I recently returned to the classroom. In fall 1999, a group of colleagues and I began a new charter high school in a small mountain community called Idyllwild in the Hemet Unified School District in southern California. Filled with high hopes, we started with more than 40 students, two full-time teachers, a teacher/principal, and several part-time teachers.
As students began to show up, we realized that our classrooms would not be filled with shining faces eager to learn. Twenty percent of our students had been in programs for special education. We had some students from stable families, but most were living with their second or third family. Many students abused alcohol and other drugs. Many students struggled to find transportation to and from school, some left home regularly and slept in strange places, and one boy lived in his brother's garage.
The teachers provided transportation as best they could, brought snacks (meals could not be provided without initiating a huge number of federal and local regulations), and tried to deal with a host of academic and behavioral problems.
I volunteered to teach a 10-week introduction to psychology. My 17 students had a wide range of abilities and emotional problems, so although the class was an elective, the atmosphere of defiance was palpable. My challenge was to implement our brain/mind learning principles (Caine & Caine, 1997) by establishing a climate of relaxed alertness, immersing students in meaningful experiences, and guiding them to actively process their experiences.
Relaxed Alertness
Right away I knew I was in trouble. Most of these students came from high-stress environments, so my first challenge was to lower the level of perceived threat in the classroom.
Downshifted students. A brain in a state of fear or perceived threat is likely to become "downshifted" (Hart, 1998), an instantaneous biological response that focuses only on what is necessary for survival. Sylwester (1998) calls it the "thalamus-amygdala-cerebellum-stress circuitry" or "default system" (p. 86), and many reseachers have established the impact of threat on the brain (Jacobs & Nadel, 1985; LeDoux, 1996; Sapolsky, 1998). When faced with this "psychophysiological response to perceived threat accompanied by a sense of helplessness or fatigue or both" (Caine & Caine, 1997, p. 103), the brain will inevitably fail to go beyond what it needs for survival. My students were almost all downshifted.
Downshifted students have severe problems paying attention because their brains perseverate, continuously repeating thoughts or unresolved emotional issues. In addition, high levels of cortisol, a powerful stress hormone, were probably present in most of my students, creating emotional volatility.
Downshifting, however, occurs along a continuum. Bruce Perry's table on the acute response to threat (1995) clarifies the relationship among mental state, cognition, and the adaptive responses that occur as threat increases. I could see that most of my students were in a state of vigilance, whereas others were in a state of resistance and defiance. Unlike students in a state of rest, in whom the most active portion of the brain is the neocortex, the brains of students in a state of vigilance are most active in the subcortex or more emotional limbic area. Whereas calm students are capable of adaptive responses and abstract learning, students in a state of vigilance tend to learn in concrete ways. Perry's model helped me understand the need for a concrete approach.
Creating community and relationship. A sense of community helps students feel safe and lowers stress. My students did not know how to talk to one another or to me in a serious way, so my solution was to use "ordered sharing," a very structured part of group process (Caine, Caine, & Crowell, 1999). Each person had a minute to speak on a common topic; everyone listened without responding until all had finished. They responded well to this exercise, speaking on assigned topics that related to their own experience—identifying a characteristic they admired in others, describing a good friend, or talking about something they valued. Because I knew that downshifted students need routines and parameters, we did this exercise for about the first 15 minutes of every 70-minute class.
Another effective way to lower the sense of threat was to develop an authentic relationship with my students. Because their mental models (physiologically lodged beliefs that shape their worldview) about authority and adults were generally negative, I needed to speak openly and honestly about my values. An example was a discussion on the use of drugs. Most of my students could point to someone who smoked marijuana regularly, and many had adults in their lives who freely used drugs. My telling them about the law and the research had no impact, but sharing my personal, deeply held beliefs got their attention. I began to earn their respect, and once I did, they began to see that I respected them.
The research strongly suggests that students who believe in their own capacities—to learn, to cause good outcomes by their actions, to exert control over their lives, and to see more options—do better in school. They earn better grades and perform better on intelligence and achievement tests (Schmitz & Skinner, 1993). By cultivating relationships and an authentic community, I shared power with these students whenever possible.
Meaningful Experience
We could not organize learning around research and projects as we had hoped because too many of our students lacked basic skills and personal initiative. They did not remember promises or obligations and could not work in complex social configurations. In addition, research on executive function (frontal-lobe development) told me that students ages 14 through 17 rarely have their executive function in place.
Executive cognitive functioning governs behavior, including planning, focusing, regulating oneself, and reasoning abstractly. Students with well-developed executive functioning think ahead, formulate long-term goals, understand the nature of consequences, and can work with symbols and abstract concepts. Substance abuse—for example, the use of marijuana—can retard frontal-lobe development and the development of executive functioning.
Everything about my students—their levels of stress, constant state of vigilance, and lack of executive function—told me that teaching using direct experience with sensory and real-world application was crucial. I began to develop "global experiences," tying new information to the senses and emotions to immerse the students in experiences with personal meaning. For example, to teach Freud's concept of the conscious, preconscious, and unconscious, I asked them to listen to relaxing music and to try to focus on something—perhaps a drawing, their breathing, or the wall—and to notice how strange thoughts entered their minds even though they tried to focus. They began to see that the mind has many levels.
To help students understand symbols, I brought in examples from newspapers and magazines. To them, logos like the Nike logo were not symbols but as real as a shoe or hat. When students began to understand symbolism, they started to discuss symbols that appear in dreams. When studying Carl Jung, students found archetypes in art, music, stories, and poetry.
Following each of these global experiences, I gave students a vocabulary list with terms and definitions fitting the specific topic that I had introduced. I was implementing what we call "immersion in complex experience" (Caine & Caine, 1997, p. 35), but at a very low level.
Active Processing of Experience
To consolidate their learning, students needed to exert genuine effort. Most students still needed to be externally motivated because of their dependence on authority.
The concept of learned helplessness explained their behavior. Students who expect to do poorly and believe that most learning is beyond their ability become helpless. One student whose mother had recently died of alcoholism and who hadn't seen his father in two years (this was the one living in his brother's garage) was fiercely defiant. He did well on the first quiz but then was absent several times and did poorly on the second. He begged for two more questions, which I gave him orally. When he could not answer them, he fell apart. His defiance was a facade; more important, he had no sense of learning as a process that requires specific steps, time, and effort. For him, and for many students like him, good grades happen by luck or for some other reason over which they have no control.
My knowledge of the research on memory helped me counteract my students' sense of helplessness. I realized that they had seldom used memory to retain simple, concrete facts. In this case, students needed to master the list of specific vocabulary and definitions, including several discrete facts that were crucial for more advanced learning. I engaged their minds by using emotional connections that temporarily elevate critical hormones like epinephrine and norepinephrine. To facilitate their memorization, I used humor, novelty, excitement, and challenge.
I read items to music while they relaxed; we read the items together; we had fun with the words and definitions as they decided how to string them together and then sing or read them out loud. They studied in pairs and groups. When they and I felt that they knew the vocabulary, I gave them a trial quiz with all the answers. They could choose to look at the answers immediately, but I convinced them that they could relax and try to remember on their own. The actual quiz was always oral because I wanted them to listen to one another's right answers, to know how to pronounce vocabulary, and to hear themselves succeed.
Quizzes were fun; they had elements of a game, with names like Spin the Bottle or Cat in the Hat. In one game, students who answered a question correctly could pick the next question from a hat, then spin the bottle to find who would try to answer it. After seven seconds, the question went to someone else. The room was alive with "I know! I know!" and "Please let me answer that!" I was implementing the most basic level of active processing: creative rehearsal (Caine & Caine, 1997).
At the end of the 10 weeks, students had to prepare for the final exam, which was to last all period. I gave them all the questions—with the answers—two days ahead of time. Remember that I was interested in lowering helplessness, creating self-confidence, and developing self-efficacy.
The final exam asked all the questions. I had brought in juice and doughnuts (not high in nutrition, I know!). I allowed them to eat and drink while taking the exam, but only two students ate while they worked. All the others waited until they finished their exam before they touched the food. Everyone passed.
The tight parameters of the approach I used can benefit students from stressful environments, and students' mastery of highly specified and limited information can reduce their sense of helplessness and help them pass basic tests. The limited scope of this approach, however, has drawbacks: The information covered rarely transfers to other circumstances, subjects, or life experiences; it can inhibit creativity and risk-taking crucial to higher-order thinking; it rarely helps students master more complex tests; and it can frustrate advanced students. A careful consideration of students' cognitive needs can help a teacher choose appropriate instructional methods.
Taking neuroscience into the classroom is challenging because we cannot rely exclusively on brain research. People are too complex, individuals too unique, and contexts too unpredictable. Integrating brain research with other research and with an adequate model for instruction, however, can provide educators with a coherent foundation for excellent teaching.
