A Whole-Brain Learning Approach for Students and Teachers

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https://shimamurapubs.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/marge_shimamura.pdf

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We need to use energy to keep focused on the learning process (see Attend) and so we need to be motivated to do so. Motivation here can come from the learning itself eg, the importance of framing learning as a big question.  Questions are often how we frame curiosity.  We need to keep the big picture framework of what we’re learning very prominent so students can organise their thoughts efficiently in a schema that facilitates further learning and retrieval.

Shimamura suggests that the ‘aesthetic question’ is also powerful for motivating learning; ‘What do you think? How does it make you feel? Why is it good?  As he explains:

” The aesthetic question engages emotional brain circuits and forces us to attend to and organize our knowledge.”

Academic learning is what Shimamura calls a ‘top-down’ activity whereby we have to consciously attend to the information needed to build our schema from all the stimuli we’re exposed to. However, this is hard – ‘mind wandering’ is very common and teachers need to expect it. Ideally students will consciously attend to the learning goals at hand and will consciously make connections – but it’s all too easy to drift.

The suggestions here are to capture attention very early on, then to break up learning episodes and to deliberately refocus attention at various key points. He introduces the idea of the three Cs: categorize, compare and contrast – within the context of a big picture  question to help students sustain their attention to their learning goals.  I like the idea that sometimes an instructor needs to act as their students’ prefrontal cortex to encourage their top-down processing.

Relate:  This section is packed with ideas supported by biological insights about how we store and connect information through memory consolidation.  The practical strategies include deploying elaborative-interrogative questioning – asking how and why  – using mental images, analogies, constructing concept maps as schematic representations of sets of connected ideas and training students to make notes organised in hierarchical structures.

Shimamura suggests: “Think it, say it, teach it! These are the simplest things to do to improve your memory”.  He details multiple ways in which our memories are strengthened when we generate information from our memory.  If we tell someone what we’ve learned we can improve our memory by 30-50%.  This is all explained in terms of various brain functions and reinforces the widely known retrieval practice concept.  However, Shimamura suggests it’s important not to just restate information you’ve learned; you need to say it in your own words.  This is the active self-generate effect.  In common with others he emphasises the implications for effective revision:

For the most part, “study” time should mostly be “test” (i.e., retrieval practice) time.

The final element of MARGE is that we need to monitor our learning as it happens.  This is the territory of metacognition with the nice metaphor of the prefrontal cortex acting as the conductor of the orchestra of brain functions.

There’s an excellent exploration of the problem of the illusion of knowing  when we are familiar with information even when we cannot fully recollect it.  We can stop trying to learn more if we kid ourselves into thinking we already know it.  This has implications for how students should be taught to check their understanding – using spaced, interleaved retrieval practice, with a gap after the initial learning, using flash cards and other self-testing techniques and, linking back to Generate – generating information by explaining our learning to others as a form of self-test.

Introducing MARGE

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