Teaching with the Brain in Mind

As I read this book, especially chapters 3-6, I constantly reflect back to students and classrooms that I have worked in. For nearly every topic discussed I could think of both good and bad examples of how the brain grows and what it needs to learn most efficiently.

In chapter 3, “Getting Ready to Learn,” I thought of how my sister raises her three children in contrast to what I pick up through conversations with the students in my classes. My sister rarely lets her kids watch TV and when they do it is a special treat. Often, when I talk to students about their night or weekend they will reply, “I watched TV all night.” Or “I just played video games this weekend.”  Granted these responses come from middle school children who are not engaged in the conversation very often but I do think it might speak to some of the challenges that many of my students face. The comparisons only go on from there; diet, sleep schedules, home life/environment. 

I admit that my sister has the education, time and resources to be able to parent the way that she does and many other people do not. It is to this point that the end of chapter 3 that I found the most useful and actionable ideas. The authors suggest many ways to inform and educate parents on how to get their children ready to learn. I personally do not see this happening in our school district and I think it would be a great use of some of our resources. I do know that the Head Start program is very good at distributing this information and providing classes for parents. This program targets pre K students, which as the book suggests is a massively important time in development.

Chapter 4 breaks down the total number of hours a student will spend in a class in their life time, over 14,000, and the ethical responsibility teachers have to use this time to enrich their lives.  I notice a growing trend, at least at my school, to maximize classroom time. While I do think that this is coming from a good place and backed by research, there are many more ways to enrich the lives of students at school that are not class room instructional times. In just a few years I have seen a drastic decrease in field trips, music assemblies, and school community activities. I feel that these events can be equally enriching and help students build bonds and the feeling of community that will only help their academic enrichment.  (my soap box moment for this blog.)

Finally, I found chapters 4 and 5 to be very thought provoking. The combination of the two relating the brains attention capabilities and the environment that the student is in made me reflect on my classroom.  As a classroom teacher I do not have control of a student’s brain chemistry but I can control the environment for the most part. Creating a classroom environment that allows students to feel safe and engaged can make a huge difference in attention, discipline and ultimately learning.  I think that this can be achieved by changing seating charts, decorations, routines (slightly) and classroom jobs frequently. 

The Heinz Predicament

While I read about the two students described and their reasoning on the Heinz problem, I could easily see myself as Jake. The answers he gave and his line of reasoning is very much in step with how I would think about this problem (although I would hope that I would rate a level 5 or 6 on the moral development scale). I also found that the reasoning used by Amy and Clair in the article very much matched what I would expect. In my own life, when discussing disputes or ethical dilemmas with a woman that I am dating, I have found that their general line of reasoning matches the depictions in this article. Understanding this and being aware of how I think differently than some people in my life is useful. But how will this apply as a teacher?

In the classroom there are hundreds of combinations of relationships happening all at once. Having an idea of how different people view relationships and make decisions based on those relationships is very important. Thinking about our students moral reasoning is an interesting but overlooked area of teaching; in fact the subject area is basically left completely out of education. In public schools, it seems, that there is only time for an occasional aside during the reading of a classic novel or during the study of civil rights for the discussion of morality. In my opinion, if we are trying to prepare young people to be productive members of society, we need to find more time to discuss morals, values and ethics. We also need to help students understand that they may have differing paths of reasoning toward their ethical answers. My ideal school system would incorporate lessons along these lines. However, the obvious question is then raised; what morals do we teach? are we teaching them to think morally or are we teaching them to think critically and then discover their own morals?

Caution: Constructivist work ahead

As an aspiring teacher, my idealistic side wants to take a constructivist view of knowledge gathering. However my realist side has doubts about how this can work in a real classroom. The article, Constructivist Cautions, points out many of my concerns.  The metaphor used by the authors of "lighting the flame" versus "filling the bucket" resonated with me. I am beginning to think that you can not have one without the other. It seems that at least some direct instruction is needed to get the project of a constructivist based classroom off the ground.

Of my many concerns, the most pressing is; how do we evaluate the various constructions students will make? Clearly some will students will make "better" or more accurate constructions. But who is to say that it is in fact better? Constructivist epistemology that takes into account a students social and cultural backgrounds seems like a slippery slope to relativism where every students construction could be justified as correct.

This article also made clear that constructivism is more of an explanation of how we come to knowledge and not a set of steps that can be applied to a classroom. This clarification was helpful. However it raised the question; What is knowledge? Where is it? What kinds of knowledge are there?
These questions recalled to memory a podcast conversation I recently listened to on the subject of knowledge, between neuroscientist and author Sam Harris and his guest Professor of Physics at Oxford University David Deutsch found here https://www.samharris.org/podcast/item/surviving-the-cosmos .