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.

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!

Drawing on the Right

Yeehah! My grant proposal to attend this Friday’s and Saturday’s Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain workshop has been funded by my school. This will be my third DRSB workshop, having attended the Five Day Intensive Drawing Class back in August 2005, and the one day Sketching Class in February 2007. This time I’m taking the Two Day Intensive Advanced Drawing Class.

Enough about the class titles! It’s all about the brain and the hand and the eye, about getting in the flow and letting yourself go. It’s about initially trying something different and then trying to get better at it. It’s about getting out of your comfort zone. It’s about tickling the brain and getting other neuron’s firing. It’s about stimulating creativity. It’s about having fun doing something different.

Can you tell I’m excited!

Learning & the Brain – Sam Goldstein (learning & schools)

Instinctual optimism and resilient mindset. Those are the two concepts that Sam Goldstein introduced in his Learning & the Brain keynote Hardwired to Learn: Creating Schools That Nurture and Grow Developing Brains. From his site: “Sam Goldstein, Ph.D. is a doctoral level psychologist with areas of study in school psychology, child development and neuropsychology.”

Instinctual optimism is Goldstein’s reply to the question, How do kids know they can? They are intrinsically driven to learn. Furthermore, as a result of this instinctual optimism, kids know that whatever it is, they can do it, hence the resilient mindset. Think of babies and toddlers you have known – they are instinctually optimistic and resilient about learning to walk, for instance. They don’t tend to ask, and aren’t told they can’t; they just go ahead and do it, taking in stride the bumps and falling down.

Both of these concepts remind me of Sir Ken Robinson’s TED Talk about creativity. Kids come to school eager, wide-eyed and filled with curiosity and creativity. (And Sir Ken says the schools proceed to educate the curiosity out of the kids.)

Goldstein went on to provide a little brain and gene background. He said that genes know in exactly which organisms they reside, and the “basic brain wiring plan is encoded in the genes.” That explains the nature part, but there is also a nurture portion, for although we may be genetically preprogrammed, brain development is also experience based.

At this point he posed three questions:

1. What is and is not intelligence?
2. How is intelligence different from knowledge?
3. How is intelligence different from achievement?

Given all of the above, Goldstein then talked about children and classrooms that nurture them. He felt strongly that it is “not our job to motivate kids, but to create an environment in which kids motivate themselves.” In creating such an environment, we need to consider (and all of the following are quotes)

• potential benefits and adversities of external rewards
• reinforcement of instinctual optimism
• providing opportunities for empathy and altruism (create community)
• providing competition in the absence of winning
• providing extrinsic reinforcers for effort and progress, and not for control [Behavior modification is for control, and Goldstein is not a big fan of this.]
• fostering opportunities for intrinsic control
• maximizing external consequences to control
• finding ways to enhance self-discipline
• setting limits in autonomous ways; helping kids learn to manage themselves instead of teachers managing them

Goldstein concluded by sharing two lists, of sorts: how to focus on student well being and describing the mindset of a resilient child. And he closed with a quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson:

The secret of education lies in respecting the student.

Plasticity and the Brain: Merzenich and Taub

Michael Merzenich blogs at On the Brain, where he never seems to mince words as he gets right down to the subject at hand. PositScience: The Science with Dr. Merzenich is a 9 minute video during which Merzenich talks about the development of the brain, brain change, and plasticity.

His current company, PositScience, is focused on how to maintain plasticity and encourage brain change and growth for aging adults, with the goal of improving memory. If you are interested, there are a number of YouTube videos about this, including interviews with neuroscientists and users of the PositScience program.

Merezenich is another one of the neuroscientists featured in Norman Doidge’s book, The Brain That Changes Itself, and may best be known for his work on developing the cochlear implant.

What interests me most, though, are the findings of his research.

‘You cannot have plasticity in isolation … it’s an absolute impossibility.’ His experiments have shown that if one brain system changes, those systems connected to it change as well. The same ‘plastic rules’ – use it or lose it, or neurons that fire together wire together – apply throughout. Different areas of the brain wouldn’t be able to function together if that weren’t the case.

Within the same chapter, Doidge explains the brain chemistry that takes place during learning and unlearning, both of which take place as a function of plasticity. As you learn something, the neurons involved in the learning fire together and thus wire together. This is facilitated in cells by LTP (long-term potentiation), which is the chemical process of strengthening the synaptic connections. When the brain is poised for unlearning, the opposite takes place due to LTD (long-term depression), where the synaptic connections are weakened and disconnected.

Another neuroscientist who brightens the pages of Doidge’s book is Edward Taub. His research and innovation in stroke treatment pioneered CI (constraint induced) therapy, which exploits the brain’s plasticity. You can listen to Taub explain his work in an interview on The Brain Science Podcast, where there are also a number of links and references posted.

Taub’s research supported Merzenich’s findings that “when a brain map is not used, the brain can reorganize itself so that another mental function takes over that processing space.” In addition, with specific application to stroke patients and anyone who had some form of brain damage, “Not only could the brain respond to damage by having single neurons grow new branches within their own small sectors, but, the experiment showed, reorganization could occur across very large sectors.”

Hazaah!

How/Why do people learn?

What causes someone to be willing to learn? “Willing” is the operative word here because without a desire to learn something, the learning process is sure to be stymied.

From readings, conversations with my sons and students, and from my own experience, it seems a prerequisite for learning is that whatever is being learned must have some relevancy to the learner. There has to be a reason for bothering to engage with the topic.

In typical schools, the reason for learning often is that the student has to get through the content in order to complete the course of education. I do wonder if that type of learning is true learning, as opposed to just satisfying requirements. When a student is excited about the material and wants to learn, there is a much deeper engagement with the content and, I believe, true learning can take place.

When that desire is not present, when the content does not present relevancy to the learner, then the prerequisite for learning rests on developmental maturity. The learner needs to be sufficiently mature to understand that despite what they feel towards the material, they need to engage because of requirements and expectations, and because doing so may benefit them in the long run. (I am writing here of students ranging from adolescent to adult.)

Of all of the above I am certain, based upon instinct and experience and conversational data gathering. And now for something based a bit more on research, I point you to an in-depth overview of How People Learn, as organized and summarized on the Internet Time Blog. Jay Cross, the blog’s author, has pulled together myriad resources and references, including the first two below that I had planned on pointing out before stumbling upon his blog.

Here is the Executive Summary of How People Learn; Brain, Mind, Experience and School, the entire book which can be read online for free.

Funderstanding’s About Learning, which explains twelve different theories on how people learn.

Marc Prensky, who coined the terms “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants”, is a believer in learning through digital games. Jay Cross appears to have read much of Marc’s writings on the topic and has included “a great list of theories of how people learn” based upon Prensky’s book Digital Game–Based Learning.

How do People Learn is a succinctly written article prepared for people who make their living training others. This article is part of the Global Development Research center that, among other initiatives, focuses on education.

Professional Development – a working definition from 2005

A few posts ago I posited a working definition of Professional Development. Here is another one, which I wrote back in 2005.

Faculty-to-Faculty confirmed what was already known – that to be most effective and useful, professional development related to one’s discipline has to happen on an as-needed basis when it can be put to use, tried out, tested, and refined in a timely fashion.

RCDS has always encouraged faculty to attend workshops and conferences by providing funding for most requests. Most often people participate in off-campus offerings specific to their fields of expertise. This makes much sense when the goal is to develop subject expertise. But a professional development program can do more than that. A professional development program can expand horizons, inspire thinking outside the box, cause empathy with learning styles, create admiration for those with different skills sets, promote more rounded intellects, and provide simple satisfaction.

I have coined a term for professional development that is all-encompassing – a “synapse factory”. Synapses are those miniscule spaces between neurons in our brains where one neuron transmits to another neuron. Researchers think this is where learning takes place and memories are made.

Ideally, in synapse-factory oriented professional development, faculty would take workshops of personal interest, workshops outside of their comfort level and zone of expertise, and workshops that complemented what they teach. For instance, a history teacher might take an art course related to the time periods s/he teaches, as well as a drawing class.

This aspect of taking workshops outside of our areas of expertise actually models what we strive to share with our students, which is to be a life long learner. By being students along side of our students we help build a community of learners. By having students teach teachers, and switching roles, we model respect for the students and acknowledge that teachers do not have all the answers, and by having administrators participate we model respect for the equality of learning.

It’s all about building synapses. And that’s what professional development is all about.