BRAINSTORM
It's not brain surgery
November 7, 2009
Alanna Mitchell
SPECIAL TO THE STAR
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.
alanna_mitchell@mac.com
Toronto Star