Brain Thinking® & Being Bright Brained®: Compassion & Understanding in Teaching
/It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.
—Albert Einstein
A young boy sits in his stiff wooden desk-chair, staring off into space. The teacher approaches, raps the desk with his knuckles and demands to know why the boy is not paying attention. Holding the opinion that this boy is absent-minded and unwilling to learn, he wants to embarrass the boy in front of the class, so asks him if he believes in education? The boy, sufficiently red-faced, addresses the class and replies that “education should not be about learning facts, it should be about ideas and that there is no point in learning dates and which army killed more, rather it would be more useful to learn why the armies were fighting in the first place.” The teacher, stupefied by this response, sent the young boy to detention and told him there was no reason for him to continue in school.
This scene is said to have taken place a long time ago in a school in Germany and Albert Einstein is said to have been the unfortunate student. But it just as easily could have been a scene from a present-day classroom in the United States. In fact, a similar story was told to me just a few years ago by a boy I knew well when he was in 7th grade at a public charter school in Boulder, Colorado. The scene was a physical science class. A frustrated science teacher stood with arms crossed glaring over the shoulder of this struggling learner who did not understand how to apply the equation to the properties of electrical circuitry and in a sarcastic tone the teacher said "wow," indicating that he was not impressed with the child's thinking.
The details in the two stories are different, but the attitude of the teacher and the shame of the student are the same. In both cases, the children were brilliant but the teacher didn’t think so. In fact, the teacher assumed the exact opposite. In the first case the young boy went on to make a revolutionary discovery that changed not only our understanding of space and time, but how the known universe works and has been celebrated ever since as the greatest genius of all time. The second boy, still on the trajectory of his own great life, was recently admitted to a prestigious university to pursue his chosen field of engineering.
Another, similar story in the public realm comes from a review in 2014 of the book You Are Not Special by David McCullough Jr. In it, the author recounts a story of a student he calls “Jack” who was by all accounts, disregarded by his teachers, including the author, because Jack didn’t perform the way teachers in our current achievement-oriented culture expected. Jack was seen as a failure despite the educators’ best efforts to reach him, because he didn’t perform well on paper and pencil tests, regurgitating facts and retelling details of content. He didn’t answer questions and participate in the way schools deem necessary in order to “see” the evidence of learning.
In the end, it turns out that Jack was a gifted artist, who created on his own time, out of the pleasure and passion of his own inner drive to draw and build, gorgeous, intricate, detail-specific models of buildings and structures he had either seen or imagined. It was clear, at the late age of 18, that Jack had talent for art or architecture or engineering—any field that would make use of his spatial mind that sees in three dimensions. Jack was not a person who thrived in the flat world of separate, deconstructed ideas about science or math or even the analysis of literature. Jack was not interested in worksheets and essays assigned to test his knowledge. He was not interested in competing and did not get joy from being graded or judged. His gratification came from an inner drive and a pleasure from doing, rather than thinking.
All of these children were drastically underestimated and dismissed by their teachers, despite the fact that educators are trained to nurture and care for the minds they are helping to develop, and schools are mandated to be places where growing children can thrive.
In her 2017 book, "Why We Drop Out": Understanding and Disrupting Student Pathways to Leaving School”, Deborah Feldman interviewed 50 high school students to understand why they leave school before graduation. She found one of the main reasons for students dropping out was “some kind of academic challenge that undermined their faith in themselves as learners, that then led to helplessness and hopelessness about their ability to be a student, which was their primary job in life.” Teachers don’t go into their profession to inflict suffering on their students, yet the message that many of the brightest and most sensitive receive is that there is something wrong with them, that some difference about the way they learn is out of sync with the culture and expectations of the classroom—and therefore, the ultimate message is that these students don’t belong, they can’t be taught. So, they leave. It was happening when Einstein was a student in 1894 and it continues to happen in classrooms all over the western developed world today. It is a paradox of a system that is charged with nurturing and guiding, that ends up harming and diminishing. Einstein seemed aware of this paradox, as he left school at the age of 15 feeling that the highly regimented atmosphere and “the spirit of learning and creative thought was lost in strict rote learning.” His general disdain for formal schooling is remembered today in a quote attributed to him saying the “only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.”
Why is this the state of our education system? How did we get to this place where the very people who are trained and mandated to give care and nurturing to children, wind up causing harm that is often irreparable and leads to a much different life than the one that might have developed had children stayed out of, or in Einstein’s case, left the system altogether?
In our achievement-oriented culture in the West, we prioritize knowledge—the acquisition of it and the ability to show that one possesses it. As a result, most of us strive to be in the knowledge elite, those who are recognized as contributors to both individual and collective, cultural success. And we have all kinds of programs, curricula, and personal approaches to improving our brains and their function for acquiring knowledge. Schools strive to enable each student to succeed to their capacity. Personalized education has become the new zeitgeist. But one aspect of personalized education that has not yet been discovered is the notion of Bright Brain Thinking®. By using our current basis of neuroscience and cognitive research to teach hemisphere lateralization/specialization, and then from this instruction understanding our individual strengths and weaknesses, and our own hemisphere dominance, we are then empowered to use that knowledge, in a metacognitive way, to maximize the effectiveness and efficiency of our learning and communication.
Bright Brain Thinking® flips the well-known paradigm of learning styles on its head. Instead of making managers and teachers responsible for holding each employee’s or student’s individual hemisphere dominance in their head, I’ll teach you how to know your own and thereby take control of your communication and learning. To super-charge your skills by directing your knowledge and control of them to what you want to do, be, or have. And once you know your own hemisphere dominance, you can identify that of others with whom you are communicating so you can prevent breakdowns and increase successful interactions. By employing your own self-awareness and self-talk and then meta-consciously deciding to use strategies to support your own communication, learning, task completion, relationship connection, goal achievement, you are truly benefiting from the essence of metacognition. You are Being Bright Brained®.
In the past, cognitive research on learning revealed that no individual achievement gains were made when teachers were responsible for addressing different “learning styles” in the classroom—talking to the verbal kids, doing jumping jacks and movement for the kinesthetic kids, and showing graphics for the visual kids. But what we do know, is that when individuals are aware of their own strengths, they can tailor the information coming to them in a way that allows it to be received. This is Being Bright Brained®. And the result is empowered, confident learners who feel capable of learning any information regardless of how it is presented.
Being Bright Brainded® is a two-step process. First it involves Bright Brain Thinking®, learning about the brain hemisphere’s specialized skills and identifying your own dominance. Each side of the brain is wired for specific strengths and we are all dominant with one side of our brain initiating our thinking. Second, once you know what the skills are of the left and right hemisphere and if you are right or left hemisphere dominant in your thinking, you can deploy those skills at the right moment to suit the environment. This is Being Bright Brained®. It requires knowing what strategies to use when the situation requires their use because you are either paired with a mismatch in the environment—the person you’re speaking with has the opposite hemisphere dominance and therefore you need to adjust to either receive or send information--or the task you want to complete requires the use of a lateralized skill set for more efficient, effective completion. Learning the periodic table of the elements, for example, is much more efficient and permanent when learned through a right hemisphere visual, associative, and mnemonic approach, than through rote memorization of each element. The essential second step is CHOOSING to USE the strategies and the meta-skills of our brain: self-awareness, self-talk/inner coaching, emotional and cognitive regulation, descriptive language, overview statements, pattern recognition, mnemonics, sequential processing guide-post language to support the non-dominant side/skills.
We are all unique and this diversity is planned for perpetuity. Thomas Armstrong, in his book The Power of Neurodiversity, discusses at length our culture's tendency to pathologize individuals who deviate from the norm. Instead, he believes as do I, that our differences are our gifts. We need them to survive as a species. Quoting the journalist who first used the term in 1998, Armstrong writes: "Neurodiversity may be every bit as crucial for the human race as biodiversity is for life in general." Since that statement by Harvey Blume in The Atlantic, the social scientist, Judy Singer, the parent of a neurodiverse child with Asperger’s, is credited with coining the term Neurodiversity, which has continued to expand as a worthy concept to embrace.
I would like to add the concepts of Bright Brain Thinking® and Being Bright Brained® to this field of learning science, in the hope that we understand ourselves and one another better.
