[00:01] SPEAKER_00:
Welcome to Principal Center Radio, bringing you the best in professional practice.
[00:06] Announcer:
Here's your host, director of the Principal Center and champion of high performance instructional leadership, Justin Bader. Welcome everyone to Principal Center Radio.
[00:15] SPEAKER_01:
I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to be joined today by Barbara Oakley, PhD. Dr. Oakley is professor of engineering at Oakland University and the creator of several wildly popular Coursera online courses, including Mind Shift, Breakthrough Obstacles to Learning and Discover Your Hidden Potential, as well as Learning How to Learn, Powerful Mental Tools to Help You Master Tough Subjects. She's the author of the new book, Learning How to Learn, How to Succeed in School Without Spending All Your Time Studying, which we're here to talk about today.
[00:48] Announcer:
And now, our feature presentation.
[00:50] SPEAKER_01:
Barbara, welcome to Principal Center Radio.
[00:52] SPEAKER_02:
Thank you for having me on the show, Justin. I'm really glad to be here.
[00:56] SPEAKER_01:
Well, I'm excited to talk with you about this book because it's a departure from what we normally talk about on the show. Being a podcast for school administrators, often we talk about books that are written for educators. But your book is actually written for students, for middle school students, high school students, college students, possibly even younger students in a very accessible style. And I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about why you wrote this book. I mean, obviously there are lots of books on neuroscience and learning, but you wrote almost a user's guide to learning. And I wonder if you could kind of tell us the origin story of that book.
[01:31] SPEAKER_02:
I think what surprised me is I remember nearly five years ago, my husband and I were in the basement filming the online course, learning how to learn. And we were looking at one another and going, you know, why are we even doing this? Because is anybody ever even going to watch this? And we had no idea that it was going to become the most popular that's ever come out. We've had something like 2.3 million students so far.
[02:01]
registered students. And one thing that surprised me again, though, was how many times I would hear from parents and teachers who would say, these ideas that often are growing from neuroscience are so practically useful and they're so easy. Why isn't there something for kids? And I thought, well, gee, why isn't there something for kids? And I think part of it is you really have to walk the walk when you're writing a book for kids. If you're going to make this information palatable, enjoyable, something they actually want to read, you better make it not only insightful, but funny and fun.
[02:48]
And so That's a bit of a tall order when you're talking about something that's neuroscientific. But I think we pulled it off with the assistance of some fantastic imagery from a great illustrator, Oliver Young. And so the result is this book, I think, that relates all these practically useful insights from neuroscience that are often simply not known or really not And it just gives plenty of ideas for not only educators and parents, but also for administrators about how they can think about learning in a new but very practical way to build on the solid structure of teaching that they already have.
[03:36] SPEAKER_01:
And the illustrations really do add a lot. I mean, the text is beautifully written and very clear. My daughter's going into second grade, and I'm sure she'd do okay with it. But I was noticing in the illustrations, you know, this is the kind of thing that often we end up with some kind of scientific and technical-looking diagrams, especially when it comes to things like neurons and axons and dendrites. But I found those, you know, even just flipping through the illustrations, I found those incredibly clear illustrations. in the sense that they convey metaphor.
[04:02]
And I know metaphor is something that you talk about or, you know, creating analogies, creating metaphors as a learning technique. And it was great to see you actually do that as an author, you know, model that for the reader so that they're getting a sense of, you know, how you're walking the talk in the book.
[04:21] SPEAKER_02:
Sometimes it makes me laugh because I will get up in front of an audience And I'll put up a sort of a traditional picture of a neuron. And you can see everybody just sitting there going, Oh, God, what's she going to be giving us now? It's going to be one of these boring old sort of scientific lectures. And then I kind of laugh with them about that, that I know what they're expecting. And then I put the space alien metaphor on right next to it. And everyone immediately relaxes and begins laughing.
[04:59]
And then suddenly it's so much more clear that, oh, wait, that axon, that's just that little tasseled hat there. And the eyeball is the nucleus. And those weird looking legs with their toes are dendrites and dendritic spines. And suddenly it just doesn't seem so ugly or awful anymore. And it really is, metaphor is such a powerful learning tool. We know from neural reuse theory.
[05:29]
that it is a great way to more rapidly onboard people onto new and even very difficult ideas.
[05:37] SPEAKER_01:
Well, I wonder if we could get into a little bit of your story because, you know, thinking about students who want to do well in school but maybe are feeling like it's hard for them to master certain kinds of information, or maybe their grades are not where they want them to be. It's easy for people to pick up a book and look at the PhD at the end of your name and say, well, of course learning is easy for you. Of course neurons and all that make sense to you, and you can learn hard material. You can take calculus and things like that. But I know thinking about our students who are struggling and thinking about how you open the book, it seems like there are some stories in here that people are going to resonate. And I wonder if we could just get into a little bit of your academic background as a learner and how that showed up in the book.
[06:25] SPEAKER_02:
It's a little embarrassing to relate, but I was actually a terrible, terrible student in math and science growing up. Often flunk courses, if it had math or any kind of science. I remember my chemistry teacher just kind of sitting belligerently in front of him because I was flunking his class and just sort of thinking to myself, you know, come on, buddy, just see if you can stick something in this brain because it's not going to go in. I was just a really, not only just a bad student, but kind of an antagonistic belligerent student. So I think it's It's really ironic that I'm now a professor of engineering and I'm the real deal. I publish in top journals.
[07:11]
I really love engineering and I love mathematics, which is just still such a shocker to me. But I think what motivated me to try to do that was I thought, well, golly, when I was young, I couldn't do much, anything except verbal kinds of things. So I really wanted to learn another language because I grew up in a very monolingual household and you can guess what language we spoke. And I just thought it would be just a revelation to be able to look at the world and think about it in a different language. So since I didn't have the money to go to college, and there weren't college loans available easily at that time, I found out that if I enlisted in the army, they would actually pay me to learn a language.
[08:05]
And I remember my father just kind of laughing when he heard that I wanted to enlist in the army. And he was like, oh, you're going to get an interesting education. And he was right. But I did learn another language. I learned Russian. But then to my surprise, when I was going to get out of the military, here I'd done what everybody had said to do, which is follow your passion.
[08:29]
And I didn't realize that I hadn't broadened my passion. I hadn't crawled out of the box of just purely what I wanted to do. And this kind of, in some sense, really selfish approach to learning happened. had actually boxed me in and made it so I had very few job opportunities or careers that I was interested in. And so that really knocked me back a step and made me realize that my follow your passion approach had led me astray and that I really needed to broaden myself. And so I decided to try to use some of the same techniques I'd learned to learn a language in order to learn math and engineering, ultimately.
[09:20] SPEAKER_01:
And what age were you roughly at this point? So you've gone through the army, you've learned Russian, you've graduated from high school, and at this point you're deciding to learn math at what age?
[09:30] SPEAKER_02:
26. And so I went back to remedial high school algebra, and at first it was just awful. Because I was scaring myself. I would try to figure out how to do the solutions to problems. But I'm looking around at everyone else and going, oh my goodness, they're all way younger than me. They're smarter than I am.
[09:55]
They're the ones that are more math inclined, especially by the time I got to calculus. Everybody was younger. And to my mind, everybody was smarter. But just using these techniques of of really internalizing some of the ideas in the same way you internalize a language really helped. For example, I wouldn't just take a homework problem and do it and turn it in. If it was an important problem and I knew I had the right solution, I would practice with that problem so I could just write it out and then eventually I could work through it every step in my mind as if I was singing a song, you know, it would just unfold naturally.
[10:43]
And I didn't realize it, but I was creating what might be termed a neural chunk. In other words, a really easy to access, compact chunk of this information about how to solve that problem. And by doing this with a number of problems, I was making it so that I didn't have to use my working memory so much when I was trying to analyze intense ideas. I could just sort of reach out to some of these chunks that I'd created. And even though I don't have a great working memory, because I had created all these chunks, which we now know from the study of experts is really important in acquiring expertise. It allowed me to become an expert at calculus, advanced calculus, eventually circuits, thermodynamics, and electromagnetics, and climbing on upward through the engineering curriculum.
[11:49] SPEAKER_01:
And I think this is an important message for us to hear as school administrators, that all of this came after you had reached adulthood, right? There was no sign when you were 6 or 10 or 12 or 14 or 18 that you were going to become a professor of engineering and publish all these scientific papers and master advanced mathematics. It sounds like there was not much indication that that was going to be your path when you were a kid. Is that right?
[12:17] SPEAKER_02:
You are exactly correct. Even at age 25, if anyone had placed bets on what my future career would be, the last bet they would have placed would have been anything involving engineering, technology, analytical skills, or anything of that nature.
[12:37] SPEAKER_01:
I think it's worth acknowledging that we can be surprised by that as educators, even though we of all people should know that we can learn things, right? That's exactly right. What an incredible story. And I was looking toward the middle of the book where you talk about Santiago. And he had, in a very different time period, he had kind of a similar journey where he initially did not do too well in school and got into some trouble. Do you want to take us through Santiago's story maybe briefly?
[13:11]
Because I think that's a super interesting one.
[13:13] SPEAKER_02:
Santiago Ramon y Cajal won the Nobel Prize, so it was around the early 1900s, and he's now considered the father of modern neuroscience. And so it's really odd to realize that he was a total washout as a kid. He was thrown out of school on a number of occasions. Everybody just said, this kid's going nowhere fast. He was a big juvenile delinquent. He did the equivalent of graffiti on the walls back in the 1800s and was getting in trouble for that kind of thing and doing stuff like blowing a hole in the neighbor's gate with a homemade cannon.
[13:55] SPEAKER_01:
Digging up corpses, I hear.
[13:57] SPEAKER_02:
Oh, yes. He went around with his father. So his father was a doctor who had flawed his way up from the deepest poverty. But as he got into his mid-teens and a little later, I think Santiago finally began to mature. That myelination finally began to take place. And he sort of began to realize that he was going nowhere fast.
[14:25]
And his father was a pretty smart guy. And knew that the best way to reach his son was probably through a little bit of oddball techniques. So now, do not try this at home today. But what his father did was, at that time, the best way to get anatomy, you know, portions of anatomy, people's bodies to study was to just go dig them up. And so they'd go furtively off to cemeteries that might dig up bodies and Santiago was able to get his hands on bodies and really sort of began to understand how the human body is put together by actual this tactile getting into it. And there was probably something about the nefarious nature of it, too, that might have been a bit attractive to him.
[15:18]
But he became fascinated by cells and by the study of human body tissues of all sorts. And he began studying, and he really regretted the fact that he had thrown out all his math studies early on, and he had to slowly clamber back on and try to learn it. And he himself said, I'm no genius. I didn't excel because of any kind of fast, marvelous thinking on my part. He said, I was, and indeed he was, he spoke slowly. He often stumbled with his words.
[15:57]
He didn't have a good memory and but he was persistent and he was flexible when he was wrong. And that is a key, key idea. We often think that only geniuses are going to, these really smart people are going to be the ones who are going to be the great successes. But actually, really smart people can have a disadvantage. And that is They're so used to being right that they can become inflexible. And when they're wrong, they'll jump to conclusions because they're always right.
[16:34]
And when they're wrong, they can't change their mind very easily because they're not used to doing that. So I think some important lessons for us are when we have these seemingly slower students in our classes, it's easy to look at the fast ones, the genius ones. They're like race car brains. But hiker brains, they can have a very deep and rich experience too. I mean, everything's not going by in a blur with them. They're reaching out to see the birds and hear them.
[17:09]
They can see the little rabbit trails. They can touch the pine needles. They can smell the pine in the forest. Completely different experiences. and in many ways, far richer and deeper, even though it takes them much longer to get to the end point than the person with the race car brain. So I just think we have so much that we can learn from the great Santiago Ramon y Cajal that resonates for administrators and teachers about how seemingly ordinary people can, they can sometimes do things that even geniuses cannot.
[17:46] SPEAKER_01:
I think that's such an important message, not only for us to understand, but to pass on to our students. So I'm thinking about the book's suitability for study skills classes, for homeroom, for teachers to read just for their own understanding and getting strategies that they can share with their students. And then, of course, for all students to read as well, to really get a sense of how to learn and that learning is not just for kids that everybody thinks are geniuses or that everybody thinks are math people, but that learning is something that we can all teach ourselves to do, as the title of the book suggests. So the book is Learning How to Learn, How to Succeed in School Without Spending All Your Time Studying. And Barbara, if people want to learn more about your work or learn more about the book, where are some of the best places for them to connect with you online?
[18:39] SPEAKER_02:
Oh, I think just go to my website, barbaraoakley.com, and there's links to books and also to the free online courses. And there's much more to come. So it would be great to just begin the conversation. And I so appreciate you having me on your show.
[19:01] SPEAKER_00:
Well, thank you so much, Barbara. It's been a pleasure.
[19:03] Announcer:
Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at principalcenter.com slash radio.
