The Art of Changing the Brain
February 19th, 2009
While reading a few papers about learning communities, I came across a reference to a publication by James Zull, entitled The Art of Changing the Brain: Enriching the Practice of Teaching by Exploring the Biology of Learning. Zull, a professor of biology at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, is also the Director Emeritus of its University Center for Innovation in Teaching and Education (UCITE). He states that his quest to explain why people learn differently and how teachers should teach to accommodate those differences led him to write this book explaining some of the physical characteristics of the human brain and how those characteristics influence our learning.
Zull combines a subject that to many might be dull (physical characteristics of the brain) with his personal experiences as a teacher and uses examples of students that he taught to illustrate his concepts. His primary message in the book is that learning is change and “thus, the art of teaching must be the art of changing the brain.” Zull deliberately does not define “learning” since he says that it has different meanings for all of us and he challenges the reader to review his book and see if the physical explanations of learning fit within their definitions of learning.
