Video 1, The Essense of How We Learn, includes content from Uncommon Sense Teaching: A Note to Our Readers and Chapter 1 Building Memory: How Students Fool Themselves into Thinking They're Learning. Content: 1) Katina fails her most recent test and blames it on test anxiety. Often students give up in their studies, not because they don’t have a “growth mindset,” but because they honestly don’t understand how to learn the sometimes difficult topics they’re learning. 2) Introduction of the three instructors and the course. 3) The brain's building block, the neuron, is made up of an axon, dendritic spines, and dendrites. Learning involves connecting, strengthening, and extending sets of neural links in long-term memory in the neocortex. 4) The strengthening of connections between links as a student practices is known as Hebbian learning. 5) How can we help Katina? (answer to come on the next video) 6) Katina's bloopers.

Video 2, Learn It, Link It, includes content from Uncommon Sense Teaching: Chapter 1 Building Memory: How Students Fool Themselves into Thinking They're Learning Content: (1) When students are learning, whatever the content or skill, they are creating links in long-term memory. (2) During the initial stages of learning, neural connections are just beginning to form, and the links between boutons and dendritic spines on neurons are weak. We refer to this as the learn it stage. (3) As a student actively practices on their own with the material and variations of the material, the links become stronger, and the student develops mastery of the new content. They can also connect the new ideas they are learning to other ideas. We refer to all this as the link it stage of learning. (4) Learn it, link it is the phrase we use to describe the gradual process of creating strong, easily accessed sets of links in long-term memory. This process is critical to gaining independent mastery of new learning. (5) The neural links of long-term memory are found in the neocortex—a napkin-sized, thin sheet of neurons that cover the outer part of your brain. (6) What is the best way for students to make neural connections and store new information in long-term memory? (Join us in the next video to find out.) (7) Why is Katina having so much trouble getting the information she is studying into her long-term memory? (We will tackle this in the next video too!)

Video 3, How Students Fool Themselves into Thinking They're Learning, includes content from Uncommon Sense Teaching: Chapter 1 Building Memory: How Students Fool Themselves into Thinking They're Learning Content: (1) Retrieval practice encourages and strengthens the connection between neurons in long-term memory and prevents students’ working memory from tricking them into thinking they have learned the new material when they really haven't. (2) An average working memory can hold up to four “balls” of information before ideas begin slipping from the mind. (3) Two of the most important types of memory for classroom learning are working memory and long-term memory. Information in working memory can fade within seconds. Information in long-term memory is more persistent, sometimes lasting (with some shifts) a lifetime. (4) Students will often place information in working memory and mistakenly believe it has made its way into long-term memory. Later, they can perform poorly on tests because they have no information to draw from long-term memory. (5) Example problems and partly worked problems help students learn new information because these problems help feed information gradually into students’ small funnel of working memory. But example problems are like training wheels and must eventually come off.

Video 4, Teaching Inclusively—The Importance of Working Memory Capacity, includes content from Chapter 2 of Uncommon Sense Teaching. Content: (1)  Students who learn more slowly and with difficulty can learn just as well—or even better—as students who learn swiftly and easily. Within any one classroom, there is a great deal of variability in working memory capacity among the students. (2) Differences in working memory capacity mean differences in learning speed. But faster does not necessarily mean better. (3) An introduction to hiker and race car-type brains. Students can be highly successful whether they have larger or more limited working memory capacities. (4) One of the great charms (and frustrations!) of young children is that they don’t have a lot of working memory. You can tell them one thing, and they can forget what you tell them within seconds!  By about 14-years-old working memory is about what it will be as an adult. (5) Economist Fredrich Hayek and Santiago Ramón y Cajal are both hiker-type learners who have won Nobel Peace Prizes. Cajal is an example of a hiker-type learner who through his persistence became not just a neuroscientist, but also the father of modern neuroscience.  (6)  The information in working memory is like a set of balls being juggled by an octopus. Too many balls at once and the working memory octopus can be overwhelmed. (7) Different working memory capacities mean different teaching approaches so that each student can be successful. (Watch the next video to learn more about these approaches.)

Video 5, Tricks for Expanding Working Memory (Hint—It Involves Long-Term Memory), includes content from Chapter 2 of Uncommon Sense Teaching. Content: (1)  The average illiterate person, for example, has a working memory capacity of about two items, whereas a typical literate person has a working memory capacity of about four items.  (2) The neural links of long-term memory can activate and extend working memory. (3) “Hiker” students with lower capacity working memory may learn more slowly, but they can learn even better than race-car learners who learn more quickly.  To do this, they need more practice with the material. Learning with more difficulty often means that you learn something better—leading psychologist Robert Bjork calls these desirable difficulties.  (4) "Hiker" students with lower capacity working memory can be more creative and find more elegant solutions to problems than higher capacity “race car” students. Students can be highly successful whether they have larger or more limited working memory capacities. (5) Building knowledge in a subject area is critical. When you hear, "I can just Google it," remember that is not true. Students need foundational knowledge in long-term memory if they are to build a solid and long-lasting structure.

Video 6, Inclusivity, Differentiation, and Scaffolding, includes content from Chapter 2 of Uncommon Sense Teaching. Content: (1)  Introducing Ms. Merkle–Barb's 8th-grade teacher, who first introduced Barb to differentiation. (2) Differentiation means providing different approaches to what students learn, how they learn, and how they demonstrate what they’ve learned. It includes adjustments in instruction, materials, and assignments. (2) Differentiation is not as hard as you think! Scaffolding for hiker-type learners may include meeting with smaller groups, allowing more time and practice, and breaking down the steps. Scaffolding for racecar-type learners may include allowing them the opportunity to sometimes work together to solve in-depth questions and challenging real-world problems.  (3) Scaffolding is at the core of differentiation. Scaffolded instruction provides the temporary support teachers use to assist students with lesser working memory capacity and other learning challenges. (4) Scaffolded instruction allows students to gradually climb to heights that might at first seem insurmountable.

Video 7, Practical Insights Related to Working Memory, includes content from Chapter 2 of Uncommon Sense Teaching. Content: (1) Should students (or we teachers) listen to music while working or studying? It depends. (2) When it comes to notetaking, pause periodically to give students a chance to reread and catch up on their notes. Pauses are especially valuable for those with lesser working memory capacity. (3) Students with lesser working memory capacity, and all students learning new, unfamiliar information, benefit from teacher-directed approaches. As students gain fluency, instruction can move toward more independent, student-directed approaches. (4) Break up your presentation of new information with active exercises—especially exercises involving retrieval practice—to assist with consolidation. (5) Teaching strategies geared for those with lesser-capacity working memory can often be useful for all students. (6) Breaking information and activities into smaller conceptual parts will combat too-heavy demands on students’ working memory.

What Is Active Learning? (Video 8) includes content from Chapter 3 of Uncommon Sense Teaching. Content: (1) Active learning doesn’t just mean that students are doing something physical with their hands—they don’t even have to be using their hands. Active learning means that they are engaging mentally with the more difficult, higher-order aspects of the material they are learning. (2) "Grecian Urns" are those learning activities that consume far more of a student's time than is reasonable in relation to its academic impact (Gonzalez, 2016).  (3) Active learning is a critical component of the learning process.  Direct, explicit instruction is often necessary to lay the first faint links of learning. Following the instruction with active retrieval practice strengthens the links. (4) The goal of learning is for students to use their new knowledge and skills independently in student-directed activities where the links are solidified and extended. (5) Interweaving teacher-directed explicit instruction with student-directed active learning melds the best of both worlds of teaching and learning.  (6) From a neuroscientific point of view, active learning supports the creation and consolidation of neural links in long-term memory.   It is part of the link it phase of the “learn it, link it” process that underlies both a basic and a higher-order conceptual understanding of the material.