Yolanda U. Trapp
The Model
Brain-based educators tend to support progressive education reforms. They decry the "factory model of education" in which developing knowledge, teachers disseminate it, and students are graded on how much of it they can absorb and retain. Like many other educators, brain-based educators favor a constructive, active learning model. Students should be actively engaged in learning and in guiding their own instruction. Brain enthusiasts see neuroscience as perhaps the best weapon to destroy our outdated factory model. They argue that teachers should teach for meaning and understanding.
This model of learning is firmly in more than 30 years of psychological research. While we know a considerable amount from psychological research that is pertinent to teaching and learning we know much less about how the brain functions and learns. For nearly a century, the science of the mind (psychology) developed independently from the science of the brain (neuroscience). Psychologists were interested in our mental functions and capacities-how we learn, remember and think. Neuroscientists were interested in how the brain develops and functions.
It is only in the recent years that scientists called cognitive neuroscientists, began to study how brain structures support mental functions, how our neural circuits enable us to think and learn. This is an exciting and new scientific endeavor, but as result we know relatively little about learning, thinking, and remembering at the level of brain areas, neural circuits, or synapses; but we know more now about how the brain thinks, remembers, and learn.
Hemispheric Specialization
An apparently simple organ, the brain is in fact more sophisticated than the most complicated computer. The brain weighs about three pounds. It is composed of two hemispheres, left and right, which are connected by the corpus callosum. These fibers radiate in the walls of both hemispheres and form a direct connection between the convolutions of the right and the left side. The hemispheres must be the organs of long term of memory and in some way retain vestiges of former currents, by means of which mental considerations drawn from the past may be aroused before action takes place.
The brain is not totally symmetrical. Many specialized functions seem to be centered primarily in one hemisphere or the other. The speech and language centers are bilateral just above in front of the ear (Broca's area). Although language is primarly in the left hemisphere for the majority of people, it can develop in either hemisphere (Vitale, 1988).
To make this concept more practical, let us talk about hemispheric specialization as it is related to academic skills. Certain skills have been assigned to either the left or the right hemisphere. Although research is not complete in this area, it is clear that differences do exist. Table 1 (Vitale, 1988) lists the skills or curriculum area strengths generally attributed to left and right hemispheres.
(table available in print form)
Each hemisphere of the brain also specializes in a different mode of consciousness. Two separate and unique ways of processing stimuli exist within each person. Although both hemispheres receive and process sensory information from the surrounding environment, each hemisphere processes the information separately. They do not approach life in the same way, yet both use high-level cognitive modes.
The left hemisphere approach to life is part-to-whole. It sequences and is logical. The right hemisphere does not sequence; it looks at things holistically, in an overall picture.
(table available in print form)
