Brain Based Learning: Book Review for Uncommon Sense Teaching (Part 1)

By Zainab Cheema

Pursuing an inclusive classroom often feels like the search for El Dorado. Despite best practices and the best of intensions, teachers come to realize that our standard lesson plans and activities are frequently normed around the ideal student. While the “race car brain” learners can draw attention in class, brain science shows that “hiker brain” learners (the ones who take longer to grasp and recall concepts) are often the ones who make significant advances and breakthroughs. In their new book, Uncommon Sense Teaching: Practical Insights in Brain Science to Help Students Learn, Barbara Oakley, Beth Rogowsky, and Terrence Sejnowski use the latest discoveries in neuroscience to show how learning takes place and how we can help our students (both the hiker brain and race car brains ones) thrive.

This is a two-part review. This post reviews the Introduction and first three chapters of the book. A follow up blog will cover the rest of the book. Let’s introduce the writers. Oakley is a professor of engineering at Oakland University and McMaster University. Sejnowski is a professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. Oakley and Sejnowski’s MOOC, Learning How to Learn, is one of the most popular online courses to date.  Rogowsky is a professor in the Early Childhood Education department of Bloomsburg University. As a writing team, they have produced a book that is witty, easy to read, but that also has substantive research into the science of how we learn. Uncommon Sense Teaching has an easy, approachable style that makes it perfect for a wide audience: university professors, K-12 teachers, parents, tutors, and anyone fascinated in how the brain works. Oakley, Rogowsky, and Sejnowski set out to provide tweaks to traditional teaching methods that will enhance your effectiveness for every kind of student.

As we know, “learn it, link it” is the shorthand for learning. In other words, learning happens when neurons that come to fire together in near simultaneous time begin to wire together. Canadian psychologist Donald Hebb described these neurons as a well-practiced choir—“singing together” is how neurons form a sequence of links with one another. Oakley, Rogowsky, and Sejnowski take this image and run with it, building their discussion of the learning process through such metaphors that they revisit and expand over the book. In doing so, they model the best practices that they recommend for enhancing students’ learning.

Race car brain students are often able to quickly grasp a concept, aka link the neurons together. However, as the book points out, this mental quickness can often impair their learning. One of the core components of learning is recall—not just placing things in our memory but extracting them at will. The brain’s storage is unlimited. As Uncommon Sense Teaching notes, the brain’s storage capacity is a quadrillion bytes. More information can be stored in the brain than grains of sand on all beaches of the world. It’s getting the information into or out of memory. This only happens when we shift concepts from our working memories to our long-term memories. As the book points out, race car brain students’ ease in making the initial neural links often makes them over-confident, preventing them from revisiting the material again and again. The net effect? The hiker brain students often succeed in planting the concepts in their long-term storage, while the links fade away for the race car brain ones.

There’s more good news for the hiker brain learners. Expanding working memory not only strengthens neural links in long-term memory, these links can extend their working memory on that topic. In other words, diligently deepening your grasp of a topic and transferring it to your long-term memory means that your short memory’s mental agility regarding the topic also grows.

Oakley, Rogowsky, and Sejnowski use the choir metaphor to explain how the working memory and long-term work together to advance learning. Our working memory is the choir singer (let’s call him Pavarotti) who quickly grasps a song—but who is prone to forgetting it after a while. Our long-term memory (let’s call her Audra) is the choir singer who often struggles to grasp the song. However, once having grasped it, she remembers it and stores it in her vast repertoire of music. Deep learning happens when Pavarotti and Audra sing a duet. Pavarotti sings the song for Audra, prompting her to sing with him. As she does, she deepens her memory of the song. When we have completed mastery of a concept, it means that Audra is singing on her own: she has the song in full and no longer needs Pavarotti to prompt her. This process means that learning is truly universal, a deep process that we shouldn’t short change for initial quickness or agility.

Recall is the name of the game. What are some strategies we can use to help students build the neural pathways for transferring and extracting information to and from the long-term memory? One of the best aspects about Uncommon Teaching is the fact that the authors give a list of teaching strategies at the end of each chapter. Here are the ones that I found the most notable:

• Collaborative Recall Technique — After you teach a concept in class, pair students up and get them explain to each other what you just taught them. A variation of the technique is that students teach each other what you have demoed in class. Make sure to reverse the roles so that each student gets to work through the material.

• Solo Recall Technique — Students can also practice recall at home by looking away from their book and explain to themselves what they have just learned.

• Think Pair Share — For more theoretical questions, ask students to think about a question that you have provided and then pair them up and get them to share their thoughts. The quiet time allows for hippocampus offloading that can strengthen neural links.
  • Pro Tip — Give students prompts to help them generate answers to your question. For instance, “In one minute, brainstorm as many examples or ways of doing ____ that you can think of.”

• Incomplete Notes Quiz — Notes are a powerful way to learn and build connections with the material. At times, students may struggle to draw the necessary connections and organizing frameworks. As a low stakes quiz, give students a set of notes where they must fill in the blanks for missing information. This helps students who have not yet mentally organized the information to do so.

• Whip Around — Pose an open-ended question for your class that calls for a variety of responses. Give students a minute to come up with an answer, waiting till each one gives you a thumbs up on Zoom or in class. Call on a student to respond and then move to each student, not pausing to correct or give explanations. Ask students to vary their answers or take things a step further to avoid getting the same answers. Fixes to incorrect answers take place after each student has spoken. This reinforces learning and makes sure that every student “gets” the concept you are teaching.

Stay tuned for Part 2 of this book review!