 Hi, my name is Tracy Tokahama Espinosa and this is a video on learning progressions. Sometimes we think of learning as being a simple process. Somebody teaches something, people take it into their minds, they process it, it goes into memory and therefore they learn it. Well, sorry to burst your bubble but this video kind of wants to break that idea that it's so simplistic. Learning progressions do not actually happen very linearly but actually advance and retract and confirm and revise and relearn at different paces. According to Fisher's Web of Skills theory as well as studies looking at white matter tract increases. Let's look at some of these theories. For 50, 60, 70 years we've had many of these different learning theories of cognitive development and most of these were psychologists who had to think about ideas and imagine the ways that brains must be developing based on their external and observational trades. So we have Piaget's stages of cognitive development, the sensory motor stage roughly zero to two years old, pre-operational stage two to seven years old, the concrete operational stage of seven to eleven years old and formal operations more or less from around eleven onward. Piaget's concepts were based on observing his own children for example and seeing how they had to have this hierarchy of understanding before they could move up to these more complex ideas and thinking. And this led to this core idea of constructivism, how people construct their own realities. You have a piece of knowledge and you have another piece of knowledge and that allows you then to think of this new concept and then that concept paired with another new concept allows you to think of another concept. But then that new concept then can be added onto something else and then become something else new or more complex. So this idea is this constructivism in the brain of your own reality. And cognitive theories of development are pretty much built off of the same kind of vision. How do we build off of base level concepts and go up to higher order concepts? Not only Piaget, Vygotsky, but also Maria Montessori and others speculated about what must be happening in the brain for that to actually occur. Now Vygotsky, a contemporary of Piaget was really very interesting and a lot of very big ideas his own proximal development, social interactions with others, social, historical and cultural mediation of learning, as well as this big idea of thoughts and language. Do thoughts produce language or does language produce thoughts? And in combination, this led to a different kind of theory of cognitive development of the individual, which had great influence of the internal mind, but interacting then with the dynamics of the external world. And if you can bear Vygotsky's theories with Piaget's theories, what's really interesting is they're both constructivists, but they took this in a slightly different way. For example, Vygotsky firmly believed that learning is very social, whereas Piaget believed that it's solitary and children actually have to construct the world themselves based on their interaction with it, but they do it on their own. Vygotsky thought that language drives thought, whereas Piaget thought that thought drives language. So they had some fundamental differences, but they were both considered constructivist thinkers and cognitive development. Later on in the 60s and 70s we had these ideas from Jerome Bruner related to a spiral curriculum, which was pretty clever because it was the first to actually bring into this idea this iterative process of how a human being has contact with the world, you learn a little bit, but then actually unless this same learning is reinforced over time, it actually doesn't solidify into something that that individual could use and transfer later on. So he believed in this spiral curriculum where learning was scaffolded and upon and then it was reinforced by experience, then eventually the individual learns. And then in the 80s and 90s, Kurt Fisher at Harvard developed his idea of dynamic skills theory. And this was groundbreaking at the time because he was really establishing the idea that there were physiological changes in the brain that paralleled what we were observing in behavior. So basically an individual had to, these webs of skills were that the more you know, the more you can know, right? These extended outwards and they attached to other other concepts. And so basically similar to dendrites from the neurons in your brain that basically these new connections could then link to other new connections. And therefore you could grow in your understanding of information. And this was brilliant because it wasn't a clean model. It wasn't this clear linear, let's teach this and learn that, so A to B. And it wasn't even the spiral iterative, neat process. He was basically arguing for this very messy process of how the brain actually connects things together based on life experiences. So other cognitive theories took the idea that training actually enhanced the brain. So basically Erickson's idea that you know, 10,000 hours of practice and you can become an expert in something was very interesting because it built off the ideas of that we see that the more rehearsal you have with a concept or a skill set, the better you get at it. So many of these guys in cognitive theory, not constructivists, cognitiveists believe that you could actually build your learning faster and faster and faster by just simple, pure experience. The more experience you had with concept, the faster you would learn. Now, if we took all of these really cool ideas and put them together, the constructivists and the cognitiveists, all of a sudden you then come up with something called neuro-constructivism. And this is the idea that it's not just your genetic makeup. It's not just the external world. It's not just the number of repetitions that you have, but it's the quality and quantity of those life experiences that will then potentiate the genes that you were born with and make those new connections in a hierarchical learning trajectory. So from here, we start to see at the turn of the century many, many, many more articles that really look at this complementary process of nature via nurture, plus the sprinkling of free will in there, right? So how does what you're born with, how do your genes interact with the environment that you're in in order to create this plasticity or new learning? So basic ideas of neuro-constructivism started to come into play 2008, 2009. This really fed into the idea then of now looking at this networks theory of human development. How do people learn within their context? And then how do these networks then connect to link information in the brain, which is the physical basis is how we establish that new learning has actually occurred. And such theories went on to try to explain how the brain reads, how the brain does basic math, how the brain learns a word, for example, a new word. And this then fed into in 2019, this idea of the five pillars, which I authored, which had to do with the neuro-constructivist hierarchy design of information that goes into our brain, which is divided into five basic types of understanding of our world. They're symbols, patterns, order, categories, and relationships. There's actually nothing we learn that isn't one of those five things. So if you think of the idea of reading a sentence, well, you have to understand the pattern, the order of the words, right? You have to understand the symbols that make up each of those different words. You have different types, words, for example, the categories of nouns versus adjectives, for example. So we found that anything that you learn is one of these five pillars, but you have to be exposed to these over time in repeated contexts to be able to recognize a symbol's patterns, order, categories, and relationships over time. And this, of course, is really hinges on the definition. What is a symbol? What is a pattern? What is order, categories, and what's a relationship? But if you think, well, I haven't heard about it, there's actually nothing that you learn that isn't one of those five things. The final big idea related to learning progressions has to do with this idea of feedback and the development of metacognitive abilities. To learn, you get feedback either from the outside world or you get feedback from yourself, but in either case, the idea is to identify what the goal was, where I am now and the sort of gap between the two and how do I get better at doing that? And there's a direct correlation then to this rehearsed way of giving feedback, how we talk to each other, how we talk to the kids in our lives, how we ask each other, well, that's great. Do you have all the materials you need before you begin that problem solving or have you used all the information possible? Have you used all your senses to gather the information? There's a direct link from feedback to metacognitive abilities. Feedback that we get from others, especially if it's in a questioning form is what serves the basis of our metacognitive skills in the future. The big idea is that your brain cannot not learn. It's naturally gonna learn no matter what, but it does not reach higher levels of thinking, metacognitive skills without explicit instruction. This means it either has to be taught or modeled multiple times before the individual really hooks into it and actually use the metacognitive skills they have. And these metacognitive skills are very basic things like self-questioning. What do I already know about this new information? What do I need to know in order to be successful at this task? Or how can I fill in this gap of knowledge between what I need to know and what I know now? Where do I start? Just these basic questions to ourselves will help us begin any quest in or outside of school in general life, right? So learning progressions also have to do with refining metacognitive skills. And we can habituate kids into doing this by asking them simple things, asking them to observe their world, asking them to think about how they're thinking, asking them what they think they already know about the information. Does this look like something that I've already seen? Do I know how to slow myself down if I start to feel like I'm getting lost or do I know how to organize the information that's around me? Can I summarize the steps that I took? Can I use strategies that have worked for me in the past to do this new skill? The key idea is to get us habituated into thinking of ways that refine our metacognitive skills over time. Okay, that's the last big idea we have about learning progressions. We hope you've come to class with a lot of great questions. Looking forward to talking to you soon. Thanks.