Learning and the Brain: Part III, Kenneth Wesson

The Brain-Considerate Classroom of the Future

Introduction
Wesson was a lively and somewhat colloquial speaker, speaking passionately to a full audience of well over 1000 people, 75% of whom were teachers. Transforming his talk into a note summarizing his point of view, is difficult because he had a rhythm and an obvious passion for his material that can't be summarized in notes. So instead I have reproduced his talk, transcribing as much as I could from notes and listening to a CD of his talk. Therefore, what follows here is in Wesson's voice, and is marked by blue text. I’ll make some comments after this near-transcription of his inspiring lecture.

Teaching Our Kids How To Think
We need to teach our kids how to think. More than any other skill or knowledge, teaching children how to think and how to solve problems, this is important because jobs are constantly changes, and what is big in the job market today didn't exist 20 years ago, and jobs are going to continue to change in this way. Therefore the skills and knowledge we give to our children have to be what they need to be able to retool their skills as needed. We are failing in this task.. In the US only 18% who graduate from kindergarten go on to finish college. In Japan 82% complete college. This suggests we are not doing so well in inspiring and educating our children. In the 1960s we got obsessed with standardized testing. We asked our kids to read a paragraph and they go through the process but it had no meaning for them. (Wesson then did an experiential exercise with us, having us read something consisting of half made up of meaningless words/sounds. We got his point.)

No Child Left Behind?
"No child left behind" ends up meaning we only do repetition and practice for a specific test. No "child left behind" means no thought of children. Tests are not what we should be doing in our schools; you can modify your statistics so they support your point of view, or so they make the school look better than it is. Our educational system takes in healthy kids with nothing wrong with them, and they get problems while they are going through our system. We fixate on the wrong things. In the classroom the teacher throws out a question, someone, or a group of someone’s, answers and then we hear the answer and comment on it, and everyone has stopped thinking.

Teaching our Kids to Learn How to Learn

Things We Can Do
But there are things we can do so our kids learn how to think, we can help them. They can learn how to learn. They can learn how to make connections in a brain-considerate classroom. We are constantly changing the "facts" so the facts are not what are important, it’s how to think and learn so we can always learn new facts, that's important. Our brains are remarkable, always functioning in numerous ways. And we do our best when we're working with another person. A teacher should be a guide on the side, an academic mentor, facilitating learning. Learning should not be competitive. Look for ways that your students can collaborate.

Put Our Teachers Under a Microscope
Instead of putting our students under a microscope, we should put our teachers under the microscope. Instead of walking around the room to see if they're learning anything we should walk around "to see if I was clear." We should encourage boys and girls to work together, to solve problems. If they think differently, that is great, together they'll be great problem solvers. We should all be following Problem-Based Learning. We need a student-centered not content-centered learning environment. We are always looking for patterns, connections, and we go from the concrete to the abstract. We need to move from a passive to an active model of learning. An ideal situation would be a brain-considerate classroom, with both teachers and researchers involved in the kids' learning.

Every Kid is Successful
Education should be designed s that every kid is successful. Instead, we have a model where the goal is to weed out kids. All of us have trouble with change and making brain-considerate classroom involves very dramatic changes. We have to change, complacency is fatal. We have to wake up, we can't continue to fall behind. We expect our kids to be good at multitasking, but multitasking is impossible. (He gave us an experiential exercise here, having us move our hand in a circle going clockwise then he told us: "Now make a six with your foot." Go ahead and try it, the audience got the point, you will too).

Growing New Neurons in the Brain-Considerate Classroom
We recently learned that there is the possibility of growing new nerve cells, and we have to learn how to teach so that we are sponsoring the growth of new brain cells. We have to work at developing ways that teaching can mirror learning, to have learning in sync with how we teach. In the brain-considerate classroom emotions drive everything. Touch does wonders for the whole brain system. We need touch every day. We need 16 hugs a day for a normal emotional state. They used to think that we shouldn't touch babies, we'd give them "germs." They kept infants in their own rooms, saying "Don't touch the baby." Kids need touch, hugs and words, they need us to tell them how great they're going to do this year. Recent experiments demonstrated that when the mother is taken away from baby rats the babies simply stop growing. When the mother comes back, the babies start growing again. They found out that what mattered was the mother's licking the pups. They can't grow without the mother's licking. Touch is essential, the same thing happens with people who don’t get touched, they stop growing.

Safety, Acceptance, Involvement, Inclusion
Our kids should feel acknowledged, wanted. We have dropouts because no one even noticed that they never dropped in. They feel they're not part of the class because they were never made part of the class, they were never invited in. We have to communicate the message: "I really like you." Emotions drive all intelligence and you only remember what you care about. Our goal is to get students engaged, we have to get to know the students, not get them to know the curriculum. Our kids need safety, acceptance, involvement, inclusion. Instead we scare our kids, not realizing what we're doing. If a person is frightened, all their blood rushes from their head, and it goes right to their large muscle groups, to their limbs, preparing for fleeing or fighting. When people are frightened they can't think very well, the brain shuts down.

A Safe Environment
We have to make the environment for learning as safe as possible, then we'll see our kids do their best work. The illiterates of the future are not those who can't read or write but those who can't learn and relearn. We have to relearn things all the time, as things change. (He called on those in the audience who had been teaching more than 20 years and said "you are our national treasures"). He said "For many no one ever turned on that light." Our students look like a lot of work, but we should be thinking "You made a difference, I'm sure glad I had you in my class." Every student has to be acknowledged, accepted, and that presents a challenge. Our goal is to teach them to connect and to do this we need a classroom environment that is risk-free. Students need a lot of feedback from their teachers. They need our positive emotional responses.

Students May Forget What You Said, but They’ll Never Forget How You Made Them Feel
We need to use drawing and singing in our classrooms. You can't draw without thinking, and that is what we need to be teaching. We have to allow for downtime, our students need it, and given downtime they will do better. The biggest thing you can do in the classroom is offer hope, the kids often have no hope from anywhere else. In the end students may forget what you said, but they'll never forget how you made them feel. Margaret Mead said "Never think that a small group of citizens can't change the world, that is the only thing that can change the world." Teachers are the group that can change the world, if we teach with the brain in mind.