Good News For Teachers: Brain Research and Education
Posted by Marsha on September 30, 2010
I feel something big is coming; something big for education. Right now, the wave is small and unnoticeable to most. Kind of like the the shifting of tectonic plates on the sea floor that are responsible for a seismicity generated tsunami. This big thing is the brain. We all have one, and some of us even use it, but it is only recently that discoveries in neuroscience, paired with continued developments in cognitive psychology, have been applied to education. This is huge for educators! This will provide us with a scientific base for learning and, consequently, teaching.
Think about how understanding how the brain works, or in our case learns, can impact how we teach! To me, this is so exciting. When it comes to teaching we are left to our experience, instructional materials created by publishing companies, and intuition to guide our instruction. Let’s be honest, the behavioral science knowledge we have is not always enough. Just ask any teacher who has lost sleep over the kids in her class who can’t seem to “get it” no matter how hard she tries to reteach, or why the most thought out behavior plans don’t work for students “X,Y, and Z.” We spend our time trying to teach our students (input information) without really understanding how they learn…how their brains work (process information). If we apply scientific knowledge of how the brain works to education and we will be better able to meet the needs of all our students.
This changes the way I reflect on my teaching. I actually have a place from which to begin my contemplation that doesn’t stop with the section in my teacher’s edition where reteach & remediate materials are packaged. If I understand how the brain learns, I can look at my students’ data, break them up into the appropriate groups and deliver instruction that meets their needs as determine by each student’s readiness level AND learning style. If I understand more about how my students take in and process information, I can understand why things work for some and not for others. I can then learn how to effectively differentiate my instruction and revise my lesson plans to add layers needed to meet the needs of my students. I can take the things I know intuitively into a more concrete realm. My classroom can be my laboratory, my instruction my experiment, my students my control groups and variable groups, and me… the scientist.
Another huge benefit of applying knowledge of how the brain works to education is it will help give the teaching profession the respect it deserves. Although teachers know the value of experience and intuition, we still battle public perceptions that lead people to believe anyone can do our job. We find ourselves at the mercy of politicians, school boards, and uniformed public who believe that because they once sat behind a desk as a student that qualifies them to stand in front of a desk as a teacher. Applying what neuroscientists are learning about memory, learning, emotions, and experience to education will allow teachers to understand why certain strategies work for some but not for others. This will switch our conversation base from the intuitive “trust me I’ve been doing this a while” defense we are so often left with to a scientific foundation that allows us to articulate what we do and will help shift the public’s sometimes ignorant perception of our profession.
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