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Not All Jokes Are Created Equal: Teacher Humor That Helps (and Hurst)
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
January 18, 2026

Not All Jokes Are Created Equal: Teacher Humor That Helps (and Hurst)

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Imagine I told you that “we have research showing that SINGING leads to more learning.” I suspect you would not feel surprised, but you would have a few follow up questions:

  • Who is doing the singing? The teacher? The student? Someone else?
  • What are they singing? Is the song about the content being learned? About Taylor Swift’s romance?
  • Does the singing have to be good? Does harmony help? Are instruments needed?

And so forth.

You might have the same set of reactions if someone says to you “we have research showing that HUMOR helps in the classroom.” That’s good to know…but we’d like some details please.

As of today, I’ve got some for you.

The Details

Researching humor might sound like a humorless project. In this case, the research method isn’t funny, but it is helpfully straightforward.

A research team in Germany made five videos, about 17 minutes long, for a geography class. In each video, the teacher covered the same content: plastic waste in the sea. (Again, not a very funny subject.) Each video presented that content with a different style of teacher humor:

  • Humor about the topic: using funny cartoons as part of the lesson
  • Humor NOT about the topic: making jokes about everyday life
  • Self-deprecating humor: stumbling, making fun of himself
  • Student-deprecating humor (“aggressive humor”): laughing at a student’s hat

and, for sake of comparison,

  • No humor.

To be clear, these videos werent comedy fests: there was about a minute of humor sprinkled throughout. Reseachers showed these videos both to 200+ teachers and 300+ students, and asked them to rate several qualities:

  • Teacher quality (“The teacher is understanding of the students’ personal issues”)
  • Interest (“The teacher poses interesting tasks”)
  • Clarity (“The teacher explains the content comprehensibly”)
  • Time on task (“A lot of time is being wasted in class”)

They also asked the 10ths grade students to rate

  • Intrinsic interest (“I became inclined to delve deeper into the subject matter”)
  • Student emotions (enjoyment, anger, anxiety, boredom)

So, the basic question is: did any of the different kinds of humor have an effect on any of those variables?

Data, and Beyond

We’ve got over 500 people rating 5 kinds of humor and evaluating 6 categories of response — so we’ve got A LOT of data. I’ll focus on the big findings, and try not to get lost in the niche-y details.

The simple headlines won’t surprise you: “On-Topic Humor: GOOD; Aggressive Humor: BAD.”

More specifically: on-topic humor got higher ratings for enhancing the teacher’s relationships with the students, and resulted in lessons being rated as more interesting. Students who saw the on-topic humor video rated themselves as more intrinsically motivated, and gave lower ratings to the negative emotions (anger, anxiety, boredom). All that sounds encouraging.

Aggressive humor — are you shocked? — interferes with teacher/student relationships, reduces intrinsic motivation, and ramps up anxiety and anger. I myself was a little surprised to read that it lowers the students’ rating of the lesson’s clarity, and gives students the sense that they spent less time on task (although they didn’t).

For comparison: on-topic humor had no effect, good or bad, on perception of time on task, or on clarity. (This final point is interesting. We might worry that on-topic humor would distract students and thereby reduce clarity. This study didn’t find that result.)

More broadly, the researchers found that off-topic humor and self-deprecating humor didn’t move the needle much (with a few exceptions here and there).

I’m Here All Week

Because “one study is just one study” (h/t, Prof. Dan Willingham), we should include important caveats here.

First: this study did not measure the effect of humor on LEARNING. Let me say that again. The researchers did not measure how much the students learned as a result of different kinds of humor. I think we can plausibly speculate that increased motivation and improved teacher/students relationships would result in more learning. But we don’t have data to support that claim, especially because…

Second: the researchers gathered self-reported ratings. The students said they felt more intrinsic motivation after the on-topic humor class. But would those self-reports — recorded by clicking a box on a computer screen — actually translate into genuine motivation? Or, stronger relationships with teachers? We just don’t know. The words “self-reported ratings” often earn the warning: “notoriously unreliable.”

Third: humor depends A LOT on cultural expectations. I don’t know much about the intersection of “Germany,” “humor,” and “school culture.” But I know enough to wonder how well that Venn diagram aligns with other Venn diagrams in other cultures and countries. We shouldn’t automatically assume that this set of conclusions applies in our cultural circumstances.

Finally: I’ll note that watching a 17-minute video of another classroom is not the same thing as learning from a teacher right here in the room with me every day. Videos are a good research tool, but results of video research might not always transfer to actual classrooms — especially for relational and motivational effects.

In Sum

I think I would have predicted that “on-topic humor” is modestly helpful in class, and that “aggressive humor” is definitely harmful in class. This study roughly supports those hunches.

If you’re a funny person, you can use this study as a guideline. Don’t mock your students; you knew that anyway. Don’t waste time with jokes about Saturday Night Live; they’re not having the effect you hope they do. But — if you want to — mix in some humor about the subject you’re teaching, you might well connect with your students a little bit more. And: that little bit helps.

Bieg, S., Banaruee, H., & Dresel, M. (2026). The impact of teacher humour on teaching quality and student learning: An experimental approach. Learning and Instruction, 102, 102311.

40% Wrong: The fMRI Problem in Educational Neuroscience
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
January 11, 2026

40% Wrong: The fMRI Problem in Educational Neuroscience

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When our students learn — or pay attention, or feel motivated — all sorts of amazing things happen in their brains. Neurons connect and neurotransmitters zip. The prefrontal cortex (PFC) coordinates executive functions; the default mode network (DMN) helps consolidate prior learning. It’s all so cool!

A recent study invites us to reconsider: how do we know about all that brain activity in all those brain regions?

One way to study brain activity goes by the cumbersome name “functional magnetic resonance imaging,” aka fMRI. In theory, fMRI tells us what parts of the brain are working and when. So:

  • If students are effectively task switching — that is, enacting executive functions — their PFC “lights up.”
  • If students are letting their thoughts wander freely as they consolidate their learning, the DMN “lights up.”

When you see those colorful brain images, the highlighted areas show what regions have been activated during specific mental processes.

Most fMRI studies reach these conclusions by relying on a clever proxy. Here’s the logical chain:

  1. When neurons activate, they use up oxygen.
  2. The brain resupplies that oxygen – in fact, oversupplies that oxygen – by increasing blood flow to the region.
  3. By tracking changes in blood oxygenation, therefore, we can draw reasonable conclusions about neural activity.

In brief: changes in blood oxygenation reveal mental work in very specific regions of the brain.

That’s what most fMRI does. If blood oxygenation CHANGES in the PFC after students effectively task switch, we conclude that executive functions “happen” in the PFC. If blood oxygenation changes in the DMN when students let thoughts wander freely, we conclude that mind wandering “happens” in the DMN.

Such conclusions just make sense.

Rethinking Core Assumptions

But wait just one minute: what if that proxy is wrong? What if the foundational assumption of fMRI analysis just ain’t so?

Last month, a research team published a simply astonishing study challenging the standard interpretation of most fMRI analysis. Instead of measuring neural activity by the blood-oxygenation proxy, they measured it more directly. (To be precise, they used a much better proxy: oxygen metabolism.)

They found that:

  • In some cases, blood oxygenation changes do correlate with the more precisely measured metabolic activity. So: yes, sometimes the standard fMRI interpretation path is true.
  • But in other cases, blood oxygenation changes in the opposite direction of the more precisely measured metabolic activity. In these cases, the standard interpretation is BACKWARDS.

We should pause to let that finding sink in. If these scholars are correct, then the logic governing fMRI interpretation for DECADES has been — at least at times — pointing us in the wrong direction.

Frying Pan, Fire

In my quick summary above, I wrote that “in some cases” the interpretation is backwards. We should ask: how many cases? If this backwards response happens 1% of the time, that’s an interesting quirk, but perhaps not terribly important.

Well, brace yourself.

  • Across the cortex, this study finds a backwards response roughly 40% of the time.
  • The backwards response is especially common — more than 60% of the time — when brain regions appear to “deactivate.” (This finding matters so much to education research because — according to the traditional interpretation — the DMN “deactivates” during focused mental tasks.)
  • Even when cortical brain regions appear to “activate,” the backwards response still occurs about 30% of the time.

Even worse:

  • In most cases, the backwards response isn’t a stable feature. SOMETIMES a specific brain region shows this backwards response, and sometimes it doesn’t.

To put the matter starkly: in brain regions highly relevant to education (e.g., the DMN), we simply do not know if most of the fMRI studies we’ve been relying on accurately describe which regions are more or less active. If the signal we use to infer brain activity often points in the wrong direction, then we can’t be confident that many published interpretations are correct. They could be 60% wrong … and that’s A LOT of wrong.

Let me summarize this grim news in one sentence:

Because blood-oxygenation doesn’t reliably correlate with neural activity, our default way of interpreting standard fMRI doesn’t reliably hold.

Not So Fast

Before I throw out decades of educational neuroscience, I should acknowledge several important caveats:

First: I am not a neuroscientist. I know more about fMRI than most people, but this study happens at a level of technical analysis WAY outside of my own direct knowledge. I’ve done my best to understand its claims, but I could have misunderstood.

Second: because fMRI is so technical, I’ve had to simplify the argument here substantially. I’ve tried to simplify without oversimplifying. But to keep this post readable, I’ve had to err on the side of brevity and clarity.

For instance, throughout this post, I’ve used the phrase “most fMRI” for a reason. This problem applies to the most common kind of fMRI: “blood oxygen level dependent,” aka BOLD. There are other kinds of fMRI – more complex and expensive — and the fears outlined above don’t apply to them (as far as I know).

This point matters a lot. If those other kinds of fMRI support the conclusions that BOLD fMRI has reached, then we might heave a sigh of relief and go on about our business. Of course, other kinds of brain scans — EEG, FNIRS, PET — might also confirm the now-wobbly BOLD fMRI conclusions.

Third: one study is just one study. Until this study has been replicated, we should remain open to the possibility that this research team just got it all wrong. (BTW: they ran their own mini-replication, and came up with similar results.) 

Hope?

Neuroscience is a kind of biology. It can tell us what IS happening in the brain, but not what teachers OUGHT to do about that neural activity. (If you teach philosophy, you will recognize David Hume’s “is/ought gap” here.)

For instance, neuroscience tells us what IS happening when new long-term memories form: neurons join together into new neural networks.

But that neuro-biological IS doesn’t give teachers an OUGHT; we don’t know what to DO to cause learning to happen.

Instead, psychology gives us that OUGHT. When teachers learn about mental functions – memory, attention, motivation – that knowledge helps us teach better. We ought to promote desirable difficulties; we ought to focus students’ attention; we ought to manage the working-memory demands of the classroom.

The potential revolution in interpreting BOLD fMRI results might change our understanding of what IS happening in the brain. But it doesn’t change our OUGHT. No matter what neurons are doing within the skull, teachers should still promote desirable difficulties and focus attention and manage WM load.

That’s the hope: teachers can focus on what psychology tells us about learning, confident that our work doesn’t depend on getting the neuroscience exactly right. That neuroscience underneath is fascinating—but thankfully, we don’t need to wait for it to be settled before we can teach well.

Epp, S. M., Castrillón, G., Yuan, B., Andrews-Hanna, J., Preibisch, C., & Riedl, V. (2025). BOLD signal changes can oppose oxygen metabolism across the human cortex. Nature Neuroscience, 1-12.

Answering Questions *Before* Reading: Can AI Make This Strategy Work?
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
January 04, 2026

Answering Questions *Before* Reading: Can AI Make This Strategy Work?

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2025 included MANY grand claims about transformational potential for AI:

  • “AI will enhance education (and civilization) in these magnificent ways,” or
  • “AI will destroy education (and civilization) in these grisly ways.”

Here’s a question that got less air time:

“Can you name me just one specific — even mundane — way that AI can make teaching and learning simpler and better?”

As of today, my answer to that question is YES.

Here’s the story.

Regular readers have heard me talk about the benefits of “prequestions” before: for example, here, here, and here.

The prequestion process goes like this:

  • Students try to answer questions about a topic even though they haven’t learned about it yet.
  • Unsurprisingly, they answer most of these questions incorrectly.
  • Students then read a passage on the topic.
  • Result: these students remember more about the topic than others who didn’t answer prequestions.

By the way: these prequestions can be very straightforward. For instance: “What distinguishes hydraulic brakes from mechanical brakes in automobiles?”

Researchers are still trying to figure out WHY prequestions help learning; they’ve got several theories. But we’ve got enough research on this strategy for me to conclude that it’s a thing — not a well-intentioned research-based fluke.

As we try to apply this finding in actual classrooms, we come across a few stark problems:

  • For teachers: writing prequestions takes time. (Boo!)
  • For students: how can they write their own prequestions when they haven’t studied the material? (Paradox!)

A research team — led by Dr. Steven Pan — wondered: can we use AI to generate effective prequestions? That is: do AI-created prequestions benefit learning the same way that human-generated prequestions do?

Researching Step by Step

Team Pan’s questions sound simple. But when researchers approach a topic like this, they face several demands.

First: they have lots technical steps to follow: sample sizes and active control groups and intricate calculations and so forth. (In my estimation, they checked all these boxes.)

Second: when done well, research studies try to disprove their own hypotheses. Researchers don’t so much kick the tires as try to puncture them. (In my view, they explored plausible alternatives admirably.)

To meet these challenges, Pan’s crew undertook four related experiments. I won’t go through all the nitty gritty, but the highlights make for encouraging reading.

In Pan’s most basic experiment, one group of students read a passage about different kinds of brakes: air brakes, mechanical brakes, hydraulic brakes — you get the idea. A second group read two AI-generated prequestions about that passage before they read it. Sure enough: the students who read the AI-created prequestions scored higher on a follow-up quiz than those who didn’t.

Unsurprisingly, they scored higher when answering the same questions that they initially read as prequestions. They ALSO scored higher when answering novel questions. In other words: it seems that the benefits of answering prequestions goes beyond the precise questions themselves to the passage overall.

Don’t Stop Now

To make sure they have a persuasive case, Pan’s team didn’t stop there.

They asked: do AI-generated prequestions provide as much benefit as human-generated prequestions?

Short answer: “yes.” Technically speaking, in some cases the human-generated prequestions led to slightly higher quiz scores — but the differences were tiny.

They asked: do AI-generated prequestions help more or less than previewing an AI-generated outline?

Short answer: “trying to answer the prequestions helped considerably more than previewing an outline.”

They asked: do detailed prompts produce better questions, or does a basic prompt work well too?

Short answer: “a basic prompt worked just fine.” In one study, the basic prompt led to more effective prequestions than the detailed one.

To summarize the good news in this study:

  • AI-generated prequestions help students learn from reading new information
  • They help as much as human-generated prequestions
  • Prequestions improve memory of the entire passage — not just the answers to the questions themselves
  • They help more than some other kinds of warm-up activities, like studying an outline
  • Even basic prompts work just fine

Good News…Bad News?

With all that good news, is there any bad news?

Honestly, I don’t see much “bad news” here. But — as always — I do see limitations.

  1. As far as I know, prequestions have been studied for learning from reading passages. I don’t know if we have evidence showing they benefit students who, say, listen to a discussion or a teacher presentation. For that reason, this strategy isn’t obviously road-tested for younger grades.
  2. This study focused on adult learners; the average participant age for these studies was in the low 30s. We don’t know if AI-generated prequestions will help in 8th grade — although it’s not obvious to me why they wouldn’t.
  3. This study, like most research into prequestions, tests memory after a few minutes. Will it help over longer periods of time? I don’t think we know.
  4. Prequestions aren’t a panacea. We don’t need to use them all the time. They should be one strategy that we use judiciously, not a hard-and-fast requirement.

Once we acknowledge those limitations, I think we have a compelling case. We know that — under the right circumstances — prequestions can help students learn. And, thanks to Pan and his colleagues, we know that AI-generated prequestions provide the benefits we want.

At the top of this post, I asked this question: “Can you name me just one specific — even mundane — way that AI can make teaching and learning simpler and better?”

Team Pan answers: “AI can help both students and teachers generate prequestions. And those AI-created questions help learning.”

Perhaps you’ll begin new classroom year with a prequestion or two.

Pan, S. C., Schweppe, J., Teo, A. Z. J., Indrajaya, A., & Wenzel, N. (2025). Using ChatGPT-generated prequestions to improve memory and text comprehension. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition. Advance online publication. https://dx.doi.org/10.1037/mac0000254

How to Change a School (Not Just a Classroom)
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
December 28, 2025

How to Change a School (Not Just a Classroom)

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Many years ago, I accepted a new school role overseeing curriculum, instruction, and faculty. I started this job with lots of enthusiasm and — I thought — several good ideas. I believed in collaborative leadership, and worked hard to welcome my colleagues into the admin team’s decisions.

In brief, the experience was a bust. All my enthusiasm and good ideas and collaborative approach…well, they didn’t accomplish very much.

Perhaps as a result, I’ve spent the last several years focusing not on collective school systems, but on individuals within systems. While I certainly hope that school leaders and district administrators read this blog and take action upon these ideas, I’m mostly focusing on YOU: individual readers who can make wise decisions about your own craft and classroom.

And yet, occasionally I do wonder what would have happened if I’d been more skilled at managing school-wide change…

What I Wish I’d Known

Given this background, you understand why I was so curious to read Change Starts Here by Shane Leaning and Efraim Lerner. These authors have years of experience working in and with schools. And: they’re experts at helping schools as a whole — not just individuals within the school — make meaningful changes.

Let me highlight three of the book’s many strengths.

First: Leaning and Lerner begin with a clear but powerful model — a model showing the process by which a PERCEIVED CHALLENGE becomes a COMMUNITY GOAL, and then a SUSTAINED SOLUTION. By explicitly building both divergent and convergent thinking into their model — those expanding and contracting triangles — L&L steer wisely past many of the traps that I fell into in my own leadership role.

Second: Change Starts Here echoes my own thinking about the importance of context:

We are not here to tell you to follow our model in every detail with fidelity. We’re not even here to tell you to follow the model at all. Instead, we provide a model that acts as a framework to ask yourself…powerful questions.

Regular readers know my mantra: “don’t do this thing; instead, think this way.” From my perspective, cognitive science research can’t tell teachers what to do. Instead, it can offer us a wise and fresh perspective on how to think better about what we do.

Clearly, L&L see their work the same way. No one process serves all schools equally well. They’ve got latitude and flexibility built into their model.

Third: Let’s talk about those “powerful questions”…

Powerful Questions

Leaning and Lerner offer forty — yes, 40! — questions to guide you through their model.

Let’s pick a few of these at random:

  • Question #26: “On a scale of 1-10, how much do we know? How can we +1?”

Like so many of their questions, this one sounds obvious once stated out loud. And yet, I can easily recall many leadership meetings where we assumed — without really thinking about it — that we already knew everything that we needed to know. If we had asked ourselves this question, I think we would have realized important knowledge gaps and invited more people into the conversation.

(After a security incident at one school where I worked, the admin team held a meeting to review security protocols. They neglected to invite the teacher who had created those protocols…)

  • Question #11: “How will this challenge make us better?”

In my own leadership tenure, I (mostly) felt comfortable taking on challenges. I don’t love conflict, but I’m willing to walk into it to help develop a healthy solution.

Question #11, however, gives me a fresh perspective on that “willingness.” I didn’t particularly see challenges as a chance to get better; I saw them as an unpleasantness that needed getting through. Leaning and Lerner’s reframe would have been a useful reminder about that leaderly perspective.

  • Question #20: “How will we celebrate?”

The various strategic planning processes that I participated in more-or-less got the job done. But they never felt celebration-worthy. They felt, instead, like a thorough drubbing that we had all survived.

Looking back on our work, I do think we accomplished goals worth celebrating. But I’m not sure that we gave ourselves the victory lap that we all — the whole school! — deserved.

By the way: I chose these three questions to show the range of Leaning and Lerner’s interests. From practical (#26) to tough-minded (#11) to aspirational (#20), they consider the process of change from every logistical and emotional position.

Beyond Recipes

I do suspect that some readers will say: “These ideas sound FANTASTIC! But, what specifically does this process look like in my school?”

On the one hand, this response makes sense. Given such an encouraging framework, we want to see it in action.

On the other hand, a book like this can’t really answer that question. Remember Leaning and Lerner’s guiding principle:

We are not here to tell you to follow our model in every detail with fidelity. We’re not even here to tell you to follow the model at all. Instead, we provide a model that acts as a framework to ask yourself…powerful questions.

These powerful questions would take my school along one path, while it would take your school along quite a different one. Such variety is a feature, not a bug. And, it means those of us who want change at scale have extra heavy lifting to do.

Leaning and Lerner have given school leaders what I wish I’d had 20 years ago: not a recipe to follow, but a framework for thinking clearly about change. If you’re ready to move beyond changing one classroom at a time — and willing to do the required heavy lifting — this book offers the questions you need to ask. And it guides those questions with lots of generous wisdom.

Leaning, S., & Lerner, E. (2025). Change Starts Here: What If Everything Your School Needed was Right in Front of You?. Taylor & Francis.

The Pygmalion Effect: What Teachers Actually Need to Know
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
December 21, 2025

The Pygmalion Effect: What Teachers Actually Need to Know

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Our story begins with a surprise and an exclamation point.

Back in 1968, researchers Rosenthal and Jacobsen wanted to know if teachers’ expectations shaped students’ academic performance and development. To explore this question, they worked with students and teachers at “Oak School.”

  • First, they gave 320 students in grades 1-6 an IQ test.
  • Then, they told the teachers that 20% of those students had been identified as “late bloomers.” The teachers should expect dramatic academic and intellectual improvement over the school year. In this way, researchers raised the teachers’ academic expectations for these students.
  • Here’s the surprise: those 65 “late bloomers” had been randomly selected. Realistically, there was no reason to expect any more progress from these students than from anyone else.
  • And here’s the exclamation point: at year’s end, when Rosenthal and Jacobsen remeasured IQ , those late bloomers saw an astonishing increase in IQ! (In some places, they reported that these students got up to a 24.8 point bump in IQ!!!)

From these data, Rosenthal and Jacobsen concluded that teachers’ expectations have remarkable power to shape student outcomes. It seems that our expectations have so much influence, we can even increase our students’ IQs by believing in them and communicating our belief and support.

Under the name of the “Pygmalion Effect,” this finding has had an enormous effect in education. Many (most?) teachers have heard some version of the claim that “teacher expectations transform student capabilities.”

Too Good to Be True?

I’ve seen several enthusiastic references to the Pygmalion effect recently, so I thought it would be helpful to review this research pool.

A quick review of the 1968 study raises compelling concerns.

First: all of the extra IQ gains came for the first and second graders. Even if we accept the study’s data — more on this point in a moment — then teachers’ expectations benefit 6-8 year olds, but not older students. That limitation alone makes the Pygmalion Effect much less dazzling.

Second: one of the first grade classes in this study tested bizarrely low on their initial IQ test. (In the ugly language of the time, they would have been classified as “mentally deficient.”) The likely explanation is therefore NOT that teacher expectations raised IQ, but that an inaccurate initial IQ measurement was more accurately measured by a later test result.

Third: the numbers get squishy. While one report describes the “24.8 point increase” quoted above, others focus on a FOUR point increase. If reported results differ by 600%, we should hesitate to give our confidence to a study. (Honestly, the fact that they claim that IQ went up 24.8 points in a year itself makes confidence difficult to give.)

Fourth: as far as I can tell, researchers measured only one variable: IQ. I’m surprised they didn’t measure — say — academic progress, or grades, or standardized test scores, or other academic measures.

In brief, even the most basic questions throw the Pygmalion Effect claims into doubt.

What’s Happened in the Last 50 Years?

If a study from 1968 doesn’t offer persuasive guidance, what about subsequent research? Honestly, we’ve got an ENORMOUS amount. Rather than summarize all of it — an impossible task for a blog post — I’ll focus on a few key themes.

I’m relying on two scholarly articles to find these themes:

First, to quote the Jussim meta-analysis:

Self-fulfilling prophecies in the classroom do occur, but these effects are typically small, [and] they do not accumulate greatly across perceivers or over time.

That is: the Pygmalion Effect isn’t nothing, but it’s not remotely as simple or robust as commonly asserted or implied.

Second, as noted in the Wang review, the field suffers from real problems with methodology. For instance, when looking at the effect that teachers’ expectations have on academic outcomes, Wang’s team found that 40% of the studies didn’t consider the students’ baseline academic achievement. Without knowing where the students began, it hardly seems plausible to make strong claims about how much progress they made.

Third — back to Jussim:

teacher expectations may predict student outcomes more because these expectations are accurate than because they are self-fulfilling.

If I struggled to learn German in high school, my college instructor might reasonably predict that learning Finnish will be a challenge for me. In this case, it’s likely that my teacher’s expectations didn’t limit my progress; instead, my difficulty with learning another foreign language influenced my teacher’s expectations.

Fourth: in some cases, negative expectations can demonstrably slow student progress. This research field has its own literature and terminology, so I won’t explore it here.

Getting Beyond the Myths

To be clear, I think teachers SHOULD have high expectations of our students — and we should let them know that we do.

However, I don’t think that high expectations are enough. For that matter, I don’t think that any 1-step, uplifting strategy is enough. Whether we’re talking growth mindset posters or SEL seminars or an hour of coding, no one easy thing will offer dramatic benefits to most students.

After all, if such an easy, one-step solution existed, teachers would have figured it out on our own.

Instead, we need to think about our instruction as a complex web of small but meaningful improvements: working-memory management here, fostering attention there; enhancing belonging with this ongoing strategy, establishing structure and routine with that ongoing strategy.

Classrooms won’t be transformed by one simple act. They will come to life when step-by-step, day after day, we use cognitive science to guide our planning.

Jussim, L., & Harber, K. D. (2005). Teacher expectations and self-fulfilling prophecies: Knowns and unknowns, resolved and unresolved controversies. Personality and social psychology review, 9(2), 131-155.

Wang, S., Rubie-Davies, C. M., & Meissel, K. (2018). A systematic review of the teacher expectation literature over the past 30 years. Educational Research and Evaluation, 24(3-5), 124-179.

The Attention Paradox: When Eye Contact Makes Thinking Harder
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
December 14, 2025

The Attention Paradox: When Eye Contact Makes Thinking Harder

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Let’s start with a seemingly straightforward logical chain:

  • To learn in school, students need to pay attention.
  • But: how do teachers know IF they’re paying attention?
  • Well: most of the time, most people are paying attention to the person or object they’re looking at.
  • So, teachers should explicitly direct students’ gaze.
  • If students are looking at the teacher–or the book, or another student who’s answering a question–they’re probably paying attention. If they’re paying attention, they’re likelier to learn.

This simple summary requires a few caveats.

First: different cultures have different norms around eye contact.

Second: some people find eye contact intensely more difficult than others do. Students on the spectrum–for example–can find eyeball-to-eyeball focus overwhelming.

In both these cases, we can and should make reasonable exceptions to any “you have to look at me right now” policy.

At the same time, many (many!) pedagogical approaches require students to look at a person, passage, slide, or screen. For what it’s worth, I myself think that’s an entirely reasonable expectation (with the caveats noted above).

But, WAIT JUST A MINUTE. What if eye contact interferes with thinking?

Intriguing Data

A study done in Japan back in 2016 raises this alarming possibility.

Researchers gave adults a kind of verbal completion task. Each participant heard a long list of nouns: for instance, “milk.” After each one, they had to respond with an appropriate verb: say, “drink.”

In some cases, the noun/verb pair is so simple as to require little thought. The “milk/drink” duo is a low-challenge task. In other cases, the mental load went up. Some nouns imply many possible verbs. The noun “soup” invites either “make” or “eat” or “drink.”

Even more challenging, participants sometimes chose obscure verbs. When hearing the noun “list,” most people responded with the verb “make.” Others offered the verb “be on”: a choice that’s plausible but rare–and implies greater cognitive work.

Crucially, the researchers measured how long the participants took to generate those verbs. They assumed–reasonably–that slower verb generation implied heavier cognitive lifting.

Where does the eye contact come in? An excellent question.

While the participants did this noun/verb work, they watched videos of faces. In fact, they were specifically instructed to look at the faces in those videos.

  • Half of the time, those faces were looking directly at the camera; in other words, making direct eye contact with the viewer.
  • And half of the time, those faces were looking off to the side.

So here’s the question: did the eye-contact video have an effect on the cognitive work required to generate verbs?

Results and Implications

Sometimes, yes.

That is: the participants needed extra time to generate verbs if

a) they came up with the most challenging verbs,

AND

b) they made eye contact with the camera-facing faces.

In brief: if thinking is already challenging, adding eye contact makes thinking even MORE difficult.

I have found this study fascinating, and it’s made me reconsider my own expectations for classroom eye contact. I do typically expect my students to look at me (or the board or the book or the classmate), and I do occasionally cue them to do so.

This study makes me open to a few potential exceptions.

  • If I have asked students a difficult question, the additional demand for eye contact might complicate their thought processes.
  • If a student is developing a particularly sophisticated answer or question, s/he might need some cognitive headroom…and therefore the freedom to look away.

Eye contact helps students focus outward; looking away seems to help them focus inward. Both have their place in learning.

As Always, Caveats

I should be clear about the limitations of my argument.

First: this eye-contact study doesn’t make any claims at all about classroom teaching. I’m extrapolating, combining this study with my own experience.

Second: each classroom and school will have its own dynamics. The culture and pedagogy of your school, and the age and neuro-profile of your students will shape your application of this broad principle.

Third: because norms around eye-contact vary among cultures, I should emphasize that the original research was done in Japan. (As far as I can tell, this study hasn’t been replicated.) In fact, about 1/5th of the participants in the study dropped out because they couldn’t maintain base-level eye contact. Application of this research finding to other cultural contexts requires close awareness to this cultural framework.

With those cautions noted, I myself arrive at this pair of conclusions:

  • In most cases, teachers can and should focus students’ attention by deliberately focusing their gaze.
  • When students need to THINK HARD, they may need to break eye contact to gather their thoughts more effectively.

A bit poetically, I might put it this way: when they’re thinking deeply, I can let my students stop focusing outward so that they can focus intensely inward. Deeper thought, it seems, benefits from such inward gaze.

Kajimura, S., & Nomura, M. (2016). When we cannot speak: Eye contact disrupts resources available to cognitive control processes during verb generation. Cognition, 157, 352-357.

Two Signs You’ve Overloaded Working Memory (While It’s Still Happening)
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
December 08, 2025

Two Signs You’ve Overloaded Working Memory (While It’s Still Happening)

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We know that working memory overload brings learning to a halt. For that reason, teachers do almost everything we can to teach students within their working memory limits.

We might ask ourselves pointed questions to anticipate WM overload before it happens: e.g., “does my lesson plan include too many instructions?”

An equally vital task: we want to recognize WM overload while it happens. If I can see that my lesson plan has exceeded WM max, then I can make helpful changes on the fly. In today’s blog post, I’ve got two quick ways to do just that.

The Big Tell

Picture this scene. My English class begins with a scripted definition:

“Everyone, please write down the definition of the word gerund. The definition has three parts:

A gerund started life as a verb, is now being used as a noun, and ends in -ing.”

Immediately Rory’s hand goes up: “I’m so sorry Mr. Watson, I spaced out for a moment. Can you please repeat that?”

I do.

Charlotte waves at me: “Wait, started life as a verb, or a noun?”

Me: “Started life as a verb, is now being used as a noun.”

Caleb jumps in: “What are the exceptions to the ‘-ing’ part?”

No exceptions. Not a single one.

Helen has something to say: “I’m still confused. It’s a verb that ends in -ing? Don’t all verbs end in -ing?”

By this time, I should be getting the working-memory message. In essence, these students are all asking the same question: “I didn’t understand what you just said. Could you repeat it?”

Here’s my observation: when my students ask me the same question several times in a row, I have almost certainly overloaded their working memory. Now that I recognize WM overload while it’s happening, I can make a mid-course correction.

The Big Tell, Take II

Let’s replay that scene, but this time take note of my own thoughts and feelings as I go.

When I first present my definition, I’m feeling confident. This simple definition–it has only three parts!–captures the gerund’s key elements in a lively way. This section of class is off to an excellent start.

When Rory asks me to repeat the definition, I’m surprised…but not surprised. High school sophomores aren’t famous for their attention span, especially during a grammar class. In any case, repeating the definition will probably help others in the class.

Charlotte’s question knocks me off my stride. I just answered her question. In fact, I answered it twice in a row. What’s going on here?

Exceptions, Caleb? Who said anything about exceptions? If there were exceptions, I would have made that point in the definition. By now I’m straight-up frustrated. I offered such a simple definition, and class has already devolved into a muddle.

By the time Helen opines that “all verbs end in -ing,” I can’t remember: why did I go into teaching?

Notice the working memory dynamics in this short exchange.

  • First: I designed this section of the lesson plan badly and created cognitive overload.
  • Second: my students reacted–reasonably enough–by trying to fix my mistake. They knew that they needed to understand this definition, and so they kept asking questions to clarify the concept.
  • Third: their repeated questions vexed me. Although those questions were a predictable response to working memory overload, I got frustrated with them for peppering me with foolishness.

In other words: my own emotional response is a second clue that working memory overload is happening right in front of me, right now. If I miss the first tell–their repeated questions–I might register the second tell–my own growing irritation. Whichever clue I spot, I can use that feedback to guide a mid-lesson course correction.

Problem Recognized; Problem Solved

Once I learn to recognize these two signs–students’ repeated questions, my own growing frustration–I can switch to solution mode.

In this case, I should (at a minimum) write the definition on the board. (Why didn’t I think to do that in the first place?) If my students can read the definition, they don’t have to hold all the words while they’re writing each one down.

Even better—as Adam Boxer has explained in his excellent book—I might reverse my order of operations. In this lesson plan, I started with an abstract definition, and then planned to give concrete examples. Result: I overloaded working memory with abstract concepts even before I got to the specifics.

As Boxer explains, I should instead start with the specific examples and then graduate to the abstract definition. This direction of travel reduces WM load.

Of course, other teaching missteps require alternative solutions. For instance, I might rely on dual coding to redistribute WM load.

Whatever the solution, my ability to spot a working memory problem in the moment means I’m likelier to solve that problem…and my students will learn more.

The Biology of Cooking; the Neuroscience of Education
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
November 30, 2025

The Biology of Cooking; the Neuroscience of Education

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Today’s post starts as a fun biology lesson; it turns out that a scientific understanding of digestion gives us unexpected guidance about cooking. And–here’s the kicker–that same lesson applies to neuroscience and teaching. Let me explain.

The Science of Cooking

I recently read an article that outlines the three core concepts in digestion: a) pushing, b) acid, and c) base. Yes, it’s that simple. At its core, “digestion” is the process of pushing food from a highly acidic environment to a highly basic environment.

More specifically, digestion starts when peristalsis (that’s a fancy word for “pushing”) moves food down into the stomach. There, hydrochloric acid breaks down proteins and kills off harmful bacteria. We’re talking a pH of 1.5-3.5 here. Next, peristalsis continues pushing food into the highly basic environment of the small intestine. The addition of bicarbonate from the pancreas shifts the pH to somewhere in the 7-8.5 range. This simple, 3-part process–“pushing from acid to base”–frees the key nutrients from our food and ultimately allows us to thrive.

Now, the magic begins. Chefs who understand the biology of digestion can mirror these essential steps in their cooking.

Expert chefs recognize that cooking–like digestion–should be a pushing/kneading process. To mirror the hydrochloric acid of the stomach, that process should begin in a highly acidic environment . After the food has been kneaded in acidic lemon juice or vinegar, it should then be switched to a highly basic preparation medium: perhaps baking soda or lye.

This food preparation process–which recreates core biological processes of digestion–offers flexible and scientifically-informed guidance for all chefs: from novice to Michelin-starred.

There’s your cooking lesson for today. To prepare food like an expert, “push food from acid to base.”

One More Thing

Here’s an essential additional point. The description of digestion above is accurate enough for this blog post; the cooking advice below it is entirely nonsense. Seriously: just imagine a chicken breast drenched in vinegar and then soaked in lye. Bon appetit?

Chefs don’t prepare good food by recreating the internal process of digestion. They do so by choosing the right ingredients and preparing them in appropriate ways. We get no benefit whatsoever from recreating the internal biological/digestive process externally. Honestly, the result would be gross (at best) and fatal (at worst).

I promised above that “the same lesson applies to neuroscience and teaching.”

Consider this argument:

“When students learn math, they process information in the visual cortex, then the angular gyrus, and finally in the caudate nucleus. Our math instruction should mirror this neural chain. Start by teaching a new concept visually; then switch to factual processing; and conclude with automatic processing. Doing so reenacts the very neural processes that result in conceptual understanding!”

Even if it were true that “the brain” processes information entirely sequentially–and it’s almost certainly not true–the logic of this argument doesn’t hold. Reenacting internal brain processes outside the brain offers no benefits for the same reason that kneading mashed potatoes in pancreatic enzymes isn’t good cooking advice.

Applying Biology to Life

Applying the biology of digestion to create cooking advice requires complex, subtle, and nuanced translation. For instance: it’s good to put butter on carrots because those fats help us digest vitamin A. This guidance doesn’t recreate the internal biological process in the cooking process; it informs the cooking process with an understanding of digestion.

Applying the neurobiology of cognition to create teaching advice requires complex, subtle, and nuanced translation. For instance: it’s (probably) true that dopamine helps regulate students’ motivation levels. But telling teachers to “raise students’ dopamine levels!” overlooks the boggling complexity of motivation, of dopamine, and of students.

To take two simple examples:

  • too much dopamine in the mesolimbic pathway–which connects the ventral tegmental area to the nucleus accumbens–is associated with the hallucinations of schizophrenia.
  • one easy way to increase dopamine levels: cocaine.

In brief: if someone offers you authoritative teaching advice because “the brain does this when students do that,” respond by asking hard questions. For starters, ask “do we have any psychology research showing that this teaching advice has any benefits in a classroom?”

Research can and should inform our teaching practice. And: our own professional experience gives us standing to evaluate the advice we get. If digestion-based cooking advice sounds gross, wise chefs ignore it. If neuroscience-based teaching advice sounds improbable, wise teachers ask thoughtful questions.

The goal isn’t to ignore neuroscience—it’s to demand that “brain-based” advice meet the same research standards we’d apply to any other teaching recommendation. In brief: know the biology, question the advice.

Telling Students to Sleep More Doesn’t Work. This Might.
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
November 23, 2025

Telling Students to Sleep More Doesn’t Work. This Might.

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Imagine that I offer you a medication with these proven benefits. It

  • enhances memory, concentration, and creativity
  • reduces blood pressure and strengthens the immune system
  • boosts athletic performance and muscle recovery
  • reduces stress, anxiety, and depression
  • fosters emotional self-regulation
  • might even lower hormone-based cancer risk

This medication is free. When used as directed, it has no harmful side effects. The only catch? You need an 8 or 9 hour dose to get the full benefit.

Given all its obvious benefits, sleep feels like free money, or a puppy you don’t have to train or walk–it’s altogether too perfect. And yet, students walk past the cash and the romping fluffball on their way to all-nighters and the zombie haze of morning.

What can we do to persuade folks to hit the sheets?

Beyond the Nike Approach

If this blog were a sneaker ad, I could say “just DO it. Stop all the excuses and get sleeping.”

In my experience as a high-school teacher, the more common approach is to explain all sleep’s benefits. “You will learn more!” we teachers cry. “You’ll be better at sports! You’ll have less acne!” (Believe it or not, there’s an indirect connection between sleep and acne, via cortisol levels.)

Since high schools first began, teachers have hoped that telling our students about sleep’s benefits will inspire them to hit the hay. That list at the beginning of this blog post should be a winner. Alas, since high schools first began, these exhortations almost never work. Adolescents being adolescent, mere information about sleep’s chocolatey goodness doesn’t actually change their behavior.

What’s a caring adult to do?

One strategy to help people accomplish difficult goals has gotten attention from researchers in recent years.

Students go through some variation of this process:

  • Step 1: Anticipate the problems that might make it hard for me to achieve my goal.
  • Step 2: Brainstorm the best solution for each problem.
  • Step 3: Make a commitment: “I pledge that, when I encounter problem X, then I will enact solution Z.”

Because of this structure, we might call such commitments “when-then pledges.” Essentially, all this pre-planning reduces mental friction. When I run into a predictable problem, I don’t even need to think about what to do next. I’ve already pledged to undertake a particular solution–and I do so. (If you’re curious to read more about research into “when-then pledges,” you can check out this blog post.)

A research team recently asked this question: could we use when-then pledges to help college students get more sleep?

Yes (but Not Exactly)

Researchers Barley and Scullin ran the sort of study we like here on this blog: enough participants to be meaningful, an active control group, sensible data collection, modest claims, and so forth.

Young man sleeping on sofa infront of book while studying for examination at home

The simple version: one group of premed college students reviewed an online sleep-education program. A second group did that same program, combined with a modified “when-then pledge” process. (“When it gets to be 11:00 pm, then I will turn my phone off and go to bed.”)

The results give us initial reason to hope. Students in the when-then pledge group went to sleep a little earlier (about 20 minutes), and got a little more sleep (about 15 minutes). And–here’s the part that gets my attention–these changes lasted. Even eight months later, students reported that they got to bed earlier.

At our most optimistic, we can say that Barley and Scullin have found a way to change students’ sleep behavior patterns–and that these changes endure.

At the same time, we do have to acknowledge the limits of these findings.

Limit #1: the researchers kept track of only sleep and grades — not all those other variables that might interest us. We don’t know if the students in the when-then-pledge group experienced less anxiety or had fewer colds than students in the control group.

Limit #2: I said just now that the researchers kept track of the students’ grades. Turns out: the GPA of the night-owls in the pledge group went DOWN slightly during the first term: averaging a 3.4 rather than a 3.6. That dip isn’t much, but if I’m in a premed program, every decimal place counts. (BTW: GPA remained unchanged for the morning types in the pledge group.)

It’s important to note that the GPA went back UP again in the second term–so the slight detriment didn’t last. But I for one was hoping for–even expecting–a benefit. The absence of harm is good news, but not home-run news.

Plausible Hypotheses

Here’s the optimist’s case to be enthusiastic about this study. Barley and Scullin have found initial evidence that we can influence students’ sleep behavior with when-then pledges. Once we work out all the kinks in the process, and start it much earlier in students’ academic careers, we should see all the benefits that other sleep researchers have found: grades and physical health and mental health. (And, heck: less acne.)

This research doesn’t guarantee that those benefits will come. But it does make that hypothesis plausible…and this hope will help me sleep better.

Two quick postscripts:

  1. I’ve written about Dr. Michael Scullin’s research several times on the blog. You can check out other posts here, here, and here.
  2. I’ve used the phrase “when-then pledge” in this blog post. I should admit that I made that phrase up. The technical psychology term is “implementation intentions.” I confess: I think that–in a discipline famous for its vague and awkward terminology–“implementation intentions” is even more vague and awkward than usual. “When-then pledge” has the benefit of saying bluntly what it means. Perhaps it will catch on.

Barley, B. K., & Scullin, M. K. (2025). Reinforcing sleep education with behavioral change strategies: intervention effects on sleep timing, sleep duration, and academic performance. Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine, jcsm-11780.

Making the Dull Stuff Relevant to Students
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
November 16, 2025

Making the Dull Stuff Relevant to Students

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I’ll be honest: my sophomore English curriculum doesn’t always inspire my students. I myself find Gerard Manley Hopkins fascinating…but only a rare 15 year-old thinks “Spring and Fall” is the most awesome poem ever. Perhaps I’m not the only teacher who faces this problem.

One obvious solution: make the curriculum relevant–more immediately connected to my students’ lives and interests.

  • For my poetry curriculum, I could teach the lyrics to current popular music.
  • For my grammar curriculum, I could write practice sentences about Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce. (Find the direct object and indirect objects in this sentence: “Taylor gave Travis four leftover grammys.”)

If I can make my curriculum emotionally interesting, then perhaps academic interest will follow.

This call for relevance often appears in educational debates. When we research this question, what do we find?

Lightning Strikes

One of the best known studies on this topic considers the potential benefits of enhancing relevance.

Let’s take the topic of lightning formation.

I could ramp up my students’ emotional interest in this topic by adding ideas that pique their curiosity:

  • Lightning strikes don’t harm airplanes–so counter-intuitive!
  • Lightning can melt sand into cool little sculptures, called “fulgurites”

I could instead focus on their cognitive interest by highlighting key steps in process:

  • Violent up- and down-drafts in cumulonimbus clouds move charged water droplets.
  • Positively charged ions move to the top of a cloud, while negatively charged ions move to the bottom.
  • This charge imbalance, in turn, changes the electrical field on the ground below the cloud…

Researchers Harp and Mayer wanted to know if students benefit when we add emotional interest (“relevance” ) to cognitive interest–the traditional focus of classroom education.

In their study, they had four groups of students read passages about lightning formation.

  1. Group one read the “cognitive interest only” description, which clearly delineated the steps that lead to lightning strikes. Each step was illustrated by a simple diagram.
  2. A second group read that description supplemented with “emotionally interesting” sentences: a lightning strike one created a hole in a football player’s helmet and knocked off his shoes!
  3. A third group read the “cognitive only” description with extra “emotionally interesting” photographs: e.g., lighting passing through an airplane.
  4. The final group got all three: the base cognitive description PLUS emotional sentences PLUS emotional photos.

To see which blend helped students the most, Harp and Mayer asked them to recall information and to explain it.

  • The “recall” question couldn’t have been simpler: “please write down everything you can remember from the passage.”
  • The “explain” questions sounded like this:
    • “Suppose you see clouds in the sky, but no lightning. Why not?”
    • “What does air temperature have to do with lightening?”

By crunching lots of numbers, these researchers could find out how much the added emotional interest sentences and photos increased memory and understanding.

Beyond Helmets and Airplanes

Harp and Mayer hoped that the additions–shocking stories and vibrant photos–would ramp up the students’ emotional interest. Sure enough, the participants in their second study rated those versions twice as “emotionally interesting” as “cognitively interesting.” For the base version, which simply outlines the process of lightning formation, those numbers were reversed.

A fulgurite created by lightning striking sand .

Having successfully raised emotional interest, how much more learning did Harp and Mayer produce?

Well: they reduced learning. For the “recall” and “explanation” tests, the emotionally interesting additions lowered students’ scores. In fact, adding both piquant sentences and vivid photos reduced understanding more than adding one or the other. (Check out the graphs on p. 98.)

In brief: students learned less from the passages they found more interesting.

The Bigger Pictures

When I write these blog posts, I typically look for the most recent quality study I can find. Today, I decided to focus on a classic: this study was published back in 1997.

I do want to emphasize that subsequent reseach has supported these initial conclusions. As I wrote earlier on the blog, a recent meta-analysis supports these basic findings. Yes, it does seems obvious that we should make our classes relevant and intriguing. Alas, we find that this common-sense strategy interferes with learning. Our students get wrapped up in all those vivid details–imagine lightning drilling a hole in a football helmet!–and lose track of the content we want them to learn.

Our goal should not therefore be to make our lessons boring. Instead, we should make them clear.

I also want to make a second cautious point. Common sense suggests that we should ask our students what helps them learn. Who knows more about students’ learning than students?

Sadly–over and over again–we find that students’ intution just doesn’t lead them in the right direction. Given the choice, students

  • prefer review to retrieval practice
  • prefer studying a topic all at once to spreading practice out
  • prefer highlighting to almost anything else.

I’m told they prefer cookie dough to asparagus.

In order to fulfill our teacherly responsibilities most wisely, we have to look past these preferences to the teaching strategies that truly help students learn. I myself often stop to explain why I am choosing the less-popular approach. (My students have been known to be vexed with me for showing them research studies.) But I do stick to those research-supported strategies even if my students don’t love them.

Despite the common-sense appeal of “making lessons relevant,” despite our students preference for “emotionally interesting” lessons, we should keep our focus on the core goal. To help our students learn, we should prioritize clarity over entertainment, focusing on the core concepts rather than flashy digressions.

So what about Gerard Manley Hopkins? I’m not going to make my poetry unit ‘relevant’ by replacing Hopkins with Olivia Rodrigo lyrics. Instead, I’ll focus on making Hopkins’ difficult language clearer—breaking down the syntax, explaining archaic terms, and helping students see the poem’s structure. This research suggests that clarity, not entertainment, leads to genuine understanding.

Harp, S. F., & Mayer, R. E. (1997). The role of interest in learning from scientific text and illustrations: On the distinction between emotional interest and cognitive interest. Journal of educational psychology, 89(1), 92.

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