JBOP: Reimagining the Future of Education

Jane Powel
7 days ago
5 min read

Jane’s Brain on Pedagogy - Understanding the black box, aka, the brain.

In this series, I discuss various pedagogical perspectives and what makes the OmniLearn model so effective. Humans are social animals and our brains are hard-wired for learning. Multi-sensory learning across disciplines is more than a pleasant experience. It leads to the formation of long-term memories and fosters new questions. But the greatest outcome of all from this experimentation and social interaction is becoming a self-motivated, life-long learner whose cognitive and affective skills are well-honed!

I think we can all agree that the American education system is not perfect. If I could take a wrecking ball to the education system and rebuild it from the ground up… it would look very different. Here is what my fantasy list of changes would look like:

Much More Emphasis on Early Childhood Development

The early years of a child's life are absolutely critical, yet they often receive insufficient attention in our current system. We need to place much more emphasis on early childhood development to give every child a strong foundation for future learning. If you look at PET scans of children's brains from ages 0-5, it's like a light show. Children are making an insane amount of neural connections every day. And that’s what counts. It’s not the number of brain cells, its connections between cells. Early childhood education needs to be accessible and elevated nationwide. Here in NYC we have at least free preschool/daycare all the way down to 3 year olds. The original plan was to carry that through to eventually be free/reduced childcare, but budgets change and education is the first to go.

Improve Teacher Training

Teachers need better preparation before they even step into the classroom, and they require ongoing in-service training once they begin teaching. Addressing the educational needs of adults—teachers and parents alike—is essential, as they are the ones bringing knowledge (or misinformation) into the schools. No one graduates from medical school and goes right in to perform a major operation. They are well-trained before they even step foot in the operating room. Teachers need much more intensive training (and, as a result, much higher compensation). We need the best of the best!

Emphasis on Neuroscience

This is a bit of a continuation from my previous point, but we need a stronger emphasis on neuroscience in teacher training. Teachers are literally responsible for filling children's brains with knowledge and skills. It’s criminal that a fundamental understanding of the brain is not a requirement for obtaining a teaching degree. Let's have much more emphasis on learning, memory, consciousness, and mental health. There has been so much research on memory! There have been many studies done that show that memory is related to attention abilities [1]. There is evidence that if teachers spend time on mindfulness and attention training, students will have increased memory function. The depth of research is bottomless. Education professionals are doing themselves a disservice by not putting this knowledge into practice.

Make Learning Engaging and Rewarding

I have learned that we're hardwired to love learning. That “eureka!” moment feels good! It drives us to want more. Think about video games! The video game industry capitalizes on players failing and yet being determined to succeed. Why don't we have that in schools? SnapCircuits are an amazing tool for teaching about electricity and circuits! You can put these materials in front of kids, who have never seen them before and watch them work it out on their own. And if the project doesn’t work, they are eager to figure it out. Before you know it, they are asking me questions and using the materials in ways I wouldn’t have imagined. They don’t want to stop!

Move Beyond the Business of Test Prep

We need to get out of the business of test prep and production, which has become a billion-dollar industry. When teachers are only focused on how students perform on a standardized test, they begin to teach students what to think, and not how to think. Instead, we could allocate those funds to increase teacher salaries, strengthen teacher training, and provide adequate materials and support staff in schools. More resources and funding would enable teachers to do more hands-on learning that will foster critical thinking skills and create students who are more prepared for life.

More Modalities of Learning

Students, especially elementary students, should spend less time on two-dimensional learning—what I call paper-and-pencil tasks—and more time on experiential, multi-sensory learning. PowerPoints and videos should not be the primary methods of instruction. Interactive whiteboards are just updated chalkboards; the instruction hasn’t changed much! Instead, children should learn through hands-on experiences that engage all their senses. A Powerpoint presentation on enzyme function and active sites and substrates and products is all well and good, but when a kid is picking up a piece of beef liver and plopping it into different concentrations of hydrogen peroxide and really seeing that enzymatic reaction happen in real time, they are going to remember that! The liver smells kind of bad, it has a huge visual change, you can hear it fizzing, you can feel the heat of the reaction.

Rethinking Age-Based Grouping

Why do we group children by chronological age? We have structured our entire system based on birthdays. Not everybody is the same just because they're the same age, and not everyone fits neatly into the categories we’ve created. Let's allow children to be grouped by their mental age or their interests. If a child loves reading, let the kid read to their heart's content. If another child is passionate about working with animals, let them explore that interest fully. Would this require more investment and infrastructure to assess children and group them appropriately? Of course. It would also absolutely require teachers who are masters of the content and trained in adapting and pivoting as guided by student interest and ability.

Breaking Down Silos in Education

Now, this one I have been on my soapbox about for decades! If you look at what education looked like 100-200 years ago, it was very didactic. Teachers taught a small group of students in a single room, and you learned about subjects separately from one another. Nothing in life is separated this way! You can’t learn about force and motion without doing math. You can’t read a text about sea otters if you don’t have reading comprehension skills. You can’t represent your data visually if you don’t know how to graph. Science can be the lens through which other subjects are learned.

In middle and high school, this would require teachers to work together across their disciplines to strengthen their students' learning. When the science teacher is doing force and motion, the math teacher can reinforce how they graph their data. English teachers can teach how to write arguments from evidence by assigning lab reports from science experiments. In elementary school, this requires administrators to allow teachers the freedom to spend time on subjects like science, even if it means deviating from the standard curriculum. We have worked with teachers who love our approach, but have confided that their administrators only allow a certain amount of time per week on science. That’s got to go!

Addressing Financial Waste

There’s so much money wasted on cookie-cutter curricula and test prep that strip teachers of their ability to think critically and adapt to their students' needs. We need to reinvest these funds in areas that truly make a difference in students' lives, such as teacher training, teacher support, materials, early childhood education, and experiential learning.

Incorporating all these changes would lead to happier, more successful students. I've seen it happen. It’s the "Secret Sauce" of education. When we use research and science to guide our decisions, when we prepare our teachers thoroughly, and when we engage students in meaningful ways, we create an education system that truly works for everyone. You will have happy kids; you will have successful kids.