ATKINSON SERIES
Cuban system leads the way
November 6, 2009
Alanna Mitchell
SPECIAL TO THE STAR
Neuroscientists are adding to our knowledge of how the brain works almost daily. It could transform education.
So how can we get to the Possible School?
It's not going to be easy to modify classroom teaching. As one neuroscientist put it, it's like rebuilding an ocean liner at sea.
But there are also pivotal steps that can be taken today, with little or no extra cost.
Classrooms could look and feel different right away.
Some of it is our own attitude – simply altering how we understand education in light of what neuroscience is showing what's happening inside the brain.
Step 1
A basic new neuroscientific principle is that every child's brain is roughly the same at birth, regardless of skin colour, wealth, sex or geography. Each of these brains has roughly the same capability. Intelligence is not fixed, but almost limitless. As well, the brain is built to learn and contains a chemical reward system for learning: the rush of dopamine. Learning is a primal joy, like sex, and it is imperative, like eating and drinking.
Applying that to the classroom means explaining to teachers, students and parents that children have huge capacity for learning, even if they haven't found it yet. Studies have shown that if a child thinks she can learn and grow her neural connections, then she can.
Psychologist Carol Dweck, author of Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, has shown how differences in attitude show up on brain scans. In one study of adults, she asked people to answer hard questions and then gave them feedback while monitoring their brain scans. One group – those trying to prove their ability instead of improve it – were only attentive when the feedback assessed their answers. Their brains weren't lighting up at other times.
The group that saw their brains as expandable were attentive both when told whether they were correct and also when the researcher explained why they were wrong. They were willing to learn. The breakthrough for education would be for teachers, parents and – critically – students to understand that one mindset makes for a stronger brain than the other. So, if a student gets 43 per cent in a math test, it doesn't mean that student cannot learn math and should give up, just that he hasn't mastered this part yet. And if another child breezes to 98 per cent, that child should be encouraged to tackle tougher math.
School shouldn't be about proving you're smart or stupid. It should be about learning and growing the brain.
Step 2
Neuroscience tells us that the goal of teaching is make sure children's brains are calm and interested enough to build strong pathways among their nerve cells, and then reinforce those paths. It's those connections that contain retrievable information and knowledge.
That means a teacher's job is to show students how to develop a healthy brain, says Stuart Shanker, professor of psychology and philosophy at York University in Toronto. This comes down to teaching children about executive function – the "Marshmallow Test" – so they can give their brains a chance to build these pathways, he says.
In the primary years, that might mean encouraging children to repeat out loud what they're doing so they focus on the task. Or explaining to them that they can play a favourite game at 10 a.m. but not at 9:55 a.m. Ontario has a particularly golden opportunity. Here, Charles Pascal, the premier's special adviser (and executive director of the Atkinson Charitable Foundation that is funding this research project) has just delivered his report on early learning. In it, Pascal says schools should emphasize inquiry and emotional literacy.
Step 3
Apply the idea that education is about mass customization rather than mass standardization. Remember when airplane flights used to feature a single movie on overhead screens that were hard to see? Today, every seat usually has its own little screen and a wide selection of choices. Plus, some passengers take their own iPods with different menus altogether.
I was recently on a flight from Toronto to Victoria and noticed that no two passengers were watching or listening to the same thing at the same time, but we were all enjoying the trip to the same destination. It's a good metaphor for the mass customization of education.
That will take creativity, ingenuity, patience and tenacity on the part of teachers. But it's possible.
For example, a young woman I know in first-year university recently described an essay she wrote on a particularly rich time in medieval history. Her class was not allowed to use any sources apart from the few assigned by the teacher, under pain of penalty. That's mass standardization.
By contrast, I was at the experimental Ross School on Long Island recently in a classroom where Mark Tompkins, a Grade 8 teacher, was helping students prepare for a final exam that would ask them to compare leaders such as Genghis Khan and Mohammed or Charlemagne. The class came up with half a dozen different ways to do that, including making a chart, writing an essay using stories from the leaders' lives and even writing it through the architecture of the monomyth, or the Hero's Journey. There were no limits on the resources and each student was encouraged to do as much research as possible. That's mass customization.
Step 4
The great neurological task of adolescence is to find identity and meaning. It's as important to their brains as eating, drinking and sleeping are to their bodies.
If the education system could take that into account, teaching teens would be more efficient and effective. That means explaining to them why they're learning things, how those things fit into the world at large, why they are relevant. So, why is it important to learn about the 14th century? Because it shares political, religious and social issues with the 21st century. Why learn quantum physics theory? Because only then can you understand modern art, poetry, philosophy and film.
Some teens are also focusing on social and emotional survival over academic excellence. One English literature teacher I interviewed has been studying neuroscience adapted to this new understanding by setting some of her early assignments around the theme of self-identity. So her high school students were given the task of explicitly figuring out who they wanted to be and that was discussed with the class.
She also began labelling her units of work around global themes of the work. The Othello unit became the "Motivation" unit, as a way of explaining to students why they were studying the play in the first place.
Step 5
The other obvious immediate strategy is to teach children how their own brains work. They are fascinated with this and it will help them understand how to harness neuroscience in ways adults may not be able to imagine.
The Possible School will appear as teachers are routinely trained in neuroscience as part of their teaching certificate. As well, schools all over the world will become research facilities along the model of teaching hospitals where teachers and scientists are learning ever more about how to lay down strong neural connections.
"Great teachers are natural researchers who constantly gather evidence and feedback regarding how kids are doing, and adapting accordingly," Pascal says.
Long-term, Shanker looks to Cuba, the best example in the world of applying neuroscientific principles to a whole educational system. Cubans have rethought the system from top to bottom.
Some features: every school has a public hygiene officer so the children eat well and are in good physical health. They have sports directors and music directors. Soon, each school will have a chess director because a core aspect of self-regulation, or executive function, is sequencing. Chess teaches sequencing.
The final word?
"Neuroscience is the new frontier," Pascal says. "But the evidence has to inform practice and the practice has to inform research and once that happens, the best will inform policy."
Until then, he says, we should think of every school as a laboratory where we must experiment with the latest knowledge about how kids learn.
"We need to take what we know and play with it," he says.
alanna_mitchell@mac.com
Toronto Star