 Hi, my name is Tracy Takahama Spinoza and this is a video on novelty and patterns in the brain and how they facilitate learning. The basic idea is that the brain seeks out and detects novelty. First it looks for patterns, then it finds the novelty, but what is novel to one individual is not necessarily novel to another because pattern recognition is different based on life experiences. And as always, we're trying to see how this would influence you as a teacher and your interaction with your students. Seven different things right now. We're going to look at this idea of attention bias and how that helps us detect novelty in the brain, how patterns and novelties work together in the brain, the big difference in human variability, why teachers need to be really aware that what might be a patterned form of behavior or understanding about learning concepts might be true for one kid but not for another. Then we'll look at a way we can take advantage of expanding mental schema, understanding concepts in the brain by using what's known about certain mental schema but teaching them with novel representations in the brain. We're going to return to this idea that the more you know, the more you can know. So basically more patterns that you recognize, the more you'll be able to recognize in the future. And we'll talk about how pattern recognition occurs. There are good patterns, you know, good social behavior patterns, for example. And there are patterns of errors or problems, things that are wrong. So how can understanding, for example, the typical errors that a kid might make in a multiplication problem help you become a better teacher? So we'll look at patterns in that sense as well. And finally, some specific ideas about how teachers can take advantage of patterns and novelty to teach better. To begin, we're going to have a quick look at a very fun video. If you've already seen this, I apologize, it's only a minute long, but it's really worth watching to understand this big concept of attention bias, how people may miss things in their immediate environment if they're not looking for them. Because not everything novel stands out. Count how many times the players wearing white pass the basketball. How many passes did you count? The correct answer is 15 passes. But did you see the gorilla? This video is from research by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabry and is copyrighted. So I always love showing that video because about half of you won't see the gorilla the first time around. And that's really important to call attention to, especially related to context in our classrooms. We know that the brain cannot not pay attention, right? But sometimes it's not paying attention to what we wanted to pay attention to. So when we try to leverage this idea of patterns and novelty in the classroom, sometimes the patterns might be very obvious to us, but not obvious to the kids. We have to explicitly call them out. So concretely, learning is based on the brain's ability to see what's different and compare it with recognizable patterns. And what stands out as not being a part of the pattern becomes something that's novel in the brain. And that's where attention is drawn. So the brain naturally is looking for that thing that's a little bit different. And this concept of novelty is really ingrained in education, at least for the past 50, 60 years, or at least since Sesame Street has been around. We always call attention to this idea of what is different. Because what's happening in the brain? You receive a sensory stimulus. The first thing your brain does is review it with memory to conserve energy, right? If it already knows something about the new information, it's not going to have to use energy to create that new neural connection. So the brain always seeks what it already knows about the information that it's faced with. And if the brain realizes this is something similar to what I already know, then it uses that prior knowledge and builds off of it. This is why association is one of the best ways to teach. But if the brain doesn't see something that it knows, then it realizes, okay, this is novelty. This is something that's very different. And the brain will begin to compare what it already knows about the new information. One of the ways we do this with very small children, and I mentioned Sesame Street before, is this very simple song, right? One of these things is not like the other. And let's have a quick look. Hi-ho, Kermit the Frog here. And Susan and I are just sitting here, and we're going to do a very favorite song for you. It's a time-honored, old chestnut, that old favorite song that we all know and love so well. And it's called... Three of these things belong together. Three of these things belong together. Hit it! All right. Okay. You're saying the first part of it? Yeah, and then you'll do the next part. All right. Okay, here we go. Okay, everybody ready? Now take a look there. See? See that stuff there? Okay, now three of these things belong together. Three of these things are kind of the same. But one of these things just doesn't belong here. And now it's time to play our game. It's time to play our game. Okay, now look at that. And we got a hammer. And we got a shoe. And pliers. And a saw. Okay? Yeah. And you guess which thing just doesn't belong. I'm going to finish my song. Go ahead. All right. Here we go. Now one of these things... Oh, I just did the wrong part. One of these things just doesn't belong here. Tell me, did you guess which one? If you guessed this thing just doesn't belong here. You're absolutely right. And now my song is done. All right? Right. Everybody guessed that? Yes, the shoe, right? Everybody got this shoe? Yeah, but Kermit, why doesn't the shoe belong here? Oh, wow. You see, because the other three things there are all tools. Are all tools. Yeah, the hammer and the pliers and the saw. Those are all tools. And a shoe is not a tool. A shoe is something that you wear on your foot. Very good. Very good. Are you ready for another verse? So we spent a lot of time in our educational system calling out things that are similar, some things that are different. And believe it or not, this is actually something you'll do all the way through a PhD thesis. You're trying to figure out the pattern of things, the things that fit together, the things that don't fit together. And basically this rehearsal over time really primes your brain. It's always looking for what is a little bit off, a little bit different, what is a novel. And the truth of the matter is the brain really seeks novelty and it does it with all of its senses. For example, through the auditory cortex, if you hear a sound that's a little bit off, that really calls our attention. Or a voice that we didn't expect. Or prosody, a tone of voice within a classroom setting. So kids will light up when the teacher changes their tone of voice, for example, right? But also facial expressions. If there's something that seems even slightly out of the ordinary, the brain will really be peaked to this idea, something visual that was wrong or that didn't seem correct for that context. The brain also seeks novelty and texture. What feels slightly different? What feels a little bit off? Does this feel correct? And smells. All of these things, if you think about it through evolutionary eyes, is really beneficial to survival. Knowing when something smelled bad, it was a very good red flag. Don't eat that or stay away. This could cause sickness or whatever, right? So we know that the brain is seeking out these things that jump out as being different from the norm or that break a pattern that we're looking for. Similarly, you get some kind of craziness here where people put chili sauce on skittles and things like that, because taste, sensation also, you're looking for novelty and things that are different. Things that break the pattern are very attractive to the brain. Now, this doesn't mean that, you know, teachers have to be novel in and of themselves, that they have to, you know, play the part or always shake things up. Although this does help, right? The brain is seeking out those differences, but you also have to be very careful because the sort of interesting is that the brain, since it does develop patterns in a unique way based on its experience, what happens if the kid becomes totally used to only paying attention to things when the teacher is doing something outrageous, right? Okay, so the time the teacher doesn't do something outrageous or when that kid is in a different teacher's class, maybe that's going to be relatively boring to that person because they've now become used to this different level of stimulus. And this brings us to the big idea here of human variability. What is a pattern and what is novel to one person is it's unique to the individual based on their own prior experiences. So this is why we think, okay, I'm going to do this in the class, it's going to be so novel. It's so different. Well, maybe for some kids, it's not. Maybe what you're doing is something that they've already experienced multiple times, okay? So to be able to take advantage of novels and patterns in the brain, we really have to know those kids well, right? We have to take advantage of this basic instinct of the brain and look for patterns, but we can help kids by starting them off with basic metacognitive questions, right? What do you already know about this? Does this look like anything you've already seen before when they're faced with something new? So using metacognitive questioning is really, really very helpful. Some of you are looking for prior knowledge, anchors. You know, what is it that you already know about this information? Searching your memory for the patterns of the same situation. Oh, I remember the last time we did this kind of report, or I remember the last time we gathered leaves outside and compared them for their commonalities and differences or whatever, right? So we know that great teachers really facilitate the retrieval of prior knowledge and they help students actually see the patterns that are in their world. But part of this is that the teachers really know their students well enough to know what is novel for that individual and what would be something that they could count on is prior knowledge and learning. And the only way you get to do this is by knowing your kids well. An additional concept, how we can really leverage this idea of novelty in the brain, is by using things that kids already know. Maybe they know certain things, but they don't know multiple representations of that same thing. So one of these ideas is that individuals who can generate several representations of the same idea or the same concept are more likely to be able to retrieve that or to find that in their brains when they're looking for that information. So multiple representations of the same concept is very useful. For example, when it relates to the brain, right? Dehan has found that there are multiple representations, for example, of the concept of three, right? The number three. So a number that's written in Arabic numerals three versus Roman numerals three, or three items, three dots, right? Or the word three are all in different neural pathways in the brain. Now isn't that really amazing, right? So part of the idea is that maybe the idea of three, maybe it's a single representation, is not new to the kid, but when we reinforce with novel representations of the same concept, when we show that number three in multiple different ways that allows the learner to then be able to find that or to retrieve that through distinct neural pathways in the brain. So it reinforces this mental schema of that basic concept of three in this case. In general, this means that more exposures to more different types of information, the better for the individual, right? We've always said throughout this course, the more you know, the more you can know. So the more patterns you can see, the more efficient you are at detecting novelty. So we usually start off as little kids, you know, identifying patterns that you might see in natural contexts. For example, in these case related to things like fractals. But this would then allow you, being able to see types of patterns, allows you to be able to work with things that are a little bit more abstract. For example, mathematical patterns or patterns in word formation, right? So the more patterns you can be exposed to throughout your life, the better you'll be at identifying patterns in general. Another way to look at this is that there are patterns that we get for social behavior or things that are good or bad. You know, what is a good work of art or a good play that we've seen? By seeing multiple representations of different types of genres. For example, of great poems or plays or sonnets or whatever. The more times we reinforce what we consider good, the easier it is to recognize that good pattern. But this is also true in the negative. When something breaks the pattern, then we automatically think in our minds, well, this is bad then, right? I share a video with you related to a very clever way that teachers can identify patterns of errors. And this allows us to be better at our craft. The work of teaching is not something that's very well understood by the public. So I'm going to just take a moment to engage you in a little task of teaching that is routine if you're an elementary school teacher and maybe not so routine if you're not. So one of the things we know about teaching that might be the easiest thing to explain is that teachers need to understand how to teach to young people. And that sounds easy because you think, well, what could be so difficult about knowing the subject matter of elementary school or even high school, not that hard? Probably the main problem is can you manage the students and can you assess their learning? Well, I'd just like to give you a little example that it starts as with a simple proposition that even knowing the subject matter well enough isn't all that easy. And what we want in Michigan is to build a system in which we can ensure that every one of our children gets skillful teaching and the spirit of our recommendations and their details are in support of that agenda. But to just give you a bit of an exercise of what this is like, consider yourself to be someone who might be teaching fourth grade multiplication. It's a fairly simple topic. And in order to be able to do that, certainly you would need to be able to multiply on your own, and obviously you can. So imagine yourself teaching the problem 49 times 25. So why don't you just take a moment and find the correct answer to that calculation? Please. Can I pull up my phone? You cannot use your phone or your iPhone. What is the answer to 49 times 25? 12, 25? You all agree? Okay, so obviously one wouldn't want anybody teaching third or fourth grade who couldn't do that, but in fact what skilled teaching involves is responding when students don't understand the material, which they don't as they're learning. They don't automatically do the problems correctly. I'd like to show you a very typical task to face routinely, even in her first year of teaching, and that is that students might get wrong answers. And if all one could do is to identify that it's not 12, 25, one would be in bad condition in terms of being able to help the students learn. So here are three wrong answers. Because you know that the answer is 12, 25, you know that these are incorrect, but if all you were as a teacher able to say is to the student you have the wrong answer, that would be a little bit like being a physician and maybe sick, that wouldn't be very helpful. So I'd like you to take a moment to see how quickly you're able to ascertain what it is that the student did wrong to produce these answers. How easy is that for you to figure out? Just take a moment to look at it. Is there anyone of you who believes right now that you understand the steps that produce the errors in all three cases? Nobody does? Does anybody believe that he or she has them for two of the three? For one of the three? Mr. Chair, I wasn't aware that math was going to be involved. Does anyone want to explain one of them? Actually in the United States it's interesting how easily one can take very well educated capable adults and reduce them to jelly when talking about elementary school arithmetic. Senator Colbeck? Alright, I'll go for B. How's that one? We'll go through and walk out how we think you got the math on that one. Does that make sense? So they essentially took four times 25 and put that down the bottom and then they did nine times 25 and put it up on the top. This is B? Yeah, for B. So the student did nine times 25 which is 225 and then simply four times 25 which is 100. The main thing that's incorrect there is that the student should recognize that it's 40 times 25. There's nothing wrong with reversing the order because multiplication is commutative and you would want a teacher to appreciate that. I don't want to spend too much time on this. My main point right now is to understand that it's not expected that someone or a lawmaker would do somebody who could be fluent in doing this. That's not my purpose. My purpose is to take us all just for a moment to recognizing that what we actually need skillful teachers to do is not obvious. That is, it's not simple and it's not just a matter of compelling people to do the right thing. It's actually difficult to do. In the case of C, for example, it's likely that what a student did is something rather smart which is to estimate that 50 is rounding up from 49 and 50 times 25 would be 1,250 and then the student compensated in the wrong direction and added 25 rather than subtracting. In the case of A, it's a little bit trickier but yet it's something that if you were to teach upper elementary school you should see immediately and here what's most likely has happened is that 9 times 5 is 45. The student carried the 4 but added the 4 to the 4 getting 8 and then did 8 times 5 is 40 and repeated that error on line 2. 9 times 2 is 10. 9 times 2 is 18. Carry the 1. Added the 1 to the 4 which produces 5 and 5 times 2 is 10. If you are an experienced or skilled elementary school teacher you will see that immediately. Someone who's good at math but doesn't understand how to help students learn math won't see that and this is the simplest example I could use today just to make sure that we all understand that what our goal is in the end is for that not to be chancey that our young people would have teachers skillful enough to recognize error to put them on the right path to help them learn the content that we expect them to learn in school. And by looking at a very simple piece of content I thought I might just remind us that that is our goal. Now Lowenberg Ball is pretty amazing. She used to be the president of the American Educational Research Association as well but actually the skill set that she's showing is something that all great teachers already know and that's identifying patterns of error that will occur and only with a lot of experience are many teachers able to do that what that student needs. So understanding patterns of what looks good and patterns of what looks bad is in great part due to experience actually seeing lots of different clays or lots of different math errors helps us be able to identify those errors but one of the great ways we can leverage this in teaching is actually calling out those typical patterns of error. For example, I liked what she said at the very end when she was mentioning well and see actually what the student did was pretty clever they tried to round out whatever. Acknowledging what students may do as typical patterns of the way they approach a learning goal and the types of errors that they could run into is really key to great teaching. It's also very important to recognize that there are patterns of emotional development. We've talked about emotion a lot in this class. One thing that's very important to recognize is that students themselves will become more fluent in their understanding of emotional structures but calling this out very cleanly is very helpful. For example you'll feel a stimulus, right? There'll be an automated response in your body. This can be related to different states to emotion so this expelling of certain chemicals that give you that emotional state. You'll think about that and then feel something based on that emotional release of neurotransmitters and then the whole cycle begins again, right? Based on what you now feel about the situation then you may have a new emotional state that's created by that, right? So understanding how patterns or cycles of emotion occur. How patterns of social interaction occur are also very important to our general learning. This is why things that happen in life, you know, outside of school have a very big influence on what kids are able to do in school. Some kids have habituated certain patterns of learning. For example they read with their parents every single night and so they have learned how to navigate a book. They understand the structure of a story. They understand how there are typical patterns of good guys and bad guys and beginning, middle and end of structures, right? This is why kids who come from wealthier backgrounds start off better and end up better in school context basically because they have already learned to habituate certain types of patterns. How to read a book. How to approach a problem. The patterns that exist in human social interactions. Social norms or patterns of readings help kids get a leg up when they do come to school and we know that kids who do not have the advantage of having those types of patterns inculcated into them. For example they have the one-eyed babysitter, that's what my mom calls a television. The one-eyed babysitter who basically does not motivate that type of deeper reflection to understand the patterns around us that keeps certain kids from doing well and those are the disadvantaged ones who do not have those engaged parents or those rich home environments. So the final thing I want to share with you is the use of analogies as a way of understanding patterns in our world. Analogies work because our brain is constantly comparing what it already knows with the new things and then determining what's novel and then trying to understand the differences between them. And so analogies, things that might be very clear, strict word analogies right or even physical analogies. How is the earth's core very similar to a peach pit for example? The kid might not be able to stand back and understand the globe, the world, the earth as it is but they would be able to hold a peach in their hand right? So using things that somebody already knows, understanding the pattern of the construct there of a peach might be very helpful in explaining something that's very new to the kid. We can't see blood circulation in your body right? Okay but maybe we could talk about how he just pumped through your house or how air conditioning works or something like that which could explain how different things can move through a larger structure like the body for example. So when kids don't understand the need for this comes up a lot in school right? Especially in sciences or in other types of intangible constructs it really takes a great teacher to understand what does a student already know and then what types of knowledge can they use as sort of stepping stools to be able to reach the new knowledge right? So understanding the pattern how does circulatory system work how does the structure of a fruit perhaps parallel the structure of a planet or understanding how you even create analogies. How is the peel of an orange the same as skin is too right? So being able to fill in those gaps is also another way that the brain leverages the use of patterns in order to learn. Okay so in summary we talked about attention bias we also talked about the interaction of patterns and novelty in the brain how the brain uses first memory to try to see do I know something about this already then identifies the novelty to be able to build off of that. We also talked about human variability and how no two people are going to have the same memory bank of patterns and therefore will not consider the same things novel because of life experiences. We also talked about a Dhan's idea of you know three three and three that we have to take advantage of mental schemas. People might have an understanding of one thing but basically explaining that same thing in a novel way reinforces that concept in the brain. Additionally we reiterated this big idea that the more you know the more patterns you know in your world the type of pattern will help you identify future patterns and how there are such things as good patterns and bad patterns and finally we talked about different ways that the teacher can jump in and actually make changes or use different types of activities to leverage the way the brain seeks out novelty and patterns. So I hope you have tons of questions and I can't wait to see you soon to talk about them. Thanks a lot.