How to Get a Wealthy Brain Even If You’re Not with Michael Toth

The great importance of redesigning Tier 1 instruction that ensures deeper learning for all students. The research shows huge benefits to students and their teachers including higher achievement, closure of gaps among all reporting categories of students, increased attendance, lower misbehavior, and increased teacher satisfaction and retention.

Michael was last on the podcast with me in 2022, talking about student agency.

• Is education about teaching or developing
• Developing humans is much different than teaching students
• Device centric development - similar to addiction
• Epidemic of anxiety because of screen time
• Brain matter loss around the areas of the brain necessary for deep learning and deep reading
• Legacy system (our current system) - Around control
• Something happened at the pandemic
• We put kids on computers constantly
• Maldevelopment in the brain - device parenting
• School’s optional is the other thing we taught with our response to the pandemic
• When you’re on a device, all the human side is not developing.
• Most connected society ever and the most lonely society ever
• Teachers have been underinvested in and have a curriculum and type that is difficult to engage kids
• How to develop character, empathy, and relationships among students and their peers.
• How to do this at scale.
• You can’t intervene your way to success
• Traditional classrooms remove autonomy
• Unstructured groups creates unstructured learning
• Ability-grouping is the worst
• Discussion protocols, team members, etc.
• Productive Struggle - is a key element that leads to learning moving forward
• Toolbox of strategies given to students
• How to get kids unstuck without giving the answer
• Power of shared background knowledge
• Easy to conflate teaching with learning
• The Baseball Experiment
• Babies build brain cells fast, but they don’t make neural connections
• What gets exercised in a brain gets developed
• One factor and one factor only changes neocortex: wealth of the family.
• Needs productive struggle to grow
• Rigor walk on Instructional Empowerment
• Just above ability level
• Time is an issue - how do you teach in this way in a slower path
• Kids also test better if they can critically think about the information
• The more you use AI the hippocampus shrinks
• How to be a transformative principal? Look at who’s doing the work: teacher or student?
• Library for deeper learning

About Michael Toth:

Michael D. Toth (LinkedIn, X) is founder and CEO of Instructional Empowerment and leads IE’s Applied Research Center. He is also the author of the multi-award-winning book The Power of Student Teams with David Sousa; author of Who Moved My Standards; and co-author with Robert Marzano of The Essentials of a Standards-Driven Classroom, School Leadership for Results, and Teacher Evaluation that Makes a Difference.

Michael is a keynote speaker at conferences and coaches and mentors superintendents on creating a bold instructional vision, designing and launching a high-functioning cabinet team, transforming Tier 1 core instruction, and leading systems-based school advancement.

Throughout Michael’s career, he has been privileged to collaborate with some of the top researchers and thinkers in education. His past key roles include CEO of Learning Sciences International (LSI), President of the National Center for the Profession of Teaching, and University Faculty Grant Director for research and development grants.

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