The brain at school: educational neuroscience in the classroom

by John G. Geake

"At last, a book that meaningfully links the evidence that we have so far gained from cognitive neuroscience with an understanding of learning and education. This book avoids the usual pitfalls of over-stretched interpretations of the research findings and outdated assumptions about teaching and learning. It is a catalyst for bringing together the expertise and experience of professional educators with that of professional scientists in which Geake has expertly balanced accessibility and rigour."
Professor Martin Westwell, Director, Flinders Centre for Science Education in the 21st Century, Flinders University, Australia Within education there is a growing interest in neuroscience research and what it can teach us. This book focuses on what neuroscience means for education professionals - in key areas such as learning, memory, intelligence and motivation - and addresses questions such

Genres: Education, Neuroscience

248 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 2009

Reviews

[Trevor · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book begins by saying, “The main reason for writing this book stems from my belief that it is important for teachers to know about how cognitive neuroscience might inform their work.” He then says neuroscience can overcome the shortcomings of contemporary educational research and then says, “A third reason for writing now is that there is already an existing literature advocating, at least in principle, that neuroscience offers some useful applications for educational practice.”

So, this ought to have provided you with some expectations. One is that if you are a teacher you are going to be shown effective strategies for teaching in the classroom that will put into the shade some of what you have already been told are effective teaching strategies proposed by less scientific theories. The provisos and terms and conditions statement that is reason three needs to be attended to – ‘in principle’ and ‘some’ in particular.

There is also an entire chapter on Neuroimaging Technologies – which is great, but it doesn’t really address the extensive criticisms that are listed in Uttal’s The New Phrenology that I reviewed a couple of months back. It includes a suitably labelled brain – although, the identified areas of the brain referred to in the book far exceed those labelled in the diagram. I’ve said this before, and will say it again, why people think I’ll become a better teacher by knowing the relative distances on a diagram between the thalamus and the parietal lobe is anybody’s guess. There are also useful photographs of people with electrode hats on, presumably in case I ever decided to have a go at brain imaging to confirm my suspicions about the cause of a student’s tardy learning.

One of the major benefits other articles and books I’ve read on applying neuroscience into the classroom is mostly known as cognitive load theory – here he mostly calls it memory load. The point being that if you overload a student’s working memory, they won’t be able to learn effectively – in fact, it might stop them learning at all. He says that “UK psychologist Sue Gathercole points out that poor working memory can manifest a range of classroom behaviours beyond poor academic performance, including difficulties in following instructions, holding back in group activities, being easily distracted, losing the place, and appearing to be inattentive.” (p.69)

He then provides what he calls a ‘dynamic account of working memory’ and says this raises two questions. I want to look at these two questions and his answers to them, as they go to the heart of my problems with this book.

Question One: “This dynamic account of working memory raises two important questions. The first is: Where in the brain do we find interconnections with most of the rest of the brain?”

How is that an important question for a teacher? If these connections were proven to be in the bottom left-hand corner of the brain, or the middle bit but over to the side a bit more – how will that actually help me in the classroom? His answer to this important question is:

“There is consistent neuroimaging evidence to answer the first question: FMRI studies have shown that the functional neural correlates of working memory lie in the frontal cortex. Other areas seem to be involved in supporting working memory, depending on the demands of the particular test, but regardless of the task, bilateral frontal activations are reliably seen when subjects use their working memories inside an fMRI scanner. This makes sense neuroanatomically.” p.70

Ah, good, bilateral activations of the frontal cortex or, as he helpfully clarifies, “Frontal cortical areas are strongly interconnected with most other parts of the brain, especially the parietal and temporal lobes, but also with all of the sensory and motor areas, as well as the subcortical organs of the basal ganglia and limbic system, and the ‘second brain’ at the rear, the cerebellum.” p.70-71

This bio-babble goes on for a couple of paragraphs. It seems working memory involves lots of the brain – particularly regions with complicated names.

Maybe his answer to the second question will provide teachers with something more directly relevant to their task of, you know, teaching people stuff. Let’s see:

“There is also consistent neuroimaging evidence to address the second question, what is working memory working at? The short answer is: selective attention. Neuroscientist Edward Vogel offers two metaphors for how the working memory system works. The first is a computer metaphor: working memory as a spam filter keeping irrelevant (and potentially harmful) information from getting on to your hard drive. The second is a social metaphor: working memory as a nightclub bouncer, admitting those on the guest list, while keeping out the wannabes. The neuroscience evidence for the working memory system that enables this selective attentional or filtering function highlights the role of the basal ganglia, interconnected to the frontal cortex. While working memory areas in the frontal cortex maintain current task goals, the basal ganglia control the inward flow of information into working memory. The role of selecting task relevancy for the basal ganglia is consistent with other evidence for its role in generic decision making, for example, selecting which particular motor movements we need at a particular moment in a dance routine, and suppressing those potential movements that we don’t need at the time.” p.71

It turns out the reason I didn’t learn any French in high school was down to my basal ganglia, I should have known all the time. And here I was thinking it was because I had never met anyone who could speak French in my entire life until I went to France earlier this year.

Okay, I’m being frivolous, but I’m still struggling to see how my now knowing that my basal ganglia works as a nightclub bouncer helps me teach in a classroom yet. And really, is the great advance in educational learning theory that neuroscience is offering here that kids learn stuff they pay attention to? How have teachers muddled through for so long not knowing that?

In case you think I’m going too far, this is how he ends his section on working memory:

“working memory is the cognitive construct of the neural process of combining information from the perceptual here and now with information from long-term memory, under attentional selection for what is relevant to the task at hand. Different memory systems – short-term, long- term, working, spatial, rote, and so on – receive and process information in different ways, and are processed through distinct, though sometimes overlapping, neural systems.” p.72

I’m still struggling to see how this adds anything to what most teachers do most of the time in the classroom. This book does this the whole way through. It will present lots of examples from psychological learning tasks – the kinds of things you’d have read about if you’ve read books like Mistakes Were Made, but not by me, or The Psychology of Judgment and Decision Making. Then it provides a paragraph or two of bio-babble, perhaps mentioning the right fusiform gyrus, or perhaps not. Then there are implications for teaching, but these are often so vague as to be next to useless.

“The implications for education are challenging. Perhaps Piagetian approaches to the teaching of fractions need to be reconsidered? Perhaps abstract mathematical thinking does not develop from concrete mathematical thinking and, hence, moving from the concrete to the abstract might not be of much help to many children. There is some evidence in support of this conjecture from teachers in Denmark who have used a direct symbolic approach, introducing fractions as a symbol system with- out real-world examples.” p.150-51

Fair enough, I have chosen an example where he has already said he has no simple solution – more strength to his elbow – but my point is that often his suggested solutions didn’t look all that different to what a good teacher would likely try without the bio-babble. The movement from the concrete to the abstract, by the way, was already something that Vygotsky had discussed at length with his discussion of scientific concepts and how these were dialectically related to a child’s learning from concrete experience. But none of that is discussed here, which is odd, since Vygotsky is a key educational theorist.

I’m being somewhat hypercritical of this book for a reason. Well, for a number of reasons. The first is that I had expected more practical advice to come out of this book that actually came. That was, after all, what he’d promised right at the start of the book.

The other reason is that I work in educational research and I sometimes teach teachers. The Australian government recently released a report that will mandate how teachers are to be taught to teach. It is called ‘Strong Beginnings: report of the teacher education expert panel’. One of the key recommendations of this report is for pre-service teachers to be taught core content, and the first type of this core content is on The Brain and Learning. The report provides a list of useful references on this important topic, and this book is one of those useful references. I read this book to see if I can find what it might teach me about the brain and learning. I can’t say I’ve come away with very much of any use within a classroom.

The author here isn’t as stupid as most authors on this topic. He had worked as a teacher, so a large part of the reason, I suspect, for him not being definitive on many of the topics raised here is that any teacher knows one big thing – that the context of learning matters. It’s not the only thing that matters, but most other things pale into insignificance in comparison – especially if by ‘learning context’ we mean the students in the class, their interests, their previous learning and so on. I’m not sure how being able to identify the basal ganglia fusiform gyrus cerebellum from the bilateral frontal cortex moves us one step closer to being able to teach anyone in our class anything.

This book ends with a ‘let’s now look to the future’ chapter – where teachers strap their kids into a brain imaging machine to see how their brain is firing while they are learning interpretive dance to help them correct their dip when they ought to have been doing a double reverse turn.

I’m always going to have trouble with this stuff. I just don’t believe that learning is fundamentally something individuals do out of context. That learning has deeply (and irreducibly) social meanings and that trying to make learning something brains do is looking through the wrong end of the microscope. Or rather, looking through the microscope when it would make more sense to look about you are real people interacting in real time and in real space.

He says a lot about how bad neuromyths are – like multiple intelligences or the left brain/right brain stuff. I suspect I first learned of the left/right brain stuff from some neuroscientist. I don’t mean to be rude, but I bet that was true. Which begs the question, how much of this stuff will be nonsense in a year or two?

I’ve never really thought very highly of multiple intelligences, but I do know this – it was created, like behaviourism, to counter something actually evil. For behaviourism, the great evil was eugenics – for multiple intelligences, the great evil was IQ. You can criticise multiple intelligences all you like, but show me how you are countering the evil it was seeking to put into the trash bin of history where it belonged? All multiple intelligences really says to most teachers, I suspect, is mix up your teaching a bit as if kids might learn stuff in different ways. Hardly a terrible thing for a teacher to consider. And a hell of a lot more useful in the classroom than wondering if your student’s corpus callosum is interacting efficiently with their hippocampal regions or indeed their thalamus. Is multiple intelligences nonsense? Probably. But then, we teach children that atoms are like little planetary systems – something any physicist will tell you is total shite – sometimes half-truths display a greater truth. Sometimes a whole-truth hides more than it displays.

[Michael Brennan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Geake's ideas for education should already be happening in schools. These are the ideas that I've had for my thoughts about opening up a learning center. It's good to have my ideas affirmed in the book. The scientific language might be lofty for many teachers that might keep this book from becoming more mainstream.

[Elisabeth Sepulveda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Probably one of the best books I've read on the topic, a comprehensive overview on the intersections of educational practice and our current knowledge base in cognition. Cautious in extending implications from studies too far, and helpful in explaining the challenges--and possibilities--inherent in fusing these two fields.

[Teresa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Un'utile ed agile introduzione al mondo delle neuroscienze pensata per chi insegna: i costrutti neuronali che consentono l'apprendimento, il loro probabile funzionamento, le prassi educative che possono facilitarne o ostacolarne lo sviluppo.

[Caroline · Rating 4 out of 5]

Engaging writing style