This entry continues the focus on one of the principles on which Sustainable Teaching is founded: Education will improve as a result of discussion between teachers and brain researchers; new discoveries and theories will inform teaching and actual classroom reality will inform theory.

Just We Two

Listen. Do you want to know a secret? Do you promise not to tell? Woh-oo-oh, I’m in love with neuroscience.

In fact, everyone seems to love neuroscience, to worship neuroscience. At conferences and workshops teachers and administrators pay rapt attention to lecture after lecture listening for the answer to one overwhelming question: how can we get students engaged in their education?

Given the constant frustrations of the job—failure to reach students who seem to stand on the far side of an ever-widening chasm, grinding pressure to improve test scores, streams of debilitating criticism, fear, self-doubt—it’s an understandable question. And god knows, new research is providing some promising insights into how we learn, insights that challenge many of the traditional assumptions and practices embedded in our schools.

But last night, I was reminded of the many teachers who, long before the fMRI supported their discoveries, challenged many of the same assumptions and practices. I was going through my bookshelves and found an old Dell paperback (95 cents), John Holt’s 1964 book How Children Fail. Holt was a teacher, and he drew his inferences and conclusions not from brain images but from the behavior of the students with whom he worked.

As I sat and reread pieces of his book, I was struck by the similarities between his insights and the implications of today’s research:

• The importance of attention and developing students’ metacognitive skills: "Most of us have very imperfect control over our attention. … Part of being a good student is learning to be aware of that state of one’s own mind and the degree of one’s own understanding."
• The relation of context (scaffolding) to performance: "Would [my students] have discovered [the answer] if I had not paved the way with leading questions? Hard to tell."
• How grades (scores) come to replace learning: "We wanted them to figure out how to balance the beam, and introduced scoring as a matter of motivation. But they outsmarted us, and figured out ways to get a good score that had nothing to do with whether the beam balanced or not."
• The importance of regression (still confused with failure) in learning: "… perhaps we should see that failure is honorable and constructive rather than humiliating." "A baby does not react to failure as an adult does, or even a five-year-old, because she has not yet been made to feel that failure is shame."
• The effect of fear on thinking and learning: "What I now see for the first time is the mechanism by which fear destroys intelligence, the way it affects a child’s whole way of looking at, thinking about, and dealing with life. So we have two problems, not one: to stop children from being afraid and then to break them of the bad thinking habits into which their fears have driven them. … What is most surprising of all is how much fear there is in school."
• How stress can make something like "word-blindness" seem like a reading disability: "My own belief is that blindness to patterns or symbols, such as words, is in most instances emotional and psychological, rather than neurological."
• The need to link new learning to the real-world understandings brought to the classroom by different learners: "Between what he was studying for chemistry and the real world, the world of his senses and common sense, there was no connection."
• Issues of homework and rigor: "I have noticed many times that when the workload of the class is light, kids are willing to do some thinking, to take the time to figure things out; when the workload is heavy the ‘I-don’t-get-it’ begins to sound, the thinking stops, they expect us to show them everything. Thus one ironical consequence of the drive for the so-called higher standards in schools is that the children are too busy to think."
• The danger of emphasizing coverage and testing as opposed to constructing conceptual understanding: "We do not consider that a child may be unable to learn because he does not grasp the fundamental nature of the symbols he is working with. … [These children] would not be in the spot they were in if, all along the line, their teachers had been concerned to build slowly and solidly, instead of trying to make it look as if the children knew all the material that was supposed to be covered."
• The connection between emotion and learning, the importance of emotional relevance: "[What I was teaching] did not meet any felt intellectual need. … The only answer that really sticks in a child’s mind is the answer to a question that he asked or might ask of himself."
• The need to understand the knowledge and skills the learner brings to the classroom: "The reason this poor child has learned hardly anything in six years of school is that no one ever began where she was."
• And the great hoax of schools: "Even [young children] learn that what most teachers want and reward are not knowledge and understanding but the appearance of them."

Why do I cite these conclusions from the past? To remind us that good teachers know or have felt many of the things that researchers are now "discovering." Let me be clear here: I know perfectly well that many teachers who resist change and remain wedded to the failed practices of the past hide behind the comforting fiction that they "already knew that." I am not talking about them.

However, when teachers and researchers come together, too often, I think, teachers sit mutely absorbing the lectures of the neuroscientists as though the teachers have nothing to contribute, and many of the neuroscientists project this attitude, as well. Lecture needs to give way to discussion because there is a great deal that teachers and scientists can learn from each other as we search for places where neural imaging resonates with student behavior.

Perhaps together, we will finally be strong enough to act on the insights that teachers like John Holt wrote so passionately about 45 years ago. Perhaps we won’t have to wait another 45 years to fundamentally change our model for schooling. Woh-oo-oh-oh.

(Note for younger teachers: The reference in this essay is to an old Beatles song, "Do You Want to Know a Secret.")

(Note: If you are interested in reading more about the relationship between teachers and neuroscience, you can read "Using and Misusing Neuroscience" by Christodoulou and Gaab published by ScienceDirect and available in the Sustainable Teaching Forum library.)