30 Minutes on the Brain

Good playlist from Edutopia on the brain:

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Alison Gopnik to speak at TBS

Using neuroscience in the classroom

Today I sent around this article about using neuroscience to inform classroom practice to the faculty. A quick hit of some highlights:


- Establish the relevance of the lesson to previous and future lessons.

- Allow more time for inquiry; ask fewer spontaneous questions, and focus on specific, planned questions. Also, slow down the pace; extend your "wait time" for student answers.

- Incorporate movement, play, and collaboration into the lessons.

And of course, teach students about their brains!

The Brain's "Air Traffic Controller"

Today Kate, Kim, Renee and I gathered in the conference room for a free lunchtime webinar on executive function ("EF") led by Dr. Bill Jenkins and sponsored by Scientific Learning, where he is Chief Scientific Officer (and also a Founder). Dr. Jenkins is a former associate professor at the Keck Center for Integrative Neuroscience at UCSF, and he keeps a very interesting blog on all things neuroscience. Pleasantly, he didn't try to sell or push the company's products, but instead remained focused on the nueroscience of executive function. 

Dr. Jenkins described EF as containing three distinct and inter-related components that function as the "air traffic controller" of the brain. Working memory allows us to do tasks such as hold and manipulate information for a short period of time, hold multiple step instruction without reminders, and make decisions in social interaction such as turn-taking. Inhibitory control allows us to master and filter thoughts and impulses, hold of distractions, and select and focus attention. Cognitive flexibility helps us switch gears, adjust to new demands and experiences, consider new perspectives and change our speech and actions based on context. To give an example of how all three parts work together, consider the situation in which working memory allows you to hold two rules in mind, cognitive flexibility allows you to select which rule to follow in the moment, and inhibitory control prevents the "off" rule from being followed.

The stand-out takeaways for me from the webinar included the importance of providing scaffolding for students (such as establishing routines, providing cues, and breaking large tasks into discrete units); that EF takes decades to fully develop; that EF skills aren't automatically developed and because children will not necessarily outgrow certain behaviors, explicit intervention might be needed; and that EF development underlies success both socially and academically. The webinar concluded with some suggestions for developing EF, including allowing children to select high-interest topics for some schoolwork, providing both quiet time and time for detailed, extensive work at school, and encouraging participation in both team sports and/or drama activities as ways to learn to manage complex sets of rules and behaviors, and thus develop EF.

Update: Check out this video on adolescent brains sent to me by Kim, in follow-up to this webinar.

Is the Brain to Blame?

This NY Times opinion piece, co-authored by a neuroscientist and psychologist, proposes that many people hold the fallacious belief that psychological causes (intention) and biological causes (the physical laws that govern our brains) for behavior are completely separate. The reason that intention and biology are not completely separate causal functions is deceptively simple: all psychological states have simultaneously occurring biological ones.

While this piece was written in the context of the horrific recent shootings in Colorado, the point has led me to a series of questions related to best educational practices. For example, are all biological states associated with specific psychological states? Another way to ask this is if there is 1:1 correspondence between psychological and biological states (since we know that all psychological states have an associated biological state, but not if the biological states are unique to each psychological state), and if so, is it generalizable within or between individuals. If these pairs/connections exist, it could change the way we structure educational practices to be more responsive to the biological states of students' brains - a goal we already pursue based on what we know about their brains. For example, if we could implement activities that physiologically tuned brains into certain states most receptive to specific learning experiences (as we attempt to do by psychologically tuning student brains to feel safe, comfortable, and un-anxious), that would increase the effectiveness of the educative process.

Another thread of this that interests me is if brain characteristics can actually cause automatic behavior that is not reflective of the "true" person - what might be considered temporary insanity from a physiological, rather than psychological, standpoint. This could potentially provide a scientific basis for understanding the experiences of individuals going through periods of extreme neural growth or change, and lead to shifts in the way we deal with a variety of discipline and classroom management issues.

The implications of this understanding for character education are a third area for investigation. Just as we are educating students to be self-aware and reflective scholars who understand and make intentional choices about their learning habits to maximize their success, helping students begin to understand how the physical neurology of their brains impacts their psychological states, and thus their behaviors, rises to new prominence.

Neuroscience and learning

Two interesting articles related to children's brains crossed my inbox today.

Tiffany Lewis wrote a nice article on the importance of identifying and understanding what's going on with children's cognitive realities, rather than defaulting to the over-simplification of labels, in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, which is something we often talk about at TBS. The question of when to tell or inform a child about his or her unique cognitive structure is a very interesting one, as here at TBS we tend to wait to do this until sometime in middle school, when children have the capacity to process the information intellectually, and also the emotional implications that come from realizing one's unique gifts and challenges.

Wendi Pillars documented five effective tenants of teaching based on neuroscience. Four of her recommendations are well-trod at this point: return to information over time, slow down, develop close relationships with students (to relieve their stress), and establish the relevance of the ideas in connection with prior knowledge. It was the fifth idea - the fact that information that is presented first or last has a greater chance of being retained (the primacy-recency effect) - that jumped out at me for its implications about lesson structures.

Math anxiety and brain function

A fascinating piece of research has just come out of the Stanford School of Medicine that confirms what seemed likely: math-specific fear interferes with the brain's information-processing capacity and its ability to reason through a math problem. In other words, math anxiety leads to decreased mental functioning in areas of problem solving, memory, and numerical reasoning when trying to engage in mathematical thinking!


What are the implications for classroom practice? First, we need to identify when students are experiencing math anxiety. Second, we need to educate students about the neurological impact that anxiety has on their brains (since it actually decreases their ability to successfully solve math problems) - we already know we don't like the experience of anxiety, but we need to understand how it actually affects us. Third, we need to teach students strategies to manage that anxiety.

One strategy I have been utilizing recently in my own practice of mindfulness (drawn from my reading of Fully Present: The art and science of mindfulness) that I think has potential application here is "R.A.I.N." R = recognize the emotion or experience. A = accept the emotion's existence (rather than suppress, repress, or fight it). I = investigate how the emotion makes you feel, on a physical level (not intellectual) - does your jaw get tight, breathing short, foot start to bounce, etc? N = non-identify, or tell yourself that this emotion and accompanying physical sensation is temporary and non-permanent, and that you are not that experience.

NAIS Annual Conference, Day Two

The theme of this year’s conference is innovation. The opening general session this morning began with an address by NAIS president Pat Bassett that made me feel extremely good about the work that we are doing at TBS. He began by proposing that the work of independent schools is to teach students to be “critical, creative and inventive thinkers”, which ties directly to our school-wide learning outcomes. He then went on to proclaim ten promising innovations in education:

1. adopting backward design and mapping of curriculum around skills, rather than subjects

2. documenting student outcomes via formative assessments and “demonstrations of learning” and digital portfolios

3. connecting appreciative inquiry, the strengths approach, and growth mindset – all subsets of the positivist psychology movement

4. globalizing independent schools

5. stage II greening of schools

6. “STEM and beyond” signature programming – the great differentiator of your program

7. professionalizing the profession – 6 or 7 day schedules to get all teachers with an affinity free on a certain day; different teams (brain based learning, flipped classroom, differentiated instruction)

8. public purpose of private education initiatives

9. online learning consortia for independent school-branded courses

10. teaching and using design thinking

I’ve italicized the five innovations on the list that we are currently utilizing, which I think is a great starting point for TBS given the enormous change pressures that we have experienced in the last five years. I also believe that we’ll be in position to begin pursuing items #6 and #8 above in the next year, in explicit initiatives and programs.

Unfortunately, I was entirely underwhelmed the presentation of the keynote speaker, Bill Gates. His talk was centered on four aspects of technology that he believes can revolution education: reimaging textbooks as interactive, scaling our best teachers via online videos, connecting thru social networks, and personalizing learning. While there are tremendous possibilities in these mechanisms, Bill’s storytelling was flat and lacked humor, his visuals were overly simplified, and he essentially dodged the tough questions during the Q+A. Here’s an example:

Q: What skills do you think will be needed in the future?

A: The basic ability to use the latest software.

After the opening session came the first one-hour workshop period of the day. I selected a workshop titled Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, presented by Helen Landry and Laurie Reider-Lewis. I struggled with buyer’s remorse for the first twenty minutes; though this workshop connected directly to one of my personal PD goals for the year, I was also interested in a workshop on changing school culture, and the initial introduction by the speakers didn’t instill confidence that the conversation would yield substantive growth in my understanding of the concept of mindfulness. It was only when we did the first exercise – a “body scan” – that I was able to slip into a more mindful mode, and thus become content with the structure of the workshop and open myself up to the learning possibilities it could present – for which I was promptly rewarded with several nuggets about using mindfulness with students. Being in this mindful state carried over for the remainder of the day, and had a positive impact on my engagement with the other workshops of the day.

After lunch and conversation with Mohammad, and browsing the exhibit hall, I headed to a workshop on implementing design thinking with students, given by Kim Saxe at Nueva School (CA). In 2007, Nueva partnered with the Design School at Stanford to launch a design lab, giving over 3500 square feet to a design studio. Learning how Nueva implements and teaches design thinking to students, and used it in the development of their own program, was inspirational and exciting. Design thinking is the process that Laurie Schoeffler and I are using to improve our K-5 literacy program this year, and this workshop gave me several good ideas about how to integrate the approach with our ongoing curriculum review as well.

For the final workshop of the day, Mohammad and I went to hear John Medina, author of the book Brain Rules (about whom, and which, I’ve blogged before). I’d read the book earlier this year, so I was a little disappointed by his presentation, as it was a case of “read the book, or go to class, but not both”. He focused on two of the twelve brain rules in his book – exploration and stress – and you can get the basic ideas of these concepts by watching the videos below.

The day closed with a series of social and professional connections featuring a revolving cast. First I met with Nancy Foy, a member of my Fellowship cohort, for a conversation about her upcoming transition to a Head of School position in Richmond, VA. After this I attended a gathering of progressive educators hosted by Peter Berner-Hays, head of The Little School in nearby Bellevue, to discuss marketing and presenting the idea of progressive education in modern culture. Next, I gathered three Bay Area educators – Steve Bileca from Brandeis Hillel, Jon Kohler from Redwood Day School (another Fellowship cohort member), and Damon Allswang from Beacon Day School – for a Mediterranean dinner at Lola’s Restaurant. Finally, I met up with three members of my Aspiring Heads cohort – Andrea Kelly from Packard (NY), Rehki Puri from the School at Columbia University (NY), and Michele Williams from Stevenson (CA) – for drinks and reflective sharing about our learning from the day.

Who do you trust, neuroscientists or magicians?

We love neuroscience here at TBS. Even when it has nothing to do with education. Here's a great article by Teller, of Penn & Teller fame, about how he uses neuroscience in the construction of his magic tricks.