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Teachers as Brain-Changers: Neuroscience and Learning

By Wendi Pillars

I'm an armchair neuroscientist, or at least I love learning about the brain, how it functions, and what recent findings mean for my practice as a teacher.

Bridging research findings to the realities of the classroom, however, is far easier said than done. In addition to navigating the daily challenges of our work, we must distinguish trendy "research-based" claims about the brain from those grounded in legitimate neuroscientific findings. And then we have to figure out how to apply what we've learned. Sifting through these claims to understand their origins is precisely the goal of my current research.

Remember when conventional science wisdom claimed that the average person could learn and retain about seven chunks of information at a time? (Hence, our seven-digit phone number protocol.) Well, recent neuroscientific findings have determined that our cognitive capacity is actually just...