions but we activate the learning with those relationships. So tomorrow when you run into your partner that you're talking with today, you can be like, dude, learning anything new about bread last night or what are you thinking about surfing? And so that learning now as you talk about it gets reactivated even though I'm no longer with you and we're talking about it. I use that a lot with management training. I always set my managers and leaders up in coaching pairs because I wanna keep anchoring the learning to that relationship and that way they can continue to leverage it. And the fifth one, which I don't think any of us are using very well, music, music. We have millions of lyrics in our head and you can not hear a song for 20 years, comes on the radio and you're humming along like you've never forgotten it. The reason that is is because music is the only thing that gets wired in every lobe of the brain. Musical learning is indestructible. You can have a severe brain injury and the music is still there. And in fact, that's how they brought Gabby Giffords speaking abilities back. She could not speak. In the same minute, they could start playing a song and she could sing the words that she could not say. And so they're using music therapy with all kinds of brain injuries, veterans, folks who have autism, they're using it because it's a way around some of the parts of the brain that might be damaged or not functioning. And if any of you have loved ones who are suffering from Alzheimer's, run, don't walk to see the documentary alive inside. Really phenomenal research showing that if you take someone who's almost catatonic in their inability to be present in today's world and they get to hear music that was meaningful to parts of their life, like the songs they loved, it activates those memories and their personality comes back online for a period of time. I mean, I cried through the whole thing. So I want to give you a couple of minutes here to play with. You wouldn't use all five types of connections. You'd pick a couple that seem relevant to the thing that you're trying to teach or learn. Try this on. What are some ways you could leverage your own learning by using some of these connections? Okay, so I took you through the five types of connections. I wanted you to process that because there was a chunk there, but picking up on the second thing we can use to push things into memory, emotions. Emotions, turns out emotions are really important to the learning experience. And we know that we experience a range of emotions. There's some core emotions that we share with all mammals, joy, sadness, fear, et cetera. And if you've not yet seen Inside Out, I encourage you to watch that. It does a great job. Actually, neuroscientists and psychologists consulted on the movie and they do a really great job of kind of articulating this emotional landscape. But here's where it relates to learning. The amygdala, remember on our 3D MRI is physically attached to the hippocampus? Well, the amygdala is our major survival structure. It's constantly scanning for potential danger and all of our major nerves go into it, our sensory nerves, so the optical nerve, the oral nerve, olfactory nerve, et cetera. It's constantly scanning for are you in danger so it can kick off the fight or flight response and save you. So that's great when you're in a truly life-threatening situation. Not so great when you're maybe in a staff meeting. But when the amygdala gets to a certain level of arousal, it turns on the hippocampus. It's part of our mechanism so that it says essentially, this is important, remember this, start recording now. And that's so if we survive the danger, we have that information so we can survive it again. What we want in our learning events is to use the amygdala judiciously. We want to arouse it but not take people to terror, okay? And if you think about, but some of us grew up in times where the teaching method of the time was fear, intimidation, and shame, right? You would sit on the edge of your seat because the professor might call you out and embarrass you in front of your peers. That works, it's not great for the long term. Some of you are giving me a thumbs up like, yes, this is my favorite method or yes, I lived through that and survived. Okay, so but what we know is in the learning moment, we can have things that are threatening, we can have things that are rewarding. So if I told you all right now you want a million dollars in the lottery, that would also stimulate your amygdala, right? And what would happen to this learning experience? You'd run out of the room and never listen to me again, right, because you have something bigger. So what we know is slightly positive is what puts the brain in the right learning moment. And awesome, for us, there's lots of great things we're already doing that do this. So we know that the stars of learning are sharing with others. We get that connection bump, we get to talk a little bit. Light competition and quizzes, if they're used in a playful way and there's not big consequences for failing. Games, gamification totally works. It turns on this part of the brain, humor. Humor, you gotta be careful though, because humor is really delicate. Something I think is funny might actually activate pain and shame in someone else. So you have to be really careful with your humor that you're picking something that's really gonna take folks to the right place. Certainly application reflection on demand learning because people get to find their answers. Aha, we talked about that. And the stuff that blew my mind, gratitude and mindfulness. So it turns out having a gratitude practice puts your brain in an incredibly receptive space for learning. So we've started doing this in staff meetings. We start staff meetings instead of saying how are you doing today? We say what's something you're grateful for. And I don't care how pissed off you are when you come into that meeting. You cannot think about something you're grateful for and hold on to that emotional state. It just puts you in a happier state. And then on top of it, the research on mindfulness is literally mind blowing. So I'm a pretty tightly wound person. I am not someone who would have ever considered meditating. But after I started reading the neuroscience of meditation and there's one researcher I would encourage you to follow. His name is Richard Davidson. He's at the University of Wisconsin, Richard Davidson. He's putting meditators on MRI machines and doing full scientific brain scans to really measure what's happening. And he's put Tibetan monks on and it turns out their brains are very different from us civilians. But he's taken us civilians and had us meditate one time for 10 minutes. Permanent change in the brain. Permanent. And the more you do it, the more your brain changes. What they're finding from the research is that as you meditate and you get a regular practice and it can be as little as 10, 15 minutes a day, the amygdala actually shrinks and becomes less reactive and your resilience increases. You become much more resilient to change stress when something bad happens to you recover faster. So after I read all of this, it was kind of like, oh, shit, I gotta meditate. Which is not something I thought I would ever do but I now meditate for 10 to 15 minutes a day. And my favorite tool is desk yogi. You actually turn your workstation into a mindfulness station. So it's something you can buy an individual subscription to or you can, there's corporate solutions. I love that. And the other thing that I love is Deepak Chopra does these 21 day meditations. You can get it at the Chopra Center and they're on your phone and they're around a theme. So like one of my favorite ones is gratitude because you get gratitude and meditation together which is like Kumbaya land. All right, so then the third thing is retrievals. This is where we got it wrong in school. Years ago we thought repetitions is what made learning happen. So remember all these times we had to do the problems over and over and over and we had to write the vocabulary words over and over. That's not what's working. What works is retrievals. So repetitions is taking the information in over and over and over again. Retrievals is going in and pulling it back out. So flashcards, quizzes, making yourself pull it back out. The studies show that the sweet spot is three that you see a significant difference in retention particularly long-term retention at three when you go to four, five, six it's negligible, so we want three. Another study that was done, we took college students who were learning math and they did 10 problems on the first day. We took a different group and had them learn the same math and do five problems. Week later they caught up and they did five problems more. A week later they were tested. First group had 75% accuracy, second group had 70%. Okay, first group's obviously better. But four weeks later it made a significant difference with the second group being twice as likely to retain that information. And another study which I think is really interesting was they said, okay, does time of day matter when we do this retrieval? So they had a group learn something and they didn't really do, they didn't do a retrieval. So they remembered 50%. They had a group do a retrieval 12 hours later. They went up to 55. They had another group do 12 hours overnight. So still 12 hours but split overnight. And then the group who did 24 hours within overnight got to 75%. What's the difference here? Sleep, sleep. Turns out our sleeping brain is doing all kinds of neurological stuff that is really important. And so during the night when we're sleeping our brain actually takes everything we learned during the day and the hippocampus is making choices around what gets deleted and what gets pushed to long-term memory and a hook to your schemas that you have. And again that movie Inside Out actually depicts it in a really funny way. So here's what was really crazy. And again this changed my life forever. The last hour of sleep is when we're doing most of this work. So if you're setting an alarm to wake up and you're short changing your last hour of natural sleep you're actually harming your ability to learn. You should sleep the amount of time it takes for you to wake up naturally. So if you need to be up at 6 a.m. to get to your job you need to figure out when to go to bed so that you wake up naturally at six o'clock without alarm. All right I'm gonna skip the next reflection just to make up a little time for starting late and then we'll keep going. But one thing I'd want you to think about is how can you take the thing you wanna learn and get yourself three retrieval spaced with sleep. That's the sweet spot. And when you think about designing learning for other people how do you have them get that information and space it with sleep. So let's jump into the third phase, the final phase, do. Ultimately we're trying to change behavior, right? So if people had a great learning experience but didn't do anything different we haven't really achieved what we were after. So the thing here is all the research on habits. Q, baby steps and reward. And if you have not yet read Charles Dew Higgs book on the power of habit I encourage you to. It synthesizes a lot of this great research. But whether we're teaching someone a new skill we're trying to get after behavior change we're ultimately trying to get them to form what is called a habit neurologically. And for those of us in the learning space we know that we're starting to get a lot of pressure to demonstrate the ROI of learning, right? And we should. Well reaction or satisfaction to a learning event is the lowest level. Did people like it? You know and sure they're gonna ask you to evaluate this keynote and if you liked it awesome. But ultimately what I want you to do is did you learn the content? Did you walk away with the new understanding of the brain? Did you walk away with the new understanding of how we can activate the brain to learn? More importantly can you implement it on the job? If you go back to your jobs and do something different with this information now we're getting somewhere, right? And you know most organizations are rolling out impact to drive some kind of change in the business results. For folks achieving a college degree it's kind of achieved that accomplishment. But like I work at LinkedIn, I've worked at Linda where we're trying to drive specific business metrics that are either gonna make us more money or stop losing money, right? And then ultimately you can calculate the cost of the learning intervention against the cost of the thing you were trying to increase or decrease and see if it was value added, right? So a lot of us have to get into this world. It's really about now leveraging behavior change. So the part of our brain that's involved here is the basal ganglia. I love the basal ganglia. I think it's the coolest brain structure ever. And what it does is when you are doing an activity over and over and over again, it says, wait a minute. We, this person's obviously doing this a lot. We should do something different with this information. So if you think about anything new you ever learned let's take driving a car as an example. Remember how much concentration it took? You know, the mirrors and the wheel and the speed and for some of us the clutch, that would mess me up. You know, just trying to track all that stuff. Well over time, as you're doing something over and over the brain says we cannot spend this much energy. And what we know is that it's glucose that the brain burns and you can measure new activity and how much glucose burn is happening. When you do something over and over the basal ganglia kicks in and says we've gotta turn this into a low energy package so it can run on automatic in the background and not take up that prefrontal cortex energy. So it's why when you're new to any environment it may be hard for about six weeks or whatever and then all sudden it starts to get easy, whatever it is. So when we're thinking about habits what I would argue a lot of us are doing in the learning space is we're designing habits that are gonna take more mental energy and the better we work with the brain and get the basal ganglia involved the better we're gonna turn that behavior into a habit. So a habit has three components to it. The first is the cue which says start the behavior. So getting in your car is the cue. Now do the routine, the series of behaviors that move the car and ultimately there's always a reward in order for it to become a habit otherwise the brain won't turn it into habit. So what's the reward for driving? Freedom, yes, right. When you're a teenager getting to go out without mom and dad, woohoo! And for most of us today it's getting where we wanna go. So that's the reward. I could also say in the morning I walk into my kitchen I turn on my kettle and my reward is caffeine or it's 8 a.m. you go to your job and you don't get fired. So a reward can be a positive thing you're moving toward or avoiding a negative, which one's more powerful? Positive, so carrots do work better than sticks. So for those of us thinking about learning I would say that we are all habit designers and I want you to take that on. I want you to take on if I start thinking about the learning is actually driving a habit how can I help people build that habit as easily and as effectively as possible what does that look like? So when we are helping people build a habit you wanna have the cue be something really obvious if it's another habit that they already do even better but you wanna make the cue for this new behavior really obvious, then you must break it into baby steps. And by baby steps I mean steps so small you cannot fail. This is where a lot of us fall down. We make it super complex. Turn on the computer, log into the software do this and this and this and this and there's just too many steps. We gotta break it into real baby steps and then ultimately there needs to be a reward for doing that behavior. Now yeah, chocolate works. A ding works, a gold star works. Our brain is not that sophisticated. It's really happy with something super small. Social also works. So a high five, you know when skin touches skin releases oxytocin in the bloodstream high five doing stuff with other people is also a reward. I want you to see this in action. So this nine year old girl has never high jumped in her life and using those three things cue baby steps and reward she's gonna learn. And the reward she's been told is when you do the behavior right you're gonna get a click. Like those dog clickers, she gets a click. She knows what it is. And in addition I want you to look for if she gets the behavior right she gets a click. If she drops a previous behavior they just go reinforce that the next time they don't take away the click, okay? So she gets a reward every time she does it right. Let's check volume on this to make sure it comes up right. Okay, how old are you? Nine. And have you ever high jumped before? No. Okay, Jennifer I'll show you. The tag point is arched back. It's every 10 days, okay? The tag point is throw the arms up. The tag point is arched back. The tag point is shoulders to mat. The tag point is kicking up with right foot. Just standing there. The tag point is kick with right leg bent. The tag point is arched back. I know, so inspiring, huh? But it really made me realize, wow, I certainly don't think about my learner's experience in that way. Like how do I break it down into baby steps? How do they get knowledge that they've done it correctly? How do we continue to make it a rewarding experience? Oftentimes, and I work a lot in corporate learning we're not only taking them to a new habit that's awkward, uncomfortable, difficult to do, we're taking them away from a behavior that was well-grooved, easy, and comfortable. But we don't give the brain the same reward for trying the difficult thing as sticking with the old behavior, which is why 70% of change initiatives fail. People are wired to stick with what they already know. And unless we intentionally override that, we're not really gonna create the behavior change we want. And even as a professor, I mean, I'll say that every time I set up, it was called Sakai at UCSBR Moodle-based product, I would go through the 10-week quarter the same way, like okay, I gotta load up my course. Well, the last time I did that was 12 weeks ago, wait, what do I do? And then I'd have to do it. And then I'd get into the middle of the course, wait, how do I do this part? And then the grades, how do I submit this part? And I needed those resources so I could go back and easily get the information. But I wasn't getting enough repetitions for a while to make it easy. It was always kind of a pain in the butt until I got the hang of it. So what we're seeing demonstration of is Hebb's Law. What Hebb's Law says is any action or thought is just a neural pathway. It's just a neural pathway. And what we wanna do is run that neural pathway when those neurons fire together, they wire together. And it takes 20 to even get a neural pathway formed. By 40, you're in basal ganglia habit land. And by the time you get to 66, they measure the microns getting thicker on that neural pathway. So this also helps us understand that if you're doing something daily, you're gonna get to 40 pretty fast. If it's something that they do once a quarter or once a month, not so quickly. So how do we work with that? Let me give you two minutes to try that on. Think about what you wanna learn as a habit. What's the cue? How would you break it down into baby steps? What kind of reward could you give yourself? It's gotta be a meaningful reward for you. By the way, you don't have to do the reward forever. You just have to do it until the habit is formed. So usually the reward has to be present for roughly the first 40 repetitions. And then you can take the reward away and the brain's happy to keep going. Give that a try. So some of the ways this helped me was like, we all wanna diet and exercise better, right? Get healthier. But I realized that the truth was, my brain was much happier sitting on the couch eating Ben and Jerry's and watching Downton Abbey. Like that was really rewarding. And going out and sweating and getting hot and uncomfortable, that can't compete, right? And so I needed to start really heavy loading reward onto my exercise. So I happen to be a huge NPR fan. I love weight, weight, don't tell me. So I only let myself, oh yeah, you are too. I only let myself listen to it while I'm exercising. So now I have this real feel good funny thing that happens and I've attached it to exercising. And I actually am finding that I really like it. So, and you know, I've joined Weight Watchers. I get little medals every time I eat well and I record my stuff. And so there's ways that we can use this pretty base level of our brain to help us be successful at the things that we wanna do. All right, so those are the three phase models that I would want you to know. And now I wanna just kind of shift our attention to what does this mean for us as learning designers. So for me, I had six key takeaways. The first was, duh, we gotta work with the brain. And most of the ways we think about education actually goes against how we're wired. So how do we start rethinking what learning looks like, how we set up learners for success by working with how we naturally learn? The second key takeaway for me was to shift the spotlight. I definitely, as a professor at the University of California liked my time on the stage and being the person infusing the knowledge to the waiting masses. But I realized that if you're really gonna care about learning, it cannot be about me. It has to be about the audience and where they are and what a-ha moments they need to make the change in their life. And so it totally shifted the spotlight from it being about what I'm going to infuse to what am I gonna turn on in the audience that's naturally there. I started to really have an appreciation for activating schemas. And many of us who teach in multi-generational environments have already seen this. You know, a reference that works for boomers, the millennials are like, huh, what? And vice versa. So we already are navigating schemas. I just got more crisp around it, like how do I pick schemas that are gonna work? So another example is, you know, I know we hear about the power of story. Story works, our brain is wired for story, but we have to be careful with story. So if you were to tell a story about your loving childhood home and all the great things that happened, what you would activate in me is feelings of sadness and loss because I grew up in a really abusive household and that's not the experience I had, right? But if you instead told me a story of, I want y'all to think about a time you felt really connected to other people you felt really supported and loved, now I can pull up that memory and you didn't have to know what my home life was like. So even just shifting our stories or our questions can help activate the schemas you really wanna activate without taking people to an emotional state you didn't intend. It's all about the power of three, baby. So I think about three when I do learning design. I'm gonna think about three levels of bloom. I can get to three in one learning event. If I need to hit more than that, it's probably at least two learning events. I'm gonna try to set them up for three types of connections, whether that's music or social or word play. And then I'm gonna try to get the three retrieval space with sleep. And the only way you can do that is blended learning. There's no way to do it without blending our learning. And so one of the ways many of us are approaching this is by flipping the classroom. You have folks do some pre-learning for all the leadership development I do. I have people watch one of my courses on lynda.com. You could watch a TED Talk, you could read a book, et cetera, then you come into the classroom and you take that base learning and now you go deeper and you get into the schemas and the habit building. And I actually make people do the behavior. I need them to go back to their workspace and do. We do it in the room. And we do it a number of times in the room because I'm literally trying to build the correct neural pathway, not just talk about it and hope they go back and do it. And then the after learning, a few days later intentionally sending a ping or a mini quiz or something to force a retrieval. There's some really exciting things happening in learning if you've not let explored adaptive learning and some of the power. There's so much amazing stuff now happening with our ability to create the stuff in the learning experience by using adaptive technology. And then perhaps most importantly is be a habit designer. Ultimately think about the end game. What are you trying to change? And work backwards from there. If I know the behaviors I need my folks to leave the room with and then who are they? What are the aha moments I need to set them up for? I'm now gonna have that natural story arc that takes them to where I need them to be. If you wanna learn more, I have a course on lynda.com that's essentially this presentation. Lot more details in my book that's on Amazon and I'll email to Gavin the article that I've written on six tips for working with the brain so that you have access to that. And I wanna leave you with my favorite quote about learning. In times of change, learners inherent the earth while the others find themselves equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists. So to the power of learning you all do an amazing job empowering others to learn and let's embrace the yet. Thank you.