GLENN WHITMAN

Introduction

GLENN WHITMAN

What promising research should ALL public, charter, district, private, international, and homeschool teachers and leaders know about the learning brain?

This question inevitably emerges in each of the talks or workshops I have been privileged to facilitate with my colleagues since we launched the CTTL in 2011. Teachers, school principals, and district leaders ask this synthesizing question as they, too, recognize how the promising research and strategies in Mind, Brain, and Education (MBE) Science are a pathway for elevating teacher quality, student achievement, and the whole child’s school experience in their context with their students. “Yes, Glenn, I can see how MBE can help. But exactly what research and strategies should we all know?”

Promising research in the field of MBE gives teachers, schools, and districts a variety of opportunities to leverage strategies in, for example, multiple modality instruction, memory, feedback, metacognition, social and emotional learning, cognitive load, and assessment. But MBE research remains just “promising” until it is tried out in a school or program’s context with a school or program’s students, and its impact is evaluated.

Evidence of impact in real-classroom and real-school settings needs to be established before we can go beyond saying an MBE principle is anything more than “promising.” It is why we welcome and enjoy collaborating with Dr. David Daniel of James Madison University who talks about teachers and schools as “evidence generators.” 1 This is, and will continue to be, a challenge to schools who want to make MBE a core part of how they function.

In advance of considering promising MBE research, we start by saying it is important that teachers should be experts in the subject areas and ageappropriate developmental range of the students that they work with. But even when we layer knowledge of pedagogy on top of this foundation, it is just a starting point. The magic comes when professional teaching wisdom and MBE research insights are entwined — practitioners who can separate and understand each of these strands in their mind, but who live them tangled together in every moment of a busy school day. When we do this, we might say that we have developed a science of teaching and learning.

While the science of teaching and learning suggests many great strategies, there are three areas that we prioritize when we begin training St. Andrew’s preschool through 12th grade teachers and leaders and they are a core thread of our virtual training tool, Neuroteach Global. We believe the following three principles and mindsets — informed by MBE Science research and adapted by the lived experience of classroom teachers — are of paramount importance in each teacher’s journey to be an even better teacher.

Neuroplasticity

The old myth that the brain was set around the age of 3-4, or 11-12, or even 18 is just that – a myth. We now know that neuroplasticity exists throughout our lives – our brains alter over time in reaction to our environment and experiences. While there is a significant genetic component to how our brain is wired, there is also a very significant environmental component — all the experiences we have and how we unpack them contribute to shaping the brain we currently have. Our brain is never “set” as neurons are formed, myelinated, connected and pruned all through our life. This is the basis of possibly the most important research-to-classroom-instruction contribution from neuroscience — that every teacher must see themselves as a “brain changer,” and that

AT ST. ANDREW’S EPISCOPAL SCHOOL

every student, regardless of race, class, or gender can learn through deliberate practice, scaffolded support, a knowledge-rich curriculum, and positive relationships in school.

Emotion and cognition are intertwined

Students bring their emotions, their identity, and their whole mental and physical selves to every school day. For example, the emotional switching-station of the brain, the amygdala, is part of the brain’s limbic system — a system that also includes one of the key memory centers, the hippocampus. The limbic system is also involved in the process by which incoming sensory information passes through to the prefrontal cortex, the brain’s higher order thinking region. But this is not always the case. When students experience trauma, toxic stress, or even episodic stress, their fight, flight, and freeze response can kick in, making learning difficult to impossible. Early in the work of the CTTL we were introduced to the concept of “downshifting” by Dr. Mariale Hardiman at the Johns Hopkins University School of Education, “as a metaphor to describe how negative emotions cause us to process in our brain’s emotional center and lose focus on higher order thinking.” We all can recall our own moment when a teacher, coach, mentor or even colleague downshifted you and paralyzed your learning.

Despite the impact it has, some stress can be helpful in learning. But lots is not. Sustained high levels of stress can lead to significant physical and mental health consequences and can even have epigenetic effects. High levels of stress need to be attacked by a multi-pronged approach. The work of Denise Pope, Stanford Professor and author of the Foreword to this volume of “Think Differently and Deeply,” is particularly useful, and we recommend that you investigate the work of her organization, Challenge Success.

The work of the Mindset Scholars Network is also helpful. This network identifies three mindsets that teachers should be familiar with and be using to inform their work: growth, belonging and purpose and relevance. We would argue that the belonging mindset is perhaps the most important of the three. If a student does not feel like they belong in a class or school, providing a level of challenge and support for them to develop a growth mindset would be difficult. Belonging also means having high expectations for all students, but recognizing that all students might not take exactly the same pathway to the appropriately high-learning objectives you set.

Eliminate neuromyths

One of the barriers to creating learning environments that align with current research in Mind, Brain, and Education Science research is the persistence of neuromyths that could be considered detrimental pedagogy. The most prolific neuromyth, despite the preponderance of research and the valiant efforts of the Twitter world, is the continued belief in learning styles. Belief in learning styles leads to teachers, students, and even parents having a fixed mindset and runs counter to what we know about neuroplasticity. In addition to learning styles, other neuromyths include: • There are critical periods in childhood after which certain things can no longer be learned. • We only use 10% of our brain. • Some people are left-brained whereas

others are right-brained. • Children must acquire their native language before a second language is learned. If they do not do so neither language will be fully acquired. 2

This said, a challenge remains that “educators and individuals with high neuroscience exposure continue to endorse about half or more of the ‘classic’ neuromyths, despite their training.” 3

Conclusion

The best part of my work at St. Andrew’s is the two hundred minutes a week I get to teach history to 10th grade students. I am confident that I am supporting and challenging this group of scholarly historians better than the first group of history students I taught when I first began teaching in Spokane, Washington in 1991. Promising research in Mind, Brain, and Education Science has made this possible for not only me, but also for each of my St. Andrew’s colleagues. And it is a journey that continues.

Glenn Whitman (gwhitman@saes.org; @gwhitmancttl) is the Director of the Center for Transformative Teaching and Learning at St. Andrew’s (www.thecttl.org) and co-author of “Neuroteach: Brain Science and the Future of Education.”