By Dennis Sale
LET’S start with an analogy – these are often useful anchor points in effective teaching – especially in making complex and abstract concepts more understandable and concrete.
Hart (1983) provides the initial anchor point for this article, in stating that:
…designing educational experiences without knowledge about how human brains learn naturally and most efficiently can be compared to designing a glove without any knowledge of the human hand.
This means that teachers, when designing and teaching their lessons, should apply key knowledge about how the brain works, especially its impact on the workings of the mind, which is where the psychological functioning that underpins effective human learning occurs.
Over the past few decades, we have learnt more about how the brain works than in the rest of human history. Of most importance, we have an increasing knowledge base on how humans learn and what teaching methods work best to have an evidence-based approach to teaching (Hattie, 2007; Petty, 2018; Sale, 2020), which is the case in other professions such as engineering and medicine. However, while we can now utilise this knowledge to teach better than in yesteryear, it is also important to recognise that the human brain is not the intelligent design that is often mooted to be – well, not for 21st century living anyway.
Research suggests that human brains were much the same (morphologically) 50,000 years ago, with recent data showing that, even 300,000 years ago, the brain size in H. sapiens already fell within the range of present-day humans (Neubauer, 2018). Our brains were nicely designed for life in the stone age, but ill-prepared for the VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous) world of today. In this article, I outline brain and mind-based barriers to effective learning, which challenge how we learn and teach.
An initial starting point is how the brain impacts thinking and memory, which are two sides of the same interrelated cognitive process. We know that good thinking and related learning strategies should be an essential part of the curriculum in all schools, and naturally infused in subject-content learning. As Paul (1993) summarised:
Thought is the key to knowledge. Knowledge is discovered by thinking, analysed by thinking, organised by thinking, transformed by thinking, assessed by thinking, and, most importantly, acquired by thinking.
However, while the human brain is an amazing organ in certain ways (for example, housing around 86-plus billion neurons with numerous networked connections, as well as unlimited storage space), it is poor in terms of processing speed. Don’t believe me? Well, ask yourself ‘how many capital letters in the English alphabet are curved’? – for example C. You will either answer this immediately because you already know it (it’s stored in your long-term memory), or it will take you at least 45 seconds. In the latter case, you will have to check all the letters one by one in your working memory (WM), which has slow processing speed and limited immediate capability when presented with new information. Cognitive scientists (for example, Van Merrienboer & Sweller, 2005) argue that in everyday situational use, this tends to be only 2-4 elements of information at a time. WM also needs quick rehearsal for information to be effectively captured and processed, otherwise it is typically lost (forgotten) in seconds. This limited capacity of WM poses severe restrictions on learning, as Clark & Lyons (2004) point out:
…it is in working memory that active mental work, including learning, takes place. Working memory is the site of conscious thought and processing.
Secondly, while good thinking may be beneficial in the learning stakes, there are those who do not see the human mind as particularly well developed for such activity, as a leading cognitive scientist, Willingham (2009), concluded:
Humans don’t think very often because our brains are designed not for thought but for the avoidance of thought.
The work of best-selling author and Nobel prize winner, Kahneman (2012), provides a powerful insight here, which has extensive implications in educational contexts and how we teach. He argues that thinking can be conceptualised in terms of two systems: System 1 and System 2. These are, of course, metaphors, but they convey something that instantly has strong face validity:
System 1 is a fast-reflexive system that identifies the familiar, especially threatening elements in a situation and quickly activates automatic-response patterns. This system is the most essential for survival and is the default system. It typically works well in everyday life where most situations and problems are familiar, and we have long-established patterned responses to them. However, this system also results in rapid stereotypical/prejudicial judgments and action. It is the price we pay for this powerful survival system.
System 2 is a slow, analytic, reflective system that explores the more objective factual elements of a situation, compares them with previously learned elements, and then responds. However, this requires self-control, effort and time, which is tiring. As Kahneman summarises:
System 1 is impulsive and intuitive; System 2 is capable of reasoning, and it is cautious, but at least for some people, it is also lazy.
Thirdly, good thinking is further mitigated – even contaminated – by the impact of beliefs and emotions on our capability for rational cognitive activity. Marcus (2009), from a cognitive neuroscience perspective, highlights how our belief systems challenge the brain’s functioning capability to be a good ‘thinking machine’:
Our beliefs are contaminated by the tricks of memory, by emotion, and by the vagaries of a perceptual system that really ought to be fully separate – not to mention a logic and inference system that is as yet, in the early twenty-first century, far from fully hatched.
Such brain-based limitations mean that elevated levels of good thinking, willpower, perseverance, and sustained concentration are not the natural or typical psychological state for many people.
In summary, knowledge about how the human brain and the mind works – both the good and the not so good – needs to be explicitly taught and reinforced in schools as this underpins the competence to manage one’s learning, self-regulation, and well-being.
- Dennis Sale worked in the Singapore education system for 25 years as advisor, researcher, and examiner. He coached over 15,000 teaching professionals and provided 100-plus consultancies in the Asian region. Dennis is author of the books Creative Teachers: Self-directed Learners (Springer 2020) and Creative Teaching: An Evidence-Based Approach (Springer, 2015). To contact Dennis, visit dennissale.com.
