Multiple Pathways to the Student Brain

Energizing and Enhancing Instruction

Janet Zadina

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781118584880
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

From an award-winning neuroscience researcher with twenty years of teaching experience, Multiple Pathways to the Student Brain uses educator-friendly language to explain how the brain learns. Steering clear of "neuro-myths, " Dr. Janet Zadina discusses multiple brain pathways for learning and provides practical advice for creating a brain-compatible classroom.

While there are an abundance of books and workshops that aim to integrate education and brain science, educators are seldom given concrete, actionable advice that makes a difference in the classroom. Multiple Pathways to the Student Brain bridges that divide by providing examples of strategies for day-to-day instruction aligned with the latest brain science. The book explains not only the sensory/motor pathways that are familiar to most educators (visual, auditory, and kinesthetic), it also explores the lesser known pathways--reward/survival, language, social, emotional, frontal lobe, and memory/attention--and how they can be tapped to energize and enhance instruction.

Educators are forever searching for new and improved ways to convey information and inspire curiosity, and research suggests that exploiting different pathways may have a major effect on learning. Multiple Pathways to the Student Brain allows readers to see brain science through the eyes of a teacher—and teaching through the eyes of a brain scientist.

Chapter 1
How the Brain Thinks and Learns

I just don't understand. For the last four weeks everything was ideal. I was really on top of my teaching game and the students were interested, engaged, answering questions in class, and turning in assignments. It couldn't have been better, I thought. Then I grade the exams and find that they didn't seem to have learned the material. What happened?

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Making Connections

What is learning? How does it differ from thinking? Could poor reading comprehension, math disability, or apparent lack of effort actually be something else? What is the purpose of homework?

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Because our purpose as educators is to enhance and energize learning, we must understand the nature of learning in the brain to enhance, not hinder, the process. Even if you are not particularly interested in the neuroscience behind learning and are only looking for strategies, it is important to understand a few basic and essential processes and concepts in order to design more effective lessons. So let's wade into the technical information, just deep enough to understand the concepts. (For those interested in more information, I suggest additional readings at the end of the chapter.) Then we will examine the implications for the field of education before leaping into classroom strategies.

The brain is highly complex. As you work through this book, you will learn about many structures and functions as they relate to the topic of the chapters. In this chapter, we take a look at some of the major structures and functions.

Figure 1.1 shows the four major sections of the brain, called lobes. The word cortex refers to brain matter, so in discussing the frontal lobe, for example, we might refer to the frontal cortex, meaning the brain matter in the frontal lobe. Describing the functions of each lobe is not straightforward, as each lobe has many functions and also interacts extensively with other lobes. You will learn more about the lobes as you go along. For now, a quick overview is sufficient:

Figure 1.1 Major Areas of the Brain

• Frontal lobe: involved extensively with many regions of the brain and regulates such things as emotion and attention. It is associated with executive functions, that is, higher-order thinking processes. It is also involved in movement, reasoning, and metacognition. Chapter 7 is devoted to this complex lobe.
• Temporal lobe: processes language, hearing, memory, comprehension, and emotion.
• Parietal lobe: integrates sensory information and is active in spatial processing and navigation, perception, arithmetic, and reading.
• Occipital lobe: processes vision.

The most important fact is that the lobes work together. For example, reading can activate all lobes but some specific regions are more activated than others.

Plasticity

If you are over forty years old, there is a good chance that what you learned in school about the brain is wrong. Until the last few decades, scientists believed that the brain could not change except during critical periods in early childhood. After the critical window, the consensus was that you were stuck with the brain that you had. Worse, if the brain was injured, there wasn't much that could be done to fix it. We now know that the brain is plastic—it changes as a result of experience. The implications are huge for teaching and learning. Let's explore the science of plasticity.

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What Does the Research Say?

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Beginning in the 1960s, pioneer neuroanatomist Marian Diamond and her colleagues were the first to show that experience or training changes the brain. In this landmark study, rats that had richer environments had greater changes in their brain anatomy, chemistry, and behavior (learning). The enriched environment consisted of the addition of toys into the cages where rats were kept in groups, as opposed to those kept alone and without any toys or just in groups. The addition of the toys with social interaction led to better brain development—better problem solving and learning. However, the environment was not as rich as it would have been had they lived in a normal environment outdoors. The enriched environment created better brains compared to a deprived environment. We have seen the effects of this in children who grow up with very little stimulation in their environment, such as orphans in some institutions. They did not perform as well on educational tasks as those who had the stimulation of activities along with language and touch from caretakers.

In the 1970s, the well-known scientist Michael Merzenich found that animals' brains remapped themselves as a result of changes to the nerve structure in the hand. What happened to the hand changed the brain. But would this happen in humans?

Rewiring

As time went on, experiments in plasticity proved that the human brain can indeed rewire itself as a result of experience. In persons born deaf and using sign language, the auditory cortex, which processes sounds, recognized visual sign language as language and processed it where hearing and language would normally be processed instead of the visual cortex even though the language was visual. Other studies have shown that engaging in specific movements changes the size of the area in the brain associated with that movement or experience. For example, researchers found that guitar players' thumb representation in the brain was larger compared to nonguitar players since guitar players use their thumb a great deal.

A series of landmark studies led by Eleanor Maguire at University College London looked at the brains of London taxi drivers using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and found that the part of the brain that processes spatial information (the rear part of the hippocampus; see figure 1.2) was much larger than normal—there was more gray matter (the neurons that hold information). Further investigations revealed that it was because they spent more time navigating (more experience) that the area grew. Interestingly, the front part of the hippocampus became smaller as a result. (This makes me wonder what the GPS is doing to our brain.)

Figure 1.2 Hippocampus

Here is where it really gets exciting for teachers. In 2006 researchers led by Arne May studied the brains of medical students as they studied for exams. Brain scans using MRI were given three times during this process. In the first few months, students' brains increased in gray matter (figure 1.3) on both sides of their brain in the parietal lobe (see figure 1.1). The third scan was given three months after the exam during the semester break and found not much change at that time in parietal areas. However, another area, the rear part of the hippocampus (the same area that changed in the taxi drivers) increased in gray matter over time and actually grew more during the period after the exam. Researchers conclude that gray matter may change differentially in brain areas over time. Some kinds of learning may just take more time to process and change the brain.

Figure 1.3 Gray and White Matter

This plasticity is not limited to critical windows or to any age group. Although the brain is more easily changed early in life, it remains plastic throughout life. More evidence has corroborated plasticity to the point that now we are seeing amazing discoveries about just how much the brain can rewire itself.

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What Does This Mean for Educators?

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This discovery about plasticity means we are at the beginning of a new frontier in education. Not only do we have a deeper understanding of the importance of early childhood education, but for continuing education throughout life as well.

Neuroscientists have recently begun looking at interventions as well as basic processes underlying learning, and we are starting to see implications for classroom practices. For example, neuroscientists and educators have worked together on studies researching whether the brains of children with dyslexia can be rewired to reroute anomalous reading circuits in the brain to traditional reading routes, leading to improved reading. For example, Michael Merzenich at the University of California, San Francisco, developed a program called FastForward. It uses digitized sound to help children with dyslexia hear the sound correctly so that they can learn to sound out words. Merzenich and colleagues report success in enabling students who work extensively with this computer program to improve their phonological performance. Sally Shaywitz, codirector of the Yale Center for Dyslexia and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• More Praise for Multiple Pathways to the Student Brain
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: How the Brain Thinks and Learns
• Chapter 2: The Sensory Motor Pathway
• Chapter 3: The Emotion Pathway
• Chapter 4: The Reward Pathway
• Chapter 5: The Attention and Memory Pathways
• Chapter 6: The Language and Math Pathways
• Chapter 7: The Frontal Lobe Executive Function Pathway
• Chapter 8: The Social Pathway
• Chapter 9: The Big Picture
• Bibliography
• The Author
• Index
• End User License Agreement