(Bravo)
Thank you very much for this well-deserved applause.
I hope with joint forces
we will be able to answer the question why we remember so little from school.
Because in fact, when we make a short examination of conscience,
it will turn out that just after the end of school education
we are not able to say
what was the course of the Greek-Persian wars,
we can not calculate the molar mass,
nor give the cellular structure of this notorious slipper.
And actually, we can confidently say
that this is not an abnormal matter,
because they are not particularly useful and useful information.
But the main question arises:
What is the scale of the problem?
This was examined by a professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Memphis,
Art Graesser, who looked at it,
what becomes students in their heads after, attention, week
from learning about some lesson.
It turned out that less than 10% of all information stays in the mind.
We’re talking about something that’s after a week,
and we’re talking about a situation where it’s less than 10%,
so we can not expect great miracles
after a few years after leaving school.
Despite the fact that it is a sad situation,
it is not primarily her normal.
Because we learned this information, sometimes a few times,
because we had the same things discussed in different classes.
First of all.
Second, many of us on tests
received five, good marks.
Later, I know how the balloon air escapes and we simply do not have it.
We could now cry over spilled milk,
but I am here to seek solutions and not problems.
Consider, first of all, why? What is going on?
The most intuitive answer would be
that first of all, this knowledge is useless, secondly, imposed from the outside,
and somehow exciting, honestly, it is not,
because it is primarily general information,
matters related to typically general, encyclopedic knowledge, even
and you would have to agree with it.
This is the right point of view.
Let’s think about where he came from.
Because of the fact why we remember so little from school,
and on the other hand, why do we lead to the situation,
where the school looks like it looks
it could be something paradoxically influenced by these events
what happened in October 1806.
What happened then?
Napoleon’s army massacred on the battlefield
the army of the Kingdom of Prussia in the Battle of Jena.
It connects to our education system for
that the Prussians did not want to give up.
Their state was decimated for a while, but they said: “Never again!
We do not want to lead to a situation in which someone will bring such a bang. “
That is why it accelerated many reforms that took place at that time.
One of such reforms was the reform of the education system.
The idea was for Prussian officials to create an ideal citizen.
One who is obedient does not have an opinion of his own
and to a large extent will do exactly what it needs.
To this end, great authorities of the Germanic world were harnessed
and, for example, Georg Hegel, the famous philosopher, came to the conclusion
that the creation of such a citizen will only be possible if
when we comprehensively educate him, and shift all the emphasis
from knowledge not specified to encyclopedic, for general information,
to be able to choose the field of study after graduation,
and thus specialize.
Or even better – no studying
only immediately to work for the Prussian state.
In addition, someone came to the conclusion
that if we have a lot of information to learn,
as we said, mainly encyclopedic,
we’re going to use the memory method for that,
which will cause the student to come back from school,
he will have to sit down and honestly learn everything.
In the students’ diaries from that time, you can see
that it worked well.
They did not have time off, not without reason.
Because someone noticed that if a student has too much free time,
it’s stupid to think of him, sinful thoughts,
so if we harness it to it, it will not be a problem at all.
It was also about organizing the school year differently.
Under the influence, above all, Wilhelm von Humboldt
the whole was organized in the academic and school years,
and from then on you could not go to school when you want.
You had to sign up for a class that, no coincidence,
guess how many students she had.
30, because it was calculated that if we form such a group for a few years,
then social, religious and cultural differences between them will disappear.
One flat citizen will come out to us, this equation to a certain level.
The class host was also appointed,
who was supposed to check if someone was getting too much,
whether individual thoughts and teaching tones come to his mind.
As if something, it will be reported to the right person,
on whom he was fully obliged to educate these students.
Teachers were these people.
Little surprising.
And not surprisingly, Prussian officials decided
that the teacher will make little money.
He does not have to work for money, just for the idea.
An outstanding historian of the interwar period, Stanisław Kot,
he came to the conclusion that the Prussian teacher earned more or less
what a farmhand in those days.
This illustrates the scale well.
Also under the influence of the Prussian system, furniture in classrooms was organized differently,
and all the benches from that moment were turned towards the teacher,
a bit further, in a slightly different place, but also under the influence of the Prussian system,
bells from the factories about starting and finishing work were taken from the factories,
and they were also harnessed to school.
When you listen to this, I suspect that many of you have smiled,
but it is really tragic,
because if we replaced the adjective “Prussian” with the words:
contemporary, Polish, European, global,
it turns out that the sources of the current education system
we must look back in about 200 years ago in Prussia.
And I remind you, it was a beautiful moment of history,
when many people were convinced that tomatoes are the poisonous tool of Satan
and if we eat them, we will either poison or simply die.
It shows more or less time in the history in which we came up with such a thing.
But to our great despair,
people around the world have been fascinated with this system.
He came to the United States, Japan and all of Europe in a very short time.
Today we can complain about this system very much,
but then they complained about him.
This is not my task today.
I am too small a man to be able to be at all
propose any alternative system solutions.
What hurts me most is the Prussian system,
which works beautifully today,
strengthened the learning pattern at school.
How does he look like?
We have a lesson where the teacher presents some content.
Most often, this is encyclopedic knowledge.
He presented the content and then, after some time, he will check
did the students learn it honestly.
The funny thing is that when we listen to such a scheme,
he is so deeply rooted in us that we do not think it strange.
Trust me, it’s completely abnormal.
And now proof of why.
Because if we were exactly the same Prussian or modern school system
harnessed, for example to learn to swim,
this lesson would look like this.
We assume that we are dealing with reliable students and a good teacher,
that it would not be that I am bending facts.
Imagine that you are coming to my lesson.
Good day. The bell rang.
In the room we have a large pool with a depth of five meters.
I undress, but calmly, I have swimsuits,
this is not a pathological school.
I jump into the pool as a teacher and swim.
And I’m showing you.
Dear students, this is the way to move,
and this is how a different style of swimming looks like.
I am a good teacher, so I ask: Do you have any questions?
To explain something again? No problem, I’m here for you.
There are no questions? Excellently.
Bell – home.
In a week we meet and there is a test.
I’ll throw each of you into the pool,
to see if you’ve learned it.
This is the scheme: presentation of knowledge, and then checking if it came out.
The only problem is that in the middle of this scheme
hardly anyone thinks how a student will learn it.
Another problem is that the student himself is often unaware
that he is learning, not the teacher himself learns for him.
In this way, after very long research, I came to the conclusion that
which cognitive psychology has long formulated,
that it’s very rare that someone ever taught us
how to learn.
Something that may sound like generalization, complaining of a sad man,
is in fact firmly embedded in scientific research.
Two cognitive psychologists, Kornell and Bjork, checked
Whether the way pupils learn depends on the teachers.
In 80% of cases, the answer was: No.
I do not blame teachers for it.
I write a lot about it in the book, I say I do not want them to be guilty,
in which the biblical stones of justice are cast.
Absolutely not.
However, the fact is that students still do not know how to learn.
Other scientific studies have precisely confirmed the same thesis.
When someone does not teach us something, we will lead to the situation,
in which they are intuitive methods
we will try to gain knowledge.
Students around the world have been doing this for generations.
Professor Daniel Willingham came to the conclusion after a very long study,
that the classic scheme in which people learn
if nobody learns to teach them, it will be nothing else,
like repeatedly torturing yourself reading the same texts.
We read once and twice before the test, and we hope that it will work.
It still seems to us not particularly strange,
because most of us have studied in this way exactly,
but from the point of view of cognitive psychology
this is a poor way to learn.
For example, the experiments carried out by Ernst Rothkopf,
show that it has no meaning for the result on the exam,
will we read the text twice or four times.
Think about the scale of wasted time, torment, torture,
through which we have to go, to read this text so many times.
This is something that is dramatically wrong.
Anyway, multiple exposure to some content
is a method so weak that we can find out about it here and now.
All you have to do is try to remember what’s in it
on the back of a stucco banknote, the most popular banknote in Poland.
We have an eagle there, and underneath we have a very important symbol.
Simple, unambiguous, no one has a problem with reading.
What is there?
Exactly.
You have dealt with this bank note many times.
You have been exposed to this information many times.
And this is nothing more than two naked swords, a cloak and a Teutonic helmet.
Unambiguous symbols of the Grunwald victor.
It’s trivial.
We’ve seen it a thousand times, and it still does not come into our minds.
This is how repeated repetitions work.
Fortunately, this is not a situation,
in which we stay with this and with nothing else.
Because cognitive psychologists have been for many years, from time immemorial,
they form diagrams, ways and methods of modern learning
any information that just needs to be used.
This is the thing that seems easy to me today,
but three years ago I did not have a clue about it.
It was only when I met this that I threw myself into the vortex of research,
and take my word for it, I’ve read hundreds of scholarly articles, books,
I consulted with experts and I was fascinated by it
from a theoretical point of view.
I decided to write a book about it.
But I came to the conclusion that if my research
they will remain exclusively in the purely theoretical sphere,
this will be another descriptive book saying that someone has investigated something,
that something can be done differently.
I thought that if these methods function as scientists say,
if I take any action and give myself a short time,
for example, half a year, to assimilate it to a good extent and it will work,
I will convince myself and I will have a lot of enthusiasm for this,
to talk about it.
That’s why I asked my wife to come from 24 different exotic languages
chose one, which I will have to learn in only and half a year.
To my great despair, it fell into Swedish.
I did not sympathize with it,
because it always seemed to me that this language sounds
more or less like radiators falling from the stairs,
and I realized that the reception of this language is different.
But the word said, the draw was supposed to be fair.
The whole has been recorded on video and is available on the internet,
that the Gaming and Betting Committee would not stick to it.
That’s how the process started.
After about half a year I decided to pass the exam
on intermediate level,
organized by Folkuniversitetet with the approval of the Svenska institutet.
How did it go?
[Swedish]
I can say that it’s pretty good.
This has been done using these specific methods.
Do I think it was difficult?
[Swedish]
It is important that if we use good, effective and proven methods,
it is not difficult at all.
Importantly, most people who use exactly what I do
it would achieve far better results than what I could do.
During the course of learning, I used only widely available free methods.
I have never been to Sweden at this time.
I talked to two Swedes, in the meantime,
which I met by accident on the street and thought:
“You are my victims, I must speak Swedish.”
They probably remember me to this day and maybe they think
that everyone in Poland knows Swedish, but let it stay that way.
I realized that I can not quit everything now
and learn this language from the very beginning.
[Swedish]
I also had to think about my family, which was just growing.
In a moment, our son appeared in the world and everyone knows that it takes some time.
So a bit, but still.
It turns out that we can actually use something
what scientists have previously studied, absolutely in our favor.
It will be difficult for me to summarize 304 pages of my book, because I have 1:45 minutes,
but I thought I would take out one thing that will show you how
very often something intuitive for us is not, despite appearances, very good.
Let’s take into account how musicians and athletes practice.
They often train, as cognitive psychologists say, in blocks,
that is, for example, one blow, all the time they move it the same way,
if they will lead him to perfection, they will go a bit further.
This is classic block learning.
It turns out that everything would be beautiful, if not for life
and the story of one man, Muhammad Ali,
which led to a situation such that he spent a moment exercising on a sack,
for three minutes something worked, then he took the skipping rope,
he quickly switched to a skipping rope, then he did push-ups,
in a moment he was returning to the pear, and he looked like a man exercising in great chaos.
We know this because he often boasted about how he trains.
Besides, his coach said
that he looks like the worst boxer in the world.
And there was something in it.
He did not do all the exercises in the blocks but interleaved them.
He led to the situation,
in which each time your muscles and brain
he surprised with a completely different set of exercises.
And it worked great.
If we put it on school reality, we’ll see
that when we learn mathematical formulas, we should not take one formula,
and then throw specific actions into it,
we should only mix patterns with each other,
to lead such a learning mode,
in which, for example, we do not solve 15 same exercises for one pattern,
because the brain turns off at some point and it’s not a challenge for him
but when we solve four tasks from one pattern, then four from the next
and four of yet another, he must think about it every time.
The research carried out in 2014 showed beautifully
that the differences between students who learn block,
and students learning in an intertwined way is drastically great.
What’s the funniest thing, those who learned like Muhammad Ali,
that is, they interweave mathematical formulas, they said intuitively,
that they will do much worse
than those who learned “in God” – block after block.
It turned out that they were more than twice as good
manage on the test than those blocked.
It is so unintuitive for us.
Each of the methods I encourage you to do it yourself,
they were looking for a way to break into their own brain on their own,
I call it exactly that,
shows us that if we use something else,
it’s just going to be in our head.
That’s why most of us remember that
what she did during the World Trade Center,
because this is the thing that involved us.
I also remember it well.
I went to my uncle and watched together as the two towers burned.
It was something that caused me some emotions, it involved me.
Just as most of you will remember my grammatical error,
because I should say “I went” and not “I went”.
But I broke into your brain.
At that moment I woke you up.
And it is to a large extent a summary of what all these methods are.
Because many of us think this way,
that we are sitting somewhere with our family and we hear the statement:
“Go learn” treats like a sentence without suspension.
And that does not have to be a judgment.
Thank you.
(Bravo)
”
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