Two Facts Collide in the Brain

I recently heard a developmental molecular biologist address us teachers about research on the human brain and its possible implications for how we teach our students.  He is an animated speaker whose own brain runs at warp speed, and I learned a number of fascinating things from him.  Here and now, though, I will focus on one of them: 300 milliseconds.

200-300 milliseconds (1/5 to 1/3 of a second), apparently, is the minimum time it takes the executive center of the human

This is your brain on colored dye, with credit to Gutenberg Encyclopedia.

brain (which processes requests one at a time) to change from one simple, conscious task to another.  Again, that's only for simple tasks, whatever those are.  Complex ones can take much longer to begin.  That's not even the time it takes me to think about something.  That's the minimum time it takes me to start consciously thinking about anything.

I suppose we all come to the same facts from varying perspectives.  Perhaps 300 milliseconds doesn't seem like very much time.  After all, it may be faster than the blink of an eye, which clocks in at 300 to 400ms.

Personally, that 300 ms changes the way I see myself as a human being.  I am monumentally slower than I want to think I am.

Let me share a different perspective.  I develop computer code that is shooting Latin sentences from students in places as remote as New Zealand or Tel Aviv to a high-powered server in Dallas, doing all kinds of conditional logic and data gymnastics, and sending them back again.  I've now invested years of my life in that action-packed round trip, which involves a relay of code in several different computer languages.

Today, from my desk in Tennessee, that entire process takes about 93 milliseconds.  It will go to Dallas, do its thing, and shoot everything back here before I can even start to think about opening Facebook.

My friend and mentor Scott Salisbury, whose company develops such solutions for corporate clients,

photo credit: Hustvedt

assures me that this figure is basically all server time.  After all, signals traverse fiber-optic cable at the speed of light, which would take me from here to Dallas in less than 4 ms!

There are times when speed matters, too.  300ms seems like a very long time for my brain to switch from engaging in a cell phone conversation to considering whether... perhaps... I should slam on the brakes.  And to go back from driving to the phone conversation?  Another 300ms.  And each time my brain switches, the car I used to drive is carrying my body another 31 feet while my mind is somewhere else. Yes, my eyes have never left the road.  My hands may still be on the wheel.  The lights are on, but I'm just not quite home at the moment.

Iraqi children - photo credit: Christiaan Briggs

We all still want to believe that we really can truly, meaningfully multitask.  We believe we experience it every day.  We insist that we can prove it.  We've raised multiple kids, for crying out loud!  What about a guitarist riffing his scales at 120 beats per minute while watching football on TV?  Heck, that guy even looks bored!  Apparently many things get chunked together and/or delegated to muscle memory.  That's what practice does.  But the chunks of conscious thought - however elaborate - still pass through the executive center of the brain, one at a time.

Even more importantly, how much additional "server time" does my brain spend actually listening to the other person instead of driving?  How much time is spent processing emotions?  How much time does it spend composing a response? After all, if - as we were repeatedly assured - all executive processing is sequential, 300ms is only the transition time, not the total time off task.  It's just a drop in the bucket of things I am not noticing.

Even with the best of intentions, I've seen students run into a similar problem: they think they can complete another task on their devices and still be listening in class.  They really believe they are listening too, but when I talk to them, they aren't "there."

300ms humbles me. Like the drunk guy who wants the keys, I may not be in the best position to judge objectively my own limits, because there is a lot of life going on while I am neurologically unable to pay attention.  But I still think I can!  So, if you call me while I'm driving, my phone probably will ring...inside my glove box, where I cannot reach it.

How do I introduce my students to Linguachet?

I teach with a woman I admire a great deal.  She is a master at growing deep, lasting bonds with her

students.  Not only does this make her effective while teaching them, but she has a continual stream of former students stopping in for years after she has taught them, particularly at this time of year.

Her example is teaching me that all teaching happens through relationship.  If this is true, it's not just what what we do in a classroom that matters; how we do it matters even more.  Maybe sometimes, in our eagerness to bolt on a magical new teaching tool or method, we forget this relational context that colors everything we do.  And if we do that, then we may be puzzled and frustrated at the results we get.

With this relational context in mind, I'd like to offer three things you can tell your students about Linguachet. 

1. The point of Linguachet is to help you teach yourself, something even more important than Latin per se.  As your teacher, I'm very interested in helping you do that.
2. Nobody's perfect...but we can all get better. Learning from our own mistakes can help us a lot.  It's not where we start that matters.  It's where we finish.
3. Linguachet will never be perfect either.  It can make mistakes.  But if it helps us learn from our mistakes, then it will USEFUL to us.

An amazing former boss had the following sign on her door: "People may doubt what you say, but they will always believe what you do."   So, once I say these things, students will be watching to see if I mean them. 

Used purely as an electronic taskmaster, Linguachet would become a source of drudgery.  Used simply as a way to test and assign grades, it would become a source of anxiety.  Presented and used as a helper, though, it can become a source of gratitude.  

With our task environment in mind, I'd like to offer a few tips for using Linguachet with students.

1. Personalize assignments:  Now that it's easier to do, you can either differentiate or offer students choices wherever it makes sense.
2. Slash busywork:  You can tell students what you want them to learn, encouraging them to skip unneeded units or questions where appropriate.
3. Roam the room and coach:  Since students are now looking up basics
   on their own, you may be able to focus your attention toward a smaller number of students who need it.  If you're carrying your iPad, refresh your results tab and see who's logging lots of attempts.
4. Explore results:  If you didn't have to grade an assignment, why not use a fraction of the time saved to click through the results and explore how each student is learning?  Over time, what I noticed started to change my beliefs about teaching.  
5. Experiment with assessment:  Often I gave simple completion grades, only to find the students driving themselves toward 100% accuracy anyway. Sometimes I assigned several units at once, but told students to choose no more than 50% of the questions in each.  I also experimented with letting students choose between taking a quiz and doing Linguachet.  Students' insights helped me understand what I was seeing and decide how to respond.

If you think about it, these are all best practices anyway; they're just a bit easier to do now!  Maybe we can experience renaissance in the art of teaching as we refocus ourselves on the things that ONLY teachers can do.

Finally, passionate teachers never fully agree.  Maybe you'll even disagree with at least one thing that I've said above and give me some pushback in the comments!

Reinventing Latin Homework: A Gateway to Differentiation?

Today another teacher using Linguachet with her classes asked me how I make assignments with it.  I spent a couple of years experimenting with this myself, and I hope to hear other teachers' ideas very soon! 

I must warn you that seeing all this behavioral data from my own students has begun to change my thinking about how I teach. Formative feedback can be a powerful motivator, but - as we know - there is no single holy grail in education.  To use it most effectively, I've been slowly learning how to watch the process data, then differentiate assignments to keep every student moving forward in flow.  

When the task is reachable for them, I find that students will knock themselves out trying to get to 100% on every question, even if I grade for completion.  When a unit is short and not overly challenging, assigning entire units works well; weaker students will just take a bit longer (and improve more) to reach the same point, but everybody will still get there and that's no problem.  The struggling students often feel encouraged because they saw their struggle pay off.  As a teacher, I feel good because I've emphasized learning as a process, reinforced a growth mindset, etc, etc..

By the same token, however, that learning process is different for every student, as we can now see like never before.  I keep an eye on the average-number-of-tries-per-question column; that shows you how challenging each

More challenging exercises expose significant differences in learning process.

student found the exercise.  When the numbers are green or yellow, they're usually learning from their own mistakes, but over 10 attempts at a question (red numbers) can signal guessing and frustration.  Those students may be spinning their wheels.  I click that yellow part of the row for details to see which questions are troubling them, then click in again to see which words in a question are giving them trouble.  That helps me know how to help them.  

Since the results tab defaults to showing each student's latest unit, you can easily have everyone doing different things without killing yourself, especially during exam review. Sometimes I give ad hominem unit prescriptions ("You need to work on your noun-adjective agreement. Do unit 62.").  More often I have students self-prescribe ("Practice your weakest concept from our last test.").  Sometimes I tell students ("Practice the imperfect.  Do units 29-33, but only pick half the questions in each unit.  Skip the ones you think are too easy.").  This is why Linguachet computes accuracy totally  independently of completion; it allows you to emphasize quality over quantity.  When students see that I am willing to break the curriculum for their learning, they tend to respect the assignment more, and I spend less time policing completion.

The more challenging an exercise is, the more differentiation is needed to help keep everyone in flow.  This is especially true in the review units.  You'll probably find that your strongest students will do challenging sentences at least FOUR TIMES faster than your weakest ones.  For this reason, I now think it's best to assign challenging units (like the reviews) by total time ("Spend 20 quality minutes on this tonight.") rather than percent covered.    Since students can return to a unit again and again, it's difficult to compute total time spent on a unit. However, Linguachet will estimate the amount of time spent on each question (not including first attempt) when the data appear to fall in a credible range.  (If you really must verify something with absolute certainty, you can click three layers deep in the data, turn on the datetime column, and see the timestamp (GMT) for every single student response.  I believe the teacher features video on the site shows you how to do things like this.)

A really cool in-class differentiation strategy here is to train your strongest students (who finish sooner) to coach others by circulating the room and asking process questions ("What's the subject?  It that a 'she' or a 'they'?  Does that change the ending of your verb?") just as you might do.  My mantra to student coaches is, "Don't give them the fish; teach them to fish." This helps your struggling students get scaffolding that keeps them in flow while engaging the stronger ones in rehearsing these same skills in a more advanced way.

As the data expose just how differently our students learn, we'll ultimately want to create review units differentiated by difficulty; one student can handle all the grammar concepts packed into five sentences, while another needs them spread out over twenty so he stays "hooked" and can keep moving forward without shutting down. This is one of the many reasons I'm finishing a custom-content app for teachers.

I hope this helps!  Thanks for asking great questions, and please share whatever you learn!