What makes a teacher adjust or transform their instructional design and work with students when introduced to the most promising research and strategies in the science of how the brain learns?
Since our founding in 2011, The CTTL has been pondering this question with 100% of our Preschool through 12th-grade colleagues at St. Andrew’s, as well as teachers and school leaders from around the world. From my own experience as a history teacher, I can point to many teaching and learning strategies that I am using today that I was not using in 1991 when I began my career in Spokane, Washington.
Back then, I used to think that I teach… and the students learn. That was my educational philosophy. My job was to teach topics such as the colonization of the already populated New World, the causes of wars and revolutions, and the expansion of Enlightenment ideas across national borders. I certainly did not understand the complexity of the organ of learning – the brain – that each student undoubtedly has with them each day. Nor did I understand the connection between emotion and cognition or how identity – mine and theirs – impacts teaching and learning.
What changed for me was learning about how the brain learns, which began when St. Andrew’s decided to train every one of its teachers in Mind, Brain, and Education (MBE) science, starting in 2007. Along our journey we have been helped by many great friends from academia. The late, great Kurt Fischer, and others, including Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, David Daniel, Mariale Hardiman, Rob Coe, Pooja Agarwal, Dan Willingham, Tracey Tokuhama-Espinosa, Mark McDaniel, Pedro De Bruyckere, Pamela Cantor, Dylan Wiliam, and Christina Hinton, and many more, have helped us understand this transdisciplinary field that includes neuroscience, cognitive science, psychology, and education research. Our work to make research principles come to life in classrooms and schools has been supported by giants, and we are forever grateful for their friendship and support.
But let’s go back to 2008 – before The CTTL was even an idea. At a Learning and the Brain Conference in Boston, I sat in the audience, confused and a bit angry: “Why have I never been taught the promising principles, research, and strategies that are being shared here?” To be the most effective teacher for all of my students, I need to know my history content well, but I also need to know how to set the right conditions for learning, use the right memory strategies to make learning stick, and how best to assess, provide high-quality feedback, set purposeful homework, and foster student agency and independence. There seemed to be so many places in my daily work with students that could be made better – if only I could find ways to get this Learning, Brain, Research “stuff” to work for me. The chasm between research and everyday practice seemed wide and difficult to cross.
In the ten-year history of The CTTL, we have had the privilege to work with individual teachers, schools, and districts who also recognized the research in the science of teaching and learning as one of the most important solutions to elevate student achievement, close student learning gaps, and support student well-being. This has become even more true after COVID – and elevating teacher practice through the highest quality professional development is the best solution we have. But we teachers can be stubborn and hold fast to what we think is working or what feels comfortable. Change is hard. Change at scale? Harder still. But surely every child deserves a teacher who has an accurate understanding of how learning happens?
The mission of St. Andrew’s is “To know and inspire each student in an inclusive community dedicated to exceptional teaching, learning, and service.” From our school’s founding in 1978, we have held fast to the research-supported idea that great teachers really matter. In the words of David Steiner, head of the Institute of Education Policy at Johns Hopkins University, “The strongest education research finding in the last twenty years is that the quality of a teacher is the single greatest in-school determinate of student outcomes.” The CTTL is a driver for great teaching.
We have invested a lot of time collectively growing our teacher’s knowledge and research-to-classroom translation skills. We have developed many tools to support their MBE journey, like the MBE Placemats and Roadmap, Neuroteach Global, and our Science of Teaching and School Leadership Academy. We help teachers build a broad MBE knowledge and skillset, but also give them autonomy to choose their own adventure – deepening their practice with those MBE principles that may have the greatest impact with the classes they teach, the departments they are in, and the students they work with in classrooms, clubs, studios, and on the stages and sports fields.
But where does the MBE journey start? As the CTTL team presents around the world, we often use this graph from Harvard’s Center on the Developing Child. It tells a story of what might be the most important concept from neuroscience that we can use to transform teaching and learning: neuroplasticity. Schools and their teachers have the unique privilege to be working with students when their brains are experiencing some of the greatest change. The good news about neuroplasticity is that it also means the teacher-brain can change. The idea that the brain is “set” at roughly eighteen years of age is a neuromyth.
I am 54 years old as I write this, and the vertical line provides some indication of the effort I will need to change my brain. It is more effort than for my students—but I can change my brain. This is one reason why most one-and-done professional learning experiences lead to little change in how teachers teach and how their students learn. What ultimately got teachers like me to change our practice was finding promising insights from research that could: (1) enhance our effectiveness with all the learners we work with; (2) enhance student academic, social, and emotional outcomes; and (3) enhance our efficiency. It also helps that we use research on how to change teachers’ practice, like Thomas Guskey’s model for teacher change, and the work of David Weston’s work at the Teacher Development Trust. The CTTL’s work with educators around the world uses the science of teaching and learning to teach the science of teaching and learning.
Meg Lee, the Director of Organizational Development in Frederick County Public Schools, Maryland (FCPS) and a contributor to this volume of Think Differently and Deeply, proclaimed about MBE, “Once you see it, you cannot unsee it.” The role of The CTTL for 100% of our St. Andrew’s preschool through 12th-grade teachers and school leaders, our colleagues, is to get them to see MBE. To see how it can touch every aspect of what they do at school, and to help make it so “everyday-useful” that they never think to unsee it. Whether they are early in their career or elevating their already excellent practice, the CTTL provides our colleagues a pathway of sustained professional growth – all focused on making our classrooms, hallways, stages, and sports fields an even better experience for our students. The importance of having the whole community of teachers and leaders in a school understand the science of how the brain (both student and adult) learns, works, changes, and thrives cannot be emphasized enough. The brain is the organ of learning and will remain so, whatever future technologies, including AI and those we have yet to imagine, bring.
My pathway to becoming MBE research-informed will not be yours; my school’s journey will not be yours. But many threads of this journey will be the same. The translation of research into everyday practice, and the extent to which it works or doesn’t, is very context-dependent. This is the joy and the challenge of the work – committed educators playing with the art and science of educating, making it work for them, with their students, in their community. Mind, Brain, and Education science offers many different paths, and we can choose these to align with a teacher, division, department, school, or district’s strategic priorities. What will be your first step, or next step, on your MBE pathway?
Glenn Whitman (gwhitman@saes.org) is the Executive Director of the Center for Transformative Teaching and Learning at St. Andrew’s where he also teaches history.
