That Neuroscience Guy - Neuroscience in Education - Alternative Learning with Jeff Hopkins

Episode Date: July 23, 2024

In this week's episode of That Neuroscience Guy, we welcome guest speaker Jeff Hopkins - the principal of the Pacific School of Innovation and Inquiry. We discuss how neuroscience fits into education, and specifically how new educational methods can leverage neuroscience to improve education. 

Hi, my name is Olof Kergolsen, and I'm a neuroscientist at the University of Victoria. And in my spare time, I'm that neuroscience guy. Welcome to the podcast. So as you know, I've thought a lot about the idea of neuroscience and education. So on today's podcast, I thought I'd bring in one of my PhD students, Jeff Hopkins, and we'll learn a lot about him because he's got some really cool ideas about neuroscience and education and just education in general. Welcome to the podcast, Jeff. Thanks a lot.

I'll point out at the start, if you're envisioning your typical graduate student, Jeff is not that. I'm going to let him tell you all about it as we go through it. But he's definitely, let's say, I'm not sure who's older, but I don't want to know. We'll leave it there. So you, in your school, so I'm going to drop some hints here. Jeff's a principal of his own high school here in Victoria. You have sort of developed an alternative way of teaching. Can you tell us a bit about that and why?

Like what's the reasoning behind doing it? Yeah, absolutely. So we started a high school 11 years ago called the Pacific School of Innovation and Inquiry. And I used to be a superintendent of a school district. I've been a teacher for a really long time, 30 years. And it was a function of both noticing what things worked and what things didn't. And now sometimes the mainstream system that we were working in kind of

worked against us in terms of what lots of teachers have found work. And they say, Oh boy, this would be a lot easier. If we could get some things out of the way to make it a little easier to teach the way that we know works. And then also research on, well, in various aspects of teaching and learning and finding that there were things that we were supposed to be doing that were, we were sort of doing sometimes, but not all together in the same place at the same time, all the time. So we started the school and it's in the title. A lot of what we do is inquiry-based learning, which is learners starting with questions, researching them and digging deep

into them with teachers supporting them as they need it in an emergent kind of a way and when they're ready with running along beside with sort of foundational pieces to make sure they have what they need to dig deeper. As you know, I find this fascinating. Let's go into a specific example. Let's say I was, and I know that you use this, say, to teach, I don't know, you pick a concept. Sure. Well, a really big one here at the school, lots of kids are really interested in psychology and sleep and dreaming is a really big one that lots of kids want to know about. Okay. So I, I give lectures on sleep and dreaming all the time as a part of my job as a professor. And I talk about, you know, what's going on behind it, but I lecture when I do this, I stand up in front of the room and I, you know, I tell them a bunch of stuff for 45 minutes to an hour and I hope it sinks in. So if you were going to teach that, how would you do it? What we would do is we,

we would help a learner ask good questions at the beginning. So not just things you could look up on the internet, although, you know, some of them might be, but we'd say, you know, what questions do you have about sleep and about dreaming? will generate a few questions and um from there they would do a little bit of research of their own so that could be online it could be you know teacher could you do a session on this for me so that we i can learn a little bit more about you know um brain waves that are associated with different stages of sleep or something like that um from there they would after they've got a bit of research, their questions get a lot better and a lot deeper. And then we help them co-construct learning activities that are going

to allow them to get into it more deeply. So for example, they might be interviewing somebody who works at a, you know, the sleep clinic near the hospital, and then they might interview, well, this is real examples that I'm pulling from here. They might go and interview some artists in town to ask them how dreams are inspirational for the artwork that they do or if they are and to what degree and how they use them. Then they might also, we had one learner here. This was actually their inquiry. They created a project that was a research project, actually, where they wanted to know to what degree did the darkness of a room

contribute to a person's ability to remember their dreams. So they were keeping dream journals and then measuring the darkness of their room with some app on a phone or whatever, and then looking at the relationship between the level of darkness and the ability to remember dreams over a six-week period. So those are just some examples, but along the way, they might have questions, and then there might be some, not exactly lectures, but maybe mini lectures and discussions with groups of learners who are also interested in what they're doing, but lots of it is them digging it out themselves and figuring it out by doing it. So because this is a neuroscience podcast, and we're going to get to

the brain bit on this, this is to me is the intro to it, but I have to ask the question. So brightness and dreaming, what is the relationship? What was the result? It was actually really fascinating. It was extremely strong correlation between how dark the room was and their ability to remember their dreams. Now, the only kind of caveat I guess, or one of many is that everybody knew that what was being measured was the relationship between the darkness of the room and how well they can remember their dreams. And the person told them that their hypothesis was, I think the darker the room, the more you're going to remember your dreams.

So they kind of blew it in terms of blindness, but there was a very strong relationship. I think the darker the room, the more you're going to remember your dreams. So they kind of blew it in terms of blindness. But there was a very strong relationship. I think they should try it again with some. But that was part of the learning, which is, you know, creating biases by not having a blindness situation there. And they went, oh, if I was going to do this again, I would do it and not tell people what I'm trying to find. It's like, yeah, really good idea. Well, I agree 100 percent. It's like, yeah, really good idea.

Well, I agree 100%. When I teach research methods, I always tell the graduate students or even the undergraduate students, you know, most of research is driven by learning from your mistakes. You try something, and only after you've tried it, you think, why the heck did we do it that way, like that, or we should have thought of this. So the sort of idea of inquiry-based learning, right, you know, that's what I would call it.

Why is it better? You know, like, I guess there's kind of a common sense answer, which is lectures are dry and boring. We know that. But why do you think, thinking more about the brain, like what's happening in someone's brain and why do they learn more when they go through this sort of approach? Well, like generally, I think it's's that people when they're ready for something they're when there's a need to learn it uh their brain is sort of set up to uh pay you know things

like what you want to pay attention to tends to have to do with what you need at the time even from like a evolutionary biology perspective like survival so when you want to know something that's important to you you can pay attention to it much more easily you're way more likely to have a evolutionary biology perspective like survival. So when you want to know something that's important to you, you can pay attention to it much more easily. You're way more likely to have a bit of an emotional attachment to it as well. If you're excited about it, it means something to you. So it's far easier to remember things that you actually care about at the time than things that could be very interesting, but you just weren't ready to attach that to anything emotionally or for any other need.

And just as a note to, to our, to our listeners, if you think back to our memory episodes, one of the things I pointed out, which sort of speaks to this, it's interesting is our memory system is driven largely by our hippocampus or at least it's a key part of it. And the amygdala, and I talk about the amygdala way too much on this podcast, Jeff, but the amygdala, there's two of them, are situated on the front of the hippocampus. And this is why we tend to remember things that are emotional,

because one of the functions of the amygdala is if there is an emotional response, it's almost like it's dialing up the hippocampus' ability to encode memories. So it makes total sense. And if you think back, you can even learn from lectures if you like the topic enough. I would just gather that your approach, people learn more. Yeah, it's not an either-or situation. And it's sort of, I know Hattie, an educational researcher,

talks a lot about thrill, like when you actually realize that you've learned a thing that in itself is emotionally kind of thrilling for most people so that it can come in lots of ways but um you can guarantee it if someone has already predisposed to wanting to learn it they're they're already ready to go i agree 100 so one of the reasons, again, I thought you'd be great for the podcast is you actually have an experiment designed, or at least the first experiment of your PhD work to sort of test this directly. Can you tell us a bit about what you're going to do? Yes, I would love to. I'm very excited about it. So yeah, it's very hard to to test all of this because it's hard to i don't kind of quantify what the not lecture looks like even what the lecture looks like but

generally the idea is um i would like to see what's happening when someone is learning in a lecture format when it comes to their brain activity so how how are they responding uh with you know looking at EEG patterns when they are learning things or being told things if they are learning things or not in that setting? And then how does that compare with the brain activity when someone is constructing knowledge in what we sometimes call a constructivist way where they're building knowledge themselves through some other process experiential or whatever it might be cooperative um i'm wanting to use a thing called concept

attainment which is actually how human beings learn everything which is um you look at a thing and try to figure out uh what what is that thing what is it how does it compare to other things you kind of test your ability to categorize things by yes and no examples. You know, like, is this a book? Maybe because it has the shape of a book or it has pages in it or whatever. Or it's not a book because it's round and plastic or something like that. So the idea is comparing someone's ability to build their own concept versus being told a concept and seeing what the brain activity is like in each of those situations. I just, I think it's fascinating. And I guess that leads me to my next question. And again, you know, my beliefs on this, but

you know, will neuroscience play a role in classrooms in the future? Do you see like a day where we're, we're tracking kids in real time? I hope so. Uh, it's actually a little bit frustrating being, I'm very new to neuroscience, but I've always been a big fan and reader of it and, you know, interested in it, dabbling in it, but getting into it properly. Now I can see the potential for education being greatly enhanced. If there was a bit more of a marriage of education and neuroscience i think a lot of education is trying things the metrics are a little um little sketchy sometimes or very just difficult to like develop a set of metrics and i think neuroscience offers some uh the ability to have some metrics that are right there we just don't um we don't incorporate

neuroscience knowledge as much as we could in education. So I do really think there is a place for it, a much bigger place for it. And we might be talking to Jetsons, and sorry for the dated reference there. But as someone that teaches, and I'm sure every teacher that's listening or professor or whoever, if you've ever taught something to anybody, you can look out of the classroom and see a, see a faces and go, do they, do they actually understand what I'm saying? Like, cause some of them are learning and some aren't. And I, and what we do in our, you know, our, our current system is we wait and we assess them, but I'm not even sure if, you know, assessment's a great way to tell if someone's learned something or not. Right. Does a final exam really equivalent, equivalent to what a student

has learned in a course? So I I'd like to see it. And I've talked about this in the podcast in the past, but we use a lot of mobile technology, right? Like a lot. And, and the Muse headband is one example, the brain products Exxon and any number of other devices. And if, if people haven't seen these things, you can measure, you know, brain activity from a headband that you can measure, you know, brain activity

from a headband that you can buy at Best Buy. So, and we've already validated in my lab that it works. So this idea of neuroscience in classrooms, I do think there's a future for it. Possibly neuroscience everywhere, although I can already guarantee I should do an episode on the, what's wrong with that. Tell us, let's wrap up by just telling us, how did you get here? So, you know, you're, you're the principal of a high school. You're now a neuroscience PhD student in my, in my lab. What was the journey and why? I know it's a short podcast. So the, the journey, I guess the why is exactly what you were saying. The, the marriage of neuroscience and education.

I want to, it's almost like proof of concept. We're doing a thing that we know works based on a lot of outcome measures, but it would be really nice to be able to say to somebody, yes, this really is different. And here's why it's different or how it's different at the nerve, at the, you know, the brain level, the brain activity level. I think it could really help us make good decisions and avoid making bad ones. And our system, the education system, mainstream system is really reluctant to change.

It has a lot of inertia. You need something pretty powerful to help people see that it needs to change. And right now it's usually people's opinions. And they can be really good opinions and even based on, you know, good intuition and even good indicators. But if you can add another indicator, that's pretty hard to argue against because it's just absolutely factual. It really helps when you're trying to make changes in a big system. Oh, I understand. And I appreciate completely, you know, a couple of years ago, we were measuring brainwave activity on doctors and nurses in the ER, the local hospital.

And, you know, right now the gold standard is, are you too tired? And it's a, you know, yes, no, maybe. Whereas we could actually measure how fatigued they were directly, which is powerful because some of those people admit they're tired and some don't. And, you know, if you've ever been into an operating room, do you really want the surgeon to be exhausted? You know, probably not the best thing. Well, thank you so much for being on the podcast, Jeff. I appreciate it. And, and as you know, cause I'm your supervisor, I think it's fascinating, but I think our listeners will find it fascinating too.

I hope so too. And thanks. Thanks for the questions and the opportunity. And if you want to see more about what Jeff's all about, I'll throw him a little bump here. He's got, I believe, two TEDx talks now, right? Yeah. So if you search YouTube for Jeff Hopkins, you will find Jeff. And I encourage you to watch them.

They're fantastic. So just a couple of administrative items here. Remember, check out the website, thatneuroscienceguy.com. There's links to our Etsy store and Patreon. We appreciate everyone that supports us this way. All of the money goes to students in the Craig Olson Lab. Well, specifically Matt Hammerstrom for all the sound editing and also helping him get through grad school. If you have ideas, we want to know what you want to know about the neuroscience of daily life. So you can get us on X or threads at that neuroscience guy or that neuroscience guy at gmail.com.

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