Neuroscience and teaching

Cognitive scientists have been busy in recent decades and they have elucidated the workings of the brain. Some of those discoveries are surprising and somewhat disconcerting to educators as they challenge much of what we have thought for generations and how we have designed curriculum and instruction for those generations. Wendi Pillars has a piece on Education Week's Teacher Leaders Network currently that points to several ideas that we need to recognize and accommodate:

#1. Teachers are, in essence, brain changers.

#2. The one whose neural pathways are changing is the one doing the learning.

#3. Critical thinking is more important than ever—which means we expect different results from learning.

I would add a few more points:

Learning is a social endeavor-- what we know and how we know it is deeply connected to who is around and how we interact with them when we learn it. You have experienced this. Two brains are indeed better than one as you brainstorm and knowledge emerges from the group that would have been impossible alone. Evolutionary social biologists have concluded that the human brain evolved for social interaction. Playing well with others matters and your brian is designed to play well with others.

Humans learn from and through their technology-- what we build influences what had how we think to an amazing degree. The adage "necessity is the mother of invention" is in many ways backwards. Once we invent something it becomes necessary. Consider the algorithm we were all taught for adding (stack the digits according to place, sum and "carry" as necessary) is necessary only because we have invented systems of accounting in which large numbers must be accurately recorded.