Sonja Smith

👩‍🏫 PT L&T at Gryffe HS + Seconded to CfTE at UofGlasgow
🧪 Chemistry Teacher
📚Interested in Cog Sci + Adaptive Teaching
😍 Other loves ☕🏃‍♀️🎤⛪

[Sonja Smith @sonja___smith]

@adamboxer1 @jonathaneshaw @Doug_Lemov I want the deep dive on this!

[Sonja Smith @sonja___smith]

@adamboxer1 @MalloryFB See also: pausing the clip to check for listening / asking questions on MWB.

[Brad Busch @BradleyKBusch]

“A big part of being able to improve [as a teacher] is having the cognitive headspace to improve”

Is this one of the most important thing school leaders can do for their staff?

@SCottinghatt discusses this and more in the latest episode of ‘The Science of Learning’ podcast

[Ihtesham Ali @ihteshamali]

A Norwegian neuroscientist spent 20 years proving that the act of writing by hand changes the human brain in ways typing physically cannot, and almost nobody outside her field has read the paper.

Her name is Audrey van der Meer.

She runs a brain research lab in Trondheim, and the paper that closed the argument was published in 2024 in a journal called Frontiers in Psychology. The finding is brutal enough that it should have changed every classroom on Earth.

The experiment was simple. She recruited 36 university students and put each one in a cap with 256 sensors pressed against their scalp to record brain activity. Words flashed on a screen one at a time.

Sometimes the students wrote the word by hand on a touchscreen using a digital pen, and sometimes they typed the same word on a keyboard. Every neural response was recorded for the full five seconds the word stayed on screen.

Then her team looked at the part of the data most researchers had ignored for years, which is how different parts of the brain were communicating with each other during the task.

When the students wrote by hand, the brain lit up everywhere at once.

The regions responsible for memory, sensory integration, and the encoding of new information were all firing together in a coordinated pattern that spread across the entire cortex. The whole network was awake and connected.

When the same students typed the same word, that pattern collapsed almost completely.

Most of the brain went quiet, and the connections between regions that had been alive seconds earlier were nowhere to be found on the EEG.

Same word, same brain, same person, and two completely different neurological events.

The reason turned out to be something nobody had really paid attention to before her work. Writing by hand is not one motion but a sequence of thousands of tiny micro-movements coordinated with your eyes in real time, where each letter is a different shape that requires the brain to solve a slightly different spatial problem.

Your fingers, wrist, vision, and the parts of your brain that track position in space are all working together to produce one letter, then the next, then the next.

Typing throws all of that away. Every key on a keyboard requires the exact same finger motion regardless of which letter you are pressing, which means the brain has almost nothing to integrate and almost no problem to solve.

Van der Meer said it plainly in her interviews.

Pressing the same key with the same finger over and over does not stimulate the brain in any meaningful way, and she pointed out something that should scare every parent who handed their kid an iPad.

Children who learn to read and write on tablets often cannot tell letters like b and d apart, because they have never physically felt with their bodies what it takes to actually produce those letters on a page.

A decade before her, two researchers at Princeton ran the same fight using a completely different method and ended up at the same answer. Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer tested 327 students across three experiments, where half took notes on laptops with the internet disabled and half took notes by hand, before testing everyone on what they actually understood from the lectures they had watched.

The handwriting group won by a wide margin on every question that required real understanding rather than surface recall.

The reason was hiding in the transcripts of what the two groups had actually written down.

The laptop students typed almost word for word, capturing more total content but processing almost none of it as they went, while the handwriting students physically could not write fast enough to transcribe a lecture in real time, which forced them to listen carefully, decide what actually mattered, and put it in their own words on the page.

That single act of choosing what to keep was the learning itself, and the keyboard had quietly skipped the choosing and skipped the learning along with it.

Two studies. Two countries. Same answer.

Handwriting makes the brain work. Typing lets it coast.

Every note you have ever typed instead of written went into your brain through a thinner pipe. Every meeting, every book highlight, every idea you captured on your phone instead of on paper was processed at half depth.

You did not forget those things because your memory is bad. You forgot them because typing never woke the part of the brain that would have made them stick.

The fix is the thing your grandmother already knew.

Pick up a pen. Write the thing down. The slower road is the faster one.

[Sonja Smith @sonja___smith]

@adamboxer1 Point B is so important - you've articulated that so helpfully!

[Sonja Smith @sonja___smith]

Such a valuable resource!

[Helen Reynolds MBE @helenrey]

Why use mini whiteboards? Data show their efficacy AND reduction in time off task! What's not to like!
Great flash webinar from @Inner_Drive @MrGoodwin23

[InnerDrive @Inner_Drive]

It’s tempting to give feedback straight away

But delaying it can sometimes be more powerful, as it creates space for forgetting and strengthens learning when revisited

https://t.co/3tmmZ2YvoK

[Sonja Smith @sonja___smith]

@XpatEducator This looks excellent, and so practical! Thank you!

[Carl Hendrick @C_Hendrick]

Highlighting and text marking improves performance for novices but has little or even distracting effects for more advanced learners, consistent with expertise reversal. https://t.co/dF5pbhwN18

[Sonja Smith @sonja___smith]

@Mr_Steenson @UofGCfTE @kate_wall98 This is really helpful in exemplifying how to keep questions realistic!

[Mr. Steenson 🏳️‍🌈 @Mr_Steenson]

Great to join colleagues this evening for our Practitioner Enquiry session. Looking forward to hearing how teachers are using enquiry to strengthen classroom practice and connect research with real learning. @UofGCfTE @kate_wall98 @UniStrathclyde

[Dylan Wiliam @dylanwiliam]

@adamboxer1 The real danger of "when done well" is that many educational interventions require considerable teacher skill to do well, so looking only at the results of those teachers is cherry-picking the data. It looks like an intervention effect, but it's really a teacher quality effect.

[Kate Wall @kate_wall98]

There is still time to sign up for this FREE online workshop on Monday. Just follow the QR code in the image below.

Also watch this space for future events - online webinar with Deirdre Grogran (25/3) and f2f workshop exploring leadership for practitioner enquiry with me (30/3)

[Sonja Smith @sonja___smith]

@adamboxer1 @dylanwiliam Two of my teaching heroes!

[Kate Wall @kate_wall98]

Are you interested in finding out more about practitioner enquiry but are unsure where to start? The CfTE Hub at Strathclyde is holding a 90-minute online workshop on practitioner enquiry, led by Professor Kate Wall. Register here! https://t.co/oADU30oSoD

[Colin McGill @colinmcgill]

My latest article in Education in Chemistry, looking at the importance of pre-planned explanations...
https://t.co/VTCmSUsSf3

[Craig Barton @mrbartonmaths]

The Show All Board lets you share photos of students' work on your board, or even a live model, at no cost, with no ads, no logins, and no data stored. Go to my Mr Barton Maths website to have a play. Please share if you find it useful.

[Sonja Smith @sonja___smith]

Looking forward to being part of this and sharing at the third webinar!

[Education Scotland @EducationScot]

📢Just added! We're running a three-part webinar series with @UofGCfTE & @UofGlasgow. The first webinar in this series is on the changing policy landscape of parental engagement and family learning on 12 March at 4pm.

Find out more and sign up
👉https://t.co/3NRM13r9uz

[Socratic Experience @socraticexp]

If your child becomes a reader, about 80% of the educational job is already done. That's our honest assessment, based on many of us working in education for over three decades. Everything else is secondary. Most parents think science education is important. Yes, it is. But if you can't read the biology textbook, you're not going to learn biology.

Reading is the meta-skill that enables all other skills. History requires reading. Science requires reading. Even math increasingly requires reading as it becomes more sophisticated. The child who reads voraciously will figure out everything else. The child who doesn't will struggle with everything.

[Sonja Smith @sonja___smith]

Looking forward to this!

[Paul Tyler 🔬🔭📡 @Glazgow]

Come and join the ASE Scotland for our first ever 'Hang Oot'.

Sign up: https://t.co/f8fx9Bfgx6

These 30 minute sessions are an informal way to catch up on what's happening in the world of science ed.

Thursday 26th February
4pm - 4:30pm

Sign up: https://t.co/f8fx9Bfgx6