Brain Based Learning promotes that in order to effectively design learning environments we must all so know more about the brain. In our classrooms many of us design our teaching of young minds without knowledge of the human mind and its development. Traditional education tents to force children into schools that have never critically studied the nature of the human brain. Although the brain is complex it really does not take much to design an educational setting where brain-fitting, brain compatible settings and procedures are implemented. The power of such settings and procedures would accentuate “real-world” experience and there would be a constant encounter with the richness and variety of the real world as opposed to a “dreary egg crate of classrooms…almost empty of anything real one might learn from” (Hart 1983).
According to Sir Ken Robinson (Changing Educational Paradigms), many people begin life as a different kind of thinker. He refers to a study where they measured kindergarteners on how many uses they could think of for a paper clip. Testers gave this to 1500 kindergarteners and it was called “Breakpoint and Beyond”, (George Land 1992). In this longitudinal study the original group scored at a 98% genius level regarding divergent/creative thinking.. By ages 8-10 the percentage had gone down to 50% and by ages 13-15 it was down below 25%. This shows that although we are born with creative thinking it deteriorates as we get older. Students have become “educated” in a system where they were told “there is one answer and it is in the back”, but don’t look and don’t copy. Outside of schools that is called collaboration, inside of schools it is called cheating. Robinson goes on to state that the problem with the customary schools seen in today’s educational arena is that they are trying to meet the future with what they did in the past. The current education system was designed and conceived for a different age. Our children are living in the most intensive, stimulating period in the history of the earth. They are being besieged with information from every platform such as computers, Iphones, advertisers and television channels. Standardized curriculum and testing were designed with the “old” world in mind and I feel we need to drastically change our education system in the United States to keep up with the 21st Century world of technology. Schools right now are pretty much organized on factory line set ups. Ringing bells, separate facilities, specialized into separate subjects, and we still educate children by batches. We put them through the system by age group, and follow with the assumption that the most important thing that kids have in common is how old they are
Brain based education encourages us to think differently about human capability. We have to get over the old notion of academic versus non-academic. We have to concede that most great learning happens in groups and that collaboration is the stuff of growth. As a computer teacher it is in this area where I believe I will find the most challenge adapting to brain based education yet reap the most results. I am going to reevaluate my curriculum and integrate smaller group activities along with getting the students up out of their chairs interacting with others. As I have learned from my research, if we break down students and separate them we form a disjunction from their natural learning environment and I am determined to change my room around to compliment brain based education.
Collaborate and connect your curriculum!
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