What Neuroscience Can Teach Us About Teaching
If you were to teach a group of aliens to make paneer samosas, and you could only choose ONE option below, what would you focus on teaching?
The layout of a kitchen and the names and uses of all the utensils, equipment, and where to find them.
How to actually cook the meal by letting them see how you do it, and possibly even letting them help you.
We’re quite interested in what all of you have to say! Since we’ve never been in this situation, it would be a bit arrogant to say that we know the right answer, but we’d probably go with option 2. Teaching only about the kitchen and cooking utensils isn’t going to translate into a fully cooked meal. We’re not saying it’s useless for the aliens to know kitchen structure and where to find everything, but seeing the kitchen in use functionally is going to be much more useful if you would like them to actually cook a meal.
Okay, because none of us know an alien, let’s backtrack to humans and their brains—and the science of how they look, work, and learn.
What & Where (Structure) vs How & Why (Function)
Like famous explorers from centuries ago, neuroscientists have been slogging away for decades, mapping, mapping… and… mapping the parts of the brain. They’ve noted which parts light up in different situations, and this has been enormously helpful. We now not only know about the hippocampus, amygdala, and prefrontal lobes, but we also know exactly what happens there. Okay, let’s be more honest—we think we have a pretty good idea.
The sticky matters come into play when we ask how we can apply this structural knowledge to practically helping people learn. This has been a notoriously thorny issue for neuroscience.
Neuroscience is more than just brain structure, just like your kitchen is more than a location in your house with cooking utensils. It is an intricate tangle of brain structure and function. Knowing what happens where in terms of structure, isn’t useful without knowledge of how and why it happens. Function cannot exist without structure, and structure has no use without function. To go back to the kitchen example, meals can’t be cooked in a kitchen (function) without the physical kitchen and utensils and appliances. At the same time though, a fully-equipped kitchen is meaningless without it being used.
Let’s explore this with another metaphor. If you think of the human brain as a city, you could look at satellite pictures of a city and say: “Oh! This is amazing! Learning happens in schools and bedrooms. We should build more schools and bedrooms.” It’s easy to see that won’t necessarily increase learning. In the same way, knowing the location of certain brain processes has limited use for application to learning. What’s more important, is asking questions like: “How does thought happen?” or “How does memory formation happen and why is it important?” Most importantly, neuroscientists should be devoting time to asking: “How does understanding work?”
When Structural Emphasis Goes Wrong
We’re not saying that structure is useless. It’s useful for many things, but applying that knowledge to learning is not that easy. And when that knowledge gets applied incorrectly, things can go south really fast, like with the left-brain/right-brain dominance myth.
The lesson we learn from this is to make careful assumptions when applying knowledge about the brain’s structure to learning. We must take a step back from worrying about which different parts of the brain do what. Instead, let’s focus on what the brain does and how it works—functionally.
Knowing Labels
In the same way that decades of brain science have slapped a label on different parts of the brain and lulled us into thinking we really understand how those parts function, we tend to slap a label on knowledge and call it education.
Let’s revisit our aliens-in-the-kitchen scenario, but this time, imagine, you’re part of a galactic exchange program. You’re now on a faraway alien planet, and you’re standing in front of an alien pantry. In it, are a bunch of ingredients that you are completely unfamiliar with.
The two aliens that you taught to fry paneer samosas earlier, are trying to teach you to cook in their kitchen. If they could help you to read, pronounce, and memorize the names of the alien ingredients, would that help you to cook?
No! Knowing the names might make you feel like you know something. And it could be very helpful eventually if you get hired as a chef in an alien restaurant. But to cook a decent meal, you need to know how the ingredients taste and to understand how the different flavor profiles and textures combine and work together. Rote memorization of ingredient labels isn’t going to get you very far.
You see, we’ve come back to the same issue: structure and smacking labels on things, versus understanding function on a deeper level.
We introduce our children to alien pantries and expect them to cook by learning labels all the time. Study the table below to see how this looks in real life.
We could probably go on with examples all day long!
The right hand column holds so many benefits. A child who learns math that way will understand division much more easily when they get there. The exploratory approach to reading (while still using phonics) will help them master sounds faster. And, they’ll understand that if a nation is put under severe climatic stresses in the 21st century, political will combined with innovative thinking could still solve big problems, just like it did for the Vijayanagara Empire.
Deeper, true learning is about much more than just knowing labels. We’re not saying you should never learn the “labels!” But, you should never mistake a mere map for the actual, real-life place that the map is representing. Let your child explore the map’s actual terrain before they memorize the map and label it.
