 The next principle has to do with prior experience, that new learning is influenced by prior experience. We did not talk enough about the physiology of this, and many of you said, Okay, what is the latest research tell us about this? How does this really happen, you know, mechanically? What is going on in the brain? What exact experiences are you talking about? Many of you asked, are these things that are explicitly known to the individual? Like, do I have to know that I had that experience for it to influence me? Which you don't, right? So one of you really summarized this really well by saying, okay, tell me, one, two, three. How does the brain learn specifically? Which areas are heavily involved? Okay, the whole brain is involved. As we mentioned before, you have sensory perception, it goes in through the brain. There's a review of prior knowledge internally in the limbic system in the brain, but then where are memories stored throughout the cortex, which is on the outer layers of the brain? There's so much to all of us. You don't have memories stored in any single part of the brain, although there do tend to be, for example, memories of musical songs. They tend to be in the auditory cortex stored in these areas. However, they are processed thanks to the hippocampus, and they may be retrieved through emotional systems in the brain. So these are different pathways all over the place. So your entire brain is important for learning. So there are key hubs when we say which areas are heavily involved. So we're always talking about networks, right? But the key hubs would be, for example, when we talk about mathematical symbol processing, the singular gyrate, which is a key hub for mathematical processing. Or you'll see that, you know, Broca's or Vernici's areas tend to be a key hub for linguistic processing. But it's not that it's just that area of the brain. It's that there's multiple pathways. So when you say, what are the key areas that are heavily involved? It depends on the type of learning, for example, whether it's math or language or music or interpreting other people's faces or doing body movements or catching a baseball. Different areas will have more emphasis. For example, you can see a growth in motor cortex areas when an individual does something like learn how to drive or hit a baseball or play a piano piece. You'll see the expansion in the motor cortex, which on the other hand, physics or higher math problems or things like that. As I mentioned before, the antiques singular gyrates see a lot more movement. And how do we measure that? You can look at the increase in white matter tracks that occur in these different areas of the brain. It's not that learning is in any one area of the brain. And it's not, for example, when we talk about importance of executive functions, it's not just frontal lobes. There's a lot of key hubs in the frontal lobes that are, you know, ping-ponging back and forth. But it's not just that you learn how to have inhibitory control or working memory or cognitive flexibility just using those pieces of your brain, right? In fact, you'll see all kinds of other things that relate to visual processing or motor processing based on executive functions as well. So it's never in one part of your brain. And I think that that's a real challenge to us to get around the complexities of typical learning pathways, for example. I mentioned to you before, and if you're interested in having a look at study that we did on what literature exists to show how an individual learns to read, zero to eight years old, what parts of the brain are involved in that. And it's stunning. We find at least 16 neural networks which branch out into like 107 different pathways which in turn are related to thousands or hundreds of thousands of neural connections. And that is all over the brain. Being able to retrieve the meaning of a word is very different from understanding how to spell the word or understanding how intonation changes the emphasis of the meaning of the sentence or whatever. Those are all different neural networks. And so where does learning occur in the brain? It's everywhere in the brain. So it's very, very hard to limit this. But what we can now see thanks to the Connectome Project are a lot of key hubs. Sometimes they're called nodes but they're the main spaces through which information tends to travel through those places multiple times. So you'll see these brain scans and the imaging nowadays before it started off with like these simple models where these blue dots would indicate core hubs of where things are occurring in the brain. Where through which the information tends to pass or when they would say, oh, this is where reading is occurring in the brain. No, guess what? It's going all over the place and there's multiple hubs that we can see here. So you'll find now that in some of the better graphs they actually have sized these hubs. So they do this on a three-dimensional scale. So they do it by color. They do it by location. They also do it by the size of the little ball there. We'll tell you how many different times information has passed through a particular network. When somebody is trying to understand a piece of information or listen to information or to read something or to do a math problem or whatever, the visuals now are very different. We don't just see one space of your brain lighting up because we're combining multiple different types of neural networks. So you can actually see through which types of hubs is the information passing multiple times and with what frequency and in what order. So it's really based on that information that we can say which areas are most heavily involved. It depends. So if you say to learn a violin piece, you know, if you ask me that then I can send you research on that particular skill set and what neural networks tend to be involved in that. So it's a very wishy washy answer, but it's everywhere. The brain is involved. The entire brain is involved in learning, especially in school learning, which has such a variety of different types of learning that occurs. So how to experience is shape pathways of learning. One of the most interesting things that is happening is that when you see the networks, the repetition through the different pathways actually changes the brain. And so between the connections that you have here, you have between one neuron or groups of neurons and other neurons. You have what's called a myelin sheath, which links these different pieces together, right? And as they are linked, this gets strengthened. The myelination gets strengthened based on repetition. So the myelination will become thicker. It's kind of like a fatty glial cell. So basically it creates the speed with which information passes between these neurons. So this is an animation here, but when you have a neuron, you have the connections between the neurons. The more that this link is strengthened, the faster the retrieval. So based on that, the multiple experiences you have with a similar concept would reinforce that speed of recall between those different parts of the brain, which means that really it can become habituated. For example, you don't remember right now how you learned to drive, but because it's been rehearsed so many times, those connections are so, so strong that the speed that you can do it is almost unconscious so that we know that the more experiences, the more quality, good experiences you have with something, the stronger that connection is. And that can be good or bad. If you have had a negative learning experience where you've seen one parent abuses the other parent, you know, and that's a norm in the house, you begin to think that, well, you know, dad comes home, gets angry, has a drink, his mom, that's normal. So that's a link in your brain where you've decided that that's a pattern of behavior that's acceptable just because of the frequency that it's occurred. So we know that higher experiences don't always have to be good and the learning that results isn't always good. You can learn to be racist. You can learn to accept violence. You can accept those things because the frequency of the experience has created this really kind of cemented version of an experience for you, which means that a lot of times you might have to unlearn something in order to relearn a new pattern of behavior. The third question here is, how does variation in normal childhood experiences shape learning, which is exactly what we're talking about here. You know, growing up in a healthy home environment versus one in which there's, you know, toxic stress and where you feel threatened all the time, you learn behavior based on that experience. And so it does literally change the structure of the human brain. Kids who are brought up in situations where there's extreme toxic levels of stress do suffer. Kids without mistreatment in the home, they tend to have a greater variety of links, connections. Whereas maltreated children might have a much more limited amount of neural networks they can depend on for future learning just because they have been taught not to rehearse certain networks, not to see things, not to react to things in different ways. So we know that the effects of abuse and neglect are severe. They do have an impact on a child's brain. Children who are under extreme conditions of neglect who are in constant levels of high threat mode may have higher levels of cortisol, for example, stress hormone which actually will reduce brain volume. So we know that these types of experiences, neglect, abuse, traumatic experiences can have a very big effect on the developing brain. Another person asks very philosophically, you know, I'd like to learn how the relationship between past experiences and how we end up being who we are, what is that link? And really, there are, you know, some philosophical reflections that basically say you are your memories. There's a lot of wonderful reflection on this, I believe, Eric Candell and some others who've written about memory really talk about the tragedy of Alzheimer's, for example, because who you are was so grounded in what you had experienced that you can't uncouple the two. So if you'd like to get more specific with that question, if it does have to do with aging and past experience, please let me know. Or if there's something else that you're getting out with that question, please, please write to me. But the bottom line is basically your experiences really do create the sum of who you are. And this is connected to getting to this idea. The more you know, the more you can know. The more links, and this is very much based on the physiological structures of your brain. When you know something, you've created links, right? But by knowing that, it potentiates the fact that you can connect to something else to that new link, right? So the more you know, the more you can know. The technical biology related to these topics, again, I'll refer you to the longer videos. If you have the chance to look at those, I think it'd be a great way to better understand how prior experiences actually influence new learning. The bottom line, though, is due to the simple efficiency of the brain. The brain seeks out what it already knows about anything that it's exposed to. Before, it tries to forge a whole new connection. The first thing it does is ask yourself, what do I already know about this concept? And this is something really great for teachers to do in class. You all know that power of stimulating prior experiences to help link to new information, right? So even asking explicitly, what do you already know about this concept? Or what does this look like that you already know? Is really, really helpful in teaching new concepts. As we know that prior experiences influence new learning. The natural question emerges then, okay, so how many prior experiences do I need to learn something new? Or how many times do I have to be exposed something to know it now, to own it, to really say, I know this? Well, again, like in all answers in this field, it depends. One, based on what you already know, a new experience, a single new experience this could be enough to consolidate new learning about something else. Remember we gave the example of if you already know how to add, I can teach you to subtract in about 10 steps, right? So because you have strong foundation on knowledge and prior experience, it's very similar. All I have to do is call out the slight differences between addition and subtraction and that can really consolidate the concept. We know that things get into long-term memory in just one of three ways. You know, one is self-preservation. Things that help you survive are learned really fast. Like just one quick experience, like sticking the fork and the light socket once is enough to learn it. But then the way we typically teach in school is by association. So what we're saying is, you know, addition, subtraction. They're very similar. How are they different, right? So if you can associate new learning to something that the kid already knows, that is taking advantage of prior experience. The third way is through an emotional link. And this is the free will part. If you really love a topic and you don't know anything about it, you can learn it really quickly as if you'd had multiple prior experiences just because of your own interest in that particular topic. So we know that it really depends how many experiences. Do you need one shocking experience or a dozen mild experiences? It depends. It depends on what you already know. It depends on your own personal level of interest in the information. And we've mentioned several times before that sometimes what is learned is not always positive. Having traumatic experience or having something negative happen to you related to other types of learning can just, you know, block you out from learning new things. So how do you unlearn something? And this gets to a concept. It's called fossilized errors, which is super, super complex. In language teaching, for example, if a kid has learned an incorrect sentence structure or incorrect pronunciation for so long, it's so hard to chip away at that. Like the fossil, right? It's really like ingrained there. It's harder to get rid of that than to learn a whole new language. But we know it's possible. This is why people go to therapy. For example, you can spend weeks, months, years until you can successfully decouple your immediate reaction. So dad comes home, he drinks, he hits my mom and then he comes after me. To decouple that that is not a normal way to live life is really hard and will take a long time to undo. Okay, it's a natural thing that should occur. Then on top of that, there has to be a new learning. This new experience, when dad comes home, there has to be a different way that things occur or things that happen should be normal to reconnect that to something new. That's the whole new learning. So there's a step of unlearning to get back to zero then to get into new learning. What is the correct way to do things? Habituated actions are very, very hard to undo but they can be undone. Okay? So unlearning is effortful but it's possible. And once again, this other person is reiterating how important it is to understand, you know, what is this connection between the nurture environment experience that impacts the brain? What is this process? And as we mentioned before, I hope you can look at the other videos but also understand this general concept of the more you know, the more you can know. So the more richer varied life experiences that an individual has, the greater their potential to connect other new ideas in the future. We've already spoken a little bit about the idea of negative experiences and how that can influence learning and the need to unlearn a conditioned response towards that to uncouple that. Psychology, I'm sure that a lot of you are familiar with, you know, these conditioned responses. That's just not on a psychological level. Those things create links in the brain that have to be decoupled before new connections can be made for a different pattern of behavior. And somebody else asks, if this is so true and we don't get kids until they're four or five years old into our schools and how is it that what has happened in other contexts in the home, for example, we have to begin to work with kids that we don't even know what their prior experiences were. And that is a huge thing. And this gets back to this big question of what is the role of the school and does it have this similar impact to what happens in the home? And thankfully it does. I guess two big things come out of this particular question. One is that it takes a village. Seriously, it takes a village to raise a child. So the idea of communal expectations, what is our community believe is the way we educate children and how do we do this as somebody else referred to earlier at this more systemic level? Is it just what I do with this one kid or what his genes do to him? But it's also, you know, what does our school do? What is our institution? What is our community? What are our values? And how do we habituate positive interactions with kids and reinforce things like resiliency and positive mindsets? Where does that all come from? Right? So what is the school's role? That's one point. But the second point that's really important and this comes from John Hattie's research in which he found what has the greatest influence in student learning outcomes? It actually ends up being the student's own self-perception as a learner which is shaped in turn by the self-efficacy or the group self-efficacy of the teachers around him. After that is teachers. The teacher is an individual and teaching. And way down there is the actual home because this has to do with student learning outcomes. So by the time the kid gets into school then they spend much more time in the school environment than they actually do with interacting with other members of their own family often. So we see that the school plays a huge role. And as we mentioned before the school has that real tipping point leverage where you can say it's not just what you are in your biology. It's not just what has happened to that kid in his early life at school with the two exceptions of toxic stress and poor nutrition in the early years. That can ruin brain architecture for long run. So minus those two conditions if you have a general normal upbringing the school then is the tipping point. The school can leverage what likely many parents didn't understand about their own children's potential. So this is why school experiences are so impacting. And so Hattie's work has shown that literally getting that kid to adopt that more positive mindset I can do this. It might be hard. I can get over this. Embracing challenges. Embracing failure. Those times of habituated reactions to learning experiences are things that can be learned within the school setting that will influence the child for life. Again, many people were also questioning so how damaging can some of these prior experiences that have occurred in the home be to a child and what can we do about it in schools? And for those of you who have the time and the interest I would love to motivate you to have a look at the Center for the Developing Child the webpage around Harvard University that really goes into a lot of these topics of toxic stress, brain architecture and young children and especially on this element of building resilience where does resilience come from and how can we as teachers participate in the construction of something that you know perhaps in the home the kid hasn't developed this cognitive resource to be able to react to disappointments in the world and life challenges that might occur through learning. It's a great series and Jack Shunkoff as the director has done a really phenomenal job of trying to go in some of these very important aspects you know what happens with neglect in children. What is this basic understanding of the gene and the environment interaction? If you do have the chance and you'd like to have more information about that we have a great relationship with them and we have many of their articles also available to you if you'd like to look at that. So hopefully we can address this question about understanding healing or repairing past experiences that have been negative or that it cause challenges for those children who are now in your classrooms. So again the majority of the questions looked at you know okay so practically what does this mean and there's this wonderful insight by this individual here who realizes you know that children from the same families you know they might have had similar experiences. Why how is it that the brains are so different? So what is this role of nature versus nurture? We now say basically it's nature via nurture. Those kids might have had very similar alleles they have these 23 pairs of chromosomes and they might look very similar genetically but the way that they took in these experiences or which of those genes because only a fraction of those genes are potentiated to become you know their phenotype the personality the way they are to the rest of the world that can be very very different so the kids might have similar parents and they seem like they have similar experiences but why are they so different? It's because not all of the same genes were potentiated in the same way. So this is why different people can have the same or live the same life experiences but take away very different types of things and so the family environment is important but it's not the ultimate arbiter of success in society. So we do deeply value great family and home environments but you and your colleagues know that you as teachers can really be the decisive factor in children's lives and changing those lives. One significant one significant adult model in the life of child is all you need to trigger resiliency but I would like to argue that the school experience and the interactions with great teachers can tip the final outcome of whether or not a child has success or finds success. There was a very clear question here related to critical periods. We no longer talk about critical periods for anything that's done in academia. What's more important is the order of steps. So if you didn't learn to read when you were three and you didn't learn when you were 13 and you didn't learn when you're 30. Could you learn when you're older? Yes, it's possible. What's more important than your age is actually the prior experience is the order of the introduction of concepts is more important than the age of the individual. But we do talk about critical periods in gestation. If the mother consumes drugs, alcohol is exposed to high levels of stress while she's pregnant that can have a long-term effect on brain architecture. So we do say that there's a critical period that may exist in gestation and there might be two other critical periods in development. One has to do with first language development and the other has to do with gross motor skills and these are both based on really limited number of studies. First, language development. The studies are based on the very few feral children studies we have around 249 studies. I think it is on children who at different ages some newborns and some kids you know three, four, five years old, seven years old who were separated from humanity for a while like they were lost in the jungle like Mowgli or something like that. And then when they came back were they able to develop language? And what's fascinating to see is that a child who might have been three, four, five who was lost and was gone for five years or six years could come back and pretty much get up to speed with language levels. Pretty interesting, right? But a kid who was lost from birth and didn't have contact with human language but came back in even shorter period of time like say when he's three or four years old actually had a lower probability of learning full language. So there's a suspicion that there's a critical period for developing your first language but it's not totally proven and it's unethical to try this. It's like I can't ask you, you know lend me your newborn child I'm going to isolate him for humanity for a couple of years and see what happens. We can't really test it. So we think there might be a critical period for first language but we're not sure. Similarly gross mortar skills. We only have these really terrible cases of neglect. For example of the Romanian orphans who were confined to a small space to to a crib to a bed and you when they find these poor children who might be four or five years old. They were actually, you know, limited to that space. They defecated there. They ate there. They did everything this small space and never developed gross motor skills. And so they found that some of those kids were unable to actually get up to a hundred percent of what would be a normal ability to walk and run and to have good physical activity once that they were taken out of that that terrible condition. So we think there might be critical periods for first language and gross motor skills, but we can't really confirm it. What we do know is that there's no critical period for anything that you learn in school. It's really much more the order of introduction of concepts. So starting from the base concepts, getting those solid and moving onward. That's far more important than the age of an individual. And the specific question has to do with multilingual experiences. So always, you know, with any kind of learning, the earlier, the better. Why? Because there's longer-term practice over your lifespan is one main reason, but the benefits of multilingual experiences on the brain, for example, extended executive functions, working memory, cognitive flexibility and inhibitory control is gained independent of the age that you learn the language. So here's the big reflection then. If we know the prior experiences influence learning outcomes and if we know that not everybody has the same level and quality of prior experiences and in fact can have negative experiences that can impede learning, what does this mean about curriculum design? How can we design something then that would naturally progress and help children learn to their best potential? And I think this leads to two big questions. If you recall when we talked about the uniqueness of brains, we talked about a curriculum challenge there as well and one suggestion being mastery learning. Can we return to mastery learning? Let's just say that by the time you, you know, get out of 12th grade, you should have mastered these multiple concepts that can then be disaggregated down through the grade levels and then shoot for the mastery learning concepts. That's one big thing. The other thing has to do with what's considered like a spiral curriculum design and which was first suggested I believe by Brunner in the 70s and it's something that's actually done in other school systems like in Japan in Germany where a concept is introduced but then just you know a few weeks later it's reinforced and it's connected to the new learning and then another concept is introduced and it's reinforced in this way you are constantly constantly building on the prior experiences and making sure that that prior experience that link is strengthened as continual new learning is developed throughout the lifespan. So another thing is not to have these kind of silos of learning where you teach as you know algebra in the next week is geometry but this idea of the integration of all these concepts throughout. So this begs us to look at a much more transdisciplinary way of learning but also to return in a spiral fashion to these core concepts throughout a child's learning experience to take advantage of reinforcing prior learning experiences in the long term. Many of you ask you know how what is the strategy then you know how can we link prior knowledge to new things you know what can we actually do in a classroom and there are explicit strategies and implicit strategies I mean those are two big categories I'm sure there's others but what comes to mind for me is that explicitly you can basically say to a kid what do you already know about this you know or you know have you ever experienced that yourself to sort of hook them into realizing they know more about the new topic than they think the other link that's related to this has to do with really creating experiential learning that then makes them remember that they have already had a similar experience right asking if they you know set off firecrackers you know over the new years okay then reminding them explosions and reminding of chemical process than having a little explosion in the classroom makes them realize they have experienced you know explosions or whatever it is so giving them an experience that reminds them of prior experiences can also help so those are more explicit ways so explicitly asking them what do you already know about this that's very explicit right or implicitly creating a context in which they remember prior experiences based on whatever you do in your classroom these are subtle ways of doing it the one difficulty we have is that often times it might be harder than we think for a kid to say oh yes you know I do relate that to something I already know or I've done that before it's much easier for them to have those other kinds of experiences and relate them themselves or to do this in small groups or to do this on a quick reflection paper beforehand for example I often ask students you know let's do a one minute paper tell me something you know about this idea and something you want to know about this idea this really lets them off the know but you're basically saying I bet you know something about this so let's you know jar your memory about this what prior experiences have you had related to this other concept what do you already know about this and what would you like to know so doing a one minute paper is something that you could also do in class that would help stimulate prior experience but again all of this depends on the individual and on the objective of the class so it's it's very hard to sort of dictate specific activities but hopefully those two or three ideas might start this reflection and if you'd like something very specific about a particular class and age group please don't hesitate to write me one other thing to also remember is that when we're talking about you know stimulating prior experience to help the kids learn new things sometimes their prior experience with the information wasn't necessarily a positive thing so a really smart question here is you know asking whether or not bringing up prior experiences always a good thing if especially if we know that it might not be something that was positive in that individual's life so again what is the goal here so bringing up negative past experiences say we're doing literature and thematic collections let's do Romeo and Juliet and you have these awful you know teen suicide things and okay maybe that's too close to home for some students do you want to remind them of prior experiences about that and that is a really this is really where the the art in your science of teaching really comes in do you have your finger on the pulse of understanding to what extent you can go into those things that might be highly personal and also highly painful to that individual would that help that learning moment or hurt that learning moment and that's a real judgment call on your part on what to what extent do you actually dig deep into something you know is negative so again we get many many teachers asking for you know really the how to's how to how can I help students access their prior knowledge and then build upon it with a lesson so the quick tips activities questions really depend on on what your objective is and so as I mentioned before you know asking a student you know outright explicitly is one way to do it another thing are to do one minute papers other things can actually you be small do group discussions others can be implicit ways of actually creating a new experience in the classroom that's related to what might be likely be prior experiences to those other students and another teacher asks you know how to how can you make that more personal and I think one of the main ways is that students love they love to hear about what you did or what you know and so it might very well be that some of these things relate to prior experience if you give an example from your own life that's related to the conceptual understanding that you're seeking and then in the class that's also a very good opening for students to see a model of how I can go about thinking about this or the type of life experiences that really fit into this category and very practically another teacher asks what is the most efficient way to train our brains to go from novel and awkward to familiar in practice basically it's just repetition unfortunately familiarity repetition and practice are key to all learning but the idea for something be to become habituated in the brain has to have multiple enough frequency for that link to become automated and most of the time except for when it's in survival mode but most of the time it takes multiple repetitions for that information to become solidified in the brain become habituated and easy to recall and the last point here has to do with somebody asking what evidence and research can help me when I encounter these different brains in second grade you know I would just celebrate that as we said before their brains plastic throughout the lifespan and will change throughout the lifespan but I think you have a particularly wonderful age group to be able to work with because the earlier the betters is a general rule of thumb just because the amount of rehearsal can be increased the earlier the information is shared with an individual okay with that we'll move on to the next principle