EdUp Innovation: Episode 21, Lauren Waldman, Learning Scientist

Introducing Learning Scientist Lauren Waldman to the EdUp Innovation Podcast 21 of the Ed Up Innovation Podcast. My guest today is a friend, Lauren Waldman. Welcome, Lauren. It's great to have you. Speaker 2 Hey, hey, Brad. Oh, I'm excited for this. Speaker 1 This is going to be fun. It's going to be hard to keep it to 25. Speaker 2 Minutes. Yeah, that's the hard part. Speaker 1 We're going to do our best. Lauren is a learning scientist. And in Full disclosure, Lauren and I work together at San Francisco Bay University, where she served as a subject matter expert for one of our general education classes, How Your Brain Works. And Lauren actually had the unique opportunity to come to SFBU last semester and see the work that our students were doing as part of that and as part of our entire general education agility practice pathway curriculum. Lauren lives in Toronto. Lauren is the brains behind the Learning Pirate, which is her company. We'll talk a little bit about that. She's given talks at places like Penn and UNICEF, She's given Ted talks, she's worked at the Learning Solutions conference, and she has a program called Joining Forces with Your Brain, kind of an online program that just a few weeks ago was launched in the United States in the entire federal prison system and is available to over 1,000,000 inmates. So I want to definitely dive in on all of this stuff. Lauren, it's amazing to have you on the show. Lauren's Unexpected Path to Becoming a Learning Scientist I want to start by sort of just talking about learning science and your career. How did like when you were a little kid growing up, you're like, I want to be a learning scientist when I, I don't know, I don't think any kid does that. So how, how did you, you know, give give us the life arc of how you ended up here with learning pirate and as a learning scientist? Speaker 2 It's definitely not. I had no clue that I was going to do this as a kid. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a waitress or a cashier because those are the people I always saw with money. So I figured that's how you got it. Speaker 1 Yeah, go, go. Yeah, Cash business, right. Speaker 2 Yeah, Yeah. No, the learning sciences came to me much later. So it was, it was by fluke, you know, I, I had no intentions of becoming a teacher. I had no intentions of becoming a learning development professional. And somehow my, my career led me to, to all of this, that at the pinnacle of sort of being AI, guess what would now be called the chief learning officer? You know, very well into the, into my career is when neuroscience came and was like, Hey, do you know anything about your brain? And I was like, not really. And I'm like, oh, but I'm a learning professional and I've been a teacher and I designed learning and I facilitate and I'm responsible for helping other people's brains change, but I don't really know anything about it myself. And that's when that's when the the trajectory of the career changed, which is stop everything I'm doing, go get some credentials. And that went even further down because very fortunately, I was given permissions to attend rounds and lectures at one of the probably one of the best hospitals and every search centers in North America, the Rodman Research. And that's when I really discovered how little we really do know about the 3 lbs of brain that we carry in US every single day. But how? Speaker 1 Well, it's a complicated machine up there. It's a little. Speaker 2 Bit complex. Speaker 1 It's complex. Speaker 2 It's complex, very complex, but so phenomenal and fascinating, especially to us as learning professionals. Speaker 1 Yeah, of course. The Impact of Teaching Students How Their Brains Work So just a little bit ago we were talking about that experience when you came to SFBU and you saw you know with the work our students were doing. And and just for context, you know these are largely first generation under represented the first time in college students. And so, you know, of all the things that we insist that they learn, learning how to learn and learning how your brain works should be an essential. I mean, it just seems so obvious when you say it. Yet most, most university general educations don't include a class like this. Learning how to learn or, or maybe metacognition is, is is mentioned in passing and, and, and something. So what struck you as part of that experience? And you know, what do you think we got right? What do you think higher Ed is, is missing? Talk to us a little bit about your work as an SME on a general education class. Speaker 2 You know, when, when I was approached to to do this and to to design this class, it was, it meant more to me to make sure that when these students were done that they had gone through a very similar journey that I did. And I was older than them when they were going through theirs. And it was could I not only help them to understand the inner working as the operational function of their brain. But then could we train those brains as they were going through the class itself. So that they did have stronger metacognitive skill when they were done. So that they not only understood how to cultivate a new habit and behavior, but even before we got to the classes on having a behavior, giving them the underlying function and mechanisms to help them understand the challenge of what that was going to look like. And then, you know, the underlying process of memory. So they can understand it's not going to happen overnight. It's not going to happen in a week. So really embedding in the practice to go with the knowledge and making sure that was very repetitive throughout their their term so that by the time they did get to the end, they were leaving not only with the knowledge, but with very practical human skill. And when I came to visit and sort of undercover Boston, it was like a weird what we were saying, like it it, it exceeded my expectations. I was so impressed with, with them and one particular student whose poster session I was speaking to because I, I knew obviously a design helps design the class. I knew what they had done. But one student in particular, when I asked them, you know, what was the habit that you tried to cultivate? And he said, you know, I really wanted to stop looking at my phone so much from bed. So at night and in the morning. And I'm like, oh, how's I said, how's that going? And the one thing I loved is that he's like, you know what? This morning, I woke up and I picked up my phone, but then I put it back down. I was like, yes. And that was that. That was everything in culmination. Yeah, that that was everything that demonstrated that he had, you know, strengthened his executive function to the point where he recognized in that moment. Yeah, put that down. Speaker 1 Yeah, Behavioral change, right? That's great. Yeah, it was great. It was great having you. Lauren gave a great talk that opened to the whole university that if you're looking for a keynote speaker, check out Learning Pirate and Lauren Waldman. A little plug right there. She'll do a great job for you. Even if you don't have a class for her to design. I would recommend Lauren to to speak to either faculty or or students. She does an amazing PowerPoint where we're doing things with our hands that our brain is not wired to do. Can you? Can you recreate that? Is it too much to ask to do over Zoom? Speaker 2 Oh, not at all. Not at all. So for everyone who's watching right now and basically if you make a fist and you but one thumb up and one pinky out. So I'm just going to hold on. See, now I'm going to there we go one thumb up, one pinky out and then whenever you're. Speaker 1 Feeling I'm doing this wrong. Speaker 2 There we go, OK and switch and switch and switch. Zoom over. Everyone's now like, going to figure out. Speaker 1 Yeah, it was fun. I mean, it was fun to watch people fumble through that. As a percussionist, former percussionist, I want to believe that I'm more ambidextrous and can divide my brain into quadrants to to do things with my forelimbs, but I can't so. Speaker 2 But that's But that's the demonstration of why learning is hard, right? Like learning is hard. Speaker 1 Yeah, that was fun. Debunking Learning Myths and Outdated Pedagogy in Education So you work both in higher education, education and, and corporate, you see it kind of in the the intersection there. Can you, Are there some things that corporate gets right that higher Ed gets wrong in terms of learning science or in the way we're training people? Speaker 2 I think that there's a little bit more of a time advantage when it comes to corporate because they've got a little bit more time sometimes to, to pull the thread through with, with employees if, if they're designing correctly. So, you know, they might have an employee for a year, two years or however long and they can continue that sort of like the journey. So unfortunately, you know, students, they move on. Anything can happen with the student. I'd say on the whole, we're still working with an archaic system when it comes to how we are teaching and how we are learning. And that is really based on the fact that when the industrial era sort of formed the educational system, that's what they were working on. And we, we replicated, we replicated, we replicated, we replicated the science did not keep up with, with the methodology. A lot of the, a lot of psychology, a lot of good cognitive psychology. But the neuroscience, you know, came along and really underpins a lot of the psychology, which taught us a lot about the inner workings of the brain. And then those you know, really critical aspects that inform us how to learn better, inform us how a memory is created and teach us the skills of focus and attention and and in service of learning memory, etcetera. Speaker 1 Yeah. What are some examples? So, you know, I mean, people who are out there in teacher education are learning things like, you know, students have learning preferences, whether they're visual or oral or kinesthetic. Like, what are some of those things that have been perpetuated in pedagogy that now neuroscience tells us maybe we we we take a different approach? Speaker 2 Well, I think everything that you just mentioned, you know, you've got, you know, I think one of the oldest ones is the whole left side, right side dominant, dominant, left brain, right brain dominant. And it was the University of Utah who did study like years ago. And they, they took I think at least 2100 scans of people between I, I don't have the, the study in front of me, but there was a significant age group then they just basically proved there was no side miss. You know, you got that many, that many scans. It was pretty evident that like you don't have that side miss. I think you know, whether you, and again, I, I taught in the classroom as well and I when I was younger, that's how I started my career. But if I go into most academic settings, if I go into most organizational settings and speak to the learning professionals there, and I asked them, can you tell me what you know about the, the function and the process of how a human creates a memory? That knowledge is very, very little. Yeah, yeah. And so there's some basic foundations that we need to get back to in service of and memory is definitely, definitely one of them. And then it's a beast of a topic in the sciences. It's you can't teach everybody everything. And it's constantly evolving because there's so much research going on. But to know the foundations of it and the process and the steps and what overlaps. And you know, for our educators out there who are probably, they were taught a lot about cognitive load. Well, cognitive load, when we, when we really scale back a lot of people, it's a lot of, it's not just about the amounts of everything, it's not the amounts of content, it's the underpinning of working memory and its limitations. Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah. Speaker 2 That really informed the theory of cognitive load. So all of these little things start to start to add up in and out of the classroom, whether you're facilitating, whether you're designing a lesson, designing an entire training intervention for large scale organizations, all of these mechanisms that you know, make us us really, really do come into play. Speaker 1 Of course, yeah. Prescriptive Changes for Higher Education and Success Stories So a lot of provosts, presidents, faculty listen to add up innovation. And so if you could build upon that and if you had kind of the ability to give like one or two piece of prescriptive suggestions to either change higher Ed or change correctly, higher Ed has terrible outcomes in the United States and Canada. Like our students are not graduating, you know, about 60% graduate in in 4-4 years, which means 40% of our students are just kind of left by the wayside. We took their money, they leave with no degree in debt, so we must have better outcomes. Some of it is that we are not engaging students in a way in which they can learn or create the ideal environment. So if you could make one or two changes, they could be anything from the the way universities are structured, the physical environment, the way classes are taught, the calendar, the curriculum. You know, if you had your magic wand, what, where would we go? Speaker 2 You know, I would want to look at this from a 2A2 sided approach. It's like what I tell, tell my, my teams is, you know, it's not only the responsibility of the teacher or the learning development professional, the instructional designer to, to create a learning experience that's, you know, that can be better absorbed. It's the responsibility of the learner themselves to understand what learning is and how to learn better. So it's from both sides. So from if we look at the academic institutions, I think I told you I was over lecturing at Penn. And after it was done, I took the liberty of just like I wanted to walk through the student centers and speak to the students and see what's going on. And I went to the Resource Center and said, do you have anything that will help somebody learn how to learn better, new methodologies, a little bit more intention and strategy? I said, just what do you have? And they're like, we don't. And I'm like, OK, yeah. Speaker 1 Yeah, and this is like the most elite, one of the most elite universities in the country, right? Speaker 2 So it was, you know, I guess lectured at Harvard and it wasn't because the the professor who reached out to me on behalf of the students. So there's definitely this appetite. And I think something that you and I have talked about extensively and we've now sort of have evidence from SFBU with the students there of how much more impactful the experience, the whole educational process can be when we not only teach them about the operational system, but we give them the tools and methodologies to work better with it. So I'd say for any of the academic institutions, this goes for organizations as well is let's let's teach the greater population the things that we were just never taught ourselves, right? How do I learn? I don't know what's focus? I don't know. Someone just told me to sit here and pay attention. Well, that's hard these days. Speaker 1 Right, right. Yeah. Speaker 2 So really training on those skills and then getting into the design of the learning itself, which we can use science for, to be much more effective for the operational system. Speaker 1 Yeah, totally, totally true. You know, I think higher Ed makes the mistake of presuming that because a student went to 12 years of high school, that along the way they learned how to learn because they did learn things in 12 years. They learned, you know, basic math and writing and language and social studies and, and, and the, the topics that they were taught in high school. But that doesn't necessarily mean they learn them in the most efficient way, in a way in which they will retain those things or enjoy learning new things or be able to transfer and apply that learning to new knowledge that might come their way. And, you know, what do we use? We use test scores. We use grades to determine how a student will do when they enter the university. And it's it's not a good system. It doesn't really show us what a student's true potential is. And you know, it's not a real predictor of their success. Speaker 2 No, definitely not. And having been one of those students in this, in joining forces with Your Brain, there's a chapter where I talk about my university experience and being in a lecture hall. I think it was twice a week with 300 other students, close to 300 other students for three hours with a small break in between. And I got kicked out of psychology in university because I was failing so badly. The funny part to this is I I just made a video about this I wanted to post yesterday. I was doing a little bit of spring cleaning and I found my transcripts and introductory. Introductory to psychology F Plus. Speaker 1 Well, the plus helps you. Speaker 2 Know the plus, you know, maybe I was like, like, I could see why you did this, but it, it didn't set me, I was not set up for success. And I, when I was reading, you know, looking at this transcript last night and I was like, if I only knew if I, if I would have known even a portion of what I know now as a learning scientist and someone who just went through the journey herself at a older age to learn how to learn. That would have completely changed the trajectory of my of my educational experience and probably the professional experience. Speaker 1 Yeah, of course, of course. What about success stories like so a lot of people are doing this. Not well. And so can you give us a North star? Is, is there a company or a university that you're particularly impressed with and in terms of embedding learning science into the DNA of what they're doing? Speaker 2 I mean obviously SFEU. Speaker 1 Well, we will take. Speaker 2 That, yeah, obviously. Speaker 1 We appreciate the shout. Speaker 2 Out obviously SFEU you know, I worked with a college here in Ontario called Durham College and they're doing it phenomenally. They have very well integrated as part of their culture, you know, the cognitive sciences. They've even branded stickers and tote bags and it's just, it's cool. Yeah, they're they're professional development days, of which I went out and and gave a workshop at was just, I was so impressed. I haven't seen many other schools if I'm being perfectly honest. Speaker 1 So they're training faculty, They're training you're training faculty. And like, here's how your students ideally will process the content you're providing. Speaker 2 Yeah. So we did. We did a session. I didn't have too much time with them and we just, it was kind of like an extended keynote and but that was enough. It was enough for them to go, Oh my God. Because again, we were never taught how to learn. We were definitely, when we were younger, we were never taught the inner workings of our own brains and how we operate. So it doesn't matter what age you are. Is is to learn now about the operational system to not only understand it for yourself, but then to be able to see it through. You know, when you're designing, when you're teaching, when you're facility, whatever it is you're doing to see it through the lens of the brain and the operational system, it, it really does change quite a bit, but also fundamentally changes you as a human being. Speaker 1 Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. One of those light bulb moments. Navigating the Future of AI and Human Connection in Education Oh yeah, definitely. Speaker 1 We're going to get a little controversial here as we as we get deeper into the episode, how should we think about AI tools in education? I know you and I remember the walk we took around campus and I was telling you some some of the work we're doing with AI here. And you know, to a humanist, it is terrifying, right? Like it is where AI can go in terms of education is terrifying. And if you, if you break it down and think like I do Duolingo every day, I'm on like a 1500 day learning streak and I am able to learn from a machine. There's not a human on the other end of that loop. It's a really well designed app that humans created, but I am learning from a machine how to speak a foreign language. And so extending that into education a little bit, because we also know that humans aren't doing a great job educating. Educating. And so I just want to pick your brain a little bit about AI, the future of AI and education. Do you think it has a place and space? And if so, in what capacity? Speaker 2 I mean, it's here, it's, you know, it's been let out-of-the-box. It's, it's just, it's already here, I think when it comes to AI and now the research is starting to uncover and there's going to be longitudinal studies on this right, of the cognitive decline of what's happening. And I think the best way that we can work with AI is to 1st work on our fundamental human skills so that we do have stronger executive function and cognitive control and focus. To be able to recognize when I have been prompting for too long, or which I, you know, I, I think I might have been the one to coin the phrase doom prompting after doom scrolling because I recognize that this is what I was seeing people do. It was like, you know, back from cat videos came out on YouTube, you just got, you know, people were like in this wormhole of, of this. And I realized how, and, and this is again, a lot of what I, what I observe is for myself as well, my own frustrations. You know, I got frustrated because like, I'm prompting, I'm prompting. I'm like, no, I didn't mean this. No, I didn't mean that. No, yet, no, no. And you wind up in the same place. Meantime, 45 minutes has gone by and I could have just gotten up and spoken to somebody. Speaker 1 Of course, yeah, Doom prompting there. I've never heard that expression, but. Speaker 2 I think I coined it. Speaker 1 I have done it. I've done do like we we've probably all done it. I also think if you remember back to the early days of the Internet, I'm probably a little bit older than you, but I, I do, you know, remember like when Google came out and you would say, you know, tell me about Chevrolet pickup trucks. And then you would just get pages of garbage, right, because the search engines hadn't optimized yet. And you'd get pages and pages of garbage because it's keying in on the wrong words. And then eventually 16 pages in, you find the thing that you were looking for. I also feel like AI right now is in its infancy and it's, it's, it's growing and learning very quickly, but it it's still not able to predict because of the token structure that the language model uses exactly what the user is looking for. So then you end up like, Nope, I meant this. Nope, I meant that Nope, do it again. Nope, you spelled that wrong. No, you know, and then you're, you're right. Right now, I have had experiences with all of the language models where it's like, I should have just written this myself because I'm I'm prompting for too long and but I think eventually that's going to tighten up. I think eventually the more people use it, the more it will be able to predict exactly what Lauren wants when Lauren logs in and asks for something. Speaker 2 You know, it's, it's because we're, we are, we're training those models, you know, but I think when it comes to the use of it is especially for a brain that's not fully developed yet, it's so important to help get them the skills to understand their own critical thinking, their own executive function, their own ability to, to pay, to pay attention, to focus those so they can have a little bit more authority on how they are using it. And when they think that, oh, you know what, this isn't I, I need to talk to somebody, a human being and like ideate with somebody else in in a different capacity. The other side of that is that the instructional designers, the teachers, the professors, everybody who's using it, who are now trying to create lesson plans faster, learning designs faster. They're implementing everything into the system that they already know. And what they already know is failing. Speaker 1 Right, right, right. Speaker 2 Yeah, so it's just failing faster. And even the cautionary tale, especially the terminology of learning sciences is thrown around and bastardized so much. And because of that, we're perpetuating new myth even as we speak right now when it comes to to learning sciences, because even with, you know, some terms that most people be familiar with, we talked about cognitive load. I could throw an interleading space repetition. There's an underlying scientific factor of why these things work, the variables, the limitations. But if you don't know that, and you're just using it as an arbitrary term to say, design with learning science, but you can't validate the output yourself. Speaker 1 Right, yeah, that that's, that is a problem and it's scary. And same with writing code, right? Like, can you? So look, we have degrees in computer science here. And if you look at those degrees in the curriculum, there are machine languages, C++, Java, Python, And AI can write code very quickly and very effectively. And so the conversation I think nationally here and nationally is do we take that out of the curriculum? Because when students graduate, is that a skill that they'll really need in the real world or we'll just AI be writing the code? And you know, to your point, a human needs to validate that, that it's correct and that this is, you know, that there's not a more efficient way to do it. And it's learn how to write code from humans, right? Like this is. And so some of it there, there may be flaws in there. IA 100% agree with you. That kind of pro social navigation skills and the ability to talk to people is needed. And so as we see, 'cause this is this will happen. It's not, you know, if it's when more of the instruction is offloaded to AI that that in the design of that there are human to human interactions intentionally built in. Like you can't ever lose that. I also feel like your point about students whose, you know, kids whose brains are not fully developed yet, Like I grew up reading, you grew up reading and you know, you read with your your parent or caregiver and that cannot be replaced by this. You know, it just can't, you can't park the kid in front of the iPad and say, go ahead and ask it questions, teach it, tell, tell a story. Do you know that human connection is absolutely essential to kind of regenerate fully functional human beings? And I don't want to live in a world where, you know, it's, it's not that. Speaker 2 No, and it's we're, you know, we are sort of in that space. You know, it's funny you say you're you've been on a roll, Duolingo. I was in Mexico City for three weeks and immersed myself with that. And I'm more motivated while I am surrounded by people who I want to connect with, but I just I'm having a language barrier, but I'm more motivated to learn in that environment. Then you bring me back to Toronto and in my back of my head, I'm like, OK, next time I really want to be able to speak, speak even more proficiently. So, you know, I'm a learning scientist. I could design my own learning plan and and but my my motivation is, is lower, obviously, while I'm here, right. But the like a week before, if I ever decide that I want to go back to Mexico or somewhere that's Spanish speaking, I'm going to regret. Yeah. But the connection was a huge part of my motive, Saying when I lived in Japan, I was meeting amazing people. The only way I could speak to them was to learn the language. And I was very motivated to do so because I know you're cool and I want to talk to you. I just, you know, gestures are only going to get us. Speaker 1 Yeah, right. I mean, I'm learning Spanish not for the sake of of learning Spanish, right? I'm learning Spanish because of it gives me the ability to connect with people I wouldn't otherwise be able to connect in California. It's obviously very important, but I've been, since I've been on this 1500 day journey, I've been to Mexico, I want to say three times and I love it because I can understand even if I'm not engaged with people, I can understand 80 to 90% of what I'm hearing. And it's like this whole, it's like the black and white becomes Technicolor. I, I understand everything that's going on And, and again, it's more motivation and there's lots of Spanish speakers here at SFBU who are always very patient with me and willing to tolerate my terrible grammar and stuttering. But I, I really appreciate the opportunity to practice with people more than, more than the, the phone. Essential Reads on Social Connection and Memory Research Lauren, 25 minutes goes by pretty pretty quickly here. I end every episode by asking folks what they're reading right now. And so if you have, and it doesn't have to be reading, I mean, it could be for, for professional growth. It could be for pleasure if you are watching something interesting on Netflix or like whatever it is that you are consuming right now. Either for pleasure or for growth. If you wouldn't mind sharing, that'd be amazing. Speaker 2 I'm such a nerd. A lot of what I read is usually around the science of, you know, of one thing I So I just finished my friend's book. I'm going to shamelessly plug him because he's brilliant. Speaker 1 Do it. We'll tag him in the post. Speaker 2 Yeah, Doctor Ben Ryan REIN Doctor Ben, he wrote this phenomenal book based on his research on social connection and empathy called Why Brains Need Friends. Speaker 1 I love that. Speaker 2 It's I love him so much and I just love this book so much and I'm re reading like the 100th time. Searching for Memory by Daniel Schachter, who is just a legend in neuroscience and and his research on memory. Speaker 1 Awesome, awesome. Lauren, thank you so much for for sharing your time, your expertise with us today. Episode 21,