Brain Development - Big brain?

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The evolutionary history of our brain helps us realise how incredible our brains are. It helps us appreciate the importance of understanding how the brain functions when trying to understand and promote the ability to learn in schools, in the workplace or just for leisure. Let’s look at three broad categories of process that are particularly relevant for education: processes supporting engagement for learning, building of knowledge and consolidation.

ENGAGEMENT FOR LEARNING

All learning begins with the learner attending to some source(s) of information or insight. A teacher, who represents one such source themselves, must be able to capture and maintain the learner’s attention and judiciously direct it to whatever other sources of information and insight are helpful. There are ancient motivational and emotional biases that impact on our abilities to engage our attentional abilities, and these biases originally evolved to aid learning rather than disrupt it. Early on in our evolution as vertebrates, we evolved tendencies that bias our attention towards experiences that promise to be rewarding. Teachers offer a range of rewards that support engagement in the classroom, many of which are social ones (praise, gold stars, points, etc.) that contribute to self-esteem and social standing. These types of social reward influence the brain’s reward system in a similar way to other incentives such as receiving money, food or even playing video games. When it comes to influencing our engagement, what is meant by the term ‘reward’ can, therefore, be very broad.