Canadian Alanna Mitchell, this year’s winner of the Atkinson Fellowship in public policy named brains as the secret to better schools. Not all agree. 
Mitchell recalled a Minister of Education who asked a neuroscientist: “The brain? What does the brain have to do with education?” In my renewal work across many countries I heard similar surprising statements. Have you heard it?
Mitchell argues for centuries of scientific discoveries to be applied to teaching. From her award winning series on applying brain discoveries at school, here are ten key points to ponder with teens brains in mind:
1. The reason schools aren’t quickly shifting to a brain based teaching approach is because it’s still a secret, unknown to most educators and policy makers, and perhaps more importantly, to parents. Do you agree?
2. Some academics and bureaucrats are dead set against changing current practices, according to Mitchell. Neuroeducator, Zachary Stein of Harvard University calls it, simply a failure of imagination.
3. Teachers patrolled like prison guards in one middle school where Mitchell spoke, looming over teens whenever they showed the least bit of enthusiasm. One teacher shuffled to the front and suggested the questions be dropped in favor of telling teens what they were to know.
4. Teens and teachers’ brains still continue to grow new synaptic connections and replace lost neurons. A key part of learning is the process of pruning those synapses to make them work faster.
5. Neuroscience tells us that the brain is a platform upon which intelligence can be built, rather than the determinant of a fixed intelligence. As organs, brains expand, and should be treated as something to improve, than than prove. Psychologist Guy Claxton, at the University of Winchester sees schools’ role to help that expansion happen.
6. Warring fields of neuroscience and education are merging into an international movement, that is gathering strength in US, Europe, Japan, and Australia. Here at the MITA International Brain Center, we agree with the Mitchell’s quote from Howard Jones: Neuroscience on its own is completely without meaning. It has to be integrated with psychology and what we know about education.
7. When Harvard launched their Mind, Brain, and Education Program at their graduate school of education, faculty couldn’t agree for a long time, that the term, brain, should even be in their title.
8. Teens or adult brains hold somewhere between 100 trillion and 500 trillion synapses, and can prune as well as build new ones throughout life. In effect, the more synapses, and the more efficiently they connect, the smarter you are. The key to learning is to find different ways into brains that value multiple approaches, and avoid cookie-cutter methods.
9. There are no textbooks at an Australian science and mathematics school. The entire school is founded on the adolescent brain and how it learns. Mitchell found that it’s what teens could look like if their biology were taken seriously.
10. Teens and young adults undergo vast brain changes in their frontal cortex, that are rarely considered as factors that impact their learning. This part of the brain – where the highest level thinking and analysis take place, is laying down white matter, or myelin. This fatty sheath insulates nerve fibers so they can communicate more quickly. Teens need relevance because their brains are geared to understanding systems. Ask them, for instance, how to build a well for clear water in Africa.
Jim Davis, principal at the Aussie school for teens, recommends a brain shift among grown ups: showing faith in the teen’s powerful, growing neural networks and in their biological imperative to move their world forward.
Do you agree with Alanna Mitchell’s award winning insights from experts, or with Davies’ conclusion: If we do that, then all sorts of magic can happen?
If so, what’s holding your school back back from bringing the secrets of brain into teen’s learning through rejuvenated secondary schools?
