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Neuroplastic people

For decades, neuroscientists have been working on uncovering the mysteries of the brain, and for nearly as long, educators have been wanting to connect this knowledge to more effective lesson plans. An article in this morning's Washington Post talks about advances in brain research and some of its applications to helping students learn. The most dramatic finding to emerge in recent years is that the brain has "neuroplasticity", meaning that our brains are malleable and can be "rewired" to learn new things. The implications are most obvious for students with learning disabilities who may be "hardwired" in a way that eludes conventional teaching methods. But it also holds promise for finding ways to teach concepts that are notoriously difficult and counterintuitive for most students, for example, understanding why dividing a fraction by another fraction produces a larger number.

Although progress in the field is steady, it is also slow. Unfortunately, this hasn't stopped the flow of "brain research-based" educational products from entering the marketplace, often before they have truly been tested. The article quotes Kurt Fischer, director of Harvard's mind, brain and education master's degree program, who offers this caveat:

"One of the major problems we face is that there are a whole lot of things that claim to be 'brain-based education' that are nonsense," he said. "One of them is the belief that boys and girls have totally different brains and learn totally differently. That's not what the evidence shows. Not at all. The other is kind of a rigid idea of sensitive periods: that after a certain age you can't learn a foreign language. You've also heard that there are left-brained and right-brained people. Total nonsense, unless they've had their left or right hemisphere removed. All of us use all our brains."

So how long before brain research has progressed enough to take our knowledge of classroom instruction to a whole new level? According to another researcher, Robert Pianta of the University of Virginia:

There's an awful lot that neuroscience can begin to tell us in broad strokes that's relevant for education and that ultimately 10 or 20 years downstream can provide us with prescriptive information.

In the meantime, we can all be encouraged knowing it's never too late to learn.

Full post as published by BoardBuzz: NSBA's Daily Weblog on October 28, 2008 (boomark / email).