Brain research inspires adjustments to Lower School curriculum: By Patricia Ayer, kindergarten teacher One of my favorite conferences was led by John Ratey, M.D., author of "A User's Guide to the Brain." He spoke on the physical makeup of the brain and the neutral pathways that control brain function. Many, such as those that we need for life - breathing, heartbeat and temperature control, are connected at birth; but many more connections are made throughout our life as we learn. Ratey believes that we always have the ability to remodel our brains. If you want to change the wiring for a skill, you must find anew activity that relates to that skill, but is novel to you. This makes a powerful argument for the fine arts in schools. They have also found that training one part of the brain can help make another stronger - a cross training concept. Maryanne Wolfe, Ed.D., led a conference titled "Dyslexia, Fluency and the Brain." She proposed that the development of reading in a child follows a progression much like learning to speak. Certain skills must be present on one level before the student can progress to the next step. Each level bulids upon the last, and it takes modeling, practice and motivation to progress in the skill. A poster in the room declared, "Nothing magic in development!" But how can this research be used to teach reading? Reading is the most visible learning behavior. In our nation 38 to 40 percent of 9-year-olds cannot read. Many of the programs used in schools do not take into account how the brain works and learns. Therefore, learning to read has become a Public Health Issue. Personally, the highlight of the conference was the session led by Barbara K. Given, Ph.D. Her part was aptly called "Teaching to the Brain's Natural Learning Systems." This was the talk that made all the others come together and make sense for the classroom teacher. Given told about the five learning systems of the brain: emotional, social, cognitive, physical and reflective. All learning is emotionally based, so this is the most important. A passion for learning accelerates learning. Another important concept stated was that stress turns on genes that leave a bad memory. The teacher's role in this learning system becomes that of a mentor and model. Humans are social creatures. Others help us construct visions of what is possible. In the social learning system, the teacher acts as a colleague. The teacher is a facilitator in the cognitive learning system as she helps the students with problem solving and decision making. Hands-on instruction is an important part of the physical system of our brain. According to Given, learning through action translates abstract concepts into concreate realities. The classroom teacher has the role of coach. The reflective learning system, sometime scalled the environmental learning system, focuses on self-evaluation, predicting and projecting for the future. This type of reflective practice must be taught by the teacher, who becomes a talent scout and guide.

Teacher reflects on 2002 brain conference Over the course of the last decade, the education industry has been inundated with brain research on how the brain learns. In this time span, literally hundreds of books have been written on the subject, and brain conferences and workshops are held all over the country. The faculty at Darlington Lower School have joined the excitement, using curriculum and teaching strategies that reflect a great deal of this research.

“There are actually some schools in the country that have become brain-based learning schools, in which the entire curriculum reflects theories of brain research,” said Lower School Principal Mark Tayloe. “We are leery of making sweeping changes in our curriculum, but, at the same time, the emerging brain research has to be of interest to anyone concerned with learning. The implications of all this information are too important to ignore, and our teachers have found much of what they have learned to be extremely valuable.”

According to Tayloe, Janice Cox, pre-first teacher, and Patricia Ayer, kindergarten teacher, were responsible for getting him and other faculty members interested in brain research and its positive impacts.

“I had been reading articles on the Internet and in educational magazines about brain research and its implications for school children, and in some of that I saw an ad for the annual ‘Learning and the Brain’ conference in Boston,” said Cox.

After attending the conference in the spring of 2001, Ayer said she felt good about what Darlington Lower School was already doing. “So many of the techniques that were presented as new brain-based learning were the tried and proven things we had done as teachers for many years,” she said.

But she and Cox also brought back a wealth of information and suggestions for their colleagues.

“We learned what foods were best to increase focus and immediately I implemented that strategy in my classroom for snack time,” said Cox. “The brain consumes about 20 percent of the body’s energy. It needs eight to 12 glasses of water per day for optimal functioning, so we encourage our students to drink water all throughout the day.

“We were reminded that repetition re-enforces learning, so we continue to ask our parents to review work with their children as it comes home,” she continued. “Alertness and memory are boosted and stress is lessened when we have a good laugh. Laughing also boosts the body’s immune system for that day and the next two days. Doesn’t that make our job more fun! There are countless other great ideas and brain facts which we now use that we were first exposed at the conference.”

According to Ayer, many of the books they brought back were shared with Tayloe and the other teachers. This sparked everyone’s interest and got the ball rolling.

Over the summer of 2003, all Lower School faculty members read Eric Jensen’s “Teaching With the Brain in Mind.” Then, during faculty orientation, Claudette Hall, former lower school head at Charlotte Latin School, led a workshop on brain-based teaching strategies.

In November, Tayloe and six other teachers attended a one-day seminar in Atlanta titled “How the Brain Learns.” Led by brain expert Dr. David Sousa, the seminar re-enforced a lot of what we had previously learned and offered even more strategies for teachers as well as for parents, Tayloe said.

After this seminar, he established a new faculty committee at the Lower School called Brain Trust, which considered all the information they had been exposed to and established expectations to ensure that everyone was using incorporating the most current educational brain-based strategies, including movement, use of technology, change in routine and collaborative learning.

In the spring of 2004, Elaine Smith, second grade teacher, and Gayle Monk, first grade teacher, accompanied Tayloe to the annual brain conference in Boston that had previously been attended by Cox and Ayer.

According to Tayloe, one of the keynote speakers at the conference remarked, “Brain research gives us an opportunity to take our schools to the next level. Classroom activities should be dismissed if they don’t correlate to how the brain learns.”

This made sense to him. “As a result, teachers are able to better assess whether or not their classroom activities are effective,” he said.

And so some of the Lower School curriculum was adjusted. The most significant change was its adoption of a new reading series called Open Court, designed for pre-kindergarten through third grade.

“The Lower School has always been dedicated to a strong phonics-based reading curriculum, but we decided to adopt Open Court because it is a program that is research-based and is totally geared to how children best learn,” said Tayloe. “Open Court is a complete reading and language arts program that incorporates each of the elements of an effective reading program: phonemic awareness, phonics taught systematically and explicitly, spelling sight words, stories to read aloud and silently, fluency practice, writing and strategies for building vocabulary and developing comprehension.”

Tayloe is convinced that students who have the Open Court experience will be much stronger students in every facet of language arts.

“We’re not going to just turn out better readers, but better spellers, writers, grammarians and thinkers,” he said. “Our teachers are already blown away by the curriculum. It’s a lot of extra work and time for them, but they’re finding it’s well worth the effort.”

According to Tayloe, Open Court will be a nice complement to the Lower School’s already very successful math curriculum, Everyday Mathematics, which has been in place for five years. As with Open Court, Everyday Mathematics is also strongly supported by brain research.

“With our implementation of Everyday Math and Open Court reading, we have begun to focus wholly on two excellent curriculums that are based on the latest research,” said Ayer. “Not everything has changed because so much of what we have traditionally done was good, but now I believe each teacher is more aware of those extras that keep the brain alert and functioning at full power. Personally, I do not believe that the perfect program can be bought, but a good teacher can take a good program, some creativity and insight, and the perfect program can be taught.”

In classes that did not adopt a new curriculum, teachers have made adjustments in their teaching strategies. The best example is the fourth and fifth grade approach to teaching social studies, according to Tayloe.

“Our teachers have learned so much about the importance of making whatever they teach both meaningful and relevant,” he said. “It was no secret to us that most of our students dreaded social studies and simply were not interested. We were asking them to memorize a lot of information that they would forget right after a test, and brain research tells us that most memorization does not facilitate the transfer of learning and probably interferes with the subsequent development of understanding.”

With this in mind, the fourth and fifth grade teachers revamped their teaching strategies and broke the social studies curriculum down into six units. The students immersed themselves in those topics with lots of hands-on activities, research about the topic and lively classroom discussions.

“We were thrilled with the response,” said Carol Mitchell, fifth grade teacher. “I’m not going to tell you that every one of our students now loves social studies, but I can tell you that they are learning a lot more than they used to, and it’s also a lot more fun to teach.”

Besides making adjustments to curriculum and teaching strategies, Tayloe said it is also important to educate the parents about the significance of brain research.

“Of course, we want our parents to know what we’re doing in the classroom and even some of the rationale behind why we do what we do,” he said. “Furthermore, we want to let our parents know what they can do to help and to ensure that their children come to us each day at optimum brain capacity.

“Last winter, I sent a letter to all parents that went over all the things we were doing at the Lower School to incorporate brain-based learning,” he continued. “In that letter, I also provided our parents with some easy suggestions in regard to providing good nutrition, ensuring enough sleep and limiting television and video games, all of which lead to greater learning capacity.”

With new brain research coming out all the time, Tayloe said the Lower School is committed to keeping up and that discovering new strategies for teaching that are geared toward optimal brain learning will remain an integral part of each faculty member’s professional development. In fact, this year, the Lower School teachers will get together on four different occasions for faculty-led brain seminars.

“The Lower School faculty continues to study and learn about the brain in hopes that we will boost our students’ levels of focusing, thinking and learning while making them healthier, happier and smarter,” said Cox.