‘Work hard, play hard’ and ‘work hard or go home’ are bumper sticker slogans that may help achieve success on the field but not in the classroom. Recent research and books on learning suggest editing the first slogan to ‘work hard, play harder’ if we want to create academic environments that help students succeed. In America’s education system, however, we have focused exclusively on work to such an extent that play is being excluded from school. Most American school districts have either reduced or eliminated recess, phys-ed and other playtime to allocate more time for work focused on studying and taking standardized tests.
The importance of play in successful learning has been highlighted and demonstrated by ancient scholars (i.e., Plato), modern neuroscientists (i.e., William Klemm) and the top test scoring countries in the world (i.e., Finland). American education leaders have ignored the evidence for the play-learning nexus by placing their heads in the proverbial sand when they should be building more sandboxes for students at all academic levels. Learning sandboxes range from wooden sandboxes at recess time for elementary schoolchildren to Makerspaces for middle and high school students to virtual online sandboxes for college students. “Play,” according to Diane Ackerman (the public science writer of The Human Age and 23 other books), “is our brain’s favorite way of learning.”
Our brain’s favorite way of learning is being removed from American schools. “When I was in elementary school,” states Peter Gray (author of Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Live), “in the 1950s, we had six-hour school days: two hours of outdoors playing per day, half hour in the morning, half hour during lunch, and a full hour in the afternoon.” Today, the national average is twenty-six minutes of recess and Connecticut, my home state, only “recommends” 20 minutes (in addition, my three boys—ages 7, 9 & 11—are given less than 20 minutes for lunch each school day). There are less than a handful of states that even require daily recess. In contrast, Finland—always at the top or near the top of international test scores—provides a 15-minute break every 45 minutes for students during the school day.
The demise of play in American schools has been linked by Peter Gray and others to a decline in cognitive and social skills as well as an increase in mental disorders. William Klemm, professor of neuroscience at Texas A&M University, recently summarized several studies on the importance of play writing that “When members of a play-oriented species [such as humans] are denied access to juvenile play, they can become dysfunctional adults…Juvenile play sculpts the brain to be more adaptable later in life. In modern human society, juvenile play is often obstructed by such externals as over-scheduling, too much adult supervision, and too many restrictions…In this respect, the ‘good old days’ really were the good old days.” Elementary school students need their play for cognitive and social-emotional learning and we, as a society, need to provide them with the playtime necessary for their development into functional adults. Increasing time for recess is not only healthy for our children but our communities.
“Do not,” Plato said, “keep children to their studies by compulsion but by play.” Yes, even Plato knew about the importance of play in education. One of the most creative ways to “keep children to their studies by play” is to build time into middle and high school curricula for using a Makerspace (a.k.a. Hackerspace). A Makerspace is an area where students learn through experimental play with technology and ideas under the guidance of teachers and other experts in the community. It is a space where students play with concepts learned in the classroom for the purpose of bringing their ideas to life via a 3D printer, software code, plasma cutter and other tools. In the words of the Makerspace Playbook: “Making is innovative and resourceful. Makers build off the idea of others and choose the best tools for the job…They identify their own challenges and solve new problems. Making provides ample opportunities to deeply understand difficult concepts. Makers seek out STEM content to improve their projects, and they cross disciplines to achieve their goals, rather than staying within one specialty.” A Makerspace is where Einstein’s idea of combinatory play is figuratively and literally brought to life.
If a community or school district does not have the resources to immediately setup a Makerspace, a relatively inexpensive way of incorporating play into the curriculum is by gamifying parts of classes. Game-based learning occurs through low-tech ways such as the collaborative geography game called Galactic Mappers (seen in the video via Edutopia noted below) to high-tech options such as Statecraft.sim, which I used in my International Relations course this past semester. Assessing student learning is not only more enjoyable for the students as compared to standardized tests but my experience shows that their learning is deeper and more enduring.
The U.S. education system is using sand exclusively for building sand timers (for tests) rather than using it to build imaginations and engage students in learning. The system is focused on turning over sand timers rather than turning on students to learning. Since I’m at the tail end of the argument, let’s go back to one of the bumper sticker slogans I started with to sum it all up: ‘go hard or go home.’ School leaders will have to ‘go’ a little harder to work play into their curricula or send their students ‘home’ knowing that they are less cognitively, emotionally and socially prepared for the real world than they could and should be.
Cordell, Sigrid Anderson, “Nixing Recess: The Silly, Alarmingly Popular Way to Punish Kids,” The Atlantic (October, 2013).
Edutopia, “Building Formative Assessment into Game-Based Learning,” YouTube (May 13, 2014).
Klemm, William, “The Neuroscience of Why Children Play,” Psychology Today blog, Memory Medic (December 12, 2014).
Klemm, W.R., Mental Biology: The New Science of How the Brain and Mind Relate (New York: Prometheus Books, 2014).
Korbey, Holly, “Despite Benefits, Recess fro Many Students is Restricted,” MindShift, KQED blog (July 26, 2013).
Makerspace Playbook: School Edition (Spring 2013).
Solomon, Andrew, “Go Play Outside,” New York Times Book Review of A Country Called Childhood by Jay Griffiths (December 14, 2014): p 26-27.
Cartoon © Phil Watson. Used with permission.
An all-or-nothing person; you know the type. Everything is black-or-white and it’s their way or the highway. As coaches, they may rack up a few W’s in the win column but as educators and leaders, they lose sight of how effective learning happens. The all-or-nothing believers and debaters in education are blind to what works in learning because they refuse to see the different shades of gray between their black-or-white ways of thinking. Education is all about the gray matter. The science of learning is in their blind spot. Two of the biggest blind spots in education are testing and memorization.
The two all-or-nothing education camps on testing that garner the most attention in social and traditional media are those who believe standardized tests are important for academic achievement as well as accountability and should be administered every year (i.e., the No Child Left Behind advocates) and those who believe there should be no tests (i.e., the Free School movement). Recent studies on testing, however, demonstrate that frequent low-stakes testing (a.k.a. quizzing) timely spaced so that students begin to forget is the most effective way of making information “stick” in their minds (it is called spaced learning). It is not one big test to prepare for every year and it is not zero testing that help students learn but the counterintuitive idea of “forgetting to learn” with frequently spaced quizzing that advances academic achievement. It is the blind spot in our educational policy debates that can help us paradoxically see the most effective learning strategies for our children, if we would only turn around or turn a few research pages to see them.
When it comes to memorization or knowing facts, the blind spot of the all-or-nothing schools of thought should be called the Goldilocks Effect: it is not all memorizing and it is not zero memorizing but ‘just’ the right mixture of memorizing and recitation that helps a student learn. Several new books on the science of learning recommend splitting a student’s time for acquiring new facts into thirds where one-third of the time should be devoted to memorizing and two-thirds to reciting the knowledge. A common theme in many of the books echo neuroscientist W.R. Klemm’s Mental Biology mantra: “the more you know, the more you can know.” As Ian Leslie points out in Curious:
“Learning skills grow organically out of specific knowledge of specific domains—that is to say, facts…The wider your knowledge, the more widely your intelligence can range and the more purchase it gets on new information. This is why the argument that schools ought to prioritize learning skills over knowledge makes no sense; the very foundation for such skills is memorized knowledge. The more we know, the better we are at thinking.”
Knowing facts and learning go hand-in-hand and are mutually supportive. The all-or-nothing types are fostering a false dichotomy between knowledge and learning.
The science of learning is showing education leaders and policymakers where to look but they are implementing education policies as though they are, in the words of a Thomas Dolby’s 1980s song, blinded by science. If education is about learning (as it should be), then the science of learning should be informing policy. The fields of neuroscience and education have combined to form the emerging field (26 years old) of neuroeducation (a.k.a. educational neuroscience) that is not only revealing the blind spots of our educational system but is also providing ideas of how we should address them. The all-or-nothing schools of thought can only overcome the science of learning by ignoring it. The all-or-nothing crowd might want to try all-for-one and one-for-all.
BOOKS & ARTICLES:
Amy Adams, “Stanford Researchers Bridge Education and Neuroscience to Strengthen the Growing Field of Educational Neuroscience,” Stanford Report (November 21, 2014).
Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III and Mark A. McDaniel, Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014).
Benedict Carey, How We Learn: The Surprising Truth about When, Where, and Why it Happens (New York: Random House, 2014).
Benedict Carey, “Studying for the Test by Taking It,” The New York Times (November 22, 2014).
Paul A. Howard-Jones, “Neuroscience and Education: Myths and Messages,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience (October 15, 2014).
W. R. Klemm, Mental Biology: The New Science of How the Brain and Mind Relate (New York: Prometheus Books, 2014).
Ian Leslie, Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends on It (New York: Basic Books, 2014).
To stir a crowd is to get them excited about something and to stir a drink, such as the perfect glass of chocolate milk, is to blend seamlessly (where there is no chocolate at the bottom of the glass but the taste of chocolate in every sip). Two recent books on learning stir in both ways; they get the reader excited about learning and they clearly show that the basis of learning is blending knowledge with understanding. While one book is more scientifically centered (Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning) and the other is more story-based (How We Learn: The Surprising Truth about When, Where, and Why it Happens), they reinforce each other’s messages in complementary styles. The trouble with both books is that while their ideas are scientifically sound, clearly explained and need to be implemented in schoolrooms as well as boardrooms, the books are not assigned reading for policymakers, teachers and leaders: anyone who cares about and/or whose job is centered around learning needs to read these books. Each book STIRS the reader to actions that are sometimes counterintuitive but always effective for successful learning. (STIRS is an acronym I created to highlight the important factors that both books focus on for building an education that generates successful learning: Spaced, Transfer, Interleaving, Recitation & Sleep.)
Spaced—Spaced learning or the “Forget to Learn Theory” is one of the most effective ways to educate. It is based on the counterintuitive idea that if you want to know something so well that you can easily retrieve the knowledge whenever you want (i.e., your brain as Google), you should separate the learning of that knowledge by gaps of time where you begin to forget the knowledge. This spaced practice of building knowledge embeds learning in long-term memory because when you try to remember something you think you forgot, you activate complex networks in the brain that makes learning more robust and durable. “Forgetting enables and deepens learning,” according to Benedict Carey in How We Learn, “by filtering out distracting information and by allowing some breakdown that, after reuse, drives retrieval and storage strength higher than they were originally. Those are the basic principles that emerge from brain biology and cognitive science (p. 41).” A method to avoid any robust learning is to do what too many traditional teachers recommend (and what Rudy Giuliani famously called for in the 2012 presidential election): “drill baby drill” or what is known in the science of learning lingo as massed practice. Constant drilling and cramming may work for short-term memory goals but it simply does not work for embedding knowledge in long-term memory or, in other words, for any durable learning purpose.
Transfer—The more difficult and effortful we find learning something, the more durable and transferable the learning is to different settings. Both books use Robert and Elizabeth Bjork’s research on “desirable difficulties” as a foundational concept for outlining how learning can be robust and applicable in other contexts. In the words of Brown, Roediger and McDaniel, “the more effort required to retrieve (or, in effect, relearn) something, the better you learn it…The retrieval difficulties posed by spacing [and other practices] are overcome by invoking the same mental processes that will be needed later in applying the learning in everyday settings” (p. 82 & 85). We learn deeper and with wider applicability when learning is effortful.
Interleaving—An effortful and desirably difficult method for learning is interleaving (spacing is another kind of desirable difficulty). Interleaving is the practice of mixing two or more subjects or skills in one learning session. It usually involves weaving new ideas with older material. Make it Stick points-out that “learning from interleaved practice feels slower than learning from massed practice. Teachers and students sense the difference…As a result, interleaving is unpopular and seldom used. Teachers dislike it because it feels sluggish. Students find it confusing…But the research shows unequivocally that mastery and long-term retention are much better if you interleave practice than if you mass it” (p. 50). The mixed practice of interleaving, in short, makes the brain work harder, which makes learning stronger.
Recitation—If you want to remember a written passage or anything else you should spend more time rehearsing or restating it rather than studying or memorizing it. Amazingly, reciting a passage increases your memorization of it better than memorizing it by itself. As Carey writes in How We Learn, you should “spend the first third of your time memorizing it, and the remaining two thirds reciting from memory” (p. 85). In another section of the book, Carey explains how the best way to learn something is to teach it and he calls that “the high-octane kind” of studying (p. 102-103); a recitation with an exclamation.
Sleep—While How We Learn devotes an entire chapter to the importance of sleep to learning (chapter ten), Make it Stick weaves sleep into sections of the book highlighting its importance for consolidating learning. The books, for me, reinforced the ideas and arguments made in the American Academy of Pediatrics policy statement this past August for delaying the time schools start each day all for the purpose of improving health and academic success. Another study on delaying school start times by the University of Minnesota in St. Paul (February 2014) “found improved grades and standardized test scores, and a 65 to 70 percent reduction in teen car accidents.” Scores up and accidents down sounds like a type of balanced learning that is good for the students and their communities.
“How we learn” is really about “making it stick” in our brain and the combination of the two books provides scientific and pedagogical clarity for how robust and durable learning can and should occur. Reading the books together was like stirring the perfect glass of chocolate milk made to toast learning. I enjoyed every sip … I learned from every chapter.
American Academy of Pediatrics, “School Start Times for Adolescents: Policy Statement” (Pediatrics: August 25, 2014)
Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III and Mark A. McDaniel, Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning (Harvard University Press/Belknap Press: April, 2014)
Benedict Carey, How We Learn: The Surprising Truth about When, Where, and Why it Happens (Random House: September, 2014).
Andy Coghlan, “Open Schools Later so Teens can Lie In, Say US Doctors” (New Scientist: August 25, 2014)
The American Dream, as James Thurow coined and described it in 1931, is about the equality of opportunity. If you believe that Thurow is right, then you need to wake up and open your eyes … now, because organizations from the American Federal Reserve to the International Monetary Fund to Science magazine have all released reports this year showing that inequality is dangerously high. The reports caution that if nothing is done to address the inequality of opportunity in the United States, the American Dream will slowly become a nightmare for Uncle Sam.
The nightmare is being conjured up by two interconnected trends: a growing income gap fueled by diminishing educational opportunities. Educational opportunity provides the surest footing when climbing America’s socio-economic ladder but that foothold is slipping away from an increasing number of Americans each year. In other words, education is becoming less of a force for economic opportunity because the number of Americans each year that have the resources to pursue educational achievements (which will help them climb the socio-economic ladder) is fewer and fewer.
Janet Yellen, Chairperson of the United States Federal Reserve, recently explained (October 17, 2014) “The extent and continuing increase in inequality in the United States greatly concern me…I think it is appropriate to ask whether this trend is compatible with values rooted in our nation’s history, among them the high value Americans have traditionally placed on equality of opportunity.” The International Monetary Fund (IMF) warned in March 2014 that the level of inequality in the U.S. “has returned to levels not seen since before the Great Depression” and more generally that “rising income inequality is weighing on global economic growth and fueling political instability.” Science magazine focused its entire May 2014 issue on inequality and one of its main findings was that “the United States has both the lowest [socio-economic] mobility and highest inequality among all wealthy democratic countries.” There are many other non-partisan reports, books and articles released this year but I think you get the point: inequality and, more specifically, inequality of opportunity is rapidly growing thereby slowly killing the American Dream (it is neither a Democrat nor Republican issue but an American challenge).
The best way to keep the American Dream alive has been and continues to be through education, especially a college education (it offers every individual an opportunity to climb the socio-economic ladder). Although Yellen called early education and higher education the “cornerstones of opportunity,” she worried aloud stating “I fear the large and growing burden of paying for it may make it harder for many young people to take advantage of the opportunity higher education offers.” She cited a report showing that “the median annual earnings of full-time workers with a four-year bachelor’s degree are 79 percent higher than the median for those with only a high school diploma” but also provided statistics that showed that every year there are fewer Americans who have the resources to pursue such an opportunity:
…the wealthiest 5 percent of American households held 54 percent of all wealth reported in the 1989 survey. Their share rose to 61 percent in 2010 and reached 63 percent in 2013. By contrast, the rest of those in the top half of the wealth distribution—families that in 2013 had a net worth between $81,000 and $1.9 million—held 43 percent of wealth in 1989 and only 36 percent in 2013. The lower half of households by wealth held just 3 percent of wealth in 1989 and only 1 percent in 2013.
The problem is that although education is the key for unlocking economic prosperity—especially in a globalized-knowledge based economy—the key is out of reach for an increasing proportion of Americans every year. Education has been our society’s equalizer until the last couple of decades. However, a new college-rating index that ranks colleges on their ability to provide “pathways for social and economic mobility” was released this month and it seeks to refocus and strengthen America’s great equalizer: higher-education.
The Social Mobility Index (SMI), which was created by CollegeNET and PayScale, was constructed to “stimulate other schools to move beyond opportunity rhetoric towards meaningful action.” Some universities such as Western Connecticut State University (ranked #11 in the country and #1 in Connecticut), where I am fortunate to be a professor, are taking meaningful actions—but there are too few WCSUs “contributing in a responsible way to solving the dangerous problem of economic immobility in our country” (SMI). In answering the question “What should students and their families take away from the SMI rankings?” the authors reply: “If a student wants to pursue academics in an institution that models awareness and civic responsibility, the SMI can provide a valuable guide.” Shouldn’t all educational institutions and organizations strive to pursue such meaningful actions? Wouldn’t a focus on SMI rankings rather than “pursuing the false prestige in popular periodicals” (you know the ones) make our society stronger and more dynamic?
T.E. Lawrence (a.k.a. Lawrence of Arabia) said “All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity. But the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.” While WCSU is one of this country’s leading universities in creating Lawrence’s day dreamers, educational institutions and leaders at all levels have important roles to play in creating and sustaining America’s day dream believers (men and women capable of transforming their dreams into reality). This country was built on the equality of opportunity and education has been a cornerstone of not only building the American Dream but for its realization. Those who diminish and weaken our educational institutions and opportunities at any level (local, state & national) and for any reason will abruptly awaken to a living nightmare created by their own vanity. Education on the pre-K, primary, secondary and higher-ed levels are the ‘pillars’ upon which the strength of America rests and the ‘pillows’ upon which the American Dream occurs.
Binyamin Appelbaum, “Janet Yellen Warns of Inequality Threat,” The New York Times, October 18, 2014
Gilbert Chin and Elizabeth Culotta, “The Science of Inequality: What the Numbers Tell Us,” Science, May 2104
Pedro Nicolaci da Costa, “Janet Yellen Decries Widening Wealth Disparity,” The Wall Street Journal, October 17, 2014.
Nicholas Kristof, “It’s Now the Canadian Dream,” The New York Times, May 14, 2014
Survey Acknowledges WCSU as a Leader in Promoting Social Mobility Western Connecticut State University website
Ian Talley, “IMF Warns on the Dangers of Growing Income Inequality,” 3/14/2014, The Wall Street Journal
Yellen, Janet L., “Perspectives on Inequality and Opportunity from the Survey of Consumer Finances,” Speech at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System at the Conference on Economic Opportunity and Inequality (October 17, 2014), Boston, MA.
Everyone’s heard the saying that “nice guys finish last” but reality and evolutionary science show that compassionate people finish on top…together. From Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man written 140 years ago to current neuroscience research showing that our brain’s structure is hardwired to be kind, generous and social rather than mean, selfish and asocial, the evidentiary support for compassion as the strongest instinct for evolutionary success in both the animal and business worlds as well as for creating vibrant academic and civic communities is wide and deep. Any doubt or skepticism for the idea does not come from science but from our popular culture; we commercialize “survival of the fittest” when science and reality show that it is really “survival of the kindest” that leads to more durable success.
We popularize, propagate and celebrate independent achievement above all other values and the cost of such exclusiveness has been hinted upon in newspaper headlines and academic studies over the last five years. “Almost 80 percent of [middle and high school] students,” according to a 2014 study by Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, “ranked achievement or happiness over caring for others.” The authors of the report highlight a “rhetoric/reality gap”—a mismatch between what parents and teachers say is important and what our children and students see us do—as the “root” cause of the student rankings. Another study from 2009 in a journal of business and economics reached the following conclusion after surveying the values of business students: “This evidence suggests that business school curricula that focus on acting ethically because it is the right thing to do may be ineffective. Our results indicate it may be important to openly discuss ethical behavior in a cost-benefit framework with the costs and benefits clearly defined.” The authors’ conclusion offers clear insight into the ideological undercurrent of the 2008 economic tsunami that swept over all of us.
The headlines show why we need to strive to be more than just achievers and why we need to weave compassion into learning environments at all levels of education. “Any healthy civil society,” as the Harvard Graduate School of Education report states, “also depends on adults who are committed to their communities and who, at pivotal times, will put the common good before their own. We don’t seem to be preparing large numbers of youth to create this society.” Do we really want a society of self-centered and self-absorbed achievers who answer ethical questions on a broad range of issues from a personal cost-benefit analysis? The idea that there has to be a choice between achievement and caring for others is a false dilemma. There is a better model for success that strengthens society as it strengthens the individual. We can prepare our children, students and employees to be compassionate achievers.
A compassionate achiever is someone who can apply their knowledge and skills to problems and opportunities in ways that strengthen themselves as well as others. A compassionate achiever is really a successful learner who thinks beyond him- or her-self; for learning is the process of acquiring knowledge and skills so that they can be applied with efficiency and effectiveness to problems and opportunities. The issue with education is that it has become a process of gathering and knowing facts to be recalled…period. While gathering and knowing facts is important, we should not be treating it as the ‘landing zone’ of education (via standardized tests). Rather, knowing facts should be the ‘launching pad’ for learning.
The ‘launching pad’ for learning perspective is used to achieve success in everything from business to sports. Knowing the fundamentals in sports, for example, is important but learning how to apply them on the court/field is ‘everything’ when it comes to success. Although a basketball team might have three of the best players in basketball, it doesn’t mean that they will “win it all.” While the 2013 Miami Heat arguably had three of the best basketball players on their roster, the San Antonio Spurs beat them in the 2014 National Basketball Association’s Championship because the Spurs were better at applying the fundamentals as a team rather than simply as individuals. The Spurs had a better understanding and sense about where and what each of their teammates would be and do in a given situation than the Heat. The soccer legend Pele has been saying for decades that such an understanding is the key to success. Success is not a solo/asocial endeavor but a connected/social experience (neuroscience has shown that this is also how the brain successfully learns). Alexander Graham Bell, known for his inventive genius and deep compassion, knew this when he said “Great discoveries and improvements invariably involve the cooperation of many minds.” Compassionate achievers not only learn this early and continually but they live it daily and consciously and that is why they finish on top…together.
COMPASSIONATE SCHOOLS CONFERENCE:ARTICLES & BOOKS:
Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III and Mark A. McDaniel, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 2014)
Steven R. Cox, Kathy Parkison and Dianne M. Roden, “A Case for Teaching Business Ethics in a Cost-Benefits Framework: Are Business Students More Discriminating in Their Decision Making?: Mountain Plains Journal of Business and Economics Vol. 10 (2009)
Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man
Matthew Lieberman, Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect (New York: Crown Publishers, 2013)
Rick Weissbound, Stephanie Jones, Trisha Ross Anderson, Jennifer Kahn and Mark Russell, “The Children We Mean to Raise: The Real Messages Adults are Sending about Values,” Making Caring Common Project (Cambridge, MA: The President and Fellows of Harvard College, 2014)
Albert Einstein and Mark Twain didn’t experience ‘it.’ Most of us, however, believe in ‘it’ and many teachers continue to strive to make ‘it’ real in our classrooms. The ‘it’ is an education based on learning. Where Einstein said “the only thing that interferes with my learning is my education,” Twain stated that “I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.” While Einstein and Twain said it differently, they said the same thing: school-education was not based on learning. Neuroscience research over the last few decades, however, has provided a series of ideas and paths that can guide us into creating school environments where learning is at the center of education. Simply stated, neuroscience provides insights into how the brain learns. The weaving of neuroscience with pedagogical and social science research offers numerous ways to improve learning and develop more effective education policies.
Neuroscience research has recently shed light on how to improve learning; some have characterized their findings as exploring the powers of the social brain. ‘Social’ is used, such as in the title of Matthew Lieberman’s book on the brain, to highlight the fact that we learn best through connections; social-emotional and conceptual. Because all information and memories are immediately broken into fragments and spread throughout the surface of the brain’s cortex, connections (or reconnections) are at the core of learning (the brain’s storage faculty is not like any recording device or computer but more like a cooperative/coordinated event similar to a flash-mob of the brain). If we connect, we learn.
We learn by connecting ideas and emotions. Recent research has found that emotional connections are the keys for unlocking learning potential. John Medina, a developmental molecular biologist, explains in his book Brain Rules that an emotionally charged event (called an emotionally competent stimulus—ECS) creates a kind of chemical Post-It note (written in the ink of dopamine) on the brain for remembering information. An ECS can be something as simple as using paradoxes (i.e., less is more) in class to create associations between concepts for enhancing memory and learning. Neuroscience shows that connecting ideas and emotions is a key part to knowing and learning and we should be incorporating ECS Post-It notes in our classrooms.
A person’s emotions or mood are such integral parts of cognition that they sometimes play the role of gatekeeper for how and to what extent each one of us sees reality. Our vision is literally affected by our emotions. Positive and negative moods, according to a 2009 neuroscience study, affect the way we see the world around us by either broadening (positive) or narrowing (negative) our peripheral vision respectively. The study by Schmitz, De Rosa and Anderson clearly demonstrates that our moods modulate the activity of the visual cortex “with positive affect broadening and negative affect narrowing the distribution, or scope, of one’s field of view (FOV).” The reason, in part, is that we see with our brains, not with our eyes. Because it is our brains that see and not the eyes, emotions and opinions help define our vision of reality. In short, the type of classroom that a teacher constructs (positive or negative) matters more than we have given it credit for. Incorporating the learning of values such as compassion into classrooms can broaden the realm of possibilities for our students—both literally and figuratively.
The realm of possibilities for our students, however, should not be confined by the walls of classroom. Academic success, according to neuroscientists and education researchers, is also linked to playground and recess time. From this week’s (4-8 August 2014) National Public Radio series on the importance of play in schools to analyses about the role of Finland’s “unstructured outdoor play” in achieving high standardized testing scores, the role of physical activity in aiding intellectual achievement is well documented (physical activity generates brain fuel such as oxygen and glucose). Medina says it best: “Cutting off physical exercise—the very activity most likely to promote cognitive performance—to do better on a test score is like trying to gain weight by starving yourself.” Education policymakers throughout the United States should be increasing time for recess and physical activity for students and not decreasing it, which is the current trend in many school districts. It makes no sense that America is trying to move up the international ladder of standardized test scores by making its test takers stand still.
But is standardized testing the best way to learn or measure learning? Even the debates over the most cutting edge theories of neuroscience offer insights into how to address highly controversial education policies such as testing. The neuroscience view, for instance, that the brain is a quantum environment and governed by the processes of quantum mechanics offers a strong critique of America’s current use and focus on standardized tests for learning. Although quantum physics is widely known for the idea that a particle can be in two different places at the same time, it is the not-so-well-known Quantum Zeno Effect (QZE) that provides the source of strength for the standardization critique. QZE maintains that “when any system is observed in a sufficiently rapid, repetitive fashion the rate at which that system changes is reduced.” In other words, QZE is explaining that the more a quantum system is monitored, the less decay occurs. If the human brain operates in a quantum environment (a recent discovery of quantum vibrations in the brain was announced in January 2014) and we, as educators, want the process of learning to be locked in and not decay, we should be instituting the “regimen of regular low- or no-stakes” testing of my schoolboy days and the type of quizzing that Peter Brown, Herny Roediger III and Mark McDaniel recommend in their book Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning. The problem with an emphasis on standardized testing, from the perspective of quantum mechanics, is that there is too much information being tested too infrequently for learning to “stick” or stabilize in the brain. This idea of quantum learning supports Roediger’s recommendations outlined in The New York Times: “We need to change the way we think about testing. It shouldn’t be a white-knuckle finale to a semester’s work, but the means by which students progress from the start of a semester to its finish, locking in learning along the way…Standardized testing is in some respects a quest for more rigor in public education. We can achieve rigor in a different way. We can instruct teachers on the use of low-stakes quizzing in class. We can teach students the benefits of retrieval practice and how to use it in their studying outside class. These steps cost little and cultivate habits of successful learning that will serve students throughout their lives.”
Einstein and Twain’s comments regarding the broken education-learning link are, in essence, quantum quotes; they say the same thing in two different ways. Einstein, however, also provided us with a way to repair or bridge the broken link via his idea of “combinatory play,” which calls for combining aspects of several disciplines when looking for solutions. The development of solutions to the Einstein-Twain quantum quote quandary (say that fast 5 times) will come from combining facets of neuroscience, education and social science research. We can improve learning in education if we follow the same type of path the brain uses to learn: a connected path.
ARTICLES & BOOKS:
Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III and Mark A. McDaniel, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 2014)
“Discovery of Quantum Vibrations in ‘Microtubules’ Inside Brain Neurons Supports Controversial Theory of Consciousness,” Science Daily (January 16, 2014)
W.R. Klemm, Mental Biology (Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 2014), 73 & 76
Matthew Lieberman, Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect (New York: Crown Publishers, 2013)
John Medina, Brain Rules (Seattle, WA: Pear Press, 2008)
National Public Radio, Series on Education and PlayL Where the Wild Things Play (August 4, 2014)
Debbie Rhea, “More Play, Better Focus,” Education Week Vol. 33, no. 22 (February 26, 2014): 21
David Rock and Jeffrey Schwartz, “The Neuroscience of Leadership” Strategy+Business Issue 43 (Summer 2006)
Henry L. Roediger III, “How Tests Make Us Smarter,” The New York Times (July 18, 2014): SR 12
Taylor W. Schmitz, Eve De Rosa, and Adam K. Anderson, “Opposing Influences of Affective State Valence on Visual Cortical Encoding,” The Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 29, no. 22 (June 3, 2009): 7199-7207
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