Podcast Series: Innovations in Education

Explore the full series of eSchool News podcasts hosted by Kevin Hogan—created to keep you on the cutting edge of innovations in education.

5 ways teachers can improve student learning based on current brain research

The brain is an experience-dependent organ. From our very earliest days, the brain begins to map itself to our world as we experience it through our senses. The mapping is vague and fuzzy at first, like a blurred photograph or an un-tuned piano. However, the more we interact with the world, the more well-defined our brain maps become until they are fine-tuned and differentiated. But each person’s map will vary, with some sensory experiences more distinct than others depending on the unique experiences and the clarity and frequency of the sensations he or she has experienced.

Educators can positively influence students’ learning by understanding how the brain is shaped by their early experiences—and how it can be rewired and reorganized to work more quickly and efficiently.

The Plastic Brain and the Critical Period…Read More

Five myths about learning

The human brain is always growing and changing.

Neuroscience offers an exciting glimpse into how the human brain develops and changes over time. And while theories on the brain and its development abound, brain research can help to clear up a handful of myths about how students learn and develop.

The human brain—a biological organ that weighs about 3 pounds—develops as a result of a combination of the genetic program children inherit from both of their parents. Out of about 70 watts of power, the human brain uses only about 15—similar to what an idling laptop or the light inside a refrigerator use.

The typical 8-year-old child uses about half of his or her body’s energy to run the brain. It is an efficient device, but one that uses a lot of energy, said Sam Wang, an associate professor of neuroscience in Princeton University’s Department of Molecular Biology. Wang, also of the Princeton Neuroscience Institute, has co-authored two books about the human brain.…Read More

How brain research might affect instruction

Brain research could help improve teaching and learning.

The 32nd annual International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) conference kicked off June 26 with a lesson relating brain function to teaching and learning, and attendees explored how brain sciences might influence how educators deliver instruction.

Educators must “help today’s students prepare for tomorrow’s complexities,” said new ISTE President Holly Jobe in opening remarks. This includes helping students learn to love learning, and simply helping students learn how to learn.

“Technology does, and can, provide a gateway” to a vast array of learning experiences, Jobe said. “The walls of the classrooms are coming down.”…Read More

Can you build a better brain?

This would be a whole lot easier—this quest for ways to improve our brain—if scientists understood the mechanisms of intelligence even half as well as they do the mechanisms of, say, muscular strength, says Newsweek. If we had the neuronal version of how lifting weights increases strength (chemical and electrical signals increase the number of filament bundles inside muscle cells), we’d be good to go. For starters, we could dismiss claims for the brain versions of eight-second abs—claims that if we use this brain-training website or practice that form of meditation or eat blueberries or chew gum or have lots of friends, we will be smarter and more creative, able to figure out whether to do a Roth conversion, remember who gave us that fruitcake (the better to retaliate next year), and actually understand the NFL’s wild-card tiebreaker system. But what neuroscientists don’t know about the mechanisms of cognition—about what is physically different between a dumb brain and a smart one and how to make the first more like the second—could fill volumes. Actually, it does…

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