Sense and Sensation

After helping found Facebook, Chris Hughes founded Jumo, a social network built around social causes.  I subscribed to education posts from Jumo, and one day I received a newsletter that coincidentally included two related articles--one about US education and one about Finnish education--and they revealed a remarkable contrast. Admittedly, the Finland-US comparison is apples-to-oranges (and groan-inducing by now); New York City’s school system alone is larger than all of Finland’s, and the demographic differences between the two nations is profound.  But what remains remarkable here is what each article focuses on when it looks at what is working. First, the pictures: in the US, students are sedentary at their desks.  In Finland, students are outside, wrapping their arms around trees...  ...even in the cold, snowy weather!  Already, we see dramatic difference in the two approaches. And second, the first few paragraphs of each article highlight n...

It’s easy these days (and a little cheap) to rail against the old school classroom as a teacher-centric, autocratic learning environment.  We hear this often; product marketers, overzealous reformers, and technothusiasts seem to express the sentiment that old school teaching is irrelevant in a high-tech world, or that if you’re not with what’s up-and-coming, you’re out to lunch, and you certainly can’t be providing a good educational experience for kids. But 2400 years ago, the Socratic method promoted discovery through asking questions, and we’ve explored how it does, indeed, provide a rich, cognitive experience .  We continue to hold this kind of teaching in high esteem. And 100 years ago, Dewey codified the ideals of experiential education, arguing that primary experience is essential to constructing understanding.  This is good teaching; it is a model of rich encoding , of multi-sensory experience.  In fact, at over a hundred years old, it rema...

Which is best:  Inquiry-based learning?  Technology-driven classes?  Socratic discussion?  Others?  These pedagogical approaches seem to have their own disciples, each claiming the One Pedagogy To Rule Them All.  How is a teacher to know?  How understand which to use when?  And why? I used to have a "grass is always greener" feeling about this.  I wondered: could everything my colleagues are doing be better than what I'm doing?  I always admired (and still do) the fervent proselytizing different schools of thought attract.  But clarity came for me when I made the realization in the previous blog post: that our habits and dispositions directly engage different stages of the cognitive process .  When I understood that the cognitive model of attention, encoding, storage, and retrieval explains how “non-cognitive skills” influence learning in different ways, then I began to consider how it might similarly cast our differe...

How a large-scale digital analysis of teacher comments led to a new understanding of why some people excel, and how we can use this information to shape educational environments and close gaps in student preparation. What are the habits and dispositions associated with success in school?  What behaviors and character traits lead to growth and development?  And how do these dispositions, these “non-cognitive skills,” relate to the science of learning--how do they inform, overlap with, or shape the cognitive functions of attention, encoding, storage, and retrieval? In the end, are habits and beliefs more important than the mechanics of the mind?  Or are the mechanics what drive our character? These questions lay at the heart of a task force I led that set out to address gaps in student preparation as they entered our school.  Researching these questions, however, researching character and performance, is tricky, because behaviors and character traits are not ...

On its own, cognitive science is helpful for understanding how the mind works; it's only useful, though, if we can apply this understanding to facilitate better learning. So how is the cognitive model for learning useful for educators?  Let’s review: learning happens in four cognitive stages: Attention , Encoding , Storage ( I and II ), and Retrieval .  And from the perspective of students , we can think of these stages working like this: Attention is the filtering out of the many stimuli of the world and the focusing on the information at hand. Encoding is the brain registering this information, processing sensory experience and attaching new information to old information. Storage is the consolidation of information and its movement from working memory to long term memory. Retrieval is the act of bringing long-term memory back into mind, back in to working memory and out into our experiences, silently to ourselves or publicly to others. As educators , ...

What saves our sanity, every day, is that we can forget.  It’s good that we forget things--even though sometimes we forget more than we want to--for if we never forgot anything we ever thought or saw, we’d drown in the information overload. For teachers, all this forgetting means that even if we sustain our students’ attention, even if we help our students encode information richly, and even if we create opportunities for students to consolidate that information in their minds--they will still naturally forget things.  Like patterns in sand on the beach that wash away, so will memories. And it turns out that the rate at which we forget things has been studied. Forgetting and Remembering In the late 1800s, a psychologist named Hermann Ebbinghaus tested peoples’ memories for both meaningless and meaningful information over time, and he developed curves that showed our rate of forgetting information.  (Ebbinghaus is that guy pictured above...) We lose inf...

What happens to memories once we make them?  Where do they live?  Why do they last?  More technically: what mechanisms enable us to move memories from working memory into long term memory?  And, what does sleep have to do with all this? Some biology will help us out here. Let’s look for a moment at two important regions of the brain: the cortex , which is the big labyrinthine web of cauliflower in the picture below, and the hippocampus , a much smaller region of the brain deeper into the center of our heads. The cortex plays a large role in conscious thought and in the processing of information in working memory.  The hippocampus, however, plays an essential role in the formation of long-term memory , the translation of information from working memory to long-term memory.  In fact, without the hippocampus, we wouldn't be able to make any new long-term memories at all.    (Kind of like the movie "Memento."  Also, there’s a r...

And this brings us to storage...  to memory.  What is memory and how does it work? Here is the current thinking: Memory is not the placement of something in the mind, like a book on a shelf, but instead it is the establishment of neural connections, of something like footpaths through the brain.  Thoughts and experiences build connections between the billions and billions of neurons in the brain, establishing new networks and patterns of connections.  These are what we understand to be thoughts and memories. And here’s one way to picture this.   Imagine a stretch of sand, like a gradually sloping desert.  But it rains on this desert, and when it rains, water from higher ground runs across the desert sand.  This movement of water is the act of thinking.  Water moves across the desert like signals moving through the brain, and memories are the tracks left in the sand, the channels and rivulets across the vast space.  Every n...