With most schools in the U.S. back in session by now, the issue of early start times and its impact on student learning is getting attention once again. The New York Times today noted that 90 percent of high schools and more than 80 percent of middle schools in the U.S. start before 8:30 a.m. The question of school start times is fraught in so many ways.  This writer concludes that “forcing adolescents to get up so early isn’t just a bad health decision; it’s a bad economic one, too.” http://nytimes.com/upshot

If you want to engage in the conversation and get to the heart of the matter, you might point out what often gets overlooked…that sleep has a far more important role in learning than just coming to class rested. When we sleep, a whole host of biological processes in the brain have been shown to be related directly to learning. And, it is worth nothing that the sleeping brain is biologically different from the awake brain. Even when we sleep, the brain is highly active in very specialized ways.

You can up the ante in the discussion by pointing out that advances in neuroscience (as explored in detail in Chapter 6 of our book) show compelling evidence that during sleep we:

• encode memory in the brain.
• stabilize and consolidate memory, so that what’s been learned stays learned.
• actually integrate new information with knowledge that has been previously stored.

If the discussion about sleep gets sidetracked into debates school bus routes, harried families’ daily demands, or even the issue of video game overload … put it back in its place. The science is clear: to learn, the brain needs sleep.

–Marie Felde

 

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

Sure, exploring how the brain learns may be beneficial for teachers of subjects such as math and reading, but what about those teaching and promoting the arts in schools?  You’d be surprised, once you start thinking about it. Consider a dance project this summer in New York. It was titled, “The Brain Piece.” Choreographer Jody Oberfelder used interactive dance theater to help performers and the audience explore where thoughts come from. “I thought, why not get the audience to try to feel their brains, without telling them how? To set up situations where they’re interacting not only with their minds but passing that down through the body…” she told the New York Times.

In developing her project (she previously focused on the role of the heart in a piece called “4Chambers”) she said that she explored neurogenesis (the processes in which brain cells are formed and developed) with Ed Lein, a researcher at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle. Lein told the Times he thought dance and brain science were a “natural pairing.”

That may sound cool, but just how do the two go together? Lein elaborates, “One reason I love neuroscience is there’s really an aesthetic beauty to the architecture of the brain – a choreography, if you will, to the development of that circuitry.”

But, you don’t need to delve that deeply to put dance and other kinds of physical activity into improving student learning. One of the seven key Guiding Principles in our book “Why Neuroscience Matters in the Classroom” is that exercise and physical activity play a key role in how we learn. Early research from 1999 at the Salk showed for the first time that physical exercise triggered chemical changes in the brain that regulate the formation of new neurons, synaptic plasticity, and learning.  A deluge of recent work is continuing to highlight the direct connection between physical activity and brain development, particularly in learning and memory.

Scientists in these studies often have mice run on treadmills to exercise, but really, isn’t it so much more fun to dance!

Teachers said they were learning a lot this weekend at the sold-out conference on “The Science of How We Learn” in San Francisco. Numerous educators told us they were glad they came.  “This conference is exhausting!” one person reported. Not sure if he was talking about the steep climb up to the Fairmont hotel location atop Nob Hill or just keeping up with all the new ideas being presented.

In any case, the audience today in our session on “Why Neuroscience Matters in the Classroom” was great. They kindly participated in each activity that Marie and I presented. Our handouts went fast and sorry to say we didn’t have nearly enough. However, check out our website for the main product people wanted — new research that identifies a framework of 7 Guiding Principles on the science of learning for teachers and educators (http://pages.uoregon.edu/kscalise/neuroscience/#portfolio). Our book sold out at the conference but is still available on Amazon at the link near the end of this post.

My co-presenter, Marie Felde, mentioned some new research out on poverty but didn’t have time to share. So I checked out the Scientific American Mind article and found the Jan/Feb 2017 issue on “Does Poverty Shape the Brain?” is only publicly available through the first paragraph of the story — too bad! So I’ll excerpt a bit here under fair use.

The article starts out mentioning that poverty is associated with a thinner brain cortex in childhood. In humans, the brain cortex tends to thin for everyone in the early adult years. It is already known that this is probably a key part of effective human maturation. The pruning of some connections helps the brain function more efficiently for the adult environment it is in.

But why does this appear to be happening early for children from economically disadvantaged backgrounds? Scientific American Mind reports it could be part of how humans adapt to reduced circumstances. “Accelerated thinning could perhaps diminish the influence of negative experiences on the developing brain,” Scientific American Mind reported. “Preventing the brain from being shaped by harsh influences over the course of many years could be an evolutionarily adaptive response, helping a child to better cope in adverse conditions.”

Makes me also wonder if the result could be explained in a different direction altogether. Perhaps it suggests children in poverty are having to simply grow up faster? Could they need their brain efficiencies sooner to cope with tougher circumstances?

I remember one experience as a young teacher. I wanted to keep a ninth grader after school to help him catch back up in class, where he was suddenly dramatically falling behind. No, the school counselor said. The young man — still a boy really — was needed at home now. His single parent had to work and there was a little brother who would otherwise be alone after school. The family couldn’t afford childcare — and here’s what floored me, the older brother was needed at home to help monitor a restraining order against the other parent, a violent offender.

What, I asked, was the older brother expected to do if trouble arose? The counselor shrugged. Make a phone call to get help, he suggested.

The boy must have long since grown up. But I still picture him peering out the window of his home, phone in hand, waiting for the moment when he would need to provide for the protection of a child even younger than himself. Adult problems indeed.

–Kathleen Scalise, Associate Professor, University of Oregon

Why Neuroscience Matters in the Classroom: https://www.amazon.com/Neuroscience-Matters-Classroom-Whats-Measurements/dp/0132931818/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1487565131&sr=8-1&keywords=why+neuroscience+matters+in+the+classroom