Mary Helen Immordino-Yang

Come with me on a journey through a way of thinking about these things.

I'm going to introduce you to a whole bunch of new evidence, stories, and stuff, and then we're going to think together

about, okay, what does this mean now?

Applying it back to your own practice, to your own understanding of the concepts.

So there's a famous neuroscientist, Dan Schachter, who did a very interesting experiment decades ago now, where he asked people a simple question, how many windows are in your living room?

And

The majority of people answer that question and you say, how did you answer that question?

The majority of people answer that question by recounting that I had no idea the answer unless I just happened to have bought drapes last week, right?

But what I did was I closed my eyes, imagined myself in my living room and walked around and counted.

And that's the way memory actually works, when it's deep, meaningful, complex memory for the kinds of things we really want kids to accomplish in school.

You live in the living room of that disciplinary space so experientially richly that you then can resituate yourself in that disciplinary frame and walk around and count windows, so to speak.

You can derive information that you never had memorized before.

We forget in education that the core memory system of the brain that holds together the memories we so care about, which are semantic memories, memories for facts and information, procedural memories, memories for how to do stuff, those two kinds of memories are organized in the brain and mind by what you would call autobiographical memory.

It's like the hat stand

of memory that all the other stuff gets hung on.

It's the experience of having been here thinking about these things, the personal, subjective, lived experience of engaging with this opportunity to learn that becomes the frame on which the information gets connected.

When I teach, I try to bring people on a journey with me.

And I don't make this a secret.

I tell them this is what I'm doing.

I'm going to introduce you to interesting case studies, interesting findings, interesting pieces of information, interesting videos of people that are embodying ideas that I want us to try to learn about.