For immediate release: December 1, 2002
For more information, contact Susan Griffith, 216-368-1004 or sbg4@po.cwru.edu

CLEVELAND—Looking for innovative ways to counter the chalkboard woes of his Case Western Reserve University colleagues, James E. Zull, director of CWRU's University Center for Innovation in Teaching and Education, turned to his own discipline of biology for answers. He asked questions about how the brain works and whether teachers can use that knowledge to engage students in learning.

The result of Zull's exploration is his new book, The Art of Changing the Brain: Enriching Teaching by Exploring the Biology of Learning (Stylus, 2002). The book attempts to bridge "the gap" between what scientists have found and what educators practice. He illustrates some of the dilemmas teachers face in the classroom by examples brought to him at CWRU's teaching center and with students in his classes over the years, although he conceals the identity of students and teachers in his book.

"The main message is that 'learning is a physical change'- because real learning makes a change in the brain," Zull says. The art of teaching is the art of finding and utilizing connections in the learner's brain to produce this change.

While he writes for classroom teachers, his message is for a broader audience. "Eventually we will find ourselves in a situation that requires teaching a child, co-worker, friend or others," he says

Zull starts his three-part book by exploring how brain structures such as the sensory cortex (gathering information) integrative cortex (forming memories and creating ideas), motor cortex (directing action), anterior cingulated (decisions), limbic cortex (survival reactions), amygdala (fear and negative emotions) and basal structures (pleasure and positive emotions) relate to learning. The learning process involves four steps that engage the whole brain with first experiencing or receiving information and then reflecting, developing abstractions and actively testing the abstraction. Different areas of the brain respond to the learning cycle. This learning cycle was developed by CWRU professor David Kolb over 20 years ago.

Without the engagement of all parts of the brain in the process, Zull says learning is unbalanced. He points out that the passive student does not use idea and action parts of the brain effectively but relies almost totally on the sensory and memory brain. "That student has information but does not produce useful knowledge," he adds.

Zull next examines how the 100 billion neurons, each potentially connected to 10,000 or more other neurons in neuronal networks, form pathways in the brain that connect bits and pieces of information to create new meaning or reinforce what is there.

The process is complex as a multitude of learning cycles take place almost simultaneously when the brain receives new sensory information and sorts it for meaning.

Zull suggests ways teachers can build upon strengthening connections by starting with what the student knows from past experiences. This information is recorded in the neuronal networks. The goal is to help these networks grow or weaken when they represent misconceptions.

"For everything we know, there is a neuronal network," Zull says. "New information must use these existing networks, so each learner constructs their own individual networks as knowledge builds. But, teachers often try to start with their own neuronal networks, where they are, rather than with the student's networks."

Zull illustrates the nature of these networks with a picture of a wagon wheel and an image of a fired neuronal network in a monkey's brain that reflects or mimics the physical relationships in the wheel. The networks are actually set up in the form of a wheel.

He says the brain pictures what it sees.

"We seem to understand by creating internal neuronal networks that reflect some set of physical relationships that accurately map the relationships in the concept, object or action itself," explains Zull.

"We build those neuronal networks on the physical experiences of living," he adds.

Zull stresses the importance of emotion in learning. He likens emotion to the "mortar" that cements knowledge together. These emotions have aided human survival, and the underlying of all cognitive functions as well. Fundamentally, the brain is an organ of emotion, he adds.

The author claims that "if we follow what the brain tells us, we can free ourselves from the education wars."

"The more you understand the brain, the more artful you can be when you must teach," says Zull.

–CWRU–

 

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