Teaching With The Brain In Mind - KeynesYouDigIt/Knowledge GitHub Wiki

  • Kids spend 13,000 hours in front of teachers from K-12

Recent neuroscience discoveries relevant to the classroom:

  • The brain grows new neurons which are tightly corelated with memory, and this process can be regulated
  • There is no stable baseline for stress. Most of the body's system return to healthy levels after trauma (homeostasis)- under extended periods of stress, your body just develops a new, less healthy baseline.
  • Emotional state and cognition are related
  • Exercise is strongly correlated with increased brain mass, better cognition, mood regulation, and new cell growth

Meet Your Amazing Brain

The Raw Material

  • Cerebral cortex is about a thick as an orange peels, folds maximize surface area.
  • Neurons have multiple inputs (dendrites) and one output (axon)
  • Glial cells carry nutrients, speed repair, provide myelin, help build new neurons, form their own communication network
  • Humans have large amounts of uncommitted cortex, which means lots of potential for learning

Lobes:

  • Occipital: Vision
  • Temporal: Hearing, memory, language
  • Frontal: Purposeful activities: Creativity, problem solving, planning, short-term memory
  • Parietal: Processing higher sensory and language

Connecting occipital + temporal = being able to visualize what you hear

Middle brain parts (limbic system):

  • Hippocampus
  • Thalamus
  • Hypothalamus
  • Cingulate
  • Basal Ganglia
  • Fornix
  • Striatum
  • Amygdala

Joseph LeDoux (1996) contends that there is no "limbic system", just individual processing centers.

Adaptability: The Constantly Changing Brain

  • Brains don't start small, get big, stay the same, and then decline when you get old
  • Environment can literally change your genes, which changes everything else about your life- even the most frustrating students can improve
  • Your brain is constantly respecializing- rehearsal reallocates parts of your brain to make it more efficient
  • Stress inhibits growth, exercise encourages it

Integration: How Brain Structures Cooperate and Compete

  • Brains are integrated by:
    • Neurons
    • Send messages through glial cells
    • Blood stream:
      • Neurotransmitters: Serotonin, dopamine, acetylchoine
      • Neuromodulators: Cortisol, adrenaline
    • Immune system
    • Neuropeptides
  • Hemispheres communicate through a nerve bundle called the corpus collosum
  • The hemispheres have different functions, but there is no "logical" or "creative" hemisphere. Both of those are very complex things that use the whole brain.
    • Right is usually as a whole, random order, within a spatial context
    • Left is usually in parts, sequenced, using language and text
    • Activities like music can migrate with experience- beginners mostly process on the right, experts mostly process on the left

Competition

Whichever activities:

  • Occur first
  • Happening most frequently
  • Are most coherent

Will get more brain real estate.

Sophistication: How the Brain Learns

  1. Input comes from senses or is activated by thinking about a memory a. Buffered for 5-20 seconds in short-term memory, in the frontal lobes
  2. Routing a. Information is routed to the thalamus for initial processing b. Simultaneously, the information is routed to the appropriate cortex for further processing c. Simultaneously, the information is routed to the appropriate subcortical structures (like the amygdala) iii. If the situation is an emergency, the amygdala hijacks everything
  3. Information is sent to the hippocampus for more subtle evaluation, and is held over time a. Over time, the hippocampus organizes and distributes memories with the appropriate cortexes for long-term storage

The Mechanics of Learning

  • As neurons fire together more frequently, it takes less energy and inital stimulus to make them fire (long-term potentiation, Hebb's law)
    • Long-term depression means that something shouldn't have fired, and requires more energy to make something fire. This happens when you make a mistake and learn from it.
    • Learning involves both exciting and inhibiting neurons
  • Information flow in the cortex is always bidirectional- the neurons talk back to each other for things like error-correction
  • Electrical activity triggers chemical activity in a synapse, which turns back into electrical activity on the other side
  • An excited synapse excites other nearby synapses- one firing makes the others fire too
  • An individual neuron may be connected to tens of thousands of others through synapses
  • There's no causal relationship between number of neurons and learning or intelligence.
  • Even when learning is stored correctly, it needs the correct "state activation" and chemical mix for retrieval. Being calm will increase learning and recall.

Learning takes place when:

  • Existing neural connections are strengthened, weakened, or reprogrammed to new neurons
  • Synapses are eliminated through competition and pruning
  • New connections are built (synaptogenesis), which is new learning
  • Retention of exuberant connections: Connections that should be eliminated aren't due to trauma, drug use
  • Compensatory reorganization: When something gets traumatized, your brain may migrate it to an unusual area of the brain

Preparing the Brain for School

Conception to birth: Fetuses are sensitive to stress and chemicals due to being in an enclosed environment without any buffer for toxins Birth to age 2: Lots of development happens here. This is sometimes called a "critical" period, but it's more like a "sensitive period." Lots of things like fine motor skills become foundational for later skills (scaffold effect), and something that can be put off will be put off (mañana effect). The also learn their emotional skills here, and if those aren't learned they generally aren't learned later in life. You need to supply lots of learning nutrients: Proteins, unsaturated fats, complex carbs, sugars. Age 2 to 5: Kids aren't naturally primed for things like language- there are mechanisms that allow children to appear as if they're doing things by instinct that they actually just learned. Age 5 to teenager: Things kids don't do get aggressively pruned. Reasoning and abstract concepts like hope and liberty develop from 6-12, and have large growth spurts on either side of it. Teenagers have bizarre behavior, make bad choices, and then lie to cover them up. A lot of brain reorganization happens during this time, and sleep becomes critical for consolidating new memories. During this reorganization, the brain is very inefficient. They're highly receptive to new information, but struggle to use it well.

Teaching teenagers:

  • Be succinct
  • Use concrete models
  • Be a coach- help them see lots of options
  • Be understanding- teens have reduced ability to recognize emotions from faces
  • Be tactful- Students have a hard time with nuance until 16-18
  • Cut them slack- go easy on punishment
  • Just let them sleep
  • Be careful of substance abuse- their brains are especially sensistive to addiction from 12-19

Rules We Learn By

  • About 50% of learning and intelligence is genetic, half of it is through education
  • Learning can be explicit (what we read, write, and talk about) or implicit (habits, games, experiences)

Learning something means a student can:

  • Identify or predict the relevant associations among variables in the learning situation
  • Predict and express accurately the appropriate concepts or actions
  • Store, retrieve, and apply that prediction in context next time

Better learning = better prediction, even with complex variables.

Some factors in learning are external (support from peers, temperature in the room, relationship with the teacher), an others are internal:

Engagement: Goal-oriented attention and action

  • Not a requirement for learning- 90% of what we learn is unconscious
  • Attention is hard to maintain- you compete with biological pressures against embarassment, failure, or harm. You need to engage and maintain the correct neural network, and exclude/suppress distractors.
  • Engagement activates more pleasure centers than memorization
  • Focused attention happens when:
    • Students choose relevant, meaningful learning
    • Students can hear well, above random noises
    • Students have enough sleep and aren't on drugs
    • Students don't have attention or processing disorders
  • Brain factors related to attention:
    • Attention, learning, and memory require enormous amounts of glucose- allow for snacks and gum
    • You can't focus if you don't feel safe
    • You can have a student's attention, or they can be making meaning, but never both at the same time. Meaning happens internally, and takes time.
  • Be brief: Limits to attention for direct instruction:
    • K-2: 5-8 minutes
    • 3-5: 8-12 minutes
    • 6-8: 12-15 minutes
    • 9-12: 12-15 minutes
    • Adults: 15-18 minutes
  • Use compelling, relevant tasks: Students should set and share goals, so they're have emotional stakes in the outcome. You can have students group and regroup material, categorize stuff, critiqueing, analyzing, resequencing, and retelling.
  • When getting student attention, students will habituate, so you need new ways of getting attention frequently.
  • Raise amine levels by change, small movement, small learning risks, artificial urgency, surprises, cliff-hangers, or excitement.
    • Have students stand a moment
    • Switch to an active game or energizer
    • Take the class outside
    • Have them walk with a partner
    • Lead stretching, dancing, or marching
  • Balance active learning, passive learning, and settling time

Repetition: Priming, reviewing, revising

  • Synapses aren't static- they respond to activity
  • If the same thing is practiced the same way too much, it gets boring. You can get around this by doing repetition under the guise of different approaches with different timing
  • Variations on repetition:
    • Pre-exposure- Days/weeks/months/years ahead, covertly. "Foreshadowing"
      • Driving a go-kart before you learn to drive a car
    • Previewing- Minutes/hours ahead, overt coming attractions. Overviews.
      • Access prior knowledge with handouts, brainstorming, teacher or student-led overview
    • Priming- Seconds, minutes ahead, covert exposure
      • Useful cues, even if students only get exposure to an idea ahead of using it. Maximally useful if they actively use the word or cue.
    • Reviewing- Minutes after learning, overtly. "Going over" previously learned material.
      • To maximize, students should come up with their own reviews.
    • Revision- Hours, days, weeks later, overtly
      • When memories are retrieved, they're altered. Every time they reengage with content, they're "learning" a new version of it.

Before learning:

  • Use vocab words in advance of an activity
  • Show a video on a topic in advance
  • Display key concepts on a poster
  • Use a pre-test as a primer
  • Use call-and-response

After Learning:

  • Have students create a review quiz
  • Think-pair-share
  • Have students make a graphic organizer
  • Have students come up with rhyming one-liners to review content

Input quantity: Capacity, flow, chunk size

You can teach more fast, but students will just forget more faster. Your hippocampus is a "surge protector" that learns quickly, but has a low capacity.

  • 3-7 chunks can be held in short-term memory before all new incoming information is ignored.
  • For explicit learning, synapses are built in 15 minutes, and continues to strengthen for the next hour.
  • For implicit learning, synapses take about 6 hours.
  • If a synapse is disturbed before it's "set", the memory is lost.
  • Sleep is needed for the hippocampus to redistribute the learning to the appropriate cortexes.
  • Brains need lots of short sessions and rest intervals, as well as frequent sleep.
  • Association and integration with other neural networks starts happening 3-30 days after initial learning.
  • Consolidating and associating memory can only occur during downtime.

In practice: Learn, discuss, talk a walk. Reviewing or journaling is a good way to elaborate on learning, but it is not settling time. Settling time is "no new learning." How much settling time is needed is driven by how novel and/or complex the material is to the learner. Teach new, complex material may take 2-5 minutes of processing for every 10-15 minutes of instruction.

Coherence: Models, relevance, prior knowledge

For simple learning (a stove is hot, definitions), you don't need a strategic model. For everyting else, content is more likely to get your attention if it is:

  • Emotional (not bland)
  • Specific (not general)
  • Novel (not familiar)

That content is likely to become meaningful if you can:

  • Relate it to prior information
  • Be both active and reflective with it
  • Learn it in context

Prior Knowledge

  • Students always have something
  • Prior knowledge is personal, complex, and highly resistant to change
  • Any piece of knowledge can be connected to anything else
  • Students fail to learn something often because they have competing, conflict, and unreliable prior knowledge. You can't erase these- you have to work with them.

Mental models

Our mental models (or schemas) affect how we interpret new events. Physiologically, they are simplified networks that often form very quickly. Students need help consciously constructing their own mental models for things. Find out what students know already, and then help them connect that to a new, more accurate model. Have students structure their existing beliefs explicitly. Help them structure things hierarchically. Link new learning to prior learning. Allow your students to physically build their mental models. Give them tools for testing their mental models against new facts, and revising if necessary.

Timing: Time of day, interval learning

Your ultradian rhythm lasts throughout the day. If you have an energy peak, you will likely have an energy dip about 45 minutes later. This cycles can be overridden with caffeine, exercise, novelty, or emergencies. These are relatively consistent day to day, so if you do the same activities at the same time, you may be consistently getting someone at their peak or valley. Additionally, your brain becomes alternately better at verbal or spatial processing every ~90 minutes.

  • Estrogen facilitates automatic verbal representations in memory
  • Low (for men) testosterone results in better performance on spatial tasks, high testosterone hurts performance
    • Opposite for women, since low testosterone in men is about about normal for women

At any given point in class, some of your students will be stronger spatially or verbally, and some students will be at high energy or low energy. Students should understand this; it's not an excuse, but something they will have to adapt to. Try alternating the times you do certain activities. Allow students to stand and do cross-lateral stretches at the back of the room when they're feeling drowsy. Taking lots of breaks increases productivity. This will affect test scores too, so allow students some choice in the assessment process, and favor portfolio-style testing.

Error Correction: Mistakes, feedback, support

Our nervous systems figure out what's going on and then what to do about it. Your brain doesn't get things the first time because:

  • You get massive amounts of sensory input, most of it isn't important, and you're not sold on the importance of the input you're getting
  • The new material exceeds your short-term memory capacity
  • Your hippocampus has overloaded and is rejecting all new information

Direct instruction is appropriate for:

  • Core, rules-based strategies within a time constraint.
  • Things that are counter-intuitive and difficult to learn through experience

When you lecture, you have no idea whether or not your students have acquired the information until you use another strategy to check:

  • Group discussions
  • Case studies
  • Self-scoring
  • Game simulations
  • Writing assignments
  • Student rubrics

You can't memorize every fact you'll need in the future, but you can eliminate some of the more costly mistakes (looking both way s before crossing the street).

There's a part of your brain called the anterior cingulate that activates when there's a discrepancy between what you expect and what happens (it's also activated by pain). This is specifically designed to help us learn from trial and error. Neural connections get stronger through repetition and more efficient through feedback loops.

Reasons why learning doesn't happen:

  • Damage: Fetal alcohol exposure, brain injury, autism
  • Prior learning and mental models get in the way
  • No reflection work was done to create a clear mental model

Trial and error alone isn't enough- you also need:

  • Feedback loops
  • Consistent activities where students can try hypotheses and make mistakes
  • Opportunities to make mistakes they can get immediate feedback about
  • Feedback that allows students to evaluate, reflect, and change their behavior

Active learning examples:

  • Call/response
  • Discussion
  • Games
  • Answering questions
  • Problem-solving
  • Building
  • Debating

Students should actively be building a mental model, not reading about how to build one. Since active learning involves motion, it takes more neurons which gives it more focus. The encoding also goes deeper than semantic (word-based learning).

Feedback needs to be high-quality, actionable, positive, and timely. Students may have anxiety about receiving feedback, so allow them some agency in the timing and resolution of it. Aim for feedback-driven activities that rely on less of the teacher:

  • Model building
  • Peer editing
  • Doing gallery walks
  • Pair-sharing
  • Student presentations with audience feedback
  • Playing competitive games
  • Using mirrors and self-recordings
  • Checklists and rubrics

Emotional States: Safety, state of dependency

The more intense the emotional state, the more likely we are to remember that event. Negative emotions are remembered longer and they affect more of the brain. Anything potentially threatening is detected by the amygdala, and it tells the hypothalamus to take over your brain. Your frontal lobes then monitor the event at a heightened state of awareness. Neuromodulators are modulating activity at the synapses, which can enhance the formation of memories.

Moderate (not high!) levels of cortisol are helpful to encode learning, but not in retrieving it.

Dopamine can also enhance the formation of memories.

One amygdala processes more general aspects of a situation, the other processes more details of a situation. Males are generally stronger in the general amygdala, females are generally stronger with the detail amygdala.

You can create emotional activities by introducing:

  • Risk
    • Public speaking
    • Pair-sharing
    • Having to role-model something
    • Meeting new people
  • Excitement
    • Halfway between fun and scary. Will be exciting for 80% of your students, boring or too scary for 20%- don't over-rely on them and change them up.
    • Public performance
    • Science fair
    • Debates
    • Field trips
    • Relay races
  • Urgency
    • Needs to be perceived as worth accomplising
    • Needs to have appropriate resources to make it happen
    • Needs a reasonable deadline
    • Otherwise, learned helplessness
  • Pleasure
    • Finishing on time
    • Having less than the expected amount of homework
    • Taking home something you built
    • Sitting with friends

Movement and Learning

Cognition, emotions, and movement are interrelated, not separate compartments.

  • Your cerebellum is most responsible for movement, and has almost half the brain's neurons. It's wired into most of the other cortexes, but most of its connections are outbound.
  • We predict our movements and their outcomes before we execute them so that we can control them better- this why the cerebellum is so wired into the rest of your senses
  • This makes the cerebellum the part of your brain that's best at prediction and correction
  • Oxygen is essential for brain function, and regular exercise increases the oxygen transported to the brain. It also increases the baseline of neuron growth and connections between neurons.
  • All kinds of play improve cognition
  • Exercise improves your stress response by training your body to recover from adrenaline quickly
  • Feeling like you want to move around or express emotions while they're thinking is an integration of mind and body.
  • Integrate movement into your lessons- even "purely" academic subjects like math
    • Drama and role plays
    • Energizers
    • Quick games (like QAQ)
    • Do cross-lateral movement
    • Stretch
    • Have physical breaks that last for 30-40 minutes- integrate with lunch?

Emotional States

Emotions drive attention, create meaning, have their own memory pathways, regulate behaviors, and help us organize our world.

Built-in biological emotions: Joy, fear, surprise, disgust, anger, sadness

You also have fleeting experiences called "states." Not all states are emotional, but all emotions are states. Everything you do is dependent on states. If a student is not in the appropriate state for the behavior you want, you won't get it. States aren't who you are, they're something you experience. That said, your body normalizes to certain states as "home" if a person is allowed to persist there.

Physical states: Soreness, fatigue, pain Feeling states: Curiosity, craziness, supportiveness, love, optimism Emotional states: Your experience of joy/fear/surprise/disgust/anger/sadness

These are caused by a variety of chemicals present in the brain, which is why you can't just turn them off once they happen.

Emotional events receive preferential processing in the brain. Emotions make your brain more activated and chemically stimulated, so things are recalled faster and more explicit memories are formed. These are likely to have increased future value for us.

Fear/Threat

  • Fight
  • Flight
  • Freeze - No escape or they are unlikely to win

Things that cause threat response:

  • Peer pressure
  • Serious deadlines with consequences
  • Being forced to stay after school
  • Making reparations
  • Giving public apologies

Brief stress (especially that the student is in control of) enhances hippocampal learning (explicit memories). You want stress right up until loss of appetite. Prolonged stress ("distress") impairs cognition, damages the brain, and makes it harder to sort out what's important from what's not.

Distress:

  • Heightened arousal
  • Perception of the event as adverse
  • Loss of controllability

Women respond to stress by increasing nuturing behavior. Men respond to stress repond to stress by withdrawal and sarcasm.

Joy/Pleasure

Dopamine increases focus, feature recognition, and suppression of the irrelevant.

Sadness/Disappointment

Pain and sadness are experienced more moderately, but longer than joy. We remember negative experiences longer and more vividly, which leads to avoidness of the behaviors that caused it.

Anticipation/Curiosity

Highly motivating states that drive people toward goals.

Emotional Chemicals

Name Type Function Mnemonic
Cortisol Hormone Energy "Uh oh"
Dopamine Neurotransmitter Pleasure "Yahoo!"
Serotonin Neurotransmitter Calm "Ahhh..."
Epinephrine Hormone Alert "Yikes!"

Tips

  • Ask compelling questions that evoke emotions
  • Get emotional and excited about what you're teaching
  • Have celebrations that show off student work
  • Use physical activity to release dopamine
  • Engineer controversy with a debate
  • Use intentional physical rituals (like clapping)
  • Have students connect with the material personally with things like blogs

Physical Environments for Learning

  • Seating needs to be adjustable and support good posture
  • Row seating provides better focus, clustered seating is more conducive to group work. Seating and tables should be movable. You should also allow people to stand, sit on the floor, on exercise balls, or anything else that helps them.
  • Cooler is better than warmer. 70 degrees is about right. Temperatures that are too high decrease cognition and increase aggression.
  • Avoid fluorescent lighting- the flicker and hum is awful for brains. Ideal is natural sunlight, both for quality of light and mood regulation.
  • Persistent noise is awful for focus
  • Ideal colors are warm yellows for the 3 walls students face, a light blue for the wall the teacher faces, contrasting accent colors on the wall the students face. Use red and yellow to stimulate, light blue to calm. Use warm golden-grey for carpets.
  • Teachers need a place they can be away from students

Managing The Social Brain

  • Our social experiences physically shape are brain and influence our gene expression
  • Social experience have a big influence on stress/safety, which has a huge impact on cognition
  • Positive group social interactions, interdependence, group and individual accountability, and conflict resolution enhance learning.
  • Students should spend ~20% of their time with groups
  • Social play helps develop quick-thinking skills
  • Cortisol levels are 18-87% higher in people who are isolated from their peers
  • Racism is learned, but being wary of people who are different than triggers a light amygdala response until it gets desensitized to the difference is natural.

Motivation and Engagement

Motivation is "arousal" and "drive"- willingness to be active, and meaningful participation

Common Sources of Demotivation

  • Lack of positive relationships (eg. a best friend)
  • Learned helplessness (more common the longer students are in school)
  • Being aware of disrespect toward their culture or ethnicity
  • Perception of threats (real or imagined)
  • Brain anomalies
  • Drug use (especially alcohol and marijuana)
  • Perception that the assignments are irrelevant

Reward Systems

Brain-generated rewards are called opiates, and they produce a natural high. You also have reward prediction systems (which especially increase motivation if the reward is random). When a reward is a surprise, the activity gets logged for the reward prediction system for the future. You get dopamine from both the ancitipation and the reward itself, although both diminish with time. Different students will also find different things rewarding.

  • Use rewards carefully, for short lengths of time, and for specific purposes.
  • Use cheap rewards- you can also use abstract rewards like notes of praise
  • Don't end them cold-turkey-- phase them out, develop intrinsic motivation, and step up the abstract rewards
  • If you don't develop intrinsic motivation, the absence of a reward will make the activity demotivating
  • You can't develop intrinsic motivation for senseless tasks- it needs to tie into something the learner finds meaningful

Unmotivated learners usually have a rigid set of behavioral states they approach learning with. If you can get them to be in a wider range of states, you can decouple those two things.

Changing Student States

States are the body's environment for making decisions. Everyone would agree to something in one state, but not in another. Managing this is key.

Determine a target State. Then read their present state. If they're in a state like apathy, they were probably in a state of frustration earlier that went unaddressed. Is their state appropriate? If not, plan how you can shift their state to make the next activity work better. For example, if you want them to do an activity, have them get up and move first.

  • Look for ways to increase their perception of choice. Point out what their options are.
  • Eliminate threats
  • Have daily goals that incorporate choice
  • Be a positive influence
  • Manage student emotions and teach them to do it too
  • Feedback increases motivation
  • Use rituals to help with state changes (stand up, stand down), music queues, signals

Critical Thinking Skills

Different parts of the brain have different levels of variability. The thalamus, cerebellum, and the motor cortext are pretty consistent from person to person, while the frontal lobes and sensory cortext have high degrees of variability between people. In general, there is consistent biological evidence that males are more impulsive and physical, and females are more cooperative and have better verbal memory. Be patient and accomodating of this.

2 hours is the upper-limit for skills training. For adults, the sweet spot is 45-90 minutes, 3-4 times a week.

"The evidence of the abysmal failure of students to transfer learning from school subjects to real-life is legendary." (Ceci & Roazzi, 1994). "Even students with a background in statistics, math, and science do not transfer that learning to novel contexts." (Leshowitz, 1989) The only solution to this is real-world learning. Vary the resources available, contexts where something is applied, and the expectations. "Repetition is a fundamental quality for learning new skills" (Kilgard & Merzenich, 1998). "The practice involved in learning a skill should move from the particular subskill to a generalization of the subskill.

Creative play with built-in feedback loops, and opportunities for trial-and-error learning are huge (this is what makes infants learn so quickly).

When students enter an emotional state often and stays there for a long time, they're able to reenter that state more quickly and with less prompting (a "stable state"). This is true for both positive and negative emotional states.

Emotional states come from 3 things:

  • Sensations (cold, itchy, hungry)
  • Mental state (confident, focused, scattered)
  • Feelings (disappointed, joyful, disgusted)

You can only actively experience one aspect of your emotional state at a time. You can influence which one you're focusing on though, and that's a valuable skill for anyone to develop. It starts with checking in with yourself and figuring out which state you're in at any given time.

Teachers can influence someone's state with:

  • The questions we ask
  • The postures, movement, and activities we use and incorporate
  • The personal encouragement we provide
  • The attitudes and opinions we hold of them
  • The respect and affirmation we give them
  • The hobbies and habits we encourage and support
  • The learning and successes they gain

Help students self-identify their emotional states, and help them develop tools for self-regulating. Always aim to end activities and days "up."

Thinking Skills

Students don't automatically have any of these:

  • Maintaining focus
  • Locating and prioritizing resources
  • Distinguishing relevance, similarity, order, differnce
  • Be able and willing to ask for help
  • Reading and summarizing content
  • Speaking/drawing/building non-linguistic representations
  • Setting goals and using feedback
  • Self-awareness of personal health and nutrition
  • Generating and testing hypotheses
  • Developing working-memory capacity
  • Organizing and mapping out ideas and information
  • Showing persistence and follow-through in the face of adversity

To develop them, students need motivation, role modeling, either direct instruction or an opportunity to use the skill, time for trial/error, practice, and debriefing, and time to use and strengthen the skill in multiple contexts.

Memory and Recall

Memories are dynamic, not fixed. They are the probability of a particular neural pattern firing. The memory network can have multiple potential activation sites. Learning is the result of strengthening the connection between two neurons (by reducing the threshold for firing), and it can be modulated by other hormones like stress. Memories are encoded in many places at multiple speeds, they're maintained through retrieval (implicit memories are harder to alter than explicit memories), and retrieved. Not all memories can be retrieved, and we're better at retrieving memories that relate to our survival. Memories are encoded in the part of the brain that originally processed them. We're very good at storing memories about important locations, how to do essential things, emotional experiences, and conditioned responses. Skills are stored in the cerebellum and striatum ("automated habit preserver").

Types of memories:

Semantic

  • Facts, figures, words & pictures.
  • Semantic memory has the weakest retrieval. Student who attended lectures only knew 8% more than people who skipped (Rickard, Rogers, Ellis, Beidlman, 1988)
  • Items go into working memory for 5-30 seconds before either disappearing or being reactivated by being attached to meaning
  • The capacity limit for your working memory has a lot to do with how related the items are and how many of them there are. It's low though- only a couple (not 7 +/-2 like the Miller study claimed)
  • Items are better stored in "chunks" rather than unconnected ideas
  • Very little semantic memory will be retained long-term unless the student is intrinsically motivated to do so

Episodic

  • Declarative (explicit). Autobiographical.
  • You have to have been there yourself
  • Storage is motivated by curiosity, novelty, and expectations and enhanced by sensory input
  • Unlimited capacity and activates effortlessly
  • You process "where" and "what" separately
  • Your episodic memories can become contaminated when you have too many "whats" stored for a single "where." Incorporate multiple locations, different seating locations, etc. to get around this.

Reflexive

  • Non-Declarative (implicit).
  • Reflexive memories come from intense emotion or lots of repetition (like flash cards)
  • Deep emotional responses (like celebrations) help embed memories

Procedural

  • Non-Declarative (implicit).
  • Unlimited storage, needs little/no maintenace, and no intrinsic motivation
  • Activated by physical movement, involvement of the entire body
  • Allow time for error-correction
  • Celebrate when you're done to further cement the learning

Memory Storage

When you're learning something, what someone said goes in one place, what you did goes in another, what you saw goes in another. When you recall a memory, you have to reassemble it from all those locations. Encoding and strengthening multiple pathways will make retrieval easier. Your newer memories are shakier and need more reinforcement. Short-term memory requires repetition, long-term memory requires emotion. Repeat new ideas at 10 minutes, 2 days, and 7 days. Use mnemonics, action-pictures (mental visualizations), rhymes, songs. Make students organize the information (rather than the teacher doing it for them). Students will bias the first and last things in a lesson, so make sure those are the most important.

  • Wholes taught before parts are recalled better because they create context.
  • The more complex the learning is, the more important sleep is.
  • We remember things that were temporarily interrupted- Cliffhangers work!

Memory Maintenance

Memories need to maintained because they're dynamic and change over time. Retrieving them activates the entire storage sequence again as you "relearn" it (reconsolidation). Sources of change:

  • Transience (erosion of unused memories over time)
  • Persistence (traumatic or powerful memories that "block" or bias formation of new memories)
  • Subject bias (distortion based on prior or subsequent knowledge)
  • Absent-mindedness (you were never paying attention to begin with)
  • Suggestibility
  • Misattribution (false recognition, get the 'gist' but inaccurately)
  • Blocking ("on the tip of your tongue")

Review is most powerful shortly after learning.

Memory Retrieval

Places where memories are activated:

  • Amygdala (from intense emotions)
  • Hippocampus (mediates semantic and episodic memory)
  • Temporal lobes (semantic retrieval)
  • Prefrontal cortex (working memory)
  • Parietal lobes (short-term memory)
  • Cerebellum (procedural & reflexive learning, conditioned responses)
  • Bloodstream (through peptides)

Retrieval will go better if the memory is retrieved in the state that the memory was formed (same place, circumstances, emotional state). Learning in a variety of states will make memories more resilient.

Memories can take a while to surface. You can take advantage of this by priming a student. They might not be able to recall something on the spot, but with a few minutes to think about it, their performance can improve dramatically. You can also give them the first letter, sing a song, or do anything that helps activate the network.

Brain-Based Teaching

Before

  • Think about students who will need extra help
  • Get yourself in a good emotional state
  • Prime the students days and weeks before for the content
  • Make sure everyone is feeling safe and secure

During

  1. Manage everyone's emotional states (humor, rituals, journaling)
  2. Hook them with a frame for the content
  3. Active learning
  4. Deepen the learning and allow for error-correction (quizzes, editing, presentations with feedback)
  • Prevents students from turning the facts into a "gist" of things
  1. Strengthen mental models, organize information, incorporate other ideas, use mneomics, etc.

After

  • Allow for settling time before introducing new content
  • Review and revise frequently

Schools with the Brain in Mind

  • If an assessment is based on recall, a student needs a lot of practice time
  • Learning to learn strategies are more important than content- give students opportunities to show those skills
  • Students ask "will this be on the test?" because so much of what we teach them isn't behaviorally relevant
  • There's little evidence that good test-takers do better in life or that testing skills transfer (Koretz, Linn, Dunban, and Shephard 1991), so it's hard to get a student motivated by getting good test scores
  • Mental models are critical in thinking, but rarely assessed

Quality education encourages wide-open, creative problem-solving, alternative problem-solving approaches, multiple right answers, and creative insights. Standardized tests value none of these.