 Another key principle that came out of neuroscience that can be applied to the classroom which is really really important has to do with prior experience. All new learning passes through the filter of prior experience. This is fundamental as far as all new learning is concerned which is why teachers are generally successful when they tap into prior knowledge or when they help students understand how the new thing that's being learned is very similar to something that they already know. So having those analogies really helps. For example, if a student really knows addition you can teach him subtraction in about 10 steps. Basically you use his prior understanding of addition, show him how things differ in subtraction, and he can learn pretty quickly. But what happens if that kid, if there's another kid in the class who doesn't have such good prior experience, doesn't really get addition. Trying to help him understand subtraction is going to be really really difficult because he doesn't have that prior experience upon which he can build his new knowledge. So new knowledge is influenced by prior experience. The efficiency of the brain economizes effort and energy by ensuring that external stimuli are first decoded compared both passively and actively with existing memories. So the first thing that you should help kids do, and this is really good for metacognitive development, the first thing is to tell those kids okay so we're going to do X today. Does anybody know anything about X? Does anybody, you know, have you had any experiences with X? So helping trigger prior experience, many great teachers just do this naturally, but connecting to what somebody already learns eases and is more efficient, is a more efficient way for the brain to take in new information. So what does this mean as far as our teaching practices go? The key here is that you got to know your students because if you don't know them well enough, you can't possibly understand what they already know about the topic. So this kind of this idea is sort of know your audience. Do you know those individuals well enough so that you can really hang new learning onto something that's already in their memory, something that they already are familiar with. Can you draw those parallels? Can you create those analogies so that it makes new learning easier? All new learning passes through the filter of prior experience. And this is a physiological phenomenon, literally. How do you learn? You learn through your sense perception, right? So anything that you learn enters, first thing it does goes up your spinal cord into the base of your brain, the first stop it makes through the amygdala. It's basically okay, is it something I should be scared of or run away from or whatever. But then, you know, less than a split second later, it goes from a lobe and then back to the hippocampus for a double check. What do I really know about this? So the first thing is a quick reaction to save the body from any harm. But then there's a quick double check of do I know something about this already? Unfortunately, other types of memories can interfere with new learning. So since we know that all new learning passes through the filter of prior experience, if a kid has had a terrible time, for example, with a poor math teacher one year who humiliated him in front of the class. Okay, so the next time he goes to the new math teacher, who's really great and nice and won't humiliate him. But his first reaction to the new stimuli is to actually do a double check with what he remembers about that context. And he may shut down, even though, you know, it's not that teacher's fault, the new teacher's fault. But because all new learning passes through the filter of prior experience, this includes emotional memories. So we have to be really conscious of that as teachers to trigger in to tie into the positive connections that students have to prior knowledge, and build off of that when we introduce new concepts in the classroom.