What does neuroscience have to do with classroom teaching?

Recently I was interviewed by a local t.v. personality on the topic of, "How a student's brain works." I am reluctant to mention it, because in the interview I was nervous and tongue-tied and gave vague, drawn-out answers.  I'd like to blame it on the fact that I had expected to be interviewed about a different topic and had to try to think of something meaningful to say on the spot, but my family and friends will tell you that vague, drawn-out answers are actually pretty common for me.  I'd much rather take a week or two to compose an essay on a topic like that than to respond orally off the cuff!

Don't worry, dear reader - I wouldn't dare inflict any such essay on you (at least not today; I don't have the time for anything like that).  If you are interested in the topics mentioned in that interview, however, I have several suggestions for where you might go to look.

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University of Lethbridge

The interview began with a discussion of the Masters of Education Inclusive Education and Neuroscience program in which I am currently enrolled.  This program is a new and innovative collaboration between the University of Lethbridge Education Department and the Department of Neuroscience.  That 3-year program is wrapping up this spring, but it looks like a new, fresh cohort will begin this summer. (If you are interested in applying for it, you'd better hurry, though; the deadline is today, Dec. 1, 2013!).  It has been a rewarding experience, but one that has challenged me as much as anything I've ever done (including first year teaching and parenting teenagers).

The best part of doing this MEd degree has been the wonderful cohort of classmates whom I got to know and who helped to encourage me through those tough times.  One of them has a fantastic blog that you really ought to read if the topics on my blog interest you (in fact, go there now and check it out.  Really - go now!) If you are interested in inclusive education, you should also check out the Inclusive Education Toolbox put together by another classmate.  I talked a bit about the cohort in the interview, but unfortunately they cut that part out.

Of course, you don't have to enroll in a Masters program to start learning about the brain.  There are are a number of great resources available online.  One free online course worth looking at is the Neuroscience & the Classroom from Annenberg Learner (thanks to another classmate for the link).

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One reason that I was interested in applying for the Inclusive Education and Neuroscience program initially was the that the U of L was home to the highly regarded Canadian Centre for Behavioural Neuroscience.  Here is one of the "rock star" founders of that facility, Dr. Bryan Kolb, giving a talk which more clearly and elaborately explains the point I was making in the interview about the effect of experience on the brain:

It is a fascinating presentation, if you can spare the hour to watch it.  Many people are shocked to hear his description of the effects of pre-natal experiences and even pre-conception experiences (i.e. experiences of the parents prior to conceiving a child) on later brain function of the offspring.  Dr. Kolb also goes on to show how these experiences clearly effect later academic performance.  Teachers, however, may be disappointed that the content of this talk does not quite match the title, since very little of it has to do with the classroom until about the 50 minute mark.  At that point, Dr. Kolb does briefly give some reasons why neuroscience is important in education.  Those reasons are to:

1. debunk myths
2. provide knowledge about brain development and function,
3. provide informed solutions to practical issues

These are good reasons, and the examples he provides are interesting ones, if somewhat too brief.  Although Dr. Kolb was not one of my instructors, his colleague Dr. Rob Sutherland made most of the same points and we were able to look at them in greater detail.  Even so, I will admit that it was often still difficult for my classmates and me to make the connections between the neuroscience discoveries and classroom practices, especially at first.

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Where I really started to "get it" was in reflecting upon the courses from the education department where it became clear that the knowledge and ideas from our neuroscience classes were the foundation for understanding pretty much everything else.  They were critical for understanding different conditions that affected student learning and behaviour, such as Autism, ADHD, Dyslexia, and Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder.  They were very important in understanding emotional and behavioural challenges and and the effects of trauma, neglect, or addiction. They were, in fact, the key to understanding motivation, memory, and attention in all children.

As I learned about the assortment of neurological factors that could come into play, the number of different forces which could influence them, the complexity of possible interactions, and the range of possible outcomes, however, I began to understand why it was so difficult to jump directly from neuroscience studies to recommendations for classroom practices.  It became clear to me that there was tremendous diversity in student needs and abilities, and that no single set of teaching techniques could be effective for all.  Instead, I became convinced of the need for teaching which was flexible and responsive to student differences.

You may detect a similar progression of ideas and understanding in this presentation by Dr. David Rose of the CAST (Center for Applied Special Technology):

It was in the materials from CAST that I first began to see a direct connection between the neuroscience and effective classroom practices.  They describe 3 broad categories of brain networks: the recognition networks which receive and analyze information (the "what" of learning); the strategic networks which plan and execute actions (the "how" of learning); and the affective networks which evaluate and set priorities (the "why" of learning). They then translated this understanding into guidelines for designing curriculum which accommodate for differences in these 3 networks by encouraging multiple means of representation, of action or expression, and of engagement.  They refer to this educational approach as Universal Design for Learning or UDL.

It was through UDL that I began to more fully understand and appreciate student neurological diversity in terms of difference rather than deficit.  Rather than relying on research to find some "perfect" strategy which would work for the highest number of students, or on neuroscience to tell me how to "fix" student differences, I began to see it as a means of better understanding the various different ways that students learn so that I can plan more inclusive and responsive instruction.  I began to recognize that the "average learner" was a myth, and that variability was a potential advantage:

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Of course, I never said anything quite so meaningful or profound in my little 3 minute t.v. interview.  I said something about the promise of diversity and needing to change the way we look at things.  I paused and stumbled over words while trying to think of what to say next.  Of course, now that I've studied a bit of neuroscience, I've got a pretty good idea of what was going on in my brain which resulted in those behaviours.  That knowledge didn't help me to avoid being tongue-tied, but it might help me to understand my students better when I am tempted to put them on the spot by asking them to verbally answer unexpected questions in front of their peers.  And perhaps I might just come up with more flexible ways of allowing them to respond to my questioning.  Maybe I'll let them compose a blog post about it...

When is a difference a disability? (Part 3)

Signmark is a Finnish hip hop artist with a world-wide following.  That is unusual enough.  He is also the first deaf artist signed to a major recording label.  If you are wondering, "How in the world does that work?", check out the short documentary video below.  At the 11 minute mark in the documentary, the narrator asks,  "Is deafness a disability, or something else?"  Signmark replies,

"My only aid, really, is an interpreter. But interpreting is still language; it's not an aide per se. If you knew sign language, I wouldn't need an interpreter here, right? So, am I disabled, or just a linguistic minority?"

Clearly, Signmark does identify with the term disabled to some extent.  He has been designated by the Finnish government as a special representative for disabled people, and he been part of the working group for the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD).  That document has a definition of disability which I find very interesting.  It states that:

Persons with disabilities include those who have long-term physical, mental, intellectual or sensory impairments which in interaction with various barriers may hinder their full and effective participation in society on an equal basis with others.

It is the "in interaction with" part that really grabs me.  

It has only been in the last few years that I have come to appreciate the importance of external barriers to the concept of disability.  Prior to that, I had considered disability mostly through a medical model  that sees disability as a defective characteristic of the individual in need of fixing or therapy.  The United Nations definition, however, draws from a social model of disability, rather than a medical model.  In this model, disability is recognized as the consequence of the interaction of the individual with an environment that does not accommodate that individual’s differences.  

From Training Package on the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities
http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/Disability/Pages/TrainingmaterialCRPDConvention_OptionalProtocol.aspx

The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Training Guide provides a couple of illustrative examples of how this might play out:

• Being in a wheelchair (personal factor) combined with living in a city with accessible buildings (environmental factor) leads to participation in the community on the same terms as someone who is not in a wheelchair: there is little or no disability.
• Having an intellectual impairment (personal factor) combined with a belief in the community that persons with intellectual disabilities lack the capacity to vote (negative environmental factor) leads to exclusion from society and denial of the right to vote: there is a disability.

This perspective is particularly important within the education system because we are not a medical institution designed to diagnose and treat medical conditions. We are, however, a social institution, and we have a fair amount of control over the physical and social environment. We can identify barriers to full social participation and work to remove them. These disabling barriers might include the school facilities themselves, the attitudes of students or staff at the school, the rules and procedures for doing things (fire drills, assemblies, etc.), the classroom environment, or even the instructional methods, materials, and goals set out by the teacher.  

In the video below, David Rose of CAST  describes how curricula itself can be as disabled. This is also described in the document, What Does It Mean to Say that Curricula are Disabled? at the National Center on Universal Design for Learning website.

Signmark knows those barriers well.  He tells about the scorn he has received from hearing Finnish artists whom he says have resented his success. He also says that back in high school, when he expressed his desire to be an artist, all his teacher could say to him was,

"I understand you have dreams; I understand you have passion.  And I think that's great, but... you also need to understand and accept that you are deaf."

I would guess that his teacher had all the best intentions in giving him this counsel.  Sometimes it is hard to imagine how the barriers we face can be removed, and to believe that dreams and passion can be enough.  It must have been difficult to see how the education system could support him in achieving those dreams.  In fact, it is true that sometimes individual passion and dreams are not enough unless there are others working to support those dreams and help to remove or overcome barriers.

By this, I do not mean to diminish the determination and creativity that Signmark has displayed. He describes how the resistance he encountered has helped to strengthen his resolve, and this attitude was likely a critical factor in his success. The fact that he has been able to have a career and tour the world, however, is likely also due, at least in part, to the support and encouragement needed to overcome the barriers. In the video, for example, we see him working closely with his collaborator, Brandon, and we hear about the support he has received from the Finnish government and the United Nations.

In fact, if it is true that disability is one possible result of the interaction between personal and environmental factors, it is also true that successful development of ability is the other possible result.  As an educator, I may not have control over all the factors, but I need to be aware of those which I can control and to deliberately use them to help all of my students develop their abilities. 

In the end, Signmark's passion for hip hop, his desire to be an artist, and his determination to achieve his dreams are personal factors that have turned out to be every bit as important as his hearing impairment.  His career shows how a personal factor such as an impairment is not a disability in and of itself unless the environment is unable to accommodate that difference.  

So is it then the person or the environment that is "disabled"?

Whose responsibility is it?

The other night I heard one of my sons watching a YouTube video that I had seen in one of my classes recently.   In it, 18 year old Texas student Jeff Bliss lectures his teacher about her classroom practices. “If you would just get up and teach ‘em instead of handing them a frickin packet," Jeff complains, "there’s kids in here who don’t learn like that."  Jeff goes on to say that “You want a kid to change and start doing better? You gotta touch his freakin heart. You can’t expect a kid to change if all you do is just tell them.”  The video went viral and sparked a lot of discussion about teaching practices and about student and teacher roles.  A lot of the debate centered on whether it is mostly a teacher's responsibility to be get kids excited about learning or whether students need to take more responsibility for their own learning. 

When I asked my son what he thought about the video, he admitted that there had been times where he had felt a lot like Jeff.  We talked a bit about those times.  It wasn't long, however, before he started telling me about a particular teacher whom  he really admired.  That teacher had not just covered content but had taught the learning strategies and study skills that he needed to remember and utilize the content.  He came out of that class feeling more confident as a student.  He wished that he had had that teacher earlier because he was sure that it would have helped him to have been more successful in his other classes.  I don't know if that is what Jeff Bliss meant exactly by "touch his freakin heart," but it must be something like that.  I couldn't help but feel that that teacher's willingness to do whatever it takes to help students be successful lead, in turn, to students being more willing and able to take more responsibility for their own learning.  It just isn't an either/or proposition.

As a Classroom Support Teacher (CST) for the last seven years, one of my main tasks has been to help teachers to come up with goals for students with Individual Program Plans (IPPs).  On almost every one, teachers either want to explicitly create a goal page for "greater student independence" or they work the words "independence" or "independently" into other goals.  One of the most common concerns expressed is that students will become dependent on the assistants, accommodations or support that I am recommending.  We are big on this independence thing.  During these conversations with teachers, I talk a lot about "scaffolding" student learning and of withdrawing that scaffolding over time.  I talk about explicitly planning for this withdrawal and about teaching the skills needed for greater independence.  I wonder, though, if I need to talk more about the importance of student success and growth in confidence.  If we withdraw supports too quickly or deny them all together, we reduce the chances for success and therefore reduce likelihood of students taking more responsibility for their learning.

And what about those students who might need certain supports for the rest of their lives?  Is there a problem with that?  I need my glasses to support my vision and pencil and paper to support my memory.  I will likely always need them.  Do these "crutches" make me more or less independent?  I still use a spell-checker and calculator.  Using these tools helps me to be more successful and gives me greater confidence in performing tasks that are difficult for me.  I have become quite masterful at using them, in fact, and I would argue that my performance on writing and mathematics tasks with these supports has been able to develop far beyond what it would have if I had never had access to them.

It could even be argued that writing itself is a "support" for our mind and our memory.  In Plato's  Phaedrus, Socrates argued that writing weakens the mind and the memory and the relationship between teacher and learner.  He's got a point. In fact, when Jeff Bliss criticizes his teacher for handing kids a "packet" instead of getting up and teaching them, he is making a similar argument.   A book (or a "packet") can't respond to questions or ask them.  It can't form a relationship.  On the other hand, print is has been extremely helpful in preserving and distributing knowledge well beyond what was possible through oral means alone.  I wouldn't be writing this blog post if I didn't believe in the value of print.  People today often make similar criticisms of digital technologies, arguing that they destroy traditional literacy.  I disagree, but I think we do need to use them critically and deliberately, specifically teaching the skills needed to use them successfully.

We need to be clear about our goals, not just about digital technologies or just for students with IPPs, but for all of our students.  If we want students who are independent learners and who take responsibility for their own learning, we need to plan for that.  There may be a number of different ways of wording it, but I think that the Universal Design for Learning folks over at CAST have got it pretty close when they state that:

“The goal of education in the 21st century is not simply the mastery of content knowledge or use of new technologies. It is the mastery of the learning process. Education should help turn novice learners into expert learners—individuals who want to learn, who know how to learn strategically, and who, in their own highly individual and flexible ways, are well prepared for a lifetime of learning.”  CAST UDL Guidelienes 2.0 

This won't just happen automatically for all students if we focus exclusively on covering subject content.  We must also take responsibility for teaching students how to learn successfully and for helping them to develop a desire to learn and a confidence in their ability to learn.  We have to stop treating this as a threat to the development of student responsibility, and see it instead as the necessary prerequisite.  In the end, we would do well to remember that:

“You want a kid to change and start doing better? You gotta touch his freakin heart."

Who do you have in mind?

 Broadwater State School class of 1929

As we approach the new school year, I have a couple of questions for my teaching colleagues: Who do you have in mind when you are designing your lessons and unit plans for this coming year?  Do you plan mostly for the "average student" in your class?  Isn't that the best way to make sure your lessons will be appropriate for the greatest number of students?

This way of thinking assumes that academic ability is a single quality whose distribution in the population more or less falls on the bell curve.  If that is true, most kids should be "average learners" and if we design our learning environments for them, we should meet the needs of the majority.  We should then just have a few "gifted kids" and a few "special ed kids" for whom we need to make adaptations and modifications.

Over the last few years, however, I have become more and more skeptical of this model. For one thing, teachers keep telling me that their classes are full of needy kids.  At first, it was tempting to assume that they were just exaggerating or panicking; perhaps they were hoping to get more assistant time and support.  I reminded myself that by the end of each year, most of these students do achieve within the acceptable range on our standardized provincial exams.  Those results likely even fell on a bell curve.

But then I started listening more closely to what teachers were actually telling me.  They had concrete evidence of the challenges faced by so many of their students: English Language Learners, difficulties with decoding text, interrupted formal education, ADHD, difficulties with abstract thinking, challenging behaviours, lack of motivation, atypical social skill development, lack of number concept, etc.  They also told me that most of these students had some areas where they didn't seem needy or disabled at all, but where they fit in well or even showed considerable strength compared to peers.  In other words, most of these students were only needy at certain times or in certain contexts.  Rather than classes with mostly "normal kids" and a few "needy" ones, they described classes where the "normal" students had needs that often fell outside the average range and where students who were coded or identified as special needs could often achieve at or above the norm in certain contexts or with the right tools or supports.

Through my studies for my Masters, and particularly in my neuroscience classes, I have become more and more aware of the incredible complexity of the brain and the processes involved in learning.  I have come to appreciate that there is actually a tremendous amount of variability in brain structure and development and in student learning.  Students vary from one another in their interests, traits, abilities, and experiences, of course.  But within each individual, there is also a great variety of strengths and weaknesses in each of these domains.  It seems to me that "the average learner" doesn't really exist, and that we need to adjust our thinking if we are to meet the needs of the students we do have.

In his writings, talks, and videos, Todd Rose presents some powerful analogies to help us understand these issues.  His analogies are drawn from outside the education world; in "The Myth of Average" Todd uses the example of fighter jet cockpits and in "Variability Matters" he uses shoe sizes and Rubiks Cubes. In each case, however, he makes the point that we need to recognize and design for human variability in learning.  He explains why doing so helps to meet the needs of individuals and develop their talents.  He also argues that designing to the edges, rather than to the average, creates the best results for individuals as well as for society.  Take a few minutes to watch his videos; I think you will find them enjoyable and thought provoking.

So what has any of this got to do with classroom teaching?  As we teachers prepare for the new school year, we are setting up classrooms, gathering resources, making year plans and unit plans, and thinking about the classroom routines and strategies that we will be using.  Whether we recognize it or not, these are design issues.  We are designing learning environments and experiences.  If we design those environments and experiences for "the average learner," we are essentially designing them for nobody.  If we design them with the flexibility needed to reach the edges of student variability in our classes, we are far more likely to help all of the students in our classes to be successful.  But these design decisions are best made from the very beginning, rather than trying to adapt and modify lessons and units designed for "the average learner."

So who do you have in mind as you are preparing for the coming school year?