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It’s not brain surgery – thestar.com.
It’s not brain surgery
Everyone – educators, parents and students – has what it takes to improve our schools
by Alanna Mitchell
Published On Sat Nov 07 2009
I have spent a year travelling the world on a quest to find out whether new understandings of how the brain works could ever be used in the classroom.
At times, it’s felt like the pilgrimage of the lost.
Like the time a school principal told me about a seminar between academic educators and scientists that burned through three hours in a furious disagreement about the term “student engagement.”
Or the time I spent a couple of hours interviewing an education theorist only to emerge from his office with the miserable conviction that there is no observable truth, no chance of reform and the whole project is impossible.
But it’s not. Combining the fields of neuroscience and education holds out great hope to improve the way we teach our children. So here’s my manifesto to get the ball rolling.
Academics
The fields of neuroscience and education are among the most highly researched, jargon-filled, contradictory and territorial of any I have come across in more than 20 years as a journalist.
So my manifesto for the Possible School contains a plea to the academics to let some of that go. What the two fields share – and it’s a powerful bond – is a commitment to innovation, flexibility and creativity. Be it resolved that we all build on that commitment, just as we build neural connections when we learn, and vow to push the movement forward. It is possible.
Teachers
My wake-up call on teachers came when I spoke with Jonathan Sharples, a super-bright young neuroscientist at York University in England. We were having an engrossing dinner at the 17th-century Old Parsonage in Oxford when he mentioned that every time teachers teach, they’re changing brain structure, remapping the neural networks.
Snap!
They are having a biological influence on children that is in scale akin to a baby’s growth in the womb. No other profession has this sway over the fundamental cellular structure of so many human beings.
Teaching is one of the most important jobs in the world. But we don’t honour that and sometimes, neither do teachers themselves. I remember meeting a woman in the U.S. who had been part of a public-service program called Teach for America, which puts non-teachers into schools in place of teachers and pays them as if they were.
As one of the neuroscientists I spoke with said: Would we have a program called Be a Doctor for America with untrained people on the job in operating rooms? Not a chance, because we take medicine far more seriously than teaching.
But why? Apart from parenting, teaching is the most direct institutional influence on the structure of the growing brain. And yet teachers take criticism from parents, administrators, academics, politicians and even students, who slyly imply that anyone could do their jobs and probably better.
In fact, while the schools that prepare teachers need to make neuroscience an explicit part of training, of all the people I interviewed over the year the most adaptable and ready to innovate were teachers. To them, education is not an abstraction, they live it and see its victories and failures every hour.
Be it resolved that teachers are at least as important to society as doctors, and let’s treat them, recruit them, educate them and compensate them accordingly. Be it further resolved that today’s teachers educate themselves about neuroscientific findings and teach their students about this emerging field, and that they begin to think of themselves as scientists in the classroom. Every school has the potential to be a laboratory school where the science of learning is under exploration. Tomorrow’s teachers will need to learn the field as a regular part of learning to teach.
This too is possible.
Parents
Some of the saddest stories I heard over the course of the year were about obsessed parents who were living their own dreams through their children’s schooling. Like the dad who hired a public relations firm to write his daughter’s Grade 5 social studies assignment because he needed her to get all As.
Or the mom who made her highly accomplished Grade 11 son show her all his completed homework and study notes for every class.
Other parents sweat small grievances – like a teacher who has a bad day or makes a genuine mistake – without looking at the big picture.
Be it resolved that parents take a deep breath. Chill. Remember that your kids’ task at school is to build strong connections among nerve cells that carry information. To accomplish that, they need less anxiety, less stress and more ability to take risks in how they learn. They need to find their own way. Ultimately, they will only learn in order to meet their own goals, not for the sake of their parents’ goals.
Instead, how about putting your energy into discovering for yourselves how the brain learns, and prodding school boards, teacher training colleges and governments to change? How about assessing the merits of a provincial Minister of Neuroeducation? It is possible.
Students
All over the world, students are trudging to school, sometimes reluctantly, sometimes rebelliously and rarely with real joy. They do time.
As one of my 16-year-old son Nicholas’s worn-out friends put it recently: School is no longer about the knowledge, it’s about the marks.
But biologically, every child’s brain needs to learn, just as the heart needs to beat. Learning is survival. And built into that is a powerful joy of mastery and understanding.
Be it resolved that students find a way to plug into the joy of building their brains at school every day. It’s different from being the receptacle of information. And it is possible.
Why listen to me? Along with doing the research for this project, I am, at 48, the parent of two teenagers and, as of four years ago, step-parent to three older kids. My youngest is still in public high school. Each of the other four graduated from the public system and went on to university.
All five lived through divorce and many years of being raised by single parents. Three are dyslexic. Each is an amazing, highly intelligent and successful human being. Perhaps you can imagine the fascinating learning curve this has been.
Of all the stories I could tell about how much my brain grew and changed during this process, the tale of my daughter, Calista, is the one I’m choosing.
At 10, shortly after her father and I separated, she developed panic attacks. They were so severe, she couldn’t go to school. We swiftly got her help with a specialist and she learned to cope with panic and control it. And go back to school.
But she never became what you would call a talkative kid in the classroom. Her teachers – talented, all – routinely told me that they heard Calista talk for the first time in the final week of each grade. Presentations in front of the class? Forget it. Not her strength.
That changed in Grade 12 when she met Austra Gulens, her English teacher at Riverdale Collegiate. Calista had always loved literature and had become an excellent, if covert, poet. But when she met Austra, the two clicked on several levels.
Suddenly, Calista was performing Shakespeare in a precise English accent, delivering projects in front of the class with verve, finding her own identity, planning her academic future, writing like crazy. Her stepfather and I watched in wonder as this child bloomed and grew into her passions.
Together, she and Austra found a human brain connection that sparked intellectual exultation in both of them.
This is the essence of neuroeducation: an openness to let the brain grow as it needs to, fuelled by jubilation at the process and sensitive guidance from someone who’s learning, too.
Coincidentally, when Austra talked about this, she mentioned that her intellectual passions had been lit by an English professor at the University of Toronto – Patricia Bruckmann – the same beloved teacher who had inspired me years before.
Can we bottle that? Not yet. But I can attest to its power when we find it. It is transformative. It is possible.
As for Calista, she’s taking English literature at university and dreaming about taking another degree at Oxford University. All because she connected with a teacher who connected back.
This was a very interesting article I read thanks to the CBC. I’ve cut and pasted it here. Working with kids who struggle with current concepts of what constitute “proper” or “accepted” literary forms, this article challenges one to think.
(http://ow.ly/lAjW)
Clive Thompson on the New Literacy
(WIRED MAGAZINE: 17.09)
As the school year begins, be ready to hear pundits fretting once again about how kids today can’t write—and technology is to blame. Facebook encourages narcissistic blabbering, video and PowerPoint have replaced carefully crafted essays, and texting has dehydrated language into “bleak, bald, sad shorthand” (as University College of London English professor John Sutherland has moaned). An age of illiteracy is at hand, right?
Andrea Lunsford isn’t so sure. Lunsford is a professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University, where she has organized a mammoth project called the Stanford Study of Writing to scrutinize college students’ prose. From 2001 to 2006, she collected 14,672 student writing samples—everything from in-class assignments, formal essays, and journal entries to emails, blog posts, and chat sessions. Her conclusions are stirring.
“I think we’re in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen since Greek civilization,” she says. For Lunsford, technology isn’t killing our ability to write. It’s reviving it—and pushing our literacy in bold new directions.
The first thing she found is that young people today write far more than any generation before them. That’s because so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text. Of all the writing that the Stanford students did, a stunning 38 percent of it took place out of the classroom—life writing, as Lunsford calls it. Those Twitter updates and lists of 25 things about yourself add up.
It’s almost hard to remember how big a paradigm shift this is. Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn’t a school assignment. Unless they got a job that required producing text (like in law, advertising, or media), they’d leave school and virtually never construct a paragraph again.
But is this explosion of prose good, on a technical level? Yes. Lunsford’s team found that the students were remarkably adept at what rhetoricians call kairos—assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across. The modern world of online writing, particularly in chat and on discussion threads, is conversational and public, which makes it closer to the Greek tradition of argument than the asynchronous letter and essay writing of 50 years ago.
The fact that students today almost always write for an audience (something virtually no one in my generation did) gives them a different sense of what constitutes good writing. In interviews, they defined good prose as something that had an effect on the world. For them, writing is about persuading and organizing and debating, even if it’s over something as quotidian as what movie to go see. The Stanford students were almost always less enthusiastic about their in-class writing because it had no audience but the professor: It didn’t serve any purpose other than to get them a grade. As for those texting short-forms and smileys defiling serious academic writing? Another myth. When Lunsford examined the work of first-year students, she didn’t find a single example of texting speak in an academic paper.
Of course, good teaching is always going to be crucial, as is the mastering of formal academic prose. But it’s also becoming clear that online media are pushing literacy into cool directions. The brevity of texting and status updating teaches young people to deploy haiku-like concision. At the same time, the proliferation of new forms of online pop-cultural exegesis—from sprawling TV-show recaps to 15,000-word videogame walkthroughs—has given them a chance to write enormously long and complex pieces of prose, often while working collaboratively with others.
We think of writing as either good or bad. What today’s young people know is that knowing who you’re writing for and why you’re writing might be the most crucial factor of all.
…I was born in September…
Watch the video…participate!
Well, it seems that there’s only 2 weeks left before school starts up again. I’m been thinking about it a lot and have been motivated to begin the long but exciting process of putting together class outlines and the first weeks activities for the students. I’ve created a new blogsite for the new school and have even included a couple of online assignments and a welcome podcast (really, it’s just a short message for the students).
Next week I’ll be heading into the classroom and setting things up. It’ll be like starting in my first year. Although I’ve been teaching for 6 years, this will be a new school with new procedures, new staff, new students and new community. I’ll have to cart many of my resoruces from my current school and set up the classroom according to my teaching style. I’ll admit it, I’m excited about the prospect of a new community and school, but at the same time I’m uber nervous. Kind of like my first year teaching. It’s starting all over again.
It will be interesting as I will really be living in two schools-my current one in the mornings and then a short drive to the new one in the afternoons. I foresee many a lunchtime spent eating in my car. But both schools are accommodating and very supportive. Even though being surplussed (i.e. redundant) for half a day is not a nice thing to happen, it has shown me that I’m lucky enough to have a lot of support within my school, the teaching profession in general and even within the community in which I work.
I am inspired by our new Director of Education Chris Spence, to integrate Twitter into the classroom. I’ve been using blogs and podcasts now for a couple of years and have had amazing success, both with the quality of student work and the level with which the students are engaged. I’m an avid Tweeter in my outside-school-life but hadn’t given much thought to adding the microblogging technology into the classroom. That was until I noticed that our Director of Education had created his own Twitter account and encouraged anyone who wanted to to follow along. Well, that got me thinking: Perhaps Twitter is a classroom worthy application after all. If nothing else, it will give my students a little insight into who I am as a teacher and person. After all, the more students begin to understand you as a person, the more they will trust you and respect you. The more trust and respect there is between you and your students, the more authentic learning experiences everyone (including the teacher) will have.
I have now added my Titter updates to all the classroom pages that I use with my students! Consider the experiment in everyday integration of social media within the classroom begun.
