Author: barboakley

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Book of the Month

Greenlights, by Matthew McConaughey.  It took us a bit to get used to McConaughey’s style. But once he hits his stride with stories, Greenlights soars as an unparalleled autobiography of a funny, tough, unfailingly curious extrovert with a sense that the world is conspiring to make him happy.  This is the kind of book you read so you’ve got funny stories to haul out when you’re sitting around jawing with friends. But the book goes much deeper than that, with insights ranging from the sacrifices and risks needed to get to where you want to go, to finding the love of one’s life, to the value of listening to your intuition.  Highly recommended—also good for audio (McConaughey himself is the narrator). 

Uncommon Sense Teaching Wins Award!

We’re delighted to announce that Uncommon Sense Teaching has made the top 10 of Learning Ladders’ “Best Books for Educators Summer 2021” awards. The awards panel featured teachers, school leaders, and EdTech entrepreneurs including Learning Ladders’ founder, Matt Koster-Marcon, who is also Chair of the EdTech Special Interest Group at BESA.  We’re proud to be included in the list, and would also like to congratulate the other shortlisted books for their incredible work. Visit the full list of recommended books, which cover topics such as wellbeing, educational leadership, and diversity and inclusion in schools.

A fine review of Uncommon Sense Teaching and of the Course Hero Education Summit 

Zainab Cheema, a US-based humanities professor, has written an excellent two-part (part 1 and part 2) review of Uncommon Sense Teaching that does a great job of summarizing key elements of the book.

And EVERY conference should be lucky enough to have a review such as what Zainab has written about Course Hero’s online Education Summit 2021.  Included in both Part 1 and Part 2 of the review are links to the relevant talks, along with a super-helpful discussion of what was covered.  (We found Dr. Luke Wood’s talk “The Effects of Racial Microaggressions” to be especially informative.)

Class Central’s upcoming Study Group venture

Starting August 23, Class Central is running a free Bootcamp, learning about Responsive Web Design via FreeCodeCamp. It’s more ambitious than the previous Study Groups – 12 weeks duration, with weekly 2-hour live sessions with Jessica Rose. You can find the details here. 

Keeping yourself on track with exercise

Sometimes it’s easy to talk yourself out of the importance of keeping up with an exercise program.  This article in Medium by LHTLer Kerem provides a good overview of the many benefits of exercise for both cognition and memory—and gives a good reminder for us all!

Барбара ОАКЛИ: Нейробиология в образовании подготовит Россию к прыжку в будущее

Here’s a nice interview with Barb in Russian published in Russia’s The Teacher’s Newspaper.  If you speak Russian (or use Google translate), enjoy!

Homing in on why spaced retrieval is so important and effective

This research indicates that spacing retrieval practice out by about an hour seems to be a good approach in helping mice to remember specific tasks.  Spacing out the retrieval practice in this way appears optimal in strengthening the neuronal connections involved in that specific memory.  

Remote learning not that bad? 7 in 10 parents say their kids are more focused in virtual classroom

Research is revealing that some 70% of parents feel their kids actually focus better while learning remotely.  “According to a recent survey of 2,000 American parents with school-age children and their children, one in three kids are excited by remote learning. Moreover, 72 percent of parents think virtual learning is a game-changer that will be around long after the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Homeschooling exploded among Black, Asian and Latino students

This Washington Post article details the rise in homeschooling, which is even higher outside white communities. Key grafs: “The percentage of schoolchildren in home-school has nearly tripled since mid-2019. By May of this year, the U.S. Census Bureau found more than one out of every 12 students were being home-schooled…

“Between 2019 and May 2021, home schooling rates jumped from about one percent to eight percent for Black students — a more than sixfold increase. Among Hispanic students, rates jumped from two percent to nine percent. The increase was less dramatic for White families, where home schooling doubled from four to eight percent over the same time period. Between 2016, the year of the most recently available data for Asian American families, and May, home-school rates went from one to five percent….

“In many cases, the migration from mainstream education shows the rising fears among parents of color that schools are failing their children, and the growing awareness of racial disparities in the treatment and outcomes for children of color. Despite aspiring to be “the great equalizer,” inequality is still deeply embedded in the nation’s public schools system, with yawning achievement gaps marking the performance between White and Asian students and Black and Latino ones. For parents already frustrated with their child’s education, the pandemic provided another reason to give home schooling a try.”

That’s all for this week. Have a happy week in Learning How to Learn!

Barb, Terry, and the entire Learning How to Learn team

• Mindshift—the book behind the MOOC
• The critically acclaimed Uncommon Sense Teaching (and MOOC!)
• The newest on learning: the book Learn Like a Pro (and MOOC!)
• The LHTL recommended text, A Mind for Numbers
• And Learning How to Learn, a book (and MOOC!) for kids and parents

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Book of the Week

Clean: The New Science of Skin, by James Hamblin.  Clean begins with a startling claim: author James Hamblin, a medical doctor, had stopped showering for five years and had given up as well on shampoo, conditioner, or soap, except on his hands.  With this unusual introduction, Hamblin moves on to describe soap, skin, and the entire set of related industries.  The book is filled with interesting factoids, such as that the pharmaceutical industry is tightly regulated at great expense, but the cosmetics industry is basically the wild west—“there are currently no legal requirements for any cosmetic manufacturer marketing products to American consumers to test their products for safety.”  That, in a nutshell, is why you can find seemingly elegant $60 creams and lotions with the same basic ingredients as a $6 tube. 

Clean was named a Best Book of 2020 by NPR and Vanity Fair. This is an especially worthwhile book if you have skin issues, or have ever wondered why—and whether it’s reasonable—to spend so much on skin products. Clean is also a good book for audio.

Getting ahead of technology in education

Barb’s article in ELearning Inside that tells the inside story of making the Uncommon Sense Teaching MOOC.  Here’s an excerpt: “It wasn’t easy. Terry was at the Salk Institute in San Diego, which had its own studio setup. Beth flew out from Pennsylvania to film in my garage studio in South Dakota, where we were both able to film together. Thanks to the magic of the greenscreen, we all appeared together virtually seamlessly on screen. Each video was carefully scripted and imagery was prepared—a process that took many months. Surprises were in store—Beth, a serious senior educator, turned out to have a Jane Curtin-like SNL comedic flair; her turns as a good witch and inept yoga master helped bring the course to spirited life. The video editing team, led by Juan Aristizabal, pulled off a near-television-like set of animations that made complex neuroscientific findings seem as simple and easy-to-understand as listening to a choir (literally—a bizarre choir is one of the key metaphors used in the course).” 

Read the whole thing!

Plant, tree, bird, and you-name-it discovery apps

One of the blessings of our time is not only Shazam, the wondrous music app, but analogous apps to help us discover the names of plants (Picture This); types of rocks (Rock Identifier ); species of birds (Merlin, which uses both imagery and sound—here’s a nice New York Times write-up about the app); and the location of walking trails (AllTrails). Theodolite allows you to point your phone out onto the horizon and (with an additional in-app purchase), be able to tell the names of the hills and mountains in the vicinity (how did we live without it!)  And we can’t help but enjoy seeing what other people think of the wines we drink: Vivino. (Can you tell we’re morning larks rather than night owls with the lack of star constellation apps in our list?)  

These apps aren’t foolproof—the Rock Identifier app, for example, identified Barb’s big toe as a quartz crystal. But when these types of apps work properly, which is increasingly the case, they are awesome. If you’d like, head on over to the discussion forum to discuss some of your favorite apps to help you recognize objects or features. That way, we can all learn from each other as we enjoy!  

Changing your life

Here is an inspiring message from this week’s email stack: “My name is Alice and I live in the UK. I was an engineer for 6 years before the pandemic, when I was put on furlough (government support scheme for those whose work is not needed due to Covid). I thought I’d use my time productively and decided to take an online course or two, and I stumbled across your Mindshift MOOC. [Hyperlink added] I don’t think I’d be exaggerating when I say it changed my life. Before that I never considered that I could do anything but engineering, even though my career in it hadn’t been great. It really inspired me to take the leap and use my skills to retrain for a completely different career. I studied really hard and learnt to code, and now am loving my new job as a data analyst/developer! Not only is coding and IT skills in general pandemic-proof, but I am so much happier now than I was as an engineer. So now that all my retraining efforts have been so successful, I just wanted to reach out and say a big THANK YOU for inspiring me to do it, and how to go about it! Keep up the good work  – Alice”

That’s all for this week. Have a happy week in Learning How to Learn!

Barb, Terry, and the entire Learning How to Learn team

• Mindshift—the book behind the MOOC
• The critically acclaimed Uncommon Sense Teaching
• The newest on learning: Learn Like a Pro
• The recommended text, A Mind for Numbers
• And Learning How to Learn, a book for kids and parents.

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Today is a very special announcement—we have just launched the new Coursera MOOC Uncommon Sense Teaching!  This MOOC is ideal for instructors of all kinds: K12 teachers, professors, parents, business trainers, and instructional designers, as well as those who are simply interested in how we learn.  

Uncommon Sense Teaching also provides valuable, evidence-based professional development training for your school or district. This information is especially important given the compelling need for effective teaching as students and teachers begin to recover from the educational disarray left by COVID. 

Here are some of the critical areas covered we cover:

• Teaching and learning inclusively in diverse classrooms

• Scaffolding, differentiation, and active learning

• The two major pathways the brain uses for learning—declarative and procedural

• Why and how to teach through both pathways

• How to promote neural consolidation for long-term retention

• The value of metaphor in helping with learning

• Why both explicit instruction and active learning are necessary

• The perils—and advantages—of multi-tasking

• How to handle procrastination

• Broadening the desire for lifelong learning

• Motivating students in the classroom

• Testing for fairness and success

• And much more!

We’ve also filled the course is filled with gifs and imagery (they are in the PowerPoint resources under each video), that you can use to make your own presentations about any aspect of the material. For those of you who have been waiting for clear, cogent, neuroscientifically-based insight into how to teach so that students truly understand and learn, the wait is over.  And, as always when it comes to our Learning How to Learn crew, we have fun while we’re at it! (Don’t miss our promotional video!) 

Course Hero’s Education Summit

As a reminder, we’re fans of Course Hero and its ability to help level the playing field for students.  

Now you have the opportunity to learn more about the latest in teaching and learning by attending Course Hero’s free Education Summit: What Matters Now? on July 28th through 30th. (Here is a video vignette from Barb with a key teaching insight. Notice how Barb’s forehead is sweat-covered in the 98-degree studio!)  

Barb will be giving the opening keynote for the conference—”Sparking A Curious Mind: Learning How to Learn in Today’s World” Wed Jul 28, 9:20 AM – 9:50 AM PDT.  She’ll also be giving an extended workshop for instructors on Friday.  We’ll see you at the Summit!

That’s all for this week. Have a happy week in Learning How to Learn!

Barb, Terry, and the entire Learning How to Learn team

• The critically acclaimed Uncommon Sense Teaching!
• The newest on learning: Learn Like a Pro!
• The recommended text, A Mind for Numbers!
• And Learning How to Learn, a book for kids and parents.

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Book of the Week

The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, by Stephen Greenblatt. One of the things we love about reading is that it allows us to discover how much we don’t know.  We had no clue, for example, about how the works of ancient Roman writers were able to make their way through two thousand years of mold, mildew, bookworms (the real kind), fire, and purposeful destruction. Greenblatt allows us to follow in the footsteps of Italian politician and humanist Poggio Braccilioni who, in the early 1400s, undertook journeys to northern Europe to seek out such ancient manuscripts as he could find hidden away in monasteries.  By leaning in to Poggio’s methods, we learn how and why manuscripts survived—often under the care of monks who were utterly opposed to the ideas contained in those ancient, heretical documents.  One of Poggio’s discoveries was epic. It was, in fact, Lucretius’s De rerum natura: On the Nature of Things, a poem that spelled out a shockingly prescient worldview of a world derived only of atoms that swerve—not the divine intervention of the traditional Roman deities.  

Greenblatt explores the nature of the Italian world of the middle ages, and also shows how important free thought, shocking though it may be, has been for the development of the modern world. The Swerve is a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Non-fiction—highly recommended, and an excellent book for audio listening. [Hat tip, Sadegh Nabavi]

Nelson’s Everest Memory Masterclass 

Last week we mentioned memory expert Nelson Dellis’s return trip to Everest (one day, he’ll summit!) This week, we’d like to bring to your attention Nelson’s masterclass on memory, which saw great success during his last two cohorts this year—his students have loved it! 

 Due to popular demand, Nelson is re-opening the class for a limited time (July 8th-11th). It’s a great class that teaches the basics of memory techniques all the way to the more complex—from how to remember your life, where you put your keys, people’s names and faces, to remembering numbers, speeches, and passwords, Nelson’s class has it all!  

Here is the link (which will be live until Sunday July 11th).  Don’t forget to go for it! 

The Cultural Implications Of Silence Around The World

Here’s a fascinating article by Carrie Shearer on the cultural implications of silence. One key graf (of many!): 

“In many Asian countries, it is considered polite to pause for a few seconds before answering a question to show that you have reflected upon the question and your response, thus demonstrating sufficient gravitas. Contrasting to this are many Western countries where silence is viewed as a void that must be filled. In these cultures, if they cannot answer a question immediately, people are concerned that the speaker may think that they do not know the answer. 

“Imagine the confusion this could cause in a conversation between a Malaysian and an American. When the Malaysian doesn’t respond immediately, the American says something else, hoping to elicit a response from the Malaysian; while the Malaysian is waiting for silence so that they may rejoin the discussion.” [Hat tip: Gemma Herbertson of Neurofrontiers.]

The Absurdity of Today’s Online World

We’ve become fans of Lubalin, who chronicles and brings to life the weird conversations that take place online. His “Is This Available” will give solace to all who have encountered internet trolls.  As one commenter notes: “The character changes, facial expressions and literal reading of misspelled words is priceless.” Not to mention the music.  

That’s all for this week. Have a happy week in Learning How to Learn!

Barb, Terry, and the entire Learning How to Learn team

• The critically acclaimed Uncommon Sense Teaching!
• The newest on learning: Learn Like a Pro!
• The recommended text, A Mind for Numbers!
• And Learning How to Learn, a book for kids and parents. 

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Book of the Month

A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence, by Jeff Hawkins. Hawkins is a neuroscientist as well as one of the most successful and highly regarded computer architects in Silicon Valley. Some of his scientific papers have become the most downloaded and cited papers in their journals. 

A Thousand Brains is one of the most intriguing books we’ve ever read about the brain—Hawkins takes an utterly novel approach to understanding how the brain works.  As he notes: 

“People often say the brain is the most complicated thing in the universe. They conclude from this that there will not be a simple explanation for how it works, or that perhaps we will never understand it. The history of scientific discovery suggests they are wrong. Major discoveries are almost always preceded by bewildering, complex observations. With the correct theoretical framework, the complexity does not disappear, but it no longer seems confusing or daunting. A familiar example is the movement of the planets. For thousands of years, astronomers carefully tracked the motion of the planets among the stars. The path of a planet over the course of a year is complex, darting this way and that, making loops in the sky. It was hard to imagine an explanation for these wild movements. Today, every child learns the basic idea that the planets orbit the Sun… Similarly, I always believed that the neocortex appeared complicated largely because we didn’t understand it, and that it would appear relatively simple in hindsight. Once we knew the solution, we would look back and say, ‘Oh, of course, why didn’t we think of that?’” 

Hawkin’s book proceeds to lay out precisely those relatively straightforward ideas—often arising from his group’s research—that make the brain much easier to understand.  He also makes a prescient case for why artificial intelligence will advance only by copying the approaches used by the human brain.  Highly recommended for brain buffs and those interested in artificial intelligence.

Barb Makes List of 35 Most Influential Women in Engineering

To celebrate International Women in Engineering Day 2021, AcademicInfluence.com has spotlighted 35 women who are making their impact felt in every area of the engineering field…. They are at the top of the engineering field today, as leaders and innovators; transforming the profession and inspiring future engineering students. Check out the development here!

Planning This Year’s Professional Development?

Planning a day of professional development for teachers or instructors?  Want to ensure your university or school district is up-to-date in its approach to teaching?  Barb has a few days available in August and early September to share practical insights on teaching and learning based on the critically acclaimed Uncommon Sense Teaching and her other works. Reach out here if you or your institution is interested in a keynote or workshop, either online or face-to-face.

Want kids to learn math? Level with them that it’s hard.

As mathematician Jordan Ellenberg observes in this preternaturally powerful article in the Washington Post, math is “only easy once you’ve mastered the concepts. Telling students otherwise can backfire… A school year unlike any other is coming to a close, but one thing remains the same: We’re still tussling, in the same old ways, over how math should be taught. More data science, less stuffy trigonometry? Students placed in separate classrooms by test scores or doing differentiated work in the same classroom? These questions are vexed, but I’ve got one suggestion for how we can improve. We can tell students that math is very, very hard….I was constantly telling students, at the outset of a computation, ‘Now this is pretty simple’ — encouraging them, or so I thought. My mentor, the master teacher Robin Gottlieb, now a professor at Harvard, set me straight. When we say a lesson is ‘easy’ or ‘simple,’ and it manifestly isn’t, we are telling students that the difficulty isn’t with the mathematics, it’s with them. And they will believe us. They won’t think, ‘I’ve been lied to,’ they’ll think, ‘I’m dumb and I should quit.’”

This is one of the best articles we’ve ever read about teaching math. Read the whole thing. [Hat tip: Guruprasad Madhavan.]  

Nelson’s Back from Everest!

Nelson Dellis, our favorite memory expert, is back from his latest attempt to scale Mount Everest–and he has a wonderful memory video to give you practice in memorizing, well, you’ll find out!  Don’t miss Nelson’s latest (literally) breathless adventures.  And don’t miss Nelson’s books!

• Remember It! The Names of People You Meet, All of Your Passwords, Where You Left Your Keys, and Everything Else You Tend to Forget 
• Memory Superpowers!: An Adventurous Guide to Remembering What You Don’t Want to Forget (10 – 14-year-olds)

The Future of MOOCs 

This outstanding article from Forbes describes Zvi Galil’s groundbreaking work involving low cost, high-quality graduate degrees: “One might assume that with that distinguished career Galil would regard the development of an online master’s program to be a bit anticlimactic. To the contrary, he believes OMSCS is the ‘biggest thing I’ve done in my life,’ pointing to the fact that OMSCS runs on a model that challenges the prevailing brand of most elite universities, who take pride in their selectivity and exclusiveness.

“OMSCS accepts all applicants who meet the program’s basic qualifications. So far, it’s accepted 74% of those who’ve applied. By contrast, the acceptance rate for Georgia Tech’s on-campus program is about 10%. Students from all 50 states and 124 countries have enrolled in the program, which earns rave reviews from its alumni.

“Affordability is key to the program’s popularity. OMSCS is the most affordable degree of its kind. Tuition runs just a bit over $7,000 for the entire program, about 10% of the cost of the average on-campus MS in computer science at private universities. As Galil says, ‘Our motto is accessibility through affordability and technology—we are making a Master’s degree in computer science available to thousands of students.’”

Thought for the Day

As Philippe de LaHarpe has relayed to us:  “Education is the place of delayed happiness.” 

That’s all for this week. Have a happy week in Learning How to Learn!

Barb, Terry, and the entire Learning How to Learn team

• Get the newest on learning: Learn Like a Pro!
• Get in early on the upcoming critically acclaimed Uncommon Sense Teaching!
• And here is the recommended text, A Mind for Numbers!
• And Learning How to Learn, a book for kids and parents.

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Course Hero’s Education Summit

As you may know, we’re huge fans of Course Hero and its ability to help level the playing field for students.  (Barb still remembers flunking a test during her undergraduate engineering studies because she wasn’t in the elite clique with access to old tests that had vital information the professor hadn’t actually taught.) 

Now you have the opportunity to learn more about the latest in teaching and learning by attending Course Hero’s free Education Summit: What Matters Now? on July 28th through 30th.  

By way of back story about Course Hero’s positive impact on students, research has revealed that one of the best ways for students to succeed in their studies is to take plenty of old practice tests. In other words, it can be a great idea for you to ensure your students have copies of your old tests. Course Hero can help make that happen by cleverly letting students think they are in the drivers’ seat when they get old tests to practice with.  (Naturally, your tests don’t just have easy-to-memorize solutions!)   Remember that you can find plenty of ideas for new test questions on the Course Hero platform. 

Barb will be keynoting for the conference—more on that to come!  

Uncommon Sense Teaching Webinar

Enjoy yesterday’s live webinar, where Beth, Terry, and Barb discuss Uncommon Sense Teaching—the way the book came together, and the breakthrough insights it provides. (And a sneak teaser at the end about a big coming attraction!)

Barb with podcaster extraordinaire Nasos Papadopoulos of MetaLearn

Barb and Nasos are old friends, and so Nasos is able to elicit extraordinary insights from Barb about the historical clash of research titans that has led to some of the challenges we see today in education.  As you can tell from the show notes below, this is a not-to-be-missed episode of MetaLearn.

Show Notes‍

• Introducing Barb [00:37]
• How the pandemic changed Barb’s workflow [02:30]
• What are Barb’s upcoming books, Learn Like a Pro and Uncommon Sense Teaching, and her new courses, all about? [04:01]
• What does the process of making an online course look like? [05:39]
• Where do Barbara’s upcoming projects fit into her wide body of work on the science of learning? How has her work progressed over time? [07:46]
• What are some significant developments that have happened to the field of learning since Barbara started researching it? [13:59]
• Why are we seeing a decline in the practice of procedural learning? [22:52]
• Does B.F. Skinner’s behaviorist approach to learning restrict further developments in cognitive learning? [23:34]
• What was Noam Chomsky’s role in the cognitive revolution and in the discrediting of procedural learning? [25:58]
• Barb shares the most expensive yet unpublicised experiment in education, and how it captures the tension of opposing views in education [32:21]
• What has the pandemic revealed about the pros and cons of online learning? [35:28]
• Examples and opportunities of a low-cost, high-quality education [38:11]
• Closing remarks [40:52]

Applying Insights From Neuroscience in the Classroom

As Megan Collins notes in this article from EdSurge: “A deeper understanding of how the brain works can help teachers plan lessons that reach every student…Teachers need to know that both ways of learning are valuable and provide a deeper way for students to understand material…When teachers emphasize only one system of learning, as by forcing students to explain declaratively every step in solving a problem, for example, it can make it more difficult for a student to be a successful overall learner. We are hurting students who learn well procedurally.”

Launch School—and podcast!

Launch School is an online school for developers—they also put forth an excellent podcast about learning and the journey to mastery. In this episode, students Jenae and Mandy interview Barb.  

As Jenae and Mandy note: “The students are loving it. Lots of great comments in our community and here’s what some students are saying today: “Really cool to see that LS interviewed Barbara Oakley! Her course and the accompanying book were super helpful in getting me prepared for the slow path to proficiency four years ago and I still see the impact that it has on me today.” ~ Zac

Barb speaking in Rapid City, South Dakota

Barb will be speaking for teens, tweens, and their parents about effective learning at 2:00 pm MDT, Wednesday, July 21 at Freedom Fest. Come meet Barb face-to-face as you learn more about learning! 

French podcaster Céline Guerreiro and Barb

Céline has broken past her reservations about interviewing outside her mother tongue to make this insightful interview with Barb. It’s impossible to believe this insightful interview is Céline’s first in English!  

That’s all for this week. Have a happy week in Learning How to Learn!

Barb, Terry, and the entire Learning How to Learn team

• Get the newest on learning: Learn Like a Pro!
• Get in early on the upcoming critically acclaimed Uncommon Sense Teaching!
• And here is the recommended text, A Mind for Numbers!
• And Learning How to Learn, a book for kids and parents. 

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Book of the Month

Churchill & Son, by Josh Ireland. Reaching the end of a fantastic book like Churchill & Son is bittersweet. There’s a feeling of satisfaction with the closure, but that satisfaction is mixed with the sad knowledge that you will not be able to return and spend more time with characters and a story you’ve become entranced by.  Winston Churchill is one of history’s astonishing figures—an ostracized man who saw a future few others wished to see. His accurate vision, combined with his ability to unite and marshal his country’s (and others’) forces to combat the Nazi juggernaut was unparalleled.  But when it came to Churchill’s son, Winston took a path that virtually everyone—especially Churchill’s long-suffering wife Clementine—could see was bound for disaster.  By overcompensating for his own neglected upbringing, Churchill groomed his son to become a spoiled, overbearing, overweening character whose descent into alcoholism left him with few friends, and lost him even the respect of his father. As this book so eloquently reveals, being the son of a great man can truly be a curse. This is an amazing behind-the-scenes story of what was really going on from a family perspective during some of the most tumultuous political upheavals of modern history.  This book was hard to put down—highly recommended! (Also good for audio.)

How to Tap Memory Systems to Deepen Learning

Deborah Kris’s article for PBS and NPR on Uncommon Sense Teaching is the best we’ve read – it captures some of the book’s central themes.  Key grafs: “Memorization can get a bad rap in education debates, conjuring images of mindless repetition or a ‘drill and kill’ pedagogy. After all, why memorize something when we can look it up on our phone?

“But memory is inextricably tied to learning. ‘You don’t really really learn anything unless you have it in your long-term memory,’ says Barbara Oakley, co-author of the new book Uncommon Sense Teaching: Practical Insights in Brain Science to Help Students Learn. When teachers have a better understanding of the brain’s memory systems, they can help students develop stronger study habits and engage them in deep learning. 

“Our brains are wired to acquire ‘biologically primary material’ with very little effort – think of a toddler learning their first language. Oakley calls this the ‘easy stuff.’  Biologically secondary material – or ‘the hard stuff’ – includes skills that we haven’t yet evolved to do, but that we can acquire and store in our long-term memory with instruction and practice. These include reading, writing and mathematics. 

“In classrooms, some students absorb and master these skills faster than others. Oakley calls these ‘race car learners’ who zoom to the finish line. In contrast ‘other students have hiker brains,’ says Oakley. ‘They get to the finish line, but more slowly.’

“Despite what students typically believe, speed is not necessarily an advantage, says Oakley, and understanding memory systems can help teachers support both the race car and hiker approaches to learning.”

ASEE Presents: Master Class on Effective Teaching – June 21, 22, & 23, from 12 – 4 PM, ET 

The Master Class on Effective Teaching is almost upon us! Barb and her colleagues will walk you as a university-level professor, K-12 teacher, parent, guardian, vocational instructor, learning officer in business, through a new, more neuroscientifically-based way of looking at teaching. Most great teachers (like you!) are great because you intuit what learners need, and when. This upcoming Master Class will provide you with insight into why you do what you do in your teaching. We’ll show you how some common teaching processes can actually inhibit students’ abilities to learn. The materials are based on the critically praised Uncommon Sense Teaching. Register here!

Interview Barb’s interview with Khan Academy!

Enjoy this interview (on Facebook or YouTube), with the wisdom-filled Kristen DiCerbo, Chief Learning Officer of Khan Academy—one of our favorite learning sites.

学び方には「コツ」がある。数学嫌いを工学部教授に変えた学習法

Learn Like a Pro is a hit in Japan—learn why in this intriguing article.

Flashcard Brouhaha

If you ever wanted proof that flashcards are effective, take a read of this back-handedly humorous article about US soldiers who exposed nuclear weapons secrets through their diligent use of flashcard apps. “For US soldiers tasked with the custody of nuclear weapons in Europe, the stakes are high. Security protocols are lengthy, detailed and need to be known by heart. To simplify this process, some service members have been using publicly visible flashcard learning apps — inadvertently revealing a multitude of sensitive security protocols about US nuclear weapons and the bases at which they are stored.” [Hat tip: David Handel, creator of our favorite flash card app: iDoRecall.] 

That’s all for this week. Have a happy week in Learning How to Learn!

Barb, Terry, and the entire Learning How to Learn team

• Get the newest on learning: Learn Like a Pro!
• Get in early on the upcoming critically acclaimed Uncommon Sense Teaching!
• And here is the recommended text, A Mind for Numbers!
• And Learning How to Learn, a book for kids and parents. 

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Book of the Week

Teach for Attention! A Tool Belt of Strategies for Engaging Students with Attention Challenges, by Ezra Werb. This brief, easy-to-read book provides “from the trenches” teaching strategies for students with ADHD, low self-confidence, distraction, and other attention challenges. There are dozens of true classroom stories that show the strategies in action. Ezra is an educational therapist working with students with attentional deficits, learning challenges, and spectrum disorders, so his insights can definitely help build your teaching repertoire if you are working with cognitively diverse students.

Learning How to Learn Effectively

You’ll enjoy Barb’s conversation about learning with real estate expert Tyler Chesser.  Their discussion focused on how to think independently and learning how to learn. Highlights include:

• Why you should ditch your allegiances
• The two main perspectives for paradigm-shifting ideas
• Why stress can be a good thing
• The benefits of broad learning in real estate investing
• Why specialization is not necessarily the right path
• Tips for people with a small working memory capacity

All real estate investors are read up on investing. How can you separate yourself from the pack through innovative thinking? Discover how in this insightful episode!

Parent Q & A: Do Music and Homework Mix?

This practical article by Deborah Farmer Kris gives a great deal of insight into a question many parents have about whether music and homework mix.  As Deborah suggests, experiment:  “If you like to mix music and schoolwork, spend some time figuring out what types of songs work best. Here’s a simple experiment you can try individually or with friends: 

“Take a sheet of math problems. While you work, play different types of music for exactly three minutes each: music with and without words, music at different volumes, instrumental jazz and classical, and so-called “brain wave” music. Finally, complete another three minutes in silence.

“At the end of each segment, note how many problems you finished and how you felt. Were you more relaxed? More agitated? More energized? Was music a distraction you had to tune out? Did it affect your speed or accuracy?

“Once you find music that boosts your focus, create a study playlist. Or multiple lists for different subjects and tasks. Or give yourself permission to work in silence. 

Deborah’s article is worth reading in full!

Helping a Parent to Help their Child

We received the following email, and we are hoping that perhaps learners might have insights to help Toni: 

“Dr. Oakley, I have read over the years your work and am grateful for it. I’m finding it difficult to find someone who knows how to use your work with children. My daughter is 9 and I can see we need to help her learn how to use her brain. The school system is failing her; and, while she’s excelling in different ways, I can see a tough road ahead. Who actually works with children to help teach them these tactics? —Toni”

If you have ideas to help, please post your insights on the discussion forum. (If the discussion forum link doesn’t work for you, just go directly to the general discussion forum.)

What Will Remain Post-Pandemic?

This perceptive article, co-authored by Barb’s friend, MIT linguist Shigeru Miyagawa and by MIT Learning specialist Meghan  Perdue, provides insight on what will come after COVID when it comes to education. Key graf: “If an award is to be given for the most raves from instructors across disciplines, it is the chat feature in video conferencing platforms. One instructor said that when he first started to use Zoom, he saw a stream of postings on the chat, not only addressed to him but also to each other. He was puzzled by what appeared to be a distraction, but then saw that the students were engaging with the lesson and encouraging others to ask and answer questions. In a large lecture class, students liked the fact that their questions were promptly answered by a TA, which helped to keep their attention on the lesson. Many other faculty reported that the chat allowed students who weren’t comfortable speaking up in class an opportunity to participate in the discussion. Many are thinking of how they can recreate the chat experience when they return to in-person teaching.”

A Great Game to Teach Kids Computer Logic

The Turing Tumble is a new game where players ages 8 to adult build mechanical computers powered by marbles so as to solve logic puzzles. Not only is it addictively fun—it also teaches about how computers work.  Kids can have a blast learning to code in a language without words. As the company notes: “Turing Tumble blurs the line between coding and building machinery. There’s no syntax to learn, no abstraction, and no electronics at all.”  This is awesome learning—highly recommended! [Hat tip Eric Siegel, instructor of our previous MOOC of the Month: Machine Learning for Everyone.]

Helping Students be Excellent Online Learners

Here’s an excellent short video by the always perceptive Kristin Palmer, Director of Online Learning at the University of Virginia with tips for being an effective online learner, including setting up your workspace, managing your time, minimizing distractions, and techniques for learning.  Techniques include recall, chunking, testing yourself, eating your frogs first and focused versus diffuse thinking.  

That’s all for this week. Have a happy week in Learning How to Learn!

Barb, Terry, and the entire Learning How to Learn team

• Get the newest on learning: Learn Like a Pro!
• Get in early on the upcoming critically acclaimed Uncommon Sense Teaching!
• And here is the recommended text, A Mind for Numbers!
• And Learning How to Learn, a book for kids and parents. 

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Book of the Week

The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival, by John Vaillant.  This is one of those books that’s hard to put down, as the story unfolds of a tiger with a lethal grudge against a particular human—a grudge that widened to encompass every human the tiger encountered.  John Vaillant is a magnificent story-teller—this brief excerpt gives a hint of his literary prowess: “As the encyclopedic reference Mammals of the Soviet Union puts it, ‘The general appearance of the tiger is that of a huge physical force and quiet confidence, combined with a rather heavy grace.’ But one could just as easily say: this is what you get when you pair the agility and appetites of a cat with the mass of an industrial refrigerator. To properly appreciate such an animal, it is most instructive to start at the beginning: picture the grotesquely muscled head of a pit bull and then imagine how it might look if the pit bull weighed a quarter of a ton. Add to this fangs the length of a finger backed up by rows of slicing teeth capable of cutting through the heaviest bone. Consider then the claws: a hybrid of meat hook and stiletto that can attain four inches along the outer curve, a length comparable to the talons on a velociraptor. Now, imagine the vehicle for all of this: nine feet or more from nose to tail, and three and a half feet high at the shoulder. Finally, emblazon this beast with a primordial calligraphy: black brushstrokes on a field of russet and cream, and wonder at our strange fortune to coexist with such a creature. (The tiger is, literally, tattooed: if you were to shave one bald, its stripes would still be visible, integral to its skin.) Able to swim for miles and kill an animal many times its size, the tiger also possesses the brute strength to drag an awkward, thousand-pound carcass through the forest for fifty or a hundred yards before consuming it.”

In The Tiger, you will learn a great deal, not only about tigers and their remarkably human ability to think abstractly, but about how the Russian Far East is slipping toward ecological imbalance, even as brave conservators work to keep this unique region intact. Highly recommended!

Live Webinar about Uncommon Sense Teaching with Barb, Terry, and Their Co-Author Beth!

Barb, Terry, and Beth will host a live webinar on Thursday, June 24th @1pm EST to discuss their new book, Uncommon Sense Teaching. There’s still time to register! They will drill down on two key ideas related to the declarative and procedural modes of thinking, and also give insights on how the book came to be. And there should be plenty of time to take questions. To receive your webinar link: 

1) Preorder the book here. Please note, for international book purchases our publisher recommends Book Depository.  

2) Complete the brief registration form here by Monday, June 14th. The form’s confirmation page will contain your link to access the webinar on June 24th!  We look forward to seeing you!

Audio Excerpt of Learn Like a Pro!

Here is a wonderful excerpt of Learn Like a Pro, read by Robert Petkoff—and when you hear Robert’s upbeat, enthusiastic reading, you’ll know why he’s such a star in the voice industry. Learn Like a Pro, audio version, is a concise, witty, practically useful book, and a perfect listen for those moments where you’d like to listen to something interesting.

Barb on the What Got You There Podcast with Sean DeLaney

Sean DeLaney is an insightful host with a fascinating podcast show—What Got You There.  Below are two links where you’ll be able to find everything from the episode, including listening, watching and episode notes. 

• Episode Page 

• Show Notes Page, with a deep dive into the many key topics Sean and Barb discussed.   

Class Central’s MOOC Study Groups

We highly recommend the fascinating study groups that Class Central has been putting together for learning on MOOCs.  Check out upcoming groups here: Learn with Class Central: Join our Study Groups on Redis, Excel for Data Analysis, and A Life of Happiness.

Reminder: ‘Pedagogy and Practice when Teaching Online’ webinar taking place June 10th via the University of Kent

Barb will be speaking for 15 minutes on June 10th at 8:15 – 8:30 am Eastern time for the ‘Pedagogy and Practice when Teaching Online conference. This intriguing conference features short presentations of the best ideas from a variety of teachers about good online teaching. If you would like to attend the webinar, please register your interest here, and you’ll receive more information. If you yourself would like to present and share, please fill out this form to join the fun! 

Why an Active-Learning Evangelist Is Sold on Online Teaching

Eric Mazur, a professor of physics and applied physics at Harvard University, has long been the leading figure in active learning. As Beth McMurtrie notes in this excellent article from the Chronicle of Higher Education: “Mazur was just as surprised as anyone when the pandemic hit and he had to scramble to move his course online for the remainder of the spring-2020 semester. And, like so many others, he took time over the summer to redesign his course for a fully remote experience once Harvard decided to remain online.

Rather than just move what he usually did online, he decided to take advantage of the new format. That meant making changes including minimizing synchronous and instructor-paced activities.

Now, says Mazur, the results are in and he’s convinced: online teaching is better. Not in all circumstances, to be sure. But in his applied-physics courses, students showed larger learning gains and felt more supported than students had in in-person classes. In fact, they appear to have learned so much more effectively in this new format that he wonders if it’s “almost unethical,” to return to the classroom this fall. [Hat tip: Zvi Galil]

That’s all for this week. Have a happy week in Learning How to Learn!

Barb, Terry, and the entire Learning How to Learn team

• Get in early on the upcoming critically acclaimed Uncommon Sense Teaching!
• Get the course recommended text, A Mind for Numbers!
• And Learning How to Learn, a book for kids and parents.