A Practical Approach to Engaging Every Learner (w/Nancy Weinstein)

(upbeat music) - Welcome to Teaching Channel Talks. I'm Wendy Amato, your host. As often as I can, I jump into conversations about topics that matter in education. On this episode, Mind Print Learning, CEO Nancy Weinstein, and I are going to explore specific ways to help students take control of their own learning. Nancy, welcome to the show. Oh, thank you for having me Wendy. I'm so glad to be here. - Let's jump in and help people understand what Mind Print is, what have you created here for educators? - For educators, families, and students. - Yes. - Mind Print is a solution that focuses on how students learn and how they can be successful in the classroom and beyond. And it's different from every other solution and education were constantly focused. What if students know? Have they learned it? Have they mastered it? And this is about getting to each student's core so we can make learning meaningful and motivational and help them be successful. - At first, I thought that Mind Print was really just for teachers, but you've been careful to help me understand that this is a tool that serves a lot of groups. Can you talk about non-teacher groups and why they should care that Mind Print exists? I'm thinking about the families, the community, the students. - So let's start if it's okay. Let me start with the teacher, because we do expect teachers. It is so helpful for teachers as a tool when they're trying to unlock a student's potential and understanding what is core to that student and how they learn best. And so a lot of our elementary middle school teachers, they really dig deep into Mind Print. But ultimately, what's the goal of learning an education? It's learning how to learn. And so once we hit that middle school high school age, we want every student to know themselves, to know how they learn and how they can be successful. So even if they're teachers or the adults in the room, don't fully understand what they need, they can say, hey, this is what I need to be successful. Can you give me this? Can you help me get there? And then every student has the capacity to learn in any environment. - The way you're describing Mind Print and how it supports us in supporting students, you can see that it becomes a shared tool that could provide some really incredible consistency for students. If there's that bridge between the way a teacher talks about teaching and learning and the family at home talks about teaching and learning and the way the student understands their own teaching and learning experience, that just strengthens everything. It takes the distraction out of the experience and can focus on the content. - Thank you so much for recognizing that because that really is the goal. So we always say the first step of Mind Print is having this objective, reliable data that we know is right and that can really help understand the student. But the goal is not just the understanding. It's the, how do I do this? How do I become successful? And that's all about the strategies. And so a big piece of Mind Print is having a whole collection of strategies that a student can use depending on the situation and having their go-to strategies and those strategies that a teacher can teach the student how to use in school and then the student can use those strategies on their own and when parents see their child struggling with homework, they say, "Are you using your strategy?" Our goal for parents helping with homework is to say, "Are you using that strategy?" Can I help you use the strategy? Not, let me do that math problem for you and then show you how I did it, right? That's where we wanna change the parent child relationship at home, but it's all about strategies. - And what a relief for parents to have a go-to question to ask like that. Can you help people understand how a Mind Print profile is developed if you use the word "assessment" and for a lot of people, that means a test at the end of a chapter or a unit. But in this case, we're talking about an opportunity to create a really beautiful profile. How does that work? - So I wish we didn't have to use the word "assessment." We want students to take it seriously. We want parents and teachers to take it seriously. But I hope that everyone will think of it as formative assessment. So an assessment for learning, not like, we're evaluating a student. It's, so it's an assessment. The assessment was developed at the University of Pennsylvania's Brain Behavior Lab by neuroscientists. It is used around the world in so many different ways to help us understand how the brain works. Mind Print has the exclusive rates, we're so lucky to our friends at Penn Medicine. We have the exclusive rates to use this assessment in the education space. And we use it, the assessment itself is, it's about an hour. So some students need more time. Some students need less time. That's part of our variability, we're all different. But it's a series of nine puzzle-like tests. So each task is different and unique. They take anywhere from two minutes to maybe 10 or 12 minutes. And they're assessing a different, each task assesses a different part of brain functionality. So we're looking at a student's memory, their ability to remember what they learned in class. But there's different types of memory. So some students remember better with words. Some students remember better with pictures. We want to know how a student remembers better. So when they have to memorize a lot, we use that stronger skill. We also look at different areas of reasoning. So we look at you learn better and understand new information better with words, with pictures, with patterns and connections. So that's called complex reasoning. We look at the term executive functions, which I know is thrown around a whole lot in schools and is so important for where the brain's ability to get things done. So even if you understand it, I like to say, can you show what you know? And so that's our attention and our short-term memory and our flexibility. And then finally, that other piece speed that I mentioned earlier. We want to know which of our students, if we gave them enough time, they would just blossom. But in a typical classroom, they might feel rushed or and can't finish their work. And if we gave them that time, so we want to see and discover who those students are. Because it might not always come out on those standardized tests when students are nervous. So that's one thing that's so important to us that students aren't nervous when they take mine print. We want to see that they're best. Our goal is to uncover their strengths. So we can teach to their strengths. A lot of other assessments are to say, what didn't they learn so we can teach them again? Where are the holes? Mine print's not looking for the holes. Mine print's looking for the strengths. Nancy, you know I've had the pleasure of taking the mine print assessment. And I hope that people will hear me when I say it was actually an enjoyable experience. You described it as nine puzzle-like tasks that help us understand different parts of brain functionality. I really enjoyed the tasks and it did feel game-like to me. And if that word means that people don't take the assessments seriously and then don't use the word, but if it helps someone to feel comfortable coming into the assessment, then my gosh, please hear from me, not from Nancy, that it could almost feel game-like, they're puzzles. And you're unlocking your own way of thinking and making it visible so the teachers can understand how to help you help yourself. Let's talk about just good teaching practices because it might be easy to dismiss some of the strategies, the mind print strategies that are made. It might be easy to dismiss those saying, a good teacher doesn't need this tool. I think you and I disagree because we know that if all students learn to the same way, then good teaching or good study skills would look the same for all students. That's not the case. Help me understand why this tool, why the profile, why the strategies are essential for meeting the wide range of student needs. - So it's such a good question. So the best teachers know lots of strategies. - Yes, of course. - And we know that and we're not suggesting strategies that are not part of what John Haddie or Bob Marzano have suggested are good and effective teaching practices. What we are suggesting to your point is that having this profile can help us understand which of those 500 plus strategies are best for this student in this particular situation. And when we step back and say what makes the greatest most amazing teacher, it's that they almost have this intuition of what this student needs in this moment. And I think when we talk to even the greatest most successful teachers, they will tell you it will take them several months with a student to figure out that at least for the complicated ones and a lot of them are complicated which strategies will work for that student. We sort of take some of that guessing and trial and error out of the process. So teachers can really focus on the art of teaching because they know what strategy to try and use that is most likely to be successful with that student. So what we're doing is we're making good teachers great and we're making the greatest teachers that much more efficient. The greatest teachers get typically nine months with a student. Yes. And so, if they from day one, they can be efficient and effective with that student. What a gift. What a gift. A lot of teachers spend first marking period getting to know their student's styles and that you are giving them the gift of that time back where they can come in at an accelerated level and get their students up to speed faster, get their teaching up to speed. I don't want a teacher to feel that there's just lost time at the beginning of every year. This is incredible, this is incredible. One of the things that you said is that student learning can be complicated. Talk to me about mind print and how it meets the needs of all students and that all students have learner variability. So the brain is complicated. We all know that, billions of neurons. How do we help every student learn? So there's a Harvard professor named Todd Rose and he wrote a book called The End of Average. And it's a wonderful book that I recommend for anyone interested in the topic of learner variability. But basically what he would say is that we are all variable. We all have relative strengths and relative needs. And it is understanding and managing that variability that enables us to unlock our full potential. So taking the average student and making that student a great student, taking that superior student who might be studying too much, right? It's possible to study too much for too long and to feel anxious and showing them how to be more efficient with their time. So they're not spending all their time studying and they have time to explore and do other things. And then for our students who might be below average academically, but really have strengths and are so capable of learning, but just need a different approach and being able to unlock that for them. So it truly is a solution for every student. I love this. You said that the Mindprint Cognitive Assessment was developed by neuroscientists at the University of Pennsylvania. Is this what they were? Is this what they set out to develop? So they wanted to understand early onset of different mental health needs. And so the earlier-- because of the value-- just like an education, value of early intervention and education, value of early detection in the medical field. And so in order to do that, they were looking at brain scans and trying to bring students, children into the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and going through and doing a study on how their brain worked. And they said, boy, is this inefficient and very expensive? And they said, can we develop an assessment to do this in a more efficient, affordable way so we can understand more students? And so they developed this test. And we're able to match it up to FMRI scans or brain scans. And so that's how they developed it. And at the time that they were developing it, they had just published a study in collaboration with the National Institutes of Health. And at that same time, I came up with this idea for Mindprint based on my own personal experiences as a mom. And I said, can we license the assessment to help kids in schools? This is exactly the information that we need. Yes. And they very graciously said, yes. So I am forever grateful to them for trusting us with their technology and their science. Mindprint offers support for reading, for writing, for test prep, for study skills. What kinds of things might we see in the recommendations and strategies that come through Mindprint work? So the recommendations and strategies as we discussed earlier are very similar to what you might see from John Haddie and Bob Marzano. But those strategies are presented as pure things that work in education that you can use. What makes Mindprint different is the prioritization, so that when you go to do your math work, I am giving you the strategies that work best for Wendy. I need all the strategies for my math work, Nancy. No, I don't believe that for a second, because my group will show you that every student can do math, right? If they have the right strategies, we have so many teachers. We have teachers who take Mindprint as part of their training to understand the science of learning. And when we have them take Mindprint, I can't begin to tell you the number of teachers who say, if I had this, when I was in school, I could have done math. And so then we say, how about doing this with your students so that they can do math? And it just becomes a very, very positive experience for teachers where they view it as something that completely supports what they want to do, what they got into teaching to do to help students. And not just this other thing, new assessment that the school is asking them to do. Nancy, Mindprint is definitely not something that teachers do that is on top of their work. It actually is through their work. It makes everything else have sense and structure. I have strongly encouraged this for all teachers. And I'd like to hear a little bit about how a teacher can get involved. So there are a couple of ways to get involved. We always say that our teachers are-- we would do anything for our teachers. So any teacher that ever wants a Mindprint for their own family, please email us. We'd be happy to support you. So that's one way, sort of individually, personally. We work with schools across the country where we teach the science of learning. And we will also be on teaching the science of learning, obviously, offer the Mindprint solution to their students and families. So that's another way. And the third way and my new favorite way is that we are watching a course with the teaching channel starting in December, where teachers as part of that science of learning course will take Mindprint and discover their own profile and have a better sense of how their own strengths might be impacting their teaching in very positive ways and how they might want to do things a little different in their classroom if they realize that they're playing to their own strengths, which might be different from their student strengths and how that will enable their students to be more successful. Nancy, thank you for those very specific examples. The strategies related to Mindprint and to the student profiles are straightforward and clear. They are available to all teachers. And we all should be using them. Thank you so much for what you're bringing to the education community. To fellow educators, thank you all for listening. If you'd like to explore the topics that Nancy and I discussed today, including a link to the course, please check out the show notes at teachingchannel.com/podcast. Be sure to subscribe on whatever listening app you use that will help others to find us. I'll see you again soon for next episode. Thanks for listening. [MUSIC PLAYING]