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.
Zull attributes the beginnings of his research in this area to David Kolb’s book, Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning and Development. Kolb happens to be Zull’s colleague at Case Western and his development of a learning cycle expressed as a sequence of experience, reflection, abstraction, and active testing has been used by others in the educational research field. Zull transfers Kolb’s cycle to a two-dimensional model that overlays the two-dimensional sketch of the brain. His explanation of the way the brain receives sensory stimulation and then processes the signals sheds light on the way we learn.
One of the explanations that I enjoyed was the process of memory; how short term memory differs from long term memory and how the brain compartmentalizes the two, separating the contents from each other. I am sure that many of us can recall classmates whose photographic short term memories assisted them with great grades on tests but whose long term grasp of the subject matter was less than exemplary. I also enjoyed seeing sketches of MRI’s in which the pattern of an object being viewed by the eyes is physically patterned in the brain in a manner similar to its physical appearance. Not having a background in biology, many of Zull’s physical process diagrams and explanations were revelations to me.
My favorite chapter of the book was Chapter 12 which explains how the brain changes through the use of emotion. Throughout my academic career as a student, my favorite classroom teachers and athletic team coaches were excellent at motivating me through the use of emotion.
One of Zull’s conclusions is that “understanding the concepts of neuronal networks and synapse change gives credence to constructivist theories of learning and of educating.” The benefits of constructivist learning methodologies in the online education world have been published by a number of researchers and interest me in their potential to improve online student retention. Zull’s book provides an interesting explanation as to the physical reasons why the brain may learn better in that environment.
