I recently read this interview below and wanted to share it with you. As our students are more and more exposed to technology, we must look at how it impacts their learning.
As a neuroscientist I’m very interested in what’s called “neuroplasticity,” which is how the brain learns. I’m also interested in the various groups of kids that we typically call “special needs,” but along any axis we measure, we find kids are really different from one another in terms of what they take in and understand and what’s confusing to them.
What do educators need to know about that?
The No. 1 thing they need to know is that kids’ brains are physically different from the brains of kids a generation ago because of the way they’re taking in information—because of this fast-paced digital intake, which is different from the way a lot of people here grew up. We were reading textbooks in black and white.
As far as brain plasticity goes, essentially anything you take up will change the structure of your brain. I can look at a brain scan and tell you for example if you play piano vs. violin. If you take up juggling, we can see changes in your brain. It is the case that brains are incredibly plastic in young people—and even in adults and the elderly, just less so than kids.
There are actually tests you can do to look at the ways the brain is very different to how they looked a generation ago. The question is how do educators meet them halfway. Kids [today] are different. Is it ADHD if they can’t pay attention to a boring lecture? Possibly not. That’s not ADHD, that’s just a boring lecture. They have actually grown up used to a certain rate of intake of information.
Do teachers need to be doing anything differently?
They need to be meeting kids halfway and on the kids’ terms. And that is what this conference [ISTE] is all about—figuring out the right ways to do that. I was just talking to a group of school leaders and I was fascinated to learn how complex it is just from a bureaucratic point of view to go about instituting technology in the classroom so that it’s not outdated in three years. It’s a tough problem because it has to be the right tech.
How do we inspire kids to be more creative within the current structure of school as we know it?
You can teach some very basic things about creativity as part of the curriculum and it’s very straightforward. I’ll give an example: We need to be making sure that the education is not an end point but a launching pad. Usually, you learn everything during the course of a semester, take a test, and then it’s over. Instead, we should be offering kids an opportunity at the end of every semester to take everything they’ve learned and bend, break and blend it to create their own version of it. And that works in the sciences, the arts, etc. That’s the important part, and there’s a sense that the only end point that matters is when a kid gets to say, “Ok, I’ve sucked in all this information, now here’s what I’m going to do with it.”
