WORLD OF LEARNING: MY REVIEW OF "BRAIN RULES"

BRAIN RULES: 12 PRINCIPLES FOR SURVIVING AND THRIVING AT WORK, HOME AND SCHOOL. By John Medina. Pear Press, 2008. 299 pages.

My sister and I both work with kids and have our own little book club where we read works that are related to learning, the brain, and child development. While she liked 'Brain Rules,' she critiqued for being 'pop.' I get that, but I really liked the book.

We read it after seeing Medina give an enthusiastic and inspiring presentation at the Learning and the Brain Conference several months ago in San Francisco. He's definitely a salesman type with his own shtick, but for me, it works.

I was reading an excellent, but all-encompassing book by Fernette and Brock Eide, 'The Mislabeled Child,' at the same time (still on that one) as 'Brain Rules,' and enjoyed having something a bit less weighty that still made me rethink how kids learn.

One of the key points Medina made at that conference was a possible way we can screen for good teachers--the concept of Theory of Mind. Medina essentially turned around current examination of that concept, the ability to think about what others are thinking about.

Lots of fascinating work is being done with children trying to discover how much an awareness that others have thoughts as well as oneself is innate, rather than learned. Early identification of a Theory of Mind deficit might help children with communicative disorders like those on the autism spectrum.

Instead of just looking at children's Theory of Mind, Medina proposes that we look at teachers' ability to understand what others are thinking. He noted that learning is constructed and breakdowns occur when there are 'gaps' caused by faulty understanding of underlying concepts.

Teachers cannot assume kids get what they are teaching, and move forward in linear fashion. They must listen to what the kids say, and be able to interpret, evaluate and return to their students' understanding. And they have to do that not with a few students but with an entire classroom. That's an astounding ability.

When we think about great teachers, we intuitively recognize that ability. Usually the teachers we remember and admire brought not only an enthusiasm for their subject to the classroom, but empathy. Good teachers respect what their students say, reinforce what is correct about their understanding, and direct them in positive ways to rethink faulty assumptions.

Perhaps, Medina says, 'an advanced skill set in Theory of Mind predicts a good teacher.' If that is true, 'existing Theory of Mind tests could be used like Myers-Briggs personality tests to reveal good teachers from bad, or to help people considering careers as teachers.'

With that idea, Medina certainly engaged me at the conference, and once again in Rule #3 of his book, 'Every brain is wired differently.' The book is framed as twelve of these 'rules.' Each one of them really got me reviewing and modifying my own understanding of the brain.

For example, with his rule ('Rule #5: Repeat to remember') and discussion on short-term memory, Medina makes a discerning distinction between declarative and nondeclarative memories. While we consciously retrieve the former as we recall information such as the names of the presidents, we do not do so when we remember how to ride a bike. I've really been thinking a lot about this motor-skill type of memory and its connection to the reading process, which we want to be automatic and subconscious.

As someone who teaches that process, I'm still working on assimilating Medina's thoughts on the 'inefficiency of text.' However proficient you are as a reader, he notes, you still must 'stop and ponder individual textual features.' While it's clear to me that reading is not 'natural' for humans, I am not sure I can completely accept that 'pictures are a more efficient mechanism of information than text.' If that's so, why did Medina bother writing his book?

That's an issue I'll have to keep reconsidering, which can't be a bad thing. Whether or not we should follow the 'USA Today' principle ('less text, more pictures'), as Medina suggests, I have no doubt that a multisensory approach to all learning is beneficial.

Medina prompts us to think about memory and sensory experience in another surprising way, by noting that elaboration is a good thing. 'More pieces of intellectual baggage to inventory should make learning more difficult,' he writes. However, 'extra cognitive processing...helps the learner to integrate...new material with prior information.'

I loved the way Medina encapsulates this concept: 'We know that information is remembered best when it is elaborate, meaningful, and contextual.' My reading of 'Brain Rules' was certainly enhanced by going to Medina's website and watching the short slide shows and videos that supplemented his text (material also available on a CD that accompanies the book).

It was also enhanced by more reading, that artificial information-gathering process. In a bit of synchronicity, I read the Eides' observation in 'The Mislabeled Child': 'Because children with poor language output can't effectively elaborate information, they'll have far greater difficulty with many kinds of language-based learning.'

Another nice connection I made gets back to the idea of children's innate capacity for learning. Medina points out that babies seem to come equipped with the scientific method: 'Hypothesis testing...is the way babies gather information. They use a series of increasingly self-corrected ideas to figure out how the world works.'

Paul Bloom, a scientist at Yale has just completed a wonderful study of babies' 'rich understanding of objects and people' (see his New York Times article: 'The Moral Life of Babies' at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/magazine/09babies-t.html). He comments, 'Babies might start off smart, because it enables them to get smarter.'

Despite criticims that could be made of Medina's easy-to-read format as superficial, this book really got me thinking and rethinking about learning and teaching, memory, sleeping (which Medina says is an active learning time we need, rather that merely a restorative period), and so much more. It's a useful introduction to recent brain research for beginners, as well as great elaboration on that subject for those with more knowledge.