Successful education is all in our heads…

Did you know that dyslexia may not result from the mixing up of  images but from confusion about sounds? Or that learning music can affect  fine motor skills?

Or, as researchers Mariale Hardiman and Martha Bridge Denckla report on the Dana Foundation site, that “… [T]he brain constantly changes with experience, makes new brain cell connections (synapses), strengthens connections through repeated use and practice, and even produces new cells in certain regions” – meaning, for instance, that just because a child or young adult doesn’t seem to have good mathematical or verbal ability at the moment doesn’t mean he or she can’t develop it in time ?  

A new field of study is emerging at the place where  education and  science flow into the same stream. It’s called neuroeducation and it combines groundbreaking study of the brain with new research about how humans learn.  

Exciting? You bet. After decades of emphasizing the science of teaching, educators and cognitive scientists may be headed for an important change: figuring out the many and best ways that humans take in knowledge, make use of it and develop their brains in the process.

This is creative in every way, from the dissolving of barriers between two closely related specialties and the new ideas about brain function that are being explored to the indications that creative education – both inventive means of teaching and the effects of studying creative disciplines such as arts – can have positive, long-term benefits for learners of every age and ability. 

Because experiences change the brain, positive environment and atmosphere may be as important to creating effective schools as innovative curricula and teaching methods.

That means a great deal is going to have to change in schools systems everywhere. Read the Dana Foundation article here and tell me what you think.

Arts education gets – and begets – attention

The struggle to discover a causal relationship between arts-related learning and improvements in general cognition continues.

This may seem an abstruse issue, but it has all sorts of real-world ramifications: For decades, and especially for the most recent one, evidence for and against the arts’ effect on children’s brains, behavior, test scores, career potential and general happiness and fulfillment has swayed school systems, national agencies, foundations, state and local governments and the entire national economic Zeitgeist.

Creativity is the buzzword of the era in economic-development circles, thanks largely to Richard Florida and his “creative class” theory about what’s making some cities grow and others shrink. And what moves the economy these days is what moves the politicians, from your local councilman on up to the White House administration. So it may matter a lot that Michael I. Posner, a Dana Foundation grantee and a psychology professor at Cornell University’s Weill Medical College, finds that arts training – not just exposure to arts, but actual practice of them – increases children’s ability to pay attention to  other subjects and tasks.

Hopefully, that will include picking up their dirty socks.

For more recent findings on arts’ influence on the brain and education, check out the Dana Foundation’s related news roundup.

D.C.-Baltimore area becomes arts-ed mecca in May

Check this out: The Learning & the Brain Society will hold its 23rd conference in the Washington-Baltimore area May 7-9, co-sponsored by Johns Hopkins University School of Education and the Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives. The title of it is “The Creative Brain: Using Brain Research on Creativity & the Arts to Improve Learning.” 

It will be preceded on May 6 by a special summit and roundtable discussion at Johns Hopkins University on Learning, Arts, and the Brain, the title of a significant Dana Consortium study on the relationship between arts and improved learning that was led by Michael Gazzaniga . (Gazzaniga, who is director of the University of California-Santa Barbara’s SAGE Center for the Study of the Mind, answers some important questions about the study and the relationship between the arts and improved learning skills in an interview by Carolyn Asbury posted on the Dana Foundation site.)

As its posted public-relations material explains, the conference’s overall purpose is to ”explore the latest brain research on how the arts can improve achievement, learning, reading, math, mood, and interventions for learning disorders, and offers strategies to create more creative-thinking students and schools.”

Exactly what’s needed.

(You can become a member of the Learning & the Brain Society by clicking here and then clicking on the Join the Society button on the left side of the site. )