We educators hear a lot about brain research, but can it make a difference in our schools? To find out, we began in 1994 with a highly motivated staff who wanted to make a good school even better. First, the staff began questioning, researching, and studying how children learn. Most important, they began collaboratively discussing, sharing, and analyzing information about the brain. They discovered that working together with passion and dedication toward a common goal develops a synergy that supports significant change.
Although many education reform efforts often target low-performing schools, in our study we chose to work with the high-performing Valley Park Elementary School, Blue Valley School District, in Kansas City, Kansas. Valley Park's students have consistently scored well above the national average on standardized tests, and their well-educated parents demand excellence from the school. We hypothesized that this school could implement an improvement plan grounded in brain research.
A Research Foundation
Through a partnership with the Center for the Advancement of Reform in Education (CARE) at Rockhurst University in Kansas City, Missouri, Valley Park staff members focused on brain-compatible practices. First, they looked for brain research that seemed valid, reliable, and usable in the classroom. Understanding neurological and cognitive research is vital for all educators so that we do not fall prey to unfounded claims that a new strategy is proven by brain research. We must become critical consumers of brain research. We must cultivate—through reading, discussion, and quality staff development—a functional understanding of how the brain works. We will then be in a strong position to combine this new knowledge with the vast wealth of experiential wisdom that we have amassed during our years of teaching.
On the basis of their research, the Valley Park staff members used the following findings from neuroscience research as a foundation for their work.
The brain changes physiologically as a result of experience. An individual's environment determines to a large extent the functioning ability of his or her brain. The brain can change its structure and function in response to external experiences—a concept called neural plasticity (D'Arcangelo, 1998). To maximize the brain's capacity to grow connections, teachers must provide an environment that is challenging yet nurturing. The brain wants to learn, but when educational experiences are too easy or too hard, learning falters.
Emotion influences learning. The connection between learning and emotions has received a great deal of recent attention. Daniel Goleman's Emotional Intelligence (1994) and Joseph LeDoux's The Emotional Brain (1996), in particular, have advanced our understanding of the role of emotions in learning. People retain more of what they learn when the brain recognizes an experience as useful: Positive emotion can facilitate that recognition. Conversely, if a student perceives an experience as threatening, learning shuts down. Unless educators create an emotionally positive and engaging environment, learning is compromised.
Intelligence is multiple. Human intelligence encompasses a far wider and more universal set of competencies than a single general intelligence (Gardner, 1985). Traditionally, schools have recognized and rewarded verbal-linguistic and logical-mathematical intelligences. We cannot as easily measure such other intelligences as intrapersonal and naturalist; however, these intelligences can serve as a foundation for better instruction and deeper emotional engagement of the learner.
Theory into Practice
Through our partnership, CARE and Valley Park created a culture based on the following key brain-compatible classroom practices: a safe, nonthreatening environment; active and meaningful learning; rich, stimulating, varied input; and accurate, timely, and helpful feedback (Jennings & Caulfield, 1997).
How did Valley Park address these practices? The staff created an environment of caring, trust, and respect through understanding and practicing Blue Valley School District's adopted core virtues: compassion, courage, honesty, perseverance, respect, responsibility, and self-discipline. We displayed posters depicting and defining each virtue around the school building to emphasize consistent expectations. Because students, parents, and staff taught, modeled, and practiced the virtues, a strong sense of emotional and physical safety developed.
To give students more meaningful and connected learning opportunities, staff developed yearlong themes around district objectives for each grade level. Content within each theme was a spiraled K–5 connected program with appropriate overlap in units of study between grade levels. Teachers organized skills and concepts from core subjects into units of learning that excited and made sense to children. Teachers provided students with multiple opportunities for learning at developmentally appropriate levels to promote mastery of skills and deep understanding. Through the unit planning process, art, music, and physical education teachers developed activities that supported and reinforced concepts that were presented by the classroom teacher. For example, the physical education teachers reinforced science concepts by having students experience the structure and movement of atoms, using hula hoops to simulate the action of the atoms when heated, cooled, or frozen. The art teacher had students construct models of atoms with wire.
These opportunities developed from the unit plan process, a collaborative process that allowed classroom teachers and specialists to bring together their multiple perspectives and skills to generate more effective teaching strategies and curriculums. At Valley Park, this key structure has evolved into a synergistic team that supports the school's belief systems and daily practices.
Art, music, physical education, and foreign language teachers worked with their classroom colleagues, the librarian, the counselor, and the reading teacher to provide a rich, stimulating, and varied learning environment. In addition to traditional paper-and-pencil tests, teachers developed multiple assessments, including performance-based assessments using rubrics collaboratively constructed by teachers and students.
The Valley Park Plan provides a vision and support for daily practices. The plan was a schoolwide effort to create a quality learning environment for all children by using brain-compatible instruction to integrate facts, skills, and concepts in meaningful and lasting ways. It included developing an integrated thematic curriculum that was delivered through collaborative planning and teaching. Initially, the plan was developed in-house and supported by our site council and the district administration. But, as we progressed, we found that we needed to include the wider community of the school's parent-teacher organization and the general parent community.
As the Valley Park Plan evolved, the staff participated in a number of activities to equip teachers with the knowledge and skills that would help them implement the plan. For example, the staff participated in Susan Kovalik's Model Teaching Week, sponsored by CARE. Model Teaching Week allows teachers to experience brain principles in action with students (Kovalik, 1995). During Model Teaching Week, several "typical" classrooms are created with students participating from throughout metropolitan Kansas City. For a portion of each day, teachers learn the theory of these brain-compatible practices and then apply them. There is ample opportunity for teachers to ask questions and discuss what they have seen with the model teachers, the students, and their fellow participants. To further their professional development, the CARE staff arranged for consultants to visit Valley Park to discuss strategies with school staff.
Not all of the professional development focused on cognitive skills. The Valley Park staff also took several personality assessments that helped them better understand one another and facilitated collaboration.
A School Snapshot
Let us peek into a Valley Park classroom to see the result of the staff's hard work. As we move into the classroom, the teacher sits at a table with a small group of students in a writing conference. Other students work quietly around the room and at computers. A group of students returns to the room with a paraprofessional, checks the schedule on the agenda board, scans the procedure chart for directions, and then starts a writing activity. The students' work—maps, charts, pictures, letters, journals, and evidence of dance and acting performances—is displayed throughout the room. Each piece shines with the personality of its creator. A rubric scored by both the student and the teacher is attached to the back of the projects and papers.
Natural light streams through the window on live plants. A tape player plays quiet music. The teacher's group finishes its work, and she changes the music to signal a transition to recess time. The students quickly organize their materials and assemble to go outside.
As we pass through the open areas in the classroom wings, the 4th graders work with their 2nd grade buddies in a science lesson on the properties of sound. The music specialist teaches a unit she developed with assistance from the classroom teachers. The unit ties together the science curriculum concepts of how sound moves and what causes changes in sound volume with music curriculum concepts of musical sound, signs, symbols, and terms. Each teacher brings to the group her particular expertise, interests, and objectives, and the 4th graders work at mastery level while introducing the concepts of sound and its properties to their 2nd grade buddies.
The joint planning and teaching among classroom teachers, the counselor, and the school's art, music, physical education, library/media, reading, and gifted and talented teachers set Valley Park today apart from the Valley Park of the past. When the classroom teacher presents a concept, one or more of the specialists address it in their work with the students. This repetition benefits students, but, more important, the specialist presents the concept in a different modality, thus tapping into multiple intelligences. When students see the connections and the practical applications, they will remember the knowledge or skill.
In addition to using brain research to improve our teaching, we teach our students about the research to help them understand their own thinking and learning. At the beginning of the year, 2nd through 5th graders learn how brain function affects learning and discuss how to stay "upshifted" into their upper, or thinking, brains where learning takes place (Sylwester, 1995). If students understand brain anatomy and physiology (form and function) at their developmental level, they can become better partners in the learning.
Several times a year, all K–5 students have theme days, which focus on one topic for the day through a variety of activities and use the multiple intelligences approach. One such day was devoted to Our Creative Mind. Seventeen students from grades 4 and 5 interested in the brain volunteered to do additional research and develop projects to share. They visited with neurologists at the Menorah Medical Center, our business partner, where they looked at PET scans and brought back MRIs. They questioned the hospital staff and gathered resources on topics such as Memory and the Brain (how memory is stored), Optical Illusions (how visual images are processed), The Power of Music (how music can help learning), A Journey Through the Brain (a guided imagery trip), and The Active Brain (a walking tour of the brain created on the gym floor). The students did further research, developed presentations, and shared this information with their fellow students, other adult presenters, parents, and the community. All students also learn about Gardner's multiple intelligences so that they can build on one another's strengths and gain self-knowledge that will help them become better learners.
Results
Valley Park is a highly successful school, so parents were concerned that any change might result in decreased student learning. Therefore, the staff began the Valley Park Plan with the hypothesis that it could be implemented without negative effects on students' performance in reading and mathematics. Throughout the project, three measures were administered to monitor student progress: the Gates-MacGinitie Reading Tests, end-of-book tests that accompanied the Harcourt Brace or D.C. Heath mathematics texts, and the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills.
We administered the Gates-MacGinitie Reading Tests every fall to all students in grades 1 through 5. Grade 1 students who were at Valley Park in the fall of 1994 when the Valley Park Plan was first implemented showed a significant gain in reading based upon a score comparison from grade 1 to grade 4. In fall 1994, when these students were in grade 1, the average Normal Curve Equivalency (NCE) was 48. In the fall of their 4th grade year, the average stood at 66—a gain of nearly one full standard deviation. This finding was repeated by the following year's grade 1 students, who began with an NCE average of 51 and entered grade 4 with 60 as the average NCE.
Because the end-of-year tests that accompany the mathematics texts are not standardized, we needed a less sophisticated analysis of the results. The end-of-book test for each grade was administered in the fall and spring. We calculated the gain in percent of questions correct. Naturally, we expected to see increases, but we looked at whether the increases for a particular grade changed over time. For grade 2, four years' data showed increases in percent correct from fall to spring of 37, 44, 36, and 35. At grade 3, three years' changes were 38, 38, and 35.
The third piece of data comes from the district testing program: the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills. We examined results for one intact group of students that was present at Valley Park between 1994 and 1999. Reading results remained steady with an average NCE in fall of grade 2 at 70 and a fall average for grade 6 of 68. For mathematics there was an educationally significant gain, with the fall grade 2 NCE average at 69 and at 78 for fall grade 6.
Overall, the results from the three measures support the premise that a school can be transformed into a more enriched environment without introducing negative effects in reading or mathematics learning. The results are more mixed on whether or not this enriched environment has challenged students to actually increase their learning in math and reading. Our further analysis of the data does seem to indicate greater growth by students who scored lower on the beginning measures.
A Happy School
The Valley Park Plan was more than a research project to raise test scores. It brought planning, teaching, and learning into a new and different focus for the students, teachers, staff, parents, and community. Ultimately, much of our achievement cannot be measured using traditional assessments. A first-year teacher stated, "I can't wait to get to school each day. We have a shared view of who's responsible for kids." A visitor to the building commented about the atmosphere: "It feels vibrant and happy—not frantic, but alive."
Today, Valley Park is refining and tailoring its instructional delivery to adapt to the expanding knowledge of the science of learning. Parental support for the school and its programs remains very strong and seems to be increasing. Throughout all of our efforts, we acknowledge that student achievement is the bottom line, but we realize that another key factor is to cultivate a love of learning in competent, caring individuals. Students learn best through rich experiences, while they also learn to appreciate one another's talents and needs.
