Brain-Based Environments and Strategies for Optimal Learning
As a long time teacher in the public school, I have participated in and witnessed America’s institutionalized education system for nearly four decades. Although this system has changed in small ways, most of these ways have been in response to corporate pressures, lobbying pressures and governmental response to “purchase” costly new materials, rationalized by persuasions of business’ interests. The education system in the United States has at its core a strident Prussian genealogy, one adopted, and little adapted, during the Industrial Age. The United States was transformed from an agricultural to industrial society in the years following the Civil War (1861–1865). Prior to this age most families lived on farms or were involved in agricultural communities. The children of these families likewise worked on the farms, and a great collaborative and creative culture was the mainstay of their successes. With the coming of a new age, it was deemed by sociologists that the new generations of workers would need to be, for “efficiency’s sake,” less collaborative and certainly less creative. In fact, both the Prussian documents and the U.S. documents designing such an educational transformation actually used the words “robotons” to describe the proposed mindset of cooperative workers. They would need to be able to follow, without creative objection or hesitation, the voice of authorities. They would need to be able to stand in assembly lines content to produce or process a small cog of the machinery, a portion of the product.
It took many years for child labor laws to protect children from being part of the labor force, and for the passing of mandatory education. However, the goal for education was “labor” oriented, rather than culturally intellectual. The schools thus designed to produce cooperative workers, sat children in rows. The children faced the front of the room where the “authority” would present the daily practices. This kind of “box” is the image that most Americans have when they think of “school.” Most Americans were educated in this manner and think of this system even when they think of educational reform. It is what they know.
Although there are alternative programs, most of these still follow the models above.
Most of the programs are not particularly punitive nor traumatic, unless a child doesn’t fit the mold. It has been my experience after teaching for 40 years, after being a parent, and after studying child development for years, that children are not born fitting the mold. In any family, there is significant diversity among siblings, even with the enormous impact of parental and cultural pressures. In reading the following thoughts, please try to keep in mind the diversity of those you have known most intimately, including yourself.
Twenty years ago, my approach to education was suddenly and then substantially changed forevermore. I was given an unusual class of 25 seven year olds, many of who were seriously depressed, and/or labeled with learning disabilities, as well as many others who were highly motivated, esteemed learners. The alchemy of such a class was unusual because of the severity of the emotional diversity. Several of these children had suicidal thoughts. Many of them suffered from the tensions of being together. The group had moved through the system from pre-school, age 3, to my class, with a reputation of trauma following them. I had been a very successful teacher for many years, at this point, and trusted that my bag of tricks would work for these children, and combined with my diligence, I would provide them with every thing I could to help them reduce their anxieties, increase their esteem, and promote their natural intelligence. This kind of individualization had been my forte for teaching, and I was often given troubled students, and trusted that we would find our way to scholarly, social and personal achievement and authenticity. This, by the way, isn’t the norm as a goal for most teachers. Most teachers as well as the system focus on scholarly achievement alone. I had grown to believe that no child learns well if stressed, and all children learn best if challenged. That dance was one that I witnessed time and time again to be the key. Much like Steiner and Montessori, I based this on observation. I did not have the science to back it up. My heart and my mind believed it to be totally true, and my laboratory of sorts was my classroom where results supported my theory year after positive year. However, this year took a long time to turn towards the positive, and it was not with the knowledge that I had previously accumulated over the years, that I was able to help these children, or the group as a whole, but with new research that I sought, hungrily absorbed, applied and learned to respect.
The research came from a then budding science which was labeled “whole-brain-based learning.” The label itself is hilarious. Of course the brain is whole, and of course learning is based on the brain; but, not really in institutionalized education and often not in family situations. This is why. The systems of both family and schools were still working on the old industrial age plan: creating robotons. Families had adopted that thinking, and in doing so were trying to “help” their child “fit in,” cooperate, become an undifferentiated cog. It was the true love of their children, and years of conditioning that caused them to believe that this was the very best to offer. In addition, since the inception of the “bell curve” in 1912, the school system has believed and was based upon this so-called distribution of IQ, upon which student’s achievement is judged and graded. With the bell curve, a classroom must demonstrate grades representing the required “curvature,” with a certain number of losers and a certain number of winners at ether end of the curve, and a great body of mediocrity in the center of the curve. Most fortuitously, the brain science of the last two decades has proven that theory to be totally false.
The new brain science purports to have research to help support most learners to be “winners,” and it promotes the science and the strategies to make that possible. In needing another way to reach my beleaguered students, I happened upon this research and have followed it ever since. I have met many of the scientists who have done the difficult research to bequeath this information to educators. Because they themselves are not teachers, they often beg to bridge to the fields of learning, knowing that the language they speak comes from the fields of neurology, and the language of the educators comes from an archaic institution, from the box know as school.
In the last twenty years I have been able to make inroads into more successful learning for children, for teenagers, for parents, for business: in any relationship where learning, communication, or where growth matters. Much of the research is being used by the military and by corporations, for its powers to “persuade” and “impact” the receiver. That is its dark edge. However, its edge of beauty, respect and expansion is tremendous. Here are some of its components. I invite you to look into them for your own use and for the support of those you love.
1. The findings of Howard Gardner, PhD., Harvard, has proven that there is no such thing as a single IQ. There are, instead, Multiple Intelligences, multiple intellectual propensities, each located in a distinctly different place within the brain, genetic, innate, and each having its own potential strength. Any of these need to be supported, or they can be, in neglect, diminished. Working with them, and becoming aware of them, allows an individual to use their major intellectual propensities to support and lift the intelligences that are innately less profound. Those specific intelligences thus found in research are: language, numbers, spatial awareness, music, movement (not coordination), awareness of relationships and patterns, interpersonal and intrapersonal intelligence. The combinations of intelligence strengths are a profound part of the brain profile of an individual. It is the combination of these intelligences that tend to give someone a kind of style of seeing the world, and a way to best interact within the world. These combine with further brain components for greater refinement of one’s interests and potential.
2. The findings of international neurology and psychology research support the character and the influence of:
• The Right and Left Hemispheres of the brain:
Most people tend to have an innate preference of either Right or Left. The Left and Right brains promote and produce very different perspectives of learning, both of which are necessary. Most schools in the U.S. are supporting and requiring Left Brain productivity: math and language, business organization and competition.
• The “triune” brain design
This three part evolutionary design was for survival, and allows different kinds of brain processes for different circumstances, wherein we experience and process differently according to our emotional states of well-being or stress. The divisions, “higher, middle and low (reptilian) brain,” are for the purposes, respectively, of “high thinking/creative, moral and/or spiritual thinking; calculation, data based processing; and flight or flight. The implications of this understanding necessitate the respect and the study of stress reduction throughout life and particularly during learning. Motivation and inspiration are then necessary components of learning: hence stress is not supportive, challenge is.
3. Research in the fields of neurology have found definitive reasons for individuals to not only reduce stress, but to exercise, to hydrate, to have adequate dietary brain support (protein), and to be come aware of one’s best and unique strategies for learning. The ways in which individuals may best process new data and new experiences differ tremendously and are part of their “whole brain learning profile.” For example: introversion and extroversion are brain styles with distinctly different brain paths. These then are processing differences. There are many, many different processing styles. To work outside of one’s best and most innate brain processes is possible, but actually takes more oxygen and is more fatiguing, thus reducing the coping of the brain. Coping has long been seen as emotion, rather than a brain level of brain functionality.
4. The brain is very “plastic” throughout life, meaning it can be changed and it can continue to develop. There are numerous research projects that have gained popularity in the United States based on this work. They are used in fields of therapy from trauma, abuse and injury. They are used in elder care concerns. They are seldom applied to education.
I have loved studying this science. In an article of this length, I can only begin to hint at its extent and its expansiveness for the lives we lead. It has given me a way to reach every student within my care and has promoted amazing social understanding, teamwork, collaboration and compassion within groups of highly diverse learners. I believe the greater by product, than intellectual achievement, in actually sharing the research with students, families, or teams is the way in which tensions are reduced and tolerance and support becomes an informed collaborative component. I would love to see this important knowledge filter into the “box” we call school. In the meantime, I continue to share it with as many as I can. I have been told that it has changed lives, as it has changed mine. I was able to help my mother heal from a serious stoke, from my knowledge; I was able to lift the esteem of many who have not fit into the school system; I have been able to understand that I am an introvert, very right brained, and very much able to see patterns and relationships, have a great tendency to be intrapersonal, and so find this information applicable and nurturing to my own self knowledge and life-work and love. I have long been a learner of learning. May you, too, find your way in this most personal and communal endeavor.