What school could be, should be, and almost never is | Steve Hughes | TEDxPragueED

Good evening, tonight I'm going to talk about how a brain is built and I'm also going to talk about the role that education may or may not play in that, but before we begin I would like you to please take a moment for someone next to you and Please tell him

what

grades you got on your metoo diet okay, it has to be enough time you

should

have finished it by now you know you can stop now I want you to stop we are losing control of the audience, okay, now the reason why I asked you the reason why I asked you to do that the reason I asked you to do that is I wanted to remind you how important that was at one point in your life and of course you know you did the work presumably it was necessary to get good grades in your maturity and then you went off to college and realized that all that work you had done to get those good grades in college had done nothing to your ability to do well in college because doing well in college. college requires a completely different set of skills than getting good grades on an exam and, in fact, doing well in your career has nothing to do with it either and you may have discovered once you started your career that it also had pretty little to do with

what

you had studied in college, in fact, the things we do in conventional

school

generally contribute very little to what we need to do what we need to know or the skills we need to be successful in life, You don't need something good. brands to be successful in the world what you need is simple what you need is you need this you need this yes that is what you need well thank you good evening yes thank you for that okay no yes this is what you need you need to have a brain a brain that works okay and you're probably familiar with this type of brain image maybe you've seen maybe you've seen an image like this have you ever seen an image like this?

Yes, these are the connections. inside the brain, well, let me show you another image of the brain. What you are seeing here is actually how the brain matures from early childhood to adulthood and the part that turns blue is the brain that is maturing and becoming functional and it is through the process of experiences in the environment, experiences real in the real world, that the brain constructs itself. In fact, you probably know, because you're a sophisticated audience, that brain development depends on experience. You understand what I mean by that dependent experience, not everything. experiences contribute to brain development to start talking about the types of experiences that help develop the brain.

I have to show you one more picture of the brain, yeah, what is it? This is your body's version of your brain. Okay, how your brain is built. the architecture of your brain has a dramatic overrepresentation of hands because, in fact, the reason you have a brain is so that your body can interact, can live in the world, in fact, the reason we evolved a brain It was because, frankly, anything that moves that needs to eat or can be eaten needs to figure out what it's going to do to survive needs to know if I move there to get that food source,

should

I go there to avoid being eaten? or should I do something else, in fact the purpose of the brain is to control behavior and the brain is controlling the behavior of that guy, okay, that's how it works and for the brain to be built, that guy needs to engage in a certain type of activity, now we I just finished the program, that happened, yes, okay, that guy needs to participate in a certain type of activity, this type of activity and I know it's a lot of words, so I'll say it with me, okay , listen like I said, that guy needs to participate. in motivated, effortful, repeated trial-and-error experimental interactions with the environment and that is how the brain constructs itself and, in fact, it is the only way the brain constructs itself.

In fact, if you ever wanted to learn to play a musical instrument, you had to care enough to learn. that musical instrument to stay motivated to apply effort to engage in repeated over and over trial and error experimental interactions with the environment because when we do this type of activity it is like weights for the brain, the brain is a kind of muscle and It's like building any muscle you have to exercise it and you have to push it as you build muscle and that's how you would build a brain there it is again God help us okay so that's what you have to do you understand what I'm saying saying okay, now we understand that I'm in your TEDx audience, it's a sophisticated group of people.

If you have kids, you're thinking about the types of activities you have an instinct for. In fact, you're thinking about types. of activities that you can have your child do to help him or her engage in that kind of motivated effort for repeated trial and error and experimental interaction with the environment, and then you do things like say yes, it's a good idea to engage in science fair if you do that kind of thing in the Czech Republic or get involved in independent projects, you know you want them to find things that enlighten them and maybe try different types of experiences and say yes, you know my son likes this . kind of things and we help him experience those kinds of things, so we like things like science fairs, motivation, commitment, work, harnesses, love, probes, you know a lot of countries, you have things like robot competitions, you have robot competitions and the Czech Republic, yes.

Well, some people like building robots, some people like writing software, which helps people figure out how to do things like work together, work collaboratively toward a shared goal, practice being good winners, being good losers, having practical than those. problem-solving applications in the real world or maybe we send our kids to summer camp because we know there's a whole set of activities that they're going to learn, they're going to learn social skills by interacting with other kids in a semi-social environment. structured, of course, I mean, these are the things that they need to learn and they only learned them when they have these experiences, they only develop these abilities as a consequence of practicing them and even playing sports, you know, some children are attracted to sports, some children .

They are drawn to art and as sophisticated, thoughtful parents who think developmentally, they know they want to align them with these types of activities, but here is an example from a Montessori classroom. Here is another example of motivated and effortful trial-and-error experimental interactions with a Montessori object called the pink tower. He is learning to differentiate by size. This is a sensory enrichment activity. He is three and a half years old. In reality, he doesn't distinguish size either, but when he does this type of activity, he develops that ability and is attracted. to do it and we don't have time to see it all here, but if we did, we would see that in about two and a half minutes he solves it and then we

could

watch him do it again and he does it in 30. seconds because he has developed some cognitive ability as a result of practice of this activity and this is how you build a brain and I think we want to build brains and I'm pretty sure we all want to build the brains of all children and this is how it works now a TEDx audience will probably be relatively professional type people in For the most part, and we know something about the research on families like yours, you are overwhelmingly concerned about your children's cognitive development, so you spend a lot of energy and time facilitating it.

This process is energy and time that people from different backgrounds and maybe even with different understandings

could

n't do, but that's how you build a brain, it's the only way to build a brain, you have to give this guy opportunities to have these things. yeah, do it right, do that, that's how you build a brain and it's the only way to build a brain and we're programmed for this. I mean, it is nature's design that children are drawn to engage in activities that help them develop their brains properly. Now you are learning something about what the natural environment is like and you realize that it feels very good.

There was a time when he couldn't do that, but his brain was drawn to the design of nature that he wanted to master. Now he is practicing the skill. development of her fingers she is refining her senses by experience and you know that's how it is for all of us that's how it was but that's how human beings grow that's how we build our brain and if you ask anyone who understands anything about brain development , about the maturation of higher order abilities, even lower order abilities, if you ask anyone who knows anything about the brain what you should study first, they will say something like this because it is obvious once you understand what is necessary to build. in a brain it becomes evident that this is how you should this is not how you should it is the only way you can do it what should go to

school

before it is possible that school can be a place where every child from all backgrounds keeps a list of the types of experiences they are having outside of school they could have experiences in school that helped facilitate this process, give each developing brain its best chance to do this, but that is not what the school, and school is generally for, as you know, learning things and that's fine. because there are things to learn and you know I'm a neuropsychologist Blaney there's a lot of things that I needed to learn to become a competent neuropsychologist and it's the same in your line of work whatever you do there are things to know yeah so we know that we have to learn material, there is content to know, but when we focus only on the content and we forget the skills and we do not develop the brain and of course you know how content learning works, it works, and here is another problem because this does not it's an environment that's designed to give kids opportunities to do what that's like again, motivate him, you know, see what happens if he repeats it, experiment like you can't do that there.

I mean, you might have a teacher who has an inclination and tries, you know. build some of that, but that is not an environment designed to develop a brain, but that is what we do in school and that is how we evaluate the school, we give tests and if we want to improve the school there is a very superficial logic that says " Well, no". I don't know if we want schools to be better, what we should do well, children will learn more things, because that is why schools learn things and how will we know if the school is improving well, it's simple, we will give them tests and if they know more things as you see in the exam, then the schools are improving, that is the way we think about improving schools and of course Pisa has played an important role in this.

Every three years around the world, children take the Pisa exams and then the OECD produces the league tables piece. They're okay, so the part in purple is the middle ground. In the United States, we are not doing so well in math. The mind instantly goes to a man who has to improve those math scores and, yes, he is doing well for us and at least in reading. We're above the midpoint in science reading, so maybe we're doing well and there's a Republican Chuck right away. The competition is set, isn't it? Yeah, so you get kicked, you get kicked, you get kicked in math. but hey man, we are winning, sorry, we are winning in science reading, so maybe you should unite your reading and science game so that we are winning and this spreads all over the world, in all the countries in the world that want .

Improving education is trying to improve test performance because, after all, if the school is going to improve, they will know more things and how will we know if they know more things? Now we will see improvements in the exams. Pasi Solberg, a former teacher in the Finnish Ministry of Education, wrote extensively about why Finnish education works so well even though they do not chase exam results. You've described this trend as the global education reform movement and that means jerm and if' You're fast and you know English well, you know what that means, that's German, but there are consequences for chasing test scores and, believe me, Test scores have real importance in the United States, so one of the consequences is that you stop teaching other things or at least de-emphasize them, in fact, then you especially de-emphasize the kinds of activities that help develop the brain because those things are not on the test and everyone gets nervous teachers can lose their jobs schools can close principals can be fired if they are not improving test scores, so one thing that happens is that the school it becomes incrediblyboring now, in an unrelated study, the economic analysis was carried out, there are

never

enough funds for education, in this study they explored what the consequences would be on school performance if it was changed. from a five-day school week to a four-day school week, but the consequence was that scores increased.

Now, turn that over in your mind for a moment. What they did is create a situation where you do better if you get less. That's what brings you Ellen to chasing test scores, because of the way the analyzes of other international Pisa exams have been done. Pisa scores don't predict anything about a country's economic future once you get out of the bottom quartile, you know what I mean, the bottom. 25 percent probably don't want to be there. Okay, maybe there are basic literacy issues, but once you get out of there, it doesn't really matter how people do on pea tests, other factors are much more important in predicting economic development.

Google knows it. I know Google doesn't care about your exam result. Google used to be famous for doing puzzles and stuff, they don't do that anymore. You know what predicts job performance at Google. Give me an example of a time when you solved an analytically difficult problem that is a highly predictive interview question. Yes, it has to do with this. how you get a job at google you have a good well you have a well developed brain this is how you get a job at ernst and young has done an analysis of incoming employees they don't care how you did at university they want you to have gone to university no They care how you did they don't care about test scores They don't predict performance in our instant the young IBM did an international study interviewed 1,700 CEOs from 68 countries in 88 and 18 industries, you know? what they want, they want people who can innovate, people who are creative, people who can communicate, people who can collaborate within the company and with clients, they don't care about test scores and, do you know, not a single one Of those 1,700 CEOs said anything? about school performance because it is not a predictor that everyone wants everywhere this is a distraction what it does is draw our attention to other places now Czech Republic hasn't always had national tests but I know you like that kind of thing not now so improving things will distract you as a country from the kind of things that will actually have an impact and this is uh-oh here we go from 2013 this is an education analysis for the Czech Republic one of the ways the Czech Republic in 2013 decided Improving school performance was about increasing more testing in schools because, after all, schools are about learning things, right?

And how do we know that if they are learning more things, they will do better on the exams and, therefore, how? Do we know better at the beginning? Well, we have to do more tests. That is the fundamental dilemma of the modern era. Will God help us? Will it build better brains or engage in German? the dilemma of education in the modern era thanks