Elizabeth Spencer Norton
Fall 2024 Interview
By Laura Ferdinand, Assistant Director of Content and Communication
Elizabeth Norton takes great satisfaction and pride in the ways her many roles at Northwestern coalesce to advance developmental science and student learning. As a teacher, mentor, researcher, Director of Undergraduate Studies for the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, Director of the LEARN Lab, and Associate Director for Neurodevelopmental Innovation & Impact at Northwestern’s Institute for Innovations in Development Sciences—among other roles, the highly lauded neuroscientist would understandably be stretched thin. However, she models for her students a practice of self-care and self-advocacy, which honors rest and recharging as a fundamental component of success and good science.
In the following excerpts from our conversation, Norton shares her early interests in language, reading, and brain development; how her research influences her approach to student learning and neuroinclusivity; and her new role in the largest ever study of children’s brain and behavior development.
I'm interested in knowing a little bit more about the origins of your interests in both your research and teaching. How did they develop?
When I was growing up, my mom was an early childhood educator, and I went to the same preschool where she was teaching. Because she was so interested in supporting children's development, I became interested in how we support people and their development from a very early age.
I remember starting first grade, and I was already reading quite proficiently, because I just love stories, and my parents read to me all the time. Reading came very easily to me, and I was gobbling up books like My Father’s Dragon and the Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle series. When we started getting reading instruction in class, I remember seeing that different students were grouped based on what I think I implicitly understood was their reading ability.
There’d be a group of the kids at the orange table, and they were all reading books that had an orange stripe at the top, and those books were really repetitive and not very interesting. There were other kids at the blue table, and they were reading books with a blue stripe across the top which had some story but weren’t nearly as great as Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle. I became quite interested in why some of those books were seemingly more interesting and had more stories to them, and weren't just the same words repeated over and over. And so, I trace my interest into why kids’ abilities and brains are all different to this. It turns out that this sparked a long journey to studying how we support everybody to make them the happiest, healthiest person and learner.
It wasn’t until undergrad when I started in a lab that focused on language, reading, and brain development that I got to reflect back on that experience and say, “what is it about some kids’ brains that help them have an easier time learning to read or make reading and language learning harder for them?” And then I went on to a Ph.D. program focused in this area.
This was the genesis of the neuroscience of education interest in the early 2000s, and I really thought that within a few years we would have figured out how to understand each individual student's brain and then translate that into meaningful ways that can help them learn.
Such has not been the case, as you're likely aware. We don't scan students’ brains to help them learn better, and we've only, I think, made modest gains, if any, from the way we would like to be able to understand the brain to translate into education, but it's part of one of the goals of my career: to be able to understand what we can bring together from the brain and behavior to support students’ education and development.
It's fascinating that you started your doctoral work at the forefront of the neuroscience of education as a field and to hear the way that you imagined it would progress. Would you tell me more about those initial feelings and why the reality hasn’t matched what you were anticipating?
I think that when we gained the capacity to scan people's brains in a safe, non-invasive way using MRI in the 1990s, people thought that that would provide enough detail about the brain for us to understand meaningful differences across people and then optimize their education. This was similar to what happened with genetic sequencing in a similar time frame; we thought that if we could sequence people's whole genomes, we could easily make meaningful, actionable insights about their health and their well-being.
In both cases, what we've realized is that humans are so much more complex than would allow us to make straightforward inferences about those things. Being able to look at someone's brain with the tools that we have now gives us quite a rudimentary—or not very insightful—picture of what their brain is, in terms of what we need to know about how they're going to learn effectively.
Has the recognition of the complexity of humans and the human brain shaped how you approach teaching?
I really think about this a lot. I think about a piece of knowledge that comes from the autism research world: if you know one person on the autism spectrum, you know one person on the autism spectrum. Generalizations are very hard to make. So, when I think about approaching my students’ learning, I try to take this view that humans are extremely different, for all kinds of different and interesting reasons, and if we try to apply one approach to everyone, it's likely to be unsuccessful. In my courses and in my lab, I really try to do my best to get to know each person for who they are, not based on their similarity with people that I've known, or their diagnostic category. I try to really understand what it is about them that is going to meaningfully make a difference.
At the same time, there are some things that brain and cognitive sciences studies have shown us [about how people learn]. Learning styles or preferences is a good example. Science tells us that a person’s learning preference doesn’t necessarily align with how that individual learns most effectively. So, if somebody says, “I'm a visual learner,” they may prefer that but it doesn’t mean they will learn better in that style. While I really try to individuate, I also lean on the science that tells us that there are universals and person-specific factors that support learning, but they aren’t linked to one’s “learning style.”
You brought up autism research and the way that humans learn in diverse ways. The Searle Center has been working on supporting neurodivergence and neuroinclusion in higher education. How does this show up in your classroom, and do your approaches shift based on the number of students you are working with?
The courses that I teach range from a high-level undergraduate seminar that's capped at eight students up to our department's course on Language Development and Usage, which is typically 40 students. I also work with lots of students one on one and in small groups in the lab. Across those contexts, one of the things that is at the front of my mind is explicitly setting the expectation for students to share with me and engage with me about the ways that we can best support them as a learner. So rather than saying, “if you need an accommodation, you have to notify by this date,” I try to frame it as, “If you have something that is going to help you be most successful in this environment, I would love to talk with you as soon as we can, so that we can start setting up the ways we can work together to make you successful.” Leading with openness to those communications and those interactions is really important, and I think helps students feel comfortable sharing those things and having the conversations.
I think a lot about setting clear expectations and emphasizing flexibility, honesty, and empathy. I have had a few students in class in the last few years who have had accommodations for flexible attendance and deadlines. These accommodations entail the greatest flexibility and requires the student’s communication, often in some of the trickiest times for them—if they’re really struggling with mental health, for example—to be able to reach out and ask for what they need. That’s where I really like to meet with them from the start and come to a place where we can agree that they are going to be direct, proactive, and communicative to the greatest degree that their situation permits, and I am going to honor and support that. Finding the flexibility to support success for those students who have the greatest and most unpredictable challenges, while maintaining course learning goals, is something I’ve really learned about and worked on and partnered with the Searle Center and AccessibleNU.
It's really poignant to think about the hardest times to be successful and needing to reach out in the moment where it might be most difficult to reach out. I’m inspired by how you promote and affirm self-efficacy in students.
I’m very glad to hear that comes through, because it’s really important to me. When I was an undergraduate and a PhD student in research labs, I had wonderful, really supportive mentors, but I saw how hard their jobs were and how much time they put in. Up until the time I was finishing my PhD, I thought that I could never lead a lab, because I cannot work the 20-hour days that [I thought] it required. I am a person that needs a good amount of time to recharge and rest so that I can apply my brain toward supporting the other people that I work with, toward the intellectual and scientific pursuit that we all are working toward. So, I set really clear expectations with the folks that I work with for how we all work well and what kinds of structures and time we need to recharge and let us get set up to do our best thinking and work.
Those expectations hadn't ever been explicit in the environments I was in, even with good intentions. I think it was just an implicit thing that everyone works hard, and maybe it looks a little different across people. Being able to lead a lab where I say, “hey, here are the times that work for me to do deep work and to correspond and engage,” versus other times when I'm recharging so that I can do those other activities, I think, has helped the people that I work with also recognize what works for them, and set those kind of guideposts.
The guiding principle of the lab is “do good and do good science.” I share this with students from the very beginning, that the first thing is do good. That doesn’t mean we have to always impact society in a positive way, but it means to do good to yourself and to others. If you're working with a colleague, and they need support, support them. This is not a “you do better because someone else does worse” kind of a culture. Then, do good science. We're all working toward trying to improve science, trying to learn together, but we can't do any of that unless those principles are in place. Doing good science also means we do things in a way that is rigorous and principled and we admit our mistakes and try to learn from them.
I’m interested in what sort of engagement you’ve had with the Searle Center. What drew you to working alongside our educational developers, and how has that influenced your teaching?
One of the most transformative things I've done in my time at Northwestern is the Searle Fellows program. I was developing my own course for the first time: an undergraduate seminar where students both learn about the neuroscience of human communication, and, very uniquely, they develop and conduct an experiment using EEG brain measures about communication. Having never created a course, this was a great opportunity to use the Searle Center to understand what the best practices in pedagogy around active learning and small group interactions. I had no idea that there were science resources that would help me help students to cultivate their questions, work together in teams, and things like that. I found a lot of support and insight. Students love that class, and I love teaching that class, and I think it's a huge credit to the Searle Center.
One of the other things that I found most valuable and interesting through my time at Northwestern is when I get to learn from other faculty. I remember going to a workshop from one of the other McCormick Teaching Award winners talking about how he leveraged social media posts as a way for students to engage in class, and it sparked so many ideas for me about how students could demonstrate their learning, and how we can move past just tests and quizzes and have students demonstrate mastery of learning objectives in so many different ways.
Even though my own courses are quite well established now, the chances that I get to engage with the Searle Center and with other faculty spark new ideas about how we can have students be super engaged and authentic and show their ideas and learning in ways that I never would have imagined when I started this journey.
Looking toward the future, are there any new projects that you're working on or any ideas that are percolating and exciting you?
Yes—there are always a million! One of the things that I've been working on that has been a humbling and learning experience is co-leading Northwestern’s site, with my colleague Laurie Wakschlag, for a huge national study called “HEALthy Brain and Child Development.” NIH has funded us as one of 25 sites around the country to be part of this, the largest ever study of children's brain and behavior development. We are well in the midst of enrolling 300 families in Chicago, starting when the kids are in the second trimester of in utero—well before I've ever had the chance to measure children's learning and development! We will follow these children, 7,000 of them around the country, to age 10 to trace the developmental origins and social determinants of health and learning.
We are looking at things like their family environment, neighborhoods, genetics—all of these dimensions that offer insights to some of the things I've been curious about for a long time. If we've got two kids who were born to similar families on the same block, and one has a lot of trouble learning to read, what could be the things that differentiate them? Is it genetics, is it brain architecture? Is it who lives closer to the train line and might have more noise exposure at home? Or the one whose brain has a less consistent way of responding to language? We really have the opportunity with a big study like this to understand the earliest indicators of learning and reading, which is what I really, really care about.
In addition to experts across the country in every domain, many students are helping us collect and analyze data, so we are all bringing our different types of experience and backgrounds to make it successful. All the study data will be shared publicly, so it’s also a great opportunity to use those data in my lab and courses. Stay tuned for updates through at least 2037!