Learning & the Brain – Taylor & Lamoreaux (adult learning)

At their Teaching with the Adult Brain in Mind page at Saint Mary’s College of Education of California, you can read Kathleen Taylor’s and Annalee Lamoreaux’s description of their Learning and the Brain session. I found Kathleen and Annalee to be relaxed yet passionate facilitators, eager to help all of us in the audience be active learners as we thought about our roles as adult learners and our roles in helping adult learners to learn.

This session was very much interactive, and a number of times we were asked to break into small groups to discuss specific questions, the outcomes of which were then shared with the larger group. Aided by our responses, the message imparted by Taylor and Lamoreaux included the following as it applies to learning that lasts:

• involve people in experiences, or to paraphrase that Chinese proverb: Tell me and I forget. Show me and I remember. Involve me and I understand.
• provide time for reflection – time to mull over ideas, allowing them to jell
• encourage conscious construction of narratives, which to me translates as relating this to your own life and pondering ways to make it useful
• and now that you’ve thought about a way to apply the narrative, go test it out in the world beyond ideas and see where it leads

While the process above, which is very much akin to Kolb’s and Zull’s models, is practical and relates to dealing with content, the next step involves thinking about how this impacts the learning process. Thinking about one’s thinking and learning (known as metacognition) can help bring about a change in mental models, ideally leading to transformative learning.

Understanding that we have the ability to change our mental models, also known as an epistemological change (a change in the way of knowing), will let us open the door to transformative learning (being willing to change and having an understanding of how to change).

Taylor and Lamoreaux sum this up quite simply:

Information adds to and fills the form.

Transformational learning CHANGES the form itself.

How do we make use of this in actual practice? They suggest it is useful to foster learners’ awareness:
• of their tacit assumptions
• of multiple perspectives
• of themselves as makers of meaning and constructors of knowledge
• of their capacity to make meaning in new ways
• of their responsibility for the meaning they make

This very much reminds me of the research done by Carol Dweck relating to a “growth mindset” versus a “fixed mindset”.

In my role of working with faculty, I am always trying to find ways to engage people in moving beyond their current positions of comfort. Kathleen and Annalee point out that one reason for adult anxiety in learning stems from dredging up memories associated with their past learning experiences. Think back to your learning experiences in elementary school, for instance. Maybe you can recall a teacher who said something that just squashed your hopes for a day, or embarrassed you in front of classmates. According to Kathleen and Annalee, those past experiences can inhibit one’s interest in further learning as an adult.

Another obstacle related to learning is the realization that something new is going to be learned. This, in itself, can make people nervous as they contemplate… will I be able to learn this, will I look silly in front of others, it’s been a long time since I had to do this, why do I need to do this. Hmm, some of those questions sound just like what younger students may be thinking when sitting in a class…

Feel free to view the slides related to this presentation, including some thoughtful quotes.

Learning & the Brain – Taylor & Lamoreaux (adult learning, Zull’s model)

After Kathleen Taylor and Annalee Lamoreaux introduced David Kolb’s Model of Experiential Learning, they next tied in James Zull and his 4 PIllars of Learning. Zull is a Professor of Biology at Case Western Reserve University, which happens to also be home to David Kolb.

Here together are Kolb’s Model and Zull’s Pillars. You can see that they utilize similar vocabulary and refer to similar practices.

What Zull appears to have done is provide the biology for Kolb’s model by ascribing the areas of the brain that experience the cycle of learning.

The image above is my drawing of Zull’s model, which is on his Case Western page. and is best explained in his words, also from his site:

According to our current model of the connection between brain function, human learning, and education, we believe that education can engage the learner’s brain to the fullest extent when students follow a cycle of concrete experience with their subject, reflection on their experience and connecting it to their prior knowledge, generation of their own abstract hypotheses about their experience and testing their hypotheses through action, which produces a new sensory (concrete) experience.

Given these two models of learning, what does this imply for adult learners and the people who teach adults? That is what Taylor and Lamoreaux focused on in the remainder of their session, and what I will focus on in my next post.

For more of James Zull’s words, please visit the following two sites.

• SharpBrains hosts an October 2006 interview with James Zull, An ape can do this. Can we not?
• James Zull authored the article What is “The Art of Changing the Brain?” at the New Horizons for Learning

Learning & the Brain – Taylor & Lamoreaux (adult learning, Kolb’s model)

Kathleen Taylor and Annalee Lamoreaux, both of Saint Mary’s College of Education, California, facilitated Teaching with the Adult Brain in Mind. This session was part of the adult brain and learning tract, a first-time tract for, and one of the two main reasons I was determined to attend, the conference. Indeed, this is what I’d like to study in the Learning and Teaching master’s program at Harvard!

This was very much an interactive ninety-minutes during which I was exposed to a number of adult learning models. Since they were all new to me, I will start at the beginning by describing the models.

————

Kolb’s Model of Experiential Learning is based on theories by people with names that are more familiar to me, Piaget and Dewey. David Kolb is a Professor of Organizational Behavior at Case Western Reserve University and a partner in Experience Based Learning Systems, Inc. His model, pictured below and which I made with Inspiration, consists of four stages, any of which may be the starting point for learning through experience.

Typically, though not always, in learning something you might begin with the actual concrete experience. This is described as the “feeling” portion of the learning process, and is naturally followed by reflective observation, a time to rethink through what you have done and how you feel about it. Based upon your reflections, you are then ready to make some abstract conceptualizations about the process, for instance, How does this relate to other areas? and What can you conclude about this process? Working out your responses to these questions will lead you to active experimentation and the testing of hypotheses, which in turn leads to another actual experience. Thus, the stages are cyclical, and since learning is rarely so neat and tidy, it is likely that you jump into learning from any of the stages.

You can learn more about Kolb’s Model of Experiential Learning at any of the following sites.

• infed, the encyclopaedia of informal education, an independent site published by educators, hosts the article david a. kolb on experiential learning, which both explains and then explores aspects of Kolb’s model
• Roger Greenaway, publishes the ACTIVE REVIEWING guide to dynamic experiential learning, which contains a ton of resources, including this lengthy collation of experiential learning articles and critiques of David Kolb’s theory
• What is Kolb’s model of experiential education, and where does it come from? includes information on John Dewey, Kurt Lewin and Jean Piaget compiled by students at the University of Toronto.
• The Centre for Learning and Teaching at Dalhousie University, Canada, provides a nice chart of Teaching Activities that Support Different Aspects of the (Kolb’s) Learning Cycle

Learning & the Brain – Ken Kosik (Alzheimer’s, MCI)

Ken Kosik is co-Director of the Neuroscience Research Institute at the University of California Santa Barbara. His research focuses on “both the mechanisms of neuronal plasticity and its impairment in neurodegeneration.” At April’s Brain conference Kosik talked about The Adult Brain and Memory: How Learning Protects Against Alzheimer’s.

Did you know that 10 to 15 percent of people over 65 years of age suffer from some form of neurodegenerative disease, and the ratio becomes one in two for people over 85 years of age. Many of us tend to think of dementia as one of those diseases, yet Kosik says that dementia “is a symptom, like a fever” and it simply “means that cognition is not normal.” It is necessary and important to ask “What kind of dementia?” He went on to note that “forgetting is part of what the brain does”, though there is a “gray zone between a normal and abnormal range of forgetting, and this gray zone is what worries people.”

In Alzheimer’s the brain shrinks, and in the shrinking process certain areas are impacted more than others. The limbic system, which handles emotions, is targeted, specifically the hippocampus (memories) and especially the amygdala (emotions). The cerebral cortex is also impacted, though the cerebellum and primary motor and sensory strip tend to be left alone. As the brain shrinks, the sulci (grooves between the folds) widen, and neurons become “swollen, twisted and distorted”. The American Health Assistance Foundation provides a clear explanation and graphic of what happens to the brain with Alzheimer’s. For a hands-on experience, take the Alzheimer’s Association’s Inside the Brain: An Interactive Tour.

Kosik also mentioned mild cognitive impairment (MCI). People with MCI function fine in daily life but have memory issues that go beyond what is considered normal for their particular age. Usually this is obvious to those around the individual, though the individual may not be aware that there is anything out of kilter. Kosik likened a line from John Updike’s Free in the January 8, 2000 issue of The New Yorker to MCI: “…one’s own ability to improvise could no longer be trusted.”

In the progression to Alzheimer’s, Kosik noted that

• the ability to think on the spot diminishes
• there is a move to regression
• the mind is “emptying out”

While none of this is pleasant to ponder, studies have provided some conclusive data about Alzheimer’s that can be put to use in attempting to combat the onset of the disease.

• Education is a plus
• Sustained long-term stress is a negative
• Challenging your brain with something you do not normally do is a plus

The most fascinating study Kosik mentioned is that of transgenic mice, i.e. genetically engineered mice. These particular mice were genetically engineered to get Alzheimer’s. Alzheimer’s consists of neurofibrillary tangles inside the neurons and amyloid plaques between the neurons. It turns out that if the mice are placed in enriched environments, the growth of the amyloid plaques is slowed. (Slides 10 through 13 in the Interactive Brain Tour provide an excellent description of plaques and tangles.)

Kosik left us wondering just where do memories go? Do they disappear or do they just become inaccessible. He says that if it’s just an access problem, we might be able to work on retrieval strategies.

Learning & the Brain – Frances Jensen, second part (teen brain)

[July 28, 2008 Update: I just came upon this wonderful interview with Frances Jensen on the teen brain. She responds to ten questions, and you can watch the brief video clips for each response or read the corresponding text.]

My previous post provided a primer in cellular learning as a beginning to understanding how the teen brain develops. As part of this process Frances Jensen describes:

The Paradox of the Teen Brain

Cell (neuronal) based learning is at its height in the teen brain
but
the network coordination is not fully connected up yet.

What does this mean? Essentially, teenagers – who, Jensen stressed, are not small adults – have superior learning skills to adults but their prefrontal cortex is still developing. As a result, then tend to have difficulty with impulse control and are not the best at making informed decisions.

As the brain develops, it matures from back to front, so the prefrontal cortex is the last to develop, becoming fully developed around age twenty-four. This explains why teenagers do not always act in what adults would consider a rational manner. Jensen also explained that the “excitation system peaks in early childhood, which is also when many affective disorders begin, while the inhibitory system continues to develop into adulthood.”

Long term potentiation, described in my previous post, peaks two to three years earlier with girls (ages 10 to 14) than with boys (ages 12 to 17). Thus, “adolescent synaptic plasticity is “way better” than adults.” Because LTP is widely influenced by the environment, teenagers may be wired for optimal learning but also have the highest susceptibility to negative influences.

If you recall from the previous post, LTP is why repetition works. Imagine a fertile brain, still developing, and highly attuned to learning. Now expose this brain to drugs or alcohol or addiction or sleep deprivation or stress or multitasking. The teen brain is primed to learn and not primed to make informed decisions. With repetitive exposure to these negative influences, the teen brain learns to want continued exposure to these influences. Jensen states it succinctly: the “Adolescent brain responds too robustly to addiction, much more so than the adult brain.”

Jensen touched on some of the specifics of these negative influences. For instance, marijuana negatively impacts the sending and receiving of neuronal signals. “The effects may linger for days, so if you get high on Saturday this may impact your test taking four days later.” (I’ll bet that’s a surprise to any teenage readers!)

She shared a story about stress: Consider a mouse in a cage, with a cat hovering just outside the cage, and imagine the stress level of the mouse. Now simply replace the mouse with a student in a classroom, and replace the cat with either a teacher or a parent, and imagine the stress level of the student. Perhaps it will not surprise you to learn that high levels of stress in adolescence can cause depression later on in adulthood.

Lastly, Jensen talked about chronic sleep deprivation. According to her, two days of deprivation can lead to no LTP taking place; that means no real learning being consolidated over night. The simple solution is to get to sleep early and be sure to get sufficient amounts of sleep. Reviewing information at night, just before falling asleep, leads to sleep-induced replay which facilitates LTP. I have read about this many times and, while not testing it out in terms of preparing for a test, have done my own experiment for remembering. Instead of writing myself a note before bed, I have repeated to myself out loud what I want to remember in the morning. And guess what, in the morning I have remembered my message to myself from the night before.

At the National Institute for Health site you can view a time lapse movie of consolidated brain MRI scans showing 15 years of normal brain development from ages 5 through 20.

“Red indicates more gray matter, blue less gray matter. Gray matter wanes in a back-to-front wave as the brain matures and neural connections are pruned. Areas performing more basic functions mature earlier; areas for higher order functions mature later. The prefrontal cortex, which handles reasoning and other “executive” functions, emerged late in evolution and is among the last to mature. Studies in twins are showing that development of such late-maturing areas is less influenced by heredity than areas that mature earlier.”

What does all of this mean in terms of teenage brains and their education? As Jensen summarized:

• Teenagers have exceptional skill for cellular learning (better than an adult, not as good as a young child).
• Connectivity is a work in progress (better than a young child, not as good as an adult).
• There is a paradoxical state in the teen brain (impulsive, enhanced susceptibility to environmental effects).
• Schools and teachers should take genetic differences and school hours into consideration (girls develop two years sooner than boys, and all teens tend to have circadian rhythms that have them most alert and awake by ten o’clock in the morning).

Learning & the Brain – Frances Jensen, first part (cellular learning)

As a teacher of teenagers and a mother of two sons, one who is currently a teenager, I was primed for Frances Jensen’s session The Paradox of Learning in the Teen Brain: Unique Vulnerabilities and Strengths. Jensen is a doctor at Harvard’s Children’s Hospital and is on a mission to share current research on teen brains with those who would most benefit from the information – teenagers, their parents, and their teachers.

Just this past Friday, I shared the bulk of her talk in a class I co-teach with an upper school colleague, Frontiers in Science. Once a week I give a talk on what’s new in technology, and volunteered to give a talk on what’s new in brain research. To best understand the paradox of the teen brain, it helps to first have a sense of how the brain learns.

Jensen provided a quick primer in cellular learning. Essentially, information in the form of a signal is received by a neuron via its dendrites, and then information in the form of a signal is fired through the neuron’s axon and out via its axon terminals. This communication between neurons happens across the synapse, which is the space between the neurons. Coating the axon is myelin, which protects the axon and assists with communication.

Not all brain cells fire; some send excitatory signals and some send inhibitory signals. According to Jensen, in order for learning to take place there needs to be:

• a synapse
• a patterned input
• enough excitation to induce a response
• and alterations in the activated cell that is long lasting and leads to long term potentiation (LTP)

What, exactly, is Long Term Potentiation? Potentiation refers to increased effectiveness or potency. In terms of LTP, it means the ability of information to retain its strength over time, in other words, for information to be remembered. To better understand what this means in terms of learning, consider that LTP (the following comes directly from Jensen)

• consists of a practice effect or memorization
• is why repetition works
• explains why multiple inputs into a cell enhances learning
• and is why multiple methods of teaching should be utilized (my addition)

With LTP the synapse gets altered to be larger, faster and newer, with more receptors.

In my next post I’ll share more of what Frances Jensen said about the teen brain, in particular how it differs from the child and adult brain. Meanwhile, feel free to check out Teen Brain’s Ability to Learn Can Have a Flip Side on The Dana Foundation site. The article shares a number of reports that lend

support to the idea that the remarkable adaptability of the adolescent brain can be a double-edged sword: The dramatic remodeling of the brain during adolescence holds tremendous opportunities for growth and learning but also appears to increase a teen’s vulnerability to the long-term effects of environmental influences such as stress and drug experimentation.

Another article on the topic of teen brains, Understanding the Temporary Insanity of Adolescence, appeared recently in The New York Times, and I suspect there will be more and more doctors deciding to specialize in this area of medicine, just as there are pediatricians and gerontologists who specialize by a general age range of patients.

Learning & the Brain – Norman Doidge (neuroplasticity)

If you read Doidge’s book, The Brain that Changes Itself, then you didn’t need to be at the Learning & the Brain conference session. And if you were at the session, then you should still read the book because Doidge shares intriguing stories and, in my opinion, is a far more captivating writer than he is a presenter.

Having blogged extensively about the people and issues described in Doidge’s book, rather than recoup it all again, I refer you to the tag cloud for a look at my past posts. If you are not a regular reader of this blog, my recommendation is to begin with the earliest post, which describes Plasticity and will be at the bottom of the page.

You will discover in your reading of either the book or my posts that “brain plasticity occurs in response to the environment, the task at hand, and our thoughts and imaginings”.

And what took so long for plasticity to be acknowledged? Doidge says it is partially due to how the brain has been considered throughout history, which has been from a combination of natural and mechanical perspectives; to a lack of technology for adequately seeing changes as they happen in the brain; to poor prognosis, in the past, of those with brain dysfunctions, coupled with insufficient clinical evidence of recovery; and to the “plastic paradox” (see the third from last paragraph), whereby plasticity leads to rigidity, and therefore plasticity masks itself.

Doidge has done an admirable job of compiling in one place results of related research and development, and chronicling tales of perseverance. If you weren’t already in awe of your amazing brain, you will be after reading his book.

Learning & the Brain – Sam Goldstein (learning & schools)

Instinctual optimism and resilient mindset. Those are the two concepts that Sam Goldstein introduced in his Learning & the Brain keynote Hardwired to Learn: Creating Schools That Nurture and Grow Developing Brains. From his site: “Sam Goldstein, Ph.D. is a doctoral level psychologist with areas of study in school psychology, child development and neuropsychology.”

Instinctual optimism is Goldstein’s reply to the question, How do kids know they can? They are intrinsically driven to learn. Furthermore, as a result of this instinctual optimism, kids know that whatever it is, they can do it, hence the resilient mindset. Think of babies and toddlers you have known – they are instinctually optimistic and resilient about learning to walk, for instance. They don’t tend to ask, and aren’t told they can’t; they just go ahead and do it, taking in stride the bumps and falling down.

Both of these concepts remind me of Sir Ken Robinson’s TED Talk about creativity. Kids come to school eager, wide-eyed and filled with curiosity and creativity. (And Sir Ken says the schools proceed to educate the curiosity out of the kids.)

Goldstein went on to provide a little brain and gene background. He said that genes know in exactly which organisms they reside, and the “basic brain wiring plan is encoded in the genes.” That explains the nature part, but there is also a nurture portion, for although we may be genetically preprogrammed, brain development is also experience based.

At this point he posed three questions:

1. What is and is not intelligence?
2. How is intelligence different from knowledge?
3. How is intelligence different from achievement?

Given all of the above, Goldstein then talked about children and classrooms that nurture them. He felt strongly that it is “not our job to motivate kids, but to create an environment in which kids motivate themselves.” In creating such an environment, we need to consider (and all of the following are quotes)

• potential benefits and adversities of external rewards
• reinforcement of instinctual optimism
• providing opportunities for empathy and altruism (create community)
• providing competition in the absence of winning
• providing extrinsic reinforcers for effort and progress, and not for control [Behavior modification is for control, and Goldstein is not a big fan of this.]
• fostering opportunities for intrinsic control
• maximizing external consequences to control
• finding ways to enhance self-discipline
• setting limits in autonomous ways; helping kids learn to manage themselves instead of teachers managing them

Goldstein concluded by sharing two lists, of sorts: how to focus on student well being and describing the mindset of a resilient child. And he closed with a quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson:

The secret of education lies in respecting the student.

More Conference Pics

Norman Doidge

Grand Ballroom – location for all Keynotes


Meeting of the emailers

Where I’d love to go!

The Russian Tale

Robert Kegan closed out his Learning & the Brain session with this Russian tale, told to him by his grandfather, and included in his book How The Way We Talk Can Change The Way We Work. Kegan facilitated his interactive, collaborative workshop by taking us through the major exercise described in his book. The exercise might best be described as understanding our languages of commitment. More on that in weeks to come. For now, here is the tale.

It was winter and a woodcutter was walking through the woods, with plans to chop some wood to bring back home. Along the way he found a bird in the snow. The bird was cold and weak, and the woodcutter took heart, picked up the bird, placed it in his jacket, and continued into the woods.

Upon arriving at just the right spot for chopping some wood, the woodcutter realized he would have to put the bird down in order to do the chopping and carrying home of the wood. Wanting to keep the bird safe and warm, the woodcutter looked around for a place to put the bird. In the distance he spied some cow pies recently dropped by a passing herd. The woodcutter walked over to the warmest pile, dug out a nesting spot, and placed the bird within the surrounding warmth.  The woodcutter returned to his cutting area, cut down the wood he needed, then picked up the wood and carried it home.

Meanwhile, the warmth of the cow pile was nourishing the bird, so much so that the bird regained its strength and started to sing a lovely song. Off in the distance a hungry wolf’s ears perked up upon hearing the bird’s song. The wolf set off in search of the source of the sound, and soon came upon the bird nesting in the cow pile. With one big gulp, the wolf had his meal and the bird’s song had stopped.

This Russian tale has three morals which, according to Kegan, is the standard for Russian tales.

Moral 1
The one who gets you into a pile of s**t is not necessarily your enemy.

Moral 2
The one who gets you out of a pile of s**t is not necessarily your friend.

Moral 3
If you wind up in a pile of s**t, don’t sing about it!