Khan Academy Ed Talks with Barbara Oakley, Phd - Thursday, June 15

Hello and welcome to Ed Talks with Khan Academy, where we talk to influential people in the education space about learning and teaching. Today, we are pleased to welcome Dr. Barbara Oakley, who is celebrating the launch of her new book, Uncommon Sense Teaching, and we will talk more about that coming up.

Before we get started, I wanted to remind you that Khan Academy is a non-profit, and we are able to do our work of providing a free, world-class education to anyone, anywhere, thanks to donations from folks like you. So if you are in a place where you are able to do that, you can find a link right at the top of our website to make any kind of donation that helps us keep continuing this work. Thank you very much!

In addition, over the COVID-19 pandemic, we've had some sponsors who have really helped us to continue that learning and keep working on making sure we are able to provide that education. So we want to, in particular, thank Bank of America, Google.org, Novartis, Fastly, and General Motors. Thank you!

Next, if you are looking for more of these kinds of conversations, you can find them via podcasts. Our podcast, Homeroom with Sal, features audio versions of many of these chats we have had, so do check that out wherever you get your podcasts from.

As I said in the lead-in, we are excited today to be joined by Dr. Barbara Oakley, whose book Uncommon Sense Teaching: Practical Insights in Brain Science to Help Students Learn is out today. We're going to be talking a lot about how research about the brain helps inform us about the things we should do in our classrooms to help more students learn more, so welcome! It's so nice to have you.

"Oh, it's good to be here, Kristen."

Great! So to get things started, I often like to talk to people about how they got to be experts in learning. I know lots of people take different varied paths to get here. What was yours?

"Oh, um, I guess a bit different than some. My father was a veterinarian, and so I grew up thinking I loved animals; I wanted to be a veterinarian just like him, except that I couldn't do math at all. So I finally realized I'd have to give up on my childhood dream. Probably helped that I did a lot of cleaning of cages when I was a kid, and that can really change your mind about some aspects of veterinary science. But instead, I became a professor of engineering. So go figure. I did..."

Did you learn how to do that?

"I did learn how to do that, and actually, I didn't change in my ability to do math until I was 26 years old, and I was getting out of the army. I suddenly realized that all my friends who had a really good technical background just had more doors open for them professionally. I mean, I would never trade the fact that I really pursued my dream of learning a language well, although my Russian is now very, very rusty unless I have a little bit of wine or something like that, but we won't go there. It comes right back at that point, but I just realized that it would be a good idea for me to try to broaden my passions instead of follow my passions, and that maybe I really could start learning in math and science.

At that time, they didn't have Khan Academy available, so it was much easier for me. Instead, I had to go to the university, start with remedial high school algebra, and slowly begin climbing my way upwards. But the thing is, if you just are slow and steady and start at the lowest level where you actually feel comfortable and begin gradually practicing day after day, after week, after even years, you can achieve far more than you ever—I mean, my high school algebra teacher would have been like, 'You've got to be kidding me!' You know her? Yeah, a professor of engineering? You're joking! I'm actually a distinguished professor of engineering; I'm a fellow in some engineering societies, and I publish in very good journals. I mean, I'm the real deal. I'm not a fake engineering professor."

"But the higher I got, the more I fell in love with math, although I do have to say that I am a very mischievous professor because sometimes I will go and look at some of Sal's tutorials. I will put them together, and then I will go and present them, you know, with a courtesy find you, just Sal, but he just presents things so beautifully that sometimes even I was learning things at advanced levels because he can help you actually just understand some of those fundamental and actually quite simple concepts—at least simple once he gets done explaining things.

So I think that we really have not, as educators, acknowledged the value of great teaching and great explanations in helping students to move forward and be successful at difficult areas like science, technology, engineering, and math."

That totally makes sense! So how did you take being that professor of engineering, who I'm sure was publishing about engineering, and start moving into thinking about how to help more people learn? And how in thinking about brain science and how to bring that into our understanding of learning, how did you make that connection or shift?

"Well, because my first degree was in Slavic languages and literature, I have always had a broader set of interests. So it's not like you have to be in one discipline or silo in your life. I've been lucky enough to realize that sometimes it's okay to be in the humanities silo, sometimes in the social sciences silo, and sometimes in the more hard science silo. I've always liked writing as well as doing math and engineering, and I kept that up even when I was doing my dissertation and even as I had my early years as a professor of engineering. Of course, I kept it secret that I was still writing on the side because other engineers, especially in academia, were not necessarily on board with the idea of being broader than just engineering.

But because I like to write, I was always looking at questions that interested me, and that led me to a lot of research into what is going on in cognitive psychology. And a good thing about looking at a discipline when you're trained in a completely different discipline is you can more easily see holes and gaps in that discipline. So I saw a lot of great research in cognitive psychology and a lot of glaring holes and assumptions that really couldn't be made because there was no solid sound scientific foundation. And I also worked and learned as much as I could about neuroscience and even genetics—so what do the hard sciences tell us about how our brain is working?

So then one day, one of my students asked the question. He found out about my terrible past as a math monkey, and he said, 'How did you change your brain to be successful in math and science?' So I wrote him a little email, and then I thought, 'Oh, I like to write books; why don't I write a book about this? I can research it even more.' And that led to me beginning to work in the discipline of education.

What I found is that a lot of educators—there's sort of a disconnection. It's like, 'I know how to teach secondary mathematics, and I'm really good at it, and that's what I do,' but they don't really look at the connection of people going out into the working world with that secondary mathematics education, and whether it actually fits out there, whether it actually builds a good bridge for learning in science, engineering, technology, mathematics. And so I found that there's, I think, an important need for people like me who help educators and help students and teachers to see more concretely that the complex interconnection between education, neuroscience, cognitive psychology, what's going on in the practical world, and tie that together in a way that people can clearly and easily see what's going on—and that's sort of how my work has emerged. I think people just liked it so much, it was very encouraging for me, and that kind of kept me going."

That's great! And so your new book is Uncommon Sense Teaching. So tell me about that title. Why is it Uncommon Sense?

"Oh, okay. So first, I thought a lot of these ideas are just common sense. So my colleague and co-author, Beth Rogowski, is a K-12 teacher of teachers who teach K-12, and she has a lot of experience herself in K-12 classrooms. So, you know, I had my bright idea. I was like, 'Beth, we should call our book Common Sense Teaching.' And Beth about blew a gasket because she said, 'A lot of these ideas, you may think they're common sense, but people are really not aware of them. It's not what—sometimes it's simply not what is taught in schools of pedagogy, even though it is very well-grounded with profoundly effective research from neuroscience about how we think and learn.'

So I went away and stood for a while, you know, because it's like, here, my great idea was all shot down. But Beth was quite right about that. And then finally, one day, it just popped into my head—'Well, what about Uncommon Sense Teaching?' And Beth wrote me back, and she was like, 'Well, I didn't like the title, but I asked a bunch of friends, and they really liked it, so now I think I like it, too.' So that's how the title came about."

Can you give us an example of something that seems like common sense but maybe is not that commonly used?

"Well, so, oh, there's so many! You will often hear from people who will say, 'You know, you don't need to learn that because you can always look it up.' The reality is—let's say, ah, French. I love the sound of French; I love French. Could I speak French if I just always went and looked it up on Google Translate? I mean, I wouldn't have the neural structure; I would have absolutely no comprehension, really, of French if I just always went and looked it up. So people might think, 'Well, okay, I'll grant you that for language,' but it's like this for almost everything else.

Well, actually, it isn't. You do not become an expert at anything unless you have those key ideas embedded in links between neurons of long-term memory, and that can only happen through not only explanations but through your own active practice with the material. Even something as seemingly simple as, 'Well, I want you to compare and contrast the French and the Russian and the American Revolutions.' Well, you could just think about it as, 'I can always go look it up,' but if you had to go and look up when did each of those occur, what were the key aspects, who were the key players—all of these things—if you had to go look that up because you didn't bother to put anything in your long-term memory, you don't really understand any of those fundamental concepts.

And we've actually seen this play out with things like students who confuse the Civil War with civil rights, and they think that Abraham Lincoln maybe knew Martin Luther King because they didn't have to memorize any dates that are affiliated with anything. So building really advanced, higher-level Bloom's taxonomy understanding of information arises in a very important way from our putting of basic fundamental facts into our long-term memory. So I mean, that's just one example."

I could probably...

"Yeah, so no, that's great! So that's the declarative knowledge side of things, and the book you also talk about procedural skills. What kind of things are we learning from brain science about being able to learn procedural skills?"

"The brain has almost like two major superhighways that it uses to deposit information in your long-term memory. The first superhighway is the declarative highway or pathway, and that goes through the hippocampus. We've long known that if you happen to be missing your hippocampus—oh, you know, I put it around here someplace—if you're missing it, you can't really deposit things you've learned declaratively into your long-term memory. So a very famous patient, Henry Molaison, had both of his hippocampi removed, and if you were introduced to him, he would greet you, and he'd be a lovely man, and you walk out of the room, and then you wait a minute or two, you walk back in, and he would not remember you, and you'd have to be reintroduced.

But let's say that you walked in and met Henry, and you were a mischievous sort, and you had in your hand a pin. I'm not suggesting to do this in real life, but actually, psychologists have done this with patients who are similar to Henry, and you shook Henry's hand. What would happen is if you walk out and you walk back in, and you introduced yourself again, Henry would not know who you were, and he'd be very glad to meet you. And if you reached out with your hand to shake hands with him, he would not shake your hand. He had learned and he had remembered something, and that was because he was able to remember about the pinprick through his procedural system of the basal ganglia.

That deposit sets of links in long-term memory, and that's why Henry could not remember you or your Facebook kind of remember that you are associated with a handshake that is a big owie. And so this procedural kind of learning is actually like half of what we learn—anything that we have to know really well so that we don't really want to have to think about it, like our native language, for example. We learn that procedurally, and that means that we can speak extemporaneously without having to think about what we're actually saying.

This is why, for example, let's say that you have a simultaneous translator—or a translator who has learned another language but it's not their native language—it can actually be exhausting to translate because you're often using that declarative system to bring in—to think about things, whereas if you can just think about it using your procedural system, speaking in your native language, it's not exhausting at all because it's habitual, and you've got those sets of links in procedural memory.

So what this means is for learners, it is invaluable to develop not only declarative, kind of factually related sets of links in long-term memory—'Oh, the date is this date'—but also procedural sets of links. This relates more to, like, complex patterns. How do you work math problems like this as opposed to another, as opposed to like a third type? How do you work all of these kinds of problems? You only develop the intuition—or seeming intuition—of how to do these kinds of problems by practicing with lots of different types, getting lots of feedback about whether what you've done to try to solve that problem is correct, and then trying again and interleaving different closely related examples so that you can see, for example, what is the geometric distribution versus what is the negative binomial distribution versus what is the binomial distribution.

You can actually see when you use one, when you use another, and how to do these things. Oftentimes, in classes, what you actually learn is, 'Okay, here's an example of binomial distribution,' and you do like a dozen problems of it, and you think you know it really well, but then you're faced with a new problem that's negative binomial, and you're like, 'No, wait a minute, what's going on here?' If you haven't practiced to train the difference between these things, then you don't know what those differences are. This is where a lot of practice with your procedural learning system can be so valuable."

And I have to ask you, what does Khan Academy do to help learners with their procedural learning?

"Well, what you were just describing—hopefully those out there listening have heard a lot of things that sound like Khan Academy because we are absolutely based in—well, some folks know us as videos. The exercises that are woven in and linked to those videos are key to the learning experience at Khan Academy, and so as we see those exercises as the active learning—that practice component you were talking about—where students can start doing a number of problems that are kind of similar to each other and then somewhat different. And then when they get to, you know, having done a few of those in a row, we actually give them problems that have a couple of different related skills, and they have to figure out which one to use, which one to apply as kind of the extra added layer of difficulty.

But essentially, that is a key thing that we at Khan Academy see as one of our main purposes as a supplemental tool for students in classrooms and working on their own to be able to provide that extra practice so those links you were talking about, those neural connections are forming and getting stronger."

"Well, you could not be more in line with what brain science is revealing about how we should learn. It does make me laugh because—see what notice how you framed what you're doing—it's like closely related concepts that you're interleaving. Sometimes teachers can unwittingly get the idea that interleaving means just having something and then having something different, but it isn't. The key to interleaving is it has to have— you want students to notice the difference between closely related patterns.

So like if you're teaching punctuation and you interleave that with things like questions about metaphors—that's not interleaving; they're too far apart. But if you talk about what's a metaphor as opposed to a simile, as opposed to an analogy, now you're talking interleaving. So that's the real—that's when you really start building that procedural intuition is with the closely related interleaved concepts."

Great! So as usual, time is flying. I want to get to a couple of questions that are coming in from the folks that are watching. I know—so it's funny you just talked about similes and metaphors. This is kind of a different question, but it relates to it. So Susanna Garcia Dominguez from YouTube asks, "Hello Dr. Oakley, could you please share about the use of metaphors and analogies to help people learn? How could we effectively use them?"

"Oh, you know, Jiminy, can I share something that would show this idea very, very clearly? If I can—come on, Barb, tell me you can—or is it possible? If it isn't possible..."

"I don't think we can do a screen share."

"Oh, but if you want to point someone to somewhere where they could look, that would be—or hand motion—whatever. I'll do full emotions!"

"So here's the thing. So you create this set of interlinked neurons, and you can just think of it like you've got this nice little golden necklace with nice links between them. So let's say you know what the flow of water is. Actually, in your own mind, that is a set of linked neurons, and it's sort of like a complex set. So you've got this net of neurons, and that net is your understanding that you've developed ever since you were a little kid watching water flow.

Now, let's say that you're trying to explain how electrical current flows. So that's like molecules—well, it's electrons moving the other way. It is, actually, the motion of particles, which is somewhat analogous to the flow of water because you already have that set of links for understanding how water flows. You can much more easily understand the flow of electrical current because it's got a lot of those same key ideas of movement of particles.

So it turns out that using metaphors or using analogies—a similarity, a likeness between something you know and something you wish to convey—is an incredibly powerful tool in education and in learning, and it's in part related to a theory called neural reuse theory, which means if we've already built our understanding of something, we can reuse some of those same neurons to help us better and more easily understand new ideas and new concepts.

So sometimes people will say, 'Yes, but the analogy breaks down after a while; the metaphor breaks down.' If you get to a quantum level in how electrical current flows, it's not at all like how water flows, and that's true. But whenever a metaphor breaks down, you just get a new metaphor. Indeed, Emmanuel Derman, who's a great physicist turned financial analyst, said that all mathematical equations are simply metaphors. So—and I think there's a great deal of truth to that. So anyway, I'm a keen proponent of metaphors, and especially visual metaphors because they can help students learn so much more quickly."

Great, thank you! I think we have time for one more, from Akshat Doobie on YouTube. I've been struggling with making habits for a long time—what are some tips to help me create a new habit?

"Just do it over and over and over and over and over again. I know that sounds silly, but let me just give you an example. Let's say that you are driving home. You're driving home; you've done it a hundred times before, and you think of something else, you know, that day, that is really important, like you should have put something into a report, and you forgot to do it. Well, 45 minutes later, you arrive at home, and you can't even remember how you got home.

Well, how did you get home then? I mean, how did you learn to do that? Well, you have driven home so many times that it actually—your procedural system has learned it, and you can drive home without even thinking about it as a consequence unless somebody does something bizarre in a car right ahead of you or something.

So what this means is, in our daily lives, for example, my, let's see—I wanted our daughters, our two daughters, to have all career doors open for them. So for many, many children, mathematics is not fun. And when you try to make it fun, it may become fun, but it may not be necessarily a good learning experience. So I just made a habit of 20 minutes every day—my girls did some extra math practice. We used Kumon Math—I think if Khan Academy had been around at that time, we would have been using Khan Academy.

But they did this extra practice, interleaving closely related concepts, and they didn't want to do it most of the time. It was sometimes pushing and so forth, but it was the habit that I developed in them: 'You just do this for 20 minutes a day—that's who you are.' And by golly, our older daughter, who's, let's say, not a natural talent with mathematics, finished her medical residency at Stanford, you know. It's this early training that just sort of a little bit of extra practice—20 minutes a day—that habit actually helped her, so she's got—she did have all career doors open for her, even if you might have said early on, 'This kid's not going to go anywhere with math.'

Our younger daughter was more natural at math; she simply hated it. So—but she had to do it anyway, and she went off, and she became an artist, and now she's back at school getting her master's degree in statistics. So it did keep those doors open for her. So for me, Duolingo—I use Duolingo, and I practice my Spanish or my Russian each day, and it helps—oh, a lot!"

Great! So I think that's a good theme to close on—that keep practicing; it builds those pathways; it builds those skills. Thank you for joining us today! Again, the new book publication day—today, congratulations Uncommon Sense Teaching! For those of you that are looking for some new guidance in the classroom, I highly recommend it to definitely pick it up and get some both the suggestions and the why that these are the suggestions to try in your classroom.

So thanks so much for being with us today! Thanks to all of you in the audience, and we'll see you next time.

"Oh, and our daughter actually got into statistics because she took a lot of Khan Academy courses, so I should add that in—so that's actually a true story. She said someone got me through calculus."

Thank you! Thank you for that good endorsement of what we're doing. We'd love to hear stories from people who have used our materials. Thank you! Thank you.