- April 28, 2024
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Our traditional public schools continue to lose students to charters, home schooling, and other alternatives. Dropout rates also continue rise.
Yet, for some students, the regular schools are meeting needs very well. Let’s tap neuroscience for some ideas that should make our traditional schools more effective for all students.
In this week’s blog we are going to spend our time examining why stories are a key to good teaching, especially for those who find school difficult.
Think back on the days when you sat in a history or science class in school, and the teacher did a thorough job laying out volumes of facts and figures. Remember how it was your job to take notes, then memorize these notes, and finally end the chapter with a comprehensive test?
Good students were those who developed the ability to organize this mass of information in a way that makes sense for the test and then excel on the test. Less effective students usually left the experience thinking the material made no sense. These students left the class with the notion that the teacher was too hard, or the material was too hard, or the subject was simply too boring.
There is a reason for these reactions. Our brains are forever trying to make sense of the world around them. It’s looking for the wheres, whens, hows and whys of everything entering its realm.
To do this, the brain must work at a feverish rate making literal (dendrites) interconnections throughout the various hemispheres and lobes of the brain. The student who excels develops this ability to race around her brain, searching out memories (former learning) that give context to the new material.
Good students become great students as their brains develop vast and comprehensive networks of learning.
The conscientious, but struggling, students usually finds themselves hopelessly drowning in the tidal wave of facts and resort to furiously scribbling down notes without a shred of understanding. They literally shut down their brains and just focus on mindless copying. The new material rarely stays with them because it’s never been connected to a network.
Teachers who embed their new material within the context of a story provide the less able students the structure to help them make the critical interconnections that are essential to learning.
Let me give you an example. A science teacher is scheduled to teach a unit on weather. She develops a story of a test pilot who is forced to bail out at 30,000 feet in a massive thunder and lightning storm. She gives the pilot a name and describes the airplane and what went wrong. Then she describes the pilot’s trip down and the massive problems descending through lightning, hail, thunder, freezing temperatures, ferocious wind currents, updrafts and downdrafts, types of clouds and everything that weather can throw at a person.
She can have the pilot do a frightening narrative of his fears of what he might be forced to endure. She can explain the pilot’s protective gear and provide a running commentary of how it’s holding up. She can involve the class in the story by setting up different scary scenarios and asking the students what they think might happen to the pilot or how he might respond.
She then can use this story as the context for many of the facts and science principles in weather.
Now the students (even those who struggle with making neural connections) have a natural structure to organize what can be a very sophisticated body of science facts. Stories are a terrific partner in the learning process.
