Humans have a marvelous brain whose possibilities appear endless. Brain-based learning concerns maximizing learning--understanding how the brain works best. We have encapsulated our findings in 12 reaming principles that emphasize the connections and patterns our brains make.

These brain/mind principles are: The brain is a complex, dynamic system. It is a social brain. The search for meaning is innate; it occurs through "patterning." Emotions are critical to patterning. Every brain simultaneously perceives and creates parts and wholes. Learning involves both focused attention and peripheral perception. Learning always involves conscious and unconscious processes. We have at least two ways of organizing memory. Learning is developmental. Complex learning is enhanced by challenge and inhibited by threat. Every brain is uniquely organized.

Our current studies are taking us into the great impact that early childhood development has on the way children ream. These findings have enormous implications for schools--even preschools--because so many neurological pathways critical for later life are laid down from age zero to 3. These pathways affect the way children interact with formative experiences in later developmental stages. These patterns also include children's beliefs about themselves and their world, which continue into adulthood.

Many children's lives are filled with threats to learning--child abuse, poverty, malnourishment, family and community violence. These devastating experiences for the child--and for the human brain--can program the child to effectively live in anticipation of them. Children who have lived with extreme threat develop perceptual loops; they look for certain signals in the environment that to some extent replicate their own experiences. Their brains are not programmed to help them cope in a healthy way. When we feel threatened, we downshift our thinking. Downshifted people feel helpless; they don't look at possibilities or feel safe to take risks or challenge old ideas. They have limited choices for behavior.

It's the psychophysiological response to threat, accompanied by a sense of helplessness or fatigue. A downshifted person experiences a sense of fear or anxiety, not the excitement of a challenge. Downshifting is accompanied by a feeling that you cannot access your own ability to deal with the situation. It can result from very drastic conditions in early childhood; but what we're seeing is that, to a lesser degree, it is everywhere in the schools.

Yes. We are concerned here not about traumatic threats like guns in school but about emotional threats to higher-order thinking and learning. The system of traditional education can be a threat that inhibits higher levels of learning.

If, as a teacher, I am in charge of the curriculum, you, as the student, are supposed to learn what I say you must learn. I know the answers you have to get. I tell you how long it will take you to learn this and when it's due. And I evaluate you and your work. In this approach, where is your input? Where is your self-efficacy? And what are you learning but compliance?

So students are doing what teachers want them to do. And downshifted people can do some things well, like memorizing, because the brain perseverates under threat and likes to do things over and over again--repetition provides a sense of safety when you feel helpless. Memorization is compatible with traditional teaching. But real learning--making connections, higher-order thinking, and creativity--is incompatible with that kind of environment.

Here's an example of how teachers faced a challenge first perceived as a threat. We were working with teachers beginning to use a rich, brain-based approach to reaming to read and write when the district suddenly mandated its own literacy program. All the teachers dropped the brain-based approach for the district's mandates. They were frightened; they did not have the self-efficacy they needed.

In the mandated program, students were scheduled to do unrelated tasks and drills every day. Soon, kids began to ask, "Why are we doing this? This isn't any fun, and we're not learning anything!" Basically the reason was fear; teachers felt helpless dealing with the district--they downshifted.

We encouraged the teachers to examine the literacy program and start incorporating it into what they knew about the human brain. The teachers then said, "What do we know about learning? We understand that children need to be in a community, to follow their own interests, and we need to constantly question and challenge them." They began to see that brain-based learning moves away from what you do on Monday morning to how children learn--that it is not limited to one approach or strategy.

In the process, the teachers took the best from the district's program--but they also took the best out of Reading Recovery, whole language, and phonics. They began seeing K-1 kids doing critical thinking and analysis. As a result, this school has gone from second from the bottom in reading in their district to second from the top.

You cannot really separate them. Relaxed alertness means "low threat, high challenge." If children are to think critically, they must feel safe to take risks. And if the teacher insists on one correct answer and is going to evaluate them, children are not foolish. They will give the answer the teacher wants. But for making connections and changing their thinking based on accrued knowledge, they need relaxed alertness--safety and challenging learning experiences.

As for orchestrated immersion, children learn best if they are immersed in complex experiences and are given the opportunity to actively process what they have learned. The best reaming happens when necessary facts and skills are embedded in experiences that relate to real life, when there's a big picture somehow.

For example, most teachers approach poetry as a subject to cover, and many children don't understand or feel poetry. One teacher using a brain-based approach to language arts decided to turn her whole classroom into a coffeehouse. The kids helped set it up--low lights, candles on the tables, tablecloths, music playing softly. The teacher asked adults from the school and community to read their favorite poetry and talk about it. Through this complex experience, the teacher gave her students a sense, or felt meaning, for what poetry is and that it is valued by adults in the real world.

In science and math, teachers and students might ask natural questions like "What happened?" "How did you do this?" "What happened when we added this element?" "How else might this have worked out?" They ask critical questions that are not necessarily in the book or worksheet. Take the "owl pellet" lesson, for example.

Owl pellets, material owls regurgitate after they eat, include the bones and fur of rodents and birds the owls consume. In a science lesson I observed, students pulled some owl pellets apart and then answered worksheet questions about what owls eat. I walked around this classroom and said, "I'm wondering--how does an owl's stomach know how to separate the meat from the bones?" This was a genuine question. And the students looked at me as though I were crazy because that question was not on the worksheet.

A teacher asking real, live questions provides rich possibilities for students. But for them to become reality, teachers need to shift their thinking about teaching and learning. They also need extensive resources, including technological support. Brain-based learning is wonderfully compatible with technology.

In our recent work, we found three styles of teaching. In the first, the teacher is in charge, using traditional strategies like lecturing, memorization, testing--the old factory model. When you speak of relaxed alertness or orderliness to teachers dedicated to this approach, they tend to think in terms of good discipline, of going along with the teacher's plan. Orchestrated immersion might consist of a teacher's bringing in some World War II artifacts to introduce a lecture, or allowing students to ask questions of a guest speaker.

In the second approach, the teacher is comfortable with many innovative learning strategies and sees new possibilities for defining discipline, but still largely directs student learning. More and more teachers are moving to this approach, though most still operate from the mental model of the traditional approach to education, because that was the way they were taught.

In the third (and rarest) approach--actually brain-based teaching--learning becomes collaborative; teachers and students have much more mutual responsibility. Here, students know what they want to do, time parameters are flexible, and orderliness and coherence prevail. Teachers have an extensive repertoire of strategies. These classrooms are characterized by ongoing questioning and analysis. Students and teachers ask experts, they get on the Internet, they learn together.

Students are often much more comfortable with the third approach. On the other hand, some students are so used to the traditional factory model that they are initially confused when they encounter brain-based teaching. And it is difficult for some parents to understand that the traditional approach to teaching is no longer going to prepare their children for the future. But five years from now, if I were a parent and still saw my children sitting in a classroom with desks in a row and a teacher up front, I would panic, because that will absolutely be inappropriate.

Parents need to be brought into the educational community wherever possible. Orderliness depends on constant communication among teachers, students, and parents. But for parents who fundamentally disagree with the rest of the community, charter schools are a real possibility. Parents can create their own school, organized around their own purposes and meanings. Private and religious schools can also meet some of these needs, though I am not in favor of vouchers. Acknowledging and celebrating diversity--in a democratic community--is an important outcome of principle 12, "Every brain is uniquely organized."

We all have different talents, skills, perspectives, and intelligences. We need to encourage children's gifts in two ways: to acknowledge diversity, and to focus on our commonalities, what makes us human and what ties us to the rest of nature.

So we agree with the basic premise of multiple intelligences. But how is it used in the classroom? Do teachers simply incorporate variation into traditional presentations? Or do they provide complex experiences within which students can use their individual intelligences (expanding into other types of skills and modes and benefiting from other people's intelligences)? Interaction and complexity are key.

On the whole, I would tend to agree about the importance of positive social feedback. Here, again, we must consider developmental learning and the effects of downshifting on children's ability to become self-motivated, to believe in their own capacities and abilities. We have suggested that the opposite of downshifting is self-efficacy.

I think we need to be very careful that we do not depend on Prozac and other psychotropic drugs for other than temporary assists, particularly for downshifted people who have difficulty ascribing any success to their own efforts and who are easily influenced by others. There seems to be a real danger here.

How can I believe in my own strengths and initiative when I know that a drug has changed my behavior? I don't advocate use of Prozac with children--I am pleading for exploration of other ways to enhance children's self-esteem and self-efficacy, such as by removing threats from our classrooms and making them safe, challenging places for children to learn. This should be the focus of education.

Shifting out of an exclusively traditional instructional approach is difficult. Our book relates the challenges and setbacks the schools faced.

First, I want to recognize all the teachers who use traditional approaches really well. It's not that their work is wrong; the times are changing on us. Our knowledge base is changing, with new information from the neurosciences and biology and technology. We're living in a different world. There's so much for us to understand, and we can't do it by getting what I call "surface knowledge"--what somebody else tells us is important to learn.

Second, to change our mental models, we have to address how our own brains learn--and immerse ourselves in interactive, real-life, complex experiences out of which we can process new ideas. To help teachers change their mental models, we found that using "process groups" was critical.

We encouraged teachers to get together in small groups and look at new information from the sciences, examine educational research, and study the brain/mind principles--as people, not just as teachers. They asked questions like "What does it mean that the brain is a complex, dynamic system?" Then they began to reflect on how their own practices did (or did not) maximize learning.

The groups included not only teachers but also custodians, librarians, and other nonteaching staff, in an attempt to arrive at common beliefs, purposes, and values--the foundation for orderliness. They all shared ideas on how to create a school and environment based on how children learn.

The groups came up with their own solutions to the "time and energy" problems that plague many other reforms: How can we allow time for complex experiences when we have to cover the curriculum? Do children really learn best in 50-minute increments? Where do we get planning time?

A supportive administration and funding arrangements gave the groups time to constantly rethink and enrich what they were doing in school--and this work is ongoing. We see no other way to produce effective change in schools--there's no top-down way to teach a new mental model. It has to come from the educators themselves.

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By Carolyn R. Pool From Educational Leadership

Carolyn R. Pool, Senior Editor of Educational Leadership, conducted this interview with Renate Nummela Caine, Professor of Education, California State University, 5500 University Pkwy., San Bernardino, California 92407-2397. Caine is co-author, with Geoffrey Caine, of books including the forthcoming, Unleashing the Power of Perceptual Change: The Potential of Brain-Based Teaching. Condensed, with permission, from Educational Leadership, 54 (March 1997), 11-15. Copyright 1997, Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 1250 N. Pitt St., Alexandria, Virginia 22314-1453 (phone: 703549-9110). All rights reserved.

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Source: Education Digest, Nov97, Vol. 63 Issue 3, p10, 6p, 1 cartoon, 1bw.
Item Number: 9711215313