Mind, Brain, (Body) and Education Science - A Conversation with Glenn Whitman

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

Research should be informing, but very rarely is education going to be solely or wholly based on research, right? Because again, I think it takes out what a lot of us have gone into the education space are, is about the art of teaching, the relationship, the EQ the best teachers had.

Hi, and welcome to another episode of the podcast. I'm your host, Tim Logan, and this week I'm really happy to be able to bring you this conversation I had with Glenn Whitman, who is a history teacher and executive director of the Center for Transformative Teaching and Learning at St. Andrew's Episcopal School in Maryland. Glenn is the co-author of NeuroTeach: Brain Science and the Future of Education, the co-designer of NeuroTeach Global, and co-editor of Think Differently and Deeply, the international publication of the Center for Transformative Teaching Teaching and Learning. Glen earned his Master of Arts in Liberal Studies from Dartmouth College and a BA from Dickinson College and has shared the work of CTTL through publications such as Edutopia, ASCD, and EdSearch and has presented around the world at public, private, and international school conferences including Learning Forward, New Teacher Center, Learning and Brain, and South by Southwest. You can connect with Glen on Twitter @gwhitmancttl or on LinkedIn to find out more about the Centre. Hello, Glenn. Hello, hello. How are you?

I'm great. Good to be connected.

Yeah, good to meet you finally. I know a bit about what you guys do, but I would love to think initially about some of the history of the development of the Centre for Transformative Teaching and Learning. So if we could kind of perhaps start there. And one of the things that struck me when I first heard about it was the word transformative, right? It's a powerful word. I would say it is getting thrown around quite a lot these days. Like, if it's not— if you're not transformative, then you may as well go home, right? But, you know, you guys have been doing this for a long time. And I just wondered, where did that come from as a title for the center? And then perhaps as part of answering that, you could just kind of give us a little bit of a brief history of the inception of the idea and how it connected to St. Andrew's Episcopal, the school, from the origins?

Yeah, no, layered and great questions certainly there, and they go hand in hand, obviously. So really, you know, we are a 43-year-old independent school outside of Washington, D.C., so we're young in a school market that actually has institutions that have been around since colonial America. So we are, we are babies in some level. Which also has given us some latitude and freedom to be, you know, innovative and, and think about how to change without some of the constraints of history and tradition, even though we do have history and tradition. We got on this sort of journey, I often say, in a somewhat of a lucky way in 2007. So really about 15 years ago. Schools sometimes do strategic planning. What's the next 5, 10 years for the school? And the question that was driving us somewhat in this process was how do you take good teachers and make them great, and great teachers and make them expert, right? So, and you can imagine, right, if you ask educators around the world what that answer would be, you know, we had 20-plus responses, right? Yeah, we, you know, starting with we need to know our content and stuff really well, all the way up to, you know, what's this edtech future? This is pre-COVID, no, none of us were talking about Zoom. So, you know, and then we had this throwaway question. I remember very distinctly, we sort of threw this question into a survey of How many to our teachers? So the N is like 100 people. How many of you have read a book on the brain, attended a conference on the brain, did some undergraduate or graduate work in the brain and learning? And, you know, we sort of had this sort of number around like 20, 23% said, yeah, I think I could probably answer that confidently that I, I mean, I've been in the space and, you know, we got to this thing, like maybe this is like the irony we should really focus on. Like, The brain is the organ of learning. It's gotta be with every kid every day at school. Shouldn't we actually just know more about it? And that was the sort of catalyst, I would say, for us to go explore, hey, what is the research field? And make some friends and, you know, talk to researchers out there and see what we might do with this. And our next question was, what if we train 100% of our teachers, every teacher, preschool through 12th grade? So if you're working for 2-year-old to 18, in the science behind how the brain learns. So we, you know, we headed down that path. And, you know, we decided how to do this and what body of research we were going to all collectively train in. And then, you know, around about 4 years later, in a very organic fashion, the external demand began to kick up, like, do you have any books, training workshops? Can we come visit?

Yeah.

And we're like, we're like, no, we're sort of just trying to figure this out. But it also said to us, maybe there is a way we can serve educators in the education community beyond our school. But then we needed a name for this thing. Like, what are we going to name this thing? The story behind that one is I was with my head of school, Robert Kozaski, and we were standing by a copier and just talking about neuroplasticity and the idea that students should be better in June than they are in September. And we also feel like teachers should be better. And one of us must have said, I don't know who was going to get the credit, maybe 30, 40 years down the road, we'll both claim it, that, you know, we're really, if we want to be within the science, we are we're changing brains, if we believe in neuroplasticity, maybe we even could say we're transforming the lives of kids and the organ of learning. What if we call this thing the Center for Transformative Teaching and Learning? We didn't hire an expert market consultant for that. The acronym's awful. CTTL has— we can't figure out how to use the letters to describe what we do. But in all seriousness, we as educators, you know this, I know this, and every teacher who might listen to this podcast knows, what we do is potentially transformative work. We can change trajectory of student lives. One great teacher, the research shows, can play that role for kids.

Absolutely.

And so if we can start thinking about how do we transform how teachers think about learning through beginning or elevating their understanding of how this brain learns, could that lead to even more transformation socially, academically for kids? And that's sort of how the term transformative stuck. We do believe it's a little backed by research in that we connected very well with neuroplasticity and the fact that a kid's brain at our school and all schools will change, hopefully for the better over their lifetime in any school they are around the world.

Yeah.

Long answer, but I hope that helps.

No, that's good. Yeah. Interesting. I mean, one of the other ways of looking at, I suppose, and what that was kind of part of my question was how much of it was about transforming teaching and learning. So it becomes a prefix to a different way of teaching and learning. I mean, it's a transformative approach to teaching and learning. Was that in there as well? I mean, how much, I suppose, has it transformed the pedagogy within St. Andrew's in terms of the way that the majority of your teachers are working?

Yeah, no, you're spot on. To transform the social-emotional academic development of students, we believe we needed better trained teachers to guide this work. And part of that in our belief was that every one of our teachers would understand the research behind topics like neuroplasticity, mindsets, you know, formative assessment, feedback, executive function, you name it, the field is vast. So, and the expectation for our teachers, we call it the 10% challenge. So every year we ask our teachers to use research to inform, transform, or even validate 10% of their practice. And it's actually, we wrote a book called NeuroTeach that Ian Kelleher and I wrote, and that was sort of our final chapter. 10% didn't seem, doesn't seem so threatening. 20% seems overly ambitious, and 15% are— I think we don't think it's a pretty, pretty enough number. But you're right, I think it's— we've taken now this whole school experience in that we think we can create better educators by elevating their understanding of the science of teaching and learning. We, we expect them to adjust their practice as well. And ultimately, the chief beneficiaries of all this work should be the end user. The end user is the student, right? We've also sort of began this work to give this, the science of teaching learning directly to students. So we do have a new innovative tool called NeuroTeach Global Student that we're piloting around the world right now to blow up how we teach study skills traditionally around the world.

Okay.

So I think it's a holistic transformation. It's ambitious. We work hard to try to measure it in quantitative and qualitative ways, but it might be less than empirical in some spaces for some of your listeners.

No. Well, I'd love to dig into a few of those things. I'll come— I'd love to come into the research piece in a bit because I think that's— it's a big one. I spoke to Dylan William last week, who's a— just an absolute legend in that, in that space. So yeah, I'd love to come back onto that. But one of the things you wrote on your blog was saying that the school has been an incubator for every new innovation that has then been shared with the global community. So I like that idea of having this kind of cross-fertilization between the center where you're intervening, supporting, training, and researching, probably all at the same time, but then supporting the teachers who are working with your students. So they become, as you say, the incubator. That's the incubator for how these developments are successful, how, how much they have an impact. And then as you go out to the global community, you know, in terms of courses and other things that you might share outside, but the first recipients, if you like, are your community. And one of the things, as I read that, it made me think of when I was working in Berlin, one of the parents was talking, you know, a grade 7 student, they were leaving unfortunately, but one of the things they were saying was, "It's great, all the kind of interesting, innovative things that you're doing, but for us, we don't wanna be part of the experiment." And, you know, obviously that's the one time that child gets to do grade 7, right? It's, you know, these are precious things. And this is one of the challenges of any shifts in the education system. Because of that fear around, well, what if it's not quite as good as the way it was being done before? And that kind of fear of innovation. And I wondered what your reflections were there on how have you developed the center and tried to be more innovative and try some things that perhaps didn't always work at the same time as having a parent community to serve and a bunch of teachers who are trying to get on with their job in the school. Sorry, very long-winded question, but I think you see where I'm going in terms of that. How does that cross-fertilization work successfully, or maybe what some of the challenges have been around that?

Yeah, you know, you mentioned Dylan, right? He's another one I can listen to read the phone book as often, right? And he might be, you know, he's got that Sean Connery look to me all the time. Like, you know, he's the educated version of Bond for me. But, you know, Dylan's been a great friend and an ally, and he's actually presented our summer academy. You know, I think we talk with him about the there's an art of teaching, right? And there's a science of teaching, but we are very cautious. And I think he would say this, and I think many good researchers would say that, you know, research should be informing, but very rarely is education going to be solely or wholly based on research, right? Because again, I think it takes out what a lot of us have gone into the education space are, is about the art of teaching, the relationship, the EQ that we all need, the best teachers have, you know, that secret sauce, right? That we have. But I will say this, like, there is a body of evidence that has been researched that is worthy of being tried out in almost every school around the world. But as Dylan would say, or even David Daniel, who's another good friend, all the research that we look at at St. Andrew's, what we call ready-made research, research that is done by others, is what is labeled as promising research. It wasn't done at our school. So we need to try it out in our context with our kids to see if it works. And I think that's a very thoughtful and responsible way to think about what evidence or research can do potentially for teacher practice and for student experience and achievement. When we began this work, the gap we saw was it still was very top-down. It was emanating from the research labs, which do not look anything like a traditional classroom experience, right? Or researchers or scholars who are writing about it and it might get to us or not. And I want to say us, I'm saying that pre-collegiate educator, but there wasn't a lot coming from the teacher or the schools out, and the tools were not very teacher-friendly. So to go to your question, when we started doing this work, when the center was launched, you know, we said, okay, what would help and make it more efficient for our teachers to translate this work into their practice? We needed everyday tools. So this is where we got to thinking like we need to use our school as a laboratory or as an incubator for teacher-friendly, next-day applicable, and maybe shareable tools and experiences. And what we realized when we did this is a couple things. One, we were professionalizing the practice. Our teachers really enjoyed those design moments where we're trying to think, how do we take, you know, 16 top because in mind-brain education science, and organize them in a way that a teacher can use and refer to easily. That led us— we have 3 very deliberate tools called our MBE Strategies Roadmap or Placemat, which organizes the promising research and strategies into these sort of one-stop-shop spaces that teachers can look at. It's sort of like when you watch an American football coach on the sidelines, and I know it's real football to folks like you or those outside America. And you know, you ever watch like Bill Belichick of the Patriots? He has this play sheet. Sheet, right? And it's sort of like, that's what our strategies roadmap— and we train educators around the world— our elementary teachers literally built that. And now they see the fruits of their labor, not only helping themselves and their colleagues, but now it's being shared and transformed around the world. So they— I think they walk a little taller about themselves when, when we come back and say, look, we were just in, you know, London, where we'll be this summer again, and sharing your work. Or sharing your stories.

Fantastic.

And you know, you know, it's also, you know, we have 2-year-olds to 18-year-olds, right? We have the whole continuum, and it gives us the space to try new research-informed strategies. I've really worked a lot this year on my own teaching. I teach 10th grade on formative assessment. I'm doing much more formative assessment now. Most parents would say to me, well, I didn't do that much formative assessment when I was in school, you know, is that really good teaching? Are using my kids as guinea pigs. And we're like, no, the research is suggesting this. We're trying it out. And we're not doing lobotomies. We're not, we're not hurting the kids, right? And the other good news is not only can we incubate with our faculty, but now we're using our students as research fellows for the center to incubate tools for them. And that has led us to this NeuroTeach Global Student product that all our 9th graders use or will use But then now students around the world can use as well to help their understanding of efficient learning strategies, whether it comes to how to study, how to take notes, how to engage in class, how to space practice, you name it.

Fantastic. Can you talk a little bit about how, what was that process in terms of both the elementary teachers and the students? How, how do you kind of facilitate that work coming from them and then taking it to formalize it? Into the other products or experiences?

Yeah, I mean, the, the way we've designed the CTTL sort of org structure is that we decided very early on we were going to anchor it with research leads for each of the 3 divisions. So an elementary or primary lower school group person, Chris Lewis, Eva Schultes sort of focused on our middle school team, and Ian Keller does upper school and then sort of oversees everything. And what we do is we keep trying to ask our colleagues, to start, or our external friends and partners around the world, and we have, we have a lot of them now, which is great. You know, what, what are some needs or challenges that you need either better tools from or access to the research? Because, you know, in a full day of an educator's life, there's only a finite amount of cognitive space that they can occupy, you know, trying to figure out what they should do next. So we try to sort of help in that translation. We see ourselves as a translational hub in terms of sharing the research and sharing of stories of implementation. So generally, in the case of our elementary roadmap, which is a tool that looks at the science of reading alongside the science of maths, as well as student well-being, knowledge acquisition, you know, we pulled together a team of 4 or 5 of our elementary teachers and, you know, worked as in a design thinking process an iterative process. The other element to it, though, is we always outsource and get our research checked by some of the, the leaders out there, right? So, you know, we've been fortunate over the years, like, gentlemen like Dan Willingham at UVA. He's helped us just look at, you know, what, what we write and think about in terms of reading, right? So trying to find those allies, and they exist, which is great. We bring something to this space that researchers would love. We have a school, we have teachers, we have classrooms. They bring this expertise in research methods and question development. And boy, when we work together, you know, that, that's when things are firing on all cylinders.

That's great. I've had Dan on the podcast and one of the things that I, I mean, he's amazing and, and he's actually just recently released his book on study skills for students directed at students, which is quite interesting, but it's good that it's targeting students, but one of the things he's very careful about, and Dylan as well, is not to prescribe what teachers should do and not to try— not to do that translational work himself. You know, he presents the robust research and then allows teachers to do with that what they will, right? And I think that's, that's an important piece of it because sometimes we do ourselves down as a profession when we go to the research and kind of ask to be told what to do. Actually, we're the ones that know our context. As you said, your context is different to one down the road in DC or in another country, you have a particular context and you've got to apply the research into that context. And so I think that's an interesting— yeah, the translation piece is an interesting bridge.

Yeah. You know, it's funny, you know, Dan and Dylan have presented at our summer academy and Dan was presenting, it was after his sort of Science of Reading book came out. And he did exactly like you said it, right? He's presenting to eager educators, right? And he sets the research. This is what the research is suggesting. And Like you said, a teacher raises his hand and says, "Dan, what should I do in my classroom?" He goes, "I don't know." And people were like, uh, but they got it, you know, but that's where the center comes in. We are the bridge between the researcher and the everyday teacher. You know, years ago it was thought of that. I think the title of the article was "A Bridge Too Far." Bridge Too Far.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Right.

And it's always referenced and it still sticks in our brain. Right. I'm having a senior moment. I'm 53. I can't remember the author. So I apologize to the author if they're listening. But, uh, the idea that it's too far to think, you know, neuroscience or cognitive science and that research can get into the classrooms, but it, but it can. And I also think, again, I'll go back to this concept. I think it professionalizes the practice. It asks teachers to not only be more evidence-informed, but here's where I think the next frontier is. And we work very closely with David Daniel and others about this. How do they start generating evidence in their context with their kids and sharing it out? I mean, and I still think it's, you know, action research seems to be a little intimidating for teachers. So there might be a little like softer experience, a lighter evidence generation. But when somebody like Dan and us work together, or Denise Pope or Tracy Tocum Espinoza, you know, there's an expertise they bring that we don't have. And there's an expertise and experience the everyday classroom in school has. And that is why we should work together. And, you know, but we're seeing these trends, like more in the UK in particular, of centers like ours developing to be these translational hubs. I would like to see them— and a shout out to anybody who's listening— you know, them to be a little more intentional in sharing their work globally with all types of schools: public, private, charter, international. And that's, that's part of the mission of our center, to really give tools to other folks to see what it looks like in their schools or classrooms.

Yeah, yeah. No, fantastic. I think it's absolutely important and it is, as much as it is very context-specific, there are some broader lessons we can learn from sharing some of that more broadly. I think there's a confidence issue professionally in doing that, but yeah, no, that's interesting. Just in terms, you mentioned your book, one of the things it would just be interesting to hear some of the specific things you lay out in the book NeuroTeach, in terms of what you are presenting as the evidence. I mean, I think you talk about them as your top 12, and you mentioned the 10% challenge, but there's the kind of the top 12 that structure the book. Just to give people a sense, what are some of— obviously not all of them, but what are some of those strategies or kind of research areas that you think are most important for teachers to know about?

When we wrote the book, right, we— in the opening part of the book, we had this overly simplistic true/false moment. Right? And we have these sort of true/false questions about teaching learning strategies, and it's never just true and false, right? We know that in education, but we wanted to provoke people to think hard about things. Now, the obvious one that the edge of Twitter goes nuts on all the time is, you know, let's not try to identify and teach to a student's individual learning style. Okay, I think, right, we know the research has not been done yet, and Howard Gardner's around the world saying, "I didn't mean it like that. Don't you guys open—" Right? And to be honest, I think it's good news, right? The research that if you can identify a student's learning style, teach to it, and assess it, that they're going to do better than a multiple modality, multiple sensory experience approach, right, has not been done. So yeah, like, I think I can speak from the I perspective though. If you asked me in 1991 versus 2022, how has research truly transferred me as a teacher? And again, I teach 15-year-olds a course called U.S., United States History in a Global Perspective. And what I didn't understand early in my career that I wholly understand now, and I really understand coming out of COVID is this connection between emotion and cognition, right? You know, challenge and well-being, right? And I give— I don't know if you've ever interviewed Mary Helen Imardino-Yang at USC. The best. Like, they're all the best, right? And no offense to all our other friends, right? But between Mary Helen and Denise Pope, in many ways, who's at Stanford, they transfer me as an educator. So, you know, I used to think, like, in 1991, I came out of college, was teaching high school history and middle school history. My attitude towards teaching was, I teach, they learn, right? They leave their identity, they leave their— you know, if they just broke up with their boyfriend, girlfriend, or whatever, that's not my job. It's not going to— keep that at the door. I understand the limbic system so much better now, you know, and I know the emo— we all should know a little bit about the emotional traffic up the amygdala, right? That's sort of housed stored near one of the chief memory centers. And, you know, I would early in my career say, look, I've taught this really well. Why isn't it there tomorrow? You know, or why is stress and anxiety of an upcoming test impacting how I teach? And so I would just say one of the sort of top 12, and as we rewrite the second edition, we'll even double down on it, is this interplay between emotion and cognition, you know, challenge and support, rigor and wellbeing. And it's not to lower the bar, right, at all. Let's keep the academic bar equitable and high for every kid, regardless of race, class, gender, sexual orientation. But some of the emotional barriers to getting the bar, teachers can make adjustments without feeling like they're sacrificing their professional ethics or whatever like that. So that's one. I would also think we talk a lot about formative assessment as one of the, you know, much more need for practice and spaced practice, right? I think was one of those key things. We at our school, St. Andrew's, we've exponentially increased the amount of formative assessment our kids do, low stakes or no stakes. We've even built it into project-based learning, right? Before you head in, we want to know if kids are ready for projects is certainly another one. Thinking about the science of reading. I know certainly there's still tension, but there's a pretty clear research base around this work. And I think it's gaining some further clarity as well. Thinking about the connection between diversity, equity, belonging, identity, work as it comes to academic achievement has been, I would say that's our 13th one. We've, we've been doing a lot of work at looking at this connection between diversity, equity, belonging, identity development, as it relates to academic journeys of students. You bring your identity to every class period as much as you bring your brain. Work around metacognition. It's one of those words that's thrown around there in education. And it's really all over the place. If you ask 20 educators to define it, I think you might get at least 60 different answers.

Exactly. I saw, I actually saw on Twitter, thread the other day. I think maybe it was Adam Boxer or someone had asked that exact question. I mean, what do people actually understand by it? Because it is such a broad term that people interpret differently, although there's clearly some— it's pointing at something which is really important, right?

Right. And the two others I'll mention in the book, I think executive function is in that same space, right? It's a loaded term. Every kid has executive function strengths and challenges. Every adult has executive function strengths and challenges. And the one that fascinated us, and to be honest, it's a chapter of the book that we would like more research on, is this work around the primacy recency effect, right? This idea that what you teach very early, first in a class period, and how you end the class have a high, very high percentage of chance that that's what's going to stick. And we're curious about this one is because I think the research was fair to good and needs to be good to great. So I would love a doctoral student out there who's listening to look at this work. And David Sousa has done some work in this area and others. Okay. I also think it's important because one of the outcomes of COVID at least in the States, is that schools have done a pretty good job of thinking about their daily schedule. Some of it was because of health and safety and wellbeing reasons during the height of COVID But that means like longer class periods, which what you can do in 60 minutes in a well-designed class versus 40, there is a difference, right? But it has to be well-designed. Yeah. So we keep thinking about that. We gave a chapter to this book and I titled it My Best Class Ever, trying to put forth this, the work around primacy and recency. But I would like to see us continue to research in that space to make it even more robust kind of work. So those are like 4 or 5 that jump out of me of our— doesn't, but we're going to add to that list or reshape it a little more as we go.

Yeah, good. Well, I mean, I think that reflects the reality of the fact that it's never a— you never arrive at a destination, right? It's always an ongoing process of researching, learning more, finding more out about a particular area. So no, I think that's, that's really important. One of the things you said towards the beginning was about the brain is the organ that does the learning. And I think one of some of the things you've just been saying there kind of link into my— one of the questions I wanted to ask slightly provocatively. But I think sometimes we set things up as teaching disembodied brains in a classroom. And as you've already highlighted, identity and feelings of belonging and just the emotion and cognition link. There is as I understand, a really important wave, I hope, of research coming that is highlighting just how strong those connections are and how the fact that we, these things don't just happen in our heads, you know, learning doesn't happen in our heads. Our minds don't exist within our brains and our learning is embodied and enacted and extended. And, you know, the kind of 4E cognition, cognitive science stuff that's coming out now. I think there's some really interesting developments there, which are challenging this idea that everything just happens in the brain. And I wonder what your, how does that fit with your approach? What, what are your reflections there on the way that we might internalize some of that research as we go forward?

Yeah, to be honest, I'm very enthusiastic about it. I have, I feel lucky to have a lot of mentors who I have a good friend, uh, out west at Dr. Sheila Walker. A neuroscientist herself. And when we talk about mind-brain education, she'll often say mind-brain-body in education. Like, she's at some point, at some point, Glenn, and we joke, you know, body's getting in there. And, you know, you might want to, you might want to trademark that and make your millions so you can retire well as an educator. But, but I think she's spot on. And I think while we might overly use the word brain, I, I don't think it's divorced at all from our thinking about Kids and adults are bringing their whole self and their whole body, right? I mean, even when we talk about nurture versus nature, you know, environment versus genes, right? You know, here's another example. You know, I am— 6 years ago, I never heard the word epigenetics. Like, you know, maybe my bio teacher said it when I was in high school, and I was a high school student. So likely I didn't— wasn't thinking about epigenetics. Yeah, right. Your emotion was somewhere else. But it's really made me think differently about stress and trauma, identity threat, and identity validation. If, if truly schools can have a negative epigenetic, right, that means, right, transferable to future generations impact, that to me means we got to think about how we design, build relationships, give kids time to physically move. You know, one of the responses to COVID in America, the concern was these learning gaps that emerged, right? Reading, writing, you know, maths. Well, school said we need more classroom time. What did they cut? They went right after the physical education, of course, work. So when you talk about body, the research is already there, you know, John Ratty's work and others about the importance of just movement, right? You know, So I say, look, if you guys want to add the word body to mind-brain education, sign me up in many ways. We need good research, as you can imagine. I think there's research already out there, and I have a lot to learn in the space, certainly around the body per se. But I don't think many teachers would say the body and the brain are divorced from each other. I do think though, we have to think deliberately though, how we're designing school and the experiences because the industrial model of education was not designed with mind-brain-body education research and strategies in mind. So now guess what? We just probably just named the field for this podcast.

Exactly. Well, and then it becomes highly transformative, right? Because you— because I think you're right, one of the challenges— because I think this is what— this is one of the things that's happened in the space when we've reached for the research, it's in order to improve our efficiency at doing the thing that the industrial model is set up for, right? Which is more and more propositional knowledge about US history in a global context, for example, in your course, right? Whereas perhaps this is a very open question, but perhaps there is a need for, for example, take US history in a global context, not just knowing about those things, Well, don't get me wrong, that's incredibly important, but also trying to understand and inhabit some of the perspectives that are involved in that conversation now and in the past, right? And how do we learn about the things that are going on there in that subject discipline, but not just in this way that is purely propositional about the, the facts, the figures, the beliefs involved, but how do we start to really more deeply understand at those deeper levels of knowing what that might mean. The body is not just about physically moving the body for me, but it's about actually learning some of these perspectives on the world or participating in some of those perspectives on the world in a way that takes learning to a deeper level. And it, you know, as soon as you hear yourself saying these things, it sounds, what does it sound? I don't know, a bit, a bit kind of fuzzy and a bit ethereal. But actually I think there's something that we need more than we're being, we're not being fed by the propositional knowing that's happening in schools. And we need, we need something else as well. Yeah. So I think that's part of it.

Yeah. I think I, if I, if I, I think I've got the way you just said it to me, I often tell our students, right. And I think, and, and it's definitely in the US society, you know, we talk about how do we stand in the shoes of others? Yeah. Whether it's intellectually with empathy, And, you know, we're not doing such a good job in America right now. Right. I mean, the opportunity I think is there, right. I still, at the most foundational level though, and I think it's a pathway to get there is, you know, is there truly a way to get every teacher around the world some foundational understanding? It's not, as far as I know, it's not, it's not required of every ed school in the United States or around the world. Shouldn't every teacher understand at minimum the foundational science, the most rigorous science and research that's transpired, how the brain learns? I think the body, as you've said it, both intellectually as well as physically, maybe needs to be more intentionally shaped in this work. But really that's like what we've seen that do for our faculty. And I can argue what it's done for me as an educator has truly been to go back to the word we talked about earlier, transformative. And to be honest, it's kept me in the classroom. It's kept me in education. And we know, you know, I'll just say, I'm And for those who are listening, whether they're teachers or school leaders, policymakers, in the United States and around the world, the teacher pipeline is worrisome, right? What is the next— how are we going to attract, retain, and develop the next generation of great teachers for the students who deserve every day and shouldn't have to get lucky to have a great teacher? And I would like to continue to think— maybe I have blinders here and you guys can tell me this— I believe one of the ways to make education exciting, for people is to show that there's a research base that most of us can agree on, that all educators should know. And there's space to incubate, as we talked about earlier, as an individual teacher, as a school. So America, you don't have to run to Silicon Valley to be the innovator. You know, teacher can be the innovator informed by research. So I don't know if that was too editorial or—

No, no, no. I mean, I appreciate your personal reflection on it because I would completely agree. And I, you know, not every teacher feels the same way. I recognize that. And they— some teachers get that spark of passion and joy from, from just, you know, the work with the children or, or whatever it is, from wherever they get it. But I agree, for me, discovering what I was never given in teacher training, which was this depth of research which just goes on infinitely, and it is infinitely fascinating about what do we know about about how human beings learn and grow. And it's not just Piaget and Vygotsky, it's, you know, and Dewey, if you're lucky, it's all this other stuff which is happening right now, which leads into all sorts of interesting and fascinating fields and right up to the cutting edge stuff. Like you say, Mary Helen Immordino-Yang and, and this, this really emergent idea around cognition and, and emotion, et cetera. You know, it does reinvigorate your professional kind of spirit and passion. It certainly did for me. And I agree, I think that would be an interesting way to support current teachers in practice, but also attract more. As, and as you said earlier, professionalize— it kind of helps to professionalize the experience of being a teacher as well.

Yeah, no, game on. Yeah, exactly.

Just one, one other thing I wanted to ask, just if I can. Again, it's a personal interest of mine, but I'm, I'm deeply fascinated by the work of Ian McGilchrist. And his new book. I don't know if you've seen his new book, The Matter with Things. So work around the right and left hemispheres of the brain. And I think that is extremely interesting work. Again, partly back to that idea of the propositional knowledge and we've become very left hemispheric dominant in the way that we see the world. We want to control everything and we want to, you know, and that's, you know, in some ironic ways that's about the looking for the evidence and the scientific perspective. But there is this right-hemispheric kind of way of attending to the world, which is much more expansive, much more open, much less about grasping the small details. So it's just an interesting area of both neuroscience and philosophy, psychology, et cetera, that I think is a very fascinating work.

No, as I, as I try to disprove the theory that You can't multitask. I'm looking at his website for a second, but you know, it's interesting in our work so far, and you've given me something to read. So thanks for the homework, you know, the hemispheric and the corpus callosum work. You know, one of the neuromyths out there always that we see about is this idea that I'm a left-brainer or I'm a right-brainer, right. And, you know, for a while, I don't know if you remember the book, Dan Pink, who actually lives near us in this area, wrote like, I think, Right-Brainers Will Rule the World or some book like that. And I remember we had some students or parents say, well, I'm a right-brainer. Right. And so it was very, and then I would say, you know, there is this thing called the corpus callosum and really under any educational experience in an fMRI, both hemispheres will light up, but not equally. But it really, you know, I'm really fascinated by this work of thinking about the role each of the hemispheres plays. And maybe, maybe we've overcorrected in education, just listening. Maybe we've overcorrected to one side, or maybe the model we have predominates one side. So more to come, but I love that.

Yeah. Good. No, it is interesting cuz it's, as you said, there's this kind of neuromyth, you know, as you said, learning styles or brain gym, these kinds of things. And they, they take a life of their own, maybe cuz as you say, someone popular writes a book about it. And that's one of the things Iain McGilchrist has had to fight against, he says, because a lot of people just disregard his ideas because of this neuromyth, but actually there's a deep science underneath all of it. And as you say, clearly it's ridiculously oversimplified to say I'm a right-brainer or a left-brainer, because both hemispheres are working. But the point being that they work differently. Yes. So the way that they interact with the world does have a different quality. And the way that we've set up education is very left-hemispheric, you know, just in general. I believe that. Yeah.

Uh, no, but it's, it's, it's great to have these moments to, to think hard with a friend. About the work. And I think, you know, for your listeners, you know, the CDTL wants to be an ally with educators around the world. So, you know, holler, email, tweet, uh, fantastic, you know. Yeah, love to stay connected with your audience.

Thank you, Glenn. That's brilliant. And you've added obviously the book NeuroTeach, and then you've got courses I think you're running on— there's a NeuroTeach Global website.

Yeah, yeah, we have a platform called NeuroTeach Global, and we are launching, uh, our NeuroTeach Global student experience this fall. And again, we want— we would love schools not only to use it, but to collect data from their users to see what it looks like in your context with your students. And that's—

and that, that means we're all generating evidence together, a community of practice. I love it. Amazing. Thank you, Glenn. Yeah, good stuff. Well, thank you very much for taking the time. I really appreciate it.

It's been a great conversation. My pleasure, sir.

Great to see you. Thank you.

Thanks for the opportunity. Great.

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