Kenneth Wesson Educational Consultant: Neuroscience San Jose, CA kenawesson@aol

1. Overview of Brain Research as it Connects to 21st Century Learning Kenneth WessonEducational Consultant: NeuroscienceSan Jose, CA kenawesson@aol.com

2. Overview of Brain Research as it Connects to 21st Century Learning • Where are we headed? • The classroom of the future • The Critical connections for 21st Century learning (neural, social, cognitive, multimodal, cross- curricular) for student learning • Why a S.T2.R.E.A.M. model for our schools instead of just STEM? Merging science, technology and thematic L’ Reading/LA, engineering, art/visualization and mathematics) • “I will…”

3. American Education: Crossroad

4. American Education: Crossroad Our students are leaving school equipped to work only in the kinds of jobs that are quickly disappearing from the global and American economies. --Tony Wagner, 2008 Harvard Graduate School of Education

5. Our Teaching and Learning Model for 21st Century Skills • Relevance to what the student needs to know in the academic world as well as outside of the classroom • Students must be actively engaged in his/her learning • Student has choices in what and how he/she learns

6. Our Teaching and Learning Model for 21st Century Skills Keys to 21st Century Skills: • Learning to learn (and life-long learning) • Flexibility in thinking • Modifying one’s thinking/understanding based on new information • Higher-order thinking • Creativity and innovative thinking • Working cooperatively • Communicating within a diverse (multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, international environment)

7. We are currently preparing today’s students for occupations that have yet to be created, for a future that we have neither encountered nor envisioned in detail, and demanding the mastery of skills that we cannot even imagine.

8. Preparing Students for YESTERDAY OR THE FUTURE?Today: 30,000 to 35,000 new research fieldsNewly hybridized scientific areas creating new disciplines:NeuropharmacologyNeuro-oncologyPlasma Physics Environmental ToxicologyGene Therapy Protein Engineering Developmental Neurobiology PharmacogenomicsBio-organic Chemistry Molecular EndocrinologyMolecular Biophysics Molecular PsychiatryCognitive Neuroscience Molecular GeneticsPsychoneuroimmunology MicroelectronicsMicrobiology NeuroendrocrinlogyEvolutionary Biology Evolutionary PsychologyBiophysics Geothermal EngineeringGeophysics/Astrophysics Physical Chemistry Heteronuclear Isotopic labeling Behavioral pharmacology

9. Administrators? • Teachers? • Parents?

10. Translational Neuroscience If you have children at home, you are an educator. If you teach children in a school, you work in a learning laboratory (not merely a “school”.) If you are a parent or a teacher, you are a “neuro-plastician” If you are an administrator, you fall into the “all of the above” category

11. We are moving away from a world dominated by economic capital formation (Industrial Age: tangibles) to a world where human capital resources and information will determine global success (The “Information Age”).

12. 21st Century Skills: Microtrends • Long-term trends are replaced by “Microtrends” – brief needs/patterns of behavior that are influencing the marketplace, society, and decision-making (all aspects of our personal lives) • The Internetredefining – lifestyles → needs → global economies • Schools designed around these new realities → teach to the world of the future, not the past • Valuation today reflects innovative/ useful information,more than its does useful tangible products

13. “The Known Knowns”: 21st Century Learners Will Need To . . . be able to “learn how to learn” . . . adapt to new technologies that haven’t been invented yet, for jobs that don’t exist yet, to meet challenges we have yet to encounter or envision . . . be digitally literate and digitally-networked . . . be multi-skilled . . . be creative (VST skills) . . . be flexiblethinkers . . . have a robust problem-solving cognitive “tool chest” . . . be able to thinkand revise one’s thinking and conclusions as circumstances demand based on new input/new information (rapidly changing environment)

14. What skills are most important for job success when hiring a high school graduate?

15. Of the high school students that you recently hired, what were their deficiencies?

16. Growing consensus that schools need to be accountable for more than “basic” academics. “Creativity is as important in education as literacy and we should treat it with the same status.” -Sir Ken Robinson, 2006 “Thetop 10 jobs for 2010 weren’t even created in 2004” - Diana G. Oblinger, President EDUCAUSE

17. Predicting the Distant Future The RAND Corporation has created this model of how a “home computer” will look in the year 2004; however the technology will not be economically feasible for the average home. Also the scientist readily admit that the technology to actually work has not been created yet but scientific progress Is expected to solve these problems. . . and the computer will be easy to use.

18. Predicting the Near Future The degree to which today's learners understand scientific inquiry will determine global leadership in the mid-21st Century. No single discipline will dominate our future more than science.

19. Science / Engineering • 60 % of Degrees – Asia • 5 % of Degrees – U.S. • ↓ Graduation Rates in science/math • High Skill → High Wage jobs of the future • Low skill → Low wage jobs

20. Potential Earnings/employment based on Educational Attainment U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

21. You are here Entrance ● ● ● Entrance

22. 1900 Workplace Demands Highly skilled Low skilled • Avg. age to enter work force 14 • Avg. age to leave work force 47 • Life expectancy 47

23. 2010 Workplace Demands Highly skilled Low skilled • Avg. age to enter the workplace 21 • Number of career changes 5-8 • Est. Life expectancy in 2100 107 -124!

24. E- Communications

25. Person-to-Person Communications

26. Paying for goods and services

27. Listening to Music

28. Information Dewey decimal system? (25 B.G.)

29. Our Schools

30. “Digitally Enhance Education” • Does digitally enhanced education “enhance” learning outcomes or is it merely an “alternative” route to accessing content? • Prior predictions of new enhancement paradigms for education: • 1950s –TVs → replace teachers. • 1980s - Floppy disks → replace textbooks. • 1990s - The most “wired” schools would enjoy measurable achievement advantages over other schools. (Now the desirable connectivity is “wireless”). • Proposals: Enthusiastically endorsed by elected officials/ policy-makers and proposed by non-educators.

31. “Trending-up” • …may be leading to a "dumbing down" of educational content and Standards by limiting content based on its portability to an e-Tablet or e-Reader format. • Neuroscientist Susan Greenfield suggests that the excessive usage of technology actually inhibitshigher level thinking by minimizing transfer and application opportunities that come by way of multimodal experiential learning. • Continuous partial attention (CPA)

32. Canesta http://www.canesta.com In San Jose, CA These are virtual keyboardsthat can be projected and touched on any surface. The keyboard watches your fingers move and translates that action into keystrokes in the device. Most systems can also function as a virtual mouse.

33. Technology and the Modern Brain The new Mercedes SLC 600

34. Mercedes SCL 600 series

36. Solar-powered Boats

37. Living with Large Numbers How far back was _____ seconds ago? 1 million secs. 1 billion secs. 1 trillion secs. 32 years ago 11.5 days 32,000 years

38. Preparation must be multi-dimensional (Olympic trainingwithout knowing your specialty) • Multi-talented (MI) – Life-long learners; flexible/creative thinkers; synthesizers of dreams and imagination Students of the Future = Swiss Army knives

39. Next technology: Gesture-based Computing

40. "It is not the strongest of the species that survive nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change." -- Charles Darwin

41. We are living during a uniquely historical time relative to our understanding of the human brain. We are neurologically shaping young brains today for a future that is vastly unlike our own recent past

43. The Three Drivers of the 21st Century Skills • SCANS(Secretary’s Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills) • States’ Career Clusters Skills & Knowledge • Partnership for 21st Century Skills

44. SCANS: Secretary’s Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills In 1990, the Secretary of Labor appointed a commission to determine the skills our young people need to succeed in the world of work. The commission's fundamental purpose was to encourage a high-performance economy characterized byhigh-skill, high-wage employment. Although the commission completed its work in 1992, its findings and recommendations continue to be a valuable source of information for individuals and organizations involved in education and workforce development. August 8, 2008 from : http://wdr.doleta.gov/SCANS/

45. SCANS Skills (1992) • Basic Skills • Reading • Writing • Arithmetic/Mathematics • Listening • Speaking • Personal Qualities • Responsibility • Self-esteem • Sociability • Self-management • Integrity/honesty • Thinking Skills • Creative thinking • Decision making • Problem solving • Seeing things in the mind’s eye • Knowing how to learn • Reasoning

46. The Brain-considerate Classroom of the Future We have created school conditions that are anti-medical and antithetical to what we know today about how the brain learns. Moving From: To: Planning instruction around the operational nature of the human brain –Learning occurs inside the cranial vault, not the classroom. Force-fitting the 4.5M yr. old learning human brain into a 150-year old educational model Emphasizing surface-level “memory” Emphasizing connections and meaning-making Focusing on “acquisition” of content Focusing on engagement and inquiry for the integration of content. These events creatememory A fixation on the “3 R’s” A focus on the 3 C’s: Connections, Critical thinking and Creativity. Fostered by the 3 I’s: Ideas for realistic problem solving, Interpersonal skills and Intelligence (what intelligent people do, when answers are not known?) Standardized testing Creative thinking Competition Collaborative problem-solving co-constructing knowledge A teacher’s determination to cover the prescribed material Teachers determined to maximize the number of neural networks, pathways and dendritic connections in the brain

47. 21st Century Skills for Creative Thinkers Learners • Agricultural Age → Industrial Age → Information Age • Moving from the Information Age → The Innovation Age

48. "Everything that can be invented has been invented." Charles H. Duell, Commissioner of the US Office of Patents (1899)

49. STEM: Creative Engineering game called “What’s the solution?” (in unison)

50. …out of spoons for your soup? What’s the solution?