Producer: Okay, welcome back to Full PreFrontal where we are exposing the mysteries of executive function. I can hear it in with our host Sucheta Kamath. Good morning, Sucheta, we are teeing up your second conversation with Dr. William Klemm. I’m looking forward to it, but I guess I want to kick it off by asking, I mean, great teachers are weird, yes?

Sucheta Kamath: Yes. Have you had some weird teachers? I have had many.

Producer: I have had many, and they are the great ones and they are memorable, that is for sure.

Sucheta: Yeah, so there are teachers who are memorable and there are teachers whose teaching is memorable, and I thought we will start off with that. So, Louis Agassiz was a well-known and quirky 19th-century Harvard naturalist who was known to put his brand-new students through what came to be known as the ordeal with the fish. You know, when students began their semester with him, he would hand them an hors d’oeuvre like stinky fish in a jar from his lab, and then the students were asked to set the fish in the pan and all they were required to do is look at their fish. So, while the students wondered what was going on, Agassiz would leave, and then you would just come back and just ask the students, what did you see? And, majority of them were just doodle their thumbs and say, “No, nothing, I didn’t see it very much.” He would encourage the kids to see and draw, and those were the only tools he would give is like just observe the fish and draw, and nothing else. So, this would go on and on for days and of course, many would lose interest, but here’s the kicker: a famous entomologist and expert on grasshoppers, Samuel Scudder was a student of Agassiz, and he is famously known to tell this account of his experience with Prof. Agassiz and he says, “After many days, I could not see whatever the heck Agassiz was wanting me to see, but what began to happen to me is, I realized that I am not good at this,” and he says, “I see how little I saw before.” So, after some deep thinking, Scudder describes that he had an epiphany, and he blurted out when Agassiz got back to the class, he says, “Paired organs, the same on both sides!” and Agassiz happily nodded, and he says, “Of course, of course,” and Scudder was so excited that he thought his job was done, and so he looked at Agassiz and said, “So, what next?” You can guess the answer. So, Agassiz said, “Well, look at the fish.” So, what I love about this story is number one is, on many students, this technique of pay attention, learn, observe, immerse was lost on them. They thought this was a little quirk of his professor and most of them did not take it up and ran with it. However, there was this again, one student for whom this awakening happened, and he saw the connection, and as we get ready to talk to our guest in a second episode, I think it’s really important to understand the link between learning and teaching and teacher as a learner relationship. The questions one must ask is, how am I inspiring my students? How do I engage them? How do I challenge them? How do I get out of their way yet how do I stay there with my students? And that is why we are having all come back.

Here is a little bio of him that I think most of you heard, but he is a professor of neuroscience at Texas a and M University who has served as a project director for two NIH grants and two other grants from an SF, all in developing science curricula for grades 6 to 8. He has studied basic and applied research on learning and memory, and has published 20 books, several of them are available online and I’m going to link it for all of you so you can take advantage of reading them. He provides teachers with lectures and workshops on teaching and learning, is a distinguished lecturer Sigma XIN, the Scientific Research Society. He also cofounded a company called Forum Enterprise as well as he is a codeveloper of Get Smart, and interactive Internet-based instructional assistant, and finally, what he is most known for are those who read Psychology Today and he has his own blog called Thank You, Brain will realize that he has had more than 2.5 million reader views off his posts. So, he is a prolific writer, phenomenal teacher, and somebody who deeply cares about our future generation, particularly the tender age of middle school.

So, I’m very excited to have him back.

Producer: I am too, so let’s get to it. Here is Sucheta’s second conversation with Dr. William Klemm.

Sucheta: Welcome back to the podcast, Dr. Klemm. I’m so delighted to have you. Today, I thought we will focus on learning. You have written several books on this, you have wonderful insights on how the inculcates learning principles into the classroom. So, let me start for all our audiences, like how do you define learning and our memory and learning related?

Dr. William Klemm: Oh, yeah, of course. Learning is one side of the same coin as memory. In other words, you can learn things which you may or may not remember, but you can’t remember things you haven’t learned, and now, learning is, it seems to me it involves two things. One is encoding the information. In other words, having the information register in your brain, but learning also involves understanding and the ability to recognize the meaning of what your brain just encoded. So, that does not necessarily involve memory except to the extent that your ability to understand very often requires you to recall some relevant memory, and to help explain, to use what you already know, to use what you are now supposed to learn that is new, but I guess my philosophical point of view is, what is the point of learning if you don’t remember it?

Sucheta: So true. So, here is what I see. I deal with a lot of smart, talented underachievers they have executive dysfunction, that is why they come to see me. They have ADHD, they have great IQ – a lot of them have been tested, and so their ability to memorize information during the younger grades is fine, and that is why they easily – they are floating through their academic life. Then comes this middle school on words, this journey where you have to not just listen and memorize and reproduce. You have to understand and apply, and that is when they start struggling because they just don’t have the proper techniques or even externalize understanding of their own ability to distinguish between learning and memory.

So, can you go a little bit deep into what does it mean to understand information how do we know we know?

Dr. Klemm: Well, sometimes, we don’t know that we know. In other words, we misunderstand, or we think we understand when in fact, we don’t.

Sucheta: Yes, and you know that when you take a test.

Dr. Klemm: Understanding is fundamental to memory in several ways. First of all, you don’t want to memorize incorrectly, and the other point is that to understand something, you have to think about it. You have to think about it in the context of what you already know and understand, and the process of thinking about it is really memory rehearsal. So, the best memory technique is actually thinking, and of course, the process of thinking, you have a better chance of gaining understanding. Now, you might say, well, do we teach children not saying? And, that’s a whole new subject which we probably don’t have time to explore, and it is probably the reason the education community has disrespected memory because they think that memory is gained at the expense of thinking, and I take a different perspective and what it can do that thinking helps memory and that memory helps thinking – you can’t think in a vacuum, you have to know something to think, and to know something, you have to have memorized that at some point in time. So, I think our educational approaches have been skewed against memory because they don’t appreciate the interplay between memory and thinking.

Sucheta: Well, I see fundamental problem in the way educators receive their training to become educators, is they never get proper training in developing memory strategies or not all educators, like you can have a master’s in physics and become a physics teacher with you have never learned a learning theory.

Dr. Klemm: That’s right, that’s right.

Sucheta: And then, that –

Dr. Klemm: I’ve given talks to teacher groups and at the end, they say, “Oh, nobody ever told me that! Why didn’t I know that when I was a student?”

Sucheta: So, you mentioned this mess that educators have amongst themselves. What’s your first recommendation to educators if they want to see improvement in their student body in terms of general learning effort?

Dr. Klemm: Well, first of all, I think they should learn these ideas about how to have an effective memory and teach it to the children.

Sucheta: I love that.

Dr. Klemm: And that is the first one [0:10:00]. Now, the second fundamental is that they need to rethink the classroom environment, they need to rethink the scheduling during the day and all of the distractions that go on in a typical school inch – and there are so many things going on in school that interfere with learning. That’s a wonder they learn anything.

Sucheta: Can you share some of the once we have observed?

Dr. Klemm: Oh, well, I don’t know where to start. Well, for instance, I’ve done a lot of school visits, and especially in the younger grades, if you walk into a typical classroom, it is just littered with instructions – all sorts of placards on the wall and doodads hanging from the ceiling, and you have perhaps seen that. If you go to a typical classroom, that is what they look like, and almost all school buildings have great big windows and you look outside and see what’s going on outside. All of these things are distractions and makes it very difficult to learn anything.

Sucheta: I’ll give you an example.

Dr. Klemm: No, and in addition to that, in a lot of classrooms, the public address system will come on about every 10 minutes so that announcement from the principal or from somebody else and they only talk about the schedule of events and later in the week, all sorts of other things for the kids to think about instead of the school lesson.

Sucheta: Oh, my God, yes. But his example, I went to observe a 10th grader in a high school, and the biggest complaint came from his science teacher that he doesn’t do his work, he’s a new his sons to the other students and interferes with the whole classroom on goings. So, I showed up, I sat in the back and there was a massive aquarium in the classroom, okay?

Dr. Klemm: Another distraction.

Sucheta: Oh, my God exhibition point and that made like a giant sound, almost like a dump truck was operating or something, and this kid sat right next to it and it was lit up and had these amazing species of fish and all kinds of turtles and it was giant. I could not believe it. Talk about a high school version of having these amazing slogans and things on the walls, this was so distracting to this kid and he would spend a lot of time studying them, and that he would get very excited if something happened in the aquarium, and he would shout out and that was what was going on.

Dr. Klemm: And it’s amazing, the teacher didn’t figure that out.

Sucheta: No, she did it and she was very annoyed with him for him not responding because she said to him every step of the way is stop, stop doing that, pay attention. Well, he was paying attention, he was very much paying attention to the –

Dr. Klemm: Yeah, each are still the kids to pay attention and then they put all these distractions in the classroom where they cannot pay attention.

Sucheta: So, what should they do instead? They are very afraid that the barren learning environment will be depressing.

Dr. Klemm: Well, I think the teachers put all these distractions in the classroom because they want to make school interesting, keep it from being boring, but the price they pay for that is distracting the kids from the lessons they are trying to teach.

Sucheta: Yeah, I talk a lot about putting the menu for the day, like the class hour, so the children what the menu, what is coming up, so give them a little bit of a preview, put checks every time you get things done so they know they are progressing so it is less boring, but to entertain them, I am not a big fan of entertainment.

Dr. Klemm: No, the entertainment is the distraction.

Sucheta: Exactly.

Dr. Klemm: Now, one other thing that happens in every school, in college too for that matter that we have specialized curriculum so that in a one-hour period, we are doing chemistry, in another hour period, we’re doing biology, and then we do history and so forth – we are just jumping from subject to subject, to subject, and there’s very little cohesion across subjects that within the real world, there is, but that’s not the way we teach. We segregate our information. But, anyway, a typical class lasts, say 15 minutes. Have you ever noticed what happens after about 45 minutes in a class? Everybody starts shuffling, they start putting stuff in their backpack, and they are shuffling around, and so forth, and they are getting ready to go to the next class. Bell rings, they jump up and go out in the hall and start talking to their buddies and go into their next class. All of this is no interfering with the consolidation of the information they supposedly learned in that previous 45 minutes, and I try to tell students what they ought to do when the bell rings is just sit there and think about what they supposedly learned in that 45 minutes, and some rehearsal, right? Then and there, before the immediately get erased by all these distractions of jumping up or running out into the hall talking to their buddies in going to the next class on a different subject.

Sucheta: That is such a simple and profound strategy and I completely agree with you. I feel there are other things that are [0:15:05] of interferences such as the teacher starts shoving homework assignments or project deadlines. Those are thrown out of the student last minute as the student is packing. So, those are the last to be even processed or consolidated. So, remember to remember processes are interfered with as well, not just –

Dr. Klemm: And now, they have attached the negative emotion because nobody likes to do homework, and so they have all this information they want the kids to remember, and oh, by the way, this is going to be a terrible chore and you won’t like going through it. That is sort of stepping on your own foot or counterproductive.

Sucheta: So, anything else you have found successful in re-engaging the teachers to think a little bit about the cognitive process of attention memory and executive function? To me, the executive function is that self-awareness piece: how do I know I’m going to forget? Do I have everything I need? Do I know that on previous tests, I have done poorly, so if I don’t change make strategy, I’m going to do poorly again? That insight-based self-management is quite poor as well, and I don’t see much effort being put in that by teachers.

Dr. Klemm: Yeah, and teenagers are not terribly self-aware in the first place, so you have to make it a point to teach them to be more introspective and think about themselves and their state of mind, and so forth, and related to this, I mean, I agree entirely with what you just said – related to this is a matter of motivation and that motivation is everything. If you are motivated, you will succeed, you will find ways to make things work. So, the emphasis ought to be on showing kids why they should want to learn this, and maybe you remember when you were a student, you will ask a teacher, “Why do I have to learn this?” That’s the first question kids as – they may not ask it explicitly, but you know in their own mind, they will ask themselves, now, why do I need to learn this? And very often, just to learn it because the teacher said so. That is not very motivating.

Sucheta: Not at all.

Dr. Klemm: Oh, and worse yet, these days, you have to learn it because the state has standards that you got to satisfy. So now, you got to learn it to make the teacher and the school look good. What kind of motivator is that?

Sucheta: So, how can the improved motivation? What will really go into it?

Dr. Klemm: Yeah, you have to let the content – try to make the content interesting. All content is interesting if you don’t have a negative attitude toward it. There’s something interesting in that content that students can relate to, but maybe, their teacher has to point that out.

Sucheta: Got it, got it. No, I agree with you. I’ve seen that the teachers loved the topic that they are teaching them to have so much extra knowledge that they bring about the experience they have had with that topic or that area of their interest, and just as –

Dr. Klemm: And that rubs off.

Sucheta: The passion is so vividly clear to the students. It totally is clear.

In closing, you have written this amazing book called Better Grades, Less Effort. Can you talk a little bit about how can you be putting less effort and do well? What is the secret sauce for those who have –

Dr. Klemm: I originally wrote it in e-book form so it wouldn’t cost much, and then I recently now have it in paperback form, but in both cases, it is the same content and the content is based on 20 tips – actually, they are more like principles, and the very first one to get motivated and be [0:18:39], we just got through talking about some of that, and the second tip is on committing the time. Students especially don’t realize how much time it’s going to take, and they don’t want to devote enough time whatever the subject is. The third tip is don’t memorize by [0:18:56] – that’s what almost all of them do, and that is the least effective way to memorize anything, and also, it takes a lot of time to memorize by [0:19:03]. You have to go over it and over it, and over it, and over it whereas if you use images and so forth, gets a lot more effective and easier. The fourth tip is to memorize only what you can figure out, and I put that in there because memory is work. So, why do it if you don’t have to? And secondly, if you can figure it out, it means you’re thinking and thinking, as I said earlier, is the best memory tool we have.

Sucheta: that’s the secret sauce, yes.

Dr. Klemm: And, the fifth tip is on leave in your ability, especially by the time they get to middle school and high school, too many students got a negative attitude about their own ability. They will say, “Well, I am a C student and I’m just stuck with that forever.” So, attitude is really crucial to developing academic skills. The sixth tip is on reducing interferences, and then earlier, we actually talked about some of that and the problems of multitasking and so forth which brings us to the seventh, is about I tried to explain to students about the multitasking culture they are growing up in and how it is interfering with their ability to learn. The eighth tip is on the value of thinking. Earlier, I said that thinking is the best form of memory rehearsal, and in addition, it gives you the opportunity to improve your understanding make sure that you are memorizing the right stuff in the right way.

The ninth tip is on self-testing and a lot of students don’t really know how to self-test. They could just be looking over their notes as a self-test and that is it. The next one is improving listening and reading skills, and students haven’t been talking much about that either, and that the next tip is on the attitude – I call it bring your 18 to class. If you really want to learn effectively, do it right then and there in class.

Sucheta: Isn’t that the simplest –

Dr. Klemm: Don’t [0:20:49] right there.

Sucheta: I tell kids all the time. It’s such a powerful simple tip. The attention and bring your a game on, and actually connect to information. Right then and there, you are done.

Dr. Klemm: Yeah, yeah. If you come with the attitude that I’m going to remember everything that is said in this class, you will do well in that class. You will remember more than the other students are remembering, and another tip is an organizing, how to organize your materials and the different notetaking techniques and things of that sort, and then I get into the tips about making associations, especially these visual mechanisms, peg systems and memory palace, and story chains and things of that sort, then there is intent on deposit some problems. What you really do remember but you have trouble recalling it, and so the tips on how to deal with that. [0:21:39] stress. Stress interferes with memory as a general rule, especially if it’s chronic stress. Actually, it damages the brain, and kids are under normal stress these days. I deal with college students. All of them seem to be anxious about something, and that interferes with learning. Negative emotions in general interfere with learning.

Sucheta: That is really concerning, yeah.

Dr. Klemm: And lastly, there are tips on healthy lifestyles which includes things like exercise. A lot of schools have eliminated the recess or even if they have, they said on the stands and watched somebody else play basketball or things like that, and they’re not really getting much exercise, and in the last one is, get enough sleep. Students, almost universally, don’t get enough sleep, and sleep is important because that is when you consolidate your memories.

Sucheta: Consolidate.

Dr. Klemm: [0:22:26] events. Even a nap, if you take a nap in the afternoon, it will help you remember what you learned in the morning.

Sucheta: I think that’s beautiful. Thank you so much for going over them and sharing your wealth of knowledge. You are a terrific speaker and thank you so much for your time and I really appreciate you coming on my podcast today.

Dr. Klemm: well, thank you for giving me the opportunity to share what I know.

Producer: All right, so that was again Dr. William Klemm. What a great conversation. I guess I want to lead off with this question, Sucheta, I mean, memory and learning are inseparable. Do I have that right?

Sucheta: Yes. You know, I think what I loved about what Dr. Klemm was talking about that learning and memory are two sides of the same coin, he said you can learn without memory but you cannot remember without having learned it, and this is something if people keep at the heart of their educating their children or those who are adult learners, I think it will be really crucial for us to be successful in whatever we are trying to learn and understanding is fundamental to learning and it constitutes recognizing meaning. In my work, teaching comprehension through children and adults, I see two ways of doing it. What is the main idea or the essence of information which helps with consolidation process, and the second is, what are the important yet relevant details? And, I think those who have struggle with learning typically are struggling with both of these ideas which is what is the essence? What is the backbone of information and deciding – that discernment to know the details and their relevance, and again, most often, these skills are taught in the classroom, but some people need more time and some people need more exquisite individualized attention in learning these finessed skills, and if they don’t get, then they are the ones who fall behind. Of course, the executive function plays a role here is to knowing how to manage learning is executive process. So, kind of having a detected by or like, discerning eye and saying, you know what, this looks really hard. I think I’m going to forget it, and so those students who apply that self-knowledge tend to do better with strategies. So, yes, I think the last thing is my understanding of the literature is also that more vivid the connection is made between the current information that needs to be learned to prior knowledge, the deeper is learning and its retention.

Producer: So, as I’m coming to understand, I mean, the environment around us needs to nurture the learning that our children and students are doing, right? So, what best Educators and parents do to facilitate this?

Sucheta: Yeah, and you know, you heard Dr. Klemm and I talked a little bit about the way classrooms are structured, and you know, recently, I did a webinar to almost 700 speech and language pathologists online several of them asked this question, that how can we facilitate the classrooms to have less information? They are decorated, they are made fun and attractive, but is that really helping? And I don’t think many people are thinking about that. I think the most important thing is going back to this issue, how we got learning wrong. Why do educators feel the need to the learner into learning? They have a lot of tricks of their backs which is their genuine effort to make the classroom engaging rather than classical learning more engaging. So, the classroom picking engaging versus the teaching being more engaging, that is the shift that can really add value. Loading the classroom walls with inspirational quotes, having seasonal decorations is simply not taking down the website that are displayed from the previous class on these huge smart boards in be incredible amount of distractions, and not all learners are created equal, so some can handle it and some cannot handle it, but I think let us create classrooms that can promote great attention and engagement and less burden on them warding off distractions.

Another thing is that it’s really important that educators and parents, too need to take in all the ideas that we discuss, so cleaning up the classroom environment, removing distractions, minimizing disruptions. Even at home, I find that a lot of parents are cooking, and they have their television on or their iPad, they have some music playing and the child in the busy life, he is studying in the middle of where the life happens which is great but not so great. Some kids cannot function. Their fragmented attention just doesn’t work, and the opposite of that is sometimes, kids go to their bedrooms and close the door, and nobody knows they’re paying attention or not. So, I think kind of having a balance in the environment that will promote learning needs to be really thought through.

Producer: when you were saying that, I was thinking back to my college days and I loved the idea of getting together with friends, student colleagues and study but they all like to do it with music and I could not concentrate on my studies when there was music playing. So, you’re right, everyone is just a bit different.

So, I guess continuing on, I mean, there is a case to be made for memorization, no doubt about it. I mean, what did you think of that discussion?

Sucheta: It’s so important. I love quoting Dr. Klemm again that educational approach has been skewed against memory. Now, somehow somewhere as people but faithful effort in getting children to problem solve and become independent learners, meditators have left the basic process as it relates to memory behind. I was reading something to get ready to interview Bill, and I came across this article in the Atlantic, and I’m quoting author here who said, “Over lines on memorization is like most problems in education, systemic. One teacher cannot topple the tyrant’s status alone, but she can begin to chip away at the base.” Again, I love this kind of terrifying analogy here that memorization is a tyrant that we need to take it down. I mean, I understand that there are too many educators who rely simply on rote learning, but I do think that people have kind of lost sight of the important element of learning through memorization. For generations and generations, people transmitted knowledge from one source to another, one human to another through memorization process. That can be a very effortful and stealth way of stating certain mind habits that can bring great sense of retention which is essential to be successfully able to apply knowledge that you are learning, and I love this context I will give you that I’m not sure, Todd, you know but many teachers allow students to bring in something called cheat sheet which is a sheet full of formula in physics or quotes in English, or things like that to the class they are allowed to use that as a reference to trigger the thoughts that they need to recall to answer the questions on the test. What is interesting about that is that the students who struggle are primarily struggling knowing thyself and knowing that task directionality which is what is important and why does it matter? So, though students were given a chance to create cheat sheets don’t even know what content should go in the cheat sheet that will be hard for me to recall. So again, going back to this process, when we are teaching independence to students, we need to teach them self-assessment and we should not dismiss certain things just because they may appear to be foolish. So, I think there needs to be a balance and certainly, I like to make a case for memorization myself.

Producer: Well, thinking about those “cheat sheets” that you mentioned, I mean, for me, on the occasion in my education where I could do that, I found the process of thinking through one to put on my cheek sheet was a helpful process towards my learning. So, even that exercise itself was beneficial to me and then going forward, let alone using it for the testing. Interesting stuff, so I guess before we go, any closing thoughts?

Sucheta: Yes. I have often used this analogy on my podcast, the Goldilocks effect. I’m going to use that in applied etiquette to the process of learning, memorization, or just making students independent. You know how in Goldilocks, the chair was too big, or the other chair was too small? And she searched around until she found just right. The porridge was too hot, and the other porridge was too cold, then she found just right porridge to eat. The same way, similarly, I think all the students and teachers need to find that balance. Over lines and mindless memorization serves no purpose in students’ life, particularly when it entails repeating the same fact or details several times, regurgitating back is not true memorization. Memorization is very active complex process of making deep connections with information. So, there needs to be some organic processes that need to be built into it, and then students need to engage and practice in recall. This reminds me of a very cute story. I’m obsessed right now with Sara Koenig’s podcast called Serial. The first one is about a 1999 murder in Baltimore of Hae Min Lee, was a popular high school senior who disappeared and they arrested her ex-boyfriend Adnan Syed, and the story covers Adnan Syed’s case, and in all that, what struck a chord with me was his lawyer, Maria Christina Gutierrez, she was a prolific defense attorney, and as she would prepare her defense, she would stand in front of fourth grade students and make a case her opening remarks, and then she would ask the students, do you understand me? And if they said no, then she would go back, redo it, and again present until the fourth graders could understand. I think that’s a wonderful discipline that talks about that application of learning needs to be put to test and I think we need to kind of tie all these components into a wholesome learning experience of our children.

Finally, as I close, let’s also not dismiss the cultural wisdom there that there are lost of cultural elements that promote memory and retention, and we must alert the students about them. For example, world-renowned psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi who studies the concept of flow talked about this in his book and I’m quoting here that “Lists of edible herbs and fruits, healthy tips, rules of behavior, patterns of inheritance, laws, geographical knowledge, rudiments of technology, and [0:33:24] of wisdom were all bundled into easily remembered sayings or verses. There were then transmitted from generation to generation.” So, there is a cultural component to memory and learning, and every person who has the responsibility of educating one’s self or others must bring that into focus when they are dealing with learning. I hope that made sense, Todd.

Producer: It sure did. Lots of important things to think about there. Good, good stuff.

Alright, well, that’s all the time we have for today. On behalf of our host, Sucheta Kamath and all of us at Cerebral Matters, thanks for listening today and we look forward to seeing you again right here next week on Full PreFrontal.