The Learning Success Blog

Traditionally, a school or a college is where students go to learn. Apart from learning new things, they get the opportunity to interact, build relationships, and become aware of social values and etiquette.

With technology evading every corner of the world, including the education industry, the learners’ amount of time in physical classes is diminishing every passing month.

The rate highly depends on the educational institution, type of class, or the student’s willingness to show up for physical or blended classes. That wasn’t a big deal before, but the rate at which the world is adapting to virtual learning and the commonly known advantages of the traditional learning style that are threatened raise lots of questions.

Students will no longer have a supportive community where they can practice what they learn or understand what coexisting really means.

Educators and schools around the world are increasingly using the knowledge, techniques, and programs developed from a new understanding of how our brains learn. They are applying neuroscience in their classrooms.

Why?

As an educator, you might be asking yourself why would I do this in my school?

Here are some reasons why. Educational neuroscience can:

Speaking almost sixty six years ago Professor John McCarthy, one of the founding fathers of AI said at the Dartmouth University conference 1956 , “Every aspect of learning... can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it.” 

Stephen Hawking, the famous theoretical physicist, said “Every aspect of our lives will be transformed by AI” and it could be “the biggest event in the history of our civilisation”.

Teaching is a responsible profession, where you act as a candelabrum for your students and guide them on the path of learning. Your sense of responsibility fuels your enthusiasm to teach your students in the best manner. So, every morning you enter your classroom enthusiastically, ready to serve your students.

But, many times, your enthusiasm can wither away within moments as you find your students not showing the desired interest in learning, despite your best efforts to teach them well. You feel disheartened when you watch them engaging in mischief, lacking attention and creating noise even when you are teaching.

Under such circumstances, you often engage in self-doubt and start thinking that you lack appropriate teaching calibre. However, this is not true! In almost every school and every classroom, teachers face similar problems from their students. So, cheer up, you are a great teacher, and deep inside your heart, you know that too!

As an educator who specialised in teaching children to read, I tried lots of different methods. Some worked with some children and some worked with others but there wasn’t one that I could say was super effective.

For 3 years I ran a reading group before school which we called Early Birds for the children who needed more help with literacy. We staffed the program with parents and volunteers and every morning before school we would see up to 15 or 16 children for a twenty-minute lesson, one on one. And when we did that, we started to see the children make progress in their reading. 

Something had to be done!

So, with a vote of 92-3 the Alabama state parliament enacted the Alabama Literacy Act beginning in 2020 to ensure that every child was reading at grade level by Year 3.

They nominated a task force to recommend a comprehensive core reading program and assessments to be used by local schools and that job fell to Tim Solley.

Solley is a kindly, bespectacled, grey-haired man who looks like he could be your kid’s soccer coach. In fact, he is a leading educational advocate and the Assistant Superintendent of the Madison School District which comprises 17 different schools.

Solley takes up the story:

“Only by changing education can our children compete with machines.”  That’s what Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba believes.  Alibaba is China’s largest e-commerce company. On some measures it is bigger than Amazon.com.

Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Mr Ma said, “We cannot teach our kids to compete with machines.  Teachers must stop teaching knowledge. We have to teach something unique, so a machine can never catch up with us.”

Don’t teach knowledge based things from the past 200 years

Mike McKay is a retired superintendent of the Surrey County schools district in British Columbia, Canada.

He was a public educator for 35 years. The area he supervised has over 160 languages spoken. 

You can imagine it would be difficult to measure the potential problems with language and reading development in such a large and diverse region. 

But back in 2008 he attended a conference hosted by Scientific Learning Corporation, where he saw the research behind the Fast ForWord programs. 

When he came back, he asked his board to trust him, and give him $300,000 to get started. It was bold pitch. Mike tells the story of how things have panned out in this Learning Capacity podcast episode:

What can you remember about your preschool, kindergarten or early school years?

Possibly not a lot, but whatever you do remember probably bears little resemblance to the preschools and kindergarten of today.

There has been a trend for preschools to become more structured, and to offer more formalised learning programs, leaving less time for unstructured play and simple fun.

Many parents and teachers will argue that this is a good thing. That it improves their child’s “school readiness” which leads to better learning outcomes in primary and later in secondary school. That it is necessary to give children the best opportunity in today's hypercompetitive world.

A new book by Yale University Professor Erika Christakis argues that the trend to push academic goals down to preschool is actually not good for children.

Almost 400,000 children in Australia and New Zealand will begin their first year of school in late January or early February next year. They will be going into classes known in various Australian states as Kindergarten, Prep, Pre-Primary or Transition, and into Year 1 in New Zealand.

Every one of these children will transition into their first year of a formal school setting in various stages of school readiness.

What will determine a successful transition? '