I have been reading a lot via the Mind Brain and Education on the how neuroscience findings apply to educational settings, but I was really struck by some of the research highlighted by Sarah-Jayne Blakemore (Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London) in an article The Developing Social Brain: Implications for Education published last month in Neuron.
In the article Blakemore describes research conducted by Kuhl et al in 2003.
"A key question is whether sounds that have been lost can be relearned. A study confirmed that infants older than nine months can learn to discriminate speech sounds to which they have not previously been exposed. Kuhl and colleagues studied American babies who had grown up hearing only English and had thus lost the ability to distinguish between certain Chinese Mandarin sounds. The authors trained three groups of nine-month-old American babies: one group interacted with a real native Chinese speaker, who played with and read to them; a second group saw movies of the same Chinese speaker; the third group heard the same Chinese speaker through headphones. The content and the time of the exposure were identical in all three groups.
The group that had been exposed to a real live Chinese person significantly improved their ability to distinguish between the two sounds, performing at around the same level as native Chinese babies. In striking contrast, babies who had been exposed to the same amount of Chinese but in the form of video or sound recordings showed no learning, and their posttraining performance was the same as American babies who had received no exposure."
This related strongly to a really interesting conversation I had with a teacher recently. She was a teacher of 20 years experience and she was describing how she worked with the 4-5 year olds in her class. This teacher was working at a highly intuitive level, recognising interest in a child, guiding and developing that interest. She was also very attentive to the children's physiology, sensing when they needed to move about, go outside to play, have a change of pace. This is teaching at it's most exciting, fulfilling and best, but she was very careful to point out that she had a lot of support from her Headteacher to work in this flexible way.
In an era of evangelical support of technology based educational investment we need to extend the research which looks at the value of real teaching. Students think that contact time with their teachers is important - it seems we are now in an era where we need to re-prove that value. I heard that a London university recently told their students that despite dropping 20% of their staff due to 30% reduction in finding that 'students could expect the same quality of teaching due the large investment made in technology'.
In Blakemore's article she also compares adolescence with early years in terms of brain development 'If early childhood is seen as a major opportunity - or a 'sensitive period' - for teaching, so too should the teenage years'. She suggests that there are a number of questions which are ripe for research, which focus on the differences in the brain between face-to-face interactions over DVD watching, video conferencing etc.
[Pic above is Michael Owen's miss in 2003 - The photograph by Phil Noble was named FA Premier League photograph of the decade. Blakemore used to photo to illustrate two aspects of the social brain. 'Firstly, it shows how rapid and instinctive social responses are. Within a split second of Michael Owen missing the goal, nearly everyone is making identical arm gestures and has the same expression on their face. The other aspect of the social brain this photograph illustrates is our ability to read other people's gestures and faces in terms of their underlying emotions and mental states'.]
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