How to Make Learning Stick

In this thoughtful Education Week article, veteran educator Alden Blodget says the current debate about standards, testing, accountability, more math and science, teacher training, funding, and a longer school day doesn’t get at the real problems in our schools. Here’s his analysis:

• Learning something new (how to solve quadratic equations, the history of the Vietnam War) involves building new “wiring” – neural networks or circuits – in the brain.

• Unfortunately, new neural networks aren’t permanent – they constantly degrade. Students seem to understand and then the next day they don’t. “It’s as though they had never seen this stuff before,” is a common complaint in faculty lounges. What seemed clear in a quiet classroom with a supportive teacher falls apart when the student struggles with the homework in a noisy house with nobody around who can answer their questions.

• The process of building and rebuilding neural networks “requires considerable effort from the learner,” says Blodget. “The essence of learning isn’t memory and recitation; meaningful learning (the sort of learning educators hope to foster) results from an active effort to understand, an effort that promotes the growth of increasingly efficient webs of neural connections among different regions of the brain.”

• “Teachers can tell and talk,” he continues, “but only learners can learn… It isn’t that Sally won’t listen or isn’t intelligent or won’t try harder to memorize what she has been told; it’s that she hasn’t engaged in the hard work of constructing and reconstructing neural pathways to understanding.”

• “Each time we rebuild the neural network, the skill or concept becomes more stable and automatic,” says Blodget. “The highest level of skill or understanding results from repeatedly experiencing this building-rebuilding cycle over time (years), moving through a sequence of increasingly complex levels. That movement is not linear and steady; it is dynamic and messy.”

• One reason many students don’t make the effort to build better circuits is that they’re not motivated – what they’re learning doesn’t matter deeply to them. Neuroscientists have found that attitudes and emotions play a major part in learning, says Blodget: “Just as you cannot separate hydrogen and oxygen and still have water, you cannot separate emotion from cognitive function and still have thinking – or learning.” Emotion acts as a rudder for thought. 

• “Children are natural learners, alive with questions,” says Blodget. “And then school happens.” But it doesn’t have to be that way. For years, some teachers have intuitively understood what neuroscientists are now discovering about learning and the brain. “The time is right for educators and researchers to become partners,” Blodget concludes, “… to look at school reform through the lens of the biology and psychology of learning instead of bickering about testing and standards and more of the same old failed practices. Waving sticks and carrots at our kids will not produce the sort of deep, meaningful learning that everyone claims to want. Neither will blaming teachers, parents, or kids.” 

“Brains and Schools: A Mismatch” by Alden Blodget in Education Week, Sept. 11, 2013 (Vol. 33, #3, p. 30-31), www.edweek.org 

From the Marshall Memo #502