The emerging brain research that supports constructivist learning collides head-on with many of our institutional arrangements for learning.

Introduction: a story to make a point

Like many liberal studies teachers, I was slow in coming to terms with the use of the computer. It was not so for my then nine-year-old eldest son Peter who, from the moment we bought him a computer to use at home, quickly learnt to manage an ever-increasing range of sophisticated programs. He either taught himself, or learnt to solve problems through working these out with his friends. At an early stage teachers asked for his help as more computers were put into his school.

A common enough story, repeated time and time again; young people, as young as nine or ten, learn an immense amount when deeply engaged in tasks that fascinate them.

A year or so later my second son, David, three years younger than Peter, decided that he too wanted to use the computer. To start with Peter was immensely patient as a teacher, and David learnt fast. But then I noticed something curious. Peter sensed that David was coming to rely too much on him to explain new processes, rather than using what he already knew to find the answer for himself. One evening Peter’s frustration erupted:

“Dad, David is just being lazy; by asking me to tell him what to do he will never learn to solve problems for himself. That’s the only reason why I know what to do – because I had to work it out for myself. If David doesn’t learn to work it out like that, then he’ll never really learn!”

That sage observation came from an eleven-year-old – a boy who had never even heard of constructivism, but who understood exactly that by bringing all his previous experience to bear on a new problem he could construct his own novel solutions. As a boy Peter learnt to listen intently to everything that he heard, and noted everything that he saw because he realized at a deep and profound level that it was he, and he alone, who could direct his own learning.

This anecdote bears out the truth shown in recent long-term research studies – that four out of the five greatest predictors of eventual success at University are applied and achieved before a child even enters school; namely the quantity and quality of discussion in the child’s home, the clarity of value systems, strong peer group support, and the amount of independent reading. Inquisitiveness is what drives children’s learning, and constructivism is the theory that Cognitive Scientists have devised to explain how a child progresses from inquisitiveness to new knowledge. Just how does this work?

Constructivism and Brain Research

In searching for answers researchers in the 1990s have uncovered a massive amount of interrelated evidence in the brain sciences, the biological sciences, and even archeology and anthropology which are starting to show in considerable detail how it is that humans actually learn. We now can see why learning is much more than just the flip-side of good teaching and schooling. Rather than thinking of the brain as a computer it is now seen as a far more flexible, self-adjusting, biological analogy Ð the brain as a living, unique, ever-changing organism that grows and reshapes itself in response to challenge, with elements that wither through lack of use.

As scientists study the processes of learning they are realizing that a constructivist model of learning reflects their best understanding of the brain’s natural way of making sense of the world. Constructivism holds that learning is essentially active. A person learning something new brings to that experience all of their previous knowledge and present mental patterns. Each new fact or experience is assimilated into a living web of understanding that already exists in that person’s mind. As a result, learning is neither passive nor simply objective.

Constructivist learning is an intensely subjective, personal process and structure that each person constantly and actively modifies in light of new experiences. Constructivists argue that, by definition, a person who is truly passive is incapable of learning. With a constructivist form of learning, each child structures his or her own knowledge of the world into a unique pattern, connecting each new fact, experience, or understanding in a subjective way that binds the child into rational and meaningful relationships to the wider world.

Such a view of learning contrasts harshly with the perceived wisdom of many educationalists. A European Professor of Education recently wrote to us,

Those involved in school management draw a sharp boundary between the areas of education which are so-called professional areas, and therefore reserved for professionals (i.e. teachers), and those in which other members of the community (e.g. parents or retired people) can legitimately be involved. While many schools encourage the involvement of members of the community for certain activities, those activities are clearly separated from the Ôprofessional’ work of teachers. It is very difficult and indeed might well be foolhardy to try and blur this distinction.”

In the light of recent research on how children learn, this distinction is now desperately, dangerously, outdated. As the neuroscientists Chang and Greenough at the University of Illinois noted in 1978 there are two sets of neurons that enable us to learn Ð one set, they suggested, captures general information from the immediate environment while the other constantly searches through an individual’s earlier experiences as it seeks meaning. Very recent research at the Salk Institute has suggested that this is a false dichotomy. Rather than representing two distinct strategies within the brain these are two separate parts of the same process. Constructivist learning is the dynamic interaction between the environment and the individual brain.

In a constructivist model of learning nature and nurture don’t compete, rather they work together. It is clear from the biological sciences that humans are who-we-are in large part because of our species’ evolutionary experience over millions of years. The vast developmental experience of our species has provided each new generation with a powerful toolkit of predispositions that go a long way in explaining our ability to learn language, cooperate successfully in groups, think across problems, plan for the future, and empathize with others. Predispositions, both in young children and adolescents, provide individuals with a whole range of skills that enable them to relate flexibly to their environment. Yet, because for most of human history people tended to live in relatively small groups, these skills have to be developed collaboratively as very few individuals ever possess all these attributes.

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If young people are to be equipped effectively to meet the challenges of the 21st century it is surely prudent to seek out the very best understandings from current scientific research into the nature of how humans learn before considering further reform of the current system.

An analogy: we humans have been using our brains to think as long as we have been using our stomachs to nourish our bodies. We think we understand both processes well — they are both a matter of common sense. Yet, with the breakthroughs in the understanding of diet in the last 30 years, we are eating better and now live longer. This analogy is useful when we look at the brain and the opportunities that now present themselves to expand its capabilities. We are now in a position to understand the brain’s adaptive functions — learning — far better.

Researchers in the 1990s have uncovered a massive amount of evidence in the cognitive sciences, and in neurobiology, evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology, and even archaeology and anthropology which shows us in great detail how it is that humans actually learn. We now can see why learning is much more than just the flip-side of good teaching and schooling. Much of this evidence confirms what many people have always intuitively thought; learning involves far more than schooling. People are quick to recognise that many successful public figures were either school failures or removed themselves from formal schooling at an early date. Conversely many successful people in school seemed to have disappeared without a trace.

Why? Not surprisingly, long-term studies, such as exist, show that the greatest predictors of success at University level (I know of no research over a longer period of time) are: 1) the quantity and quality of the discussion in the child’s home before entering school; 2) the amount of independent reading regardless of subject matter which the child did for itself; 3) the clarity of value systems as understood and practised; 4) strong positive peer group pressure; and 5) the primary school. Still further down the list is the secondary school. Formal schooling is only part of what fires up the inquisitiveness in a child’s mind.

Children’s learning is the most natural and innate of human skills; humans are born to learn — that’s what we are better at than any other species. As a result of brain imaging technologies researchers are now able literally to watch learning occur as specific patterns of brain activity within the brain light up on a computer screen. The unprecedented clarity that this technology reveals about brain function is causing scientists to revise many of their earlier assumptions about how individual learning actually takes place. These findings have undermined the behaviourist metaphor of the brain as a blank slate waiting for information. The brain is now seen as a far more flexible, self-adjusting, biological metaphor — the brain as a living, unique, ever-changing organism that grows and reshapes itself in response to challenge, with elements that wither through lack of use. The mass of evidence that is now emerging about learning and brain development has spawned a movement towards educational practice which confirms that thinking skills (meta-cognition), as well as significant aspects of intelligence, are learnable.

The prestigious Santa Fe Institute noted in 1995, in a collection of essays entitled The Mind, the Brain and Complex Adaptive Systems, the mismatch between emerging learning theory and dominant educational practice when they wrote, “The method people naturally employ to acquire knowledge is largely unsupported by traditional classroom practice. The human mind is better equipped to gather information about the world by operating within it than by reading about it, hearing lectures on it, or studying abstract models of it.” These new understandings about human learning and the brain question the long-term effectiveness of plans among many governments to place increasing emphasis on the role of the school and the classroom in young people’s learning.

Most school reform movements have been within the existing paradigm of pupils/teachers/schools, whereas what is now needed is that out-of-the-box thinking which starts more broadly by focusing on the brain’s ability to learn and how we become evermore effective humans. Only then can we think about how to develop and nurture appropriate learning environments.

We are who-we-are in large part because of our species’ evolutionary experience over millions of years. Those experiences are firmly encapsulated in all of our brains, with each of us carrying all those predispositions that previous generations found useful to their survival. The work of the Dartmouth cognitive neuroscientist, Michael Gazzaniga, shows that life is largely about discovering what is already built into our brains. He warns that “all the ways that human societies try to change minds and to change how humans truly interact with the environment are doomed to fail. Indeed, societies fail when they preach at their populations. They tend to succeed when they allow each individual to discover what millions of years of evolution have already bestowed upon mind and body.”

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Relearning learning: Educator John Abbott has devoted his professional life to a message that inspires fundamental change: “It takes an entire community to educate a child.”

John Abbott is worried about our children and our future.

But the president of the 21st Century Learning Initiative is an optimist, and part of his power for change in the way communities view education is his contagious enthusiasm, and emerging optimism that says communities have the knowledge, the power and technology to use the human capacity for learning to transform the world.

Abbott will be in Winona April 22 (1999) to help moderate and participate in a community-wide discussion of education for the 21st century. In an interview last week, he talked about the 21st Century Learning Initiative’s mission to change the way the world views education, and about his own passion for learning.

Winona Daily News: What kind of experience have you had with places like Winona?

John Abbott: This is really where my life story started, because I was a principal at an English high school, and for a dozen years I tried every single trick in the business to try and bring about fundamental change. But then, progressively, one realized that schools standing by themselves can’t do everything. You need a whole community behind you.

And so in 1985…we started by taking the town of Letchworth, which is a town of about 35,000 people in Hertfordshire, and said: What would happen if the people of Letchworth felt that nobody other than themselves would be responsible for sorting out their education system? What would happen if the state passed all responsibility down to a level as small as a town? And what would happen if enough resource was provided to give every teacher a significant amount of time over a period of years to retrain to begin to understand how you could open up the whole community as a learning resource for young people? And how teachers themselves could begin to change their teaching format so that in addition to getting children to understand subjects…(they could) get children to understand how they actually learned, what a successful learning strategy is?

And we were introducing that at a time which computers were first becoming available, and we went even further and said: “What would happen if we provided a computer to every seven children?”

And for three glorious years, we had marvelous experience of what Winona is now trying to do – the whole town coming together and saying nobody else is going to sort this out unless we do ourselves, and let’s get behind all the schools, not just one or two, and work it with a program in which the teachers would see themselves not as teachers of a particular school but teachers of a whole young community.

WDN: What changed?

John Abbott: In the short run, the thing that changed was the enthusiasm of the pupils to start doing things that beforehand they had not wanted to do – because they (now) were living with vastly enthusiastic teachers. And that was the heart of it. We actually went right down the line and said (that) if you want exciting students, you want exciting teachers.

What made them exciting was the fact that for the first time in their lives the authority had been in a sense overridden. The powers that be…were actually saying you’re so important that we will provide you with at least 10 percent of your time to be continuously upgrading your skills, the way in which you work with children. So that rather than saying retraining is something which is done after school on the back of an envelope, we’re actually saying your professional development is so important we’re putting it on the timetable.

And what went along with that were a whole series of individual programs, one of which meant that over a three-year period, two-third of the teachers spent three or four weeks shadowing people in other forms of employment so that part of the retraining program for teachers was that teachers had the opportunity to shadow other professionals and look at what other professionals were doing dealing with issues of change.

WDN: How does an individual school district move toward that model?

John Abbott: There are a couple or three strategies that are going to be very important. One is not to let people think you are going to be very important. One is not to let people think you are condemning what they used to do in the past because often what they did in the past was the best that they could do given the knowledge they had at the time…It’s a question of saying what was good enough in the past, which really was good enough in the past, is not good enough into the future.

The second strategy, which is vitally important, is to bring everybody into an active discussion about what the issues are. People are talking and talking and talking until eventually people realize they’ve convinced themselves they can’t just go on doing it the way they used to do it.

What happens to children in any one day (in traditional education) is the result of meeting half a dozen different teachers for three-fourths of an hour each, and unless each one of those teachers believes in what they are doing, then the experiences of the child is not going to be as good as people like myself are trying to get it to be. And so you do have to invest in helping people understand why change is necessary.

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Education, so politicians in many lands are quick to claim, is at the top of the political agenda – the “number one” item. Yet, for most people, education seems a strangely boring topic. Like religion, people sense that it’s important, but prefer to leave it to others to practice or think about. Search a bookshop and you are most likely to find the education section in some dark, out-of-the-way, corner, and most of the books on the shelves will be about specialised topics of little general interest. Few education books make it to the front of the shop, and even fewer are promoted as best sellers.

This is strange, for there is more material now about the nature of human learning and its importance to individuals, to society and to the economy at large than at any previous time. It is found in books all over the shop – in many different sections: in neurology and cognitive science; in physics, biology and evolutionary psychology; in economic and political theory; in business studies and systems thinking; in information and communications technology, and in cultural anthropology and even in archaeology, philosophy and theology. In fact there is so much about the nature and importance of learning that it is virtually impossible to keep up with all the ideas. It is learning which will drive our future economies. Yet the education section remains dusty and remote and to search here for a clue as to why education is now the “number one agenda item” is to become even more confused.

What is happening? Is it that education, as previously understood to mean schools, is simply being sidelined, and for some reason is unable to keep up with these new discoveries? Has education ceased to be about learning? Why is it that teachers world-wide seem depressed, fed up, disillusioned and unsure of themselves? Is school “dead”?

Yet, ponder this: children start life inquisitive. Their endless questioning can drive us to distraction! It’s as if each and every child wants to make their own particular sense of the world around them, as if no one had ever thought about such matters before. Even on a good day, constantly they reinterpret what we say – our cherished personal summing up of the world – in terms of their own experience, their own interests and their patterns of inherited predispositions. These predispositions seem to vary quite enormously; one child in a family seems to think like a poet, another like a mechanic. There are things here which scientists are now in a position to begin to understand far better. Many of these reflect what good teachers have known since long before Socrates — that learning is not simply the flip side of teaching.

Like most of our social institutions, traditional learning theory and traditional schools are based on a linear mechanistic model of the world. Mechanistic understanding is now deemed to be of questionable value. So surely it is right to question whether learning as organised in schools is consistent with what we now know about the brain? The human brain is the most complex adaptive system known in the universe, that is it is a mechanism adept at detecting patterns in the environment, interpreting and responding to these, and changing the rules subsequently so as to be able to do this even better in the future. Yet, most educators and policy makers know little about how the brain works, and much less about the dynamics of complex adaptive systems. Is it possible that we are failing to capitalise on these ideas and persist with educational strategies that simply fail to go with the grain of the brain?

As Professor Robert Sylwester of Oregon notes, “Get rid of the damn machine model of the brain. It’s wrong! The brain is a biological system, not a machine. Currently we’re putting children with biologically shaped brains into machine-oriented schools. The two just don’t mix. We bog the school down in a curriculum that is not biologically feasible.”

Most conventional school reform fails to realise its potential because it attempts to mandate new structures without changing the important rules in the system. New learning theory and practice constitute fundamentally new rules governing the interactions between players in the educational system. As these new ideas and rules spread throughout the system, we should expect to see old structures break-up and new ones form. This means we should look forward – yes genuinely look forward – to an extensive period of turbulence in education. Maybe, just maybe we have an Upside Down and Inside Out system.

Eric Hoffer had it right when he said “in times of change learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped for a world that no longer exists.”

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For more than a decade politicians, business leaders and educational leaders have assumed that their education systems needed reform, not re-design. On both sides of the Atlantic reformers have insisted that young people can be successfully prepared for the challenges and opportunities of the Knowledge Age by getting systems of education designed for the Industrial Age to work more efficiently and towards a higher standard. In taking this stance, much of the emerging body of research into the nature of human learning that challenges the underlying principles of the systems that reformers have taken for granted has failed to be fully appreciated.

New forms of education await development through exploiting the new insights emerging from an ever increasing array of research into just how it is that people learn-how-to-learn (and thereby develop real understanding and transferable skills), and then merging these insights with best practice from around the world. If learning is the critical issue for the future, and not simply more schooling, then a transformation of the life of the community is as essential as any restructuring of formal educational arrangements.

Learning and schooling are not synonymous. No form of schooling can continuously compensate for a dysfunctional community; perversely, the harder the schools try, the less incentive communities have to help themselves. At the most fundamental level, it is impossible to bring up children to be intelligent in a world that appears unintelligible to them.

Key Elements of a Learning Community

Details of the proposed redesign should be determined by the members of the particular communities involved. The broad outlines, however, include:

• new relationships between young people and the adults in their communities, replacing the isolation from real life that makes current schools so ineffective;
• much greater investment in the personal, social, and intellectual development of young children; leading to
• assumption by adolescents and young adults of greater responsibility for their own learning and for contributing to their communities.
• a new unit of change; something smaller than most current educational administrative units, but larger than a single school. This would be coterminous with what people feel to be the place where they belong, and for which they feel a sense of identity and hopefully responsibility.

Sources of Knowledge Compelling a New Approach

The proposed redesign should be based on four bodies of knowledge derived from recent research in the fields of neuroscience, cognitive science, anthropology, sociology, the evolutionary sciences, and related fields:

• knowledge about the biological nature of learning,
• knowledge about the impact of information technology,
• knowledge about the relationship between thinking processes (meta-cognition), and the development of expertise, an
• knowledge about how we construct our systems for learning.

New Knowledge About the Biological Nature of Learning

Until recently the study of learning was largely the preserve of philosophers and psychologists, and latterly of cognitive scientists. Neurologists, as a result of functional MRI and CAT scans, are now able literally to watch specific patterns of activity within the brain light up on a computer screen. The unprecedented clarity that this technology reveals about brain function is causing scientists to revise many of their earlier assumptions about how individual learning actually takes place.

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Being an English academic working with researchers outside the United Kingdom offers me the opportunity to relate British events to what is happening in other countries. Distance certainly lends a sense of perspective, if not always enchantment!

“In a global economy knowledge is everything. It is the country which knows how best to educate it’s young people that will compete most successfully in the global marketplace,” claim politicians in many lands. International competition is obviously intense. We all want, it seems, the same thing.

Defining this “thing” clearly is hard, and its essence elusive like quicksilver. “What you earn depends on what you learn,” claims President Clinton. On Thursday, April 9th, in The Independent, Chris Woodhead, the Chief Inspector of OFSTED, battled with Seamus Hegarty, the Director of the National Foundation for Educational Research, to prove that most educational research was a waste of money. We, the English, it appears to Mr. Woodhead, know what we have to do – the only thing is we have to do it harder, more efficiently, and in a more closely prescribed manner.

Yet, on The Independent’s previous page, a report on the Committee set up last year by David Blunkett to advise on “Creativity and Cultural Education” questioned such simplistic solutions when they asked, “How do you manage to tap students’ creativity in an education system which is consumed with the very basics?” This is a critical question, especially as critics have seen earlier attempts to develop creativity among Primary School students as being responsible for a perceived fall in standards.

The answer, as Mr. Woodhead argues, lies in moving beyond simply more research in the “sociology of education.” However, Mr. Woodhead should be advised that such research is just a tiny corner of a very large body of research — much of it international and most of it not by educationalists —highly pertinent to his responsibilities. He should look well beyond the box of the sociology of education at the emergent research on human learning. Professor Ken Robinson, Chair of the Creativity Committee noted that “the most interesting and ground-breaking research is happening where archaeology meets science, and where music meets sociology.” It’s happening through synthesis.

Research findings into the biology of learning from cognitive science, neurology, developmental psychology and the evolutionary sciences tell us that if we want young people who are able to think across boundaries then the primary purpose of education should be the development of transferable skills. Transferable skills are defined by cognitive scientists as those skills which can easily be transferred across new domains of knowledge and disciplines. Now, at a time when the half-life of useful scientific knowledge is thought to be less than seven years, we are slowly coming to recognise that it’s not so much what you know when you leave school that matters, as what you understand about how to go about solving novel problems.

In a world of continuous change, the ability of individuals to plan and implement their own learning without external direction is the key to success. Research from cognitive science and developmental psychology show that learning is nothing if it is not a deeply reflective activity in which every new idea is internalised and used to refine, or to change, or to upgrade, earlier, more naive understandings. This intrinsically driven learning gives children a greater sense of mastery and control and is what leads to successful life-long learning. Learning is a consequence of thinking.

To understand the relationship between basic skills and creativity, we have to face the old hoary conundrum of transferability, and before doing that it is critical to appreciate the subtle difference between two key concepts which are too often confused in the public mind – Specialisation, and Expertise.

Recent work by two Canadian cognitive scientists (Bereiter and Scardamalia), further extended by the findings of neurologists and systems thinkers shows that a specialist, by working within the well-defined parameters of a specialism “knows his subject from the top to the bottom.” A specialist knows all the rules, all the tests, and all the possible combinations and formulae. His authority rests on the depth of his knowledge, and is uncluttered by the need to assess extraneous influences. A specialist exudes a confidence in his/her competence – in some this comes through as arrogance. Discussion with such people is often difficult for they know all the answers or are just not interested. Where their specialisms fit in a bigger picture does not trouble such a person, for that is essentially unquantifiable, imprecise and highly uncertain; there are no rules for that kind of thing, so these are questions best left unanswered.

A caricature perhaps, but the world has come to be fearful of specialists for, in some hard-to-define way, we sense they are just not “real”. They “think the world apart”, and that gets us into trouble and makes us schizophrenic.

“Experts,” in contrast, “tackle problems that increase their expertise,” whereas “(specialists) tend to tackle problems for which they do not have to extend themselves (by going beyond the rules and formulae they accept),” argues Bereiter and Scardamalia. “Experts,” Bereiter and Scardamalia have observed “indulge in progressive problem-solving, that is they continually reformulate a problem at an ever-higher level as they achieve at lower levels, and uncover more of the nature of the issue. They become totally immersed in their work (flow), and increase the complexity of the activity by developing new skills and taking on new challenges.”

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