Facilitating Learning with the Adult Brain in Mind

A Conceptual and Practical Guide

Kathleen Taylor, Catherine Marienau

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781118711453
• eBook ISBN: 9781118711590
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

Practical "brain-aware" facilitation tailored to the adult brain

Facilitating Learning with the Adult Brain in Mind explains how the brain works, and how to help adults learn, develop, and perform more effectively in various settings. Recent neurobiological discoveries have challenged long-held assumptions that logical, rational thought is the preeminent approach to knowing. Rather, feelings and emotions are essential for meaningful learning to occur in the embodied brain. Using stories, metaphors, and engaging illustrations to illuminate technical ideas, Taylor and Marienau synthesize relevant trends in neuroscience, cognitive science, and philosophy of mind. Readers unfamiliar with current brain discoveries will enjoy an informative, easy-to-read book. Neuroscience fans will find additional material designed to supplement their knowledge.

Many popular publications on brain and learning focus on school-aged learners or tend more toward anatomical description than practical application. This book provides facilitators of adult learning and development a much-needed resource of tested approaches plus the science behind their effectiveness.

• Appreciate the fundamental role of experience in adult learning
• Understand how metaphor and analogy spark curiosity and creativity
• Alleviate adult anxieties that impede learning
• Acquire tools and approaches that foster adult learning and development

Compared with other books on brain and learning, this volume includes dozens of specific examples of how experienced practitioners facilitate meaningful learning. These "brain-aware" approaches can be adopted and adapted for use in diverse settings. Facilitating Learning with the Adult Brain in Mind should be read by advisors/counselors, instructors, curriculum and instructional developers, professional development designers, corporate trainers and coaches, faculty mentors, and graduate students—in fact, anyone interested in how adult brains learn.

Part I

Brain: Then and Now

WE BEGIN with a brief overview of the brain. Rather than focus on anatomical detail, we use stories and analogies to explore how it came to be what it is today.

Chapter 1 first describes the brain's activity metaphorically, in terms of two states of mind that can affect how learning happens. We then explore what sociobiologists have inferred about the development of brain structures and function over time, culminating in what now resides in our twenty-first-century skulls. Finally, we briefly touch on an admittedly touchy subject: our currently aging brains.

Building on this backdrop, chapter 2 explores in more detail what we know about what the brain does as it learns—specifically, what supports and enhances adult learning. We more closely examine the embodied brain's fundamental learning process—analogical categorization and association—and the role that emotions play.

Chapter 3 looks more closely at how analogy and metaphor shape experience and conceptual understanding. We also examine current understandings of the differences between the left hemisphere and right hemisphere and how they affect learning.

Chapter 1
Brain Basics

The biological mind is, first and foremost, an organ for controlling the biological body… Minds are not disembodied logical reasoning devices.

—ANDY CLARK

THE BRAIN'S prime directive has always been to keep the organism alive and functioning optimally, whatever the situation. It does so by monitoring everything going on in and around the body. In fact, your brain can do a lot of things sophisticated medical diagnostic systems can do—and some they cannot. For example, in addition to continuously analyzing all body systems and states, your brain also responds instantly when those readings are out of whack, working to put things back in balance, called homeostasis.

Now, imagine what might have happened way back at the beginning when the brain had to face a saber-toothed tiger. In such situations, it is designed to go into survival mode: adrenaline rushes through the body, extra blood flows to muscles, and respiration rate increases. Though our current brain has ways to keep our more primitive emotions at bay, fear-based systems still affect much of our conscious and unconscious behavior. More than anything else, the brain wants out of there! The parts of the brain that can focus on problem solving and rational reflection are on hold. For many adults, taking a test is just about the modern equivalent of the tiger.

This is also true, though less intensely, in any new learning situation. Fortunately, adults have two competing states of mind: whereas one says, “I'm anxious,” the other says, “I'm curious.” Negotiating this ongoing tension is a major factor for adult learning facilitators in any setting (ALFAS) seeking to facilitate meaningful, lasting learning—but in our experience, it is one that is not sufficiently addressed in many learning environments.

Two States of Mind

It makes perfect sense that the brain's most basic imperative is self-preservation because if it can't manage that, nothing else much matters. We are constantly on the alert for potential threats. In fact, the brain suffers from negativity bias; that is, it is many times more likely to focus on and remember negative interpretations of experience.

Negativity bias affects thinking, feeling, and acting. Daniel Kahneman (2011) also describes this in terms of negativity dominance, in which “negativity and escape dominate positivity and approach” (p. 300). We see and respond to visual threats (a scary picture) or verbal threats (words like war) more quickly than we do to positive stimuli (happy faces, pleasant words). Furthermore, when presented with positive and negative stimuli (such as words or photographs on a screen), we unconsciously—and almost imperceptibly—lean our bodies toward the positive and away from the negative. And in interactions with others, we may dwell more intensely on what we perceive as negative input than on positive.

Anxious Brain

Here is a metaphorical description of our threat-anticipating, defensive, certainty-seeking, anxious, ready-to-fight-or-flee, no-time-to-think-about-learning brain figure 1.1. Its response to the basic question, “What do I have to do to save myself?” is:

Figure 1.1 Anxious Brain

• I have to know what's happening.
• I have to focus narrowly on the immediate potential danger.
• I have to be certain.
• I have to be right (uncertainty or ambiguity can mean annihilation!).
• I have to avoid threat.
• I have to be always prepared to react, just in case.

Curious Brain

Fortunately, a few hundred million years ago, our brains began refining and elaborating the systems designed to respond to threats. We now also have a very well-developed novelty-seeking, pattern-constructing, cause-seeking, meaning-making, analogy-directed brain figure 1.2. Its major focus is still and always self-preservation, but it comes at it in a completely different way:

Figure 1.2 Curious Brain

• I have to seek experience.
• I have to categorize and associate by comparison (analogy) what's happening now with what happened before.
• I have to construct and elaborate patterns.
• I have to determine cause and effect.
• I have to reward myself for figuring things out with “feel-good” hormone release.
• I have to focus more widely, on possibilities beyond the immediate.

To be most effective, our practice as ALFAS has to account for both of these states of mind. But unless we first attend sufficiently well to threat mediation, adults may literally not have enough presence of mind to learn. They may dutifully try to memorize and follow procedures, but until the brain can pull itself together, it is likely to have difficulty with more substantive learning.

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Mezirow on Learning

“Learning is understood as the process of using a prior interpretation to construe a new or revised interpretation of the meaning of one's experience in order to guide future action” (Mezirow, 1996, p. 162). This is especially relevant in the context of adult learning and the brain because it (1) frames learning as a process rather than merely an outcome; (2) places meaning making, which is the essence of adult learning, at the core of the process; (3) includes the role of prior experience and interpretation of that experience; (4) refers to the brain's construction and reconstruction of knowledge, key to literally changing one's mind; and (5) alludes to the relationship between reflection and action, which is the essence of praxis. (For more on Mezirow, see chapter 9.)

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Learning and State of Mind

We must be attuned to situations likely to trigger the always-on-alert anxious brain to go into threat overdrive. People in a state of heightened anxiety, such as during tests or performance appraisals, are on brain overload. They may not see or hear correctly, “which causes them to misinterpret and give the wrong answer… Their brains are so busy dealing with the [intensity that the brain can't] perceive accurately. Our brains are not infinite. They run out of space, out of gas, as it were,” as worry and anxiety leave less room for perceiving (Ratey, 2002, pp. 61–62).

Most ALFAS intuitively realize this—but not all of us and perhaps not consciously. Moreover, we may not recognize that some of our favorite strategies for enhancing learning, such as detailed feedback and group activities, need to be carefully reviewed with the anxious brain in mind. (More on this in chapter 8.)

Think of it this way: In terms of learning, when the brain is scared, it has a foot on the brake; when it is curious, it has a foot on the accelerator (figure 1.3). With a foot on the brake and none on the gas, such as at a stoplight, the car idles. Many adults, including those with impressive experience and credentials, start off a new learning situation that way. Even if they have willingly chosen to participate (sometimes they are there for other reasons), stress inevitably is associated with a new setting, new facilitator, and perhaps new approaches to new ideas. As Julie Willans a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Preface
• Part I: Brain: Then and Now
• Part II: Practices That Enhance Adult Learning
• Part III: Reflecting on Practice
• Epilogue
• References
• Acknowledgments
• About the Authors and Contributors
• Name Index
• Subject Index
• End User License Agreement