Lois Letchford, Lincoln Project (3) Learning Propagates Brain Changes

23 Jul 2020 · 3 min

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2:47

In this short presentation, Lois Letchford—author of Reversed: A Memoir and The Literacy Problem Solver—explains how learning activities travel through the brain in complex, interconnected ways. She cites Mario Livio’s idea that learning cannot be captured by a single snapshot, then shares a personal case study of teaching her son Nicholas, a child who had failed first grade. By introducing simple, illustrated poems and gradually expanding to richer content (e.g., maps, a poem about Captain Cook), she helped Nicholas link decoding skills to broader language experiences and world knowledge. Letchford argues that decoding must sit within a “nest” of diverse language activities, especially for vulnerable learners who need additional knowledge about letters, sounds, word structures, and their purposes. She concludes with a call to action for educators to provide richer, multi‑modal learning experiences and to support struggling readers with extra scaffolding.

Chapters

Hello, I'm Lois Letchford, author of the book Reversed: A Memoir and The Literacy Problem Solver. And today I'm going to talk to you about learning activities that change the brain and how they do it. I use a quote from Mario Levio's book Why, and Why is about curiosity. And he says, learning activities propagate in complex fashions throughout the brain. We can't take a picture of the sea And say that's what the sea looks like or the whole ocean looks like. In the same way, we cannot take a simple picture of the brain and say this is what the whole brain looks like. But activities and learning activities propagate in complex fashions throughout the brain. When I was teaching my son Nicholas, my young son Nicholas who'd failed first grade, I started to write poems for him. Very simple poems. And we started to illustrate them. Immediately there was a change in our classroom. It wasn't long before we started to do far more complex things talking about Australia and many other complex poems, and particularly the poem that I talk about most, Captain Cook. Nicholas at this time was connecting the reading and writing to To our experiences, to seeing other maps, to questioning the world and questioning how the world map came together. This level of thinking didn't come from just doing and teaching him how to decode. And teaching him across a whole range of activities is how his brain started to connect. And it also started to show his strengths. But he's connecting information from all levels and putting the decoding on top of it. And that is what really drove me about the teaching of reading. It's not just about the learning to decode, but learning to decode sits in a bed or a nest of other language activities. And we can never forget that. Particularly when we are teaching our most vulnerable students, because we have to provide more support for them. We have to give them more knowledge and more understanding of not only letters and sounds, but how those words work and why they work and why they are so important for our students. So Lois Letchford, hit like, hit subscribe, and remember that learning activities propagate in complex fashions throughout the brain. Thank you.