The Brain-Based Classroom

Accessing Every Child's Potential Through Educational Neuroscience

Kieran O'Mahony

• Publisher: Eye on Education
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000330663
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Klassenführung

The Brain-Based Classroom translates findings from educational neuroscience into a new paradigm of practices suitable for any teacher. The human brain is a site of spectacular capacity for joy, motivation, and personal satisfaction, but how can educators harness its potential to help children reach truly fulfilling goals? Using this innovative collection of brain-centric strategies, teachers can transform their classrooms into deep learning spaces that support their students through self-regulation and mindset shifts. These fresh insights will help teachers resolve classroom management issues, prevent crises and disruptive behaviors, and center social-emotional learning and restorative practices.

Part I
Breaking Paradigms

1

Neuroscience of Learning

I feel so helpless … I don’t know what to do! It’s my daughter. I am at my wit’s end.

—Guardian

Teachers are not easily convinced. They have witnessed so many attempts to increase student academic performance that they are wary of the next change du jour. “If you KNEW the kind of students that I deal with, you would never suggest anything so crazy. Fifty bouncing balls in my classroom will be pure chaos, broken windows, fighting, and … and mayhem.” Then, a week later, they beat down my door. “Why didn’t you tell me sooner? How come I never knew this stuff?” What happens in the meantime is not a miracle … it is simply science. And when something works, and works every time, teachers are quick to want more. That has been my experience over the past ten years, since Neural Education gained a limpid toehold in classrooms in a practical way.

In the beginning, I would have said the same thing … agreeing with naysayers, that it would be foolhardy to introduce more distractions, foolish to invite chaos where there was a tenuous, if intermittent, calm. Yet, today I never start a lesson without first inviting the entire class to engage in a physical exercise designed to improve learning. The idea is threefold: free up working memory; increase blood flow to the brain; and fill the room with appropriate neurotransmitters for learning. Appropriate neurotransmitters include dopamine, serotonin, norepinephrine, and oxytocin. That means children are out of their seats, moving kinesthetically in a structured way that is both fun and challenging. It is part of every classroom norm, so children expect it. In fact, if I do not do it right, or if I am late in starting, the children remind me. They expect a safe, fun, and energetic start to every lesson.

Paradigm Shift

For me, that is a paradigm shift from the way in which I managed my classroom in the past. I was a strict disciplinarian because I wanted to give my students a sense of responsibility and a level of consequences for their behavior— good and bad. I was convinced that I was doing them a favor. I thought I was setting them up for life. After all, the school had standards by which it gained its reputation for success, and its ethos/culture for improving children’s academic outcomes. In colorful introductory brochures, we claimed that we used emergent ideations to better the lives of our students; that we knew what we were doing so that your children would excel in life. I bought into this positive marketing language because I joined the profession that I loved in order to make a difference for young children. The next generation was going to be better than their parents’ generation. They would have more opportunity, would do well in life, love, and work.

So what happened?

In retrospect, it was a no brainer! I should have seen it sooner. Why would a ten-year-old child say the words “I hate school” and viscerally mean it? It just doesn’t make sense. All guardians recognize this dismal attitude towards learning in organized learning. The two-year-old had become a belligerent pre-teen. For a moment, she was insatiable, simply couldn’t get enough knowledge, and was forever asking “why” and “what” questions. Why would that same eager child grow to hate the sacred place of learning within just a few years?

All children have brains—hardwired learning machines (see Figure 1.1). Right from the get-go, every child is a veritable vacuum sucking up as much knowledge and skills as humanly possible. That is, right up to the moment they show up in school. Then their tune is changed—changed dramatically. School is boring; school is icky; school is work. Learning used to be play, it used to be about curiosity, and getting an answer to a question that I chose, and that helped me make sense of my world. But now it feels like you are trying to fill me up with useless scraps of information that I will never like and never use. And you punish me when I am not feeling well about myself or about school.

FIGURE 1.1 All Children Have Brains

Crisis in Academia

But it gets worse. In the US, a child drops out of high school every 26 seconds—that’s more than a million children pushed out of school every year. That is costly, in more ways than might be apparent. It’s more than a million children not contributing to society every year (2). Such dire dramas persist year in, year out … since we began collecting data in the middle of the last century. Research shows that the cost of dropouts is not only injurious to the students at the moment and for the rest of their lives, but that it has a very real collateral dollar impact on all taxpayers, and for the nation as a whole. For instance, the Washington Alliance for Excellent Education highlights the following impact of dropouts on society:

If half the students who dropped out of the class of 2008 had graduated, they would have generated $4.8 million more in wages and $636 million in state and local taxes nationally in one average year of their working lives (adjusted to reflect today’s costs).

(3)

Expenses compound in a cycle of negative social and economic calamity. Impending expenses exacerbate individual and state “lost revenues,” since the probability is also high that dropouts will end up incarcerated, use welfare, or live on food stamps (4). For instance, it costs significantly more to keep children in juvenile detention or in prison, than it does to educate them. A direct comparison in the state of Washington highlights that an incarcerated youth costs approximately $15,000 each year by comparison with $6,000 if attending public school (5).

And for a large population of children who manage to stay in school, the numbers with regard to their academic achievements are anything but spectacular. As shown in Figure 1.2 and Figure 1.3, scores indicating proficiency in math and reading have stagnated to 48% (give or take a few points) in 35 years. This is hard to credit in a country that has so much wealth, so much opportunity, spends so much per student, and has such aspirations for the individual within the free world. It makes no sense (6). Dissatisfaction at school adds up to squandered opportunities. The numbers are prohibitive; the cost astronomical. National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) annual reports continue to churn out disappointing results and represent student lost potential (7).

FIGURE 1.2 Nation’s Report Card: 35-Year Trend in Mathematics

FIGURE 1.3 Nation’s Report Card: 35-Year Trend in Reading

A visceral background fear is an added crisis in today’s learning environments. Students, guardians, and teachers are worried by school shootings and other violence that rob children of their potential in a system that is confused, broken, and seemingly stuck (8). Policy makers revert to two longstanding and popular solutions—more money and more technology (9), and have in recent years added a call for more mental health wellness and counseling (10). But the crisis persists. In addition, in most states youth suicide rates have been climbing (11). According to the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), youth suicide rates increased by 56% between the years 2000 and 2017 (12) a sad, grim fact that contributes to Americans’ lower life expectancy.

Clear and tragic links have been drawn between dysfunctional classrooms and a robust school-to-prison pipeline (13), as well as to generational poverty and homelessness (10). Researchers who dig deep into questions of racial inequality between White and African American youth highlight findings that are staggering: severely high youth unemployment costs $10 billion in tax revenue each year at the federal and state level (14).

The sad reality is school sucks for at least 50% of kids! Ask them. School makes me … “Cry, sad, depressed, suicidal, anxious, feel like a failure, stupid.” These are top results one gets when the question is aired on the web—regardless of search engine. At the same time, the other 50% either love or tolerate the exercise with equanimity. So what is going on? When we visit the same issues through a neural viewpoint, suddenly, it is less difficult to make sense of the apparent conundrums.

Intuition vs. Science

The neural outlook offered in this book “makes visible” the paradigm shift. Yet, this book is but a chapter. Most of what comes next will be created and co-created through practice by the very same teachers who were so reticent in the beginning. Paradigm shifts are hard. But wanting “more” involves undertaking a paradigm shift—actually several paradigm shifts at the same time. By adopting a neural vantage point in the classroom, teachers change along three axes. Intuition evolves into method when it is shown to have substantive scientific sustenance.

The three paradigms embrace three disciplines: Mindset, Expertise, and Motivation. Teachers already embrace many aspects of each paradigm. But intuition is not enough. In this book, we explore these three dimensions in greater detail, and from a neural perspective. A shift on three axes at the same time will deliver a completely different teacher, and a completely different learner.

So what do tennis balls have to do with any of this? It seems facetious and a little ridiculous to claim that two bouncing balls for every child solve American education. The short answer is that bouncing two balls alone is not sufficient intervention to solve American education. However, this simple exercise is ample evidence of a shifting paradigm that describes a route to solutions that are bringing meaningful change in classrooms every day. Teachers are reporting that their students are more engaged, more prepared for learning, and have found new joy in learning.

But, teachers have tried umpteen interventions sponsored by university education departments—prestigious, and intentioned, over the same 50 years that NAEP has been documenting stagnation and “flat lined” results. Why would this one be so different? Why would a paradigm shift of this simple nature have such different and palatable results?

Another no brainer! Only this time, it is the brain. A teacher who is prepared to introduce 50 lacrosse balls into her class first thing Monday morning is also the teacher who is thinking about “structure” before “function”; who is thinking about neurotransmitters instead of discipline; who is aware that there is no “good” behavior or “bad” behavior—it’s just communication. And this teacher is...