Khan Academy Ed Talks with Benjamin Riley - Wednesday, January 5, 2022

Hello and welcome to Ed Talks, where we at Khan Academy talk to folks who are influential in the field of education. I'm Kristen Deserver, the Chief Learning Officer here at Khan Academy, and I am happy today to welcome Ben Riley, who is with Deans for Impact. We'll talk a little bit more about what that organization is and what it means, but think about—we want to talk about how we can embed what we know about learning, what we know from learning science about how people learn, and how we can help teachers use that in their classrooms.

So before we get started, I want to remind you that Khan Academy is a non-profit organization, and we're able to keep doing our work because of donations from folks like you. So if you have the means and you go to khanacademy.org/donate, you will find a place where you can help us continue with our mission. Thank you very much!

I also want to recognize some of our COVID crisis supporters, including AT&T, General Motors, and Fastly. Thank you for your support! One final thing before we get started: if you want to revisit some of these conversations in audio form, we do have a podcast, Homeroom with Sal, the podcast that you can find wherever you get your podcasts, and you can enjoy listening to some of our conversations.

And we will jump right in now to talking to Ben Riley. Ben, welcome, and thank you for joining us today.

Ben Riley: Thanks for having me, Kristen.

Kristen Deserver: Excellent! So I like to start off with just talking to people about how they got to where they are today. So I know in your background you've got some different paths that maybe aren't typical for folks that are in education. Tell us a little bit how you got to wind up in the field of education.

Ben Riley: Sure. So I come from a family of public educators. My grandmother was a school psychologist, my mother was a school teacher and then a school librarian and then a school counselor, and my father was a neuroscientist and a professor. So education was everywhere in my family, and as a consequence, I wanted nothing to do with it. My whole plan with my life was to do something entirely different from that. Through a securities route, I ended up getting a law degree, and even though I didn't want to be a lawyer either, I ended up working for the California Department of Justice.

Within that, I started working on lawsuits brought against the state of California for issues related to education policy, and maybe it was in the blood—maybe it was something about being surrounded by educators my whole life—but the questions that were raised in those lawsuits were profoundly interesting to me. So I quickly became pretty heavily involved in the issues related to California education policy that were hotly contested at the time, such as whether charter schools should exist or whether every eighth grader should be taught algebra or not. Should testing be only in English or in multiple languages? A lot of hot-button issues.

Then there were policy matters that started happening like Race to the Top and President Obama wanting to change education policy throughout the 50 states, and soon-to-be Governor Jerry Brown asking me, "Is it a good idea? Is it a bad idea? What's your view?" So that kind of sucked me into education issues, and I felt a bit hamstrung being an attorney where I was forced to sort of take the position of the state of California, which wasn't always what I necessarily personally believed and aligned with. Through a bunch of circuitous routes that I won't belabor, I ended up becoming really interested in how to improve teaching and teachers in particular.

What I always say when I speak is that I don't have a background as a teacher—I wouldn't pretend to be a teacher—but I have spent my life as an advocate, and I am an advocate for teachers and for great teaching. So that's what I've found myself doing for most of my professional life.

Kristen Deserver: That's great! My mom is also a school librarian. I've talked to other people in education whose mothers are school librarians. I think that's a powerful force to have in your background that kind of just gets you into these issues and hooks you into ideas in ways you wouldn't expect to come back to.

So that's excellent. Based on that, let's just talk—tell me a little bit about what Deans for Impact is as an organization and what prompted you to found it.

Ben Riley: Yeah, so Deans for Impact is a national nonprofit organization dedicated to ensuring that every child has a well-prepared teacher. The story of our organizational life is a little different, I think, than some, in that it didn't start out with, at least from my end, any intent of starting an organization.

What happened was that because of those interests I mentioned earlier, I started to get interested in who are the leaders in programs that prepare people to be teachers—the deans of schools of education predominantly—who might be interested in trying to transform and improve that process. I started to look for them and found them, and they started leading me and mentioning others, but what was fascinating is as I was talking to them, it was very clear to me that there was not any connecting network amongst them.

So I tried to bring them together and just put them in a room—this is going on, you know, eight, nine, ten years ago—and say, "Okay, well, you know, everybody in this room seems to agree that we can do better in the way that we prepare teachers. What will it take to do that, and what would an organization dedicated to making that happen look like?" And from that, Deans for Impact was born.

A big part of that—we do a lot of different things—but a big part of that has been trying to strengthen the experiences that people who are planning on becoming teachers have, making them more meaningful and relevant to classroom practice, and connecting them to our best scientific understanding of how students learn. I would say that if there's anything that I feel like was my contribution to the Deans for Impact effort, it was really focusing on that piece in particular—in part because I was stunned to find out some years into my career in education that there were all these insights into how our minds work and how we think and learn that I was not aware of.

Frankly, I was working on pursuing some projects that looking back on it, I might not have worked on in pursuit if I had known the science of learning. So we've made that a point of emphasis, and it continues to be something we're working very hard at.

Kristen Deserver: That's actually how I first came to be aware of Deans for Impact—was the release of this science of learning paper that laid out in really clear language some fundamental things that we know about learning from research, all with nice little footnotes that give the reference to where things are, but that it's really accessible and easy for people who haven't studied and don't have PhDs in education to grasp how did that come about? And as you started thinking about how to build that?

Ben Riley: Yeah, thanks for those kind words. There were a couple of things where I could almost say we got lucky, but it was also a little bit by design in putting the science of learning out. By the way, it's available on the Deans for Impact website completely free of charge—six pages, click, download, you've got it. And really, it was born of the fact that I knew we had a cognitive scientist who thought a lot about how to communicate ideas of cognitive science to the general public, and Dan Willingham at the University of Virginia is someone who's written a lot of books and a lot of blog posts.

The reason I knew he was actually a previous Ed Talk guest.

Kristen Deserver: Okay, great! Go watch it because I'm sure it was compelling.

Ben Riley: I didn't even know that. And I think that speaks to the fact that Dan has spent a non-trivial amount of his career trying to get these ideas into the hands of teachers.

So I knew on the science side we had a scientist who could think how to communicate effectively to non-scientists. The flip side—and this is, I think, a place that's still underdeveloped in education generally—is that there are an awful lot of teachers out there, and wouldn't it be interesting to have a teacher involved in the creating of something that's meant for teachers? So, through, again, a time when blogging was more common than it is now, I had found this blogging teacher named Paul Bruno, based in California, a middle school science teacher, who wrote often about education issues and wrote very clearly.

He had written in particular about academic standards—content standards—and how some of the new standards that were being drafted weren't going to be very useful to teachers because they were getting vaguer and vaguer. I thought, "This is what we need! We need to find something that will tell teachers in ways that don't make it just completely like anything goes," which is often, I think, the unfortunate byproduct of people being afraid to take a stand.

Yet at the same time, you don't want to get so micro-specific that it sounds like you're being prescriptive in how you are teaching. So we got Paul and Dan together and said, "All right, let's get to work," and from that, the science of learning was born.

Kristen Deserver: That's fantastic! That point is really interesting because often even researchers themselves very much hedge their conclusions or say, "Well, you know, it might depend," or "In this specific situation." Getting from that to something that is still actionable—knowing that there are maybe some caveats behind the scene—but it gives teachers something that is concrete for them to work on but doesn't get all the way to, "Do this exact thing," is a fine line to walk and find that sweet spot for sure.

Ben Riley: I think that education generally, again, sort of tends toward the nice. And that’s a good thing—in general, we’re working with students, we want to be nice. But I think teachers sometimes need something that's more directly relevant so that they don't have to be spending…they've got so much time to spend on trying to think through all the various things they need to think through. If you can make it easier for them to see, "Okay, this is how this scientific principle connects to specific teaching actions, instructional decisions," then you sort of help build the bridge—scaffold, as we say in education—ideas from science to their implementation, their application in the classroom.

So I think that's an ongoing challenge and will never be a perfected challenge. But I think that if you have, again, teachers involved, you're going to be more likely to get something that teachers find helpful, and you also hopefully have scientists who are able to think about how to make that science translatable and understandable to non-experts.

Kristen Deserver: That makes sense! In the research world sometimes we're starting to hear a lot about brain science and brains, but you've been vocal about distinguishing between the brain and the mind when it comes to children's learning. What's the difference between those two?

Ben Riley: Thank you for that question, because I see this a lot too, as you just said. There are conferences that are like "mind, comma, brain, comma, blank." A lot of times people will assume that, like, I'm really excited about neuroscience. My dad was a neuroscientist. I actually think neuroscience is super fascinating as a field, and provocatively, I actually don't think it's that useful to teachers.

So let me back up and answer your question. The brain is an organ, right? It exists inside our head, and there's no doubt that it exists. It has all the different pieces—the cerebellum, the amygdala, and too many other parts to count—but it's there. It's a thing; it's a physical object that's part of our anatomy. The mind is a metaphor. The mind is a construct that we use to try to make sense of a lot of different things that are going on.

Sometimes when I try to explain this, I invoke another metaphor to make this a little bit more tangible, so I'll try that out here. If you think about a car and what a car is supposed to do, a car is supposed to transport you from one spot to another. The car has within it an engine—we're going to call that engine the brain. What I'm going to say is that in order to operate your car in ways that are meaningful and useful to you, you don't really need to know hardly anything about how that engine works.

What you do need to know is how to drive the car. Driving is what matters, and if you think about what we mean when we say "driving," it actually consists of a lot of different pieces. It's putting your foot down on the gas and shifting into gear and turning and braking, and making decisions about oncoming traffic. Driving is the mind. The mind is the driver and the driving of cognition and how we make sense of the world.

So everything that I think that is super important for teachers to have at least some understanding of is: How do I drive this thing? The thing really is the minds of their students. How do I get them to think about what it is they need to think about in ways that lead to durable and lasting learning?

Kristen Deserver: That totally makes sense! I could probably go on a whole other tangent about that brain science piece. I'm actually very aligned with you on the practicalities of what it offers for folks in classrooms and what they're doing. But as you're thinking about what teachers should know about how to drive that car, and how to do it, I know that you also did some work with some pre-service teachers—teachers that are in teacher training programs—to try to understand what they are learning and what they know as they go through those programs. What were some of your findings there?

Ben Riley: Yeah, so before directly answering that question, I'll back up and say that we reference the science of learning document, and that document sort of has a series of questions about like how learning takes place, how do we understand new ideas. Over time, we sort of distilled those into a set of principles that come from the science of learning—cognitive science—and we use those as sort of our basic framework for figuring out what it is that we both want future teachers to know and where they start, what do they know about how we learn before anything has happened vis-a-vis an engagement with Deans for Impact or frankly in any of the programs that are preparing them to become teachers.

We developed an assessment, and we looked actually around to see if any assessment like this existed already—and it might be out there, but we couldn't find it. So one of our very able employees, Dr. Rebecca Berlin, came on board and said, "No problem, let's get to work, we'll build an assessment around these learning science principles." So we did, and then we asked a lot of teacher candidates—over a thousand—to take the assessment and give us just a sense of where they were in their understanding of learning science.

There were a couple of interesting findings. You can go kind of glass half-empty or glass half-full in that when it came to sort of basic understanding of cognition, they got about half the questions right, half of them wrong. Now you could say, you know, half right on a test is usually not an A for sure and is usually tilted toward the other end of that spectrum. On the other hand, they hadn't really been exposed to a lot of it yet, so you know how much would you expect them to know anyway if this hasn't been a focus of their studies.

The other thing that I thought was really interesting with that is that there was a significant difference between their understanding of scientific principles in the abstract versus their understanding of how to apply those principles when making an instructional decision—something that relates to the classroom. On those sorts of test questions that we gave them, they did a little bit better, and significantly better, I would say 10-15 percentage points better. So that was interesting because it sort of suggests—and I've come to believe this in my time working in education—that sometimes you don't necessarily know why something works; you just figure out that it works.

I think when looking at sort of making certain choices, people who are preparing to become teachers are better able to figure out, "Well, yeah, I want to do that with my students," rather than some alternative. They make a better choice there than their basic understanding of learning science might suggest. So that was encouraging, and in some ways we're trying to lift up how future teachers do on both dimensions, but it's really that latter dimension—that is, applying these principles in practice where the real impact will be made. Because if they are making those sort of choices correctly over and over again with their students, it's more likely to have the sort of impact on student learning that we're hoping to have.

Some people can look at the data and sort of have a negative takeaway, but we view it the opposite at Deans for Impact.

Kristen Deserver: Yeah! Well, it also somewhat laid out the case for why your organization is needed. People are doing okay on their own, and we need to think about how to raise that up above where it is. That makes sense! I also wonder if some of the results from education research are kind of intuitive in what we would expect, and so if you're making choices based on that, it makes sense.

Then there are some other things that maybe aren't as intuitive—honestly, learning styles come to mind—where you think like, "Oh yeah, people have these different styles; we should tailor instruction to that," but the research doesn't really support it. Maybe it's more those kind of counterintuitive findings where you're seeing, you know, if no one's ever been taught that, then they aren't going to know where that intuition is.

Ben Riley: I think you're right. Now, I'm going to make it a little bit provocative here, Kristen, and I'm going to ask you a question. So before we jumped on this, I went and visited the Khan Academy website, which I hadn't been to in a while. Like many places, I see sort of a cry for personalized learning—a sort of flag for personalized learning—and in particular that students should control the pace of their learning.

Look, you're not responsible for what's put on a website, I know that. But I wonder, knowing what you know about learning science, do you think that's a good idea? Because I think that's another thing where that idea sounds so appealing. Certainly philanthropists enjoy it; I think a lot of parents enjoy it. Provocatively, I would say the evidence, as I understand it from learning science, would suggest that actually novices—students are in a poor position to be regulators of their own learning because they don't know what they don't know. Thinking is very difficult, and when faced with something that is cognitively challenging, they may try to take the path of least resistance in order to get through that.

I mean, I certainly see this a lot with students who just want to get the answer right and move on, and that's kind of built into a lot of our education system. So I wanted to ask you if you are working internally—if you have like internal conversations—how do you think that situates between learning science and personalized learning?

Kristen Deserver: First, love it! Thank you for asking. We have tons of conversations about this. So the foundational thing that Khan Academy is really based on is the idea of mastery learning.

So the idea of mastery learning is working at something until you have that high level of proficiency before you go on to the next thing that you're working on. That is pretty well supported; there are meta-analyses and meta-analyses of meta-analyses that support that idea of mastery learning. And the key thing about mastery learning is that it's pretty antithetical to moving at a lockstep pace in a classroom, because just students are going to have different gaps that they need to fill in.

Some students are going to take longer on this concept to really master it than students who are going to take longer at this concept. So that idea of pacing and students maybe being at different paces is really an artifact for us of the idea that we want students to get to that idea of mastery, and really build proficiency on a skill before they try to build something on top of that skill with that shaky foundation of where things are.

So there's that piece of it. And then the second question is: okay, if that's kind of that personalized piece of everyone's not going to be moving at the same pace through this content, you’re going to move at different paces depending on what you're doing, then the question is who controls that pace? So I think—and where I push for is actually there's a kind of a triangle of teacher, the system, and the learner.

Depending on a student's proficiency, depending on their developmental stage, depending on where they are, we want to be changing that portion of who's doing what over time. When we're starting out with novices, when we're starting out with young learners, it's going to be more teacher-directed. When we have teachers who have 30 kids in a classroom, there's some benefit to having the system do a little bit of the guidance too that we can build into that over time.

Ideally, we want learners to end up being lifelong learners who are able to control and regulate their own learning, but they’re not going to be there from the beginning. So it's more of a journey, and that self-regulated personalized learner is the goal, but not where we're going to be all the time. So that's kind of where we are.

Ben Riley: Does that make sense?

Kristen Deserver: No, it makes sense! And I think, you know, look, I can be that rude guest to sort of, you know, I'm invited on and then, like, lob some little criticisms where you're coming from with that. I would say that like the mastery point is an interesting one because we could, you know, offline or in a perhaps future Ed Talk, talk about various readings of the research. I think it's really hard to know what mastery is of anything.

One of the key insights of learning science that's really, really hard to build into any education platform or education system is that you're unlikely to remember most of the information you're ever exposed to at any one time, and you've got to come back to it. Anyone who's ever crammed for a test knows that you're able at a point in time to perform as if you have learned something—aka, perhaps from certain dimensions develop mastery of it—but if it hasn't actually changed your long-term memory, i.e., what it is that you store as your knowledge, then you haven't gained that mastery.

I'm sure Khan Academy doesn't do this, but there are a lot of other platforms where mastery means take a quiz at the end of something and if you score above a certain thing then on you, you've demonstrated mastery and on you are to the next subject. So I think that's an area where, you know, sort of I would love to see more technology enthusiasts in education have a deeper understanding of what learning science says or suggests.

Kristen Deserver: Well, I cannot let that just lie there because in Khan Academy, we in fact have mastery challenges. So initially, you take a quiz and get some level of proficiency, but then after a period of time, you'll have a mastery challenge come up that's going to bring back skills from previous things that you have achieved initial mastery at and give you more questions about those—doing that spaced practice, that kind of spiral review.

Absolutely because of all of that research, it's not just the one time you're done—but there's a forgetting curve, and you need to think about how to help learners keep that information fresh over time. So we absolutely are thinking about that in what we do too.

Ben Riley: Great! I'm glad to hear that.

Kristen Deserver: I'm going to pivot us back so you can tell a little bit more about what you do. I appreciate, though; I love this conversation! So in thinking about teacher preparation programs, how do you go about working with different schools and bringing them together?

Ben Riley: Yeah, sorry if I hijacked the interview, but I was like, I like this to be bilateral rather than just one-sided. So we do a lot of different things with schools of education and leaders in schools of education, but per the conversation we're having now, the thing that we do is bring together networks of programs that want to embed learning science into what we sometimes call the arc of experiences that a teacher candidate—someone who's preparing to become a teacher—goes through from the very beginning until the very end.

That work takes multiple years, involves multiple faculty members, and typically the dean of education at least sign-off on the project. Then, really working hard to both figure out what, if anything, is being done presently to get those ideas into the heads of future teachers and then figure out, "Well, how can we do more of that, and how will we figure out whether we've made improvement with that?"

We have something now that we've developed around sort of the six principles that we have, and I'll talk about those in more particularity in a second here, but we have sort of these modules, as we call them, where we sort of introduce a concept from learning science, set up a series of ways of engaging with it—not just, you know, read and regurgitate back the principle—but think about it in the context of a variety of different situations that a teacher is likely to encounter.

Then moving towards a place where both teacher educators—those responsible for preparing people to be teachers—and teacher candidates are actually enacting and working with other students or other humans to actually apply the principles in practice, and then from that, getting feedback and coming back and seeing, "Okay did that work? Did it not work? Did you understand what you were trying to do and why it may have worked or why it did not succeed?"

Now hopefully, they get feedback on that so they can go try it again and hopefully practice and get better.

So that’s the nature of the work. As mentioned earlier, we're both assessing at the beginning throughout the whole process and at the end to see whether there's improvement. We have enough data now since we started launching these networks to see pretty dramatic improvements in the areas where programs have focused.

So, you know, I'll pause there if you have any questions about that, but I can sort of talk about a particular principle that's become pretty focal for a lot of programs and sort of what that looks like in the work that we do.

Kristen Deserver: Yeah, one of my questions—to go back to this point about mastering skills—we're actually asking teachers to master these skills related to teaching based on learning science. How do you think about designing programs so that it's not just, "Here's the skill, here's the thing, okay now we're moving on to the next thing," and keep it kind of woven through?

Ben Riley: I mean, this is the hard part, and it's particularly hard working with schools of education that are inside institutions of higher education—universities, as we typically call them. The reason for that is if you think back to anyone who's experienced college and university, you had a bunch of courses, right? And maybe they all added up to a major, but each of the courses was sort of the project and owned by whoever the professor was or maybe the professor farmed it out to some grad students who then taught the class.

What you have typically had is a series of discrete things that don't braid and do not interleave—to use a term that comes from learning science—that basically means, just, you know, keep coming back and weaving through ideas and don't just focus on one thing and move on. So what we try to do is bring together all the people involved in the whole arc of experiences again, as we call it.

That means getting together tenured faculty, non-tenured faculty, what are called adjuncts—who are often sort of hired on to do a lot of sort of the practicum training. It means bringing in—and this is really hard—bringing in the teachers who are in K-12 schools who are involved in mentoring the teachers. So you've got to get everybody at the table agreeing on the importance of embedding these principles in all of the aspects of preparing someone to be a teacher.

So it's hard work, but it's also really amazing work when it pays off because you can actually talk to these teacher candidates at the end of it—people who are often, you know, 21, 22 years old, you know, college seniors who are about to graduate—and the level of sophistication they have in talking about their practice and the confidence that they have in sort of what sort of teacher they want to be, what sort of activities they want to give to their students, what sort of learning they want to see take place, their beliefs about the capabilities of all of their students—it's inspiring!

I know I'm biased, but it's what gets up everybody who does this work at Deans for Impact. I think it's probably the single biggest motivator for us. So that's what it looks like and that's what it takes.

Kristen Deserver: That sounds great! We have already gone through our 30 minutes; I didn't even get to talk about specific principles. My bad! I ask questions…

Ben Riley: A couple minutes, we can do a good principle. Let’s do that. Go ahead and let’s talk about that!

Ben Riley: Well, I just wanted to talk about one principle in particular that I mentioned earlier has proven to be particularly important, and I think there’s a reason for that. One of the six principles from learning science that we've articulated is something we call deepening meaning and learning, and that's kind of vague and hazy. But what we mean by that is kind of simple, and that is what is it that do you—what is it that you want your students to think about and how will you design the experience they have in your classroom so they think about that thing?

Let me give you a very tangible example, and it kind of connects to what I was just saying about the inspiration that comes from this work. I just was on the phone about a couple weeks ago with a soon-to-be teacher in North Carolina who was doing part of her teacher training in a school in Charlotte. A veteran 12-year teacher asked her to do a particular task within—with her eighth-grade science students—and the task was get some plaster of Paris, roll it around, take a plastic dinosaur, stick it in the plaster of Paris, wait for it to dry, and now you have a fossil.

Now that might be fun and interesting to an eighth grader; I have my doubts. But what it won't do is teach them anything meaningful about how fossils get made. What was really remarkable is that this soon-to-be teacher could see all this and could say, "This isn't the sort of thinking that I want my students to do. There are five different types of fossils; I want them to understand what the differences between those five different types of fossils are. I want them to understand the differences in what it takes to make those fossils. I want them to understand what different things we can learn and know about our society today because of those different types of fossils."

You know this is someone— I don't know exactly how old she is—but she's a college senior, and she's looking at something that unfortunately some 12-year veteran teacher is thinking is a good activity for eighth-grade science students and saying, "Uh-uh, not for me, and not for the students I'm gonna teach."

So that's the principle that more than any other we have seen with the programs we're working with—teacher candidates struggle—and frankly even sometimes teacher educators struggle. More than just about anything else in education broadly, if we could get everybody involved to really focus on the question, "What is it that is important for students to think about?" and "How will I get them to think about that in ways that they will truly learn it?" to our earlier point, I think nothing else could be more transformative to our education system and to, frankly, our citizenry.

Kristen Deserver: I really love that, and I love that as a prompt for thinking about technology in the classroom too. Because there are real limits to what technology can do, and I'm at Khan Academy really ready to acknowledge that. It’s really hard from our side to know what students in the classroom are actually thinking about. So we can provide those prompts and those activities, but it takes the teacher in the classroom working with those students, asking them why, asking them, you know, what made you say that, what was that—all of that—to really understand what students are thinking and if they're getting that meaning from what the prompt was and what those places were.

Ben Riley: You're totally right about that! I thank you for raising it. And at the same time, I actually think there are a number of ways in which technology, when you have an understanding of learning science, becomes really empowering. Because now you're not just being told to use technology by a superintendent who has sold something by a vendor somewhere; you're thinking about how will this be something that leads to the sort of learning I want to have with my students?

I didn't think I was going to tell the story because I haven't thought about it for a while, but I think it's befitting our conversation. One of the interesting tools I've seen used a little less so nowadays, but you know there are tools that allow people to become their own Sal Khan, right? You can do sort of your own little casting. Well, there are some brilliant teacher educators and professional development specialists who have taken to giving kids a tablet and asking them to be their own Sal Khan as they're working through a problem.

Then they record it, and you have an artifact that you can look at that literally gives you sort of like you can hear the student talking through—you can see them doing the math equation, you can see them erasing things, and you can go back and look at it and start to say, "Okay, where was the misconception? Where did that come in? What were they thinking when they did this? Why do you think they did this? What would you do as the teacher if you thought they were having that misconception? What would you do to check if you were mistaken about that misconception?"

So it's a way of saying if we get every kid to be like Sal Khan with a little tablet, we might be making some real progress.

Kristen Deserver: Sounds great! Love it. All right, I will ask to close one for you to give us one note of optimism—something that you see that’s promising or gives you hope in our current times.

Ben Riley: Well, I may have already stepped on it by mentioning that teacher I was speaking to earlier, but she’s not alone. You know, there are so many teachers right now who are starting to get more and more interested in these ideas from learning science. It's global. It’s really a conversation that's happening, and we get inquiries from teachers and teacher educators and policymakers from all over the globe.

Without exception, their inquiries are always about the science of learning and what it means for their teaching or for their education system. There’s a movement happening, and we're lucky to be part of it. I’m grateful for the chance to have this conversation because I hope everybody who's listening and watching will take a peek and start to get interested in these ideas if you aren't already.

Kristen Deserver: Great! Thank you so much! Thank you for the work you do and also for joining us to talk about it today. Love the conversation!

Ben Riley: Thank you, and best wishes in the new year!

Kristen Deserver: Thanks so much, Kristen. I really enjoyed it. Thank you again!