(Lia Commissar) Hi! This morning
I'm going to talk about education and neuroscience,
both generally as a field that's developing
but also, the specific work that we've been doing in this field.
The Wellcome Trust -- OK --
the Wellcome Trust, for those of you who don't know,
is the second largest charitable foundation globally,
with the aim of improving health.
And it does that by funding lots of bio-medical research, but also
by funding work in the social science and humanities,
funding lots of education work, doing lots of engagement work
and also lots of policy work.
So I'm going to talk through a few things this morning.
Firstly, what has neuroscience got to do with education?
What impact does it have on education at the moment?
The work that we've been doing and then, thinking about the future.
So, what has neuroscience got to do with education?
Well, if education is about learning something,
be it knowledge or a skill,
and neuroscience is the study of the nervous system and the brain,
then they're pretty linked, in my opinion.
And it's not new to kind of talk about the brain, in relation to education.
People have been discussing this, critiquing it,
debating it for lots of years.
There is loads of research papers out there with titles such as
"A Bridge too far", "Its a Prime time to build a bridge",
"A two-way path is possible", "Booting the bridge from by thence". (check)
So lots of people have been talking about this bridge
but not many people have been building it.
And, this is kind of understandable
because its probably only really in the last 10 years that neuroscience is,
the understanding from neuroscience has evolved significantly
that we can start to think about how it may have implications for the classroom.
And this is really exciting and there is lots of potential
and its really understanding,
you can understand why teachers, why policy makers,
why technologists want to start applying some of these ideas to education.
But my word of warning that will go throughout this presentation
really is about waiting and doing the research and finding out
whether these things are actually going to be helpful and impactful
in the classroom.
And the other thing that I must say just before i go on
is that I am not saying in any way that neuroscience alone is the answer
and its going to solve all our problems
or can tell us everything about the classroom,:
that's a very complex ecosystem.
But, neuroscience is a kind of a new-ish field
where we can start using that alongside psychology,
alongside educational research and alongside teacher's knowledge
to build something really good for the future
and see if we can start improving learning in the class room. 2.51
So, what impact does neuroscience have on education?
So, we're at an education conference --
I thought I'd wait and see what you guys think.
So, I'm going to put a few statements up on the board, as any good teacher does.
And what I would like you to do is just simply raise your hand
if you agree with the statement, if you think it's true.
So: "We mostly only use 10% of our brain."
Hands up if you agree.
OK. I will just show you this:
These are some stats, I'll show you the paper this comes from in a second.
This was a survey of teachers in five countries
and those are the percentages of the teachers that agree.
Hum -- it's not really working, but I can tell you that this is not true
-- uh, there we go -- even sat there now, you might think you're not doing very much
but your brain is still in control of your breathing,
in control of your heart rate, keeping you standing up, sitting upright,
perhaps paying attention, maybe not, maybe mind-wandering
but it's all using your brain, all parts of your brain.
So that's one of these myths.
Second one: "Individuals lean better when they receive information
"in their preferred learning style."
So visually, by seeing, auditory, by hearing,
or kinesthetically, by doing things.
Hands up if you agree with that statement.
OK.
You can see, across the board, teachers in lots of countries agree with this.
(Laughter) Yes. So (she laughs)
It is true that people have a preference.
You might prefer to learn something in a particular way,
you might feel that you are a visual learner,
and that you learn better in that, by using stuff visually:
you do have a preference; but researches show that you don't learn any better
if you are showing the material in that particular way, believe it or not.
One last one:
"Differences in hemispheric dominance, left or right brain, can help to explain
"individual differences amongst learners."
Hands up if you agree.
We might start to see a pattern, I don't know.
(Laughter) So, here is some stats.
Really high in the UK.
Again, it's not true.
If you hear things about integrating the right or left brain,
or if you hear things about one side of your brain is the logical side
and the other side is more mathsy -- sorry, creative, it's just not true.
And I'm going to skip the next one.
["Regular drinking of caffeinated drinks reduces alertness."]
But this one is true. (Laughter)
OK, I can tell you a little more about that.
If you want to see more about these neuromyths,
This is a really good paper written by Paul Howard Jones last year.
It got a lot of interest on social media
and it goes through lots of what these common neuromyths are.
So, neuromyths: Where do they come from?
Are they a problem? And what to do about them?
So, generally they often come from some kind of science
that's been over- or misinterpreted, and they tend to stick around (excuse me)
because they are easy to understand or
easy to kind of implement in the classroom.
Are they a problem?
Well, if you think you only use 10% of your brain, is that a problem?
Possibly not, it's not accurate,
but when I first started teaching about nine years ago,
and this was common in lots of schools across the UK,
I'm not sure about in other countries,
students were asked to fill a questionnaire about how they learned,
and did they like learning in this way.
And teachers were given a spreadsheet with students
and which were their preferred learning styles.
And teachers were encouraged to make sure that they were providing
information for those students in that particular way.
And I'd say that is a bit of a problem,
because teachers were potentially wasting time
or feeling that they should be doing something
that was not actually benefiting the students.
A positive outcome was that lessons became more diverse,
............... (check) about a range of activities
but at the same time, students would say things like:
"Miss, I'm not doing this activity because I'm a kinesthetic learner."
And so students were themselves limiting themselves
and not getting the benefit of learning in multiple modalities,
which is the way you learn best,
by using different ways of learning the same information. 7:19