Brain Rules for Education Served to Conference Consumers
By Rebecca Salon
John Medina sought to answer a single question during his Thought Leader session on "Brain Rules for Education" on Saturday: Is there any diagnostic tool available from the cognitive neurosciences that could screen an applicant pool for teacher competency?”
Although posed with some humor, Medina, who is the affiliate professor of bioengineering at the University of Washington School of Medicine and director of the Brain Center for Applied Learning Research at Seattle Pacific University, brought his brain research alive for conference attendees as he related it to teaching and learning.
After dismissing most brain-based research as mythology, Medina focused his remarks on one of his 12 brain rules from his book, Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School, noting that all education is about brain development at some level.
He cited this rule: Every brain is wired differently from every other brain and learns in ways unique to that wiring. Therefore, he concluded, there are not seven learning styles, but millions.
Medina offered a problem that stumped the hundreds of school leaders in the audience, but was easily solved by 3rd graders (i.e., he showed five abstract looking graphic symbols and asked what logically comes next in the pattern). He then explained crystallized intelligence, which compels us to memorize things, and fluid intelligence, which compels us to improvise off of the database we’ve memorized as soon as possible.
Relating this to educators, Medina noted that knowledge accumulates in a structured way in that people build on the structure to create new knowledge. However, if children don’t acquire certain foundational knowledge along the way, they will have difficulty grasping new information.
So, Medina posed, what might give a teacher ready knowledge of the gaps that might exist for students? Does such a skill set or talent exist? If so, is it measurable? If not, is it teachable?
To answer those questions, he described what he called the “Theory of Mind,” which would allow a teacher to understand someone else’s motivation and their view of rewards and punishments, so they could know whether they have learned what was being taught.
Citing the work of Marco Iacoboni on mirror neurons, Medina explained what happens in the brain to process information and make connections, giving examples in primates whose brains mirrored reactions to behaviors they witnessed but did not perform. He noted this is what happens for us when we can predict someone else’s behavior. Therefore, if a teacher is good at theory of mind, they’ll see when a child is learning and when the child isn’t “getting it.”
The good news is that this can be learned. Theory of mind is a teachable talent. Medina posed that, although brain scientists and educators don’t often work together, if they did, this could be turned into a science to improve education outcomes for students.