Brain-Based Learning

Useful Websites
Read•Write•Think is a website providing educators and students access to the highest quality practices and resources in reading and language arts instruction.
Academic Earth provides free video courses from leading universities in most subject areas.  You can not get credit, but you can audit some awesome classes from universities like Yale and Stanford.
There is also a complete AP Test Prep course for your college bound students.
The 60 Second Brain Game and Word Wanderer are two games from Posit Science , a  company that provides brain training software.
More Brain Exercise is a site that has tons of interesting facts about the brain and exercises to help develop your brain's potential.

Articles of Interest
Kindergarten crunch: Lack of playtime killing joy of learning, say advocates : Early childhood education is becoming the first step in our stressful public schools.  We are creating high stakes testing for our youngest children! This article promotes the importance of play for kindergarten children. 
A Program Teaches Students What to Believe in the Digital World  This article discusses the topic of media literacy and the News Literacy project that brings seasoned journalists into high schools to help them learn how to interpret the news. 
From Brain-Based Research to Powerful Learning: Innovative Teaching Techniques In the Classroom visits Key Largo, a P-8 school of 1,200 students where all classrooms are wired and where the student-to-networked-computer ratio is 3 to 1.  It demonstrates ways to use technology to put brain-based research to work for our kids.

Thoughts from Yrisarri-Neuroscience and Education
I have always been interested in research concerning how the brain works and learning.  In 1980 my principal at La Plata Jr. High School brought a brain researcher to speak to the faculty and he told us of very interesting research concerning young adolescents and learning.  Since then I have attended workshops with Tim Burns, Eric Jensen and others speaking to this topic.  I believe that what neuroscientists are learning about how the brain works will change the way we teach.

In February LaWanda and I attended the Learning and the Brain conference in San Francisco.  The Learning and the Brain society is an organization dedicated to sharing information between educators and neuroscience.  They state in their members site that:

educators and neuroscientists share a great many goals. Neuroscience is delving into realms that have pre-occupied educators for years, such as learning and memory, the emotional development of children, the basis of musical talent, bilingual experiences, and dyslexia to name only a few areas of mutual interest.

At the conference almost every speaker spoke to this statement.  Neuroscientists are very interested in using their research to help teachers and are looking for feedback from eduacation to help them direct their research in useful ways.  As I think about what I have learned from my studies of how the brain works, I realize that much of their research reinforces what we already know about good teaching.  For instance, brain researchers have shown that if we want to remember something for a test, we need to practice with the information we want to remember.  Another finding that many educators already know is that vision trumps the other senses when learning new information.  But the brain research goes much deeper than just reinforcing what we know about good teaching.

An important neuroscientist's work that comes to my mind is Robert Saplosky .  His  Great Courses' class Biology and Human Behavior taught me how we are truly unique biological beings.  His presentation made me realize that there is no one way to teach everybody.  When we put students together in a lecture, we are lucky if only a few hear what is said, much less remember it.

Eric Medina's 10 brain rules have had a great impact on my thinking about teaching and learning.  His studies on stress strike me as one of the most important facts about our brains that all teachers should know.  Medina states that stressed brains do not learn the same way and:

Stress damages virtually every kind of cognition that exists. It damages memory and executive function. It can hurt your motor skills. When you are stressed out over a long period of time it disrupts your immune response. You get sicker more often. It disrupts your ability to sleep. You get depressed.

I believe that our competitive nature and fear of the future for our children have caused us to create schools that are institutions of stress.  Teachers can cause a child to feel stressed with a look, a few demeaning words or work that is beyond their ability.  We have not created places of safety and security for all children.

The research on memory holds much promise for teachers.  There is no one place that holds a memory.  Memory is a web of nueronal connections that have been prompted by something that can pull them together.  You have to cause students to remember what they already know in order to teach them something new!  In addition,  memories are suspect, brain research indicates that after you learn something you do not recall it exactly as it was learned.  Then, each time we recall that memory it is remembered as it was the last time it was recalled.  Memory is a complex process and if we want students to remember what we teach, brain research can help us understand how to do that.

The concept of the plastic brain is an important for educators to understand.   As Mariale Hardiman and Martha Denckla state in their article,  The Science of Education: Informing Teaching and Learning Throught the Brain Sciences:

Research shows that learning changes the brain. The brain is “plastic”—it makes new cellular connections and strengthens existing ones as we gain and integrate information and skills. In the past decade, the enormous growth in understanding brain plasticity has created an entirely new way to consider how learning and achievement take place in the education of children.

This means that everyone can learn.  The brain can change and adapt to meet the needs of each person.  Almost every child in school can learn what they need to know!

Probably the most important thing for teachers to know about brain research is that when a statement begins with "based upon brain research...." we should be skeptical.  Last week I used the article about Disney refunding money because of their claims about the Einstein Baby videos and learning were false.  There are many brain myths circulating in our culture and we need to research claims of better learning based upon brain research before we purchase programs making those claims.