If one ever wanted more definitive – or more inspiring – evidence to show how brain science and skilled teaching go together, you only had to look to Marian Cleeves Diamond. She was one of the great pioneers of modern neuroscience, the first to show that the brain can change with experience and a suitable environment, and a legendary teacher at the University of California, Berkeley. She died in July at the age of 90 (she’d been researching and teaching well into her 80s.)

A splendid obituary published by the university will make you wish you had worked side-by-side with her in the lab or had the honor of being a student in her classroom http://news.berkeley.edu/2017/07/28/marian-diamond-known-for-studies-of-einsteins-brain-dies-at-90/.  Included is a video clip of her from a recent  documentary that will give you the flavor of the great woman.

When we interviewed her in 2012 for our book she was as gracious as could be.  She even offered a teaching tip you might want to give a try. She called it, “Each One Teach One.”

The idea, she explained, is that to teach you need to really know a subject in detail. Anyone, an undergraduate or even a small child, can improve his or her own learning by preparing to teach a friend, a classmate, or parent. Diamond began using this technique when she teamed up with a city public health specialist to send her anatomy students to teach about the human body at a Berkeley school. Later, she brought the concept to the Lawrence Hall of Science, a hands-on children’s discovery center at UC Berkeley, when she served as its director.

Everyone has the capacity to learn to teach at some level, she explained. She believed everyone should develop their capacity to teach as a legacy of the human condition. “One has to be accurate with the facts as a teacher, yet imaginative with creative ideas for new directions in the future,” she said. “As we learn the facts, we can turn around and share with the next person so that ‘the association cortices’ can create the new ideas,” she wrote in a 1991 article.

Even a child in kindergarten can learn to be a teacher, she believed.  Why spend 12 to 15 years only being taught, she asked, when what one learns the first day of school can be shared not only with other schoolmates but with parents as well.  “The expression on the face of the little ones when they are told they, too, can teach is priceless.”

– Marie Felde