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"The more work the brain does, the more it becomes capable of doing". A Building Process... Learning is, in fact, a physiological process, and every day can make a difference.
What we Know • Every event and/or learning experience embeds new learning and information into the brain and broadens its foundation. We need to expand upon the ways we as educators can increase the quantity and quality in which students are exposed to rich content and context through new learning. • We need to stimulate the action of "process thinking" which is a state in which students understand how to synthesize and digest newly acquired information. • New learning becomes apparent when individuals synthesize new thinking and integrate it.
What we should Consider • "The more children talk about what they are doing (Cohen 1984) and the more their teachers use the appropriate vocabulary in teaching, the greater the learning". • "The learner needs to be engaged in talking, listening, reading, viewing, acting, and valuing. Brain research supports this."(Harste 1989,& Moraes 1986)
The Learner • The learner is on a constant search for connections for everything that is learned on all levels, we as educators must plan and orchestrate how and what we teach. • We must establish clear connections to previous learning while building upon that which is new and relevant learning. • Students learn from their entire life-long ongoing learning experience every minute of the day.
Knowledge • Meaningful knowledge will be critical for success in the 21st century, but we continue to encourage the learning of "surface knowledge". • Surface knowledge which is highly valued in present day educational institutions values memorization and retention of any subject. Because surface knowledge is what we depend on when testing and evaluating students the tendency is to push more and more surface knowledge at kids. • Meaningful learning should be associated with the type of learning that stimulates the synthesis of old and new knowledge into current thinking.
Learning & Meaning • Attaching meaning to what students do adds greater understanding in what the end result is and why. Like the use of a mathematic formula, it is not only important to arrive at the correct answer but to also understand the logic and reasoning behind why the answer is correct or incorrect.(Making Connection, Caine & Caine 1991, pg.15)
The Future Worker • The implications for the future are powerful. The future worker in the next millennium will do what robot's can't do, such as tasks that require sophisticated intelligence. • We will need workers that are capable of problem solving, decision makers, adept negotiators and confident thinkers who will be comfortable with openendedness, flexibility and resourcefulness. • Still required will be an environment that fosters stability, social harmony and integrity.(Making Connection, Caine 1991, pg.15
Brain Basics • Our schools…are not ineffective because they do not know what happens at synapses of the chemistry of neurotransmitters, but rather because they have yet to address the brain as the organ for learning, and to fit instruction and environment to the "shape" of the brain as it is now increasingly well understood. We know that as the consequence of long evolution, the brain has modes of operation that are natural, effortless, effective in utilizing the tremendous power of this amazing instrument. Coerced to operate in other ways, it functions as a rule reluctantly, slowly, and with abundant error. Brain Complexity •The brain has an infinite number of possible interconnections. Because this parallel and interrelated processing is typical of the brain, the brain is described as holographic or global or interconnected. Every element influences every other element in the brain, understanding its complexity is paramount for educators. Brain Plasticity •Researchers have accumulated a substantial amount of data indicating that the brain will grow physiologically if stimulated through interaction with the environment. There is mounting evidence that a highly enriched environment can have positive effects of the brain. Brain plasticity is lifelong.
Learning Environments •Children from highly enriched environments will have more highly developed brains, and that in itself increases their ability to learn. •We must treat this point with extreme caution. •Stimulation here refers to complex events, not isolated pieces of information fed to the brain.
Learning Environments Most importantly this does not mean that a child from a middle class home with lots of toys will have a more highly developed brain then a child who does not. There are many interacting factors, most children are likely to be impoverished in some ways and enriched on others. Rates of Development •There is an enormous difference in rates of development in "normal" children. There can be as much as a five-year difference in the early years. One consequence is that assessing children by reference to chronological age is often worse the useless. Each brain appears to have its own pace, which renders the "failing" of a child in the first year of school entirely inappropriate.
Rest & Activity •With the great emphasis on outcomes and high test results in education, many schools eliminated nap time for small children, presumably to take advantage of every minute for instruction. This is a bad idea because it fatigues the entire physiology, including the brain-which therefore become less responsive. •The brain is a physiological organ and its rules for functioning include an emphasis on health and respect for its rhythms. It is also known that adolescents who get minimal amounts of sleep have a more difficult time absorbing new information and demonstrate less creativity (Horne 1989)
Brain Hemisphericity Split brain research has helped us to appreciate that the brain has an enormous innate capacity to deal with parts and wholes simultaneously. The brain can deal with the interconnected, interpenetrating,"holographic" world, provided it is encouraged to do so. A Provocative Finding... An infant's brain thrives on feedback from its environment. It wires itself into a thinking and emotional organ from the things it experiences-the sounds, sights, touches, smells, and tastes that come its way, and important give-and-take interaction with others. What we do know... • Immediately after birth the brain goes through a wild spurt of growth, constructing trillions of synaptic connections between brain cells each day. • These neural networks can be aborted when early childhood experiences lack mental stimulation or fraught with stress. • We now know that lack of verbal communication with an infant can stunt the brain. These words must come from a parent or other caregiver who talks with love and meaning in his/ her voice, and not from television or radio. • Infants learn all the sounds for their native language by the time they reach 6 months old. • Music is nature's version of a free lunch because if exercises the same neural networks we use for learning and memory. • Eighty percent of prisoners in U.S. jails are high school dropouts. • Although the brain is capable of learning throughout life, nothing will ever again match the stage of learning in the birth to 3 years of age. • There is mounting evidence that children should begin the school experience at age 4 or even 3 years of age. • At the age of 8 month's of age and infant's brain has 1000 trillion synaptic connections. These connection begin to gradually die-off to half their original numbers by 10 years of age to 500 trillion connections. • Synaptic connections come and go with differing levels of stimulation. These connections are the key to individual brain power. • The brain can rearrange it's synaptic connections according to the types of stimuli it is fed. This is both good and bad.
Neural Networks... What we do know... Martha Pierson a neurobiologist from Baylor College of Medicine says... • Alcohol and drug abuse can interfere with growing brain cells, jamming their genetic performance and increasing the risk of mental disorders. • There is an individual shaping process that the brain goes through at an early age of perhaps 2, 3 or 4 years of age. Fredrick Goodwin the former director of the National Institute of Mental Health says " We are underinvesting in our children, we spend seven times more on the elderly then we do on children. Now that we have a solid understanding of the plasticity of the brain we are wasting a tremendous resource.
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