Teacher World

Over the past few blogs, I have shared with you what the newest studies of the brain reveal and how we can utilize this research to design better strategies in the classroom which will ensure superior results while positively enhancing cognition and brain function. Eric Jensen’s strategies and applications are well-supported by brain research and deserving of consideration for creating new methodologies in our educational system. But these methodologies run counter to our current educational framework which is built around routine assessing and teaching to guarantee test preparedness in the spring. And there-in lies the rub…

How would teachers, who already feel there isn’t enough time to prepare students for state achievement tests, give up valuable teaching time to provide 30 to 60 minutes a day for physical activity as well as 30 to 60 minutes a day, three to five times a week for students to be engaged in art, dance, theater, etc.? And, in our race to cover and achieve mastery of numerous standards, how do we cover everything that we must cover if we must take constant breaks, every 4 to 8 minutes if we are teaching complex content for which our children have limited prior knowledge or every 8 to 15 minutes for less complex content for which they have greater prior knowledge? What content do we sacrifice teaching in order to teach our students emotional states as life skills which they should have been taught at home? When will those of us who have inclusion or co-taught classrooms set aside time each hour to do skill-building work with our special education students 3 to 5 days a week, to help them make more progress?

Don’t misunderstand me; I am all for integrating brain research into my classroom, in fact, I would welcome it because it would be the first methodology which is based on scientific research rather than what people, often unaffiliated with education, think is the way to properly educate students. Unfortunately, our hands are tied due to our current misguided educational philosophy which believes that constant testing of students is the way to hammer home knowledge and allow our students to compete in a global economy. And I am curious to see how much more we will be impacted with our new national standards with their integral component of on-line assessments. Until there is a radical shift in educational philosophy, information like this on how our brains grow and develop is just interesting reading, because there is no practical way of applying it in our current situation.

So, what’s the answer? Our current paradigm is not going to change unless the Eric Jensens and Kathie Nunleys of the world, who have studied the brain and understand how it works and how that valuable information can positively impact teaching strategies, vocally and persistently lobby those in government from President Obama to the Department of Education in an effort to recreate our educational system based on brain research rather than business research.

Now that would be an educational reform I would certainly rally around! What about you?

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This is the third blog in a series on brain research and Eric Jensen’s strategies for using what brain research tells us to improve education. Again, I would suggest you read the last two blogs before this one for greater understanding. In this blog, I will cover Jensen’s last four strategies.

“Strategy #7: The role of the arts in schools continues to be under great scrutiny.” According to recent projects by the neuroscience departments of five universities studying the impact of arts on the brain, certain arts improved attention, working memory, and visual-spatial skills. These studies also showed that dance, theater, and drama help to improve social skills, patience, timing, empathy, verbal memory, and other transferable life skills.

Jensen recommends giving students the choice of several arts, support them with great teachers, and make them mandatory. He recommends that students have art three to five days a week for 30-60 minutes a day because they “support the development of the brain’s academic operating systems in ways that provide many transferable life skills.”

“Strategy #8: Humans have the remarkable capacity to display many emotions, but only six of them are ‘hard wired’ or built in at birth. Children need to get these emotional states taught to them from ages 0-3 years, and if they don’t, they will be “emotionally narrow” which can lead to weakened cognitive skills and discipline problems in schools. Unfortunately many children aren’t being taught appropriate emotional responses at home anymore. Some of this may be due to the higher number of very young children in day care centers today; 60-80 percent today compared to 10-12 percent two generations ago. Whatever the reason, because they are not getting it at home, Jensen says teachers should be teaching them at school providing skillbuilding with quick, daily practice. Why is this so important? Because out of the hundreds of possible emotional states we can experience, only a few are good for learning, such as anticipation and curiosity.

Jensen says we have to teach these appropriate emotional states as life skills, such as honor, patience, forgiveness, and empathy. And he says that it is important for teachers to “read and manage the other emotional states in the classroom”. Brain research shows that students learn and behave better if they are in good states rather than bad, which of course, we can readily see in the classroom. Therefore, teaching students patience, empathy, attention, and cooperation will produce better students who achieve more academically.

“Strategy #9: There have been stunning strides in rehabilitation of brain-based disorders, including Asperger’s, learning delays, dyslexia and autism.” Recent discoveries in brain-based disorders indicate that these students might be able to make huge improvements through aggressive behavioral therapies, new drugs, and stem cell implantation.

As a result, Jensen’s first recommendation is that all teachers learn the latest in dealing with special education learning delay recovery. He also says that just putting these children in inclusion classrooms is not enough; they need consistent, hourly throughout the day skill-building for the greatest improvement to occur.

“Strategy #10: The recent brain/mind discovery that even memories are not fixed but, instead, are quite malleable is powerful.” Brain research has shown that whenever we retrieve a memory it goes into a flex state, which means it is temporarily reorganized. Therefore, every time we review with our students, which we must do, we might be changing their memory. Therefore, we must use strategies which continually strengthen memory over time.

Based upon this research, it is Jensen’s recommendation that teachers review content being taught halfway between the beginning of the unit and the test. Additionally, other reviews in the form of written quizzes or group work which focuses on the content, would lower confusion and improve test scores.

A lot to digest. A lot to debate. And a lot to frustrate teachers stuck in the current teach-for-the-test mind set we are forced to operate under. I will discuss how we are expected or able to align this new information with our current classroom reality in my next blog. Wait for it…

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This is the second in a series about brain research and Eric Jensen, as reported on in OhioSchools magazine. (I would suggest reading my previous blog, “Brain Research and the Classroom”, before this one, if you haven’t already, to better understand what will be discussed here.) In this blog, I will present the next four strategies for education based on current brain research.

“Strategy #4: Chronic stress is a very real issue at schools for both staff and students.” This next statistic blows me away. A staggering 30-50 percent of all students experience stress ranging from moderate stress to daily, intense stress! It gets worse; some schools see twice as much stress, and in schools in poverty-stricken areas the stress levels are higher yet! Jensen refers to these as “pathogenic stress loads” and says that, not only are they becoming more common, but they can lead to serious learning, behavior, and health risks. We all know that everyone experiences stress, and some is even good for you. But when it becomes chronic or acute, it is detrimental to learning and may even lead to behavior problems. Chronic, high stress levels in students affect their attendance, memory, social skills, and cognition.

Jensen’s suggestion is: “Teach students better coping skills, increase student perception of choice, build coping skills, strengthen arts, physical activity and mentoring.” He says that these activities help to lower stress as students experience a feeling of control over their own lives, thus reducing the impact of stressors.

“Strategy #5: Schools are pushing differentiation as a strategy to deal with the differences in learners.” Research shows that instead of classrooms with predominately “typical” students and a few with “differences”, it is actually uncommon to have what is considered a “healthy brain”. In fact, Jensen states that research has proven that “almost 90 percent of human brains are atypical, damaged or in some way not healthy.”

Now, this is both alarming and challenging! And how does Jensen propose that we apply this fact to our classrooms? He says we need to celebrate everyone’s uniqueness and diversity in the classroom. These differences provide us with a wide range of abilities, talents, and interests, and we need to validate these distinctions. Therefore, to expect all students to be at the same point, at the same time, in all subject areas goes against research databases that show variations in maturation rates and other brain differences.

“Strategy #6: New evidence suggests the value of teaching content in even smaller chunk sizes.” In the past, it was believed that students had a higher capacity for working memory; seven plus or minus chunks at a time. New research drops that figure significantly to two to four chunks. Additionally, research shows that the hippocampus, which is where we hold onto content, also has a limit to how much content it can hold, and is overloaded quickly based on the complexity of the subject and the learner’s background. Finally, the more intense the learning, the more physical resources like glucose, which is consumed by learning and memory, are used by our brain.

Jensen’s suggestion is to chunk content into smaller, more manageable amounts. Here is his rule of thumb: the more complex the content and the less background the learner has in that content, reduce the time spent on that content to 4-8 minutes. Conversely, the less complex the content and the greater background knowledge the learner has of that content, the longer you can spend teaching that content, from 8-15 minutes. He concludes by informing us that we should never spend more than 15 minutes of content input at a time, and recommends that we “share this with your colleagues. But share it in a small chunk, and then allow time for processing it.” Better yet, share it and run for cover!

The last 4 strategies will be explained in the next blog. So, to be continued again…

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Brain research is providing educators with important information as to how children’s brains grow and develop. Having attended a class with Dr. Kathie Nunley regarding brain research, I am very interested in how we, as educators, integrate what brain research is telling us to more effectively teach our students. So I was excited to read a recent article from the January issue of OhioSchools magazine entitled “Bringing brain research into the classroom” by Eric Jensen. Over the next few blogs, I would like to convey to those of you who haven’t had the opportunity to read this article some of its salient points.

Eric Jensen is an internationally known educator who has written over 20 books, including Teaching with the Brain in Mind, and who leads workshops which emphasize the connection of brain research to student achievement. His simple premise is: “The brain is intimately involved in, and connected with, everything educators and students do at school. Any disconnect is a recipe for frustration and potentially disaster. Brain-based education is best understood in three words: engagement, strategies, and principles. You must engage your learners and do it with strategies that are based on real science.” In this article, Jensen breaks down brain-based education into ten strategies. I will deal with the first three in this blog.

“Strategy #1: Physical education, recess and movement are critical to learning.” The growing of neurons, which can occur throughout our lifetime, can be regulated by everyday behaviors, one of which is exercise. These neurons correlate with memory, mood, and learning. Research shows that the best activities to grow neurons are voluntary gross motor activities such as running, dance, team sports, power walks, games, etc. New research shows that during early childhood, “movement wires up the brain to make more efficient connections.”

So how do schools apply this research? “Support more, not less physical activity, recess and classroom movement. It raises the good chemicals for thinking, focus, learning and memory.” Jensen recommends 30-60 minutes per day of voluntary physical activity. He claims it will lower stress response and boost neurogenesis, the formation and development of nerve cells, and learning. He recommends starting out the school year offering a variety of physical activities and eventually allowing students to choose the type of physical activity they enjoy because forced activity can cause an overproduction of cortisol, a steroid hormone which is released in response to stress.

“Strategy #2: Social conditions influence our brain in multiple ways we never knew before.” Jensen points out that school behaviors become encoded through our sense of pleasure, coherence, stress, reward, acceptance, and affinity because they are highly social experiences. While educators are aware that poor social conditions have an adverse affect upon students in the classroom, research now shows that a sense of isolation or social defeat are correlated with fewer brain cells.

How does this apply to the classroom? Jensen says, “Do not allow random social groupings for more than 10-20 percent of the school day.” He suggests the use of diverse groupings that are targeted and well-planned allowing for mentoring, teams, and buddies. He also recommends creating and strengthening positive social conditions between students and between the teacher and students.

“Strategy #3: The brain changes!” Here’s an incredible fact: the brain changes every day, which means our students’ brains are changing daily right before our eyes. This process can be influenced through reading, the arts, skill-building, meditation, career building, and improved thinking skills. The better our skill-building approach, the faster the brain can change. Jensen explains: “We used to think about the paradigm as either genes or experience. We now know it can be a hybrid of both. We now know that environments can trigger genes to express themselves in ways we never would have predicted-if you know what to do. You can upgrade a student’s capacity for memory, processing, sequencing, attention and impulsivity regulation.”

Jensen recommends that teachers take 30-90 minutes a day, 3-5 times a week to improve student skill sets. He suggests teaching attention, memory, and processing skills at least 30 minutes a day to ensure student progress.

I will refrain from discussing how or if Jensen’s strategies can be integrated into current teaching strategies which are, by necessity, based around state testing, until I have reported on each strategy. Until then, this is to be continued…

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CNN Health recently reported some interesting news about dyslexia, a condition which makes it difficult to interpret language. This condition which is also called developmental reading disorder may affect from 5 to 20 percent of the population. Those are significantly high percentages making it critical that we learn as much as we can about this condition. New research suggests that it might be possible to predict from a brain scan whether a child with dyslexia will be able to improve their reading ability over a few years. Interesting stuff, right? So let’s dive into the challenging issue of dyslexia.

Children with dyslexia may experience difficulty with reading comprehension because they don’t connect sounds with letters and have difficulty recognizing words. The reason for this is that their brain doesn’t properly recognize or process symbols. While it is possible for some children with this disorder to read fairly normally in time, the question being researched is which children will be able to improve their reading skills and how much extra help it will take to make that possible.

A study conducted by Fumiko Hoeft, a psychiatry researcher at Stanford University School of Medicine, followed 25 children with dyslexia and 20 children without dyslexia for 2 ½ years using brain imaging to try to answer these questions. Using two kinds of neuroimaging, functional magnetic resonance imaging and diffusion tensor imaging, they studied children as they performed reading tasks. According to the article, “Neuroimaging ‘Predicts’ Which Dyslexics Will Learn to Read”, published on 12/21/10:

* No behavioural measure, including widely used standardized reading and language tests, reliably predicted reading gains.
* Children with dyslexia who at baseline showed greater activation in the right inferior frontal gyrus during a specific task and whose white matter connected to this right frontal region was better organized showed greater reading improvement over the next two-and-a-half years.
* Looking at patterns of activation across the whole brain allowed them to very accurately predict future reading gains in children with dyslexia.

Let me break this down as simply as possible. What this research tells us is that, first, after additional testing, it may be possible to use brain imaging as a prognostic tool to predict reading improvement in children with dyslexia. Second, since the research shows that dyslexic children used different neural mechanisms and pathways when making gains in reading than those used by typically developing children, interventions could be developed for children with dyslexia which would focus on the regions of the brain that are more effective at improving their reading skills.

As we learn more about how the brain works, it is exciting to think that we may be able to use this research to help people who struggle with a variety of learning difficulties like dyslexia. What good news!

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