Book Reviews – Page 7 – Education & Teacher Conferences

Game on? Brain On!: The Surprising Relationship between Play and Gray (Matter) by Lindsay Portnoy

Rebecca Gotlieb

March-17-2021

Game on? Brain On!: The Surprising Relationship between Play and Gray (Matter) by Lindsay Portnoy

Game on? Brain On!: The Surprising Relationship between Play and Gray (Matter) is an affectionate, evidence-based, tribute to the importance of play for learning and preparing young people for their future. Author Lindsay Portnoy, who currently serves as an Associate Teaching Professor at Northeastern University, argues that we are born to play and that games can be an ideal space to develop skill in solving problems, thinking critically and creatively, persevering, collaborating, communicating, and empathizing. Portnoy argues for the value of play for supporting each individual student’s learning and for addressing equity issues in education. Throughout the book and on her website she offers tools to support educators in transitioning to more play-based learning exercises for students and urges educators to push back against rigid, putative learning cultures and standardized assessments. Especially amidst the COVID-19 pandemic when students miss their friends and may find online learning to be exhausting and when teachers are seeing anew how challenging standardized curricula can be, we could better serve our students by absorbing Portnoy’s lessons about how to harness the power of play. As such, Game On? Brain On! will be of interest to an array of K-16 educators and education reformers.

Drawing on neurodevelopmental research Portnoy first argues that people come into the world ready to learn. Play is a natural way of facilitating learning by capitalizing on our intrinsic interests in a low-stakes, imaginative context. Portnoy offers numerous examples of games that students enjoy playing and can be educational—from commercially available board games (e.g., Monopoly), to video games (e.g. Fortnite), to physical games at recess (e.g., wall ball), to student or teacher invented games. By observing and probing students about their play while letting the students take the lead, educators can learn a lot about those students’ skills and interests. Simultaneously, they can support the students in developing critical skills such as executive functioning, emotional regulation, convergent and divergent thinking, and metacognition. Among the benefits of play are that it does not ask of students the same high degree of conformity and compliance that classrooms typically do and it draws on students’ strengths rather than admonishing them for their weaknesses.

Classic psychological motivation theories support Portnoy’s call for more game play. While playing games students can experience a sense of competence, autonomy, and connectedness with peers. Games allow students and their playmates to try on different roles creating a safe way to express different parts of themselves, opportunities to draw on peers’ expertise as sources of support and guidance, and a scaffolded context for building empathy. Cognitive psychologists and learning scientists know well that distributed, interleaved practice of skills supports long-term retention. Games encourage recursive practice, and they frame failure as an opportunity for feedback and growth, which supports learning.

Although educators do not often use games as a tool for assessment, games can be effectively harnessed as a way for students to demonstrate what they know and how they can continue to grow. Portnoy urges educators to consider employing reflection about experiences with games or other active learning exercises as a mode of assessment.

Citing examples of several games that are addressing pressing issues, Portnoy notes that through games students may be able to make authentic contributions to real problems in their community or in our society. Further, in school we often divide students by age or ability, but games are conducive to having players of all different ages, interests, and abilities work together, which can offer important social learning opportunities for students.

Children will always play. If we paid less attention to what students play and learn and more attention to how they play and learn, we might be able to bring out the best in our learners by capitalizing on their passions to inspire their continued growth.

Portnoy, L. (2020). Game on? Brain On!: The surprising relationship between play and gray (matter). Dave Burgess Consulting, Inc.

Teachers vs Tech?: The Case for an Ed Tech Revolution by Daisy Christodoulou

Rebecca Gotlieb

February-04-2021

Teachers vs Tech?: The Case for an Ed Tech Revolution by Daisy Christodoulou

The dramatically increased reliance on technology to support students’ learning during the COVID-19 pandemic has brought to light educators’ need to understand how technology can support learning and how educators can make thoughtful decisions around the use of technology in schools. Daisy Christodoulou, Director of Education at No More Marking, draws on principles of human cognition and evidence about effective teaching and learning practices to offer suggestions for how technology can help bring about necessary improvements in education. Her book, Teachers vs Tech?: The Case for an Ed Tech Revolution, will be of interest to teachers, school technology managers, and EdTech entrepreneurs.

Lack of understanding and misconceptions about how people learn interfere with building technologies that can improve education. One especially important feature of human cognition is that while we have the ability to store vast amounts of information in long-term memory, we can only hold and manipulate a few pieces of information at a time—i.e., we have limited working memory capacity. Too often in-person or technology-based educational tools and techniques are ineffective because they tax our working memory. There is increasing pushback against teaching students facts since students can “just google it.” Christodoulou argues, however, that without sufficient content knowledge students’ working memory capacity would be quickly overwhelmed, they would not be able to understand the things they look up online, and they would easily fall prey to false information. A common misconception about learning is that students have different “learning styles.” This learning myth assumes that, for example, some students learn better with visual information while others learn better with auditory information.

While it is the case that technology could substantially help improve education by personalizing learning, doing so with technology that teaches to different learning styles or lets students guide their own learning based on their interests and assessments of their competency is not effective. Rather, technology could effectively personalize learning by providing targeted feedback and assessments based on students’ objective performance. Good educational technology can break down complex skills into smaller parts, provide helpful examples, and help students practice those skills repeatedly.

Christodoulou warns that a challenge with smart devices is that it is so easy to become distracted from educational work while using such devices. She suggests reducing device use, changing settings to reduce distractions, and potentially moving towards devices designed for a single learning purpose so that there are fewer possible distractions.

Christodoulou suggests that the path forward for EdTech should be to combine teacher expertise, for example in motivating students and evaluating complex ideas, with the ability of tech to do things like scale lectures, engage students in spaced, repetitive practice, and consistently applying rules to make grading fair. Further, teachers should receive training in using new technologies. Before adopting new EdTech, educators should investigate how the technology personalize the learning experience, how it builds long-term memory, how it support attention, and what evidence there is about its efficacy.

Christodoulou wisely concludes that change in education will only be possible when it is grounded in the realities of how people learn and the objectives that society and students have for school, and when it honors the expertise of teachers. Still, she argues that technologies that adapt to students’ performance and provide opportunities to practice challenging component skills provide an example of useful educational technology. In this moment when understanding the possibilities of EdTech is so important, Teachers vs Tech is a helpful read.

Christodoulou, D. (2020). Teachers vs Tech?: The case for an ed tech revolution. Oxford University Press-Children.

Active Learning Online: Five Principles that Make Online Courses Come Alive by Stephen Kosslyn

Rebecca Gotlieb

January-11-2021

Active Learning Online: Five Principles that Make Online Courses Come Alive by Stephen Kosslyn

The COVID-19 global pandemic has spurred a massive and rapid increase in online education. Although it is possible to design effective learning experiences in online classrooms, often online education fails to take advantage of the strengths of recent technologies and of the science of learning to meet students’ educational needs. Stephen M. Kosslyn, a former cognitive psychology professor at Harvard University who has worked in education technology start-ups and currently serves as the president of both Foundry College and of Active Learning Sciences, seeks to empower educators to provider better online education. His new book, Active Learning Online: Five Principles that Make Online Courses Come Alive, first defines active learning and reviews the psychology of how people learn and remember. Kosslyn then reviews five principles that contribute to successful learning—deep processing, chunking, building associations, dual coding and deliberate practice—and discusses ways to combine these principles and motivate students to help them learn. The book ends with clear and helpful examples of specific active learning activities that can be effectively conducted online in middle school through graduate school classes and describes how to implement these for different subject areas and groups of students. Even when the COVID-19 pandemic is better controlled, online learning will continue to be a major part of education; Kosslyn’s dual expertise in the science of learning and online education make him well equipped to guide educators towards practices that will help their students.

Learning, according to Kosslyn, is the process of acquiring and encoding new skills and information in memory. Ideally learned material can be transferred and applied in novel ways. Active learning, or using information in service of achieving a learning outcome, is typically more effective than lectures for helping students to retain and apply information, even if it does not feel to students like they are learning during active learning exercises. Although lectures allow students to passively participate and cannot be tailored to students’ interests and background knowledge, in small doses they can be an effective teaching instrument because they highlight and organize key ideas for students, model expert thinking, and can be used to reach many students at once. Kosslyn advocates for the “learning sandwich,” which features a brief lecture-based explanation of an idea, followed by an active learning exercise, and then a class-wide debrief on the learning exercise.

To support students’ learning it is helpful to understand a few key aspects of how human learning and memory work. One key principle is that the more mental effort one exerts on understanding or manipulating a piece of information the more likely that piece of information is to be retained. Similarly, linking new information or ideas to existing knowledge aids learning. Pushing students just slightly beyond their current skills and knowledge can create a fertile environment for them to engage in this sort of deep processing and association building. Another key principle is that it is easier to learn content that has been organized into a few small units. Educators might organize lectures into three or four distinct chunks and pause between chunks or build in active exercises between chunks to aid learning. Presenting information in both verbal and visual forms aids learning. Educators often rely on verbal information deliver (e.g., through lectures and texts); maps, charts, graphs, and diagrams can be used to engage with information visually. Specific, timely, and actionable feedback, coupled with a learner’s motivation to improve, can help learners make significant gains. Kosslyn suggests several classic memory tricks that draw on and integrate these principles of how people learn. For example, he describes the method of loci in which one draws on known visual images to learn lists or sequences.

For students to learn they need to be motivated to participate in the learning experience. Kosslyn reviews basics of theories of motivation. An intrinsic desire or inherent interest in learning stems from an individual’s basic desire to feel competent, autonomous, and socially connected to other people. Extrinsic motivation involves offering incentives or threatening consequences. Kosslyn offers examples of ways to capitalize on these sources of motivation. He concludes with several examples of exercises and activities that can be incorporated into online classes, whether those classes are synchronous or asynchronous, and explains how to set up the relevant technology for these activities. Active learning exercises can include analyzing and evaluating various materials, engaging in perspective taking via debates, role playing and storytelling, solving problems, finding information, making predictions, and explaining ideas.

Online learning has really come of age in the last year. Educators can equip themselves to be able to teach effectively online with the advice in Active Learning Online.

Kosslyn, S. M. (2020). Active Learning Online: Five Principles that Make Online courses Come Alive. Alinea Learning; Boston, MA.

Andrew Watson

December-15-2020

December Book-a-Palooza

When I started in this field, back in 2008, teachers really didn’t have many helpful books to draw on.

Books about teaching? Sure. Books about psychology and neuroscience research? Absolutely. Books bringing those topics together? Not so much…

What a difference a decade makes!

These days, we’ve got so many books that it’s hard to keep up. My “Read This Now” pile has been growing for months. Only in the last few weeks — since I sent my own book to the publisher — have I had time to read again.

I want to share a few recent discoveries with you.

Generative Learning in Action

A new series of books, edited by Tom Sherrington, focuses on research “in Action.” They’re all quite short — less than 100 pages — and carefully focused on practical classroom applications of research.

Sherrington kicked off this series with Rosenshine’s Principles in Action last year. Now, Zoe and Mark Enser’s book explores Fiorella and Mayer’s theory of Generative Learning.

Unlike many such books, this one focuses more on what students are doing. Specifically, generative learning invites them to do mental work that makes sense of their learning.

The Ensers describe eight distinct kinds of generative learning. Some — like “summarizing” — seem straightforward, even mundane. Others — like “drawing” or “enacting” — might feel more daunting to some students.

In every case, Generative Learning explains how these activities require their big three mental activities: selecting, organizing, and integrating information. When students “map” a topic, for instance, they have to select relevant ideas, organize them into meaningful patterns, and integrate them into a coherent whole.

The Ensers take care care to offer specific classroom examples of these eight strategies. Several chapters include “case studies” from other teachers who have put them to use.

They also emphasize the limitations that might make them less helpful. (Researchers call these “boundary conditions.”) For instance, almost all of these techniques require some working memory headroom. They also benefit from a fair amount of explanation and practice.

One important caveat. As noted above, generative learning strategies focus on the cognitive work that students do. The Ensers explicitly emphasize that such generative learning does not replace teaching but follows teaching. That is: we don’t use these strategies so that students might figure out concepts on their own. We use them so that students might consolidate ideas they learn in class.

In brief: this book — which takes less than an hour to read — provides clear explanations and practical examples. If you want both new ideas to try and new ways to think about your students’ classroom work, give Generative Learning a read. (Next up in the series: Ollie Lovell explores Cognitive Load Theory.)

The Science of Learning: 77 Studies that Every Teacher Needs to Know

In our work, you’ll often hear that we teachers should try a certain technique because “research says so.”

“What research?” we ask. “Well — you know — the research,” comes the reply.

In this usefully skimmable book, Bradley Busch and Edward Watson (no relation, that I know of) briskly summarize 77 research studies that might usefully guide our practice.

For each study, they describe its design, its main findings, and its classroom applications.

Should we really spread practice out over time? Check out #4. (BTW, I’ll give you a hint. “Yes.”)

How do we make feedback more effective? #25 has some answers.

What does PISA data tell us about helping disadvantaged students? The answers — summarized in #62 — might surprise you.

In this book, Busch and Watson provide lots of useful information. AND, they offer insights into reading and understanding research studies.

The more of these recaps you read, the more insight you’ll have into the strategies researchers use to answer the questions that they ask. (However: don’t be fooled by the repeated tagline “the one about” — as in, “the one about reading out loud.” ALL psychology research requires MANY studies.)

Like Generative Learning, The Science of Learning makes for a helpful, easy, and informative read.

Who On Earth Are You

Given the importance of cross-cultural understanding, it would be great to find a wise guide for negotiating its inherent difficulties.

How do different cultures think about time? About hierarchy? About uncertainty?

How do those differences influence teaching, learning, and schoolkeeping?

In his new book — Who On Earth Are You?: A Handbook for Thriving in a Mixed-Up World — Peter Welch brings several perspectives to these complex questions. (The illustrations are by his wife, Suzanne Shortt.)

Clearly, Welch knows A LOT of research. For instance, he explores Richard Lewis’s theory about cultural modes of communication: linear-active, multi-active, and reactive.

Despite his scholarly knowledge, Welch keeps his book light and personal.

Having lived in many countries and many continents, he has humorous and sad and enlightening stories to tell.

Having taught in schools — and run schools — from Africa to Turkey to Singapore to Finland to Thailand, he particularly understands how cultural differences shape educational expectations and experiences.

Welch has more than the usual share of “I thought it would turn out this way, but gosh was I wrong!” stories to illustrate the questions he explores. (For instance: the production of Romeo and Juliet he staged in Lesotho included — to his great surprise — lots of spontaneous audience participation.)

If you teach — or plan to teach — in a school with a rich cultural blend, Welch’s humility, humor, and insight offer new ways to think about living and teaching in our “mixed-up world.” He makes a thoughtful and encouraging guide on this adventure.

How Learning Happens: Seminal Works in Educational Psychology and What They Mean in Practice by Paul Kirschner and Carl Hendrick

Rebecca Gotlieb

December-11-2020

How Learning Happens: Seminal Works in Educational Psychology and What They Mean in Practice by Paul Kirschner and Carl Hendrick

Bridging the research-practice divide is a perennial issue in education. Fortunately, Paul A. Kirschner and Carl Hendrick’s book— How Learning Happens: Seminal Works in Educational Psychology and What They Mean in Practice — helps address this issue by presenting time-tested, impactful research in a way that is useful for educators. Kirschner, Emeritus Professor of Educational Psychology at the Open University of the Netherlands, and Hendrick, who teaches at Wellington College, explain the significance of several seminal studies, engage readers with stories and insightful commentary, explicate applications of research for teaching practice, and provide helpful definitions of research terms and lists of resources for further reading. Kirschner and Hendrick define learning as a change in long-term memory. They discuss implications of how the mind works for supporting learning, the impact of socio-cultural factors on learning, and effective and ineffective teaching and learning practices. They conclude with commentary about common myths about learning and education. This book is a useful primer for teachers in training and individuals new to educational psychology research who seek to bring an evidence base to efforts to improve learning.

Kirschner and Hendrick first explore aspects of how the mind works. They explain, for example, that experts think qualitatively differently than novices and exert less mental effort to do a task. They present research showing that, although it may feel counter-intuitive, deep and effortful processing is conducive to learning and retaining information. They review several factors that facilitate learning. For example, what one knows already about a topic or skill shapes the extent to which and ways in which they will learn more about that topic or skill. Self-regulation, feelings of efficacy around learning, practice, and metacognition (i.e., thinking about one’s own thinking) all play a role in how people learn. Kirschner and Hendrick offer an overview of the research on “mindsets,” i.e., how beliefs about intelligence and other skills affect performance, and relatedly, the meaning individuals make of experiences of success or failure. They also suggest effective study techniques and how to use them.

In addition to ending each chapter with clear and useful bullet-point descriptions of applications of this research for classroom practices, Kirschner and Hendrick devote a section of the book to research specifically about teaching and tutoring. They discuss the importance of structured support for optimally supporting learning. Good teachers ask questions, check for understanding, and correct students’ misconceptions as they arise. They gradually introduce new and increasingly complex information, provide conceptual models, and offer examples. Good teachers are experts at providing useful feedback. They recognize that assessments are not just for measuring what students know, but also can be useful for expanding what students know and can do.

In addition to advocating for the benefits of direct instruction and showing the evidence base for the efficacy of doing so, Kirschner and Hendrick acknowledge that, as social beings, we learn by observing others in context. In this way, apprenticeships can be a useful way for individuals to learn. Educators should attend to the way our social environments affect how and what we learn.

Unfortunately, many misconceptions prevail about how people learn and about what students would benefit from learning. Kirschner and Hendrick review the extensive research that has accumulated showing that students do not have distinct “learning styles.” Although it is important to be sensitive to individual differences that exist across students, it is also the case that nearly all students benefit from learning across multiple modalities. Another misconception that exists is that in the age of Google, when information is so easily at our fingertips, it is not important for students to learn content knowledge. This is not so; students need content knowledge to help them build increasingly sophisticated understandings of issues, and they need to be taught how to search for reliable sources of information online and sift through evidence.

Readers of How Learning Happens will not only gain insights into the learning process itself, but also will understand the empirical basis for those insights and develop the language and skills necessary for using research to inform an understanding of how learning happens and how best to support it.

Kirschner, P. A., & Hendrick, C. (2020). How Learning Happens: Seminal Works in Educational Psychology and what They Mean in Practice. Routledge.

The Power of Discord: Why the Ups and Downs of Relationships are the Secret to Building Intimacy, Resilience, and Trust by Ed Tronick and Claudia Gold

Rebecca Gotlieb

October-21-2020

The Power of Discord: Why the Ups and Downs of Relationships are the Secret to Building Intimacy, Resilience, and Trust by Ed Tronick and Claudia Gold

The famous, well-replicated “still-face experiment” involves an infant and parent seated facing each other. After a few minutes of play, the parent becomes completely unresponsive and shows a blank face. The infant tries an increasingly dramatic array of tricks to reanimate the parent while becoming more distressed. After a minute of participating in the experiment, the parent reengages, and parent and infant can synchronize once more. Not only did this experiment dramatically shift developmental psychologists’ understanding of infants’ agency in their social relationships, but also the research that built from this study over the last four decades offers insights into how each of us can build a strong sense of self and healthy relationships. In their new book, The Power of Discord: Why the Ups and Downs of Relationships are the Secret to Building Intimacy, Resilience, and Trust, Ed Tronick and Claudia M. Gold argue that discord in relationships is common and we build our sense of self, closeness with others, and ability to manage challenges when we embrace relationship mismatches, uncertainty, and the opportunity they present for growth. Tronick is the creator of the still-face experiment and University Distinguished Professor of Developmental and Brain Sciences at University of Massachusetts, Boston and Research Associate at Harvard Medical School. Gold is a pediatrician and author specializing in early childhood mental health and faculty at University of Massachusetts, Boston and at Boston Children’s Hospital. Although the still face experiment focuses on the infant-parent relationship, the paradigm and this book will be of interest to individuals seeking to improve a variety of different types of relationships as well as people who care for others who may have a history of unrepaired relationships.

People feel pressure to or expect to be in sync with relationship partners, but in reality, mismatch is the norm. The way that mismatch is repaired can nurture us and bring about a sense of pleasure, security, and trust. Parents and infants, for example, are out of sync about 70% of the time, but that mismatch is important for infants, and adults, to feel agentic, self-confident, and competent in managing challenges on independently and with the help of others. In this vein, Tronick and Gold echo previous calls that parents should trust their own instincts, remain calm and present, and be simply “good enough;” they should not strive for perfection, which undermines mental health and well-being.

We make meaning, in our bodies and minds, of moments of mismatch and repair with others and the interpretations we build of these experiences stay with us. Because of our parents’ roles in children’s early environment and meaning-making they act as “neuroarchitects,” changing how their children’s minds and brains are built and even how genes are expressed. When people cannot make coherent meaning of events or cannot construct a vision for a better future, it can threaten their sense of self, keep them stuck in a moment of hardship, and produce feelings of hopelessness. Even if an individual had insufficient experience with relational mismatch and repair in early life or experienced other early life stresses, they can learn to self-regulate as they co-regulate in the context of new relationships. Relationships are the best buffer against stress and trauma, way to heal from them, and the best booster of well-being generally.

To build productive interpretations of the messiness of relationships, people need to feel safe and accept that being out of sync is part of the process of connecting. Relationships are dynamic and each party has a responsibility in shaping the dynamic. Considering the other party’s perspective, remaining open and curious about the other person, listening to them and making them feel like they belong, being playful, and leaving room for uncertainty can support relationship health.

Although Tronick and Gold focus primarily on relationships between two individuals, principles from the still-face paradigm have implications for society more generally. Society needs to invest in social relationships, including but not limited to the parent-child relationship; our relationships are literally, biologically, life-sustaining. The differences between us can be our greatest strength if we allow ourselves to work through relational turbulence, accept that struggle is normal, and recover into better and stronger relationships. In this moment in time, with so much political divisiveness, and when we are quarantining at home and many of us are spending significant amounts of time with family, we could all benefit from heeding Tronick and Gold’s relationship advice.

Tronick, E. & Gold, C.M. (2020). The Power of Discord: Why the Ups and Downs of Relationships are the Secret to Building Intimacy, Resilience, and Trust. Hachette Book Group.

Hivemind: The New Science of Tribalism in Our Divided World by Sarah Rose Cavanagh, PhD

Rebecca Gotlieb

September-22-2020

Hivemind: The New Science of Tribalism in Our Divided World by Sarah Rose Cavanagh, PhD

How do we balance our social, collectivist nature with our individualistic drives? How do technologies, such as smartphones and social media, affect the tension between collectivist and individualist drives? Given that we have become highly individualistic at the expense of collectivistic tendencies that promote happiness and health, how can we move towards more collectivistic tendencies, while avoiding the drawbacks of group operation? How might technology facilitate this process? Through a series of interviews with a diverse group of experts (e.g., a bee keeper, social neuroscientist, young avid tech user, etc.) and a synthesis of psychological and neuroscientific evidence, Sarah Rose Cavanagh offers keen insight into these questions in her latest book, Hivemind: The New Science of Tribalism in our Divided World. Cavanagh is a professor and director of the D’Amour Center for Teaching Excellence at Assumption College with expertise in the psychology of emotion regulation.

Hivemind, according to Cavanagh, refers to the extent to which we harness a collectively focused state of mind to recognize that our thoughts, feelings, and sense of reality are shaped by the collective. We are an extremely social species, and to a large extent our happiness is driven by the attention we pay to collective goals and experiences. In the debate about the appropriate role of smartphones and social media in the mental health and intellectual development of children and adults, Cavanagh urges us to consider that it may not be the screens themselves that harm us but the way that certain patterns of use may reduce our collectivist tendencies. When social media and technology help enhance existing relations with others who are not physically together or help create meaningful new relationships (especially for people with niche needs and interests) to help foster a sense of belonging in a community, social media can be beneficial. When screen time replaces time spent with other people, sleeping, or exercising, and when screens create an echo-chamber of our own beliefs, facilitate the spread of false information, or allow people to bully others while hiding behind the guise of an avatar, social media and smartphone use can be harmful. Cavanagh’s reanalysis of reports about the correlation between smartphone use and the mental health crisis in adolescents suggests that we actually do not understand this relationship well and, although fearing for our children is instinctual, we should avoid panicking about their use of technology.

Rather than debating whether current technologies are good or bad, Cavanagh argues for investing in digital literacy for young people, modeling for youth self-regulation around use of these technologies, and recognizing that many of the challenges we have attributed to social media use (e.g., bullying) are simply a new form of age-old human challenges. She suggests we identify and protect those who may be vulnerable to adverse side-effects of tech use. For example, people with ADHD or dementia may struggle with the mental task switching that is common with these technologies. (Cavanagh suggests a handful of books for further reading about tech use and who may be most vulnerable to its drawbacks. See Irresistible by Adam Alter and The Distracted Mind by Adam Gazzaley and Larry Rosen.)

The evidence for our collectivist nature and its benefits for health and well-being is strong. We are born expecting to be part of a culture. Most of what an individual knows is not the result of first-hand experience but of shared knowledge. Stories are one of the most natural ways of learning about and from other people, and gossip is one of the ways that we invest in our social relationships. From a neural perspective, we know that a special class of brain cells, “mirror neurons,” support our ability to understand and imitate others. The brain’s “default mode network” supports much of our social reflections.

To benefit from the power of the hivemind, we need to apply moderation. Too much collectivism or authoritarianism can lead to viewing other individuals as less human. Too little collectivism, which leaves individuals feeling disconnected and unsure of their identity, creates a fertile environment for cults to thrive. Cavanagh believes that we have overemphasized the individual and deemphasized the collective, to our detriment. We need to think for ourselves, dissent, and innovate, while also learning from and investing in inclusive communities. She advises listening to and learning from experts, and seeking out (fictional or real) stories from and experiences with diverse others.

Cavanagh writes with a warm and personal voice, offering insight into who she is and how she builds empathy and community. Hivemind helps readers appreciate how investing in the collective and developing healthy tech habits can help address some of the great challenges facing youth, society, and democracy.

Cavanagh, S. R. (2019). Hivemind: The new science of tribalism in our divided world. Grand Central Publishing.

Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought by Barbara Tversky

Rebecca Gotlieb

July-25-2020

Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought by Barbara Tversky

Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought is the recent book by Barbara Tversky, an emerita professor at Stanford University, a professor of psychology at Teachers College at Columbia University, and a past president of the Association of Psychological Science. In this book, she argues that spatial thinking is the foundation of all thought, including abstract thinking. Tversky draws on nine general principles of cognition to show how we think about space and movement and how we use them to think. Among these principles are the ideas that: with cognition there are always trade-offs; action models perception; minds can override perception and impute missing information; and cognition mirrors perception. She suggests that when there are too many thoughts to hold in mind, we put those thoughts into the world in various ways, and the way we put ideas into the world is similar to how the ideas are stored in our minds.

Tversky’s bold foregrounding of spatial thinking will be of interest to individuals who study and attempt to shape thinking, such as educators and psychologists, as well as to individuals who think in space and movement for their work such as chemists, designers, architects, and dancers. She argues that actions in space allow us to integrate information from our senses and to understand the thoughts and intentions of other people so that we might mimic, coordinate, and cooperate with them. In social situations, verbal thinking often falls short relative to visual thinking.

For example, generally we are better at visually recognizing faces, emotions, and scenes, than we are at describing them. Gesturing is one example that Tversky offers of the power of action for supporting thinking. Gestures can express ideas more directly than words and can do so in a way that forces abstraction. How we gesture can reveal how we think about the relation among ideas (e.g., people’s gestures about time reveal the linear and sequential way we think about events). Further, when people are unable to gesture they have more difficulty describing ideas verbally.

The primacy of visual representations is evident in our linguistic history. Visual representations of ideas predate written representations of ideas by thousands of years. For example, it is widely accepted that “see” means “understand” and “look” means “pay attention to.” The way we visually represent ideas or relationships (e.g., with maps, sketches, diagrams, and comics) often distorts those ideas or relationships so that the most salient parts are emphasized and less important parts are excluded. Tversky argues that diagrams and pictures can be very helpful for learning ideas since they can communicate quickly and directly, and can express more than one meaning.

Relatedly, drawing ideas can aid understanding by making the ideas more concrete and promoting coherence and feasibility within parts of the idea. Spatial thinking, which includes creating physical or mental representations and engaging in mental rotation, is related to mathematical ability. Teaching spatial thinking, which can be accomplished in a variety of ways, including for example, through sports, could help to support youth’s math performance.

Tversky reviews what various visual symbols, including dots, lines, arrows, boxes, and certain diagrams, reveal about how we think about a range of topics. She asserts that the way we reason about space, perception, and action is the backbone for how we reason about social, emotional, scientific, philosophical, and spiritual issues. She argues also that while assuming different perspectives can slow the process of coming to understand something, it will ultimately result in a fuller understanding and more creative problem solving.

Tversky concludes by introducing the intriguing concept of “spraction,” which posits that actions in space design our world and create abstractions in the mind. Readers will understand from Mind in Motion that in considering how to augment cognition, we should rely not only on language but also on spraction.

Tversky, B., (2019). Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought. Basic Books, Hatchette Book Group.

Executive Function Isn’t What You Think It Is (Maybe)

Andrew Watson

July-09-2020

Executive Function Isn’t What You Think It Is (Maybe)

As a soccer coach, I want my students to get better at soccer.

As an English teacher, I want my students to get better at English.

And, as a hip-hop dance instructor, I want my students to get better at hip-hop dance.

To accomplish those goals, I usually teach them soccer, English, and hip-hop dance.

That is: I need to tailor my teaching SPECIFICALLY to the topic I want my students to learn. Sadly, for instance, when I teach English, I’m not helping students learn soccer (or math, or dance…)

Wouldn’t it be great if I could teach some GENERALLY useful skill that would boost their abilities in all those areas? This broad, overarching skill would make my students better soccer players, English essayists, and hip-hop dancers. That would be amazing…

Answer Number One

For a few decades now, we have mostly thought that the answer to that question is “no.”

Despite all the hype, for example, teaching young children to play the violin doesn’t make them better at math later on.

The exception to that general rule: EXECUTIVE FUNCTIONS.

When children get better at, say, inhibition, they improve across all their studies.

In soccer, they resist the temptation to run to the ball, and instead play their position.

In English, they break their bad habits — like using too many dashes — and choose good ones instead.

And in dance, they follow the tricky choreography that steers them away from the (super-tempting) downbeat.

So, executive functions — task switching, prioritizing, self-control, etc. — help students generally.

No wonder we spend so much time talking about them.

Answer Number Two

Professor Sabine Doebel wonders: what if that account of executive function is just wrong.

What if executive functions — like so many other things — depend on specific, local circumstances.
What if we don’t develop general abilities to inhibit actions, but we learn specifically that we shouldn’t run to the soccer ball (or use dashes, or step on the downbeat)?
And, what if getting better at one of those local skills doesn’t make me better at any of the others?

She explains this argument in a Tedx talk. Happily, this one includes an adorable video of children trying the famous “Marshmallow Test.” (It also has an even more adorable video of children trying the less-well-known “Card Sorting Task.”)

She has also recently published a think piece on this question in Perspectives on Psychological Science. This document, naturally, is more technical than a Tedx video. But it’s certainly readable by non-experts who don’t mind some obscure technical terminology.

Why Do We Care?

If the traditional account of executive function is accurate, then we can help students generally by training their EFs.

If Doebel’s account is more accurate, then — alas — we can’t.

Instead, we have to help students learn these specific skills in specific contexts.

Because Doebel is proposing a new way to think about executive functions, I don’t doubt there will be LOTS of institutional resistance to her ideas. At the same time, if she’s right, we should allow ourselves to be persuaded by strong research and well-analyzed data.

This question won’t be answered for a long time.

But, we can use our (general or specific) executive function skills, restrain our impatience, and keep an open mind.

Permission to Feel: Unlocking the Power of Emotions to Help our Kids, Ourselves, and Our Society Thrive

Rebecca Gotlieb

June-16-2020

Permission to Feel: Unlocking the Power of Emotions to Help our Kids, Ourselves, and Our Society Thrive

How are you feeling? We ask this question often because our feelings are an important source of information about our internal lives, yet too often we do not ask or answer with sincerity. Marc Brackett, a Yale professor and Director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, argues that our emotions, though messy, make us human. Further, when we deny ourselves permission to feel, as we often do, we as individuals and a society suffer adverse consequences. In Permission to Feel: Unlocking the Power of Emotions to Help Our Kids, Ourselves, and our Society Thrive Brackett draws on his extensive research expertise and personal experiences to teach skills for recognizing, understanding, labeling, expressing, and regulating emotions. This book will be of interest to readers wishing to improve their own emotional lives, parents striving to better support their children’s social-emotional skills, educators wishing to implement high-quality social-emotional learning initiatives, employers and employees wishing to improve both the culture at work and the bottom line, and those interested in working towards a more equitable, creative, and compassionate society.

Although western philosophical tradition contends that emotions interfere with rational thought, since Darwin we have understood that emotions are important for our survival, shaping our learning, memory, decision-making, and actions, and health. Brackett details the ways in which our culture of ignoring emotions is adversely affecting all of us, and especially young people. Fortunately, emotional skills (i.e., skills for magnifying our strengths and navigating through social challenges) can be taught Teaching these skills can improve well-being, creativity, academic performance, relationship quality, and leadership skills. Brackett and colleagues developed the RULER framework to summarize the critical skills for building emotional competency.

The first skill in the RULER acronym is recognizing emotions through verbal and non-verbal signals in ourselves and others. Factors such as culture, personality, context, and technology can affect our ability to recognize emotions. A “mood meter,” which sorts emotions based on the degree of pleasantness and on the degree of energy or arousal, can be helpful in understanding the range of emotions that exist and how they relate to one another.

The second RULER skill, and perhaps the hardest to master, is understanding emotions or seeking to answer why one feels a certain way. We should listen to others’ emotional experiences not just to be sympathetic but also to discover the underlying causes of their experiences. Brackett suggests we act like “emotion scientists” developing and testing hypotheses about why we feel certain ways and seeking to gather evidence through question-asking that supports or refutes these hypotheses.

Although there are over 2,000 emotion-related words in English, in general Americans, know and use relatively few emotion words. Labeling emotions facilitates making sense of our emotional experiences, regulating emotions, and helping one another. As such, labeling acts as a hinge between the recognition and understanding components of RULER and the expression and regulation components.

Expressing emotions, including negative emotions, and listening to others’ expressions of emotion are key for understanding, empathizing, and helping one another. Expressing emotions can help build supportive relationships. The final component of RULER, regulating emotions, provides individuals power over which emotions they experience, when and how they experience them, and how they express their emotions. Brackett suggests a few helpful strategies for regulating emotions, including mindful breathing to calm the body and mind, reinterpreting the cause of an emotional experience to change the experience, and planning ahead to avoid triggers of unwanted emotional experiences. He suggests also shifting attention away from stressful encounters, engaging in self-talk, and taking a moment to pause before making decisions with long-term consequences based on short-term emotions.

Emotional regulation is a lifelong journey. Parents can support their children’s emotional skills by honing their own emotional skills and by initiating family conversations about the emotional culture and expectations in the family. Both teachers and students are experiencing a high degree of stress in school. Students will do better in the classroom when they have a strong relationship with their teachers and when they can learn material that feels relevant and important. Teachers understand the importance of social-emotional learning but many feel that they do not have the time or know-how to teach it. Based on his extensive experience introducing the RULER curriculum to schools, Brackett suggests that strong school-based social-emotional learning initiatives require buy-in from all staff, should be practiced daily in a proactive (not reactive) manner and should be integrated into the curriculum across all grade levels and developmental stages.

With the clear, personal, and research-backed insight Brackett strives for nothing short of creating a better society, by encouraging us all to give ourselves and others permission to feel.

Brackett, M. (2019). Permission to feel: Unlocking the power of emotions to help our kids, ourselves, and our society thrive. Celadon Books.

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