 The next has to do with the constant changes in the brain, that there's changes in the brain that occur at such a molecular level that they might happen before you're ever going to see any observable behavior, you know, that you can just see in class. And what does that have to do with your teaching? And so there was a lot of questions again, what is the current research? Where does this information come from? How do I know what molecular changes are happening? What are the studies that prove this? What is the current research? And for that I would refer you to those videos that I mentioned in the general observations about neuroanatomy and neuroplasticity, and information about neuronal types that are shared in the other videos. So then some of you are very curious about, okay, what is the stage of my own brain at this time? That is really hard to tell and I'm afraid that we, you know, we advance a lot in technology but we don't have portable brain scanners that can actually check this right now. Although if you did want to invest, you know, around, you know, $800, $900, you could do some types of brain scans that would give you some indication of neuronal development, but it's not conclusive. And so most brain scans that you could do in a typical hospital or a visit will not do what something like the connectome does. The connectome takes multiple types of measure. We measure the brain through electrical impulses, chemical changes, and physiological structural changes in the brain. So you'd have to have different tests and then you'd have to overlay them all to be able to say, okay, where am I at right now? But we're getting there. We're getting there. Another person has written here that I think it's fantastic if we know that the brain changes constantly with experience, then how can you foster this and ensure that there's learning beyond the high school years? So if we know that you can always learn until die, what types of habituated learning need to occur or what types of practices need to happen within the school structure that actually motivate this lifelong learning? And I would say that this has less to do with the brain and more to do with our actual practices and methodologies in our schools. How do we make kids fall in love learning? Are they lifelong lovers of learning? Have we stimulated their curiosity enough that they are constantly reflecting on what do I know about this? What can I know about this? Where do I get the information about this? And there are a lot of people concerned about this idea of the changes in brain capacity over the lifespan. What are the limitations? Can you teach old dogs new tricks? Short answer is yes, you can. The more you know, the more you can know. Use it or lose it. All of these are kind of, you know, pat sayings, but they really kind of cliched sayings, but they really have a lot to them. If you want to keep your brain, you know, as healthy as your body as you grow older, think about it and think about your body, you want to keep your brain healthy as you grow older, you know, think about your body in an analogous form there. What do you do to your body? You need to have, you need to take care of it. You need to treat it right. You need to get enough nutrition and exercise. You need to get good sleep. That takes care of your body. Now what do you need to do with your brain? For your brain to thrive, your brain needs to have continued, you know, scaffolded challenges throughout the lifespan. Use it or lose it unless you, and somebody is asking about strategies for keeping your brain young. Basically, it's never stop learning. Learning is the whole reason the brain exists. And if we stop learning, if we become passive, if we allow mom or dad to come and live with us but only sit on the couch and watch TV all day, there is no challenge. There is, you know, there's nothing there to keep that brain functioning alive. There's a lot of commercial things out there now about brain training for old age and I would really caution you about a lot of those because they have, there's nothing on the market. No computer training, no brain training things, nothing like that that works all levels of cognition that helps your brain, you know, stay young. If you do, we know that different people have different areas of interest, different passions. I would really say that grabbing on to one of those passions is really the best way, staying, keeping up with your favorite hobby, whether it be just, you know, whether it's the baseball scores or the crossword puzzle or the Sudoku that you do every day, but do something every day. Now, if you really want to push yourself as far as maintaining the physiological structures in your brain, there are studies by Ellen Bialstock and colleagues showing the cognitive benefits of learning a foreign language into old age and or using a foreign language you once knew. It pushes your brain to do a lot of things that it, you know, there are these studies of if you take care of a plant, a dog, if you did Sudoku crossword puzzles or if you learned a foreign language, which of these helps you have better quality of life. Well, basically all of them help you live longer. The first two, like taking care of a plant or a mascot, it's because you feel guilty. If I die, the dog dies, you know, you feel bad, so you live longer because of that. If you do Sudoku or crossword puzzles, it's kind of the same thing. It's a repetitive activity and it's in a single realm. And so once you figure out the pattern of a Sudoku or of, you know, you're always digging for vocabulary and crossword puzzles, so maybe that's slightly better. But once you figured it out, you figured it out. So it's one type of thing. Obviously, learning a foreign language or practicing a foreign language into old age is much better for your brain just because it's using many more different things, semantic recall, construction, emotional appropriateness, and all kinds of things are used there. The main idea, though, is to, and the Alsach's work showed that, you know, you actually stave off the natural decline of the brain about four to five years by doing that. So there's some things you can do, but the general, I would say that the easiest rule of thumb would be just, you know, doing something that you love and continuing to grow in it. Always doing something slightly different. There's, I have, as I mentioned before, a big folder on cognitive aging. So if any of you are really interested in that, please write to me and I will point you in the right direction for more information on that. Other people, when they look at this whole idea of life experience, really focused on the middle school years and on the high school years. And they want to understand how short term, long term memories are changed at different stages of life. Basically, the mechanism for learning is the same throughout your life. What does change, and it's very important. Remember, we mentioned before that you can measure brain activity through chemical, as well as electrical, as well as structural functioning. One of the things that's fascinating with, with preadolescence, adolescents, is the change in hormones. So basically, the chemical composition, chemical changes in the brain and how that can have an influence, not only on, on moods and affect emotional states, but also on learning. What is it that this does to learning? And one of the main things that we've seen has to do with the disturbance of sleep patterns because of this serotonin balance. There's a shift there, melatonin, serotonin. And there's a shift in this serotonin balance and this, this changes. You know, what time you want to go to bed, what time you want to wake up. And, and since we know sleep patterns influence learning, we know that these changes in chemicals also have an impact on learning for that reason. And also because of other imbalances in chemicals also change the way that you either can make those new synapses or not make those synapses based on the balance of chemicals in the brain. For those of you who are interested in looking more at the teenage brain, you know, I'd highly recommend there is, in the Harvard Health Department, a teen brain development. There's a series of videos there. There's also some work by Pitt at, sorry, there's also some work being done by Dr. Luna about childhood development in the brain. And also. You know, we used to think that changes in adolescence were because of raging hormones and we now know that, that while hormone level. And there's some other, and Dan Siegel also has a couple of videos here that are very interesting or related to the pruning process. And so not blaming everything on hormones or chemicals, but also what is happening when the brain becomes more efficient by pruning off some of these different connections just because it's, the brain is learned the most efficient way to, the most efficient way to connect certain things in the brain and therefore it's going to lose some of these connections. And so why is that natural? He's got some, some excellent, excellent insights that I hope you'll have a chance to look at if you're interested in looking at the, the developing teen brain. Another person wrote a comment that I think is really interesting. This question about, you know, what are reasonable expectations for middle school and high school age students? Well, reasonable to whom and for what? Just related to that word expectations, I think there's something, another reflection we need to have. And that is that students tend to live up to the expectations placed upon them. So high expectations, high outcome, low expectations, low outcome. So if you presume the worst of middle school kids or of adolescents, I mean it really brings out probably the worst in them. So basically, reasonable expectations as a rule of thumb should pretty much be just generally high expectations. Now, all of this is being said with this huge parentheses of the way we structure schools, the time of day we have schools. And knowing that there is this big shift in hormones, in pre-adolescence and adolescence, I would say the expectations that we can have are really based on the structures we decide to offer those kids, as far as the format of what we expect of them. If we were, and there are great settings by Clarkinson and Acevedo about later school start times, and just the huge change in behavior. And since learning is a behavior, the improvements in student learning outcomes as far as academics are concerned, when the school day started, slightly later, maybe an hour later. How does that actually change the way students behave in the class? So the response to this really has to do with what are reasonable expectations based on the conditions we place on the learning environment? And are we actually creating? Do we have the best policies for that? Is this the best way that we can go about catering to what we know are changes in the way people sleep, their emotional states, managing different types of expectations of them? So the way teens, the way pre-teens and teens sleep, the way they eat, the importance that friends have for them, all out of this based on chemical changes in the brain, and also based on the pruning and refining that the brain is going through at this moment. So I think it's a two-way street. This question is a two-way street. We have to think about what's reasonable to expect of them. But are we creating the best conditions we possibly could for those students in our classrooms? This is a wonderful question because it really shows that the person who wrote it already values the idea of a growth mindset and how that really can have a huge impact on learning. We see that, but then how then do you go about doing this? And I think Carol Dweck really explains this well in her own work. I'd say that nobody says it better than she does herself. And so I'd recommend that if you'd like to see this kind of how to, you know, developing a growth mindset, that if you have a look at some of the videos she's already recorded about tips about things that habituated interactions with students, dialogue, the way that we give feedback to students that help them see how a growth mindset is beneficial. But also I think that, as I mentioned earlier, it is very powerful for students to know more about their own brains. When students do see that they themselves have a lot of control over whether or not they do learn or not, it is not when they understand, you know, that it's the dynamics of the nature and nurture combined with your free will. All of those things are so important in influencing learning outcomes. When they see that balance, they tend to also appreciate the growth mindset more. Again, there's somebody who says, okay, how can I help my students understand that the brain changes constantly with experience? And this has a lot to do with, remember we gave an example of a person teaching a kid to read, right? And you might spend days or weeks or months trying to get that kid to learn that one skill set to read, right? But then in one day, you know, from one moment to the next, he reads. And this is kind of this awesome phenomenon. You think, wow, when did that happen? That is this explanation of how, you know, all of these different neural networks have to be aligned before that kid really can, you know, show us that observable behavior. So one of the things that you might share with the students, and I think it's a good video, is Erin Clark's, the deep dive on neuronal structures. When she talks a bit about the neuroplasticity and how that actually links everything together, it really makes the point very clear that so much happens at this molecular level, invisible to the naked eye. And invisible to ourselves, we think, oh, I'm so dumb, I just don't understand that. When you realize that you are inching forward, you're slowly but surely creating, you know, the conditions under which you can actually show that you have learned something. And I think it's really powerful for students to see that, to actually see and understand. Learning takes time. Neuro connections, synaptogenesis is a process. Strengthening of those connections through the myelin sheath takes rehearsal and repetition. And then we might see the subituated behavior. Kids see this in themselves. They can see, OK, I didn't learn to drive the first time I tried. I had to practice. I didn't learn, you know, how to hit that tennis ball right. You know, I had to practice. I didn't know how to do that algebra problem without a lot of practice. So a lot of this is understanding what is that role of practice, of that repetition, to strengthen those connections so that it does become more automated, easier for somebody to do. This last question is so empathetic and it's beautiful, but it's also one of the biggest challenges we have when we have kids that are at such different levels with concept information. And basically, because since the brain changes constantly with experience, there are some kids who just haven't had enough of that prior experience to be at the same level as the other students. So we have to be able to do what? One concrete suggestion is that if we are able to differentiate homework, and I would suggest doing that by leveraging your technology. You have a Canvas platform. Why don't you offer different levels of repetition, of rehearsal with prior information so that those people who need more rehearsal with the concepts can get that before they come to the live class with you so that you're able to provide them. Basically, you can begin at their starting point. Where is that student needing more repetition or practice so that they don't become panicked? There's this terrible and true concept that success begets success. But failure begets failure. So if that kid starts to falter at one stage and then he doesn't believe in himself and so he gets depressed and doesn't spend time studying because he's not excited about the topic, then he will fail. And then that failure will prove to him that he wasn't good enough to do this at all. And it's a terrible cycle that's really hard to break. So if we can create kind of behind the scenes support for that student to fill in those gaps in knowledge that he might have, that would be key. That would really be key. One of the basic questions here is that, OK, now how does all this information then, what do I do with it? What can I do to create these optimal learning environments so that we can have these connections so that we can strengthen these neural networks so that the kid can actually demonstrate learning? So what is it that I can do in my own classroom? How do I use that? How do I take this and make this usable knowledge as a teacher? And again, these teachers are all asking, tell me what to do. What is the specific activity in the class? And again, the partial response is it depends. It depends on your learning objective. And it depends on how the choice of activities in a class always depends on your learning objective. So choosing what the right activity to do is very important. But I think more important than actually the activity that you're doing is sort of this methodology of approaching the teaching learning dynamic with this kind of, with acceptance, that there's got to be a reliance with acceptance that learning takes time. And a lot of the process of the physiological changes of the brain is totally under the radar. These are things that are not easy to see. And so part of what we have to do is to believe that certain interventions within a certain period of time should have a certain response. And if they don't, what else can I do for that kid to sort of shore up his additional experiences that would give him that scaffolding so that he can neural constructively build his own learning in his brain? What are the prior experiences he's missing that he needs? So we know that the brain is changing constantly with experience. But also are we sympathetic that that might mean it takes time? And maybe some kids need more time and rehearsal than others. There were several questions about foreign language and learning and how this changes the brain over time. One thing that's really clear that we mentioned slightly a few minutes ago, one thing that's really important to remember is that there are benefits of foreign language in the brain. Literally, I think one great policy for every department of education would be to have early bilingualism or multilingualism throughout the lifespan. And we're kind of behind this in the states and in Europe of all the countries. I think all countries require bilingualism. And 17, I think of the 33, require trilingualism for graduation. And they start this in the very early years. And there's great spin-off benefits, great spin-off benefits in general cognition, as I mentioned before, in working memory, cognitive flexibility, inhibitory control, all of which serve other academic domains. So shouldn't this be an earlier introduction? You think you think so. So but one of the specific questions here is that the language acquisition folks seem to conclude based on research that explicit instruction is not conducive to language acquisition. So and what's more, there's a move, you know, let's do less grammar and more context-based language. OK, again, what is the objective? Depending on the objective, if you want fluid speakers who can have a spontaneous conversation, you do one thing in the class. You do something very different than if you want a kid to pass an AP Spanish exam that's going to require him to know some grammatical rules, right? So depending on what your objective is for learning, you do different things. Sometimes they're explicitly taught, and sometimes they're not explicitly taught. It shouldn't be that all explicit teaching, this is important, you know, x equals y or whatever. That shouldn't be taboo. There are moments when that is really important. I think the key idea here is we moved away from this tendency to say, let's stop having this dictated learning with the sage on the stage and move towards the guide on the side, right? So we shouldn't be doing explicit teaching. Sometimes explicit teaching is important and necessary, and that depends on the objective of the class. So based on the objective, you would choose different types of activities. If you want to talk about this more, I really invite you to look at our web page, TheLearningSciences.com. There's a whole section on foreign language instruction. Finally, there was some really interesting questions about understanding the science of race and gender, of understanding mindfulness practices, and yoga effects, how experiences impact the brain in predispositions to psychological conditions like schizophrenia and depression can be detected earlier, and what is known about how to change, what is known about the effects of trauma, depression, anxiety on optimal learning environments. Those are a bit more specific than what we want to talk about today. So if you'd like to send me an individual email, I'd be very happy to respond to these questions and to send you also to point you in the direction of some really important up-to-date literature in these areas. OK, with that, we'll turn to the last principle.