Todd Zakrajsek
This isn’t an academic book that’s written for faculty on how to get students to learn. It’s not a book for students and how specifically to learn. It’s a book about how do you get through life with ways that we can learn, how to learn that we were never taught. If you’re listening right now. Think about how you learned. I love this concept. How did you learn? How to Learn? And most people say oh, and they’ll start the sentence or the answer with, oh, well, I just and then they pause for a second, because you may have used flash cards. But like, Who taught you how to use the flash cards, you may have used the strategy of reading a chapter three times.

Keith Edwards
Keith, all right. Hello and welcome to Student Affairs NOW. I’m your host. Keith Edwards, today, I’m joined by Dr Todd zachryzek to talk about his new book, essentials of the new science of learning, based on his earlier books the new science of learning, which is currently in its third edition. This essentials book builds on the foundational text that distills cutting edge research in neuroscience, cognitive psychology and education to help students optimize their learning. It’s organized around actionable strategies grounded in brain science to help students study more effectively, retain information more longer, retain information longer, and understand how to apply what they learn. I love learning about learning from these books, learning about learning meta learning from these books and some others. And I’m so excited for this conversation. Student Affairs now is the premier podcast and online learning community for 1000s of us who work in alongside or adjacent to the field of higher education and student affairs. We release new episodes every week on Wednesdays. Find details about this episode or browse the archives at studentaffairsnow.com This episode is sponsored by Evolve. Evolve helps higher ed senior leaders release fear, gain courage and take action for transformational leadership through a personalized cohort based virtual executive leadership development experience and Huron. Huron education and research experts help institutions transform their strategy, operations, technology and culture to foster innovation, financial, health and student success. As I mentioned, I’m your host. Keith Edwards, my pronouns are he, him, his. I’m a speaker, author and coach, and I help higher ed leaders and organizations advance leadership, learning and equity. Can find out more about me at Keith edwards.com and I’m recording this in my home in Minneapolis, Minnesota, at the intersections of the current and ancestral homelands of both the Dakota and the Ojibwe peoples, Dr Todd Zakrajsek, if you for being here. I was practicing the last name, and thank you for your help with that. Why don’t you introduce yourself and tell us all a little bit about you?

Todd Zakrajsek
Oh, thank you, Keith. I appreciate that. I’m Todd Zakrajsek. He him, and people ask me how to pronounce my last name. It’s kind of funny. I’ll just say quickly. Here is I got invited to Slovenia, which is where my family is from, and I was, I was explaining to somebody from the US how to pronounce the and there was a waitress who came by, and she looked over and she said, What are you doing? And I said, I’m showing how to pronounce my name. And she said, That makes no sense. It is exactly how it looks. And we all at the table kind of laughed at that, but the J is pronounced as a long I like island, so it just is a crazy kind of just flows out there. I’ve spent my entire life in higher education. I feel like I’m one of those individuals that says, Once I graduated, once I got my graduate degree, I just never left. And my background is industrial organizational psychology, which I also like to point out, highest paid field in psychology. I went into higher ed because I’m money phobic, and so we went in that direction. But they started teaching at Southern Oregon University, Southern Oregon State College at the time, got promoted, got tenured, and then had an opportunity to go back to Michigan, where I started a Center for Teaching and Learning at Central Michigan University, and then eventually went to University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and I currently work in the medical school at the University of North Carolina, at Chapel Hill as a first generation college student. It’s a little surreal at times to think this is where I’m at. But, you know, found my way into a little bit of faculty development stuff and just helping people on how to be better learners.

Keith Edwards
Yeah, well, I really appreciate it. It was a few years ago. I guess maybe in 2018 or 19, we were writing the curricular approach to Student Affairs book, and we wanted a chapter on pedagogy and learning. And so I did a deep dive and read, I think, 23 books on learning and pedagogy, and yours was one of them. I have it right here, so I have the eye of a first edition copy, and now you’re in the third edition, and now you’ve written this essentials book to really kind of cook, cook it down for students or learners, because I think we’re talking about students, but also I’m learning all the time. And one of the stories that I often tell when I’m working with student affairs folks is to share your mess, to share your mistakes, to share what you don’t know. And the analogy I give is that no one wants to take physics from a Nobel Prize winning physicist like that’s just scary and threatening. But when you’re taking physics, and the physics professor says, you know, I failed physics my first try, and what I learned was to think about it this way. And I want to help you learn that, then we all go, oh, this is a real person. I can relate to this. And that’s a totally made up story, but yours is real. So tell us your version. That story.

Todd Zakrajsek
Yeah, it’s I was so being the first person my family go to college, I actually wanted to be a Michigan State Trooper. So we live right across the street from Michigan State Police. Post, I walked over said, Hey, how do you become a trooper? And he said, How old are you? And I was graduating from high school at 17. And he said, There’s nothing you can do to 21 so go get a college degree. So Lake Superior State College, a small school, 200 faculty members, 3000 students. I wanted a place where I didn’t get lost in a crowd, and they had a good program in criminal justice, and so I went up there and I signed up for classes. I didn’t ask for an advisor. Because, you know, if you’re smart, keep in mind, folks, I’m a first generation college students. So most of the things I do are not smart, but at the time, I thought, if you’re smart enough to be a college student, you shouldn’t need an advisor. I mean, that’s a waste of time. And so I picked up my own classes. I picked intro to CJ, because criminal justice was my major, after all, and then it said I had to have a science course. So I thought, Oh, I like chemistry. So I signed up for chemistry, and then said to had you had to have a lab course? And I thought, well, all science courses have labs. Why would they do that? I better take physics, just to be sure. And then it suggested a math course. So I took calculus, and then a social science course. I took psychology. And those of you who are listening here would say, really, criminal justice, major in calculus and physics and chemistry, but I was an academic nerd, and the reason I’m telling you this is that my first grade I got back was my intro CJ, which was a d minus. The next grade I got and I called home and I said I got a D minus, and my family’s like, you never get D minuses. And then my next grade was my calc grade, which was no physics, was next that was an F. And then the grade after that came in was after calculus, was physics, and that was an F minus. And when I called home, it’s like, well, at least it can’t get worse than an F minus. And my mom said, I didn’t know they made F minuses. And we laughed about that. And then my last grade that I got was chemistry was an F minus minus. And when I asked the professor, like, I don’t understand what this means. Meaning, like, I know an average of an A and a C is a B, but like, what’s the average of an F minus minus and something? And his response bearer just burned into my brain to this very day, and I’m pretty darn sure it’s exactly these words he said, given you received an F minus minus, it doesn’t surprise me, you failed to comprehend the concept you need to drop today, I coming out of high school and without my advisor, because who needed an advisor? You can’t drop classes in high school. So I thought he meant drop out of college. And I went to the registrar, and I said, I need to drop out of college. And she handed me a form and said, you get this filled out and bring it back. We’ll take care of it for you, and we don’t do that nowadays. Y’all know that one pretty well is we wouldn’t just say, Sure, here’s how you do it. But you know, this is long time ago, but four of the five teachers signed that form without a problem, and a campus that that should never have happened. And then Tim Sawyer, who is my psych prof, said, This is ridiculous. You need you know how to flunk a test. You just need to learn how to pass one. And he says, you probably in high school, or one of those students that just glanced at material and got it. And I said, Yeah. And I came, I came to call those people a B sliders. You don’t really work at it. You just get A’s and B’s. And when I got to college, I You can’t do that in college. And so, yeah, I came within one signature. If Tim Sawyer had signed that form, I would have been out of college. And from that day forward, I always just kept in mind that big thing that resonates with me, and I think it’s a really good one for everyone to keep in mind, is that my mom was tremendously supportive, but she couldn’t be helpful. All she could say is, I believe in you. If anybody in the family can make it, you can make it. Now when my daughter and she’s okay with me selling this, and it’s not a whole story, she got an F on her first test, the difference is that I wasn’t first she wasn’t first generation college student, so I was able to help her, and said, you know, that’s okay. It’s just an indication of where you’re at, you need to be somewhere else. And then my darling daughter said, Dad, don’t get so stressed. I saw your TED talk. You got an F minus minus and ended up with a PhD. I’m so far ahead of you that it’s not even funny. So yeah, I started out with a struggle. And the thing I’ll end with is when John Gartner wrote the introduction, the preface, which I didn’t know him, and he even says in there, I don’t know dr z, but he and I have something in common. I almost flunked out my first semester. So the book is written by a person who was a near dropout by and with a preface from a person who almost flunked out of college and went on to create pretty much the First Year Experience concept. So I do think I’m glad you asked the question, because I think that’s a really important thing for people to get across

Keith Edwards
well, and it’s so helpful because it’s, it’s, uh, your book is full of science and cognitive psychology and neuroscience and a lot of things, but it’s also written to be very applicable and very helpful. I think you make really. Great points about first gen students not knowing how to navigate, and their families who, as you beautifully said, Mother so supportive, but didn’t know how to be helpful. And then also so many staff who could have intervened and said, Yeah, before I just hand you this form, let’s have a conversation. And so many people who signed off and good for Tim Sawyer, who said, No, I’m not signing your form. You can do this. Let me help you, which then led to your learning and obviously some success, and then a passion and an interest to one and help others. And I think that that’s a story for many student affairs folks, right? Yours is really around the science of learning, but so many student affairs folks have a have a mentor, someone who really helps them feel seen and heard and is helpful and supportive for the first time. And then we want to, we want to do that for others. We want to offer that you’ve gone on to do that through your teaching and through centers for teaching and learning, and then also through these books. So just, just help our audience understand there’s the new science of learning trilogy, there’s a third edition. And so help people to understand what that third edition New Science of Learning book is, and then what this essentials of the new science of learning book is? Oh,

Todd Zakrajsek
gotcha. It’s a good question before we forget. I just have to put the little plug in there, because you mentioned Tim Sawyer again when I wrote the book, dynamic lecturing. He is, he was such a great lecturer. He did storytelling lectures, which I love. But that book is dedicated to him, because that’s such a huge difference. So the difference between them that so as I started writing the book, the first edition is a nice little primer on kind of getting rolling. It’s has 120 pages, I think. And you know, faculty members, Student Affairs, people I know are no different is we’re really good at addition and terrible at subtraction, so we keep adding and adding, so that by the time it got to a third edition, it was actually 265 pages. And the chapters that had been like you could read in 10 minutes were now 3040, minute. Reads the early book, the shorter one was used in a lot of courses, including a friend of mine, Kathy neighbors out in California, who would say to her developmental math class, tell her students, read the chapter on sleep. And this will be a Monday Wednesday class. On Wednesday, read the chapter on sleep. Monday, they would talk about it for like five minutes, and then just do the class. And she did that all every week through the semester, and their attrition rate dropped by 19% of anybody who did that, which I was pretty cool. And so the reason I mentioned that is it was it was doing well, once it got to 265 pages, you can’t really do that anymore. So then the essentials book was bringing us back to the length of the first edition. The reason it got so long, the first edition still has bits and pieces of this, but I really started building out the equity aspects and inclusion, microaggressions, and a lot of the things that we don’t really think of that are separate from the brain actually learning as the implications of it, because there’s the cognitive side, but there’s also the social side. And it doesn’t matter, I can be studying and you can walk up and say one sentence to me, and it would shut down the studying for the entire evening, depending on what you say. And I’m going to throw this in there, my chem profit told me, given you received an F minus, minus doesn’t surprise you failed to comprehend it. That’s something that was just burned into my brain. If I had from that point, I couldn’t leave there and go study. So this way that we treat people, the way that we are treated, all comes into the learning process. And that’s why I think that’s it all rolls together. It’s very important. And that’s what the third edition kind of does. The I like to say that the essentials books, it’s like a fine reduction of that, so still got all the major concepts. It just doesn’t go into the details on lots of things, right?

Keith Edwards
So if folks are thinking about a graduation gift, or a student starting college, the essentials book is really kind of cooks it down, very practical, very applicable, and if you want that, plus a lot more context and background, then the third edition of the new science of learning. The subtitle to that book is how to learn in harmony with your brain. So that’s really great. Now we’ll have to cut this, because I’m not really sure where I want to go next. I to go next. Why don’t I just turn it back to you and you can

Todd Zakrajsek
go where you want to go next. So I think probably one of the big things I’m giving the show and everything is to kind of maybe talk a little bit about why this would be valuable for student affairs folks, as well as anybody else. I mean, so you know, if you’re working in student, if you’re working as a faculty member in class, it makes total sense. You’ve got a book now that will help your students to be better at learning. And one thing to keep in mind, kind of pulling this all together here, is that there’s an old study, if and everybody who teaches school knows this. One. Primary School, if you ask kids, do you like to learn and do you like school, they answer yes to both of those questions, until they hit third grade, and in third grade they start to say they like learning. They don’t like school. And that’s right about where we introduce standardized tests, and all of a sudden we have to memorize things before that you memorize things by playing. You did games and things, and you pick stuff up, like we do everywhere in life. However, there comes a point when there’s just material content. You have to get down. And so the point is, this book was kind of designed so that, really we should be doing the starting in about third grade, instead of trial and error of like doing flash cards. It’s like, how should you use flash cards? And so I’m kind of pulling this back together here. So this book was actually written originally for faculty, and it was actually the real title at the beginning was the new science of learning, how research is revolutionizing the way we teach. And then I thought, This isn’t right. This isn’t for faculty. This isn’t for student or for faculty. Sorry, it’s not for faculty only. This is for everybody. It’s students. And so what I did is I changed it to and it is angled to students, because we’re in academia. But you’ll notice, instead of things like it’s important for your students to get to sleep, get sleep at night. It’s important to get sleep at night. And I did that because we should all be working on this. So back to the Student Affairs aspect. This isn’t an academic book that’s written for faculty on how to get students to learn. It’s not a book for students and how specifically to learn. It’s a book about how do you get through life with ways that we can learn, how to learn that we were never taught. If you’re listening right now. Think about how you learned. I love this concept. How did you learn? How to Learn? And most people say oh, and they’ll start the sentence or the answer with, oh, well, I just and then they pause for a second, because you may have used flash cards. But like, Who taught you how to use the flash cards, you may have used the strategy of reading a chapter three times. Research says, By the way, it doesn’t work so well to do that, but you may have done that because it felt good to you. So we have these implicit assumptions. But what should you do? And so you know, if you’re working in student affairs, there’s a lot of things you have to learn. And so I think that this book can be very helpful for anybody who’s got to memorize new processes, got to memorize names of people. Gotta figure out how systems work. All of those things are in there, and that’s part of what this book does, kind of a roundabout way of getting there, but yeah, I think the book is set up to helps people a lot of directions. Yeah,

Keith Edwards
I really relate to that. I mean, I am someone who does love to learn. And one of the great things about having a PhD is you don’t have to take more classes. You can just learn things as you go. And I love learning from from webinars and podcasts and books and conversations. And I think your story of being a very successful high school student and then really struggling with college, I think is so relatable to many folks who are who are so smart that high school, they were able to be successful without good strategies, without knowing how learning works, that just kind of it was, I could just do it. And then they get to college, and they need study skills for the first time, and they don’t know how to do it, and they start turning to what they maybe see on TV and movies, of pulling an all nighter and cramming, which we kind of glorify really bad strategies. I was someone who was very comfortable learning concepts and ideas and being able to internalize that and be able to explain that to others. But when I took an acting class as a senior, it was the hardest class I ever had, because I had to memorize this monolog, and it wasn’t very long. But if I had had to learn the concept of the monolog and be able to put on my own words, that would have been easy, but to memorize it word for word was really a challenge. So I think it points out that even if we are successful learners, there’s there’s different kinds of learning that might be more challenging for us, where we might not need explicitly some of these strategies, maybe we’re employing them implicitly. But now my learning shifts to a different kind of learning, and I can turn to these what would be some of the big ideas that you would want us to really latch on to? I know we’re talking about two different books and a lot of different contexts. What are some of the headlines here that you would want to make sure we don’t miss?

Todd Zakrajsek
Yeah? So yeah. First of all, I gotta come back to this, the concept where you’re talking about, like memorizing something. It’s this is the part I love about this book. And the stuff we talk about, the learning how to learn, is that our brains are actually wired to do semantic concepts. And so if I say the letter was mailed by Edith, or Edith mailed, the letter, all your brain captures is there’s a person named Edith and a letter got mailed, and that’s all we have. And so the exact wording of which way does this go? We’re not we don’t do that. And so the acting. Is a really good example of a situation where you were being asked something different than what your brain was wired to do. If somebody said what you just said, too. What’s the gist of the monolog? You could probably to this very day explain the gist of the monolog, correct, but if the coach or the director says, I want the first sentence and every word has to be exactly in the same order. Now it makes a difference whether the letter was mailed by Edith or Edith mailed the letter. It’s more than active passive voice. It’s the thing in school. Come back to your concepts here. But in school, there’s some really neat things, not just learning, that the brain does for this. For instance, when we have enough information, we stop processing. If you keep processing something, after you have enough information, you’re wasting your time. You’re wasting cognitive resources. So one demonstration I love to do, and if you’re listening to this sitting around your house someplace, just pull out a piece of paper, draw a circle, pretty good sized circle, and then fill in as much of the front of a US Penny as you can, or any of the coins, quite frankly. And what you’re going to find pretty quickly is that you can kind of outline a face and put right down the bottom. This is Lincoln, because I don’t draw very well, and then all of a sudden, is what goes on. It sure, in God, we trust is on the penny, but where? And the reason that’s challenging is because all you need to know is, if there’s a handful of coins, it doesn’t matter that. It’s not worth much. You need to know that it’s a copper color. It’s the only corn in circulation, this copper color. So once you handful of coins, you could say, oh, three pennies while you’re working. And this is great for Student Affairs, folks, while you’re working, as you’re explaining concepts to people, the individuals are going to start nodding, saying, I got it, yeah, I got it, yeah, I got it. What’s happening there is, they think they have enough information so that they’re all good to them. It’s copper. It’s this big. I’m done for you. However, if you’re a coin collector, you really care what’s on the front, what’s on the back, if it’s smudged a little bit, if the edges, whatever you care about, all the details in your jobs. Y’all care about details because it’s important, though, the person you’re talking to is going to get to a spot where they think they have enough and they’re going to stop listening. Your job is to get them to fight through that spot where they need to realize there’s more critical information. And it doesn’t help to just say, wait, there’s more, because that just sounds like, oh yeah, there’s more. But I got it. When you’re when you’re working with people, you can use phrases like, okay, so it sounds like you’ve got the basic foundation down really well. Why don’t you explain it to me just quickly so I make sure you got it. They can start to explain it to you. They’ll realize if they don’t have something. And you can even stop periodically and say, okay, great, you got the first step down. Now let’s talk about the next piece, and that’s different from let me explain the process to you. So number one is just understanding that difference. Now some of the other big concepts, and I will watch the clock here, Keith, because you could go until, I don’t know, whatever day this is, oh, let’s, let’s do it. Let’s be nerds. Let’s go for it. Oh, you know what we could do, a filibuster of concepts. But the there’s a couple of big ones. Metacognition is huge. Just knowing when you know, as humans, we don’t tend to think about do you really know something? And so quick example for this one is if you’ve ever lost the car at a mall, if you ever shown up at the mall and you’re trying to run in and get a tickle me ammo, yes, I’m old enough that that means something. You’re going to run in, you’re going to you’re going to go shop a little bit. You come out and you realize, I don’t know where my car is. Well, the reason you didn’t know where your car is is because you didn’t encode it properly. You didn’t get it in there. But what’s really important is, if you were in the mall for two hours, you didn’t forget where your car was as you left the building. When you left the building and realized you didn’t know the car was, your metacognitive moment of, do I know where the car is? The answer is no. Up until that spot, if somebody, 40 minutes into your shopping had said, Hey, by the way, I’m going to run out and get something from the car. Where is it? You would have probably, at that point, said, Ooh, you know what? Hm, I don’t remember. And the point is that you don’t know you don’t know something, or you don’t know if you do know something, until it’s actually tested. And this is why it’s important to say things like, if you could explain it back to me real quickly, we’ll make sure you’ve got it down and you’re all set. If the person says, I got it, you say, Just do it. And you can do this with your teenagers, your kids, whatever, your spouse, you know, anybody, and if the person is, oh, okay, I got it. I’m going to go to the store and I’m going to get a hamburger buns, and I don’t remember the second item. You catch that before it’s a big deal. That’s why in in college, we have these big problems. Students will go into an exam and flunk it and not know they were going to flunk it. They should have known that before they started taking it. So I won’t do this on all the concepts. Metacognition is huge. Another one that we know is practicing at retrieval. The more you do something, the easier it becomes, and that’s why you can drive a car and not even think about when you start to press press the brake. When you’re pulling into a parking place, or how hard you hit the gas you just got it down. Ride with a brand new driver, if you’re brave enough. And if your kids are learning to drive,

Keith Edwards
I’m doing this right now. I know exactly what you’re talking

Todd Zakrajsek
about to you. So if you watch them, it’s interesting, because they don’t have that automaticity. So their brain is calculating all the time, and by the way, So Keith, I’m going to help you out here quickly too. Is their brain has to calculate a little bit more. And anybody who says they can’t do math, by the way, I got an answer for all y’all, is when you pull up to a stop sign and the cross traffic doesn’t stop, and you’re going to be making like, a left hand turn, you look to the right, and you see a car. You’ll look at that car for about two to three seconds, and in two to three seconds, you’re going to estimate how far the car is away based on the size of it. You’re going to estimate how fast it’s going by, how fast that size changes from a small car to a bigger car. You’re going to estimate how long it takes you to turn into the intersection and then hit your gas. How long will it be before you accelerate enough if that car is coming, they’re not going to run into the back end of your car. You’re doing complex mathematics all in like three seconds, which is amazing. Your new driver is stepping up to the intersection, looks to the right, looks to the left, and you say, sitting there in what they used to call the death seat. Now we have air bags, so you probably just get hurt. But you sit in that passenger seat and you glance over, and your mathematic automaticity brain from all of those trips can say you can go now because your your son, daughter, your child is looking and they’re trying to do the calculation, but they don’t have a million chances, right? Here’s the dangerous part, when you you know you’ve got some time, so you say you can go, but they’re not sure, so they’re watching. And then you say you can go, and they they’re still thinking about it. And the third time you say you’re going to say you could have gone, but what you say is, yeah, don’t go. But they hear you start to talk, and then they go, yeah, because what they think is, you can go, you can go, you can go. And then they trust you on the third one, and and then it’s too late. So the point here is give them some time to calculate. Watch all of the people around you when you become automatic. It almost becomes boring. But everybody struggled the first time they did things. So the forms you fill out. Now, when you hand me a form and say, Oh, Todd, just take this back to the dorm and fill it out, or just step over there and fill this out. Keep in mind that you’ve seen that thing a bazillion times. I haven’t practiced it, retrieving it all the time. So the other quick ones, just to be done here

Keith Edwards
is, let me just jump in before we get the other ones, because you’re reminding me two things. One is the curse of knowledge. When you are so knowledgeable about a thing, and driving is a great example, right? I’ve been driving for 35 years. I know it inside and out. It’s hard for you to explain how to drive to someone who doesn’t know it the way that you did. And I think that happens to many student affairs folks. We know College, we know this institution, we know these processes. It’s hard to explain it to someone who has never encountered that process before, who none of this makes sense to. So that curse of knowledge I was taught when my when my youngest daughter needed to learn how to retire shoes. I tie my shoes every day, and turns out I don’t know how to tie my shoes because I just do it. But her sister could explain it better because she didn’t have that. And then the other thing, remember reading David Eagleman, who’s a neuroscientist, explaining that muscle memory is actually neural connections. Yes, you know your muscle memory to write with your right hand, but not as well with your left hand. Has nothing to do with your right or left hand. It’s about your brain wiring related to that. And you just explained a lot of muscle muscle memory and tying into that. And so, super relevant. So thanks for letting me interject about my insurance, teaching my daughter how to drive. What else would be really helpful? Yeah, and the other

Todd Zakrajsek
thing I did want to mention it from what you just said too, is, and I think you really good. The good point with that curse of knowledge is it’s it makes it harder for empathy. Yeah, people don’t tie this together. But the empathy part is, again, when I make a mistake in any of your any of y’all out there in student affairs, you got all of your own areas, I make a mistake, and you look at me and say, I cannot believe you did this. You mean you went and actually dropped that course before you filled out your financial form for this thing. And in your head is like, how would a person do that? How stupid would you possibly be just again. Keep in mind that a person taking a gallbladder out for like, their appendix out for the 100 and 50th time might be thinking about going out kayaking or something while they’re doing it. And you gotta be careful, because the person who’s doing it for the first time has to have all of the stuff focused and so just be careful, because of empathy, can be in there, and that’s where things like cognitive load. I’ll just wrap these up in seconds, because I’ll watch the time I’ve gone long on this one. Things like cognitive load, how much can you process at any given moment new people? They kind of get maxed out really fast, so you just got to give them a little bit of time there. That’s a big one, practicing every. Retrieval, which I already mentioned, is huge. Interleaving is one of the other things that’s demonstrated to be really good. We tend to learn academically by you know, you read chapter one, you get tested on chapter one, you read chapter two, you get tested on chapter two. Life doesn’t hand you stuff in order of chapters. And so having the students kind of interleave, it’s called pull the material together is really helpful, I will tell you, Keith, I have, I have probably the longest it’s probably still active. I’m not sure of a book that that was contracted to be written that still hasn’t been written yet, and that was from 1993 and in 1993 I signed a book deal to write a statistics book, but for this interleaving concept, I didn’t know what the concept was, but I knew how the brain kind of worked at that point, I said, here’s what I want. At the end of each chapter, like chapter four, will say, I want some problems that are actually from Chapter concepts from chapter two, and someone’s going to look at it and say, Wait, we didn’t just study this, but that’s going to help them practice something from before, which is another is another space pack, just kind of thing too, but it’s going to be there. Some of the material obviously, is going to be chapter four. Some of the material is going to be chapter some of the questions will be from chapter seven. Material, though, the answers to those questions are, I don’t know. And so it’s perfectly legit to look at a question, a statistics problem, and after you read the problem, say, I don’t have the knowledge to solve this, and that might be the right answer, which I argued back in the early 90s is a great skill to have, is to say, I don’t know. Let’s find somebody who does versus I think you just need to do this. And the reason I mentioned this is the publisher absolutely refused to do it because the questions had to come from that block of material. And I said it’s got to be better if you’re actually weaving it in and out of all the other materials. And that’s what our life is like. So interleaving as you’re learning stuff is really important. And the only other one I mentioned just is one of the chapters is actually called, was it pitfalls, pitfalls, traps, academic traps. They’re kind of pits that you fall avoiding, learning pitfalls. That’s it. That’s what it was. And those are things that we do in the academic scenes, and we do it in our lives too. They’re things that look like they work and the and we do it and it actually hurts us. So the very quick version is, if you I tell students this all the time, if you have 10 hours to study for a test, and you could either study two hours a night for five nights or 10 hours the night before the test, which gets you the better score on the test. And the answer, quite frankly, when I ask the students, the students will say five nights, two hours a night and they’re wrong, you’ll get a better test score by studying the 10 hours the night before. Now here’s a more important question, if you take that same test a week later, or if you’re asked about the concepts a week later, is there a difference? And that’s what the academic trap is, you get the immediate higher score because all that information is right there. You just studied it, but you also flush it out very quickly. And so rough estimates, you can’t really do this stuff, but in kind of equating it out, it’d be like losing about 80% of the material when you only lose about 50% when you do it every, every night for a while. And it might not sound like a lot, but the best way of learning anything is to know something about it so it’s it’s cumulative, so that chunk you remember allows you to relearn it faster. The problem cramming looks like it’s better, but it’s not. And so there’s a lot of things like that. We have to be careful

Keith Edwards
of. One of the things I am telling my daughters, who are in middle school and high school, is there’s two things you need to do in school. One is learn stuff and to your example, like math. You’re going to be doing math, you got to really learn that math. The other thing you need to do is learn how to play the game. What’s the game that this teacher has? You know? How do they grade? How do they evaluate? How do you need it is, do they care if you pay attention and participate? Do they just care how you do on the quiz? You know, what’s each teacher has a different game, and a lot of it is learning how to play the game and learning how to play the game. I mean, we all have bosses, even I work for myself and I have a boss. What’s the game My boss wants me to play? And that’s what your example is really helpful, because there are some things where they’re like, you know, I’m not going to need this in the long term. I just need this for the test. But then there are other things that like, yeah, I need this for the test, and I need it next year, when we’re building on this concept and this idea, super helpful in thinking about that. Oh, I also love that we just example of because, because you couldn’t remember the name of a chapter that you wrote, but I could, and just full disclosure, I have it on my screen right here in front of me, so I didn’t remember either,

Todd Zakrajsek
but I could choose a little bit. Yeah, the only thing I was going to say, though, jumping in there, because what you said, and just tips for folks as you’re working with your kids and stuff, is there’s studies on this, which is really cool. People, if in your if your mind, if you’re studying something, and you think, I only need it for the test, and then I don’t have to worry about it after that. It actually makes it significantly harder to learn the material, right? Because your brain is discounting the value of it. You’re not invested. Yeah, we’ve been around for a lot longer than, like, whatever our age is, and so we’re wired really well that if we need to know that a saber tooth tiger is down that path, we’re going to remember that. But if we’ll, if we know right now, we will never go down that path again, then I don’t really care if there’s a tiger down that path, because I’m not going there. So when people will even tell their kids sometimes, or you might tell students in the dorm room, even as like, you know, I know that this is hard, but, you know, just get through this general ed course and it’ll be over, and then you don’t have to worry about it. You make that statement, you’ve just made it harder for that student to pass the class. And so, you know, we say things like, I, I know that you this is the primary reason you’re here, but you know, a lot of people, when they leave college, they care more about that than they do the stuff than their major and so just getting that across, I think, is a really important point

Keith Edwards
well. And I think at a time of AI, I’m thinking a lot about how, how Google changed learning, and how I learned from knowing things to then that having less of a priority because you can look everything up. I do this all the time in arguments with friends about who was in that movie who wasn’t like we can figure this out to really prioritizing learning. And now AI is prioritizing a different kind of learning, a thinking, a creativity and innovation, about being clear about what it is you want to do, and maybe less about getting maybe help with how you’re going to say it, or how you’re going to communicate it, or the word. Communicate it, or the wording or things like that, but that creativity and those innovation and those ideas being, you know, a different, different premium on on different ways of learning and thinking and engaging.

Todd Zakrajsek
This is, this is it’s changing so fast, but I gotta tell you, this is a game changer. I will point out, because you mentioned AI, and just real quickly, is, I love to not, like, pull my hair out and run around like the world’s on fire, because I point out workshop, I do workshops, keynotes, on on AI, and education a lot. And, you know, we have, we go back to Socrates, who basically said, it weakens the mind if you write stuff down. I mean, if you have to memorize it, and all of a sudden, people have the ability to write it down. You don’t have to memorize it. You can just read it. That’s going to make it a much less cognitively complex thing, and that was going to be awful. Luckily, people wrote that down, so we know about it. When Samuel Johnson’s late 1700s one of his quotes was with the ready availability of books, we don’t need teachers anymore. Just go get a book. And I can’t imagine teaching a class without people writing things down, and with books. They read books. This is good. The Internet came along, same thing. So each step, it’s been like that. The difference with AI, which is going to be another step, we’re going to integrate it, we’re going to make education stronger than it was. And just so y’all know, out there huge environmental impact, there’s all kinds of ethical issues, there’s copyright infringement, there’s equity based differences. There’s a lot of bad water usage. Yes, well, the water usage is the one that just is awful, um, somewhere near a liter of water. Every time you ask it a question. So, you know, it’s like, I will ask it this question, but it’s a liter of water, so that’s in there, however it you know, if people say, I’m never going to touch it, because Netflix does that, YouTube does that, flying on an airplane does that, so we have to balance things out. But the reason I wanted to bring this up quickly is, from what you just said, Keith, is one of the big things about the human brain is that we can recognize things more easily than we can recall things. So if I ask you to list five, five words that end with a K, it’s like, okay, and you you can come up with one. Or, you know, you stumble on them. Or if I ask you for 20 of them, we kind of work through a little bit. But if I show you a long list and say or read them to you, does this end with a K? Black? Does this end with a K? Juniper, and the recognition is so much easier than recall what AI is doing, and nobody’s talking about this right now. So we’re cutting edge conversation here is because AI allows you, with a couple of cues to then come up with information. Means all you need is some general recognition things to put out there, and then it could pull it up for you. So it’s doing some of the harder work, and it can be very valuable on research studies. Now I say, hey, there was a study that was done around 1975 by the group from Ohio State that looked at the way social interactions happened. And chatgpt will say, Oh, you’re talking about pen makers study on that’s kind of amazing. But we have to be careful, because if, in the end, it just keeps throwing stuff out and saying, do you mean this? Do you mean this? Do you mean this, then our abilities to retrieve information, practicing at retrieval back to the I don’t know, 20 minutes ago, this is going to be a problem.

Keith Edwards
So well, any critical thinking to go, Oh no, it’s actually. Not Pennebaker was something else that’s not Yeah, well, we’ve talked a lot about learners in terms of college students and classroom examples. What might be helpful for student affairs folks in their role as educators beyond the classroom, what might be helpful from these resources in that context? Whew, I

Todd Zakrajsek
Yeah. First of all, I think we’ve hit a lot of them. So I think that we’ve kind of tried to, I tried to weave some stuff in there as much as I can. But Student Affairs, folks, quite frankly, there isn’t a student affair job, right? It is a huge proportion of the campus, just kind of all over the place, throughout the campus. So it really depends on what your job is. You know, student affairs. You might be in a position where it’s really important for you to know students names, and so then it’s like, how do you remember students names? And there’s stuff in there about how to do students names. It may be that you’re really your big chunk of your job, or budgets. Oh my gosh, did I ever Oh, side note, my friend, individual who is a friend of mine running applied to the position of admissions, and she got the interim job for a year, and at the end of the year, it turns out that enrollment dropped, actual students signing on dropped by like 8% there was No way that she was going to get that job with that. You can’t be an interim, have it dropped by 8% and then not get the job. And she kept saying, This is wrong. There’s something wrong here. Because I know, I’ve talked to people, it’s wrong. It turns out that, you know some budgets, if you have a negative sign, it’s you have money because you’re spending it down other budgets. If you got a negative, you spent too much. It turns out that they had that kind of a system. They didn’t drop 8% she went up 8% in a year, which would kind of change your mind about hiring somebody, because she did institute a bunch of new things within student affairs. She was learning all these things. She was working on some stuff, and in the end, it was a budgeting issue. But that concept of We do so many different things. So again, if you’re willing with contracts, there’s different ways of learning to make sure you know processes for there. If you’re working directly with students, it could be programs. It could be resources. I think, look at any aspect of your job. That’s things that you just need to know, whatever that is. And keeping in mind the thing I mentioned, like with the penny, making sure that there’s ways that you go beyond that concept of, oh, I recognize this too. You really know it, so you can work through that no matter what you’re learning. We now know that when you go to sleep at night, stage four sleep is really important for solidifying semantics, the meanings of things. REM sleep, where you’re doing your dreaming, that’s really important to actually solidify procedural things. So if you’re learning how to how to play a sport, that REM state becomes really important for running plays. For instance, if you’re learning how to the place, what they’re called and stuff, then that stage four, regardless whatever you’re doing, sleep is huge. There’s a chapter on sleep in there. Also another chapter on there, on exercise, regardless of what you’re doing, aerobic exercise just changes the way the brain works, and the chemicals that are produced, you just learn faster. Now, some of these things, it’s not so obvious that you like, go for a jog, and the next day it’s like, I’ve gotta read this contract. And you say, Oh, now I get it. Um, but little by little we do increments and stuff, exercise, sleep makes a huge difference. There’s a chapter in there on on nutrition, because we know that what we eat makes a difference. And hydration, 10% decrease in hydration, you start to see cognitive declines. If you’ve got an elderly member of your family and they’re in the afternoon, they’re kind of confused. If you call the doctor’s office, first thing the doctor is going to ask you is, what have they how much have they had to drink today? Mm, because if that person has not had any water all day long, the doctor cares, which means if you’re really busy, and whatever your student affairs job is, and you’re sitting at your office and you realize that from nine and morning until two, you’ve not gotten up, you’ve had nothing to drink, you haven’t eaten anything. That’s why we start to get fuzzy about things. And so there’s the obvious in there of the cognitive stuff, like metacognition can help any of y’all in your jobs, but also sleeping and eating and drinking water, those all come into play too. I think

Keith Edwards
that’s really helpful. I mean, we all know that these things are good for our physical well being. We all know that good nutrition, water, exercise, sleep are good for our bodies, but they’re absolutely critical for learning and memory and retrieval and processes, and just absolutely critical. I think that’s a lesser known story, right? And I think that’s that’s really helpful. Well, we are coming up on our time, which has been very. Very mindful of which I really appreciate, but we always run out of time. And as you’ve already demonstrated, you’re just a genuinely curious, broadly interested kind of person. With your examples that have been great, and we do call this a podcast Student Affairs. Now we always ask to end by asking our guests, what are you thinking, pondering or troubling? Now we got into the AI a little bit. But what would you like to add? What kind of thoughts are kicking around, what’s kind of occupying you as we close this? And then also, if folks want to connect with you, what’s the best way for them to do that? Sure the connection I’ll

Todd Zakrajsek
do first, because I’m going to forget soon as I start explaining things that I am interested in right now. So easiest thing is just my name. If you find something with my name on it, Todd zach@gmail.com I got in on Gmail when it was at the very beginning. Plus, I’m the only Todd Zak in the world, so it’s not that hard to find me. LinkedIn, kinds of things, just my name. Things will pop up. That’s good. That’s the other nice thing, the best and the worst thing about my name is I’m easy to find So it works both ways. So what I’m working on right now, there’s a couple things. Number one is definitely the AI, and I’ve had the opportunity to write six books in the last five years on academic aspects. Part of that, by the way, I’ll tell all y’all out there, is if you’re doing something that a chunk of it you’re really good at, and another chunk you’re not good at. Just look to see if it’s worth hiring somebody to do the thing you’re not good at. Most faculty members, and actually, almost anybody who writes books. You write the book, you submit it off. They’ll edit it at the end, but you’ve gotta get through the process. I just hired an editor. I didn’t use AI on any of those books, but the point is, my editor does that, so all I have to do is just write like the wind. Hand it to Mackenzie, and she’s brilliant. So here’s the thing. Number one is, I’m actually just signed a book on AI. It’s the first time I’m using AI in my writing process. But AI is something that I am monster, massively concerned about. I do think they’ll iron out some of the environmental impact issues. I don’t know what they’re going to do about jobs. Is going to be very interesting to see what happens, because disruptive innovation is something to always keep an eye on. What happens with disruptive innovation, for those of you who don’t know, is that I come in as a competitor and I pick off something that’s so low hanging fruit in your area, that you don’t care, that I’m doing it. So if you’re making steel slag, there’s there’s a kind of a steel that you can make that’s just basically scrap kind of stuff that nobody really cares much about. I could start a company just doing that you don’t care, because all I’m doing is that. But while I’m doing it, I’m learning how to do the next step. And as I keep moving up step by step, there comes a point when I can do enough of what you do and undercut your costs. It’s all of a sudden, it’s like we’re going in new direction. And so AI, we have to be very careful that we could use AI just as a way to find out the names of movies for us. But if we don’t use if we don’t recall stuff enough to make it automatic, and if we don’t interleave, if we don’t get all those things that we could do, then all of a sudden AI is just doing our thinking for us. And that’s the thing is to stick away from that. So that’s dangerous. So number one is, I’m looking at, how do we integrate AI with the learning process? Like, instead of using it to look up movies, how do you use it to make a person better at metacognition? So I should be good at knowing whether I know something. How can I use AI not to tell me if I know it or not, but to make me better at that process? So that’s what I’m really working on, is using AI to make us stronger thinkers, not for thinking for us. That’s one big one. The other one is and I’ve got total permission to talk about a daughter of mine. I won’t say which one. I’ve got three daughters, but I have one daughter who really struggled in school because she has a lot of challenges. She’s on the spectrum. She’s bipolar. She runs manic depressive. She at times, has a hard time with thought processes and everything she managed. It took her four years, but she got an associate degree. And it took her six more years, but she got a bachelor’s degree from UNC Chapel Hill. 10 years to get a bachelor’s degree. Could not be more proud of her. And when Keith, when you mentioned earlier, sometimes you got to know the system versus like, get the learning. I’m 100% on board with that you college is a way you learn stuff, and part of what she learned was how to overcome big adversity. So that’s all good stuff. The reason I mention her is because I have learned, I shouldn’t say learned more. She has changed my view and vision of learning more than any system, any book I’ve written, anybody I’ve talked to, because I watched her struggle all the way through. I watched her have faculty members who said she couldn’t get out of bed for a week. They’d say, that’s okay. Turn in the stuff when you can other people’s I’ve already administratively dropped you. You’re out of this class. Totally different responses from people. But here’s the big thing in participation points, if. Percent of the greatest participation, she would just zero that out, because she can’t talk in front of other people. So what she would do in your class with 20% participation is say, okay, that’s gone. I now can get 80% so I need a 90 out of the 80 to get a 72 I can’t tell you the number of classes. She had an A average and got a 2.0 and she graduated with 2.001 she should not have she should have graduated with about a three, six. But we, when we think about equity and inclusion, I gotta be careful how I say this, because it’s really hard in a situation like this to not say something that gets me into a lot of trouble. Is, I believe in equity, inclusion all over the place, but we have to be careful that we don’t focus on the salient aspects of diversity and miss the non salient ones. And what I mean by that is, I can look at a person and tell very quickly. I can get a sense of the gender, sex, you know, get a pretty good sense of that skin color. I can get a good sense of where a person in the world may have been from, hair color, all of those things are out there. What we don’t often see are the lived experiences and the internal struggles people have and so and I’ll wrap this up quickly with I have a couple slides I use in my presentations now. One of them is Golden Retriever puppies that are like running toward the camera. And I’m gonna tell you this real quickly, because I think for all of you, this has really changed how I see students. If you’re gonna go get a puppy, we used my family raised leader dogs for the blind for like, 15 years. So we raised several of them. If you get picked up the litter anytime for getting a dog, have the owner take all the puppies off to one side of the room. You sit on the other side of the room with a little piece of bacon or something, and call them number one. You do not want the first dog that gets to you, because that dog is going to tear your house apart. It’s an inquisitive dog that’s got a lot of gumption. You don’t want the last dog. The last dog is the timid one that isn’t really sure to let the brothers and sisters go kind of out in front of them. That’s the dog. When you say sit, it’s going to later say, up, sit. Ooh. Am I doing this right? Am I do? You mean, should I be doing this? That dog’s going to be hard. You want one of those dogs in the middle? And the reason I say this quickly is because we all know the difference in those puppies. And to get it away from people, it makes it easier. Those puppies have different ways of interacting with the world. Then you could look at different breeds of puppies, which would make it even more different. Then you could look at old dogs versus puppies. Now you’ve got lived experiences, very different. So if you look at six different dogs and think they’re just dogs and, oh, that’s a German check burden. That’s a poodle, you’re missing all the rest of that stuff. And so the point here is, and then in my workshops, I do that, then I show an image of students and students from different ethnic backgrounds, different hair color, different styles, everything. But people almost immediately start seeing more they see more diversity there. And so I guess what I’m saying all this boils down to is keep in mind that there’s all kinds of diversity, the people that we resonate best with are the ones who are like us, because we have our own lived experiences. We think that’s how it should be done. So for instance, when I was in college, people use the phrase, you teach the way you were taught. You teach the way you best learn. When I was in college, one teacher used groups. One teacher used role plays all the time. One teacher had storytelling lectures, which those of you who watching the show right now know that I’m a storytelling lecturer. That was Tim Sawyer. The way you fill out forms, the way you process things, whether you do it early versus waiting till the last minute. Just keep in mind, and this is my equity statement here and inclusion. Keep in mind, that’s your way of doing it. And when you say to somebody, the best way to do this is to fill out the form right away. Because if you do that, you know you got it done. What you’re really saying is, the way I do it is to fill it out really early to get it done. And out of the way, if you’re like me, this will be the best for you as well. And we have all of these, these values that we put onto other people, and we don’t mean to it’s back to that concept of, we don’t mean to do that. It’s because it worked for me. I know it worked for me over and over again, and that comes out very quickly, like, if you do this, it will work. And we lose that piece of if you’re like me and do this, it’ll work. And so really digging into inclusion and what it really means, and I will finish with this, but I gotta tell this one. When my daughter got down to her last class 10 years to get a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a school I could never have gotten into, she had to take. She couldn’t ever take more than three classes at a time, which you all know out there means part time student.

Todd Zakrajsek
You sign up for five classes. People on the spectrum, read other people quickly, and if they don’t get along with you, they’re not going to get along with you. Sign up for five classes. Go to the five classes one time. Pick one of those that you’re going to drop because it’s the person that you. Least think you’re going to be effective with that’ll give you four classes. You can’t handle four classes, honey. So here’s what I want you to do, go to those four classes for two more class periods. Pick one of those classes. You have to show up on test days because you can’t get dropped from that class, because you become a part time student. When you become a part time student, you’ll never get back in. So take the F now with your other three classes, you have to get a C average, because C’s get degrees 2.0 gets you through. So basically, sign up for five, go to four, drop one, get your C average. She did that, but because she had three classes, it meant she had to go in the summers to make up for those classes. So her 10 years was not 10 academic years. They were 10 calendar years, right? When she got down to her very last class, this is the end of the story. She came to me and I said, okay, because I worked with her every semester. I said, now we got to get ready. This is the you time out at UNC. Six years you’re done. Take your credits and go, because they don’t want to keep taking your money if you’re not going to make it first summer session is the end of her time. If that she gets to take no more classes. She needed three credit hours in anything. Just three credit hours, so I said, Okay, well, let’s sign up for three classes. She said, No, I found a Christopher Nolan film class. I like, I’m just going to take that. I said, But you know, if you don’t get along with the teacher, she says, Yeah, then I’ll flunk the class. I said, But you have to have this class. She says, No, I don’t have to have it. I need it to get my degree. And then she said to me, you still don’t get it. This is what changed my life. You still don’t get it. I can’t want this degree even after 10 years. If I do, I want things. I really, really want them. It’s my personality. Is how I am on the spectrum and everything, and when I don’t get it, it’s crushing. So I don’t actually know if I’m going to get the degree or not, and I will. I did what you said all the way through, because I didn’t want to get kicked out. Now we’re down to the very last thing. I will either get this degree or I won’t. And I’ll tell you, Keith, it just shook me because I thought to myself, I put so much values, of my values on other people that I would think, if you don’t do this little thing, you don’t get the big prize. How could you not do it? That’s all me. That’s my perspective. And so I knows long story, but I want to finish with all the student affair folks out there is I’m working on this concept of, how do I make sure to really see the other person, even when it’s things that I can’t see. And I think that’s huge for for all of us, not even higher ed, just all of us.

Keith Edwards
So there you go. Great lesson about neuro divergence. It’s a great lesson about, you don’t know what trauma they’ve had. We don’t know, you know, the differences that we have. And I think it’s really, really useful. This has been great full of really useful strategies about how to learn, really useful strategies about how to help other people learn, and for me, I’m taking away a lot about the tremendous value in terms of learning and shaping a life of struggle and even failure. Right? So many stories that we’ve shared about struggle and failure not only being something you can be resilient and overcome, but can actually shape you in pretty dramatic ways. So thank you for that, Todd, or Dr Z or Dr Todd is a kryzek, put them all in here. So thank you being here. This has been terrific, amazing, insightful, life changing and fantabulous. Thanks for your leadership in the space and for your books and for the conversation. Really appreciate it.

Todd Zakrajsek
I appreciate the opportunity to come here, and Keith has been great chatting with you, although I did most of the talking, but it was great getting the opportunity to do this. And I hope everybody out there, you know, there’s something they can do, but you know, we can all it’s big stuff. What we do, what we do, is so important. So good luck to all y’all.

Keith Edwards
Thank you. I also want to thank our sponsors of today’s episode, both evolve and hero evolve help senior leaders who value aspire to lean on, aspire to lead on and want to unleash their potential for transformational leadership. This is a program I lead with doctors Brian Rao and Don Lee. We offer a personalized experience with high impact value the asynchronous content and six individual and six group coaching sessions maximize your learning and growth with a focused time investment, greatly enhancing your ability to lead for transformational leadership. And Hera Huron collaborates with colleges and universities to create sound strategies, optimize operations and accelerate digital transformation by embracing diverse perspectives, encouraging new ideas and challenging the status quo. Huron promotes institutional resilience in higher ed. You can visit them at go.hcg.com/now, as always, a huge shout out to our producer, Nat Ambrosey, who does all the behind the scenes work to make us look and sound good. And we love your support for these conversations. You can help support this conversation and others by subscribing to the podcast on YouTube and to our newsletter, where we release each new episode on Wednesday mornings. Five star review helps great conversations like this reach even more folks. I’m your host. Keith Edwards, thanks to our fabulous guests today and to everyone who is watching and listening, make it a great week.

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