Introduction GL E NN W HI T M A N
What
promising research should ALL public, charter, district, private, international, and homeschool teachers and leaders know about the learning brain? This question inevitably emerges in each of the talks or workshops I have been privileged to facilitate with my colleagues since we launched the CTTL in 2011. Teachers, school principals, and district leaders ask this synthesizing question as they, too, recognize how the promising research and strategies in Mind, Brain, and Education (MBE) Science are a pathway for elevating teacher quality, student achievement, and the whole child’s school experience in their context with their students. “Yes, Glenn, I can see how MBE can help. But exactly what research and strategies should we all know?” Promising research in the field of MBE gives teachers, schools, and districts a variety of opportunities to leverage strategies in, for example, multiple modality instruction, memory, feedback, metacognition, social and emotional learning, cognitive load, and assessment. But MBE research remains just “promising” until it is tried out in a school or program’s context with a school or program’s students, and its impact is evaluated. Evidence of impact in real-classroom and real-school settings needs to be established before we can go beyond saying an MBE principle is anything more than “promising.” It is why we welcome and enjoy collaborating with Dr. David Daniel of James Madison University who talks about teachers and schools as “evidence generators.”1 This is, and will continue to be, a challenge to schools who want to make MBE a core part of how they function. In advance of considering promising MBE research, we start by saying it is important that teachers should be experts in the subject areas and ageappropriate developmental range of the students that they work with. But even when we layer knowledge of pedagogy on top of this foundation, it is just a starting point. The magic comes when professional teaching wisdom and MBE research insights are entwined — practitioners who can separate and understand each of these strands in their mind, but who live them tangled together in every moment of a busy school day. When we do this, we might say that we have developed a science of teaching and learning. While the science of teaching and learning suggests many great strategies, there are three areas that we prioritize when we begin training St. Andrew’s preschool through 12th grade teachers and leaders and they are a core thread of our virtual training tool, Neuroteach Global. We believe the following three principles and mindsets — informed by MBE Science research and adapted by the lived experience of classroom teachers — are of paramount importance in each teacher’s journey to be an even better teacher. Neuroplasticity The old myth that the brain was set around the age of 3-4, or 11-12, or even 18 is just that – a myth. We now know that neuroplasticity exists throughout our lives – our brains alter over time in reaction to our environment and experiences. While there is a significant genetic component to how our brain is wired, there is also a very significant environmental component — all the experiences we have and how we unpack them contribute to shaping the brain we currently have. Our brain is never “set” as neurons are formed, myelinated, connected and pruned all through our life. This is the basis of possibly the most important research-to-classroom-instruction contribution from neuroscience — that every teacher must see themselves as a “brain changer,” and that
