September 11, 2023

In 2000, I met neuroscientist Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, then a doctoral student at Harvard Graduate School of Education (she is now a professor at the University of Southern California). We were both interested in the role of emotion in learning. Mary Helen was studying two high-functioning boys each of whom had had half his brain removed in order to control epilepsy, one the right hemisphere, the other the left hemisphere. She wanted to understand how the boys used their emotional and cognitive strengths to compensate for these losses and develop skills that typically require both hemispheres. Since then, she has spent many years researching the relationship between emotional, cognitive, and neurological development.

My interest in emotion and learning began when I was a freshman in college and abandoned my intention to become a chemical engineer, fleeing to pursue a major in theater. I had been a “good” science student—good in the sense that I performed very well on tests because I could memorize anything. My grades were good (it didn’t matter whether I understood concepts, just that I could recall and regurgitate them) and I adored my science teacher, whose encouragement and courses I enjoyed for three years, so I “loved” science. Until I arrived in college. Until I sat taking tedious notes in the deadening lecture classes and stood in the seemingly endless lines to use the analytic balances in the labs. Until I realized that I couldn’t think like a scientist. Until I discovered that science really meant nothing to me, that I had no spur to prick the sides of my intent to major in chemistry.

In the theater, I found meaning and purpose. I also discovered that most of the required courses outside the theater department offered knowledge and skills that made me a better theater student. My deep emotional connection to theater stimulated me to think like an actor, a director, a set designer, and these frames of reference predisposed me to experience anthropology, psychology, history, and English classes as relevant and adaptable to my theater studies. (Eventually, I even discovered uses for my chemistry and physics classes.) I learned from experience that students’ engagement and learning depend on an emotional connection to their studies—a connection that leads to a sense of personal meaning and purpose. 

So, like some other teachers, I spent many years after entering the profession working to apply what I had learned as a student: creating environments and strategies to increase my students’ emotional engagement. Some of this work was successful; some was not. I could change what went on in my classroom, but effecting institutional change produced mostly Sisyphean frustration. Institutions tend to resist and thwart change, especially when most of one’s colleagues don’t want change and, even more so when those advocating change lack the support of the deities of data and research. Years of experience are irrelevant. Imagine, then, my excitement in meeting a neuroscientist who would observe that educators “want students to get feelings out of the way so that students can ‘think clearly.’ But brain studies reveal that thinking clearly is in fact an emotional process.” Mary Helen’s research would eventually lead her to declare that healthy neuropsychological development and meaningful learning are functions of engaging in and thinking about things that matter to the learner.

And yet, despite impressive progress in some outlier schools (NuVu Studio, Red Bridge, UP Academy Boston, One Stone, Mastery School of Hawken, for example), the education system (both public and private) remains remarkably untouched by 25 years of research implications that strongly suggest a need to rethink and redesign school. Why is that? And, especially, why so little progress when so many schools (not to mention consultants peddling interventions, curricula, and programs) increasingly claim the “brain-based” or “research-based” label?

Although some of the baser traits of human nature are part of the explanation (laziness and fear and loathing of change), I believe we need to consider that one cause may be a failure to distinguish between two broad categories of research. There is the comforting research that focuses on “best instructional practices”—essentially, on how to fix students and teaching—and the more challenging research that neuroscientists like Mary Helen offer, the implications of which are that we need to fix the schools, not the students or teaching. Instructional-practice research offers a lifeline to educators and a relatively quick fix to administrators who don’t want to rethink the entire system. An administrator friend summarized this perspective when he said, “In order for teachers to embrace cognitive psychology and neuroscience in their teaching, they need colleagues to make it accessible, socialize it, and provide real-life examples of strategies to deploy immediately.” He described Mary Helen’s research as “so dense that I think teachers would be turned away,” which is the reason that he looks to instructional-practice researchers for “a simplified and brief text with great imagery for learning and teaching strategies.” 

He’s right. That’s the reality. So it’s not surprising that so many educators just want to be able to tinker with the traditional system to improve “student outcomes,” mainly retention—factual and procedural recall. Researchers in the instructional-practice field tend to put “retrieval practices” at the center of their work: spaced repetition, elaborative rehearsal, visual memory, spiraling, interleaving, dual coding, chunking, turn-and-talk, concrete examples, frequent low-stakes tests, etc. 

I don’t challenge the research; these are methods that can help improve memory and would likely help some students even in fundamentally redesigned schools, as well. However, the “best practices” approach won’t lead to what Mary Helen calls “transcendent” thinking, deep learning, meaning-making, engagement, or the healthy mental and emotional development of children. And these basically mechanical memory strategies do irreparable harm as a distraction from considering more meaningful change because they become the sole focus; they take up all the available energy. Adopting these practices in classrooms requires time for teacher training (professional development), planning, and practice, all of which deplete the teachers’ bandwidth for more change. However, these memory strategies don’t address the design problems of the traditional schools that so many educators seem unwilling to give up (standardized graduation requirements, standardized expectations and assessments, traditional classrooms, student groupings by age, teacher-generated “big questions,” projects, and curricula, etc.). Yet because the strategies do result in some students improving their test scores, everyone gets to cry, “Success.” All done. And educators get to continue to delude themselves that, for example, retrieval is the valid measure of learning, thus maintaining the status quo and supporting the whole woeful assessment and test-prep—and, now, consulting—industries. No need to wrestle with the complexities, the densities, of research that might suggest that the system itself is flawed.

The research of Mary Helen and others provides much more significant insight into the functioning of major neural networks that support deep learning. It also suggests that the traditional design that so many educators would tweak is basically built on an outdated understanding of brain function and learning. The classroom model reflects a time when educators believed that learning involved transferring knowledge from the brain of a single teacher to the brains of 15 to 25 students, regardless of whether the knowledge mattered to the students. It reflected a belief that learning was a linear and ladder-like (always improving) process and happened in the same way for people of the same age (unless someone had some sort of disability). It reflected a belief in standardization (the same graduation requirements for all, the same curricula, the same expectations, and the same assessment tools). Research into the neurobiology of learning challenges these and many other assumptions.

And if the assumptions are flawed, then so is the system (structures, practices, policies) that they support. But because tweaking the system is infinitely more attractive than undertaking the massive systemic design changes required to improve child development, educators prefer to embrace the easier “solutions,” basically research-based gimmicks. For example, teachers know the importance of mindsets and metacognition, but those, too, are areas that tend to be approached with “interventions” and other mechanical “curricular” exercises or classroom lessons, rather than addressed by fundamental redesign. Mary Helen’s insights into the functioning of the salience network, the executive control network, and the default mode network suggest a more organic, healthy approach to the development of metacognition and growth mindsets.

Unfortunately, the system-tweakers tend to cherry-pick the research. They readily embrace Mary Helen’s conclusion that emotion and cognition are intertwined but ignore her further, uncomfortable insight that it is “impossible to think deeply about things you don’t care about.” Their goal, first and foremost, is to translate her research into the classroom context, not to look critically at the mismatch between classroom context and the implications of the research. So, to demonstrate their commitment to emotion in learning, they spend their time focusing on good, worthy goals: They develop techniques for creating classrooms that feel safe, that create a goldilocks amount of stress. They focus on social-emotional learning, belonging, and creating positive classrooms of trust and respect. But instead of considering whether an entirely new school design might result in achieving these goals, they struggle to shoehorn interventions that address them into the existing structure. They advocate for students to have more of a voice but only within the limits of “constrained choice,” which “research shows” increases motivation in the traditional classroom model. They don’t consider that perhaps a model that allowed unconstrained choice might be even more effective. They don’t even see the contradiction in, on one hand, pointing out the correlation that “research establishes” between student happiness and GPA and, on the other hand, simultaneously stressing the importance of intrinsic motivation.

If the design is flawed, the submersible will implode, regardless of what tinkering might be done with the shape of the seats, the placement of windows, or the training offered to the passengers and crew. It’s time for educators to distinguish between these two types of research. Instead of succumbing to the allure of quick-fix research, we could devote our limited time to studying and internalizing the implications of the neurobiological research for how we design schools. Instead of investing time and money in interventions, administrators could hire their teachers for a certain number of weeks each summer to engage meaningfully in the collegial work of study, discussion, and redesign. What if we could create brain-based structures, practices, and policies that obviated the need for research-based interventions?

You may also be interested in reading more articles written by Alden Blodget for Intrepid Ed News.