 Hi, my name is Tracy Tagahama Espinosa. In a short video, I want to do three things. I want to first talk about four big changes that have occurred on the educational landscape within society over the past decade that necessarily impact and change what we expect of teachers in society. Second, I want to talk about some very specific recommendations on teachers new pedagogical knowledge that comes out of the OECD publication from 2017, which recommends that new teacher formation has to include more information about the brain and how it learns. Technology. So what are these big necessary changes in education? Do you remember Rip Van Winkle? You know, he fell asleep for like a hundred years and what happened in that time when he woke up, you know, transportation had totally changed and the way we do business is very, very different now than it was a hundred years ago. And the way we elect people into office has also changed drastically. Where we get our food from, how we shop, how we feed ourselves has also changed and our schools Okay, this isn't so drastic. Okay, we have some schoolhouses that still look like this. This one obviously very extreme Amish community in Pennsylvania. So maybe that's pushing the point. But the key idea here is that schools are the slowest institutions to change in society and we have a lot of catch-up work to do and we're pushed to do this not only because everybody else is changing, but also because there are different expectations of schools. We now go from this idea of equal access, almost everybody gets to go to school now, but they don't always get the same level of quality. Depending on their school district, their zip code, people are sort of condemned to a type of education. That has to change, right? We're moving from teaching in silos like teaching math, language, science, art as separate concepts to understanding the value of transdisciplinary thinking. We're moving from just looking towards standards. Let's meet the average to really more creativity on the part of our students. And from this idea of just passing a class to this concept of lifelong learning, from traditional resources, textbooks, basically, to using technology in intelligent ways in our classroom. From bettering just the self before we used to think that, you know, you go to school and you can have a better life. We know that. That's absolutely true. We know that somebody who finishes high school learns about twice as much as somebody who only finishes primary school. And somebody who goes to college learns about twice as much as somebody who went to high school. And somebody who has a master's or a PhD is almost never unemployed. So we know there's benefits to the individual. But we also now recognize that when individuals in society flourish, then society as a whole flourishes. We've also moved from just content knowledge, you know, knowing a particular math formula or a grammatical rule or a form of language to understanding how to think about approaching problems in our surroundings. And we've also moved from these face to face brick and mortar classrooms with solid walls to understanding things like virtual classrooms that take advantage of the flipped classroom, for example, in which you send video content beforehand. And then when you're in class, you can really go deeper into the information. And I'm sure there's other changes, but these are some really core shifts in expectations of schools. A second big change has to do with not only changes in school expectations, but also what do we expect of students? And what do we expect of teachers? If you can really look at the 21st century literature out there that says, what is it that we hope that we do in classrooms? You'll get this idea that we want critical and creative thinkers. We want people who know how to work with people who are different from them, who know how to use tools or who embrace technology or who understand and appreciate complexity or innovative. This means that we are no longer just looking at understanding history or math or reading or writing as subject areas. But we expect that students come out of our systems being able to act autonomously, to be responsible citizens, to be open and empathetic and be able to work with people who are different from them. This puts a huge burden on the teacher, right? Because you can't get apples from a pear tree. If this is what we expect of students, then we as teachers have to be this and more. So we have to embrace that and we have to identify our own shortcomings perhaps and fill in those gaps. A third change that has occurred is the way that technology has opened up our better understanding about the brain. We're still in diapers. We still know very little about the human brain. But what we do know is allowing us, for example, to get rid of all of these myths back in the 90s before we could really see into the brain very clearly. We would do cartoon sketches and oftentimes overgeneralized information or misinterpret scientific findings. And all of these things that you see here have now been proven to be myths. So slightly better technology helps us understand that we can measure brain activity, either electrically or chemically or structurally. And all of these things together now give us this deeper appreciation that it's not that you just have math in one part of the brain or a spatial creativity and another. That's not true. You have very complex neural networks that are formed for any type of skill set that you learn or undertake. So doing something as simple as saying a sentence or a basic math problem will involve multiple areas of the brains. And so where we used to think language was located or math was located. Now we understand these are core hubs, information passes through those places, but it's not where language or math is. And so this refined technology has helped us get a more sophisticated understanding and appreciation of all of the complex ways that people learn. And in doing so, it also permits us to be much more precise. Instead of saying that well, the kid just doesn't have a brain for math, we can actually break it down and we can say, oh, my gosh, he doesn't understand, you know, magnitude or how symbols relate to certain procedures in a mathematical formula or whatever. So we're now able to become more precise in understanding what types of difficulties kids might have in our classrooms. The fourth big change is that we also now have better insight into what really influences student learning outcomes. And this is thanks to longitudinal studies. Finally, you know, formal education is only around 120, 30 years old. So finally, we now have studies that can track whole cohorts of people since the time that they enter education all the way until they graduate over time. So we can actually see what types of interventions seem to work with what types of individuals and what types of context so we can compare them across the lifespan. We also have internationally comparative studies so we can sort of sort out now what types of things are really true for all human brains. And then what things have a very heavy cultural component attached to them, especially as they relate to cultural artifacts like language and how we write numbers or letters. And thirdly, we now have a methodologically comparative scale, thanks in great part to the work of John Hattie, who has really been tremendous and has opened our eyes to understanding that if you compare influences on student learning, you can weigh this now as to its effect size. So what has a greater effect? What has a greater impact on student learning outcomes? So he's tabulated to find the point of four as this basic sweet spot effect. Anything above that is really where we want to be. And you can compare things. Like you can say, yeah, homework is important, you know, it makes sense. But actually, there's a bunch of other things that even more important, like the student teacher relationship has a huge or a much bigger effect size than homework does, for example. So you sort of have to choose your battles. What's the most important thing that we should be focusing on when we teach teachers? Do we teach them how to grade homework or emphasize their time there? Or do we tell them, you know, your time is better spent cultivating those strong student teacher relationships so we can compare multiple things. Teaching explicit study skills or how teacher clarity and feedback aids learning or how interactive discussions, getting students to actually use the information and the knowledge as opposed to just doing a worksheet. How does that influence their learning outcomes? And maybe most importantly, how a student's own self expectation, you know, I am a learner or, you know, I'm not going to be good at this. How the students own self perception as influenced by what the teachers make them think about himself changes that students outcomes. So based on how these work, we're able to now not only have these longitudinal studies, international studies, but now we have methodologically comparative scales where we can actually say certain things really have a bigger impact for most of the students in our classroom. And this moves us from just being an educator to moving towards being a learning scientists. And this is a big shift now in teaching. It is something that was forecasted more than 30 years ago by Leslie Hart, who said designing educational experiences without an understanding of the brain is like designing a glove without understanding the human hand. Basically, if you don't know enough or a little bit, at least the basics about how humans learn, we can fall into these areas of great misconception. The main problem is that research led in great part by Paul Howard Jones just shows that across the globe, most teachers do not know enough about the brain. New teacher education would be not only understanding all these things about education, but being a mind brain education scientist means that you also understand things about consciousness and how emotions influence learning and the role of memory and attention systems. So while it's acceptable that some people say, oh, no, no, I'm just an educator, you know, okay, but I'd like to make the argument that there's a real need for people who understand who get this, who are mind brain education scientists, not just educators, but people who understand how the rest of the learning sciences really influence our brain. Why? Because we have studied the learning brain for about 150 years, but we barely know anything about how to teach based on that information. This is really changing the face of educational training, whereas before, teachers might learn a bit about how people learn, and now we need to get to the point of, okay, no, how do you take advantage of how the brain learns to teach better? What are those precise interventions that are most important? And the reason that I argued that this is important to do is because, you know, we have not figured it out yet, and education is so complex, and so every single school year we begin with this optimistic view of, okay, this year I'm going to figure it out, or this year it's all going to work. And there's a lot that is still unknown. So unless we begin to nurture our profession, education, with information from the other learning sciences, we will not come to those conclusions. And I say this because mind-bren education science takes all of the information from the learning sciences. So understanding how nutrition or sleep influences the brain, to understanding the basics of neuroscience and how their chemical changes that occur in the brain in different types of human development, and mixing all of this with information from education, from psychology, understanding just how historical or cultural context influence things. And then moving into this idea of not just educational neuroscience, but to this new field of mind-brain education science, which is this kind of sweet spot in the middle that looks at the teaching elements that we can gain. Can we take all of this information and now be more effective teachers in our classroom? And I believe we can. So this means combining Hattie's work with mind-bren education into a new type of teacher's professional development scheme. We are the only profession out there that really still continues to go without rank, and that's very democratic, but it's a bit problematic because somebody who is fresh out of a teacher's college is a teacher. And somebody who has been teaching for 45 years and is brilliant is still a teacher. We'd like to recommend that you can sort of sort this out to saying, okay, somebody is a newly formed teacher to being a novice, proficient expert, and then hopefully we get a handful of people who end up being master teachers. This happens over time, but also more importantly over depths of knowledge. It doesn't mean that only old people can be master teachers. You can have really young people who are great master teachers when they have the greater depths of understanding of our new profession. And all of this comes back to the recommendations that were made by the OECD expert panel on teachers' new pedagogical knowledge and the changes that are occurring in education, the changes in expectations of society, but how we need to change teacher formation. So to summarize, that the first steps that we would suggest is that number one is to get rid of the neuro myths and to correct teacher attitudes. The second step would then be looking at these core principles. What are these things that we know that are true about all human brains? And believe it or not, there's only six, okay? And then things that are tenets that are also true, but they have huge human variation. Things like, for example, motivation influences student learning, but what motivates one person doesn't motivate another. So we know that it's important for learning, but it doesn't work the same way for all human brains. Then we also have to take into consideration cultural aspects and the context within which learning occurs. And then we can reach core recommendations of how you should teach in the new modern classroom that includes mind brain education science. So these would be the steps that we'd recommend. In conclusion, this is just sort of laying the groundwork then. We know that there have been changes in education. We know that now there's different expectations. We now know that teachers really need to know a bit more about the brain so that they can actually be more efficient in their jobs. So this is an invitation to explore this mind brain education science perspective. This take on new teachers' pedagogical knowledge in the 21st century and how do we approach them? So to conclude, I would just ask you to do a short exercise, three, two, one. Are there three things that I mentioned to you that you didn't know beforehand? Are there two things that you will continue to research or talk about? Are you curious about anything? And is there at least one thing that you might consider doing differently to improve your personal and professional practice based on the information that we shared right now? Why do I ask you to do this? One of the things that we understand about memory consolidation, and remember memory is vital to all new learning, is that you need time for reflection. Education is not just bombarding people with content information. You also need downtime. You need to process it. You need to think a little bit more and decide, is this usable knowledge? What can I do with this? So getting to that point is part of these types of reflections. If you also like, you might also do a visible thinking activity that comes from Richard and colleagues' ideas. And just tell yourself, well, I used to think teacher education or professional development was whatever, whatever. And now I think. This is a different way of putting this information into perspective because it also shows concrete growth. Before I was here and now I am here with this information. But take the time. Take two minutes to do this. And I promise you it will make a big difference in the way you approach the information in the future. So now I hope I am leaving you with a whole lot more questions than answers right now. I want to invite you to stay in touch. And I would like to follow up with you to talk about each and every one of these points in more depth if we get the opportunity. Thanks for the chance to introduce this idea of mind-bren education science and the changes that are necessary to improve our educational practice.