Dr Georgina Donati and Dr Annie Brookman-Byrne, researchers at the Centre for Educational Neuroscience, were keen to share the latest research in adolescent brain science with teachers and sought out a film-maker to help them out.

“We are Georgie and Annie, researchers at the Centre for Educational Neuroscience, and we are interested in sharing the latest research in adolescent brain science with teachers.

A few years ago, we participated as scientists in an interactive play, with a theatre group called Cardboard Citizens. The play, META, was performed in front of teenagers, and explored how changes in the teenage brain can impact their lives, and even lead them to spin out of control. During performances, we (and our colleagues) were there to explain the adolescent brain science underlying the play. We were often approached by teachers and parents after the play, who said that they found the science fascinating and useful, wishing they had known it sooner.

This feedback inspired us to work on a resource for teachers (parents are also encouraged to get involved!). We teamed up with a film-maker and some great professionals from Small Films to bring you this short film. The aim of the play META had been to encourage teens, armed with new knowledge about how their brains work, to think about how they might be able to change their behaviour for their own benefit. The aim of the film is similar for teachers: how can knowledge about how the teenage brain works influence the way teachers interact with, respond to, and ultimately teach teenagers?

As part of the interactive play, teenagers came up with some interesting strategies to better manage their emotions and stay focused on the task at hand. We’re interested to find out what strategies teachers come up with (or already use) to engage the teenage brain, deal with their quirks, and essentially take advantage of the special world that is the social and emotional rollercoaster of being a teen…

At the early stages of creating the film, we spoke to teachers about our ideas. Based on this discussion, we decided to keep the video short and with basic science, but with more detailed resources about the topics covered on this website. The teachers we spoke to were particularly keen to get ideas for specific strategies to use in the classroom. We are experts in adolescent brain science, but not in teaching, so we are handing over to you, to crowdsource strategies that draw on this science.

Under each topic there is the opportunity to add your own thoughts about how you might use, or have already used, this science to inform your teaching. We hope you will take this opportunity to share your ideas with other teachers. We will regularly update the website to include the strategies that you suggest (anonymously). Our hope is that this will become a useful resource of strategies designed by teachers, for teachers, and informed by research. We are excited to hear from you!

You can also get in touch with us on social media – we have a Twitter account @TeenBrainFilm – come and ask us questions, give us your feedback, or share with your colleagues and friends!“

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You can also read more about topics touched on in the film in more detail in the CEN pages dedicated to each area…

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Sleep      ***      Hormonal Changes      ***      Prefrontal Changes
Inhibitory Control      ***      Mental Time Travel      ***      Limbic Changes
Sensation Seeking       ***       Risk taking       ***       Social Development
Theories of Adolescence      ***     Evolution      ***      Mental Health
Neuroconstructivism      ***     Educational Neuroscience
About

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In today’s excerpt from our resource How the brain works, we must come to terms with a rather humbling revelation. We like to believe we are rather clever. If we were asked, we might say our brains are so big and complex because that’s what it takes to create our wonderful, deep, imaginative thoughts. By contrast, reaching out to pick up a cup of coffee and bringing it to our mouth without spilling it isn’t something we’d typically boast about. Well it might be time for a rethink. Grab yourself a cuppa (careful, now) and read on…

Why do you need a brain? Not all organisms have brains. Jellyfish don’t have brains. They do all right, floating about.

The main reason for having a brain is to coordinate movement. Sight, sound, and other sensory information is brought together; muscles are controlled to produce coordinated movements of the body in response to perception, to achieve the goals of the organism (e.g., eating, not getting eaten).

Organisms that don’t move don’t need centralised coordination of information. Trees don’t move and they have no brains, not even a nervous system. Jellyfish float, gently swim, and stay upright waiting for prey to hit their tentacles. They have a different type of nervous system for this less demanding repertoire, with separate sets of neurons to synchronise muscle actions in different parts of their bodies. There is no integration in a single central brain.

Even humans don’t always need their brains to move. Sometimes, your spine will do the thinking for you. Touch something hot, and in half a second, you will snatch your hand away. Temperature and danger receptors in the skin have rapidly signalled to the spine, where local neurons have already decided to trigger the withdrawal reflex, and the arm muscles spring into action. Quick, withdraw your hand! It is, as they would say these days, a real no-brainer. But anything beyond a reflex movement is going to involve the brain.

At the other end of the scale, human actions can be vastly subtle and sophisticated, aimed towards long-range goals. Studying for a university degree, for example. But it is worth remembering the primary design influence of the brain: make the right movement.

This influence is still discernible in our ‘high-level’ cognitive skills. Take attention. We focus attention on particular objects in our visual field or on particular sounds around us. The ‘attention network’ in the brain involves the circuits of the particular sense (sight, hearing) and two other regions – a system that processes space and a region that controls eye-movements. In the brain, attention isn’t some abstract part of thought: it is about orienting to objects in space and preparing to make the right movement – including movement of the eyes to look to that region of space to get more information. While ‘paying attention’ in the classroom may be held to be a high-level cognitive skill, inside the brain it is about planning for the right movement.

Hang on a minute, what’s this other bit?

The cerebellum! There’s, like, this whole extra ‘mini’ brain at the back, like a petite cauliflower. And you know what? The cerebellum is so densely packed with neurons, it contains around 80% of all the neurons in the brain. What does it do? Is this where all my brilliant thoughts happen?

Well… No. The cerebellum is also all about movement. It is dedicated to the job of coordinating movement and sensation. It needs to make everything hang together, to make it run smoothly and automatically. Because, you know, you may have decided you’re thirsty, and you may want to reach out for that glass of water next to you, but actually your body is already busy. There are muscles holding your posture, keeping you balanced, holding your head up. And if you are going to reach out your arm, a limb is heavy, it’s going to change your centre of gravity. You don’t want to topple over, so lean back a bit, adjust, subtly, unconsciously. A reach of the arm needs to be fitted in with everything else, so that overall movement and posture is smooth, so it all flows together. This takes a lot of integration and monitoring of sensory input and adjusting of motor output. Some heavy-duty number crunching, requiring a lot of neurons and connections. It’s a job for a specialist.

Yet when everything is running smoothly, you don’t notice the cerebellum is there. Only when things go wrong – when your coffee cup doesn’t quite reach your lips and you spill the coffee down your front; when you step off a pavement and misjudge the height of the curb, landing heavily and jarringly – only then do you notice everything the cerebellum has been up to.

It’s keen to take on more work, too. As practised actions become less voluntary and more automatic, the cerebellum takes over from cortical commands to deliver movements swiftly and smoothly.

The cerebellum doesn’t just contribute to movements, but also to thought. Instead of movement, cortex can manipulate images or ideas. When these objects are repeatedly manipulated in the mind, the cerebellum can help make their manipulation smooth and automatic. Here’s some single digit numbers. Six. Eight. Add them together. Adults have years of experience adding single digit numbers. Up pops the answer, 14, smooth as you like, no thinking required, cruise control.

So our brilliant brains are mostly designed for movement. Now that you’ve got your head around that, in our next installment we’ll take a look at how the layers of the brain are organised and start to get an idea of how the whole set up works together.

If you prefer bingeing and can’t wait, you can leap ahead here

At CEN we are always trying to improve dialogue between academic researchers and teaching professionals and are always pleased to hear from practitioners who are working to bridge that gap. Today, we are delighted to welcome Mark Miller, Head of Bradford Research school.

What does educational neuroscience mean to you?

It’s important that we can further our understanding of the complexity of learning. The interdisciplinary nature of educational neuroscience helps to draw together education, psychology and neuroscience to make more sense of how we can support teachers and pupils. For me, it is the ‘educational’ part that matters most, and it is always our goal to try and make what we know practical and effective in schools and classrooms. But I think that neuroscience needs a ‘bridge’ into education, and I can see cognitive psychology as that bridge.

How do you keep up to date with the latest research?

As Head of Bradford Research School, I am lucky to be able to engage with the Research Schools Network, and learn from colleagues across the network, the EEF and the IEE in York. While it helps to be knowledgeable about a range of topics, it’s hard to be expert in them all, so I constantly rely on the kindness of others to share their knowledge and wisdom.

I have found The EEF’s guidance reports to be accessible and useful. For example, as a secondary English teacher I have learnt much about literacy from the Improving Literacy in Key Stage 2 guidance report. Furthermore, the extensive references offer a reading list for anyone keen to find out more about the evidence base. I am looking forward to some of the forthcoming reports, including Improving Literacy in Secondary Schools, Behaviour and Digital Technology.

I read a great deal. My desk will often have the latest copy of TES, whose revamped research coverage is excellent, the Chartered College’s Impact journal and at least a couple of books: today it is How to Explain Absolutely Anything to Absolutely Anyone by Andy Tharby and The Teacher Gap by Rebecca Allen and Sam Sims. I am indebted to those who signpost, filter and curate on social media.

Can you give some examples of how neuroscience understanding has helped you and your school? Is there a specific research-informed idea that has had a positive impact in your school, one which others could potentially try?

Across Dixons Multi-Academy Trust, and in my school Dixons Kings Academy, we ensure that our work is evidence-informed. We have explored the best available evidence on cognitive science and tried to use it to help inform our school-wide understanding of how we enable a change in long-term memory.

Knowledge organisers have been a useful tool to explore some of the key ideas and we have focused on three principals, supported by evidence, that can facilitate their use. Principal one is to facilitate retrieval practice, informed by the work of Roediger (2011) among others. Principals two and three are designed not just to ensure that material is learnt, but that it is ‘usable’. Principal 2 is elaboration, where material to be learnt is elaborated upon, by relating it to additional knowledge associated with it, often in the form of ‘why’ questions. The Learning Scientists have written extensively on this, and Weinstein (2018) is particularly helpful in explaining this (and other principles of cognitive science).  Principal three is to organise the knowledge – ironically Knowledge organisers don’t always help the mental organisation of knowledge! Reif (2008) offers a clear explanation of why.

You can read more about the evidence here.

How do you get teachers and students involved?

There is always a tension with how much teachers need to know about the cognitive science. At Dixons Kings, we don’t want gimmicks and practical tools that are easily replicated with little understanding of the evidence behind them, but nor do we need to overburden with multiple readings of all the original studies. We have explained the principals and practical implications in CPD sessions and assemblies. The staff CPD is followed up with subject-specific CPD, and the message is communicated regularly.

It’s also the same with students. There is real power in students understanding how the advice we give them about studying is determined but there are many demands on students’ time that we may well need to keep it simple. With students, initial assemblies exploring how to use effective revision strategies for knowledge organisers have been followed up with exploration of how to explore things in individual subjects e.g. elaboration in Physics is different from elaboration in English Literature.

Looking more widely, as a Research School, we share evidence through free events, training courses, blogs and newsletters. Again, there is a balance between keeping things concise and watering down the evidence. Where our blogs and our twilight events keep things concise, our training courses allow for implementation of strategies and deep and thorough knowledge.

Are there areas where you think research should focus next (ie what are the important gaps in our understanding)?

40% of our pupils at Dixons Kings Academy are eligible for the pupil premium. According to Becky Allen, “SES-related disparities have already been consistently observed for working memory, inhibitory control, cognitive flexibility and attention.” I would like to see more research into these aspects and particularly how we can mitigate for factors affected by disadvantage.

 

To read more about some of the research mentioned, see the references below. And you can stay up to date with Mark by following him on Twitter

Roediger H, Putnam A and Smith M (2011) Ten benefits of testing and their applications to educational practice. Psychology of Learning and Motivation 55: 1–36

Reif F (2008) Applying Cognitive Science to Education: Thinking and Learning in Scientific and Other Complex Domains. Massachusetts Institute of Technology: Bradford Books

Weinstein Y, Madan C and Sumeracki M (2018) Teaching the science of learning. Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications Open Access

 

We’ve been busy at the CEN writing a guide to how the brain works. Yes seriously. How the brain actually works. Not how we think it could have or should have but how it actually does. The guide is intended to give a general audience a decent gist. There’s no show-offy long anatomical names or world record breaking facts, just a best-estimate summary of the brain’s modus operandum. (That’s the last Latin you’ll get.) You can dip into the full resource whenever you like – it’s here howthebrainworks.science and over the next few weeks, we will also be presenting some of the main ideas in bite size portions. We all love a brain-teaser, so where better to start than with some puzzles?

Why can I forget what the capital of Hungary is, but not that I’m afraid of spiders?
Why do I find I have learnt things better after a night’s sleep?
Why do children learning to read and write mix up their bs and ds?
Why does my mind go blank when I’m stressed in an exam?
Why do I learn a new language so much more easily when I’m 5 than when I’m 50?
Why do I sometimes go into a room to get something, then forget what I went in for?

The answers to all these questions don’t lie in psychology. Even though psychology has some great theories about how the mind works and how we learn, there are some answers it’s less hot on. Instead, the answers lie in the particular – and sometimes peculiar – way our brains work. Our brains didn’t have to work this way. There are other ways you could do things. Our brains work the way they do because of their particular biological and evolutionary origins.

Think of it like this: if you were GoogleAmazonApple Inc. and you were building a robot that learns, you could design your device so that it didn’t have any of these properties. The robot could store Capital-Cities and Animals-I’m-Scared-Of as similar types of memories. It need not forget either. You could build your robot without emotions like ‘stress’ or ‘anxiety’, which on the face of it seem to detract from learning performance.  And, battery life permitting, you could build a robot that didn’t need to sleep to achieve efficient learning.

Figuring out how the mind is generated by the brain has turned out to be pretty tricky. When we look at human behaviour, what we see is often a fluid, smooth, glistening, dynamic interaction with the world. It can seem unified from the outside. When psychologists have taken this outside-looking-in approach, they have constantly run into the same problem: what is one thing in psychology is many things in the brain. For example, ‘keeping something in mind’ seems like a single thing, but there are many different memory systems at work in the brain. In this resource, we’ll come across many cases of ideas from psychology that turn out to be many things in the brain, among them: the self, attention, learning, concepts, people, language.

Much of psychology describes activities – things like ‘problem solving’ or ‘drawing’; these describe what happen on the outside rather than the actions of many mechanisms at work on the inside. To bring about an activity, lots of bits of the brain work together, different subsets work together for different activities and there is fluid interaction between brain, body, and external world.

Sad to say, ‘looking inside your mind’ doesn’t necessarily get you much closer to how the brain works, either. Take that voice in your head, the one that you use to reason with before you make a decision. ‘Should I have that extra slice of cake or not? Well, I only had one slice of toast for breakfast, so maybe it’s okay.’ The voice (psychologists call it the ‘phonological loop’) is generated in the side of the brain, the bit next to the ear. Guess what? That’s not the part that makes decisions. The bit that makes decisions is the front of the brain. When you listen to the voice in your head, you’re listening to the commentator, not the decision maker.

Psychologists are rightly concerned with consciousness, the mental life – the ‘you’ that you experience, your awareness, the thoughts you have about yourself. Here, neuroscience hasn’t really helped out. We’re still at the stage of seeing which bits of the brain become more active when we have certain experiences. The story, though, seems to be headed in the same direction: one experience is lots of bits of brain interacting with each other.

So, have some sympathy for psychologists. Building detailed links between psychology and neuroscience is a big challenge and will take a while. Luckily, we don’t need to worry about that too much to understand how the brain works…

To begin to understand that, we need to go back to the beginning, a few million years ago…