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126: Neuroinclusive Learning & the Brain w/ Michael Weingarth
31 Plays2 years ago
The thing I appreciate most about Michael Weingarth, and that will become clear as you listen to this episode, is his passionate intensity. He comes off like a man who has received wisdom, like a divine revelation. Yet bolstering that intensity and passion is the deep understanding of a body of literature from subfields of neuroscience calling into question what the current popular model of “raw cognition” - represented by #cogsci, ResearchEd, and elsewhere in professional development - leaves out. As well as how its premature generalization into school settings - often wrapped up in language of “evidence-based” or “research-based” practice - is derived from evidence & research that excludes disability & neurodivergence. The consequence is a school setting whose values & measures, pacing guides, practices & interventions center the mythical “normal”.
In this conversation we talk about the genesis of and the concepts surrounding Michael’s work as the Founder of Penelope Education, which educates teachers on why and how error patterns manifest across subject areas and grade levels- and more importantly, shows teachers how to pinpoint possible root causes and how to collaborate with students to build workarounds. Using neuroinclusive frameworks to create an anti-racist, feminist, anti-ableist education. As a side note, Michael recorded an addendum to his thoughts about cognitive compensation that I’ve added to the end of the episode. I hope you find this conversation as energizing as I did.
Guests
Michael Weingarth is the founder of Pillars of Learning and Penelope Education as an expert on brain science. His framework to examine compensatory patterns of cognition helps students achieve academically.
Resources
Recommended
Transcript
Understanding Brain Adaptability
00:00:00
Speaker
I think if we can get away from this idea that there is a solution, that there is a way that brains do things and instead just accept that it's always adapting, it's always dynamically responding to its environment.
00:00:11
Speaker
And if we know as much about that as possible, we're just better caretakers of not just the brain and the stuff that goes into it that equips it for stuff later in life, but of the human also.
00:00:22
Speaker
And if we make sure that we're caretakers of the human as well as the brain and we're adopting that policy of like,
00:00:28
Speaker
Knowing about the brain doesn't dismiss everything that we intuitively believe about helping kids navigate school.
00:00:34
Speaker
That's something where I think we can all benefit and sort of move away from that cog-sci one-dimensionality, that lack of criticality.
Episode Introduction
00:00:43
Speaker
Hello and welcome to episode 126 of our podcast at the Human Restoration Project.
00:00:48
Speaker
My name is Nick Covington.
00:00:50
Speaker
This episode is brought to you by our supporters, three of whom are Simeon Frang, Brandon Peters, and Lori Walker.
00:00:56
Speaker
Thank you so much for your ongoing support.
00:00:58
Speaker
You can find out more about our work at humanrestorationproject.org.
Questioning Cognitive Science Models
00:01:04
Speaker
The thing I appreciate most about Michael Weingarth, and that will become clear to you as you listen to this episode, is his passionate intensity.
00:01:12
Speaker
He comes off like a man who has received wisdom, like a divine revelation.
00:01:17
Speaker
Yet bolstering that intensity and passion is the deep understanding of a body of literature from subfields of neuroscience calling into question what the current popular model of raw cognition, as represented by hashtag cog sci, research ed, and elsewhere in professional development, leaves out.
00:01:34
Speaker
as well as how its premature generalization into school settings, often wrapped up in the language of evidence-based or research-based practice, is derived from evidence and research that excludes disability and neurodivergence.
Introduction to Penelope Education
00:01:48
Speaker
The consequence is a school setting whose values and measures, pacing guides, practices, and interventions center the mythical normal.
00:01:57
Speaker
In this conversation, we talk about the genesis of and the concepts surrounding Michael's work as the founder of Penelope Education, which educates teachers on why and how error patterns manifest across subject areas and grade levels, and more importantly, shows teachers how to pinpoint possible root causes and how to collaborate with students to build workarounds, using neuro-inclusive frameworks to create an anti-racist, feminist, anti-ableist education.
00:02:24
Speaker
And as a side note, Michael recorded an addendum to his thoughts about cognitive compensation that I've added to the end of the episode.
00:02:31
Speaker
I hope you find this conversation as energizing as I did.
Michael's Teaching Background
00:02:49
Speaker
Michael Weingarth, how are you doing, sir?
00:02:52
Speaker
I'm great.
00:02:52
Speaker
How are you, Nick?
00:02:53
Speaker
So let's just start the conversation with the beginning for you.
00:02:57
Speaker
Like what?
00:02:57
Speaker
What's your story?
00:02:58
Speaker
What's your background?
00:03:00
Speaker
What are your interests and passions?
00:03:02
Speaker
What have you been up to?
00:03:04
Speaker
Yeah.
00:03:04
Speaker
So, you know, I'm a former classroom teacher from 2010 to 2012.
00:03:08
Speaker
I was teaching at a quote unquote rigorous private school, right?
00:03:12
Speaker
With these kids who were going to Ivy League schools and all the elitism.
00:03:17
Speaker
And I was there and I encountered a student for whom I was pretty sure was just kind of shy and not that into my English class.
00:03:24
Speaker
Right.
00:03:25
Speaker
And after about six months, I had a
00:03:28
Speaker
I had to administer a grammar exam.
00:03:29
Speaker
And on this grammar exam, it became clear that this student really couldn't actually pick up what she was reading.
00:03:35
Speaker
And so like a little bit, you know, a week later or two, she gets evaluated and it turns out she has a subtype dyslexia.
00:03:42
Speaker
And for six months, you know, I was a person who did my, you know, professional development.
00:03:46
Speaker
I went to the learning in the brain conference.
00:03:48
Speaker
I read all the cognitive science books, the bestsellers, and I was convinced I was doing a great job pedagogically.
00:03:54
Speaker
And, uh,
00:03:55
Speaker
You know, I couldn't realize that the student couldn't read, which, you know, is weird because she could read in some ways.
00:04:02
Speaker
And in other ways, the important ways that I was missing the cues on was where she was struggling.
00:04:07
Speaker
And it's not because I wasn't paying attention to the student.
00:04:09
Speaker
It's because I had no clue how to separate out my own conceptions of what reading looked like from what it looks like from a neuropsychological perspective.
00:04:17
Speaker
Shortly after that, I left the classroom to kind of dive into that question of like, how did I miss this?
00:04:22
Speaker
And
00:04:23
Speaker
why would anyone miss this?
00:04:24
Speaker
And bear in mind, she came to me after being at the school for two years and no one had figured out that this was a problem.
Founding a Neuropsychological Tutoring Company
00:04:30
Speaker
Um,
00:04:31
Speaker
So that led me to found a tutoring company, which really looked at not just helping kids one-on-one, but actually using neuropsychological theory and constructs and language to teach kids about the ways in which their brains manifest certain behaviors or responses to certain stimuli and trying to get them to a place where they could make themselves self-sufficient and not need a tutor and not really need help and be able to describe their struggles without the need for
00:04:57
Speaker
extra help constantly with the teacher or this belief that they're quote unquote, just bad at.
00:05:01
Speaker
And this all stemmed from a fundamental reason why I got into teaching, which is that I always believed there was no reason a student could not get better at something if you gave enough time and energy to it, which I know might be naive in some respect, but hey, you know, that's, that's what drew me to education.
00:05:14
Speaker
And so for about 12 years, I ran Pillars of Learning, which was my tutoring company.
00:05:20
Speaker
And that really taught me a lot about how brains actually work, not just what you read in those cognitive science bestsellers or what you get in someone's bullet points from their talk at learning in the brain or all those things.
00:05:32
Speaker
And then I decided I wanted to do something a little different.
00:05:35
Speaker
I got a little, you know, I'm a little burnt out on the just working with kids for whom they're stuck between a rock and a hard place.
Penelope Education's Frameworks
00:05:41
Speaker
And I founded Penelope, which basically takes what I do and tries to equip schools to do the same thing, which is teach teachers how to use everyday vocabulary to look at what a student's dealing with.
00:05:52
Speaker
So describing question stimuli, answer stimuli, cross-referencing that with knowledge they can get about neuropsychological phenomenon like
00:06:01
Speaker
or components like executive functioning, processing, perceptual cues, looking at all of these to say, when you're describing what a student's missing, here's how you can do it in a way that actually lets the student get at a pattern.
00:06:13
Speaker
So it's instead of just this idea of like, I'm analyzing their work, I know what's going on, it sort of tries to place the focus on common vocabulary that can be used across subjects.
00:06:23
Speaker
And if you're really into this, like Penelope is what we're hoping to do is help schools develop
00:06:27
Speaker
qualitative brain-based data system.
00:06:29
Speaker
So looking at neuropsychological language across an entire curriculum, across policy, across everything about how students are supported, how they're learning, how they're being assessed with the goal of saying like, actually what the school is missing are these components of executive functioning or of processing cues or whatever.
00:06:45
Speaker
and helping schools realize there's these gaps which are really easy to fill if you can locate them.
00:06:50
Speaker
But oftentimes teachers especially, but administrators also don't have the language to say, that's what this thing is.
00:06:57
Speaker
It's planning.
00:06:59
Speaker
Let's say we know that 50% of our 10th graders aren't great at planning essays or outlining essays.
00:07:05
Speaker
It's not really planning essays.
00:07:06
Speaker
It's a bunch of other things that go into that.
00:07:08
Speaker
And if you have these types of systems in place or just some training
00:07:12
Speaker
where you're teaching the teachers how to do it, they can catch these things that can identify them, they can separate them out into categories, and then you can work on them.
00:07:19
Speaker
The same way that a trainer can rehab, you know, a tiny little tendon issue in your foot that ultimately leads to your knees splaying out when you land, when you run, which ultimately leads you to tearing your ACL.
00:07:33
Speaker
The goal of Penelope is to treat everyone and get everyone to that level of expertise.
00:07:37
Speaker
So they're like that trainer saying it's a tendon and we can figure that out and we can test it and see how it reacts up the chain rather than waiting for the catastrophe and needing the surgery.
00:07:48
Speaker
So that's ultimately the goal of Penelope is teaching teachers and teaching administrators how to get to that degree of precision using layperson language as well as the more technical ones to identify brain-based patterns.
Role of Neuropsychology in Education
00:08:01
Speaker
And that's what's most exciting to me right now is sort of bringing that to people that have no clue what neuropsychology is, or who think executive functioning is solely about a book bag and how organized it is, or people who imagine that neurobiologically, there's the prefrontal cortex, and that's the only thing that does the thinking and the learning, and it's not connected to any other part of the brain.
00:08:21
Speaker
And then if you know enough neuroanatomy, you can describe learning.
00:08:25
Speaker
That's ultimately enriching that field is my goal and sort of bring it to a larger, more complex set of interaction.
00:08:33
Speaker
One of the most powerful parts of what you're explaining there is something that is not generally included in teacher education.
00:08:40
Speaker
It probably isn't something that's part of, you know, getting your admin licensure and kind of, you know, moving the chain of policy and practice, I suppose.
00:08:49
Speaker
And that's that neuropsychological component.
00:08:51
Speaker
So when you talk about the work that you were doing with that student in that tutoring context, one thing that we've talked about is that work with, you know, those twice exceptional students and how they don't fit into those, I guess, those boxes that neuropsych that educators kind of get in our own toolbox to solve those problems.
00:09:10
Speaker
And then the systems box on how to
00:09:13
Speaker
resolve and provide supports for those kids.
00:09:15
Speaker
It just doesn't seem to fit into all of those.
00:09:17
Speaker
So they kind of face challenges from both of those ends.
00:09:19
Speaker
I'm wondering if you could go into a bit of that, that neuropsych component, like what is it that we are missing that you are honestly like such a knowledgeable and passionate kind of advocate for pulling back that curtain and looking at the ways in which our cognitive models applied to school have failed a lot of kids, but particularly these kids, the twice exception here.
00:09:42
Speaker
And then just maybe go more into that if you are able to just talk more about how, you know, those kids kind of fall in the cracks specifically.
Critique of Educational Labels and Models
00:09:50
Speaker
Yeah, sure.
00:09:51
Speaker
I mean, first of all, I just want to be clear that twice exceptional is not a label I think is good or accurate.
00:09:57
Speaker
It's a label that's given to kids based on two inadequate systems to address problems.
00:10:04
Speaker
potential and labeling kids in terms of their potential, to me, strikes me as something horrible that we should never seek to do.
00:10:11
Speaker
But that's what we have currently.
00:10:14
Speaker
So just so you're clear, twice exceptional is someone who would be categorized as both learning disabled, again, not a word I would choose to use, and gifted, which again, not a word I would choose to use.
00:10:23
Speaker
But that's the language that we have that's given to us by legal entities.
00:10:27
Speaker
and state policies and whatnot.
00:10:29
Speaker
So a twice exceptional student has to be tested, you know, a variety of ways to identify what the issue is.
00:10:35
Speaker
The problem with this is that a variety of twice exceptional learners, in shorthand people will call them 2E if you read that anywhere,
00:10:42
Speaker
A lot of them don't actually get their issues located when they take a neuropsychological evaluation.
00:10:48
Speaker
So to back this up a step, neuropsychology itself as a field looks at three major components, which is neurodegenerative brain injury or disease, which is important.
00:10:58
Speaker
And that's stuff we should definitely be looking at and caring about.
00:11:01
Speaker
The second one, which has gotten the most attention relative to education, is concussions, which is also really important.
00:11:07
Speaker
And the last one, which gets the least amount of funding, is learning difference and how to identify it and what to do with it and how to test for it.
00:11:14
Speaker
Within neuropsychology, the school of thought or the field, rather, is school neuropsychology, which is what most of the people that you might come in contact with who are evaluating the children in your classrooms, that's the person that's going to be doing it.
00:11:27
Speaker
That was their specialty.
00:11:28
Speaker
And in school neuropsychology, their primary duty is a couple things, but one of them, which eats up most of their time, is every kid that gets hit really hard in the head, you have to evaluate them to make sure they don't have a concussion, which is good.
00:11:41
Speaker
We should do that.
00:11:42
Speaker
That's important.
00:11:43
Speaker
But it also means that if there's just one person doing this in an entire school district, they're relatively crunched for time in terms of actually doing tests to tease out subtle differences in a learning profile.
00:11:54
Speaker
When you read the textbooks about how to train as a neuropsychologist or just guidebooks, you know, practitioners, handbooks, whatever, they'll tell you, here are these confidence intervals.
00:12:02
Speaker
You can't always trust them, but they're a rough guy, right?
00:12:05
Speaker
And so if you're bottom of one confidence interval, top of another in a related field, maybe that's not really an issue, right?
00:12:10
Speaker
Maybe that's not actually two separate categories.
00:12:13
Speaker
Maybe you're just sort of in this range where they're both really similar.
00:12:16
Speaker
Yeah.
00:12:17
Speaker
The problem is that if there is something significant there and you're swamped with seven other kids to evaluate to make sure they didn't get a concussion, you're stuck basically choosing between, do I spend more time doing this or do I do this other thing that I need to do?
00:12:32
Speaker
And it's not ultimately up to you because it's also based on the amount of tests you can order based on your budget.
00:12:37
Speaker
If you're in private practice, that's not an issue, but that's expensive.
00:12:41
Speaker
Sometimes insurance will reimburse you for a private neuropsychological evaluation.
00:12:44
Speaker
Other times it's not.
00:12:45
Speaker
And most states issue what's called psychoeducational testing as their first step and try to identify a learning difference if a kid gets referred.
00:12:52
Speaker
Psychoeducational testing is an IQ test, which I've written on extensively about their history and links to
00:12:58
Speaker
eugenicist scientists and the ways in which it hasn't evolved much since then.
00:13:01
Speaker
And there's still lots of problems with anything related to measurable intelligence as a field.
00:13:07
Speaker
They're used in conservatorship cases for individuals with intellectual disability to decide if they have agency over their own life or not.
00:13:13
Speaker
And the fact that these tests were really designed never to actually measure anyone with an IQ below a certain cutoff.
00:13:19
Speaker
speaks to the problem of trying to update that test and fill in the gaps.
00:13:23
Speaker
So there's a lot of problems with IQ testing as a whole.
00:13:25
Speaker
But if you want to get to this place of being 2E, fundamentally, someone has recognized that you have latent gifts or talents, and you have this natural ability in some way that seems like you're smart, and you have these other things that seems like you're not as smart.
00:13:40
Speaker
That's basically like the lay teacher's description of what will happen, right?
00:13:44
Speaker
They're great at this, but then this happens, and then they can't do it at all.
00:13:47
Speaker
And it's weird also because you can be twice exceptional and it doesn't have to be domain specific.
00:13:52
Speaker
For instance, you can be a brilliant math student with illegible handwriting.
00:13:56
Speaker
And that means you may have dysgraphia or a series of fine motor coordination problems and that would qualify as a learning disability.
00:14:02
Speaker
So you'd be twice exceptional.
00:14:04
Speaker
But the only indication was that no one could read your handwriting, which if you only type is never a problem.
00:14:09
Speaker
So...
00:14:10
Speaker
There's all these weird ways in which twice exceptional as a label is only existent because of various systems pushing kids into certain categories.
00:14:18
Speaker
Giftedness really also shouldn't even be a category.
00:14:22
Speaker
Neither should learning disabled.
00:14:24
Speaker
Really what we should develop is a system that seeks to free ourselves from the need to segregate children into different groups.
00:14:31
Speaker
And I agree that there's some kids who are best served by being grouped with peers who are facing the same issues.
00:14:36
Speaker
But the problem isn't that that's not possible.
00:14:39
Speaker
Like that's possible in a totally unsegregated classroom.
00:14:43
Speaker
It's just not what we do now.
00:14:44
Speaker
We have systems in place.
00:14:46
Speaker
We have training models in place.
00:14:47
Speaker
We have evaluation models in place.
00:14:49
Speaker
And we're not really willing to invest any money into change them.
00:14:52
Speaker
So that's how we get to the systems piece.
00:14:54
Speaker
If we go back just to twice exceptional learners, if we're going to talk about them this way, is that
00:15:00
Speaker
Nothing that they have shows up on evals most of the time.
00:15:04
Speaker
That's because evals are bad at catching subtypes of dyslexia, subtypes of, sorry, anything to do with autism, nonverbal learning issues, which fundamentally would be what looks like autism without other hallmarks of autism.
00:15:17
Speaker
That's a nifty way to describe that kind of problem.
00:15:20
Speaker
executive dysfunction that's specifically around symbol system dysfunction.
00:15:24
Speaker
So this wouldn't be a kid who's disorganized.
00:15:25
Speaker
This would be a student who can't transfer rules of exponents successfully over to chemistry or can't differentiate between the rules of chemistry, which involve subscripts and exponents, which involve hyperscripts, obviously going up, right?
00:15:39
Speaker
Rather than down.
00:15:40
Speaker
And so stuff like that, where you see these bizarre patterns of error, where you can't quite describe them,
00:15:46
Speaker
Students who have those will fall through evaluation holes where they just keep getting referred for more and more testing and nothing shows up.
00:15:53
Speaker
And so twice exceptional students often get squeezed because they're bored, right?
00:15:58
Speaker
And they're simultaneously very frustrated that they can't learn certain things or can't do certain things.
00:16:03
Speaker
And really what they're actually frustrated with is that no one's teaching them how to do certain things because there's beliefs about their smartness, which is preventing a teacher from realizing what's going on.
00:16:13
Speaker
For handwriting, how could you possibly have such bad handwriting if you're so good at such complex stuff?
00:16:19
Speaker
Often teachers don't have that connection that there's two separate parts of learning and doing this or thinking about it, right?
00:16:26
Speaker
That
00:16:27
Speaker
that make up that task.
00:16:28
Speaker
So it's this idea that handwriting should be easy.
00:16:31
Speaker
It's a fundamental skill, right?
00:16:33
Speaker
And that doing algebra as a fifth grader is genius level work.
00:16:36
Speaker
And how could there be such a disconnect?
00:16:39
Speaker
And that's largely due to a cultural way that we understand learning and intelligence, which is this kind of bottom up acquisition of skills that go along the way.
00:16:47
Speaker
And if there's any problems, right, that means you have a learning struggle.
00:16:50
Speaker
And that's not really what happens at all.
00:16:52
Speaker
it's way more similar to a body in that you can have a kid who goes through a growth spurt and is 5'10 as a third grader and then stops growing for a long time and then maybe hits another one when they're 18.
00:17:02
Speaker
I have no idea how likely that is, but I just know that bodies don't follow a uniform linear developmental path, right?
00:17:09
Speaker
They're all unique.
00:17:10
Speaker
They all compensate.
00:17:11
Speaker
They all have this
00:17:12
Speaker
adaptive ways of responding to the tasks that they're asked to do and the environment that they exist in.
00:17:18
Speaker
Brains do the same thing, but for some reason, we've convinced ourselves that it all tracks linearly and first grade is time for this and second grade is time for that, so on
Cognitive Compensation Strategies
00:17:26
Speaker
and so forth.
00:17:26
Speaker
And the problem with 2E is just, it's not so much that they're not developing, it's that they're doing stuff which
00:17:32
Speaker
is remarkable and unique and wonderful.
00:17:35
Speaker
And it's instead of being labeled as that, people are just mystified by this discrepancy between excellence in one area and profound struggle in another.
00:17:44
Speaker
Could you unpack that notion of cognitive compensation for us as a framework?
00:17:51
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't posit it as a solution to anything explicitly, but it's a really good way to unpack what we have in terms of systems and how they've labeled kids, you know, accurately or not.
00:18:03
Speaker
It's a great starting place.
00:18:04
Speaker
And it's also a useful way for teachers to get to that place of sort of anti-ableist framing of how they're looking at student error and also ensuring that they're looking at the right ways of error longitudinally so that they can get students to that place with self-sufficiency.
00:18:17
Speaker
To explain it really simply as a phenomenon, all brains compensate all the time.
00:18:21
Speaker
The easiest example, which is if you read neuropsychological textbooks, this is always in there, but if you get hit in the temple with a baseball, you go temporarily blind due to some brain swelling or some local swelling.
00:18:32
Speaker
And then you're relying on your other senses to move about the world and you don't perish.
00:18:37
Speaker
You know, it's not like that stops you and kills you.
00:18:39
Speaker
Your inability to see doesn't utterly mean that you can't function.
00:18:43
Speaker
So cognitive compensation, that's one example of it, right?
00:18:46
Speaker
Which is just neural pathways are unavailable.
00:18:48
Speaker
The brain uses other ones.
00:18:50
Speaker
What's interesting about cognitive compensation, if I could say it, in an educational context is that kids do this all the time in super inventive ways.
00:19:00
Speaker
And
00:19:01
Speaker
one of these happens all the time with like subtraction, right?
00:19:04
Speaker
So when I was being taught math, there is a big thing about you have to learn to carry the one when you're doing subtraction.
00:19:10
Speaker
And there's new ways of teaching math that don't involve this, but
00:19:14
Speaker
For a long time, if you couldn't carry the one and didn't do this sort of vertically aligned way of doing subtraction, you wouldn't learn subtraction the way you're supposed to, right?
00:19:24
Speaker
You might be getting the right answers, but you couldn't demonstrate that you were right or back up your reasoning that you were right because you were just doing it in a way in your own head that made a lot of sense.
00:19:32
Speaker
And maybe you were calculating like, you know, moving into negative numbers and then subtracting the second two-digit number after you've moved into that negative or adding the negative back in.
00:19:41
Speaker
But you didn't necessarily, you're nothing wrong with the way you were doing it in your head if you weren't carrying the one and still getting the right answer.
00:19:47
Speaker
That's a compensation pattern.
00:19:49
Speaker
It's not necessarily even a compensation pattern because there wasn't something there.
00:19:54
Speaker
It's only compensation when a teacher says, you can't do it that way.
00:19:58
Speaker
You have to do it this way.
00:20:00
Speaker
And now your brain has to kind of like ditch this thing that was easy and route through a different way of doing it that you're not told to.
00:20:06
Speaker
It happens the other way too, where let's say you're not doing something, the way that you are doing something isn't working.
00:20:12
Speaker
So let's say I'm trying to do an analytical English paper, right?
00:20:16
Speaker
Which I couldn't write for the first two years of my high school career because I didn't understand what the point of it was.
00:20:21
Speaker
And so I'm regurgitating what a teacher says, and I'm guessing that these are important quotes to talk about, but I have no clue what the point is or what the purpose of it is because I don't care about what I'm writing and I don't care about what I'm reading.
00:20:32
Speaker
And I'm just trying to do this to get a good grade.
00:20:36
Speaker
My brain's compensating because I'm attempting to map to something which I don't know what it is.
00:20:42
Speaker
Compensation really, when we talk about, like, those are light examples.
00:20:46
Speaker
What we really talk about for this is students who are actually dealing with something significant.
00:20:50
Speaker
And in reality, you know, what's going to become clear at the end of this conversation, my emotional reluctance to invest in my poorly taught English class in ninth and 10th grade actually is a serious neurobiological block.
00:21:04
Speaker
That student's inability to feel validated by their teacher when they're doing subtraction in a cool, unique way is also a completely legitimate neurobiological phenomenon.
00:21:13
Speaker
What we care about really with compensation and the easier way to understand it is something more concrete in the brain, like a neural pathway that genetically will not open.
00:21:22
Speaker
So let's say this was an executive function around segmenting.
00:21:26
Speaker
And let's say particularly it's really acute for a student segmenting more than two numbers at a time.
00:21:31
Speaker
So they're great with two digit addition, subtraction, multiplication.
00:21:35
Speaker
All of a sudden they get to three and it's very hard for them to break it apart.
00:21:38
Speaker
It just becomes too much.
00:21:40
Speaker
or let's say it's polynomials.
00:21:42
Speaker
If there's more than three elements in a polynomial, like 4x squared or 4x minus 7x cubed, it just breaks down for them.
00:21:49
Speaker
And they can't figure out how to move forward.
00:21:52
Speaker
And it feels like they're frozen.
00:21:53
Speaker
And they'll describe it as being too hard or never knowing how to start.
00:21:57
Speaker
And they look to a teacher for a process, right?
00:22:00
Speaker
And so they get a process, but ultimately they may never understand what it means fluidly to understand those things at a deep level.
00:22:07
Speaker
Instead, they just know when I see this, I have an algorithm that I apply.
00:22:11
Speaker
The hope of all math and of all teaching in general is that eventually with enough of those, you get to a place where you could put the pieces together and it makes more sense.
00:22:18
Speaker
But the problem for so many of these kids is that if it actually is something neurobiological in nature, there won't be a point at which it just goes click until it's someplace in a context for them that it works, right?
00:22:31
Speaker
And so you may never get it in school and you may never actually have it in your life.
00:22:35
Speaker
You might just be something that you're told that you're not good at and that's the narrative you run with and you don't ever investigate it.
00:22:40
Speaker
So what thinking about compensation does is instead of saying this student can't do this task, it says the student can't do this task.
00:22:48
Speaker
And we absolutely have to investigate why on certain factors that I would never normally think about, like literally counting the number of digits and then asking every other teacher that this student deals with, where does this student seem to struggle?
00:23:02
Speaker
And seeing if I can figure out what that means.
00:23:04
Speaker
Is it about working memory?
00:23:05
Speaker
Like how many numbers a brain can hold at a given time?
Survivorship Bias in Education
00:23:08
Speaker
Is it about separating things apart?
00:23:10
Speaker
Is it about attention span?
00:23:11
Speaker
Is it last year's math teacher?
00:23:13
Speaker
Did they have a bad experience?
00:23:14
Speaker
And I'm not, this is going to make it sound like I'm asking a teacher to do all this investigation themselves.
00:23:19
Speaker
But the point is that if you adopt this as a framework that you're trying to work with,
00:23:22
Speaker
Everybody will know how to do this.
00:23:24
Speaker
Everybody will know how to pass information on in a way that's helpful.
00:23:26
Speaker
And there's also a common vocabulary for things like executive dysfunction around segmenting, for instance.
00:23:31
Speaker
So you could say like, you know, they were fine, but once we got to shapes, they had a really hard time breaking up like the different angles, right?
00:23:37
Speaker
Or figuring out how to count the number of angles inside a shape.
00:23:40
Speaker
Or they couldn't figure out how to translate, right?
00:23:42
Speaker
To manipulate, to think about rotating a shape or transforming it or making it bigger or smaller.
00:23:47
Speaker
And all of these things will provide connections and insight into what's happening for that student more than Tommy doesn't do well with three-digit numbers.
00:23:56
Speaker
Like Tommy cannot do well with three-digit numbers for any number of reasons.
00:24:00
Speaker
But compensation and thinking about it actually lets you investigate why.
00:24:04
Speaker
And so it combats survivorship bias, which I've talked about a little bit on Twitter, not a ton, but that's this idea that we don't investigate failure because we assume we understand what causes
Precise Identification of Learning Issues
00:24:14
Speaker
it.
00:24:14
Speaker
And that sort of comes from an example of World War II where this refugee statistician, Abraham Wald, was dealing with a bunch of engineers.
00:24:23
Speaker
And they were like, all these planes came back from defending London after the Battle of Britain.
00:24:28
Speaker
We should reinforce the places where the planes took damage.
00:24:30
Speaker
And Abraham Waltz was like, no, we need to reinforce the places that, you know, like the planes didn't come back or what we need to reinforce.
00:24:38
Speaker
We need to find them and figure out what went wrong.
00:24:40
Speaker
And that's what we care about.
00:24:41
Speaker
But we can't see that.
00:24:42
Speaker
So we don't know what to do.
00:24:43
Speaker
These planes made it back.
00:24:44
Speaker
There's not an issue here.
00:24:46
Speaker
So the idea with survivorship bias is that we have all these reasons for failure.
00:24:51
Speaker
And survivorship bias is also heavily tied into this concept of measurable intelligence, which I spoke to a little bit, spoke about a little bit earlier.
00:24:59
Speaker
But the idea here is that any teacher can look at a pattern of errors and decide if they know enough, neuropsychologically, this may be what's going on.
00:25:07
Speaker
I'm going to talk to the student about it.
00:25:08
Speaker
Let's see if we can give them vocabulary for describing this error.
00:25:12
Speaker
And then the student might say, yes, that's perfectly it.
00:25:15
Speaker
Like I have a real problem with segmenting any digit, any number more than three digit numbers, or they might not.
00:25:21
Speaker
They might be like, no, I just don't like this stuff.
00:25:23
Speaker
But you have a better inroad than just being like, you're bad at this.
00:25:27
Speaker
Here's more problems of the same thing to do to practice this in different contexts until you get better at it.
00:25:34
Speaker
And the idea with all of this, though, is that we're assuming that error is discrete.
00:25:39
Speaker
We're assuming that it's decontextualized, and we're assuming that it can be remediated if you just practice it more in isolation.
00:25:47
Speaker
All of it's connected to a much richer and more complex system than we're aware of.
00:25:51
Speaker
And compensation also means that you're aware of those systems and you're getting educated about effective neuroscience, how emotion connects to learning.
00:25:58
Speaker
You're getting aware of perception and how connected it is to your brainstem.
00:26:02
Speaker
That perception itself may trigger an emotional response or a, sorry, a response in your fight or flight system
00:26:10
Speaker
you know, your sympathetic nervous system, which shuts down your ability to function for a moment.
00:26:14
Speaker
And that's okay.
00:26:15
Speaker
That's, you can recover from that.
00:26:16
Speaker
And like, but if you, if you know this as a teacher, you're that much more sensitive and adept at figuring out what's going on for a student when they're struggling, rather than this blanket pushing of like, just this stamp of like, you know, not good or incorrect or didn't do this to task.
00:26:31
Speaker
I think most teachers that I hope most teachers who care about their students are trying to establish those connections, trying to figure out how can I help this student help themselves?
00:26:41
Speaker
Compensation just gives you more precise vocabulary, more education, and more knowledge about stuff that isn't taught in teacher training or professional development currently.
00:26:50
Speaker
And plugs those gaps, hopefully.
00:26:53
Speaker
And it's not exact.
00:26:54
Speaker
It's not a solution.
00:26:55
Speaker
It's not a silver bullet.
00:26:56
Speaker
I want to be absolutely clear about this.
00:26:57
Speaker
Learning this does not mean that all of a sudden you see error patterns and you're like, you know, one of those geniuses with the numbers floating around your head, you know, or writing on a clear board, right?
00:27:08
Speaker
With the whiteboard marker, that meme, whatever that is.
00:27:12
Speaker
It's really, it's just about like, you get a better chance at identifying a deep pattern that happens for a student across their entire life and will continue to happen.
00:27:20
Speaker
And I think that's the other key component difference of compensation versus regular remediation, right?
00:27:26
Speaker
Is that remediation, you're just looking at a specific thing, practicing it until it makes sense, then you send the student on their way.
00:27:31
Speaker
Compensation, you're basically looking at a neural pathway difference.
00:27:35
Speaker
And you're trying to say your brain wants to, by default, do these things.
00:27:38
Speaker
Let's try to train it habitually to do these other things when it recognizes these factors are present.
00:27:44
Speaker
So if we go back to that rehab example of like there's a problem in my foot with a tendon, it might be that I need to think about lifting my arch of my foot and like pulling it in by like pushing my balls of my feet towards my heels because I can't just think about lifting my arch when I land.
00:27:59
Speaker
But if I do that, it fixes the tendon problem and then my knee doesn't splay and then I don't re-tear my ACL after I've had it repaired already once for doing this in the first place.
Criticism of Cognitive Load Theory
00:28:08
Speaker
The whole point of this is that we give more subtlety, more precision, more depth
00:28:12
Speaker
more training in a really condensed amount of time because this stuff actually maps to student activity really well.
00:28:21
Speaker
Unlike something like cognitive load theory, which maps very well to teacher activity.
00:28:26
Speaker
You know, it doesn't map necessarily to what a student is experiencing in a given moment because there's no way to know that without giving fMRIs to every one of your students.
00:28:34
Speaker
But cognitive load theory makes a very compelling case for how to make an excellent lecture slide and how much information should be on it and how it should be portrayed.
00:28:41
Speaker
But that may, like, there's no way to know how that's going to impact a student who has a visual processing disorder.
00:28:47
Speaker
You might have dual coded it.
00:28:48
Speaker
And the fact that you chose a visual stimuli has completely ruined it for that one student.
00:28:53
Speaker
But we never know that.
00:28:54
Speaker
And there's very few studies that are going to actually tease out to say, here's how it impacts neurodiverse learners.
00:28:59
Speaker
Here's how it impacts students with this particular subset of issues.
00:29:02
Speaker
Instead, it's always averaged or norm referenced, which is not helpful at all, because we know on average, students learn better when these things happen.
00:29:11
Speaker
But everyone that I'm concerned about really are students that are already pushed to the margins of these things.
00:29:17
Speaker
And schools that are trying to do the progressive dynamic models where you're not pushing people to the margins should also care about this, that a lot of that cognitive science is really looking at the smack dab middle of a bell curve.
00:29:29
Speaker
They're not concerned with who's getting pushed to the margins by these practices as they exist.
00:29:34
Speaker
Well, let's dive right into that since you just opened that door for me here.
00:29:38
Speaker
So I'm curious about a few things in this direction, right?
00:29:42
Speaker
Because you mentioned the cognitive load theory.
00:29:44
Speaker
Because aside from your professional work, you've kind of been leading a one-man extracurricular project against what you call the neuro fluffers.
00:29:53
Speaker
And I'm wondering then if you could just kind of unpack, because what that's really getting at is this sort of narrowed vision for what I always call hashtag CogSci, because it's kind of a brand, right?
00:30:05
Speaker
It's not like representative of a real science, a holistic kind of field of understanding of human cognition.
00:30:13
Speaker
It's kind of a very narrow branded model of thinking about thinking that happens to tie really well to a political ideology of a few people in the UK, for example.
00:30:23
Speaker
That's neither here nor there.
00:30:24
Speaker
But when we bring it back to cognitive load theory, the neuro fluffers, and even some conversations then that we have had, and you've opened my eyes to the fact that a lot of the research into cognition,
00:30:39
Speaker
does not include people who are not, does not include neurodivergent people by its very nature.
00:30:45
Speaker
So I wonder if we could kind of unpack a little bit of that, like where are the flaws as you see it, right?
00:30:50
Speaker
As you've labeled in that neuro fluffer category, what are kind of the things that you kind of poke fun at in that,
00:30:57
Speaker
And then really, like, what are the flaws in that field writ large?
00:31:01
Speaker
And how are the students that you're trying to reach excluded from those models that then inform their experience of school, the experience of school, from this particular lens of hashtag COGSI does not include them.
00:31:13
Speaker
What's up with that?
00:31:14
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, the easiest way to think about this is that cognition is a field, like looks at the idea of raw cognition, right?
00:31:23
Speaker
Up until extremely recently, no one's really been looking at cognition as like a larger phenomenon than simply prefrontal cortexes responding to stimuli, which means that it's a loop between perception, attention, and working memory and nothing else.
00:31:38
Speaker
Annie Murphy Paul, who wrote this beautiful book, The Extended Mind, which is about embodied cognition, has sort of already made a little dent in that.
00:31:44
Speaker
But real people that work on cognition studies aren't the people that we're talking about being this hashtag cog sci or these neuro fluffers who are really just like taking one isolated piece of cognition and
00:31:56
Speaker
running with it as if it's the thing that's going to sell their book or get them their next speaking gig.
00:32:02
Speaker
I think the problem with cognition as a field is that you rely on two things, which is memory as your major thing that you're able to measure through testable output, and observable behavior is your other one.
00:32:16
Speaker
And that's a pretty flawed model for assessing
00:32:19
Speaker
like it's a really flawed model for assessing what a student has learned because you can define learning to be whatever is on the output.
00:32:27
Speaker
And it may mean nothing.
00:32:28
Speaker
Like your ability to memorize a string of random words
00:32:32
Speaker
I don't know how relevant that is for, or how much of a predictor that is for anything else.
00:32:38
Speaker
And even if it is, does it really matter?
00:32:40
Speaker
And that's the problem I see with a lot of the COGSI is that the scientists who are doing it are interested in those isolated, disconnected pieces of like, we know that students can memorize this many things in this time, right?
00:32:51
Speaker
And then their next step is like, now that we've done that, we're going to extend this by one inch further, right?
00:32:56
Speaker
But it's like, now that they've done random words, we'll do numbers.
00:32:59
Speaker
And then we'll see how they do on a test, right?
00:33:02
Speaker
And so the connections there aren't meant to take those isolated findings and bridge them to a world where better teaching and better outcomes in life are connected to individual pedagogical choices around memorization.
00:33:15
Speaker
But COGSI treats a lot of that stuff as if it is, or assumes that there is a model which leads to better teaching and in turn better everything.
00:33:23
Speaker
When you generalize one finding, one study, even a series of studies to say this is settled science and this is known about the human brain, you are ignoring a huge field of study about the human brain, which says nothing is settled, that it is continuously evolving.
00:33:38
Speaker
James Shine, who's a very brilliant scientist at the University of Melbourne in Australia, has one of the best Twitter threads on the brain I've ever read about the way that human brains develop.
00:33:48
Speaker
And his whole theory is that the thalamus drives neural developmental pathways.
00:33:52
Speaker
It's like the energy governor for it.
00:33:54
Speaker
And he studies systems level interactions between the brain.
00:33:58
Speaker
Someone that he retweeted, I think it's Jasmine Sullivan.
00:34:01
Speaker
Apologies if I'm doing her name justice, but she just did a study that threat probability in mice is calculated in the brainstem.
00:34:08
Speaker
So it's not actually even in the prefrontal cortex that there's this possibility that threat probability doesn't even really go into your thought.
00:34:15
Speaker
You're not thinking it at all, right?
00:34:16
Speaker
It's that not just that recognition of threat.
00:34:19
Speaker
That's a different thing, right?
00:34:20
Speaker
We know that humans can recognize threat and have that be in the brainstem, but that threat probability calculation.
00:34:28
Speaker
which is, you know, the word calculate is in there, which we think of with the PFC heavy, you know, thinking part of the brain.
00:34:35
Speaker
Just this idea that like they're settled science is kind of a joke.
00:34:38
Speaker
Gary Marcus, who's a famous AI researcher posts a lot about the difference between computer models of the brain and the reality of the brain.
00:34:46
Speaker
And there's a great piece he found, and I forget who posted it and I'll see if I can send it to you afterward, but it's how we don't know the physical basis of memory.
00:34:52
Speaker
Like we just don't understand how memory functions.
00:34:55
Speaker
Like we know what it does output wise and we have ways of measuring it, but we don't understand in the brain where memory is.
00:35:03
Speaker
We know things are connected with it.
00:35:04
Speaker
We know things help form memories, but we don't have like a, that's the memory part.
00:35:08
Speaker
And there's a theory in the piece that it's stored in synaptic connections, which would make a lot of sense.
00:35:15
Speaker
It explains a lot about PTSD and dendrites closing off after trauma and also flashbacks and all these other fascinating things, right?
00:35:23
Speaker
But
00:35:24
Speaker
My point is that I'm, I am on Twitter, and I read a lot of textbooks, and I do a lot of research.
00:35:30
Speaker
And I don't think that you have to be a very educated person to access those things and draw the same conclusions I have, which is, there's very little settled science about the human brain, we don't know a ton about it.
00:35:43
Speaker
And extrapolating that
00:35:46
Speaker
this certain model is the thing to do to get the best outcome seems insane to me.
00:35:52
Speaker
And it's also the same shit that the eugenicists did when they were designing measurable intelligence tests, which is these are the things that I care about and I'm going to go take this test and I'm going to use it as a way to leverage my own beliefs about everything.
00:36:06
Speaker
Right.
00:36:07
Speaker
And that's why, you know, Carl Brigham, the guy who wrote the original SAT and was the grandfather of the AP exams,
00:36:16
Speaker
wrote a book where he basically just said immigrants and anybody who isn't white should not reproduce.
00:36:21
Speaker
Racial reproduction threat is a huge threat to all of humanity.
00:36:25
Speaker
That was in the intro by Robert Yerxes, who was the head of the APA at the time.
00:36:29
Speaker
And I know that like, we're like, oh, it's of a time.
00:36:32
Speaker
But my point is that it was 1920s, 100 years ago.
00:36:35
Speaker
And I know that that's a long time.
00:36:36
Speaker
And there's a lot of things that have happened between now and then.
00:36:40
Speaker
But the fact that we're still using intelligence tests, when the whole field sprung up from guys like that, that'd be like saying we're going to do medicine.
00:36:48
Speaker
We're going to use medical tools by the same guy who is like running around with, you know, a bunch of leeches, right?
00:36:55
Speaker
Like it might work.
00:36:57
Speaker
It might not.
00:36:58
Speaker
But like, do we want to trust the leeches guy or do we want to go with somebody else?
00:37:01
Speaker
You know, it's like, why are we still using this stuff or connected to it at all?
00:37:05
Speaker
And I know that that's complicated, but medicine itself, I think, is a really good example of how quickly accepted science leads to bad outcomes.
00:37:14
Speaker
And not just like, oh, surgery didn't go well.
00:37:17
Speaker
It's like it kills people, right?
00:37:19
Speaker
And like structural bias in medicine kills black mothers more than it does anybody else.
00:37:24
Speaker
The black mortality rate in the US, I should say.
00:37:26
Speaker
is shockingly high.
00:37:28
Speaker
You just Google it and you'll read a bunch of horror stories and you'll probably cry and it's super sad.
00:37:33
Speaker
And it's because of pervasive myths about high pain tolerance and other stuff that's shockingly outdated and still around and still hanging around.
00:37:42
Speaker
And so availability bias itself, if you look at stents in medicine too, availability bias drives this.
00:37:48
Speaker
People assume clogged artery, high blood pressure will put in a stent, but a stent may or may not be as helpful as other things.
00:37:56
Speaker
And there's a great article, which I'll also send to you about this, about availability bias.
00:38:00
Speaker
And just because you know it's a thing, it then becomes the thing you do.
00:38:04
Speaker
And that isn't necessarily helpful if you're not critically... There's no criticality in these pieces, right?
00:38:09
Speaker
It's just available knowledge.
00:38:11
Speaker
So...
00:38:11
Speaker
The problem with any COGSI, the problem with a lot of Learning the Brain conferences and stuff like this is that we're positioning all of this as if it's about learning, as if it's about brains.
00:38:21
Speaker
But we don't actually know if it is.
00:38:22
Speaker
What we do know is that brains are complex, they adapt to their environment, and that they're always taking in stimuli, be it
00:38:29
Speaker
on the classroom, around them, the sounds they're hearing, the air they're breathing.
00:38:33
Speaker
And that if you're in the West Coast and there's bad wildfires and you have asthma, you may be having a panic attack without even knowing that you're having a panic attack because you're getting less oxygen, your asthma's starting to trigger, and all of a sudden your brain's on fire screaming there's a problem and you had no clue it was coming, right?
00:38:48
Speaker
That's still learning in the brain, but no one's talking about that.
00:38:51
Speaker
Obviously, a kid will know, hopefully, if they're having an asthma attack or if they start feeling panicky, they'll be able to talk to you.
00:38:57
Speaker
But that's an extreme example.
00:38:59
Speaker
What we could talk about instead of learning in the brain is the ways in which
00:39:02
Speaker
A kid has a, you know, intense reaction to noise and they live in a neighborhood where there's a lot of loud bangs and noises.
00:39:11
Speaker
And then they go to school, right?
00:39:12
Speaker
And it's a particularly noisy ventilation system and they freak out every time there's a loud bang.
00:39:18
Speaker
Now that kid, every time that that's happening is having like a mini trauma trigger that they've just got to ignore as they go through their day.
00:39:25
Speaker
But instead we're like, present your lecture notes these way, right?
00:39:29
Speaker
Like there's no investigation of these pieces where,
00:39:33
Speaker
bodies exist, where brains exist, where humans exist.
00:39:36
Speaker
It's all just like this isolated, I think Annie Murphy Paul calls it brains and vats.
00:39:40
Speaker
And Trevor Elio, our good friend, is also fond of saying that.
00:39:44
Speaker
That's what really the focus is in cognition is like just like this isolated little mechanical piece of you doing things that we can measure and look at, ignoring the rest of it, which obviously impacts everything.
00:39:55
Speaker
And the irony of this too is that it's not like this stuff is hard to find.
00:39:59
Speaker
Mary Helen Imordino Yang, effective neuroscientist, looked at this and talks about neurobiologically, it's impossible to separate emotion from cognition.
00:40:06
Speaker
Yet all of cognition and all of hashtag CogSci tries to do this.
00:40:12
Speaker
And so I think if we go back to that rehab piece, the surgery component of like you have a torn ACL, we'll do surgery, your ACL is better, there you go.
00:40:21
Speaker
That's a really convenient way of thinking about everything, right?
00:40:23
Speaker
Which is like, I am the expert, I have identified the cause, I have fixed the problem, I have applied problem, you know, branded thought pattern X to fix it.
00:40:31
Speaker
Rehab is time intensive.
00:40:32
Speaker
It's attention intensive, right?
00:40:35
Speaker
You need a lot of history and context and you need to build trust because someone has to believe to tell you like, it actually hurts when I do this or they have to bear with you while you tease these things apart.
00:40:45
Speaker
I think if we can get away from this idea that there is a solution, that there is a way that brains do things and instead just accept that it's always adapting, it's always dynamically responding to its environment.
00:40:57
Speaker
And if we know as much about that as possible,
00:40:59
Speaker
we're just better caretakers of not just the brain and the stuff that goes into it that equips it for stuff later in life, but of the human also.
00:41:08
Speaker
And if we make sure that we're caretakers of the human as well as the brain, and we're adopting that policy of like, knowing about the brain doesn't dismiss everything that we intuitively believe about helping kids navigate school.
00:41:20
Speaker
That's something where I think we can all benefit and sort of move away from that cog-sci one-dimensionality, that lack of criticality.
00:41:28
Speaker
Yeah.
00:41:28
Speaker
Sorry, this got really long-winded, but I think that's the biggest problem with CogSci is that it flattens all of the dynamic into a series of lecture notes, a series of outputs that the teacher creates.
00:41:40
Speaker
And that's really what cognition does is it says learning happens in this way for everyone all the time.
00:41:45
Speaker
And it doesn't.
Focusing on Individual Learning Patterns
00:41:46
Speaker
All brains compensate.
00:41:47
Speaker
And if you understand that and you try to actually work with students to figure out how they compensate, they'll tell you how they're doing it.
00:41:53
Speaker
And that's the thing which for me has been so liberating about the work I do is
00:41:57
Speaker
kids feel more competent doing.
00:41:59
Speaker
The few professional developments I've done, teachers feel more competent saying this eval might actually have missed something, which again, I'm not out to prove any evals wrong, but they're blunt tools at best.
00:42:10
Speaker
So the idea there is that there's a richer, more dynamic world that we're missing and we're dismissing it out of hand with stuff like CogSci.
00:42:19
Speaker
That's the danger of CogSci really is that flattening or that acceptance of a prepackaged conclusion without any criticality.
00:42:26
Speaker
My frustration with that hashtag COGSCY, again, that flattened version of it, not the holistic field of cognitive neuroscience or neuropsychology or anything, but just this particular narrowed version is that it imagines learning that is like something that happens out here and not something that happens.
00:42:42
Speaker
And by out here, I just mean like in the ether.
00:42:45
Speaker
Like it's something that teachers, learning is something that teachers do.
00:42:48
Speaker
And so it focuses on those teacher controlled factors rather than right learning is just something that happens in the brain and it's happening all the time.
00:42:56
Speaker
And so when we reduce that that learning equation down to those inputs and outputs that we can measure right in the cognitive science lab and then we say like here's the settled science on how learning functions.
00:43:08
Speaker
Well, then like you're not treating human beings in the context of their bodies and in the world.
00:43:14
Speaker
And it's not just reductive.
00:43:16
Speaker
Like I understand it being reductive from like a scientific method perspective, but then to extrapolate and then to apply that onto fully fledged, again, embodied humans in the world just seems like a fallacy from the outset.
00:43:29
Speaker
And yet you get so much pushback.
00:43:31
Speaker
from people who are the most fervent supporters of this cognitive science, you're a science denier.
00:43:38
Speaker
If you don't think it looks like this, do you also doubt the efficacy of vaccines and global warming and blah, blah, blah, just because you say like, hey, I think learning might be more complicated than cognitive load theory, if that's the thing we're going to root all of our work in.
00:43:54
Speaker
You've been mentioning Annie Murphy Paul, Mary Helen Imardino Yang.
00:43:58
Speaker
What other foundational works are kind of out there?
00:44:01
Speaker
What things do you read to kind of keep up to date?
00:44:03
Speaker
What are some foundational texts that you could get into if people wanted to think more like you and kind of have our minds broadened, no pun intended, into because the hashtag CogSci research ed
00:44:17
Speaker
all of that stuff is ubiquitous, right?
00:44:19
Speaker
On edgy Twitter, it's everywhere.
00:44:22
Speaker
It's the pedagogical front for the UK Department of Education at this point.
00:44:30
Speaker
So they have a lot of resources, they have a lot of influence, and they're very easily accessible.
00:44:36
Speaker
I have found that you've been a tremendous resource for me, but I can't just go find neuroscience articles and try to make sense of those things.
00:44:44
Speaker
But what
00:44:45
Speaker
if you kind of had like a read this, watch this, where could people kind of start to get involved in that bigger conversation about the mind in the world?
00:44:54
Speaker
This is tough too, right?
00:44:55
Speaker
So it's like, I've been doing this for 12 years and I started out trying to help kids for whom neuropsychological evaluation could not identify what their problems were.
00:45:05
Speaker
And so it was like,
00:45:06
Speaker
I got to go learn everything I can about the eval process and see what it's missing and how it works and what it's getting at so that these evals that they do have are at least hopefully contextualizing something.
00:45:16
Speaker
Right.
00:45:16
Speaker
So,
00:45:19
Speaker
I think the biggest thing I would tell, I mean, it's tough.
00:45:23
Speaker
If you're really interested in it, you can go pick up a bunch of school neuropsychology practitioner handbooks, which are dry.
00:45:28
Speaker
And it's all about reading test results.
00:45:30
Speaker
And that gives you, if you're interested and you could bear it, that's a starting place.
00:45:35
Speaker
That's where I started, which was gross.
00:45:36
Speaker
And honestly, I would never do it again if I didn't have to.
00:45:39
Speaker
It was brutal.
00:45:40
Speaker
But it gave me what I needed.
00:45:42
Speaker
The thing which filled in the gaps after that was
00:45:46
Speaker
Neurodevelopment is huge.
00:45:48
Speaker
Reading about the ways in which the brain actually grows and changes in different theories about it.
00:45:54
Speaker
And then looking at the evolution of the theories of neurodevelopment, like
00:45:59
Speaker
Not just this idea of like, you know, ah, brain grows this time and then it stops developing.
00:46:03
Speaker
Your prefrontal lobe is not fully developed until this age.
00:46:06
Speaker
And that's why you, you know, like new metal, you know, or whatever.
00:46:11
Speaker
But the idea there is like, there is no one solid theory of neurodevelopment that is people are like, yes, brains do these things in this order.
00:46:18
Speaker
And so reading about it lets you figure out like, ah, there's a lot more here than I thought.
00:46:23
Speaker
For me specifically, because neuropsychology deals with the identification of problems, learning about dyscalculia, dyslexia, processing disorders, executive dysfunction, ADHD, social emotional issues, all of that stuff.
00:46:38
Speaker
I read a lot of trauma therapy stuff.
00:46:41
Speaker
That stuff was really what I read next.
00:46:43
Speaker
And so my expertise is cobbled together from so many disparate fields of desperately trying not to miss something.
00:46:52
Speaker
mainly because also when I was tutoring, I was often the last resource people had.
00:46:57
Speaker
They had done the evals, nothing was working, changed schools, and then they would call me and ask for help, and I would try as hard as I could to figure out what was going on.
00:47:06
Speaker
So I will say that for lay teachers, just people in the classroom, I'd say reading executive functioning books are great, but most of them are terrible is the problem.
00:47:16
Speaker
So you have to go through this kind of like
00:47:19
Speaker
you know, it's organization.
00:47:21
Speaker
Great.
00:47:21
Speaker
What do I do now?
00:47:22
Speaker
It's emotional regulation.
00:47:23
Speaker
Wonderful.
00:47:24
Speaker
What does that actually mean?
00:47:25
Speaker
I think it's executive function and child development is a book by a husband and wife team.
00:47:29
Speaker
I think they're Chuck and Marcy Yeager.
00:47:31
Speaker
It's not Chuck Yeager.
00:47:32
Speaker
Sorry.
00:47:32
Speaker
He's a fighter pilot.
00:47:34
Speaker
It's somebody Yeager, maybe Daniel.
00:47:36
Speaker
I forget.
00:47:37
Speaker
But it's it's Jaeger and Jaeger wrote it.
00:47:39
Speaker
It's really good.
00:47:40
Speaker
And it contextualizes how executive function works across a variety of developmental contexts.
00:47:45
Speaker
And it really dispels this idea that by first grade, you should be able to sit in a chair and regulate your feelings of being bored.
00:47:51
Speaker
You know, and I have a first grader right now, and I can tell you that it's not it's not there for him.
00:47:58
Speaker
He's trying his hardest, but it's... He comes by it honestly.
00:48:01
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:48:02
Speaker
And so I think that book's fascinating just because it dispels the notion that there is linear tracking of those things, which impact learning so much.
00:48:10
Speaker
Like, I mean, imagine viewing your entire learning through...
00:48:15
Speaker
attempting to control impulses you have, right?
00:48:18
Speaker
Just about basic, not like big impulses, like I want to throw this eraser at Mark, like the smaller impulse, like I don't want to be sitting right now, or I have to pee and I have to wait, or I'm very hungry and I can't eat.
00:48:28
Speaker
Those things never block a kid from doing those things when they're home, right?
00:48:33
Speaker
It's like, you just go pee, you just go eat, whatever, like you just do those things.
00:48:37
Speaker
there's never the impulse control that you need to have.
00:48:40
Speaker
And that's not really important for life either.
00:48:41
Speaker
Like in my, I've worked at an office, I've worked in a school, I've worked in a huge variety of different places.
00:48:47
Speaker
And like, on a long bus ride is the only time you don't get to go pee when you want to, unless it's an absolute emergency.
00:48:54
Speaker
And then the bus driver may make a, you know, a change for you, right?
00:48:57
Speaker
And so I think this is funny to me that we've convinced ourselves that it's funny in a tragic way that
00:49:03
Speaker
There is this kind of uniform development and acquisition of these skills about controlling yourself and that it's important for life to do these things when it's not at all.
00:49:12
Speaker
I can't tell you how many times I work in an all remote, you know, I have a full time job, which I'm not speaking in my professional capacity here about that at all.
00:49:20
Speaker
So just for my employer's sake, but like I work there and like, you know, every like very smart people will be on camera on Zoom and they're interrupting not because they are mean or because they're rude.
00:49:35
Speaker
It's because they're excited and they want to jump in and say something.
00:49:39
Speaker
And then a person will have to ask them to stop.
00:49:41
Speaker
Right.
00:49:41
Speaker
And they do.
00:49:43
Speaker
And it's fine.
00:49:44
Speaker
But my point is, like, the idea that that's punishable in a school.
00:49:48
Speaker
Right.
00:49:48
Speaker
That like that's you not paying attention or not remembering the rules of the classroom when adults do it all the time, because it's just not that natural to continuously check your impulse to.
00:49:59
Speaker
Listen, I mean, in some context it is.
00:50:01
Speaker
I'm getting ahead of myself here.
00:50:02
Speaker
But my point is, like, it's not necessary for life.
00:50:05
Speaker
You can accidentally interrupt people and catch yourself.
00:50:08
Speaker
You know, it's like you could pee when you want to.
00:50:11
Speaker
But that's assumed that not doing that is somehow this, like, you know, developmental problem.
00:50:16
Speaker
And it's also the same thing, like, forgetting a pencil, you know?
00:50:19
Speaker
So I don't know, like reading about executive function gets you that piece that this stuff is insane, that we believe it's linear development and it doesn't, or that there's a, there is a process for acquisition of these when most of the stuff when you can't learn is learned by outside modeling, that that's how you acquire it.
00:50:34
Speaker
And also that executive functioning extends to symbol systems, meaning it's not just yourself, your planning, your everything.
00:50:40
Speaker
It's literal language.
00:50:42
Speaker
Like executive function groups, organizes, segments, deconstructs words, letters, the lines that make up the letters.
00:50:48
Speaker
That's all executive functioning.
00:50:50
Speaker
It's perceptual, yes, because you have to perceive it.
00:50:53
Speaker
And it's visual, right?
00:50:54
Speaker
Because you have to be able to track it.
00:50:55
Speaker
But at post moment of perception, to make sense of the stimuli, to make sense of the lines, there is executive functioning taking place.
00:51:03
Speaker
And that book really blew the doors off that conclusion for me.
00:51:06
Speaker
Because then once you understand that, that like dealing with numbers might actually be executive dysfunction, and then you look at how dyscalculia manifests, you're like, oh my God, there's so much overlap between these two.
00:51:18
Speaker
So long-winded way of saying read that one book by the Yeagers and then be very skeptical and careful looking at anything else about executive functioning, especially if it's about planning.
00:51:27
Speaker
And then the next piece I'd say is looking at Stephen G. Pfeiffer, who's a little-known neuropsychologist who writes – he wrote great books around the turn of 2000, right?
00:51:39
Speaker
So turn of the century, I was about to say.
00:51:42
Speaker
I guess it is in one way.
00:51:44
Speaker
But he wrote The Neuropsychology of Mathematics, Neuropsychology of Reading Disorders, and The Neuropsychology of Written Language Disorders.
00:51:51
Speaker
three books he illustrated it with this guy i think albert defina i want to say is his name who did all the diagrams but and the charts but it's fantastic it's it's such a good trio of books um particularly dyscalculia and dyslexia that's what i spend most of my time digging into but he explains in short why we're bad at detecting these things and they can be caught in better ways and iq tests are terrible how
00:52:14
Speaker
And that here's all the different ways you can think about catching these compensation patterns.
00:52:18
Speaker
And he'll talk about compensation patterns in this book.
00:52:20
Speaker
So I want to say like compensation patterns isn't like my, you know, patented, you know, trademark pending thing.
00:52:25
Speaker
It's like a well-documented neuropsychological phenomenon.
00:52:29
Speaker
And what you're doing is you're locating a kid's pattern of errors.
00:52:32
Speaker
You're helping them identify it.
00:52:34
Speaker
And then you're saying like, here's how your brain compensates.
00:52:37
Speaker
Here's where I want it to go.
00:52:38
Speaker
Here are the things we're going to try based on that.
00:52:40
Speaker
And we'll see which one works.
00:52:42
Speaker
It's cooperative.
00:52:43
Speaker
It's collaborative.
00:52:44
Speaker
It's open.
00:52:45
Speaker
There's no expertise.
00:52:46
Speaker
There's no authority.
00:52:47
Speaker
There's just a person saying, here's what I'm seeing.
00:52:49
Speaker
Let's check it.
00:52:50
Speaker
Let's see this new method and see if it works.
00:52:52
Speaker
And it's remarkable how less stringent the idea of remediation is with Pfeiffer because he's not trying to remediate, right?
00:53:01
Speaker
It's like you are trying to get a kid to do, to re, what's the word I want?
00:53:05
Speaker
They're trying to access functionality that wasn't there there or trying to build functionality that wasn't there before.
00:53:10
Speaker
And you're doing it not by having someone tell you to do this branded thought pattern or have these lecture slides presented this way.
00:53:17
Speaker
You're doing it because they identified this stuff was hard.
00:53:20
Speaker
You verified it with them.
00:53:21
Speaker
And then together, you're going to embark on this other program or course of action that you know might help.
00:53:28
Speaker
And that alone to me is like just kind of blew my mind that like you can operate that way, helping kids learn to read, learn to do math.
00:53:36
Speaker
And it doesn't have to be this kind of...
00:53:40
Speaker
This idea that you've outsourced them to special ed or you need a specialist for it, right?
00:53:44
Speaker
Granted, he relies a lot on buying pre-made programs as your solution because like certain programs do certain things well.
00:53:52
Speaker
And he's gone through all of the resources that are available and listed them out, at least when it was published, which is great of him and super helpful for educators.
00:54:00
Speaker
But it is really cool to see like you could remediate dyslexia by using this program's patented approach if this subtype is what manifests.
00:54:07
Speaker
And if it's a different one, you should use this other one.
00:54:09
Speaker
But honestly, like the two best things about those books is there's a chart in each of them for dyscalculia and dyslexia of what the problems are, like what's lost, what's the deficit, what can't a student do, and what's preserved, what can a student do.
00:54:24
Speaker
And I went to, again, I did a lot of professional development in my two years in the classroom.
00:54:28
Speaker
I was super interested in it.
00:54:29
Speaker
I read all as much as I could.
00:54:31
Speaker
And not once did someone show me a fucking chart like this, where I was just like, here's what they can't do or what they will say is hard.
00:54:38
Speaker
And here's what still works.
00:54:39
Speaker
You can figure it out.
00:54:41
Speaker
You know, like just collect your own data, like talk to them, like, and then see which one it is.
00:54:46
Speaker
And when I tell people this, they're like, but I can't diagnose anyone.
00:54:49
Speaker
And absolutely, no, you should not.
00:54:51
Speaker
This isn't for diagnostic purposes.
00:54:54
Speaker
But it's the same thing as the rehab idea, right?
00:54:57
Speaker
If I can help a kid adjust the foot motion to not tear an ACL, I should do that.
00:55:02
Speaker
I'm not telling them that they have an ACL tear.
00:55:04
Speaker
I'm not telling them they have a tendon problem.
00:55:06
Speaker
I'm just saying, try this different technique.
00:55:09
Speaker
And compensation and thinking about it that way gets you that degree of specificity.
00:55:13
Speaker
It gets you this knowledge that is honestly hidden away.
00:55:16
Speaker
I don't know why this isn't in teacher training, but it should be like front and center for everybody, general ed, not just special ed.
00:55:22
Speaker
And it should be a primary thing of like, when this is happening, you should look for dyslexia.
00:55:28
Speaker
You should look for dyscalculia.
00:55:29
Speaker
You should look for a processing disorder.
00:55:31
Speaker
There's all these different ways we could think about helping kids, right?
00:55:35
Speaker
And the idea that me stumbling on the right combinations of 10 books or bizarre fields of study that have all coagulated into what I do now,
00:55:45
Speaker
Like the fact that I existed as a field, my company existed as a tutoring company for so long basically speaks to the need that we all have for this stuff, right?
00:55:54
Speaker
It does work.
00:55:55
Speaker
I know it works because I've done it for 12 years.
00:55:57
Speaker
And I also know that it works on kids who aren't 2E.
Challenges in Current Educational Systems
00:56:00
Speaker
It works on everybody.
00:56:01
Speaker
And I did a bunch of test prep stuff where we built an entire system of curriculum and assessment of standardized test prep for the SAT and the SSAT, which are two of the worst design tests ever.
00:56:13
Speaker
But that's a separate episode.
00:56:15
Speaker
Yeah, but the score improvements were huge.
00:56:18
Speaker
And I know like, you know, this is always spurious when a test prep expert claims their score improvements are huge.
00:56:22
Speaker
But it was basically designed to say like kids who really struggle with this, who have these documented learning issues, this course I know will work for you.
00:56:29
Speaker
And then when everybody else took it, it worked for them too really well.
00:56:33
Speaker
And the idea here isn't that I think what I want to get to with compensation is
00:56:37
Speaker
is that it's not just a 2E, LD, autism, whatever.
00:56:42
Speaker
It's not just a neurodivergent phenomenon.
00:56:45
Speaker
All brains compensate all the time, and they do it in ways that are absolutely unique.
00:56:50
Speaker
It's just that school pushes certain categories of compensation outside of its box and gives it a bad label.
00:56:57
Speaker
And other ones are richly rewarded.
00:56:59
Speaker
And it's bizarre that we have that, and it's totally arbitrary, but it's no different than saying a hockey coach saying you can't teach height.
00:57:07
Speaker
right?
00:57:07
Speaker
It's like, that's the world of hockey.
00:57:10
Speaker
You need big people to play hockey professionally.
00:57:13
Speaker
And likewise, it doesn't mean you couldn't be a good hockey player if you were small, but there's a certain idea and a limiting belief about what it means to be a hockey player, and that's it.
00:57:22
Speaker
And this is exactly what compensation should be.
00:57:25
Speaker
It should be this way that we bridge across those categories and stop thinking about it as these narrow definitions of ability and disability.
00:57:32
Speaker
But instead, you know, we're in the systems that we're in.
00:57:34
Speaker
And those ideas of like, you can go to learning in the brain and not once you get to see a chart, which that's like, here's how to spot legit patterns that your kids are having.
00:57:43
Speaker
Instead, it's like, when you're doing your lecture, here's an excellent way to keep kids attention,
Energy Expenditure and Learning
00:57:49
Speaker
right?
00:57:49
Speaker
And maybe that's good.
00:57:50
Speaker
And maybe it's not.
00:57:51
Speaker
But literally, the guy talking about differentiating your lecture methods, lecture to a room for an hour straight showing slides.
00:57:58
Speaker
I can recall from my own teacher training and my experience with professional development is that they want to situate solutions in the discipline.
00:58:05
Speaker
So you'd have to approach things from a reading lens or a math lens.
00:58:10
Speaker
So it's like, okay, let me work through this series of heuristics and practice problems.
00:58:15
Speaker
It's exactly what you said, just
00:58:16
Speaker
throw an iterative series of practice problems to kind of figure out what students can't get.
00:58:21
Speaker
And then if those things fail, you stop looking for solutions where really the model that you're talking about doesn't seek solutions in the discipline.
00:58:29
Speaker
It seeks solutions between you and the student and trying to troubleshoot those within the student where, you know, where the issue, where the hurdle, where the, right, the barrier that you're trying to break through exists.
00:58:39
Speaker
It doesn't exist in math.
00:58:40
Speaker
It doesn't exist in history or biology, right?
00:58:43
Speaker
It exists in some kind of
00:58:44
Speaker
Right disconnect barriers some something you know is not clicking in the mind of that student so it attempts to situate the solution space at the troubleshooting space within the students brain am I am I grokking that in the right way.
00:59:00
Speaker
I believe you've grokked it.
00:59:02
Speaker
I think there's also like a larger, this is weird too, because it's hard to talk about compensation in this, in a lens of like then how teacher training works.
00:59:11
Speaker
But the simplest thing I can say is like, if we just had this compensation idea and we were going with that as like, we're going to think about all thinking in this frame, you stop really caring about like your discipline is as much your discipline, but it's also like,
00:59:25
Speaker
It's the connections you have with your student.
00:59:28
Speaker
It's knowing your own, it's your own qualitative data that you're collecting through observation that isn't just about test results, right?
00:59:34
Speaker
It's knowing that Tommy said this was really hard, right?
00:59:36
Speaker
Or knowing that they took an extra two minutes or came up to you and asked you seven extra times for help.
00:59:41
Speaker
And one of the coolest things that James Shine, he's that Australian researcher that I mentioned, this idea of energy expenditure, right?
00:59:49
Speaker
as a, as a kind of like governor, right?
00:59:51
Speaker
Is that energy expenditure for neural pathways that are farther apart or not available or compensating in a long
Conclusion and Further Engagement
00:59:58
Speaker
way, right?
00:59:58
Speaker
The longer the pathway is, the more energy you need to do it.
01:00:01
Speaker
So something that's really hard, you're going to spend a lot of energy going.
01:00:04
Speaker
Brains are always trying to conserve energy.
01:00:07
Speaker
Always, always, always, always, always.
01:00:09
Speaker
So
01:00:10
Speaker
energy expenditure is a really good proxy for like processing effort, if you want to call it that, right?
01:00:16
Speaker
Or like, you know, brain effort or energy, even just calling it like it's a good proxy for difficulty.
01:00:22
Speaker
And it may not mean necessarily that the problem is quote unquote hard.
01:00:26
Speaker
It's just particularly, it's hard for that student, right?
01:00:29
Speaker
So it's a relative measure of it.
01:00:31
Speaker
But the idea that energy expenditure could be a measure of these things mean that every teacher has
01:00:37
Speaker
I don't know how many terabytes, right, of data in their brain, just from the random things they remembered about what happened with student X, student Y, student Z in particular context.
01:00:47
Speaker
And if you put that to use, you're equipping teachers to move way beyond this narrow box of pre-constructed lessons or curriculum or training that really doesn't ask them to stretch to the full limit of their ability in terms of
01:01:03
Speaker
Like there's probably a lot more that they're capable of.
01:01:06
Speaker
And the idea that lesson planning and lesson structure has to happen in a certain vertically aligned, paced out way is most likely limiting them.
01:01:15
Speaker
Like in addition to the students, but like most teachers could probably tell you what's going on with the student emotionally or which problems were particularly hard.
01:01:23
Speaker
And you can leverage that if you have compensation as a framework and you get the training around it.
01:01:27
Speaker
you can do nothing with it.
01:01:28
Speaker
If you're, you're just telling the teacher next year, like, yeah, like Charlie really fractions are hard, you know, and that's, you're hoping that that gets resolved somewhere.
01:01:38
Speaker
Right.
01:01:39
Speaker
This has been a great conversation, Michael, honestly, like I have learned so much from your own, you know, passionate, knowledgeable, informed intensity, like laser focus on, on these issues.
01:01:51
Speaker
Um,
01:01:51
Speaker
And just being such a willing, you know, sharer of that stuff too.
01:01:55
Speaker
Like, you know, in all of the spaces that we've participated in, I always walk away learning a lot.
01:02:00
Speaker
Is there, are there places where our listeners can connect to you on Twitter websites?
01:02:05
Speaker
What, where can people find you at your words and your work?
01:02:08
Speaker
Yeah.
01:02:09
Speaker
So PenelopeEducation.com.
01:02:12
Speaker
Let me just check to make sure I still own that URL, but I'm pretty sure I do.
01:02:16
Speaker
I probably should have checked before the show, but I'm pretty sure that's it.
01:02:20
Speaker
That's where I sort of post thoughts.
01:02:23
Speaker
If not, we'll post the updated URL on the show notes.
01:02:26
Speaker
Yeah, exactly.
01:02:26
Speaker
That's sort of like the biggest store of stuff.
01:02:28
Speaker
Yeah, PenelopeEducation.com.
01:02:29
Speaker
It's there.
01:02:30
Speaker
And I'm updating that.
01:02:31
Speaker
So there's a lot of stuff on there, which I'm going to be hopefully changing in the next three months.
01:02:36
Speaker
But that's there for now.
01:02:38
Speaker
And I got a blog on there, which I never update.
01:02:40
Speaker
But there's some stuff on there.
01:02:42
Speaker
Twitter, I've stopped posting on after the muskery takeover.
01:02:46
Speaker
So I'm on Discord.
01:02:47
Speaker
If you're interested, you can shoot me an email at my full name or you can drop me a Twitter DM.
01:02:52
Speaker
My email is just michaelweingarth at gmail.
01:02:54
Speaker
So if you're interested and you want to join the little Discord server I have where I'm posting a lot of this neurofluffer stuff and expansive ways of thinking about teaching and learning without relying on that super limited...
01:03:06
Speaker
Cognition Lens, that's a place I'm going to be posting all of it.
01:03:09
Speaker
Yeah.
01:03:09
Speaker
And then hopefully there's an updated website in the next couple of months with some more continuous writing on it.
01:03:14
Speaker
Awesome.
01:03:15
Speaker
Thanks so much again for joining us, man.
01:03:17
Speaker
Yeah.
01:03:17
Speaker
Thanks for having me on.
01:03:23
Speaker
Thank you again for listening to Human Restoration Projects podcast.
01:03:26
Speaker
I hope this conversation leaves you inspired and ready to push the progressive envelope of education.
01:03:30
Speaker
You can learn more about progressive education, support our cause, and stay tuned to this podcast and other updates on our website at humanrestorationproject.org.
01:03:45
Speaker
Hey, listeners.
01:03:46
Speaker
Thanks for making it this far.
01:03:48
Speaker
This is the addendum Michael wanted to add about cognitive compensation.
01:03:52
Speaker
It's about 13 minutes long, so I hope you find it useful.
01:03:56
Speaker
Cognitive compensation is not my proprietary idea.
01:04:00
Speaker
It has existed for a long time in neuropsychology as a way to look at brain function that, or neural pathways that are currently unavailable and what a brain does to route around them.
01:04:12
Speaker
The textbook example is getting like a blunt force injury to your temple somehow and temporarily having a loss of eyesight.
01:04:20
Speaker
And in the meantime, while you can't see you as a human, presuming you can hear
01:04:25
Speaker
and can feel things, can navigate the world without that sense.
01:04:30
Speaker
So the idea behind compensation is that it is a way of moving around neural pathways that are unavailable using pathways that don't particularly do those things.
01:04:41
Speaker
So the way this works with schools and the way this works with learning that's so interesting and unique is once you take that idea of neural pathways that are unavailable, you can enter into this way of elevating
01:04:55
Speaker
earned knowledge and wisdom by knowing, you know, my students are struggling with this thing or this unit's always hard and certain students have these types of patterns that show up.
01:05:04
Speaker
You don't just have to keep saying that it's types of patterns.
01:05:07
Speaker
You can then name those patterns and give them more technical terms and you can see them in this new light where you can
01:05:13
Speaker
tease out what components of executive functioning or processing are going on.
01:05:17
Speaker
And more importantly, it gives you a subtlety and a way to investigate error with more precision, with more connection to other patterns.
01:05:26
Speaker
And so the best way I can explain this is that when I was young, I decided I wanted to be a musician and I picked up a bass guitar and a regular guitar and taught myself how to play those two instruments.
01:05:37
Speaker
I did not take lessons for the first...
01:05:39
Speaker
seven years or no, sorry, the first six years that I played.
01:05:42
Speaker
And then when I finally did, I was ready for the lessons.
01:05:47
Speaker
But at the time, I was learning a lot of songs by ear.
01:05:51
Speaker
And I understood sounds as a sort of catalog of relationships between finger spacing.
01:05:57
Speaker
And so I had some basic understanding of like, these are notes, right?
01:06:00
Speaker
And there are half steps and whole steps.
01:06:03
Speaker
And I understood the difference between what sounds like a rock song or what sounds like a folk song.
01:06:08
Speaker
I understood those things, but I didn't have a language for talking about
01:06:12
Speaker
like a minor third versus a major third or an Aeolian mode or a Lydian mode and why I should solo in that in this particular key.
01:06:20
Speaker
And once I took lessons, I didn't really take them for that long, but I learned enough theory that all the earned experience I had suddenly connected to a higher plane of,
01:06:31
Speaker
possibility.
01:06:32
Speaker
I was immediately able to do things I didn't think was possible because I had started to disregard theory and technical knowledge as limiting.
01:06:43
Speaker
And what it did was that it opened up all of the patterns I had seen or I had heard rather, and then mapped to a visual spatial relationship between frets.
01:06:52
Speaker
All of a sudden now they were interlaid and connected and plugged into a larger system.
01:06:58
Speaker
And the pattern recognition that I had done
01:07:01
Speaker
Now I could find even larger patterns.
01:07:04
Speaker
I could see the ways in which the smaller pieces I had identified made up components of things that were amazing.
01:07:11
Speaker
And that made me so much better as a player.
01:07:14
Speaker
And as a listener too, I could hear bigger patterns once I understood those connections.
01:07:19
Speaker
And compensation aims to do that for educators.
01:07:22
Speaker
It aims to make student feedback readable and investigative.
01:07:27
Speaker
Investigable?
01:07:28
Speaker
I don't know what word I would use there, but it lets you tease apart student error and student feedback to actually figure out in terms of not just the earned experience one where you can say, you know,
01:07:39
Speaker
Charlie's having a hard time with fractions when the denominator is bigger than a certain number, you can actually then look at this and say, you know, what's the executive functioning involved with that?
01:07:50
Speaker
What's the processing involved with that?
01:07:52
Speaker
And then not only can you figure out that one moment,
01:07:55
Speaker
Can you figure out the precision, the name for it?
01:07:57
Speaker
That itself is not really that useful.
01:07:59
Speaker
Really where you leverage this is then you can see it across all of Charlie's work.
01:08:03
Speaker
You can see patterns of executive functioning that are not quite firing the way you might expect or hangups that maybe don't represent a full-on processing disorder, but represent a pretty serious lag time.
01:08:16
Speaker
a way that a slower uptake of certain concepts or across the board, anything with diagrams that involve horizontal and vertical relationships and isolating them is really hard for this student.
01:08:27
Speaker
And that would show up in their science class, in their math class, in maps, in all these different contexts, these things would show up.
01:08:34
Speaker
And so the idea here isn't to like, let you say, you know, Charlie is bad at thing X, Y, and Z in these new ways.
01:08:42
Speaker
Rather, it's to say, here's what's going on for this student.
01:08:44
Speaker
Here's what's going on for Charlie.
01:08:46
Speaker
And what we're seeing with Charlie is Charlie is really good at these other things.
01:08:50
Speaker
And that's the compensation is where we can look at what Charlie is good at and find ways to route what he's not through those available pathways to basically say, well,
01:09:01
Speaker
I know that when Charlie has struggled with other stuff, stuff that he's confident and comfortable with, what he does is he covers up most of the work so he's only looking at one thing at a time, right?
01:09:11
Speaker
Or he uses six extra sheets of paper so he can write really big.
01:09:14
Speaker
And there's a hint there about how much information Charlie can take in at a given time.
01:09:21
Speaker
Using a smaller visual field, like the amount of information your eyes can see or expose to in any one given moment,
01:09:28
Speaker
is basically about prioritization and visual processing, but it's really an executive functioning about prioritizing what you're seeing.
01:09:35
Speaker
And so if we know that Charlie likes to cover up his work, probably it means it's easier for him to perceive things and process information when it's limited.
01:09:43
Speaker
And that's true for most people, but what's interesting is that you can take something there where they have a strategy that that works when they're doing something they like, and you can transfer it over to the context where they really struggle.
01:09:55
Speaker
Um,
01:09:56
Speaker
And usually you're going to find some degree of traction, but more importantly, you're getting the student, you're asking them what works for you.
01:10:03
Speaker
And then you're leveraging that over and trying it in other ways.
01:10:07
Speaker
And if not, there's a whole boatload of ways to think about combinations of executive dysfunction, of processing issues, of perceptual issues, and tools and strategies and ways of thinking about it that you can
01:10:20
Speaker
always be recontextualizing and shifting how a student's approaching it until they find one that feels like an available compensation pattern or a viable, I shouldn't say available, it's a viable compensation pattern that's going to get around the roadblock.
01:10:34
Speaker
And I think...
01:10:35
Speaker
where this sort of differs from everything else that's going on is that this is a way of working with a student to collaborate, to enhance and enrich their feedback as well as the earned experience of teachers into something way more powerful as opposed to something like cognitive load theory, which you and I have talked about extensively, but really represents the opposite end of that spectrum where a teacher is refining how they're presenting material, but it's very much a one-way dynamic.
01:11:05
Speaker
where we're using science about how to lecture at children or how to present information at children, and then measuring how they regurgitate that information in some way, shape, or form.
01:11:18
Speaker
We are rarely using cognitive load theory and saying that's the reason that students are more critical thinkers or doing more complex tasks.
01:11:29
Speaker
you know, what we see is that we're using those things like cognitive loan theory in these really isolated and measurable contexts as opposed to compensation, which isn't designed to really produce a better test score or an evidence-based study.
01:11:46
Speaker
What it's designed to do is shape and form student reporting and teacher experience and let them meet in a place where everyone can understand a common
01:12:00
Speaker
scientific vocabulary or theoretical vocabulary of how to think about error patterns and also how to think about error itself expansively, not just as a thing you can't do or didn't understand yet, but rather as an indication of your brain's latent preferences for how it prefers information or how it has processed information in the past and its reluctance to form new ways to do that or the possibility of forming new ways of doing that and how difficult or easy that may be.
01:12:29
Speaker
Once you start reframing error this way, you're not telling a student, I presented my lecture slides in this way, therefore you should understand this information and not make errors.
01:12:40
Speaker
What you're doing then is saying, you know, you and I are going to trust each other to meet somewhere in the middle on finding ways to work through material that you find very difficult or tasks or components of tasks that you find very difficult.
01:12:53
Speaker
And I'm going to trust your, your reporting and use it.
01:12:57
Speaker
And I'm going to teach you the science I know.
01:13:00
Speaker
And with that, we will both be doing this together to effectively remove the obstacle.
01:13:06
Speaker
Um,
01:13:07
Speaker
So compensation really just puts, you know, the student right alongside the teacher in figuring out what's going on.
01:13:13
Speaker
And you're both playing detective at that point.
01:13:16
Speaker
Um, it's the teacher's job to educate and inform.
01:13:18
Speaker
And it's, it's my job to sort of train and educate teachers, um, or administrators or whoever enough so that that information can get imparted.
01:13:26
Speaker
But, um,
01:13:28
Speaker
you know, it's a framework and it's not a set of solutions.
01:13:33
Speaker
So I think this is, it's more similar to something like universal design for learning, which is an attempt to expand the constraints of, you know, design thinking and, and other sort of pedagogical approaches that emphasize an output.
01:13:49
Speaker
And UDL is real saying, you know, the, the, every component of the design has to meet, you know,
01:13:56
Speaker
these different criteria in order to be quote unquote universally accessible.
01:14:02
Speaker
Even then, you know, there's problems with using UDL as a catch-all for everything to do with neurodiversity.
01:14:07
Speaker
And I think the one thing it really leaves out is the fact that brains adapt, you know, and they change and they shift.
01:14:13
Speaker
And what we see in our work is that
01:14:15
Speaker
You might be working on something with a student and two months later, that is no longer a problem, but something completely new has now emerged.
01:14:23
Speaker
And really the way I described this in a podcast with Aviva Levin, who does Less Than Impossible.
01:14:30
Speaker
But it's sort of like building a bridge where you put the first pillar in place to build the bridge or to build the foundation of the bridge.
01:14:37
Speaker
or you put the first wire, whatever component of the bridge you're building first, you put that there.
01:14:42
Speaker
And then the next one, right, has to go up after it.
01:14:46
Speaker
But people don't expect that you're going to find catastrophic failure after it.
01:14:51
Speaker
What they expect is that, oh, we worked through this hard part and things should be easier now.
01:14:56
Speaker
And I think the interesting thing about brains, right, and neural pathways is that if you're sort of forging a path, it's similar to forging a path in deep woods where you got to kind of
01:15:07
Speaker
You got to hack and remove stuff and push a boulder out of the way.
01:15:10
Speaker
And you're not always doing the same task, right?
01:15:12
Speaker
You're not always just clearing with a machete or an axe or whatever.
01:15:16
Speaker
You are moving the earth.
01:15:19
Speaker
You are moving the trees.
01:15:20
Speaker
You are peeling back hanging branches.
01:15:24
Speaker
You're knocking down thorny bushes.
01:15:27
Speaker
It's a bunch of different tasks to get to a clear and available path.
01:15:32
Speaker
And brains don't like the effort associated with clearing new paths.
01:15:36
Speaker
That's why we're creatures of habit is that once we get a habit, it's way more energy efficient to use the habit.
01:15:42
Speaker
And so, you know, the problem with thinking about UDL as a lifeline, right, is that if you hit UDL guidelines, then somehow you've
01:15:50
Speaker
differentiated sufficiently.
01:15:51
Speaker
And in reality, you might come across a student whose path isn't fully cleared, right?
01:15:56
Speaker
Maybe UDL let them move a little bit farther than a path that didn't have that, but there's still more obstacles for them.
01:16:02
Speaker
They're going to require basically just more differentiated feedback or a way of moving around an obstacle that's very specific to them.
01:16:11
Speaker
And compensation lets you do that.
01:16:13
Speaker
It lets you address those individual
01:16:15
Speaker
obstacles.
01:16:16
Speaker
Obviously, when we talk about this stuff, it's energy intensive and time intensive.
01:16:21
Speaker
And that's really, it was designed in a one-on-one context for my work with students.
01:16:27
Speaker
And for some group classes, we're able to leverage this into data systems.
01:16:31
Speaker
And part of what I'm doing with Penelope, which is sort of my side project, is doing that, is trying to find ways to build qualitative data systems as a way of looking at larger batches of information to find conclusions.
01:16:43
Speaker
And we've done that with test prep pretty successfully.
01:16:46
Speaker
The goal here really is that teachers should be able to explain this to any student.
01:16:50
Speaker
And I think in progressive schools that are interested in this, that care about accessibility, that care about neurodiversity, that care about brain-based learning, I think this is the type of thing that takes them to the next level and enriches that, you know,
01:17:04
Speaker
hiring great educators and letting and trusting them, this is a type of thing which then enables them to really grow past just the constraints of quote unquote, the science of teaching and learning, or those more one way components where all the studies and the evidence is about measurable outcomes from tests, not just what they're hearing from students.