The Art of Changing the Brain – James Zull

James Zull is a professor of Biology and also Director Emeritus of the University Center for Innovation in Teaching and Education (UCITE); both of these at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio. Coupled, this explains Zull’s approach to his 2002 book, The Art of Changing the Brain – Enriching Teaching by Exploring the Biology of Learning.

Zull is a biologist with a keen interest in how the brain learns. At its simplest form, our brains produce electrical and chemical signals in the process of creating synapses, and the result of this process is physical change in the brain. Thus it follows, according to Zull, that:

Teaching is the art of changing the brain.

and this is done by “creating conditions that lead to change in a learner’s brain.”

Zull begins by providing an overview of David Kolb’s Experiential Learning cycle, and equates it with related brain structures. (You can brush up on Kolb’s theory in this previous post.)

Kolb’s cycle provided the Ah ha moment for Zull to make “this natural connection between brain structure and learning.” With the above chart as a basis, Zull spends the remainder of his book delving into the learning process/cycle. More on this in future posts.

For more about James Zull:

• James Zull in his own words – New Horizons for Learning article: What is “The Art of Changing the Brain?”, May, 2003
• SharpBrains interview with James Zull: An ape can do this. Can we not?, October 2006
• Director Emeritus of UCITE (University Center for Innovation in Teaching and Education at Case Western Reserve University)

For more about David Kolb:

• Kolb’s faculty page at Case Western
• Kolb’s R&D company – Experience Based Learning Systems, Inc

For more about UCITE:

This fascinates me because it is professional development by and for faculty, providing “services for faculty which will enhance student learning”.

• As part of this initiative they have a Learning and Teaching page filled with links about teaching methods, assessments, getting student feedback, dealing with controversy, general classroom issues, cooperative learning, experiential learning coupled with the learning cycle and learning styles, and using technology in teaching.
• Some of the services provided by UCITE , including assistance with presentation skills!

Off the Grid redux

We are heading north to Boothbay Harbor, Maine, for a week off the grid. For my family that means no computers, which is quite unusual for us!

I leave you with Ben Zander making the closing talk at Davos 2008. He makes a few comments that relate to my previous post on choices and decisions…in particular listen for:

If you make a mistake – How Fascinating!

and

his comment on Radiating Possibility.

Design and Innovation with Arnold Wasserman

Arnold Wasserman is the man behind The Idea Factory. I discovered him thanks to a recent interview by Joan Badger and Ben Hazzard for their SMARTBoard Lessons Podcast.

Wasserman echoes Sir Ken Robinson in saying that we all come hard wired to be creative, and we then teach that feature right out of our children as they progress through school.

In discussing his company’s work with Singapore’s education system, Wasserman asks how we go about reintroducing our two hemispheres to one another, and concludes that we need to figure out how to use the ideas of K-6 education in the upper grades. He says:

“The brain knows how to be creative and the mind gets in its way.”

In other words, as we get older (and more “educated”) the mind encounters enough information that it begins to put a harness on the brain, stifling it from using ideas that do not mesh with the reality to which the mind has been exposed.

Wasserman references Google’s 80/20 rule as a way to nurture innovation. The rule states that employees can spend twenty percent of their time focused on their own ideas. This allows “the mind to get out of the way of the brain.”

“The Learning Journey” is a method that his company uses to “get the mind out of the way of the brain” by shakings things up. He suggests that to innovate it helps to see how innovation is working in other fields in order to understand how innovation works, in general, as opposed to within a specific field.

Wasserman’s tips to discover the principles of innovation:
First – see how it is done in other fields
Then – try to solve a problem in yet another field, completely different from your own (the proverbial “sandbox”)
Now – translate this to your field

The main reason for getting out of your comfort zone and exploring a completely different field, where you then have to solve a problem, is that “expertise is the killer of innovation.” The more you know about your own field, the more difficult it is to innovate. What is required is to “think back into the company from the minds of those outside it.”

This last bit reminds me of teaching. It is said that the best way to learn something is to have to teach it, and I agree with this concept. However, sometimes if you know a thing too well, it becomes very difficult to think back into the learning from the mind of someone who is struggling to learn that very thing. Yet more food for thought for educators on summer break.

What we educators know, and sometimes forget

In December 2007, I participated in a three-day training session to become a Smart Master’s Certified Trainer. At the time, my school had close to 50 Smart Boards installed, and this summer another 20 are being set up. Thus, it should not surprise you that I follow several blogs geared to the Smart Board and interactive white boards.

One such resource is the SMARTBoard Lessons Podcast by Canadians Joan Badger and Ben Hazzard. I confess to usually not listening to the podcast (because I learn better visually) but to always checking out their links and often checking out their lessons.

This week’s lesson is about Design & Innovation with “Arnold Wasserman, a legendary human systems designer, is the Chairman and Co-Founder of the Idea Factory who is redesigning the nation state of Singapore. Wasserman talks about design principles in an education context, innovation in education, and his ideas about the brain versus the mind.” Given the topic, I couldn’t pass up listening to the podcast, which I will write about in my next post.

Before listening, I visited the The Idea Factory and did a bit of exploring. Curious to know more, I downloaded the pdf An Introduction to the Idea Factory and was immediately struck by three of the six beliefs of the company:

Hazaah! These beliefs coincide with what is known about how we best learn, and the third one is quite in harmony with what I have written about professional development. These ideas have been around since the days of John Dewey, but it’s always a little disconcerting how many in education tend to forget them. Food for thought as we educators transition to the summer.

Learning & the Brain – assorted

Having written a lot about the various Learning & the Brain sessions I attended, there are just two more about which I will eventually write in greater detail. However, that will mean skipping over the Monday afternoon Keynotes on Brain Plasticity, Stress & Adverse Experiences. Not to diminish their importance, I will give them their due now.

What struck me at first about Bruce McEwen was his initial resemblance to Mel Levine. McEwen talked about Stress and Neuroplasticity in Learning. He noted there are three types of stress:

1. positive, which consists of positive challenges
2. tolerable, which consists of adverse life events coupled with good social and emotional support
3. toxic, which consists of a sustained stress agent and a lack of social and emotional support

McEwen went on to state that “Structural plasticity in the adult brain is modulated by experience”, so stressful experiences will take their toll on neuronal activity. He further discussed the impact of stress on various developmental stages and concluded with some additional concepts.

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Seth Pollak gave a funny, personal talk about Developing Brains and At-risk Children. He left the podium and walked around making eye contact with those in the front. He engaged us with his slides, which were packed with visual imagery and very little text. (Garr Reynolds would have quite approved!)

Pollak talked about how “emotions tend to emerge in the same order and same time frame across cultures, and questioned if this is due to the hard-wiring of emotions or that cultures tend to treat infants and children in the same manner.” The focus of his engaging talk was about how neglect and other types of negative behavior can impact the development of an infant’s and child’s brain. He concluded with three points:

1. Experience matters, and early experience REALLY matters in terms of the development of the emotional system.
2. The type and pattern of deficits reflect the specific kinds of experiences children encounter.
3. Development = Experience + Biology

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The last speaker of the day was Elkhonon Goldberg. I had been eager to hear him talk, as I have seen him referenced in quite a number of books and articles. As Goldberg began his talk on Brain Plasticity and Cognitive Fitness, I was looking forward to hearing what he had to say. However, despite my interest in his topic, it became difficult for me to follow his talk as he digressed and then skipped over information in order to end on time. More helpful in understanding his points was watching A Change of Character, the movie made by Neal Goodman that focuses on a patient of Goldberg’s.

Goldberg did make some early points about novelty and pattern recognition. “As we age, our expert knowledge remains strong, and our capacity for solving problems within our areas of expertise can often exceed that of those who are younger.” He went on to state that the main cognitive asset of aging is pattern recognition, and that our arsenal of patterns grows with age. “As one ages, the domain of the novel shrinks, and the domain of what is known (pattern recognition) grows”. Goldberg employed us to “turn neuroplasticity to your advantage” by:

1. Welcoming novel challenges.
2. Beware of being on mental autopilot.
3. Remain cognitively active.
4. Take note that cognitive fitness will be the trend of the future and be sure to “separate the wheat from the chaff” when considering these programs.

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You can read more about any of these presenters at the following sites.

• Brain Connection has A Conversation With Bruce McEwen
• The American Association for the Advancement of Science has a 2003 article, Neglect During Infancy Can Affect Children for Years, Scientists Report, about Seth Pollak’s research
• Los Angeles Times 2007 article Like a StairMaster for the brain includes commentary by Elkhonon Goldberg and also speaks to his point 4 above
• A SharpBrains 2006 interview with Elkhonon Goldberg
• Thanks to the comment on this post I further explored the SharpBrains site, which led me to Ten Important Truths About Aging, an article by Alvaro Fernandez and Elkhonon Goldberg at The Complete Lawyer. This article nicely covers many of the points made by Goldberg in his Learning & the Brain talk.

Learning & the Brain – Taylor & Lamoreaux (adult learning)

At their Teaching with the Adult Brain in Mind page at Saint Mary’s College of Education of California, you can read Kathleen Taylor’s and Annalee Lamoreaux’s description of their Learning and the Brain session. I found Kathleen and Annalee to be relaxed yet passionate facilitators, eager to help all of us in the audience be active learners as we thought about our roles as adult learners and our roles in helping adult learners to learn.

This session was very much interactive, and a number of times we were asked to break into small groups to discuss specific questions, the outcomes of which were then shared with the larger group. Aided by our responses, the message imparted by Taylor and Lamoreaux included the following as it applies to learning that lasts:

• involve people in experiences, or to paraphrase that Chinese proverb: Tell me and I forget. Show me and I remember. Involve me and I understand.
• provide time for reflection – time to mull over ideas, allowing them to jell
• encourage conscious construction of narratives, which to me translates as relating this to your own life and pondering ways to make it useful
• and now that you’ve thought about a way to apply the narrative, go test it out in the world beyond ideas and see where it leads

While the process above, which is very much akin to Kolb’s and Zull’s models, is practical and relates to dealing with content, the next step involves thinking about how this impacts the learning process. Thinking about one’s thinking and learning (known as metacognition) can help bring about a change in mental models, ideally leading to transformative learning.

Understanding that we have the ability to change our mental models, also known as an epistemological change (a change in the way of knowing), will let us open the door to transformative learning (being willing to change and having an understanding of how to change).

Taylor and Lamoreaux sum this up quite simply:

Information adds to and fills the form.

Transformational learning CHANGES the form itself.

How do we make use of this in actual practice? They suggest it is useful to foster learners’ awareness:
• of their tacit assumptions
• of multiple perspectives
• of themselves as makers of meaning and constructors of knowledge
• of their capacity to make meaning in new ways
• of their responsibility for the meaning they make

This very much reminds me of the research done by Carol Dweck relating to a “growth mindset” versus a “fixed mindset”.

In my role of working with faculty, I am always trying to find ways to engage people in moving beyond their current positions of comfort. Kathleen and Annalee point out that one reason for adult anxiety in learning stems from dredging up memories associated with their past learning experiences. Think back to your learning experiences in elementary school, for instance. Maybe you can recall a teacher who said something that just squashed your hopes for a day, or embarrassed you in front of classmates. According to Kathleen and Annalee, those past experiences can inhibit one’s interest in further learning as an adult.

Another obstacle related to learning is the realization that something new is going to be learned. This, in itself, can make people nervous as they contemplate… will I be able to learn this, will I look silly in front of others, it’s been a long time since I had to do this, why do I need to do this. Hmm, some of those questions sound just like what younger students may be thinking when sitting in a class…

Feel free to view the slides related to this presentation, including some thoughtful quotes.

Learning & the Brain – Taylor & Lamoreaux (adult learning, Zull’s model)

After Kathleen Taylor and Annalee Lamoreaux introduced David Kolb’s Model of Experiential Learning, they next tied in James Zull and his 4 PIllars of Learning. Zull is a Professor of Biology at Case Western Reserve University, which happens to also be home to David Kolb.

Here together are Kolb’s Model and Zull’s Pillars. You can see that they utilize similar vocabulary and refer to similar practices.

What Zull appears to have done is provide the biology for Kolb’s model by ascribing the areas of the brain that experience the cycle of learning.

The image above is my drawing of Zull’s model, which is on his Case Western page. and is best explained in his words, also from his site:

According to our current model of the connection between brain function, human learning, and education, we believe that education can engage the learner’s brain to the fullest extent when students follow a cycle of concrete experience with their subject, reflection on their experience and connecting it to their prior knowledge, generation of their own abstract hypotheses about their experience and testing their hypotheses through action, which produces a new sensory (concrete) experience.

Given these two models of learning, what does this imply for adult learners and the people who teach adults? That is what Taylor and Lamoreaux focused on in the remainder of their session, and what I will focus on in my next post.

For more of James Zull’s words, please visit the following two sites.

• SharpBrains hosts an October 2006 interview with James Zull, An ape can do this. Can we not?
• James Zull authored the article What is “The Art of Changing the Brain?” at the New Horizons for Learning

Learning & the Brain – Taylor & Lamoreaux (adult learning, Kolb’s model)

Kathleen Taylor and Annalee Lamoreaux, both of Saint Mary’s College of Education, California, facilitated Teaching with the Adult Brain in Mind. This session was part of the adult brain and learning tract, a first-time tract for, and one of the two main reasons I was determined to attend, the conference. Indeed, this is what I’d like to study in the Learning and Teaching master’s program at Harvard!

This was very much an interactive ninety-minutes during which I was exposed to a number of adult learning models. Since they were all new to me, I will start at the beginning by describing the models.

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Kolb’s Model of Experiential Learning is based on theories by people with names that are more familiar to me, Piaget and Dewey. David Kolb is a Professor of Organizational Behavior at Case Western Reserve University and a partner in Experience Based Learning Systems, Inc. His model, pictured below and which I made with Inspiration, consists of four stages, any of which may be the starting point for learning through experience.

Typically, though not always, in learning something you might begin with the actual concrete experience. This is described as the “feeling” portion of the learning process, and is naturally followed by reflective observation, a time to rethink through what you have done and how you feel about it. Based upon your reflections, you are then ready to make some abstract conceptualizations about the process, for instance, How does this relate to other areas? and What can you conclude about this process? Working out your responses to these questions will lead you to active experimentation and the testing of hypotheses, which in turn leads to another actual experience. Thus, the stages are cyclical, and since learning is rarely so neat and tidy, it is likely that you jump into learning from any of the stages.

You can learn more about Kolb’s Model of Experiential Learning at any of the following sites.

• infed, the encyclopaedia of informal education, an independent site published by educators, hosts the article david a. kolb on experiential learning, which both explains and then explores aspects of Kolb’s model
• Roger Greenaway, publishes the ACTIVE REVIEWING guide to dynamic experiential learning, which contains a ton of resources, including this lengthy collation of experiential learning articles and critiques of David Kolb’s theory
• What is Kolb’s model of experiential education, and where does it come from? includes information on John Dewey, Kurt Lewin and Jean Piaget compiled by students at the University of Toronto.
• The Centre for Learning and Teaching at Dalhousie University, Canada, provides a nice chart of Teaching Activities that Support Different Aspects of the (Kolb’s) Learning Cycle

Learning & the Brain – Ken Kosik (Alzheimer’s, MCI)

Ken Kosik is co-Director of the Neuroscience Research Institute at the University of California Santa Barbara. His research focuses on “both the mechanisms of neuronal plasticity and its impairment in neurodegeneration.” At April’s Brain conference Kosik talked about The Adult Brain and Memory: How Learning Protects Against Alzheimer’s.

Did you know that 10 to 15 percent of people over 65 years of age suffer from some form of neurodegenerative disease, and the ratio becomes one in two for people over 85 years of age. Many of us tend to think of dementia as one of those diseases, yet Kosik says that dementia “is a symptom, like a fever” and it simply “means that cognition is not normal.” It is necessary and important to ask “What kind of dementia?” He went on to note that “forgetting is part of what the brain does”, though there is a “gray zone between a normal and abnormal range of forgetting, and this gray zone is what worries people.”

In Alzheimer’s the brain shrinks, and in the shrinking process certain areas are impacted more than others. The limbic system, which handles emotions, is targeted, specifically the hippocampus (memories) and especially the amygdala (emotions). The cerebral cortex is also impacted, though the cerebellum and primary motor and sensory strip tend to be left alone. As the brain shrinks, the sulci (grooves between the folds) widen, and neurons become “swollen, twisted and distorted”. The American Health Assistance Foundation provides a clear explanation and graphic of what happens to the brain with Alzheimer’s. For a hands-on experience, take the Alzheimer’s Association’s Inside the Brain: An Interactive Tour.

Kosik also mentioned mild cognitive impairment (MCI). People with MCI function fine in daily life but have memory issues that go beyond what is considered normal for their particular age. Usually this is obvious to those around the individual, though the individual may not be aware that there is anything out of kilter. Kosik likened a line from John Updike’s Free in the January 8, 2000 issue of The New Yorker to MCI: “…one’s own ability to improvise could no longer be trusted.”

In the progression to Alzheimer’s, Kosik noted that

• the ability to think on the spot diminishes
• there is a move to regression
• the mind is “emptying out”

While none of this is pleasant to ponder, studies have provided some conclusive data about Alzheimer’s that can be put to use in attempting to combat the onset of the disease.

• Education is a plus
• Sustained long-term stress is a negative
• Challenging your brain with something you do not normally do is a plus

The most fascinating study Kosik mentioned is that of transgenic mice, i.e. genetically engineered mice. These particular mice were genetically engineered to get Alzheimer’s. Alzheimer’s consists of neurofibrillary tangles inside the neurons and amyloid plaques between the neurons. It turns out that if the mice are placed in enriched environments, the growth of the amyloid plaques is slowed. (Slides 10 through 13 in the Interactive Brain Tour provide an excellent description of plaques and tangles.)

Kosik left us wondering just where do memories go? Do they disappear or do they just become inaccessible. He says that if it’s just an access problem, we might be able to work on retrieval strategies.

Advanced Drawing Class

Brian Bomeisler’s two day intensive Advanced Drawing Class focused on light, shadow, crosshatching, and sighting. I had my first experience drawing some of the classics of drawing – a still life of fruit, a bottle and flowers; and a nude. We began on a rainy Friday.

Friday morning, just getting started by warming up with a Vanishing Point.

A styrofoam ball to expose shadows and light.

Perspective, shadows and light with a cone, cube and ball – I was pleased with the shadows and relationship of the cube and ball. I headed home after a full day of drawing, pleased that for not having drawn in many months, as with the act of bicycle riding so much had remained with me.

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This was our first drawing on a sunny, cool Saturday morning, and I was a bit too focused on what I was drawing, so the end result is a bit forced…a bit too left brain! I headed to lunch with this on my mind, and determined to relax a bit for our afternoon drawing, which was made all the more possible by an enjoyable lunch with Dianne, another student in the class. We talked about our careers, our children, and our feelings about the class, having both taken prior workshops with Brian.

I am still amazed that I drew this picture. I didn’t think about the body form; only about defining the negative space that surrounded the body. Am tickled with the result!