Think Like a Teacher

According to neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky’s fascinating piece in the New York Times, “This is Your Brain on Metaphors, “ the structure and sheer size of the human brain give us certain capacities that distinguish us from other animals, most notably:

• the ability to defer reward and engage in long term planning toward long term goals
• the ability to make connections through metaphor and enjoy the experience of mental metaphors as expressed in poetry, oxymoron, and other creative combinations. As Sapolsky explains the delight:

We know, and feel pleasure triggered by … unlikely juxtapositions….Symbols, metaphors, analogies, parables, synecdoche, figures of speech: we understand them. We understand that a captain wants more than just hands when he orders all of them on deck….And we even understand that June isn’t literally busting out all over.

It is precisely this latter capacity that Sapolsky probes further, including the neurobiology of the brain’s responses to analogous  experiences, both real and imagined.  Significantly, both real and imagined sensations are experienced in the same place in the brain. If  we feel disgust at an imagined experience, it triggers the same physiology as disgust at something real, touched or smelled.

What does this mean for our students (and us)  for learning? What about as producers of multimedia experiences (“class projects”)?  Students who do a good job creating an experiential metaphor for the senses — perhaps a glog, a video or an enhanced image — can trigger brain experiences that are as real as the real deal. The better we can trigger the analogies of experience for learning, the better they will “feel” and understand concepts. If we want students to know the Civil War, we should first let them immerse themselves in as many “experiences” of it as we can find. We should also challenge them to create such experiences for others. The mental poetry of both feeling and creating analogies for vital, invisible concepts such as citizenship or atoms can make the experience of learning real. Even the very young can understand simple analogy and experience if it is personal and familiar enough in their context.

Teachers, take the time to read this one. Although Sapolsky focuses more on the international, political implications of analogous brain experience, the analogy of extending such experience in our classrooms is important. We need not make virtual experience realistic. We need to help students trigger analogies, build analogies, and notice analogies. Think like a teacher.