Brain Fact Friday ”Using Neuroscience to Inform the Future of Teaching and Learning”

“The brain has a capacity for learning that is virtually limitless, which makes every human being a potential genius.” Michael J. Golb I want to welcome you back to The Neuroscience Meets Social and Emotional Learning Podcast where we bridge the gap between theory and practice, with strategies, tools and ideas we can all use immediately, applied to the most current brain research to heighten productivity in our schools, sports environments and modern workplaces. I’m Andrea Samadi and launched this podcast almost 4 years ago, to share how important an understanding of our brain is for our everyday life and results.  For today’s episode #276, we will go back to one of our early episodes, #119[i] on “The Key Ingredients of Learning with the Brain in Mind” and take a look at what I picked out as the key ingredients for learning back then, to see how NEW research has informed this area today. When I went back to review this episode, there were some ingredients in this “learning” equation that we’ve talked about often on this podcast, and the new research I found was eye-opening. The new research took what we covered so beautifully on those early episodes, to a whole new level, showing me why it’s important to go back to the basics and see what strategies are effective, and why. Before we get to what’s NEW, let’s look back at where our podcast began, and what we were focused on, with learning with our brain in mind. Learning with the Brain in Mind We can go right back to our very first interview EPISODE #3[ii] with Ron Hall, from Valley Day School, who mentioned how things changed for him when he met Horacio Sanchez and began teaching with brain science in mind. This is the whole reason why we are going back to the basics this season, as we connect the new research to our past episodes, to strengthen where we all are in our process of building a stronger, more resilient 2.0 version of ourselves in 2023 and beyond. It’s always easy to look back, and connect the dots[iii] like Steve Jobs’ famous quote, and trust that these dots will connect again in the future, with new meaning that’s evolved with time, knowledge and understanding. John Hattie’s Research: As I glanced at our earlier interviews, Greg Wolcott from EPISODE #7 on “Building Relationships in Today’s Classrooms” was our next guest in this learning equation, as he was the first guest to mention that his work and book, Significant 72[iv], was inspired by New Zealand Professor John Hattie.  John Hattie became known for his two books Visible Learning and Visible Learning for Educators that focused on teaching strategies that have a high probability of being effective. You can read directly from John Hattie himself, as he connects his dots looking backwards, where he says he believes he got some parts wrong with his approach to learning in the classroom.  He shares he’d like to stop looking at the strategies teachers are using and look closer at the impact we have on our students and how they learn best when he reflects that “we need to switch from saying (I care about how you teach), to saying (I care about the impact of your teaching).”[v]  Hattie goes on to talk about the criticism he faced with the term “visible learning” because learning isn’t visible at all. As John Hattie now prepares to release Visible Learning: The Sequel[vi] this March, 15 years after his first book that sold out in days of its release and was described as “teaching’s Holy Grail” he’s returning to his ground-breaking work, with a new angle. Like the direction we are taking with this podcast, going back to the basics, this is what Professor John Hattie is doing with his next book where he not only looks at WHAT works best with learning, as he shares the research is his new that is now informed by more than 2,100 meta-analyses (more than double that appeared in his first book, drawn from more than 130,000 studies, and has involved more than 400 million students from all around the world. He t