Sun, 08/01/2010
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What is "Brain-Based Learning"?
by Lisa Chipongian
The Organ of Learning
To many, the term "brain-based learning" sounds redundant. Isn’t all learning and teaching brain-based? Advocates of brain-based teaching insist that there is a difference between "brain-compatible" education, and "brain-antagonistic" teaching practices and methods which can actually prevent learning.
In his book, Human Brain and Human Learning (1983), Leslie Hart argues that teaching without an awareness of how the brain learns is like designing a glove with no sense of what a hand looks like–its shape, how it moves. Hart pushes this analogy even further in order to drive home his primary point: if classrooms are to be places of learning, then "the organ of learning," the brain, must be understood and accommodated:
All around us are hand-compatible tools and machines and keyboards, designed to fit the hand. We are not apt to think of them in that light, because it does not occur to us that anyone would bring out some device to be used by human hands without being sure that the nature of hands was considered. A keyboard machine or musical instrument that called for eight fingers on each hand would draw instant ridicule. Yet we force millions of children into schools that have never seriously studied the nature and shape of the human brain, and which not surprisingly prove actively brain-antagonistic. (Hart 1983)
Granted, the brain is infinitely more complex than the hand. Although Hart does not deny the brain’s vast intricacy, and he admits to his own deliberate simplifications regarding the brain’s design, he argues that some knowledge, even if it is partial and simplified, can still be applied "to design brain-fitting, brain-compatible instructional settings and procedures." Such settings and procedures would emphasize "real-world" exposure. The school, in Hart’s words, would become an "exciting center where there is constant encounter with the richness and variety of the real world" as opposed to a "dreary egg crate of classrooms…almost empty of anything real one might learn from."
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