 Hi, my name is Tracy Takahama-Spinoza and welcome to Digital Learning, the three-part series on promises and possibilities for the learning sciences in a post-pandemic educational landscape. Here in part one, we're going to be tackling these macro issues of how assessment evaluation feedback mechanisms have changed due to the move to online learning. Choices in curriculum, given that time and space have also shifted, as well as this ongoing look at what is really a lifelong learner and a student profile for the future of education. I teach a course at Harvard University's Extension School called the Neuroscience of Learning. It's an introduction to mind-brain health and education. I am also the associate editor at Nature Partner Journal's Science of Learning and I had the honor of serving on an OECD expert panel looking at teacher's new pedagogical knowledge, which really needs to incorporate a lot more technology as well as information about how humans learn best. I've also had the pleasure of teaching kids pre-K all the way through university and I spend a lot of my time now working with adults in teacher's professional development. Today we're going to frame this big problem that we're currently experiencing and living through right now as an opportunity and looking at this mainly from two different perspectives. One is that we know as a problem teachers have not received a lot of training about the brain and how it learns, understanding all of these different angles from mind-brain health and education as they gain their teacher certification. These problems pay back on the current situation of COVID-19, but we see this as a great catalyst for change. There's been a lot of opportunity to rethink really everything in education based on this problem, so we want to frame that pretty clearly. Then I want to explain a little bit about the structure of my new book, Bringing the Neuroscience of Learning to Online Teaching, an Educator's Handbook, and to give you a framework within which we're going to be visiting all of these different concepts throughout the series. Today's topics, we're going to choose four of them. One has to do with this triad of assessment or diagnosis, evaluation and feedback, curriculum structures, what is really worth teaching, and the use of time and space in education, and then also finally exploring the changing student profile that is beginning to emerge around the world. So now a quick word about my book. So I'm very pleased to announce my new book, Bringing the Neuroscience of Learning to Online Teaching, which was based in large part off of the past six years of evidence that we've been gathering in my course at the Harvard University Extension School, which is called the Neuroscience of Learning. It's an introduction to mind-brain health and education, which is a transdisciplinary look at how we can leverage information from the learning sciences to teach better. Sharing that general idea was already in the oven and being researched when COVID hit, and that was really a tremendous catalyst for getting the book done a little bit faster. The big idea behind the book is to move from the state of emergency remote teaching, how do we react to a crisis, and think about long-term planning and really what would be the long-lasting changes and the opportunities to actually shift the ground in some areas of education based on the need for change. And all of those inequities I was mentioning before, how they've been magnified, what could we do about them with this new opportunity to rethink educational practice. So overall, the big focus is what will remain after the pandemic is gone. The book has six chapters and the introduction. I use a moving metaphor to talk about how going online is really like packing up and moving. We have to make a lot of choices. Some things won't fit in this new modality of online that we knew and loved before, and other things will have to be replaced. It's an opportunity for change. We have to downsize or upscale certain types of interventions depending on this move where we are going to. And I think while most of us are really tuned into the downside of moving, the hassle, the organization, the headaches, the choices that we have to make, there are some really great upsides to this move. And I think that if we can get to that big attitude shift about what it takes to actually make that move, this really has the potential of being a huge watershed moment in education, specifically in public school education. Chapter one looks at how we can use guidelines from the learning sciences to better shape educational practice. This will specifically focus in on the teaching learning dynamics and what information we do have from the learning sciences that might better shape that. Chapter one lays the foundation of using the learning sciences as a platform upon which we can make evidence-based decisions in education moving forward. Chapter two considers pedagogies that exist that have been shown to be successful equally well in online contexts as well as in face-to-face. So the pedagogies that we reviewed actually are successful and independent of the modality. So whether or not you are online or a hybrid or face-to-face, all of these things are worth knowing as teachers. In chapter two we look at each of these pedagogies and how they might influence educational practice at kindergarten through university. Chapter three looks at many of the different tools. We know that there are things like websites and apps and there's gamification out there. Well, even more importantly than just knowing what tools are available, it's how to choose them. How do you prioritize based on a clear understanding of your objectives? How do you actually select the best tools possible when designing your face-to-face or online classroom? And this means structuring and transparently what are the objectives that you have, knowledge, skills and attitudes for your classroom setting? How are you going to measure that? And then what kinds of tools or resources or pedagogies would facilitate reaching those objectives? Chapter four considers the huge question of time and space and the way that the terms that many of you have become familiar with is synchronous and asynchronous learning encounters. And how do we choose what goes where and what things should be done on students' own time? For example, the individual rehearsal of certain skill sets versus what things should or could be done in group contexts as far as collaborative activities, for example, or exchanging of ideas or debate. This chapter tries to lay out a clear path towards that kind of selection. In chapter five, we look at this construction of an online classroom setting and how is it that we've put together, for example, the course that we have now at Harvard as far as looking at those long-term macro objectives and laying that out and getting the topical order, like choosing our distinct objectives, how do we set up the slides, and how do you go on making those pre-class slide decks and videos and so on and coming up with the bundles that support the learning. All of those steps are explained in chapter five. And chapter six is basically a huge celebration. Looking at this grand possibility of the learning sciences, what do we have from technology and algorithms of complex thinking, and how can we couple those things with information from neuroscience and psychology to now have a much clearer vision of what we can do within our formal educational context to continue to informally learn throughout the lifespan. As we use learning sciences, it really spins out into things as vast as a spectrum of fields that are concerned with the teaching learning dynamic, from information technology to cultural anthropology and behavioral science and pedagogy and even philosophy. All of these different learning sciences have something to contribute to our understanding about teaching and learning, and we as educators really need to expand our vision to embrace many of those newer perspectives that can add a lot to our ability to maximize the potential of all the kids in our classroom. So that internet shell is what my book is all about. Moving on and looking back at the agenda, we said that we were going to talk about four different topics from that book, so we'll begin with that right now.