Mind, Brain and Education
Sunday, July 29, 2007
We were privileged to spend an hour with Kurt Fischer Ph. D. who is Charles Bigelow Professor of Human Development & Psychology and Director of the Mind, Brain, and Education program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Professor Fischer is exploring the inter-relationships between:
Education—-Neuroscience—–Cognitive Science
He started out be exploding some of the myths which have built up around Neuroscience and learning.
“There is no such thing as someone who has a dominant side of their brain”
I was amazed to see people who had had one of the brain’s hemisphere’s removed by surgery and that contrary to all predictions for a “left brain” child he had become skilled at drawing.
Professor Fischer’s goal is to put cognitive science, biology and education together to enable optimal learning to take place.
The following video extracts show Prof. Fischer explaining this in more detail: (you will need to download Real Player to access all the videos)
Here Prof. Fischer provides an overview of this work, describing growth spurts in brain and cognitive development that occur within the same age periods during the school years.
Here he elaborates on measuring the growth in brain activity from childhood through early adulthood. He describes how EEG (electroencephalogram) techniques can be used to detect developmental patterns in brain connections.
In this clip, Kurt Fischer uses the example of children’s social role understanding to illustrate how simple representations are reorganized into more complex representations and then into abstract concepts. These new skills that emerge in children’s best performance are closely associated with growth spurts of brain activity. (view text)
Fischer’s point is that we suffer from a pervasive mataphor in our culture for learning and teaching which sees knowledge and ideas as objects which can be exchanged, “I gave the idea to Sally” and the brain as a container “I can’t get this idea out of my mind”
Professor Fischer’s point is that we need active involvement for learning to take place.
He referred to the PLASTICITY of the brain - “it changes based on active experience” - see this clip where he explores how people are more than just their brains.
“There’s a misconception that we have to get rid of, a prevalent misconception in the English language and culture in general, that we are brains – that we learn with our brains as opposed to being people who have brains that help us learn. We are not brains disembodied in the bucket sitting in the corner. And likewise, we don’t learn by having information stuck into our brains.
So by one image, I have a port up here on my brain – see that little mark right here on my forehead – and that’s where I plug in every morning, and the computer tells me the knowledge for today.
Well, it doesn’t work that way. We have to learn more actively than that.
So it is not true that you can plug the world into the brain and thereby know everything. Instead, knowledge has to built.”Kurt Fischer
For me this linked very well with what Richard Elmore had been syaing about the importance of the “instructional task” which must challenge and involve the learner.
This will be a key area of research for me over the coming months - see -http://www.imbes.org/ - for more information