_____ 1. The more a teacher knows about neuroscience, the more differentiated his or her instruction will be.
_____ 2. Students should be praised for their intelligence, not their effort.
_____ 3. The ability of the brain to change stops around the age of sixteen.
_____ 4. Human brains seek and often quickly detect novelty.
_____ 5. Humans use about 10 percent of their brains.
_____ 6. Integrating the arts into the curriculum enhances learning and understanding.
_____ 7. Informing students before an assessment that they will receive feedback/results sooner lessens their performance.
_____ 8. Providing students opportunities to self-correct wrong answers enhances the retention of information.
_____ 9. Spaced instruction and studying enhance long-term memory consolidation better than mass instruction and review.
_____ 10. There are brain differences by race.
_____ 11. Listening to music with words while studying enhances students' ability to learn the material.
_____ 12. A student’s emotions affect learning, memory, and recall of information.
_____ 13. Frequent, ungraded, formative assessments enhance memory consolidation.
_____ 14. Multitasking reduces memory consolidation.
_____ 15. Some students are left-brained and some students are right-brained.
_____ 16. Regularly changing the decorations and/or organization of a classroom enhances attention.
_____ 17. Individuals learn better when teachers teach and assess in their preferred learning styles.
_____ 18. In a class period, the information that is delivered first is what students remember best and the information that comes last is what the students remember second best.
_____ 19. Sleep enhances memory consolidation.
_____ 20. Learning is enhanced by challenge and inhibited by threat.
_____ 21. Having students memorize information is an outdated instructional strategy.
_____ 22. Providing students choice in their learning enhances engagement and deepens learning.
_____ 23. Brains are able to multitask.
_____ 24. The more teachers understand principles from educational neuroscience,
Important Information:
Stress, sleep, choice, novelty, teaching and assessing in multiple modalities, using modalities that are driven by content, using arts integration, requiring and helping structure executive functioning tasks, the use of play, giving rapid feedback, giving scaffolded feedback, creating a safe place to get something wrong, the effect of emotions, the importance of relationships, and the need for hard work and smart work to have the greatest positive influence on neuroplasticity.
The Research:
Remember that boredom has an effect on the amygdala that sends incoming sensory information to the “flight, flight, freeze” reactive part of the brain rather than the reflective part of the brain where higher-order thinking and executive functioning take place. Remember the Yerkes-Dodson curve—that a certain degree of “arousal” is required to increase attention and interest, but too much impairs attention, working memory, and decision making. In between, the sweet spot of optimal performance, is something we called “the zone of proximal discomfort.”
Remember that a certain amount of tolerable stress is a good thing as it helps developing bodies and minds build robust stress systems to deal with future stresses—but the important points are that students have supportive relationships, and that the stress is episodic rather than never ending.
Intrinsic motivation and engagement improve learning, and while these factors can sometimes elude our best efforts, chances of fostering them may be improved by strategies like giving students choice, adding novelty, adding relevancy to their lives, incorporating well-chosen aspects of play, including things that lead to students making an emotional connection, and creating a school culture that stresses the importance of positive peer–peer and peer–teacher relationships.
The primacy-recency effect suggests that students may remember most what they hear at the beginning of class—so do not religiously use this precious time to go over last night’s homework. At times you may want to emphasize a point, but make this the exception not the rule so that its novelty stands out.
Rapid feedback aids motivation and engagement and leads to improved learning, as does scaffolded feedback and the opportunity to redo work. This suggests that homework that is done, merely checked off that it is done, and then is not heard of ever again, is not great homework. Getting some feedback is key, even it is something as simple as giving access to worked answers. Assignments that are returned by teachers weeks and weeks after being turned in, even if they are full of excellent feedback in whatever color of pen, do not result in great learning. In fact, research shows that even the anticipation of rapid feedback leads to better learning.
Sleep is crucial. Lack of sleep deteriorates a wide swathe of brain performance, including working memory function, long-term memory storage, and memory retrieval. Whether we like it or not, teachers play a role here by how much homework we assign and how we schedule it.
Teachers tend to believe that in order to be a rigorous teacher they have to assign homework every night; this is a fallacy. Quality of homework is more important than quantity. Expert teachers assign great homework, not lots of homework—just the right task at just the right time. It is the arthroscopic-keyhole-knee-surgery approach to homework, as opposed to the “let’s just open it all up and have a rummage around” one. Research suggests that one to two hours of homework a night is optimal in secondary school—maybe up to two and a half hours for the oldest students. Beyond this the effect of homework actually tends to diminish diminish. So if a student has six or seven teachers, does each assign only fifteen to twenty minutes? Or do some not set homework? Or do you create some type of block schedule that reduces the number of classes for which a student has to prepare each day? It may sound extreme to change schedules based on homework, but it may sound less extreme if you take the time to listen to students talk honestly and thoughtfully about learning.
To aid the goal of sleep, teachers have a role in helping students develop a system that works for them that makes sure assignments are both completed and turned in. Yes, parents do and should play a huge role here, but as we will discuss below, deliberate work to grow executive functioning skills tends to be effort well spent.
Remember that our students have at least fifteen more years of significant brain development in their prefrontal cortex, the area responsible for executive functioning, so include scaffolding to help them develop the skills of organizing, planning, executing, evaluating progress, and adjusting adjusting accordingly. Remove this scaffolding as appropriate, realizing that different students need different scaffolding, with the goal of putting each student in their zone of proximal discomfort. This is effort well spent. One day, even if it as far ahead as the third year of med school or law school, they may thank us. Elementary schools tend to be really good at deliberately teaching these skills, but secondary schools tend to ignore them more, mistakenly thinking that these skills are already well developed. However well developed they are, they have a good many years of prime neuroplasticity to make them even better.
There is no such thing as multitasking. The brain cannot multitask—instead it rapidly switches from meeting the demands of one task to meeting the demands of another. There is a switching cost for doing so. Students (and adults) will insist that this is not true and that they can multitask—they are wrong. It results in more effort for less-efficient performance. We need to repeatedly coach students, and parents where possible, to create homework environments where multitasking is limited.
Remember the “multiple intelligences” neuromyth. While each student has individual differences in brain demands that he or she is good at and not good at, it is a myth to try to teach to each individual student’s strengths. Instead, the best modality to choose for teaching and assessment should be driven by content. Use this to help craft quality assignments. This intersects somewhat with the idea of using arts integration to increase learning. In both cases, be careful of whose work you are assessing, the parents’ or the students’, and design projects accordingly, even if it means “sacrificing” class time to bring some construction activities into the classroom. The skills you bring into the classroom by doing so, including things like collaboration, communication, and creativity, are valid brain demands that we as teachers should be actively fostering anyway. Done well, students will see that designing and building is a very social activity, and relationships relationships are important in a community of problem solvers, which can help more people see activities like this as something that they can, and want, to do.
Memory tasks play a large role in secondary school, and there is nothing wrong with that. But we can help students by building in interleaving as we plan our weeks and months of homework, and encourage them to space their studying rather than use massed studying. We can also assign and promote active-retrieval approaches to studying, rather than reading and reading notes or textbooks, a practice that tends to lead to the illusion of fluency. Teaching or suggesting memorizing methods alongside material that needs to be memorized can be effective in modifying students’ practice because the advice is timely and comes in context. One important strategy to remember to promote for memorization is the use of brain breaks and movement to reset attention.
Low-stakes or no-stakes formative assessments can be a good tool to assess what future homework could be (as well as working to improve memory storage themselves). This gives the students a feeling that homework assignments might be tailored to meet what they need, which can increase buy-in. Formative assessments also add variation to more routine practice assignments.
The act of getting something wrong is a key part of learning, prompting the rewiring of the brain as students work to get it right. There are several implications to this nugget of neuroscience. Homework is a great place to work on things at increasingly difficult levels until you get to the point where you get something wrong. Students need space to struggle with getting something right without being penalized for reaching the point where great learning is taking place, which suggests that assigning a grade based on demonstrating significant effort rather than on percent correct might be fairer if the goal is ultimately learning the subject. It also suggests, as we have stated above, the need for timely, scaffolded feedback and the opportunity to redo, if we assume that the role of homework is to aid learning.
What is working for a student with regard to homework routine? What is not? What can the student do about it? Reflection and metacognition activities as homework assignments may help shift practices and mindset. The amount and quality of effort are important to success, as is getting students to realize that they have the ability to rewire their brains to become better learners and higher achieving students by working hard and working smart. We will not get students to have a growth mindset by telling them “have a growth mindset!” no matter how many posters saying so we put up. But we have a chance of doing so by engaging them in a conversation on the amount and quality of their effort, and how it meets the demands of the subject. Homework plays an important role in this conversation.
Do you actively work to ensure that your students feel heard, listened to, and known? Learning and emotion are linked. When we are teaching well, we are pushing students into areas of thinking and levels or amounts of work where they do not feel comfortable. Their relationship with and trust in their teacher are a significant part of whether they will succeed—and thus a significant part of how far we can push each individual student in their own distinct “zone of proximal discomfort.”
Relationships are really important in learning. When a student’s perceived bulk-of-my-work focus shifts away from the classroom to homework, it shifts away from a place where relationships are central to learning to one where they are not.
NeuroTeach:
Whitman, Glenn; Whitman, Glenn; Kelleher, Ian; Kelleher, Ian. Neuroteach (p. 171). Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Kindle Edition.
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