Much of this book is about how. This, I hope, makes it attractive to teachers and trainers who are understandably eager for new practical ideas. The risk, though, is that it provides no more than a “box of chocolates”. Once the chocolates have been enjoyed, the box is likely to be thrown away and a fresh one demanded. The more taxing but ultimately more productive intention of The Teacher’s Toolkit is for readers to internalise the recipe so they can make their own confectionery when this particular selection runs out.

So this first section is about why – the rationale. Why push the boat out and do things differently? Why not just carry on as normal? My basic premise is that learning in schools is likely to be at its best when teachers follow the natural laws of the learning process. This idea is presented strongly by the Scottish Consultative Council on the Curriculum in the introduction to their excellent Teaching For Effective Learning:

The difference between attainment and achievement is more than semantic. In Effective Learning in Schools Christopher Bowring-Carr and John West-Burnham stress

Behind all this is biology. For the last couple of decades neuroscientists have been telling us with increasing confidence about the workings of the brain. This is a direct consequence of advances in scanning technology, particularly fMRI (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) and PET (Positron Emission Tomography), which allow us to see the brain in action to a very precise degree. For those who are not very familiar with all the bits of the central nervous system, visit Eric Chudler’s fresh and frequently updated website Neuroscience for Kids at http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/neurok.html

For more advanced technical stuff about the structure of the brain, go to www.vh.org/Providers/Textbooks/BrainAnatomy/BrainAnatomy.html

Alternatively, familiarise yourself with Susan Greenfield’s work. Professor of Pharmacology at Oxford and a popular TV presenter, she describes the inner secrets of the grey matter in very readable texts such as The Private Life of the Brain,15 Brain Story16 and The Human Brain, a Guided Tour.17 If you’re ready for a detailed and fairly technical account of shifts in brain research from the 1940s to the present day, read John McCrone’s Going Inside: A Tour Round a Single Moment of Consciousness. Towards the end of the text he sums up: “This book has tried to track what would be a fundamental change in the science of the mind: a shift from reductionism to dynamism.”18

Nowadays the brain is thought of as dynamic, not as some sort of computer crunching its way through billions of inputs per second. It is considered to be a flexible, self-adjusting, unique, ever-changing organism that continually grows and reconfigures in response to each stimulus. Early in the 1990s researchers such as the neurobiologist Karl Friston of London and the psychologist Stephen Kosslyn of Harvard were instrumental in formulating this new paradigm. They realised that the brain operates rather like the surface of a pond. New inputs provoke a widespread disturbance in some existing state. The brain’s circuits are drawn tight in a state of tension and when a pebble is thrown in (a sensory input) there are immediate ripples of activity. New pebbles create patterns that interact with the lingering patterns of previous inputs. Then everything echoes off the sides. Nothing is being calculated. The response of the pond to the input is organic, or more accurately dynamic.

Elissa Newport, psycholinguist at the University of Rochester in New York, uses another image: the brain can now be seen as working more like a beehive, its swarm of interconnected neurons sending signals back and forth at lightning speed. Sir Charles Sherrington, who has been described as “the grandfather of neurophysiology”, says of the brain, “It is as if the Milky Way entered upon some cosmic dance”. However you choose to describe it, the brain is characterised by activity, plasticity, responsiveness, interplay, speed, adaptability, continual reshaping and inexhaustible resources – a far cry from the computer-like comparisons of the not-too-distant past.

Aware of the vitality and fluidity of the brain, all made nakedly apparent by imaging, McCrone suggests that a complete understanding of consciousness can be achieved only if insights from a number of disciplines are combined: