Pupils learn better at school when they’ve had enough sleep. It seems so obvious that it’s hardly worth talking about.
But Barbara Oakley, an engineering professor at Oakland University, Michigan, USA, has been talking about it - to more than a million students who last year signed up to her online course, Learning How to Learn.
It turns out that knowing sleep helps is not at all the same as knowing why sleep helps - and that is what makes the difference to students.
Oakley’s course has become the most popular Mooc (massive open online course) in the world.
Now the academic, along with her co-instructor on the course - neuroscientist Terry Sejnowski - are hoping to revolutionise schools with a junior version of the Mooc, aimed at 11-year-olds.
The Learning How to Learn course tells students that to boost learning they need a good night’s rest, to exercise, and to take breaks during revision and shows them what happens in their brain when they do these things.
It is based on neuroscience research, but uses analogies and metaphors to explain the science - in effect, telling stories about how the brain works. This approach has been sneered at by some as “dumbing down”, but it is one that Oakley points out is itself backed up by neuroscience.
“Neuroscience shows that you use the same neuro-circuits to convey an in-depth scientific idea as a complex idea,” she says. “You are not dumbing it down, you are more rapidly on-boarding people.”
Oakley’s 2014 TEDx talk on learning how to learn has been watched online more than 364,000 times. Comments posted by viewers include: “I wasted all those nights studying nothing”, “Soooo brilliant!”, “This was a real eye opener for me” and “Her story is such an inspiration!”
Passion for learning
So, what is her story? At the TES-Bedales leadership conference earlier this year, she explained how her life informed her work.
She smiled a lot and walked a lot and gave off a sense of joyful curiosity as she wove the findings of neuroscience with her own story of extraordinary determination and optimism.
As a child, Oakley’s education was disrupted - she had moved 10 times by the age of 15. “Math is really sequential. If you get one thing wrong in one place, you fall off,” she explained. “When I moved from Texas to Massachusetts when I was seven years old, they were way ahead of me. I realised I couldn’t do math at all.”
But she was passionate about learning a language. Oakley could not afford to go to college, so she joined the army, which sponsored her to do a languages degree.
By the time she left, aged 26, she found there wasn’t much call for Russian speakers. But there was work for engineers - so she went back to the maths textbooks.
Three more degrees later, she is now an engineering professor, and an author on subjects as diverse as psychopathy, altruism and her time as a translator on a Russian fishing trawler. Her maths book, A Mind for Numbers: how to excel at math and science (even if you flunked algebra), was a New York Times bestseller.
She is, as the Times Higher Education puts it, a “polyglot polymath and scholar”.
Having made the switch from linguist to engineer - she was once asked by one of her students, “How did you change your brain?” And it was while researching the answer that she discovered the key idea of using metaphor and analogy to help students understand.
Her explanation about sleep, for example, is based on a paper published in the prestigious journal Science entitled “Sleep drives Metabolite Clearance from the Adult Brain” - but she explains it with little jargon.
During the day, metabolites - by-products of being awake - build up in the brain, making you weary. These are “like boulders” and are too big to be washed out of the system, but when you sleep, the brain cells shrink by just enough to allow space for your natural fluids to clear them away.
Learning to learn early
The Mooc has been an eye-opener for many students - but, as their comments on her TEDx speech show, it comes after they have spent years staying up late to cram. Why not help children from the outset? And that is something she is now planning to do.
“Terry Sejnowski and I have received many, many requests for a junior Learning How to Learn curriculum,” she tells TES. “It’s really strange that students generally take 12 to 16 years of schooling without ever having taken a course on how to learn effectively - despite the fantastic information that has become available that can help even young children.
“Getting powerful learning tools early on can make an extraordinary difference in how well a student does in school, and what that student’s beliefs are about their capabilities.”
The course will use analogy, images and - Oakley reveals - humour.
She is a woman who likes stories. And her own - of the girl who couldn’t learn maths but went back and tried again - is one of the most engrossing. In a world where there is increasing pressure on children to learn more at a younger age, she embodies the idea of lifelong learning.
“Part of the message I want to convey is that I’m no rocket scientist and yet this Mooc has surpassed by far any Mooc done before,” says Oakley. “It has even surpassed those from prestigious universities. It really means anybody can do something like this.
“Sometimes if you come from seemingly nowhere you have a different approach, a different way of looking at things. Do a good job and you can do something that can change the world and that can have an enormously beneficial impact on people.”
