This podcast is packed full of information, neuroscience and paradigm shifts. I’ll put a few thoughts below to whet your appetites. 1/
https://twitter.com/RethinkingJames/status/1449066205470511112
Mary Helen thinks we need a paradigm shift in education as fundamental as Copernicus - who first realised that the earth went around the sun and not vice versa. 2/
Early scientists looked up from the earth and tried to predict what was happening with the assumption that they were at the centre. It kind of worked, but there was lots that didn’t fit. 2/
After Copernicus, everything was different. All the data had to be reinterpreted in the light of this new perspective. New theories and models arose. 3/
In education, we’re sitting on the earth watching kids’ trajectories, trying to work out how to get them to change and go in the direction we’d like. Tweaks like ‘growth mindset’ are attempts to do this. 4/
The shift she suggested is that we put how it feels to be a thinking person in the system at the centre of the educational solar system. Then all of our other work should be centred around that. When we do this, many of the other problems disappear. 5/
This is beyond what is thought of as a whole child approach, it means we centre the experience and thinking of the learner. It implies that we should reinterpret the data we have to ask what it reveals about how it feels to be the person who was measured by that data point. 6/
She thinks that learning outcomes are important but these are not the metrics we should be centering our education system around. How the learner feels about what they are doing is more important than any information they remember in the long term. 7/
She thinks educators should be asking, what dispositions of heart and mind are we supporting in this setting? We need to shift the purpose of education from promoting learning outcomes to promoting human development. 8/
She uses the analogy of soccer - adults look at the game, people need strong legs to play, so we make the kids do weights to develop their muscles, send them off to the soccer field - but they can’t play! They don’t know how to do it, their learning was decontextualised. 9/
So school decontextualises learning and then we sent kids off into the real world to be autonomous citizens but they’ve never had a chance to practice really living and being a person with agency. 10/
From the neuroscience, what predicts young adult outcomes such as happiness, purpose in life, relationships is not how much they know, it’s how they think and the learning dispositions they bring to the world. 11/
Moving onto #cogsci, she says that there is a tendency to organise studies around what is easy to measure and then the system becomes organised around that. But what if learning info curated by someone else doesn’t help you live happily in the world in the long term? 12/
We need to understand that learning and development is not an efficient process.The messiness &non-linearity is important.Otherwise it’s like saying that babies should skip crawling &go right onto biking because they’ll never need to crawl as adults&so it’s a waste of time. 13/
So education has, from her perspective, the wrong aims. We should be thinking seriously about what it feels like to think within the system - do kids have agency? Are they engaging with complex information that they deeply care about?Are they able to bring all that they are?14/
To her, these things are the fundamentals. High control school environments actively dissuade these things because they focus on the wrong outcomes. They focus on outputs, on behaviour& production-and not what is actually going on inside a young person’s head&how they feel.15/
She says, when we micro-control young people and their learning, we rob them of the opportunity to develop inside themselves the capacity to manage themselves as thinkers. 16/
High-control learning environments steal real learning opportunities which are inevitably messy, inefficient, difficult and context-dependent. We clean it all up and by doing so rob YP of the change to learn how to manage for themselves when the structure is no longer there. 17/
She talks about different brain systems &how when we focus kids attention on the here & now, on goal directed outcomes &behaviour, we suppress activity in other brain networks which are not in the immediate here & now, which focus on deep understanding and complex problems. 18/
She says, adolescents need time to do both. They need time to be free form, out of the box thinkers. They need opportunities to think abstractly and deeply. Keeping them focused on outcomes and remembering actively stops this from happening. 19/
If kids don’t get the opportunities to practice managing their own thinking, chances to move themselves between goal directed work and a different way of thinking, Mary Helen says we can actually see the difference in their brains. They develop less effectively. 20/
And this lack of opportunity to develop thinking & your relationship to thinking in the messy, inefficient way which human development demands actually translates to less achievement and lower wellbeing as adults. 21/
I won’t go through the rest of it - this is a long podcast and she talks fast and says lots. But there were a couple of other aha moments for me. 22/
One was how emotion and cognition are always intertwined, but this doesn’t show up in scientific studies because emotion is effectively held constant in studies in order to focus on cognition. Real world learning is far messier. 23/
The separation between cognition and emotion is artificial, because the whole person always includes emotions, experiences, culture and what they feel about what they are doing is fundamental. 24/
My take: meaning and purpose are a fundamental part of learning.Putting the experience of the learner in the centre of the solar system means enabling autonomy and self-direction. It’s a paradigm shift which would have dramatic effects on wellbeing, motivation and learning. 25/
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