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Learning is S.W.E.E.T.

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My last WYPR commentary on learning

Discoveries in cognitive psychology, neuroscience, education, design thinking and behavioral economics have given us substantial new insights into how learning works. 

At its core, learning is what happens to the structure in your brain and it turns out that the five most important things anyone can do to improve learning are S.W.E.E.T.: sleep, water, exercise, eating, and time are the most important conditions for supporting your brain in learning.  

We have great experimental confirmation of all of these things. Moderate exercise, even 4 hours after studying improves retention. Being dehydrated reduces both cognitive and physical performance. And T is for time: teaching matters, but you learn more when you practice more.

The S for Sleep and it is critical because sleep is when your brain sorts memories and decides what to remember: if you get only 7 hours of sleep, your emotional reactions to yesterday’s class predominate. You remember that you felt stupid in math class.  But 90% of your REM sleep occurs in that 8th hour, so with an extra hour of sleep, your brain re-lives that math class and de-emotionalizes the memories: so you better remember the math part. 

These research findings can help us improve learning. Your brain lives in your body, so it only functions and learns well when it gets what it needs biologically. Emphasizing wellness and the SWEET part of learning is as essential as what happens in classrooms. 

There is a chapter on SWEET in the Nudge book, due out in 2022.

Thinking for Yourself

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My series on WYPR continues here https://www.wypr.org/post/bowen-three-rs-education with this discussion of my focus on a new 3Rs of process instead of just content.

Think for Yourself: what does this really mean?  The new convergence of behavioral economics, neuro-science, and cognitive psychologysuggest a new educational 3Rs of “Relationships, Resilience and Reflection” and new ways for this to be designed and delivered including “nudges.” If we want the new learning economy to be inclusive, we will need education to focus more on the potential we release and less on the content we input: graduates will need to be voracious self-regulating learners. 

The rapid pace of knowledge creating and a changing job market could mean that colleges have to adapt faster and update content more often. That is true, but even the most nimble college curriculum is likely to be four years out of date if it only focuses on content. We need to focus more on the process of learning to think for yourself. 

This is sometimes called, the meta-cognition of learning. Do you as the learning, understand how to help yourself change your mind and reflect on how new content must change your old habits and assumptions? Can you abandon your own preconceived ideas?

As a teacher, I most want to make myself obsolete. I want to help my students discover new content and process it for themselves, so that eventually, without me, they will be able to ask better questions, seek new information, understand how this will create discomfort, and generate new mental assumptions. So instead of telling students that this paper, experiment or musical piece needs more work, I ask them if they think their work is ready for public performance yet? Eventually that is the question they will need to ask and answer themselves.That is thinking for yourself.

From Professor to Cognitive Coach

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The next of my commentaries on education on WYPR

Learning is a bit like fitness. The person who does the work gets the benefit. 

So the best teacher is not necessarily the one who knows the most, in the same way that the best fitness coach is not the one who can DO the most push-ups. Watching someone else do push-ups, even intellectual push-ups, is not nearly as useful as doing push-ups yourself. 

While it is tempting to think that the best gym is the one with all the latest technology and the coach with the largest muscles, like knowledge, exercise equipment is only beneficial if you use it. You need to be motivated to get on and pedal faster. 

So a good fitness coach or teacher starts by asking: why are you here? Understanding what motivates you and what you already know (or fear) about a subject is essential. (If I don’t know you are afraid of water, my swim lessons will be much less effective.) 

A good fitness coach adds value because she understands YOU and can get YOU to do more push-ups. It is a design problem. Classes work the same way. If I can design structures and assignments that you find more motivating and engaging and you do more work, you will learn more. The role of the teacher as “professor” (with a focus on “professing” and conveying content) needs to be reimagined as more of a cognitive coach (with a focus on the process that will both inspire the student to do the work).

[This shift from more content to more process and how we can design better learning environments and schools is the subject of the new book I am working on this year:A New 3Rs: Using Behavioral Science to Prepare Students for a New Learning Economy due from Johns Hopkins University Press in 2020.]

Expanding Comfort with Discomfort

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Here is the text of my latest public commentary on WYPR: https://www.wypr.org/post/bowen-expanding-comfort-discomfort

Some tolerance for ambiguity is essential for learning, change, and growth. When we encounter a new idea, technology or method, it feels strange at first. That is almost the definition of new: something foreign to what we already know. 

Goucher College requires all students to study abroad. And when students ask where they should go to study abroad, the answer is simple. Go to the place that makes you as uncomfortable as you can stand. Learning to be comfortable with your discomfort is a key aspect of learning. All creative people and self-regulated learners have learned to expand their own comfort with discomfort.

If I reject all ideas that are foreign, I will miss opportunities to change. But if I accept all new ideas as better, I will simply substitute one set of assumptions for another. Learning is about creating a space, at least temporarily, for what might be true. 

Learning is also about making distinctions. All the music we hate sounds the same. OR more accurately, the less we know about something, the more it seems to all be the same. As we learn, we distinguish, and things become more complex. Knowledge is also always changing: new discoveries will change what we thought we already knew. 

Our tolerance for ambiguity is useful because it mirrors how knowledge is assessed and accumulated. The answer to most good questions, is “it depends.”

Discovering your Accent with Study Abroad

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My series of public commentaries on WYPR continues here

Here at Goucher, we require all students to study abroad before they graduate. We do this in part because employers want graduates who can navigate working with people from different cultures and backgrounds, but also because study abroad provides an almost unique opportunity for self-discovery, reflection, and growth.

One of the first things we notice when we leave home is that everyone else in the world speaks with an accent. Then we realize that we too have an accent. Upon further reflection, we get the big reveal—that everyone has an accent. There is no neutral way of speaking, and everyone speaks in a way conditioned by culture, geography, and experience. 

This is equally true for how we all think—everyone also has a thought accent and study abroad brings us face to face with our assumptions and how they differ from those in our new surroundings. We can exchange one thought accent for another—just as we can learn a new spoken accent—but the insight that we all have assumptions that are invisible to us is fundamental to critical thinking. 

Initially, this can seem crippling, especially for students whose high school experience was all about a single truth or a single right answer. But understanding that different is often just different is a critical path to many things. Study abroad is not just about visiting difference, it is about encountering your own difference, your own assumptions and learning that everyone thinks with an accent. 

The future of work: what you do will not define who you should be.

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My series on WYPR continues here.

As parents, we want our children to be happy after college, just not in our basement. Given the cost, it is reasonable to expect one benefit of college to be a better job—and college graduates earn, on average, $1M more over a lifetime over those with no college education. 

But technology is creating new jobs and eliminating old ones. No college can give you all of the content that you will need in 10 years, because a lot of it has not yet been discovered. The future is unknown. But it will involve technology.

If you want to be prepared for the future job market, focus on the places where computers do less well. You will still need to be able to interface with computers and understand data analytics, but the future of work is about being complimentary to technology.

So an modern education should help you ask better questions. Computers will increasing be able to answer our questions faster, but thinking of new and more creative questions to ask is something humans are likely to be better at for a very long time. It is our ability to leap into the unknown that provides the advantage.

Technology is also changing the nature of work. Artificial intelligence might make your job obsolete, but might also make work obsolete. Here again, determining not only what CAN be done, but what SHOULD be done, and what is worth doing—these will remain fundamentally human decisions. Education should also provide the tools to create meaning in life. Helping students understand who they can be and not just what they do is an essential part of college.

It is HOW you go to college and not WHERE

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Next in my continuing series of public commentary on WYPR. You can listen here

As high school seniors and their parents enter the stressful college decision time, here is some advice. Relax.

Where you go to college matters a lot less than how you go to college. We have know this for years, but it is hard to accept. Surely being around all of those future titans of industry at Harvard has some advantage. Probably, but much of that seems to be correlation not causal: people who exercise also tend to eat better. 

What we do know is that college provides the most benefit when students are engaged in their own learning. Find a mentor. Do research. Spend the time to meet new people. Finding a person who believes in you and your potential matters far more than anything you will do in class. 

If you find a place where you seem to fit in and it feels right—that is probably the right place for you. But if you picked wrong, you will probably never know. Most students are pretty happy with where they have picked: in truth, any college feels way better than high school. 

What you do while you are in college—any college–really matters. Take advantage of the diversity of new people. Get comfortable with being uncomfortable. Go to exhibitions, events and talks you think you will hate.  Any one of them could change your life. So pick a school and then relax. But once you arrive make new friends and most importantly—go visit staff and faculty.

The Entire Toolbox

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Here is the second installment in my series on higher education for WYPR. You can also listen to it here.

Any college major is like a single tool. And most tools are really only useful when the job at hand is the one for which it has been designed.  Biology might be a hammer, and anthropology a screwdriver. But which tool will you need in ten years? If the jobs of the future are uncertain, then what you really need is a larger toolbox. 

Colleges usually require a series of introductory courses. It is important for students to be exposed to every tool in the toolbox, but do you really need an entire semester of Introduction to the Hammer before you are ready to build something? Might we instead let students pick problems that interest them? 

This is motivating, and we all learn more when we care about the topic. It is also more of a “real world” job skills approach. We don’t know what the problem will be after you graduate, but we suspect you will need both your hammer and your screwdriver. 

College students are often far too focused on trying to pick the right major. But rather than specializing in a specific tool, or picking your favorite way of looking at the world, wouldn’t it be better to figure out what types of problems really matter the most to you?  

If you are interested in poverty, the environment, immigration or disease, you will still need to understand something about politics, culture, history, music, science, marketing, anthropology, psychology and language. They all have important insights to offer and they are all tools that can help you build your solution. 

It’s not really a “smart” phone

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I’ve been doing a series of commentaries for WYPR, the NPR station in Baltimore. You can read the first post below, or listen here 

Technology is only one of the many factors that has changed the starting point for educators. Technology has changed our relationship with knowledge, but has also created a new learning economy where most of the information you need for the jobs of the future is unknown. 

Education has always been about critical thinking, but now that most of the content we are teaching is also available online for free, and much of what students need to learn is still being discovered, we need to shift the balance between process and content. In this new learning economy, graduates who are truly self-regulated learners will have a huge advantage. Good teaching has always been about making yourself obsolete, but new technology makes it clear that the best schools and teachers are the ones whose students can learn new things on their own. 

We are confused about what it means to be smart, we are so confused, we call it a “smart” phone. But despite its access to so much content, your phone isn’t smart. Smart is not about how much you know, but how much you can learn. Smart is the ability to change your mind. In a new economy, where new jobs are being invented every day, requiring new skills, and using new knowledge, we need more self-regulated learners—college graduates who are able to learn new things, reflect and change their minds to adapt to new situations and new information. Learn to change your mind.

Get some TNT for your teaching

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Teaching Naked Techniques: A Practical Guide to Designing Better Classes by José Antonio Bowen and C. Edward Watson is now available (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2017).  Early reviews call it “as rich a resource…to improve students’ learning as has been written in a generation.” (More early reviews below.)

Use this discount code at Wiley “TNT30” for 30% off.

 Teaching Naked Techniques (TNT) is a practical guide of proven quick ideas for improving classes and essential information for designing anything from one lesson or a group of lessons to an entire course. TNT is both a design guide and a “sourcebook” of new ideas: despite masses of new research, technology and ideas, it is a more focused, detailed and immediately useful book than the original Teaching Naked.

If you want to understand why technology has had such a powerful impact on teaching, student learning, and the future of higher education (everything from faculty workloads to tuition and pricing) then you might want to start with the original Teaching Naked (2012). TNT includes some newer technology, but mostly we wanted to write a more practical book for faculty (especially new faculty) who wanted a one-stop shop for the latest research on how students learn distilled into tested techniques and best practices that work.

The premise remains the same: we need to use technology and apply new research on how the brain learns to redesign our courses and classrooms. Decades of research have brought an explosion of knowledge about how human evolution has shaped the way we process, think, and remember. Teaching is largely a design problem, and we need to design our classes for the brain in the body.

Research informs the book, but the focus is on practical and discipline-specific applications for faculty. At the same time that psychology and research have given us new insights into student learning, students now have much more to learn and new technologies to help or inhibit how they learn. We are already in a new learning economy, where, thanks to this same explosion of knowledge creation and technology, most of what students will need to learn, they will need to learn after they leave our classrooms. What we know in our disciplines will remain important, but what we know about student learning and development will also grow in importance. The future will belong to self-regulating, life-long learners, and we now know how to create them.

As faculty, of course, we have spent a lot of time in school, and we assume that gives us some insight into how people learn. Sadly, the opposite is probably true. As faculty, we may have understood the value of paying attention even when bored, long sessions of single focus without distraction, distributed repetition, the futility of cramming, discovering why the professor assigned the reading, the importance of re-writing notes and probably naps. All of these are now proven learning enhancers, but none of them are obvious. If we are to turn students into self-regulated learners, we will need to be more explicit in designing environments that help students learn for themselves.

Terry Doyle (2008, p. 25) sums it up this way: “the one who does the work, does the learning.” That does not mean teachers only need to put content out there and let students work; if that is all you do, the Internet does it better. Rather, it means that the value of the teacher is in the way he or she can stimulate good behaviors in students: pedagogy is a design problem and it involves motivating and nudging students in the right direction. The fitness coach does not exercise for us, but still provides enormous value. More exercise equipment will not increase your fitness, in the same way that more content will not increase your learning: faculty being the exception. Normal learners need a person who understands their anxieties and what motivates them and can then create structures that will allow them to succeed.

Teaching Naked Techniques will help higher education faculty design more effective and engaging classrooms. The book focuses on each step of class preparation from the entry point and first encounter with content to the classroom “surprise.” There is a chapter on each step in the cycle with an abundance of discipline-specific examples, plus the latest research on cognition and technology, quick lists of ideas, and additional resources.

By rethinking the how, when, and why of technology, faculty are able to create exponentially more opportunities for practical student engagement. Student-centered, activity-driven, and proven again and again, these techniques can revolutionize your classroom.

“Teaching Naked” flips the classroom by placing the student’s first contact with the material outside of class. This places the burden of learning on the learner, ensures student preparation, and frees up class time for active engagement with the material for more effective learning and retention. Teaching Naked Techniques is the practical guide for bringing better learning to your classroom.

Teaching Naked Techniques is a practical guide of proven quick ideas for improving classes and essential information for designing anything from one lesson or a group of lessons to an entire course. TNT also corresponds to my most popular faculty workshop. You can find out more here.