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Monthly Archives: September 2022

Marshmallows and Beyond: Cultural Influences on Self-Regulation
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
September 25, 2022

Marshmallows and Beyond: Cultural Influences on Self-Regulation

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Few psychology studies have created a bigger stir than Walter Mishel’s research into marshmallows.

Okay, he was really doing research into self-control.

But the marshmallow images were adorable: all those cute children desperately trying not to eat one marshmallow right now, so that they’d get two marshmallows in fifteen minutes.

Mishel’s studies got so much attention because they suggested that self-control correlates with SO MANY good things: high grades, better jobs, better health, etc.

And, they suggested that self-control is relatively stable. Some studies suggested that the marshmallow test, given at to a child at age five, could offer insights into their lives decades later.

Now, this research pool includes lots of complexity.

If, for instance, you saw Dr. Mishel at our 2015 conference in Boston, you know that trustworthiness matters.

Children waited for the 2nd marshmallow more often if they had reason to believe that the experimenter would actually follow through on their commitments. (Smart kids!)

So, do other factors matter?

The Power of Culture

A research team in Japan, led by Kaichi Yanaoka, wondered if cultural factors might shape self control.

So, for instance, in Japan waiting for food gets cultural priority — much more so than in the United States (where Mishel did his research).

But, Japanese culture does not emphasize waiting to open gifts as much as families in the US often do.

For instance, as Yanaoka explains in this study, Japanese parents often leave gifts for their children, with no cultural expectation that the children should wait to open them.

So, do these cultural differences shape performance on the marshmallow test?

Hypothesis. Data.

Based on these cultural norms, team Yanaoka hypothesized that children from the US would be better at waiting to open gifts, but worse at waiting to eat marshmallows, than their Japanese counterparts.

Because research requires precision, this study includes LOTS of details. (For instance, the researchers checked to be sure that the Japanese children had eaten marshmallows before, so they knew what temptation they were resisting.)

But the overall design was quite simple. In the US and Japan, children waited either to eat marshmallows, or to open gifts. Researchers followed a simple script:

Now it’s gift time! You have a choice for your gift today. You can either have this one gift to open right now, or if you wait for me to get more gifts from the other room, you can have two gifts to open instead. […]

Stay right there in that chair and I’ll leave this right here, and if you haven’t opened it […] before I get back, you can two to open instead.

Of course, for the children getting marshmallows, the script said “marshmallow” and “eat” rather than “gift” and “open.”

So, what did the researchers find?

Sure enough, cultural expectations shape self control.

In this case, Japanese children waited for the second marshmallow (median time: 15 minutes) much longer than US children (median time: 3.66 minutes).

But, US children waited to open the gift (median wait time: 14.54 minutes) longer than Japanese children (median time: 4.62 minutes).

When you look at the graphs, you’ll be impressed by the precise degree to which cultural expectations reverse wait times.

The Big Picture

So, what do we do with this information?

I think Yanaoka’s study offers us a specific reminder, and a general reminder.

Specifically, this study lets us know that self-control is NOT one monolithic, unchangeable thing.

Self-control varies across people and cultures. Yes, self-control matters; but, performance on one test — even a test with marshmallows — doesn’t tell us everything we need to know.

Generally, this study reminds us that culture always matters.

So, teachers should indeed welcome advice that experts offer us about — say — adolescence. But, that advice always includes cultural constraints. Adolescence, after all, differs in Denver, Kyoto, Sao Paolo, Reykjavik, and Gaborone.

So too cultural norms around stress. And feedback. And appropriate relationships between adults and students. Yes, and self-control.

No advice — not even research-based advice — gives us absolute guidance across all cultural norms.

Yanaoka, K., Michaelson, L. E., Guild, R. M., Dostart, G., Yonehiro, J., Saito, S., & Munakata, Y. (2022). Cultures crossing: the power of habit in delaying gratification. Psychological Science, 33(7), 1172-1181.

From Stressed to Resilient by Deborah Gilboa
Erik Jahner, PhD
Erik Jahner, PhD
September 20, 2022

From Stressed to Resilient by Deborah Gilboa

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Our lives are filled with change and all change is stressful whether that change is good or bad. Whether stress takes a toll on our well-being or whether we use that stress to build resilience is determined partly by a set of skills that need to be practiced and refined. In From Stressed to Resilient: The Guide to Handle More and Feel it Less, Deborah Gilboa (Dr. G) has written an easy-to-follow workbook that enables the reader to build resilience.

The book is a dynamic, personalized instruction book for building and working on our resilience. It begins by putting forward a particular mindset toward stress: feelings of stress are our brains’ way of interpreting change; stress is an integral part of living and adapting. The goal of the book is not to reduce stress but to transform how we prepare for and react to feelings of stress, utilizing stress to make us strong. The early chapters help us understand the landscape of our own beliefs and reactions to stress and where some of the opportunities for social-emotional development are in our lives. The useful questionaries guide this process helping us determine what should be a priority when reading the book. But don’t take these questionaries as determinative of who you are. They take stock of you at the moment, so I found it useful to return to them regularly.

The remainder of the book is a series of exercises for which there is a useful set of accompanying PDFs and online resources. These subsequent eight sections target specific skills leading to resilience: building connections, setting boundaries, being open to change, managing discomfort, setting goals, finding options, taking action, and persevering. Each of these has multiple practices and avenues for development giving you ownership of your own growth.

For those of us that feel a sense of “just tell me what to do,” this book walks you through steps in an easy-to-follow way and the author’s humor and forthright analysis allow you to put all your energy into the necessary self-reflection the book invites. The process is deceptively simple but enables the reader to learn and grow in small measurable steps. This is not the type of book that you read cover to cover but you read it strategically, guided by the information in the early chapters but also by our changing life goals. I also often repeated the useful exercises as I saw fit and reread old responses to gain insight into my development. While some of the books I have reviewed here are research-heavy and academic theory-laden, this is truly a book for guided self-improvement.

I advise integrating the book somehow into your daily routine while you work through it. I found it useful to integrate the reflective exercises into my morning routine right after I woke. These positioned me well to frame learning from the previous day and reframe the stresses present in my mind when I woke. Each section also has some practices to follow throughout the day from questions to ask others in conversations to imagining contingency plans or rescheduling missed opportunities. These practices then can frame the day; small goals that bring awareness to daily work and personal practice. Overall, the book will help you live life a little more mindfully and with purpose.

But the book does not end with you. The book is entirely adaptable for a variety of contexts, and I could easily see these exercises being pulled out for classroom practice, college student self-reflection, and teacher professional development, I even found it fun to practice some of the exercises with friends and family. The fact that they are already in worksheet format also makes it easy to scale them up for more than one person.

This book is not an intellectually heavy lift, and thank goodness, because we don’t need to add more to our plate when we are trying to self-improve. The book is not an added challenge but facilitates the process of building a stronger more resilient version of yourself.

 

Translating Research to the Classroom: the Case of Discovery Learning
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
September 18, 2022

Translating Research to the Classroom: the Case of Discovery Learning

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Here at Learning and the Brain, we want teachers and students to benefit from research. Obviously.

When psychologists discover important findings about the mind, when neuroscientists investigate the function of the brain, schools might well benefit.

Let’s start making connections!

At the same time, that hopeful vision requires care and caution. For instance, research (typically) operates in very specialized conditions: conditions that don’t really match most classrooms.

How can we accomplish our goal (applying research to the classroom) without making terrible mistakes (mis-applying research to the classroom)?

A Case in Point

Today’s post has been inspired by this study, by researchers Angela Brunstein, Shawn Betts, and John R. Anderson.

It’s compelling title: “Practice Enables Successful Learning under Minimal Guidance.”

Now, few debates in education generate as much heat as this one.

Many teachers think that — because we’re the experts in the room, and because working memory is so small — teachers should explain ideas carefully and structure practice incrementally.

Let’s call this approach “high-structure pedagogy” (although it’s probably better known as “direct instruction”).

Other teachers think that — because learners must create knowledge in order to understand and remember it — teachers should stand back and leave room for adventure, error, discovery, and ultimate understanding.

Let’s call this approach “low-structure pedagogy” (although it has LOTS of other names: “constructivism,” “project/problem-based learning,” “minimal guidance learning,” and so forth).

How can we apply the Brunstein study to this debate? What do we DO with its conclusions in our classrooms?

If you’re on the low structure team, you may assume the study provides the final word in this debate. What could be clearer? “Practice enables successful learning under minimal guidance” — research says so!

If you’re on the high structure team, you may assume it is obviously flawed, and look to reject its foolish conclusions.

Let me offer some other suggestions…

Early Steps

In everyday speech, the word “bias” has a bad reputation. In the world of science, however, we use the word slightly differently.

We all have biases; that is, we all have perspectives and opinions and experiences. Our goal is not so much to get rid of biases, but to recognize them — and recognize the ways they might distort our perceptions.

So, a good early step in applying research to our work: fess up to our own prior beliefs.

Many (most?) teachers do have an opinion in this high-structure vs. low-structure debate. Many have emphatic opinions. We should acknowledge our opinions frankly. (I’ll tell you my own opinion at the end of this post.)

Having taken this first vital step, let it shape your approach to the research. Specifically, try — at least temporarily — to convince yourself to change your mind.

That is: if you believe in low-structure pedagogy, look hard for the flaws in this study that seems to champion low-structure pedagogy. (BTW: all studies have flaws.)

If your biases tend you to high-structure pedagogy, try to find this study’s strengths.

Swim against your own tide.

Why? Because you will read the study more carefully — and therefore will likely arrive at conclusions that benefit your students more.

Gathering Momentum

Now that you have a goal — “change my own mind” — look at the study to answer two questions:

First: who was in the study?

Second: what, exactly, did they do?

You should probably be more persuaded by studies where…

First: …the study’s participants resemble your students and your cultural context, and

Second: …the participants did something that sensibly resembles your own possible teaching practice.

So, in this case: the participants were undergraduates at Carnegie Mellon University.

If you teach undergraduates at a highly selective university — the Google tells me that CMU currently admits 14% of their applicants — then this study’s conclusions might help you.

However, if you teach 3rd graders, or if you teach at any school with open admission, those conclusions just might not offer useful guidance.

After all, high-powered college students might succeed at “minimal guidance” learning because they already know a lot, and because they’re really good at school. (How do we know? Because they got into CMU.)

What about our second question? What exactly did the participants do?

In this study, participants used a computer tutor to solve algebra-ish math problems. (The description here gets VERY technical; you can think of the problems a proto-Kendoku, with algebra.)

What about the guidance they got? How “minimal” was it?

Getting the Definition Just Right

At this point, Brunstein’s study reminds us of an essential point.

When teachers talk about educational practice, we use handy shorthand phrases to capture big ideas.

Metacognition. Mindfulness. Problem-based learning.

However, each of those words and phrases could be used to describe widely different practices.

Before we can know if this study about “minimal guidance” applies to our students, we have to know exactly what these researchers did that they’re calling minimal guidance.

Team Brunstein says exactly this. They see discovery learning and direct instruction not as two different things, but as ends of a continuum:

“No learning experience is pure: students given direct instruction often find themselves struggling to discover what the teacher means, and all discovery situations involve some minimal amount of guidance.”

In this case, “minimal guidance” involved varying degrees of verbal and written instructions.

This study concludes that under very specific circumstances, a particular blend of structure and discovery fosters learning.

So, yes, in some “minimal guidance” circumstances, students learned — and practice time helped.

However — and this is a big “however”:

In one part of the study, 50% of the students at the extreme “discovery” end of the spectrum quit the study. Another 25% of them went so slowly that they didn’t finish the assignment.

In other words: this study in no way suggests that all kinds of minimal guidance/discovery/PBL learning are always a good idea.

The “just right” blend helped: perhaps we can recreate that blend. But the wrong blend — “extreme discovery” — brought learning to a standstill.

Final Thoughts

First: when using research to shape classroom practice, it helps to look at specific studies.

AND it helps to look at groups of studies.

Long-time readers know that I really like both scite.ai and connectedpapers.com. If you go to those websites and put in the name of Brunstein’s study, you’ll see what MANY other scholars have found when they looked at the same specific question about minimal guidance. (Try it — you’ll like it!)

Second: I promised to tell you my own opinion about the low- vs. high-structure debate. My answer is: I think it’s the wrong question.

Because of working memory limitations, I do think that teachers should provide high structure during early stages of studying a topic.

And, for a variety of reasons, I think we should gradually transition to lower-structure pedagogies as students learn more and more.

That is:

We should use high-structure pedagogy with novices, who are early in schema formation.

And, we should use low-structure pedagogy with experts, who are later in the process of schema formation.

The question is not “which pedagogy to use?”

The better question is: “how can we identify stages along the process of students’ schema development, so we know when and how to transition our teaching.”

Research into that question is still very much in the early phases.

Brunstein, A., Betts, S., & Anderson, J. R. (2009). Practice enables successful learning under minimal guidance. Journal of Educational Psychology, 101(4), 790.

Have You Heard of…”Prospective Memory”? What It Is, Why Teachers Should Notice
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
September 15, 2022

Have You Heard of…”Prospective Memory”? What It Is, Why Teachers Should Notice

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Most of the time, we remember things experienced in the past:

My most recent birthday

A childhood vacation

An obscure factual tidbit from the news

However, we also spend some time remembering the future:

An errand to complete on the way home from school

A phone call I have to make this evening

A coffee date this weekend

When we remember the future, we’re using our prospective memory.

Here’s why this distinction matters:

Schools focus primarily on remembering the past: the topic or formula students learned last week, class rules, concepts and skills from a previous unit.

We also spend a fair amount of time relying on prospective memory.

Students remember the third step of the instructions while they do the first. That’s prospective memory.

Teachers remember an announcement that we should make at the end of class. That’s prospective memory.

What can research tell us about this under-discussed cognitive capacity? And, does any research provide practical classroom advice?

Start with the Basics

We know (all too well) that remembering the past can be difficult. After all, students regularly forget the ideas they seemed to know so well just last week. (Let’s admit it: we do too.)

Perhaps we’re not surprised to learn, therefore, that prospective memory creates cognitive strain. Simply put: we don’t remember the future very well either.

Have you ever driven home and forgotten to pick up milk on the way?

Have your students ever forgotten the 3rd instruction while working on the first?

Yup: we struggle to complete prospective memory tasks.

I myself think of this problem as (basically) working memory overload.

After all, working memory selects, HOLDS, reorganizes, and combines information from multiple sources.

Prospective memory requires us to HOLD that information for a long period of time — and thus strains working memory.

Simply put: when we ask students to use prospective memory, we increase working memory load and thereby make learning harder.

Sound familiar?

Problems Require Solutions

Teachers are a practical lot. Once we learn about a problem, we’d like a solution.

Happily, we have some steps to follow.

Step #1: recognize the problem. 

If I tell my students five steps to follow, I’m creating a prospective memory problem. They must remember to do all five steps in the future.

Once I recognize the prospective memory load inherent in this task, now I know to change something.

Step #2: rely on long-term memory.

If students have routines in long-term memory, they don’t need to HOLD them in working memory.

So, if I always stop at the grocery store as I drive home on Wednesday, I’m much less likely to forget that errand this upcoming Wednesday. It’s part of my routine.

If students always start by circling the verbs in a sentence, they’re much less likely to be stumped by instructions that begin with that task.

Simply put: routines reduces prospective memory load.

Step #3: Recent Research

Today’s blog post was inspired by a recent study about prospective memory, led by Dawa Dupont. Specifically, the study wondered if we can reduce prospective memory load by writing down information we will need in the future. (IMPORTANT NOTE: I’m oversimplifying here — I’ll come back later to the definition of “writing down.”)

This three-part study came up with several answers.

Answer #1: YES. When we write down important information, doing so reduces prospective memory load. Students remember it better.

Answer #2: SURPRISE: writing down important information helps us process less important information as well.

By reducing prospective memory (working memory) load, we help both complex and simple cognitive processes.

Answer #3: Re-SURPRISE: when students can’t write down important information, this limitation harms recall of important info more than recall of less important info.

In other words: in prospective memory, we often get priorities wrong.

All these answers lead to a helpfully straightforward solution to prospective memory problems: let students write stuff down.

That is: don’t just describe five instructions. Have students write them down. (Or, give them a written copy.)

Don’t try to remember the announcement at the end of class. Write in your lesson plan the announcement you need to make.

Simply put: offload prospective memory burdens onto paper — or some other technology reminder.

Important Definitions

I said above that I was oversimplifying when I said “write stuff down.” Let me now unpack a bit more complexity.

In this study, participants played a simple video game.

In some versions, players could mark objects in a special way. This marking reminded players what to do with those objects in the future.

In other versions of the game, players couldn’t create those reminder marks.

Those special markings were, in effect, a technology strategy for “offloading” prospective memory. Players didn’t have to remember “move this one to the left” in the future. They had already put in a reminder marker to do so.

In other words, players didn’t exactly “write stuff down.” They created a kind of technology reminder.

However — this is important — the first sentence of this study suggests that “writing stuff down” and “creating a kind of technology reminder” serve the same prospective memory function:

Individuals have the option of remembering delayed intentions by storing them in internal memory or offloading them to an external store such as a diary or smartphone alert.

Researchers didn’t study the “written diary/calendar” option here, but the logic is very much the same.

Even More Important Definitions

I’m being quite transparent about these definitions because I worry that other sources are extrapolating too far.

I found Dupont’s study by following this headline: “Using smartphones could help improve memory skills.”

Um, what?

If students use their cellphones to write down their homework, or take pictures of instructions I’ve written on the board, or do some other task-focused activity, doing so could reduce prospective memory load.

But:

First, that’s not at all the same thing as “improving memory skills,” and

Second, having cellphones handy in class can produces all sorts of other distractions. I mean, are students honestly using cellphones for “task-focused activities”?

True confession: more often than not, my students aren’t using cellphones for good. (I had one student answer his phone in class. No, really.)

So, I think Dupont’s study supports cellphone use in class only in narrowly defined ways. In no way does it generally support the idea that cellphones are good because they “improve memory skills.”

TL;DR

Prospective memory allows us to remember the future (yay). And, it creates working memory load (boo).

We can reduce that load by a) recognizing the problem, b) developing classroom routines, and c) creating reminders — written or technological — to offload those prospective memory burdens.

Anyone who says this research broadly supports cellphone use in classrooms is — in my view — dramatically misrepresenting its conclusions.

Dupont, D., Zhu, Q., & Gilbert, S. J. (2022). Value-based routing of delayed intentions into brain-based versus external memory stores. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.

Online Teaching + Research: Insights from Cognitive Load Theory
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
September 10, 2022

Online Teaching + Research: Insights from Cognitive Load Theory

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Most of us spent the last 2 years learning LOTS about online teaching.

Many of us relied on our instincts, advice from tech-savvy colleagues, and baling wire.

Some turned to helpful books. (Both Doug Lemov and Courtney Ostaff offer lots of practical wisdom.)

But: do we have any RESEARCH that can point the way?

Yes, reader, we do…

Everything Starts with Working Memory

This blog often focuses on working memory: a cognitive capacity that allows new information to combine with a student’s current knowledge.

That is: working memory lets learning happen.

Many scholars these days use Cognitive Load Theory to organize and describe the intersection of working memory and teaching.

In my view, cognitive load theory has both advantages and disadvantages.

First, it’s true (well, as “true” as any scientific theory can be).

Second, it’s a GREAT way for researchers to talk with other researchers about working memory.

But — here’s the disadvantage — it’s rather complex and jargony as a way for teachers to talk with other teachers. (Go ahead, ask me about “element interactivity.”)

How can teachers get the advantages and avoid the disadvantages?

One recent solution: Oliver Lovell’s splendid book — which explains cognitive load theory in ways that make classroom sense to teachers.

Another solution, especially helpful for online teaching: a recent review article by Stoo Sepp and others.

“Shifting Online: 12 Tips for Online Teaching” takes the jargon of cognitive load theory and makes it practical and specific for teachers — especially when we need to use these ideas for online teaching.

Examples, Please

Because Team Sepp offers 12 tips, I probably shouldn’t review them all here. (Doing so would, ironically, overwhelm readers’ working memory.)

Instead, let me offer an example or two.

Cognitive load theory (rightly) focuses on the dangers of the split attention effect, but it can be tricky to understand exactly what that means.

Sepp translates that phrase into straightforward advice, as you can see in this diagram:

The version on the right integrates the descriptive words into the diagram: well done.

The version on the left, however, places the descriptive words below — readers must switch their focus back-n-forth to understand the ideas. In other words, the left version splits the reader’s attention. Boo.

Team Sepp’s straightforward advice: when teaching online, be sure that diagrams and videos embed descriptive words in the images (as clearly as possible).

Managing Nuances

This insight about split attention might seem to answer an enduring question for online instruction: should the teacher be visible?

That is: if I’ve created slides to map out the differences between comedy and tragedy, should my students be able to see me while they look at those slides?

At first glance, research into split attention suggests a clear “no.” If students look at my slides AND at me, well, they’re splitting their attention.

However, when this question gets researched directly, we find an interesting answer: the instructor’s presence does not directly reduce (or directly increase) students’ learning.

In other words: video of the teacher doesn’t create the split attention effect.

Sepp and colleagues combine that finding with this sensible insight:

“A visible instructor provides learners with important social cues, which help them feel connected to and be aware of other people in online settings.”

Researchers call this “social presence,” and it seems to have positive effects of its own. That is: students participate and learn more when they experience “social presence.”

As is always true, we can’t boil cognitive load theory down to “best practices.” (“No split attention ever!”)

Instead, we have to take situations and subtleties into account. (“Avoid split attention; but don’t worry that our presence creates split attention.”)

Team Sepp balance these complexities clearly and well.

Final Thoughts

This blog post introduces Sepp’s review, but it doesn’t summarize that review. To prepare for the possibility we might be back to online learning at some point, you might take some time to read it yourself.

Its greatest benefits will come when individual teachers consider how these abstract concepts from cognitive load theory apply to the specifics of our curriculum, our students, and our own teaching work.

Sepp’s review article helps with exactly that translational work.

Sepp, S., Wong, M., Hoogerheide, V., & Castro‐Alonso, J. C. (2021). Shifting online: 12 tips for online teaching derived from contemporary educational psychology research. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning.

Teaching Minds & Brains: the Best Books to Read
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
September 05, 2022

Teaching Minds & Brains: the Best Books to Read

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When I started in this field, back in 2008, we all HUNGERED for good books.

After all, teaching is profoundly complicated.

And, psychology is mightily complicated.

And, neuroscience is fantastically (unbearably?) complicated.

If we’re going to put those three fields together — and that is, after all, the goal — we need authors who know a great deal about three complicated fields.

These authors need to know enough to synthesize those fields, and explain that synthesis clearly. Can it even be done?

Back in 2008, the goal seemed unreachable…

Places to Start

Since then, the publishing pace has started to pick up. In fact, we now face the reverse problem: too many good books.

My stack of “I must read these RIGHT NOW or I will lose all credibility” books gets taller by the week.

Where to begin?

Long-time readers know one of my mantras:

Don’t just do this thing; instead, think this way.

Applied to book recommendations, that mantra becomes:

I shouldn’t just recommend individual books; instead, I should suggest helpful categories of books.

So, these three categories seem most helpful to me.

Getting Specific

When authors combine teaching, psychology, and neuroscience, they can focus their interest on one specific topic.

This approach has lots of benefits. In particular, one-topic books can explore the field in depth, give lots of classroom examples, delve into critical nuances.

So, for instance, if you’d like to learn more about long-term memory formation, you won’t do much better that Powerful Teaching by Agarwal and Bain.

Carol Dweck’s book on Mindset is, of course, a classic in the motivation field. But: if you want to explore motivation more substantially, you really should know Peps Mccrea’s Motivated Teaching.

How about adolescence? I’m a big fan of Lisa Damour’s Untangled: wise, practical, funny, humane.

Blog readers certainly know that working memory deserves all the attention it can get. Ollie Lovell’s recent Cognitive Load Theory in Action makes this theoretical approach as concrete as possible. (My own book Learning Begins focuses on working memory without the cognitive load theory framework.)

You might even want to know about the role of evolution in this field. Paul Howard-Jones’s Evolution of the Learning Brain is a delightful and informative read.

Ready for More

These books — and MANY more — explore one topic in depth.

However, you might be ready to put all those small pieces together. These authors consider the individual pieces (attention, stress, evolution, working memory), and try to build them together into a coherent picture.

The first of these put-the-pieces-together books, of course, is Dan Willingham’s Why Don’t Students Like School.

The first book of its kind for a general audience, WDSLS? boils all those topics above into several core principles: “factual knowledge must precede skill” or most famously, “memory is the residue of thought.”

Now in its third edition, this book offers splendid and friendly guidance for those of us who want psychology (and some neuroscience) research to guide our thinking.

You might pick up How We Learn by Stanislas Dehaene. (This book is so good, our blog published two separate reviews of it.) Dehaene considers “Four Pillars” of learning, and how they work together support students’ progress.

Being careful not to confuse the titles, you might also grab Understanding How We Learn, by Weinstein and Sumeracki. These two scholars founded The Learning Scientists, a consistently excellent source of online wisdom in this field.

If you’d rather read a synthesis book by classroom teachers (rather than university professors), Neuroteach by Glenn Whitman and Ian Kelleher provides all the scholarly background knowledge combined with a teacher’s practical insights.

All these books — and others like them — unite various topics into a coherent and thoughtful system.

Build Your Own Adventure

The first category of book explores one topic in depth. The second category puts several topics together in a coherent, unified structure.

The third category provides the individual pieces (like the first category) and lets the reader synthesize them (like the second category).

I think of two major players in this field.

Back in 2019, Bradley Busch and Edward Watson (no relation that I know of) published The Science of Learning. This book — and a follow-up volume — offers 2-page summaries of 77 studies in several core topics: metacognition, parents, memory, and so forth.

Busch and Watson, in effect, provide teachers many vital building blocks. We can then use those blocks to build our own structures — that is, our own synthesis.

Each of us is our own Dan Willingham.

In 2020, Paul Kirschner and Carl Hendrick published How Learning Happens: Seminal Works in Educational Psychology and What They Mean in Practice.

As the title suggests, this volume explores 25+ papers making foundational arguments about the intersection of psychology and teaching.

How can we invite students to think more deeply? What is the role of elaboration? Why and how should we make thinking visible? Kirschner and Hendrick explore those questions by carefully summarizing and unpacking the most important papers investigating them.

Earlier this year, Jim Heal joined Kirschner and Hendrick to publish How TEACHING Happens, looking at similar questions for teachers and teaching.

Here again, we teachers can use these building blocks to build our own synthesis.

My synthesis might not look like yours.

But that’s okay: I’m a high school English teacher; you might be a 2nd grade reading specialist; whereas he might be a college music theory professor. We need (slightly) different syntheses, because we do different things, and are different people.

Where to Begin?

I suspect that the best place to begin depends on your prior knowledge. (Of course, almost all learning depends on prior knowledge.)

If you’re new-ish to the field, probably single-topic books will give you the biggest bang for your reading buck.

You won’t learn everything about the field, but you will know enough about one topic to make real progress.

Once you’ve got a good foundation laid, I think the synthesis books will offer lots of wisdom.

After all, teachers need to think about attention AND memory AND stress AND development. If I have some prior knowledge about most of those topics, I’ll have some real chance to understand how Willingham (and Dehaene, and Weinstein/Sumeracki, and Whitman/Kelleher) put those ideas together.

Or, perhaps you’re more of a choose-your-own-adventure reader. If you like the cognitive quest of building your own castle, these books (Busch/Watson, Kirschner/Hendrick/Heal) give you the very best research bricks to build with.

And, honestly, at some point, we all need to do this synthesis work ourselves. That is: we all need to build our individually tailored models.

Because we teach different curricula to different age groups in different cultural contexts, we will draw more on some kind of research than others.

And, of course, our students might have different learning profiles. And, of course, each of us has our own strengths and muddles in the classroom.

In other words: I suspect we all need to start by studying specific topics. And, someday, we will all be grateful for the books that help us create our own unique syntheses.

Author’s confession: I could EASILY double the length of this post by including more books I love and admire. I’m trying to give a useful sample; in doing so, I’m inevitably leaving out lots of splendid texts.

Perhaps in the comments you can add your own favorite book!