The way education woks today doesn’t match how we think.

That’s the view of Barry Sheckley, an East Lyme Board of Education member and lifelong educator at all different levels, including working closely with the current head of education in America, Miguel Cardona. He recently appeared as a special guest on “Stories Worth Telling with the Steels” hosted by fellow Board of Education member Cate Steel.

“The brain is very, very complex,” he said, “Nobody knows how it really works.”

We know only somewhat about the structures of the brain and how those things work, which can have enormous ramifications in all facets of life – but especially education.

A lot of how the brain works is recording the state of our body and what happens. It has some marvelous ability to convert stimuli into consciousness.

The brain is all about connectivity.

You get into a situation, and the mind has the ability to remember a similar situation. The real question is how do we optimize this remembered past to encourage new learning.

A lot of the agency in the classroom dissipates because the classrooms often tell the students exactly what to do, how to do it, and with little to no self-reflection or conscious decision-making.

The goal is to allow students and people to exhibit their own agency, their own creativity, and their own ‘ownership.’

“It’s the only way we exist (through our agency),” explained Dr. Sheckley.

The environment is a big press on what happens to people in each and every specific setting.

For instance, students in school environments might be quite different and how do we break out of these traditional molds or mental pathways into new learning?

“I’ve worked hard to help students to be an agent of their own learning,” said Sheckley.

He tells the story of an Albanian, Contos, who was being followed by the Secret Police. Then he escaped and found himself in Chicago in an entirely new environment. Thanks to his soccer skills, he was able to fit in and feel fine.

“As long as you score goals, you’ll be fine,” he remembered the soccer coach telling him.

Eventually, he became a recruit at the University of Connecticut soccer team and started playing with the team at the collegiate level.

He handed in his first paper and took a C grade.

His second one with a C grade changed things. His Greek friend, Dukas, said “why are you taking the C?”

“Don’t you understand what he said, he’s giving you all this feedback and you can redo it and hand it back in,” Dukas explained to Conto.

Eventually, Conto started doing just that.

Eventually, he knocked on Sheckley’s door and let him know that he was graduating with honors.

“It’s all due to you,” he said to Sheckley.

“When I first got into that course, I thought I was just a C student,” he explained to Sheckley.

“You explained to me the difference between engaging in my learning and the difference between a C and an A, and that I had the ability to do that, I just went out and did it!”

“I never would have done that without your encouragement or your course,” Conto said to Sheckley.

“It isn’t always about the grade, it’s about the learning,” responded Cate Steel, who has taught at various levels in education from elementary to educational psychology classes at the graduate level.

The teacher and student relationship is the most important predictor of student outcomes, explained Sheckley.

A positive or a negative relationship with a teacher can create more than a standard deviation difference in performance. Therefore, it’s imperative that we foster positive, nurturing relationships among students, staff, and community members as much as possible.

How do you best improve education and help students learn?

There’s more to focus on regarding self-regulation and reasoning.

“If people better understand the task, they will self-regulate towards that task,” explains Sheckley.

Sheckley asked the students to describe a time when they were a good learner, and realized how passive students were in most of the learning and life in general.

About 20 percent of the students would explain a specific time when they were a good learner.

“Kids are reacting to the environment you are placing them in,” Sheckley explains.

They basically figured out what the game was and how to play it to make a good grade.

“We have to change the nature of the classroom,” Sheckley said.

Find out more about Cate Steel at https://www.catesteel.com/

This episode:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAFWEsSCqNU&t=605s

The “Stories Worth Telling” shows are on public access TV Sunday night at 7:30 pm; subscribers on the YouTube channel have eclipsed 1,800 with some of the shows reaching hundreds to thousands of views.