Author: barboakley

Cheery Friday Greetings from Barb Oakley!

It’s been a busy six weeks in North America, Europe, and Asia. The University of Leeds; Cambridge International Education; the International Congress of Mathematicians in Philadelphia; keynotes in Hsinchu for four thousand engineers and managers at the world’s largest chipmaker; teacher conferencing at Taiwan’s preternaturally beautiful Sun Moon Lake. Next week, it’s on to Frankfurt, Germany—more on that below… But let’s start with:

The Hangover That Changed Mathematics

Peter Scholze may be the most gifted mathematician alive. In 2019 he spent months on a proof so involved he could not quite hold it in his working memory, no matter how hard he tried. He’d get a concept in one arm of his “attentional octopus,” so to speak, but then feel another concept slip away. But one glorious Thursday it finally all—well, almost all—came together, with one simple step left, so he went out to a bar to celebrate with a colleague. But come Friday morning, he found himself, as he put it, “fully destroyed” with a hangover. He finished the proof that day anyway, but what with his muzzy thinking, he couldn’t be sure he had it right. In fact, part of his problem, Scholze knew, was that he was such a powerfully good mathematician he could convince practically anyone that he was right—even when he was wrong! 

This is how Scholze came to ask Imperial College London’s Kevin Buzzard whether Scholze’s hangover-finalized proof might be checked using “Lean,” a program that verifies every step of an argument. (Lean is merciless—when Buzzard had started using it, it made him prove that 2 ≠ 1 before it would let him going with anything else.) 

Kevin Hartnett tells the story in his magnificent new book, The Proof in the Code: How a Truth Machine Is Transforming Math and AI. I was lucky enough to be on a panel with Rutgers mathematician Alex Kontorovich at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Philadelphia about education in mathematics, and then heard Alex’s phenomenal lecture related to Hartnett’s book and the future of math, The Shape of Math To Come. If you think AI is generating a revolution in math, well, Lean is a revolution within a revolution that will allow math to leapfrog that revolution.

Incidentally, here at Learning How to Learn, we’re convinced that however fast technology is changing, the human brain still needs its knowledge foundations. The basics are important—there’s no skipping schema formation! Here’s a wonderful essay, “Why LLMs Make Learning to Code More Important, Not Less,” by Senthil Kumaran, a software developer at Uber, that states our case. 

Cambridge Is on Board

I had an exhilarating visit to Cambridge International Education in Cambridge UK, where I gave the opening keynote and a workshop at their Schools Conference. Cambridge International Education is serious about science and applying “cognitive realism” in teaching. Parents, if you’re weighing international school systems for your children, this is an outstanding one to sign up for.

A Visit with John Tomsett in York—which found its way into influencing Taiwan

My hero hubby Phil and I are huge fans of James Herriot’s All Creatures Great and Small (Phil especially!) which is a good part of why we keep finding our way back to Yorkshire. So after our visit to Cambridge, we were happy to find ourselves in York having tea with the perceptive education author John Tomsett and his brilliant wife Louise (all the more brilliant because she, too, is a fan of James Herriot!)

I was particularly interested in work on social emotional learning (SEL), because this has become something of a fad in Taiwan, where I was planning to head next. John Tomsett is well-versed on SEL—he’s written thirteen books, among them This Much I Know About Mind Over Matter: Improving Mental Health in Our Schools. John also recommended Ecclestone and Hayes’s The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education. I read them with interest.

Then I flew to Taiwan and, amidst many lectures, checked out the SEL scene. What I found was, sadly, that Taiwanese teachers are drowning in expectations, expected to be not only subject matter experts (Taiwanese teachers are indeed superb!), but also to be experts in neurodiversity, differentiation, and now, as students’ quasi-therapists using SEL. Emotions matter. But these varying, diverse demands can kneecap a teacher’s ability to teach. In particular, therapy and teaching pull in different directions, and a teacher told to do both at once can ultimately do neither properly.

Make Plans, if You Can, for Beautiful Toronto in October!

On Saturday, October 24, I’ll be speaking at researchED Toronto on what the neuroscience says about teaching math — the different jobs of declarative and procedural memory, what scaffolding physically consists of in the brain, and why minimally guided discovery so often hurts the students it means to help. We’ll work one example all the way down: teaching division, following John Mighton’s approach in JUMP Math. If you’ll be there, come find me!

What AI Offloading Does to the Brain—a Week in Frankfurt

Starting August 30th, Terry Sejnowski and I will be in Frankfurt co-chairing the Ernst Strüngmann Forum on “Memory, Learning, and Neural Adaptation in the Age of Cognitive Offloading.” The Strüngmann Forum isn’t a conference with keynotes and posters. Instead, some forty researchers from neuroscience, psychology, computer science, and edtech are sorted into four working groups, each assigned a set of open questions to cogitate over for a week at the Ernst Strüngmann Institute. In the end, we produce a book so everyone can see where our thinking led us.

Everybody’s talking about cognitive offloading onto ChatGPT, Claude and the like. Much of what we know comes from psychology through surveys and test scores. There are a few brain-imaging studies —but what we really don’t yet understand are the underlying neural mechanisms involved: how offloading affects the brain’s learning processes. The brain learns in part from internal prediction errors—so what happens to those signals when the answer arrives from a chatbot instead of from your own struggle? The brain structures knowledge by compressing experience—but what is there to compress when the experience was never yours? More generally, what’s worth internalizing? What can be safely offloaded? This is a vitally important question for both education and industry: The engineers and managers I spoke with in Hsinchu, and at IBM, and elsewhere, all are wondering—what happens to an engineer’s judgment after a few years of letting the tool take the first pass?

We’ve pulled together Nelson Cowan on working memory, Fernand Gobet on chunking and expertise, Kenji Doya on the neural basis of habit and motivation, Azzurra Ruggeri on curiosity, and Evan Risko on offloading itself, among many others.
I’ll report back once the dust settles. Wish us luck!

That’s all for now. Happy learning!

Barb Oakley

• Uncommon Sense Teaching—the book and Coursera Specialization!
• Mindshift—the book and MOOC
• Learn Like a Pro—the book and MOOC
• The LHTL recommended text, A Mind for Numbers
• For kids and parents: Learning How to Learn—the book and MOOC. Pro tip—watch the videos and read the book together with your child. Learning how to learn at an early age will change their life!

Cheery Friday Greetings from Barb Oakley!

Headed to Cambridge

In a couple of weeks I’ll be giving the opening keynote and a workshop at the Cambridge Schools Conference in Cambridge, UK (July 15–16). If you’ll be there, come find me!

Stranded in the Rain in Taiwan’s Silicon Valley — the Lesson Behind Teresa Martín-Retortillo’s New Book on Business Strategy 

A few months ago I spent an evening stuck in a car in Hsinchu—Taiwan’s Silicon Valley—inching forward for hours in a downpour. Why the traffic jam? Hsinchu was modeled on the original Silicon Valley, right down to copying its weak spot: no solid public transportation of the kind you find all over Europe. Both Silicon Valley and Hsinchu grew up fast on the chip business. But in the rush, nobody thought hard, early on, about how people would actually get around once things took off. So there I sat — in one of the most advanced places on earth, dead in the water.

But there’s a bigger lesson in that traffic jam. Early on, there’s a short window when you can lay down sensible bones for a future you can’t fully see yet. Miss the window, and you spend years—sometimes decades—wrestling with a mucked-up system that makes life harder for everyone.

That’s exactly what my good friend Teresa Martín-Retortillo takes on in her fine new book, Artificial Intelligence: Rethinking Business Strategy. She spent some twenty years as a partner at Bain & Company, advising CEOs and their boards through more than a hundred deals—the messy, high-stakes transformations a company either gets right or pays for later. She’d started out as a young analyst at Goldman Sachs in London. Then she moved into education, helping a global publisher reinvent itself for the digital age, and today she runs executive education at IE Business School in Madrid. So Teresa isn’t theorizing about how a business steers through hard change. She’s done it, at the top, for thirty years. Her book walks leaders through the known-knowns, the known-unknowns, and a handful of plausible future scenarios worth working through now—not after the traffic’s already backed up.

When “No Complaints” Counts as a Rave Review

A late-career math teacher once asked his head of school for feedback. The reply: “You must be doing a great job, since I haven’t heard any parent complaints.” That’s the whole problem in one sentence. The teacher, (an immigrant who wrote the memoir we’ve mentioned before, Unbalanced, about teaching high school math after COVID), argues that somewhere around 2015 American schooling swapped accountability for equity as its goal—and the numbers since haven’t been pretty. Twelfth-grade NAEP math slipped. The gap between the top and bottom students didn’t shrink—it grew. And per-student spending climbed 52% along the way. More money, worse math. The mechanisms he describes—grade floors, unlimited retakes, dollars counted instead of outcomes—will be familiar to anyone who’s watched a yardstick disappear. His hopeful counterexample is the one to remember: the Mississippi Miracle, where grade retention plus better reading instruction lifted the state from 49th to 9th in 4th-grade reading. Check this post out!

You Wouldn’t Sing a Song Just Once

I recently joined Krutiya Adatiya on On Your Marks, a podcast from ACCA—the global body for chartered accountants—for people studying for their professional exams. She told me that as a kid she always felt like the slow one—her brothers studied half as long and got the same grades. I had exactly the same experience. And it turns out slow learners often have the advantage: because they can’t skate over the hard parts, they catch what the fast learners miss. Hayek said he owed much of his Nobel-winning work to being slower than his clever friends.

Then we got to math, which trips up a lot of accountancy students. You wouldn’t sing a song through one time and call yourself a singer—and a math problem works the same way. You practice it until each step whispers the next, until you can look at the page and think, “Oh, I know this one.” Does it take time? Sure. So does learning to sing well.

Have a listen if you’ve ever studied hard for an exam, then watched it all vanish the moment you sat down. 

Lauren Brown on researchEd NYC—and “cognitive redlining”

I’m a stalwart supporter of researchEd, having just finished keynotes at the Tokyo and Bogota conferences. (Every researchEd speaker donates their time—that’s how the movement runs.) researchEd’s founder, Tom Bennett, is the longtime London teacher whose 2013 tweet grew into the whole thing. He’s also serious about classroom management. (His book Running the Room: The Teacher’s Guide to Behaviour is literally “best in class.”) At a researchEd in Santiago, I used Tom’s techniques to bring a group of recalcitrant students to initially begrudging—and then rapt—attention. researchEd’s mission is to make teachers research-literate and pseudo-science-proof, and protect classrooms from the steady stream of “proven-by-research” initiatives that turn out to be nothing of the kind. From one tweet to six continents and 25 countries.

Lauren Brown’s post on the recent researchEd NYC is the next best thing to being there. The standout: Zaretta Hammond’s morning keynote, where she linked the science of learning to racial equity and gave us a new term—cognitive redlining—for the way bad teaching further disenfranchises the already-disenfranchised. Antiracism alone, Hammond said, isn’t enough to disrupt it. The remedy is to actually teach—to get kids thinking and build their knowledge. Or take Lynn Gaffney’s line at the final panel: “I feel like I’ve been lied to”—about her training never once mentioning the science of learning. A lie by omission, Lauren calls it. Check it out! Takeaways from researchED NYC

That’s all for now. Happy learning!

Barb Oakley

• Uncommon Sense Teaching—the book and Coursera Specialization!
• Mindshift—the book and MOOC
• Learn Like a Pro—the book and MOOC
• The LHTL recommended text, A Mind for Numbers
• For kids and parents: Learning How to Learn—the book and MOOC. Pro tip—watch the videos and read the book together with your child. Learning how to learn at an early age will change their life!

Reflections from Hsinchu, Taiwan

Book of the week: Why Taiwan Matters: A Short History of a Small Island That Will Impact Our Future

If you think Taiwan is just a tiny blip on the map, Why Taiwan Matters will quickly disabuse you of that notion. Kerry Brown (a former diplomat and longtime China scholar who knows the players and the history) pulls off a rare feat: he makes a fraught geopolitical topic genuinely readable—even at bedtime.

Taiwan, as Brown shows, is a political paradox: a democracy with no official independence, a global tech powerhouse with few formal allies, and a cultural gem that’s caught between history, ideology, and high-stakes diplomacy. Oh, and just in case you missed the memo—90% of the world’s most advanced semiconductors are made there. (And yes, I was able to visit one of these remarkable facilities.)

Why Taiwan Matters is not a dry policy treatise. Brown has a knack for humanizing the story—whether it’s Taiwanese voters navigating identity, or the economic balancing act that keeps tensions from boiling over (for now). It’s not a thriller, but you’ll still turn pages like it is. 

Brown also—refreshingly—doesn’t pretend there are easy answers. A few of his arguments rubbed me the wrong way, and the more I pushed back in my head, the more I had to admit I was pushing back from feelings, not from anything I could actually defend. That’s the kind of reading I wish more of us did more often—not reading to confirm what we already believe, but reading that makes the mind actually work. Which is pretty much the whole idea behind our “Speak Freely, Think Critically” course.(The link is to a free version of the course.)

Memes, Remixes, and Serious Neuroscience at Taiwan’s NYCU

At National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University (NYCU), I had the chance to spend time with around 300 students, teachers, and school principals who are doing genuinely exciting things in educational innovation. My host was Professor Kenzen Chen — longtime collaborator, co-author, and one of those rare people who manages to be both rigorous and fun. Together we’ve published work in the International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education and The Asia-Pacific Education Researcher on how we adapted Learning How to Learn (學習之道) and Uncommon Sense Teaching for Chinese-speaking learners — not just translating the content, but rethinking how to make the neuroscience land for teachers and MOOC designers across very different cultural contexts. Those redesigned course series have since reached hundreds of thousands of learners across multiple Chinese MOOC platforms. 

The evening class Kenzen taught was a treat. Kenzen had his students creating “remixes” — memes and posters riffing on ideas from LHTL and UST. Some of them had me laughing out loud. Others gave me better ways to explain retrieval practice, focused and diffuse modes, the importance of sleep for memory consolidation, why interleaving beats blocked practice, and much more. (Note to self: never underestimate what a good meme can do for a concept.)

NYCU’s Institute of Education is, in my experience, doing some of the most serious work anywhere in the world on integrating real neuroscience into evidence-based educational research. It’s the kind of program that quietly raises the bar — for what teacher education can look like when it actually takes the science of learning seriously, rather than just gesturing at it.

I also had the privilege of visiting several remarkable experimental schools in Hsinchu: Authentic Education, the Zhubei U-School, Hsinchu Digital Experimental High School, and the IBSH of the Hsinchu Science Park. Each one, in its own way, is asking what school can become when you stop treating the brain as an afterthought.

Which brings me to exciting news: I’m joining a new initiative there as Chief Learning Scientist, working with the Sage Humanities and Education Foundation and NYCU’s HERO Center to help translate what we know about how the brain learns into real classrooms, teacher development, and a new digital learning platform. Taiwan is now well into the second decade of its experimental education movement — and this feels like exactly the right moment to be part of what comes next. More as it unfolds.

That’s all for now. Happy learning!

Barb Oakley

• Uncommon Sense Teaching—the book and Coursera Specialization!
• Mindshift—the book and MOOC
• Learn Like a Pro—the book and MOOC
• The LHTL recommended text, A Mind for Numbers
• For kids and parents: Learning How to Learn—the book and MOOC. Pro tip—watch the videos and read the book together with your child. Learning how to learn at an early age will change their life!

Cheery Friday Greetings from Barb Oakley!

Attention Required: What a Memory Champion’s Brain Reveals About Learning

Nelson Dellis—the six-time US Memory Champion whose new book Everyday Genius I recommended a few weeks ago—has just had his brain studied in unprecedented detail by researchers at Washington University in St. Louis. Nelson had an ordinary memory until his mid-twenties, when his grandmother’s decline from Alzheimer’s inspired him to start training for hours every day. What the researchers found, after more than 13 hours of brain scanning, is remarkable.

Nelson did not supercharge his normal memory circuits. What he did was stranger and more interesting. Years of daily practice built entirely new functional modules in his brain—modules that simply do not exist in typical brains. And we know this because of a shift in how brain science itself is done. Imaging studies in the past generally worked by averaging scans across large numbers of people, which blurs exactly the individual differences that we might be trying to focus on. The team working with Nelson used precision functional mapping—dense, repeated scanning of a single brain—to see what was really going on inside his head.

What they found is that Nelson rerouted normally-difficult-to-remember information into the brain’s very large and naturally accessible systems for navigation and storytelling—systems that evolved because finding your way home and remembering the stories that held your group together were essential to survival. Nelson’s retrosplenial cortex, which most of us use for spatial navigation, developed unusually strong connections to visual and memory networks. His caudate nucleus—deep in the brain, involved in skill learning—forged connections to memory networks that were simply absent in the nearly 900 control participants. The researchers speculated that the caudate’s involvement makes memory a “consolidated skill”—something that has shifted from effortful to automatic through sheer practice.

But here is the thing. None of it works without attention. As Nelson Dellis observes, “The ability to control your attention on demand is a genius superpower.” Nelson’s entire memory system—visualization, storage, review—depends on a step so fundamental that it is easy to overlook: you have to notice the information in the first place. No amount of technique can encode what the mind never took in. Attention is the gate through which all learning must pass.

And that gate of attention is exactly what Tom Bennett—a former London nightclub manager turned teacher, turned the UK government’s national behavior advisor—is fighting to keep open.

Running the Room: The Book Every Teacher Deserves on Day One

Before Tom Bennett became a teacher, he ran nightclubs in central London—managing drunks, bouncers, bartenders, and what he calls “every shadowy citizen of Soho.” He could read a crowd well enough to know when horseplay was about to turn into a brawl, could snap his fingers and have 300 people removed, and had years of practice doing what he calls “dissolving ardour, anger or anguish in the fraught centrifuge of a nightclub.” None of it helped. When he walked into a classroom, the confidence melted, the certainty evaporated, and the children’s indifference was crushing. His crowd control, it turned out, was not some magic quality he carried with him—it worked in the clubs because the clubs gave him authority—a room full of teenagers simply didn’t care. The story of how Tom wove his way through the school of hard knocks to be able to run a classroom is what makes Running the Room: The Teacher’s Guide to Behaviour the best book on classroom behavior management I have ever read.

Bennett’s core argument is simple and important: students need to be taught how to behave, deliberately and carefully, the same way you would teach any academic subject. That idea still runs against the dominant belief that children will behave beautifully if you just make lessons engaging enough and get out of their way. But good behavior is not natural. It is built, piece by piece, day after day, by someone willing to do the work. And when it isn’t built—when even a handful of students are allowed to misbehave unchecked—the damage radiates outward. Every child in that room who came ready to learn is paying the price for an adult’s failure to act. 

The science of Nelson’s brain and the practical wisdom of Bennett’s classroom are making the same argument from differing perspectives. Every student whose learning is disrupted by unchecked misbehavior is a student whose attention has been hijacked—not by choice, but by an adult’s failure to run the room. If students cannot focus, they cannot encode. If they cannot encode, they cannot build the neural connections that transform effort into skill. Practice reshapes the brain in extraordinary ways, but only if someone first creates the conditions that let a learner pay attention.

Tom will be keynoting at researchED Tokyo on April 18—if you’re in Japan, you do NOT want to miss it! (And I’ll be speaking there, too!) https://researched.org.uk/event/researched-tokyo/

Looking Ahead to 2027

With 2026 largely spoken for, I’m now fielding inquiries for 2027. If your organization or institution is interested in a keynote or workshop on learning science, neuroscience, or AI and education, I’d love to hear from you. Just visit barbaraoakley.com to get in touch!

That’s all for now. Happy learning!

Barb Oakley

• Uncommon Sense Teaching—the book and Coursera Specialization!
• Mindshift—the book and MOOC
• Learn Like a Pro—the book and MOOC
• The LHTL recommended text, A Mind for Numbers
• For kids and parents: Learning How to Learn—the book and MOOC. Pro tip—watch the videos and read the book together with your child. Learning how to learn at an early age will change their life!

Cheery Friday: The Ecstasy of Certainty

I just finished a book I couldn’t put down—Josh Ireland’s The Death of Trotsky—and it gave me a new way of thinking about patterns I’ve noticed in the world of education.

A bit of context: Leon Trotsky was one of the architects of the Soviet state, once second only to Lenin. Joseph Stalin, who eventually seized power, considered Trotsky his greatest rival—and spent years methodically hunting him down across two continents before finally having him murdered in Mexico in 1940.

Ireland gave me something I hadn’t quite seen so vividly before: just how akin to religious conversion the experience of becoming a communist could be. He quotes one fellow believer describing the moment of conversion as a “mental explosion”—new light pouring in from every direction, the entire universe suddenly snapping into pattern like a jigsaw puzzle assembled in a single stroke. Every question answered. Every former doubt revealed as mere ignorance. The colorless world of non-believers left behind forever. And once inside that feeling, almost nothing could touch them.

Whittaker Chambers’ memoir Witness captures this with one unforgettable image. Chambers had done his best to convey to Alger Hiss what was really happening inside the Soviet Union—the show trials, the mass executions, the machinery of terror grinding through the very people who had built the revolution. Now they are parting for what both men sense may be the last time, standing on opposite sides of what Chambers calls “a molten torrent—the revolution and the Communist Party.” And as they hesitate, tears come into Hiss’s eyes. What is devastating about that moment, read alongside Ireland’s portrait of the true believers, is what those tears don’t mean. They aren’t doubt. They aren’t horror breaking through. The cause Hiss had given himself to—so total, so morally consuming, so much like a religious conversion—could absorb even the knowledge of atrocity and hold firm. The tears were the cost of devotion, not its undoing.

This is what a truly unfalsifiable belief system looks like from the inside. The horror doesn’t refute the vision—it gets folded into it, becomes part of the necessary price, even a dark confirmation of how serious and world-historical the whole enterprise must be. It doesn’t feel like ideology. It feels like the one clear thing in a compromised world.

I’ve seen this mechanism up close. In the early 1980s, having learned Russian at the Defense Language Institute, I worked as a Russian translator for the Soviets. What struck me wasn’t so much the crude propaganda—it was the tap, tap, tap of a thousand smaller messages, so constant and so ambient that my communist colleagues didn’t experience them as messages at all. The beauties of communism, the evils of capitalism: not slogans, just reality. A worldview so thoroughly absorbed it had become indistinguishable from perception itself.

Which is why a video essay I stumbled across recently stopped me cold. It argues that Hollywood’s decades-long habit of portraying businesspeople as villains has quietly done something similar in the West—not through state decree but through the steady accumulation of images and stories until the conclusion feels self-evident. Researchers call the mechanism “narrative transportation”: we don’t experience it as persuasion, we experience it as seeing clearly. The uncomfortable corollary is this: the same tap, tap, tap, applied to any institution—science, medicine, education—would produce the same result. It doesn’t require a totalitarian state. It just requires enough repetition. The irony is hard to miss: Hollywood is itself one of the world’s great capitalist enterprises—yet the artists it employs have long chafed at their dependence on the financiers who get a say in their work, and that resentment has a way of showing up on screen, decade after decade, until the next generation of writers grows up taking it for granted.

Grand visions have always worked this way—across every era, every ideology, every cause that promised to finally set things right. What varies is the content. What never varies is the underlying pattern: the moral beauty of the framework, the discomfort that greets any question, the quiet but total insulation from disconfirming evidence. And education, it turns out, is no more immune to this pattern than anything else.

The dominant teaching framework of the last several decades wraps itself in language that is almost impossible to argue with: student-centered, inquiry-based, child-led. Who could object? Raising questions about it feels a bit like kicking puppies. And that feeling—that moral discomfort at even asking—is extraordinarily effective at keeping evidence at bay. When students don’t thrive under discovery-based approaches, the framework is never blamed. The implementation was wrong. The teacher needed more training. The test measured the wrong thing. No result is ever allowed to count against the vision.

That’s not science. That’s a belief system so morally beautiful it has become immune to disconfirmation—which is precisely the pattern Ireland illuminates so vividly in a very different context.

I wrote about this recently in my Substack piece “The Teaching Method That Can’t Fail (and Why That’s the Problem).” One reader who had worked across science, engineering, and finance wrote that of all those fields, education alone had shocked him—not for lack of intelligence among its practitioners, but for how often conclusions rested on moral conviction rather than evidence, and how reliably that conviction kept the evidence at bay. Regular Cheery Friday readers will recognize him: he’s Yellow Heights, author of Unbalanced: Memoir of an Immigrant Math Teacher—last week’s book pick, and well worth your time if you missed it.

Spotlight: The Mill Institute and the Case for Constructive Disagreement

If you care about open inquiry in K-12 education, the Mill Institute is doing work worth knowing about. Founded on the conviction that students need practice wrestling seriously with competing ideas—not just exposure to them—the Institute partners with schools to build the institutional structures, norms, and classroom practices that make constructive disagreement genuinely teachable.

Their current focus includes helping school leaders manage conversations about misinformation, broaden the range of perspectives in discussions of current events, and help teachers and students break out of intellectual echo chambers together. The data from their school partnerships are encouraging: teachers report measurable shifts in how students engage with views that differ from their own.

They’re now planning fall programming and looking to connect with K-12 leaders who want support in exactly these areas. Learn more at mill-institute.org or reach out directly at info@mill-institute.org.

The Ireland book is riveting, by the way. Start at page one and try to stop.

Still cheery, despite all of the above—

Barb Oakley

• Uncommon Sense Teaching—the book and Coursera Specialization!
• Mindshift—the book and MOOC
• Learn Like a Pro—the book and MOOC
• The LHTL recommended text, A Mind for Numbers
• For kids and parents: Learning How to Learn—the book and MOOC. Pro tip—watch the videos and read the book together with your child. Learning how to learn at an early age will change their life!

Cheery Friday Greetings from Barb Oakley!

Happy Friday! If you’re looking for a book recommendation, here’s one I genuinely mean: Nelson Dellis’s new Everyday Genius (Abrams Press)—and yes, I wrote the foreword, so you know I’m not just being polite.

Nelson is a six-time USA Memory Champion, which sounds impressive until you realize he started with the same average brain the rest of us have. What changed wasn’t his innate ability—it was the techniques he learned and practiced, under pressure, in real competition. That’s what makes this book different from the usual “unlock your potential” fare: these methods are battle-tested, not dreamed up in a lab.

The memory chapters alone are worth it. But he also covers mental math, card counting, speed reading, problem-solving, and—I’ll admit this surprised me—remote viewing and lucid dreaming. Whether you use all of it or just the parts that fit your life, you’ll come away thinking differently about what your brain can actually do.

Grab it this weekend. You won’t regret it.

When a Learning Scientist and a Memory Champion Walk Into the Same Podcast

Jeff Young’s “Learning Curve” podcast recently put together an unusual combination: me and Nelson Dellis, six-time USA Memory Champion, interviewed separately and then woven into the same episode. We didn’t plan our answers together, but we kept landing in the same place—which is either reassuring or alarming, depending on how you feel about what AI is quietly doing to human cognition.

Nelson’s side of the conversation is worth the listen on its own. He demonstrates how he encodes D-Day into a mental image involving Steve Jobs on a Normandy landing craft doing something I won’t spoil here. It is both ridiculous and impossible to forget, which is exactly the point.

Five Minds, One Mission: A Roundtable on Math Instruction

Something a little different this week—instead of a one-on-one conversation, I joined a lively roundtable on Kennet Fröjd’s podcast with four other people who have spent their careers trying to fix math education: Amanda VanDerHeyden (behavioral psychologist and founder of Spring Math), John Mighton (founder of Jump Math), Anna Stokke (mathematician and host of Chalk and Talk), and Craig Barton (author of How I Wish I’d Taught Maths: Reflections on research, conversations with experts, and 12 years of mistakes). What struck me about this conversation is that we all arrived at essentially the same conclusions from very different directions—behavioral psychology, cognitive science, classroom practice, curriculum design, and neuroscience—which I think is actually the most compelling argument that we’re onto something real. We dig into why multiple-strategy instruction backfires, what fluency actually means and why it matters, and why the biggest barrier to better math education isn’t teachers—it’s the layer of management above them. Worth a listen if you’ve ever wondered why so many kids leave school convinced they “just aren’t math people.”

Around the World and Back Again: Where You’ll Find Me in 2026!

One of my favorite things about this work is that it takes me everywhere—from Guatemala to Hong Kong, Tokyo to Göteborg, and a whole lot of places in between. If you’re in any of these cities and want to connect, or if your organization might be interested in a talk while I’m already in the region, just visit barbaraoakley.com to get in touch!

Here’s where I’ll be keynoting (mostly in person, but occasionally via web)

• March 9–13 — Universidad Francisco Marroquín, Guatemala City, Guatemala
• March 21 — IBM Tech2026, San Diego, CA (On “grokking” and “distilling” and your brain)
• March 31 — Healthcare Leadership Academy (webinar, UK)
• April 10–14 — The Hong Kong Polytechnic University Distinguished Speaker Series, Hong Kong
• April 16 — Coach A, Japan
• April 17 — Tohoku University, Japan
• April 18 — researchEd Tokyo, Japan
• April 25 — researchEd Colombia, Bogotá (webinar)
• Late April — Korea (dates TBD)
• May 5 — University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, TN
• May 11 — OMSCS Conference (Online Master of Science in Computer Science), Atlanta, GA
• May 21 — Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ
• June 5 — University of Wollongong, New South Wales, Australia (webinar)
• July 15–16 — Opening keynote and workshop, Biannual Cambridge Schools Conference, Cambridge, UK
• August 30–September 4 — co-chairing the 2026 Ernst Strüngmann Forum: “Memory, Learning, and Neural Adaptation in the Age of Cognitive Offloading,” Frankfurt, Germany
• September 17 — University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, IL, Gies College of Business
• October 6–9 — AHISA Leading Learning Caring Conference, Perth, Australia (webinar)
• November 20 — The Human Rise: Learning in a New Era, Göteborg, Sweden

It’s going to be quite a year! If you’d like to explore having me speak at your organization or institution—especially if you’re in one of these areas around the time I’ll be there—just visit barbaraoakley.com to get in touch.

That’s all for now. Have a happy New Year in learning!

Barb Oakley

• Uncommon Sense Teaching—the book and Coursera Specialization!
• Mindshift—the book and MOOC
• Learn Like a Pro—the book and MOOC
• The LHTL recommended text, A Mind for Numbers
• For kids and parents: Learning How to Learn—the book and MOOC. Pro tip—watch the videos and read the book together with your child. Learning how to learn at an early age will change their life!

Cheery Friday Greetings from Barb Oakley!

More Research, Worse Results—What’s Going On?

I’ve launched a Substack! My first post, “The Teaching Method That Can’t Fail (and Why That’s the Problem),” asks a question that’s been nagging at me for years. We have more research than ever on how to teach well. There are more education PhDs, more journals, more studies, more funded programs than at any point in history. And yet outcomes in country after country keep getting worse. How is that possible? Could the research itself somehow be part of the problem? The answer turns out to be yes—and the reason has a surprisingly simple structure. The comment section has turned into a conversation all its own, with psychologists, teachers, engineers, and parents from around the world weighing in. Have a look and join the discussion!

Book Pick: Unbalanced: Memoir of an Immigrant Math Teacher by Yellow Heights

What happens when a sharp-minded finance professional from China trades Wall Street for a whiteboard? Yellow Heights’ Unbalanced is a riveting, deeply personal account of one immigrant’s journey into American math teaching—and the bewildering educational culture he found waiting for him.

Yellow Heights came to teaching with the kind of intellectual curiosity and directness that made him successful in finance. What he discovered in his teacher preparation program stopped him cold. Instead of learning how to teach math well, he was immersed in ideology. Class time was devoted to exploring personal vulnerability rather than instructional methods. As the author dryly notes, what the program did not teach was that math teaching requires good math skills.

The real power of this book lies in what Yellow Heights saw once he got into the classroom. He grasped something many educators miss entirely—that learning operates at three levels: conscious understanding, mental muscle (the automaticity built through practice), and intuition. In American classrooms, he found students encouraged to explore but rarely required to practice deeply enough for genuine proficiency to take root—thinking without practicing, he writes, “can make learning empty and futile, like trying to learn tennis without wielding a racket.”

But his sharpest observations are about the culture of too much kindness. At his affluent private school, he watched well-meaning adults coddle students into fragility—providing so much accommodation that students never developed the skills to handle life’s inevitable challenges. He captures the self-fulfilling cycle perfectly: the more fragile students are perceived to be, the more support they receive, resulting in still more fragility, entitlement, and dependency. 

Unbalanced is that rare education book written by an outsider with no tribal loyalties to protect-someone who arrived with fresh eyes and the courage to describe what he actually saw. Yellow Heights isn’t grinding a political axe. He genuinely loves teaching, loves his students, and wants them to learn. That sincerity makes his critique all the more devastating. If you care about what’s actually happening inside American schools—and why so many well-intentioned efforts end up hurting the students they’re meant to help—this is essential reading.

What’s Resonating Right Now

A homeschooling mom named Janae recently posted a video comparing an 1877 arithmetic textbook to her son’s modern second-grade math book—and nearly 250,000 people watched it in under two weeks. The comparison is stunning. Ray’s New Primary Arithmetic from 1877 is a slim little volume that teaches one thing at a time: counting, then addition, then subtraction, then multiplication, then division, then word problems. It uses concrete objects like marbles and kernels of corn, progresses sequentially, and by the end is gently introducing algebra. Her son’s modern textbook, Envision Math 2.0, comes in two thick volumes with 13 authors, pages of Common Core standards, and asks second graders to “reason abstractly and quantitatively” and “construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others.” The mom’s verdict? She finds the modern book so overstimulating and confusing that she can barely figure out what’s being asked. The 3,300 comments are flooded with teachers, engineers, and parents saying the same thing. This is what the cognitive science research has been saying for years, and it’s exciting to see so many people arriving at the same conclusion from lived experience. 

Evidence-Based Education Comes to Colombia

ResearchED Colombia launches in Bogotá on April 25—the first researchED conference in the country, and a landmark for evidence-based education in Latin America. The lineup includes speakers from the World Bank, Chile’s Aptus, and leading science-of-learning researchers, all focused on what the evidence actually says about how students learn. I’ll be presenting remotely on some fascinating new material about grokking and distillation in AI—and what it reveals about why a solid foundation in knowledge matters more than we thought. The conference is organized by Fundación Aprender a Quererte, whose founders include Morat, one of Colombia’s biggest bands. If you’re in Colombia or anywhere in the Spanish-speaking world, this is worth the trip. Details at researchedcolombia.com.

Calendar Party Trick (Courtesy of Nelson)

Let’s wrap the week with something a little different — and genuinely cool. In this quick video, Nelson Dellis (yes, the memory champion guy) walks through how to figure out the day of the week for any date — no phone, no calendar, just your brain. It’s surprisingly learnable — and just the right kind of nerdy to pull out at a dinner party or confuse your students into thinking you’re secretly a time traveler. Here’s the video!

That’s all for now. Have a happy month in learning!

Barb Oakley

• Uncommon Sense Teaching—the book and Coursera Specialization!

• Mindshift—the book and MOOC

• Learn Like a Pro—the book and MOOC

• The LHTL recommended text, A Mind for Numbers

For kids and parents: Learning How to Learn—the book and MOOC. Pro tip—watch the videos and read the book together with your child. Learning how to learn at an early age will change their life!

Why We Have Two Learning Systems: Max Bennett Made This Click

One book that has given me great insight as I dipped into it over these past few months was A Brief History of Intelligence by Max Bennett. What I appreciated most was how clearly it laid out why we have two fundamentally different learning systems—an older, model-free system for fast, automatic behavior, and a newer, model-based system for deliberate planning and simulation. Bennett doesn’t just describe them—he explains their evolutionary logic. The model-free system evolved first because it’s efficient: it repeats what worked before. The model-based system came later, letting us imagine possible futures before acting. What clicked for me was how this distinction maps onto everyday learning. Much of schooling aims at building the slow, deliberative capabilities we prize—things like reasoning, abstraction, or transfer. But when working memory gets overloaded, the brain defaults to the model-free system. That means students may fall into habits or superficial strategies even when we think we’re fostering deep understanding. Bennett’s evolutionary lens helped clarify why that happens—and why guidance and structure matter so much more than we often assume. [Hat tip: Brandon Hendrickson of Science is Weird.] 

Two Late Bloomers Talk About Learning, Struggle, and Second Chances

This week’s YouTube recommendation isn’t just a listen—it’s a reminder that brilliance can come from surprising places. In this conversation with John Mighton, mathematician, playwright, and the quiet force behind JUMP Math, we swap stories of being “hopeless” in math, getting books confiscated in class (twice), and coming to love a subject we once avoided like the plague. This is a great listen if you need inspiration about making changes in your life and career.

John and I share a similar arc—falling off the math train early, then climbing back on much later, one careful step at a time. We talk about what finally turned things around, what makes good math teaching so hard to scale, and why students don’t need to be taught less—they need to be taught better.

There’s some honest reflection here: how fear and learned helplessness can shape an entire life path, and how one good teacher—or one clear explanation—can change everything. It’s also a peek behind the scenes of our new course, Making Math Click, and why we both believe that math is far more accessible (and transformative) than people are led to believe.

You’ll hear a bit about flawed research incentives, air guitar pedagogy (it makes sense, I promise), and the odd story about division, group theory, and Sylvia Plath. But mostly, you’ll hear two educators trying—honestly and earnestly—to figure out how we can do better.

The course is perfect for teachers, parents, students, or anyone who thinks math is for “other people.” (It’s not.)

(The above link to the course is free–be sure to choose the “audit” rather than the “register for free” option.  If you have already gone into the course, go to your profile and remove it and then try the link again, choosing the “audit” link.)

Cheery Friday Spotlight: Bryan Betz and Learning How to Learn for English Language Learners

Looking for creative ways to introduce Learning How to Learn in your classroom—especially with English language learners? Meet Bryan Betz, an inspiring English teacher based in South Korea who’s combining academic language development with brain-based learning strategies. Bryan is running a book club where upper-elementary and middle school ELL students explore the core ideas of Learning How to Learn—from focused and diffuse thinking to chunking and metacognition. His students not only build essential study skills, but they also gain confidence in academic English.

Bryan has created a treasure trove of classroom-friendly materials: word-association puzzles, guided discussion questions, and clever fable pairings (like “The Blind Men and the Elephant” to teach focused vs. diffuse thinking). If you’re an educator hoping to adapt Learning How to Learn for multilingual learners, Bryan is happy to share what he’s doing—and learning—with others.

You can contact him directly at bbetz1985@gmail.com

AI vs. Human: Who’s the Better Writer (or Teacher)?

If you’ve ever wondered whether AI can write as well as a human—or teach like one—Patsy Bowden has been wondering too. In one piece, she revisits an old Coursera assignment to see if today’s readers (and AI detectors) can still tell the difference between authentic human quirks and algorithmic polish. In another, she dives into the strange new world of AI avatars teaching AI itself. Both are thoughtful, gently provocative reads about what it means to write, teach, and learn in an AI-shaped world.

• Do I Write Better Than Gen AI?

• Can an AI Teach AI? Learning From an Avatar

AI Can’t Learn for You (Sorry)

Next week I’ll be giving a talk for the National Science Foundation’s AI-Adult Learning & Online Education group on how we might use AI to support real learning—not replace it with shallow mimicry. I’ll share more thoughts from our recent paper, “The Memory Paradox,” including why memorization is still essential (yes, even now), how over-reliance on tools can quietly erode thinking, and why the popular idea of “just look it up” often undermines understanding. AI is here to stay—but whether it helps or harms learning depends entirely on how we use it.

🔗 Details and registration

Why Listening to Others with Differing Views Builds a Better Brain
In my recent conversation with Drew Perkins on the ThoughtStretchers podcast, we explored a topic that’s both close to my heart and backed by solid neuroscience: how engaging with opposing viewpoints—yes, even the ones that make us uncomfortable—actually strengthens our brain’s ability to think clearly. It’s counterintuitive, but shielding ourselves (and our students) from challenging ideas doesn’t make us safer—it makes us more brittle. If you’ve ever wondered what the inability to talk to others with different ways of thinking may be costing us cognitively (not to mention societally), you’ll want to give this episode a listen. And check out our “Speak Freely, Think Critically” course! (The link is to the free version, but be sure to check the “audit” button once you get in to ensure you’re in the free version.)

That’s all for now. Have a happy month in learning!

Barb Oakley

• Uncommon Sense Teaching—the book and Coursera Specialization!
• Mindshift—the book and MOOC
• Learn Like a Pro—the book and MOOC
• The LHTL recommended text, A Mind for Numbers
• For kids and parents: Learning How to Learn—the book and MOOC. Pro tip—watch the videos and read the book together with your child. Learning how to learn at an early age will change their life!