About Pillars of Learning

I (Michael Weingarth) founded Pillars of Learning in 2009 to answer a very simple question:

“Why can’t standardized tests accurately predict the difference between difficulty and complexity from a student’s perspective?”

As I grew more experienced in the classroom, what I began to see was breakdowns between functional compensation patterns but had no language to accurately capture what I was seeing. Instead, I asked questions like: “Why can’t I predict what a student will find difficult more precisely and why can’t I predict when and how they’ll succeed?”

At the time, these questions led me to exhaustive research that bore little to no fruit until nearly three years later (2012), when the idea of starting with neuropsychology, the field that examines why behaviors and reactions manifest due to brain structure or functionality, helped explain a lot of the unique patterns i was seeing that traditional cognitive science could not explain. After digging into the intersection of cognition, perception, affective neuroscience, and neuropsychology for years, I developed a proprietary framework to examine what I began to realize were “compensatory patterns of cognition.” This concept, that every student has a dynamic and adaptive response to content, context, and many other factors, has become the bedrock of what makes us different: we desperately care about communicating as much as we can about the relationship between observed behavior and brains to our tutors, the students, their parents, and to other educators. We believe that sharing that knowledge with students not only increases academic performance but makes them more self-confident, self-resilient, and mindful.

Knitted together from far too many textbooks, case-studies, science/education journals, and various best-sellers, this new way of connecting student error patterns based on combinations of stimuli, processing, emotional state, and executive functionality led to dramatic increases in student test prep averages and academic performance in 2015 for my small Connecticut-based company that we’ve maintained and improved upon since. In 2019, we partnered with Choate Rosemary Hall to provide test prep services to their Summer Programs Office, and we’ve served thousands of students since the days of me saying “Gee, cognition and learning science really doesn’t address emotion at all, huh?” back in 2009.

And there’s never been a better time to be interested in brains. We’re seeing a kind of golden age of brain science, at least in terms of the stuff that I wish I had read 10 years ago, that’s digging into these complex dynamics with really exciting results. It all points to a more complex and realistic picture of human learning that isn’t just purely computational (input a produces output a) or emergent (it’s unique every time and therefore cannot be explained or examined). I might be biased, as a lot of this science validates what I’ve been grasping at, but these are the most fascinating ideas I’ve come across: Mary-Helen Immordino Yang’s work continues to provide a cornerstone for the importance of emotion in not just memory but thinking, problem solving, and neurological functioning, and Mac Shine’s neuorimaging work and theories (see Shine Lab’s GitHub) on the mid-brain and thalamus have validated ideas I clumsily called “functional adaptations” which were really concepts of fine-tuning and neuromodulation. Luis Pessoa is at the forefront of the “Systems-level Neuroscience” camp, producing brilliant work on the connections between functional areas, not modular components, of the brain, and evolutionary neuroscientists like Paul Cisek and Kevin Mitchell continue to produce deep work that positions complex human behavior and learning in new ways that don’t rely on anatomical or computer modeling to explain away human interactions with stimuli as predetermined. Like I said, though, this work really aligns with what I saw for 15 years in my own work: human brains don’t “learn” the way that most learning scientists claim. Instead, Learning is a complex, adaptive and context dependent task that exists in a dynamic space, able to shift and change based on the nature of that space and the constraints that exist or emerge within in. If you’re interested in learning more, I highly recommend Kevin Mitchell’s most recent book “Free Agents” and Alicia Juarrero’s brilliant “Context Changes Everything” as well as her previous work “Dynamics in Action” and Mary-Helen Immordino-Yang’s post 2016 pre-prints and published papers as well as her seminal text “Emotions, Learning, and the Brain.”

Our roots are in working with high achieving students with recently diagnosed or as-yet-undiagnosed learning issues as well as students with low self-confidence or profound test anxiety, but the methods we’ve produced are, to use a buzzword, “neuroinclusive”. They work for everyone. I personally continue to find the work with neurodivergent students, gifted children, and children who hate/dislike school fascinating because every brain presents a unique set of fine-tuned responses to so many different sets of contexts and stimuli. However, my first group of tutors, substantially less engaged in this research than I was and with far less free time as 4th year med students from Yale, had to become quickly conversant with cognition, memory, processing, trauma, race and gender bias, their own implicit biases about achievement and intelligence, and basic therapeutic techniques used to help shift procrastination and avoidance so that we could make sure our students succeeded with methods they could replicate and practice on their own to eventually become self-sufficient. Ever since that frantic rush to build a resource bank for that first crew of tutors, the company maintains a high degree of investment in staffing tutors who are driven and eager to expand their knowledge base and absolutely love to show up, learn new stuff, share that knowledge with kids, and help their students become self-sufficient. We hire tutors not just to teach content, but to understand how a student’s learning environment and learning history provides support and/or friction, and to work with what is present, what strengths and challenges show up, rather than superimpose ideas and concepts from prescriptive pedagogy.

If you’re interested in working with us, for us, partnering, or just need help because your child has some unique learning patterns that no one seems to understand, feel free to reach out to me directly at Michael@pillarsoflearning.com.