Brainstorms

The premise of my research, speeches and workshops over the past three decades has been based on the question, "If it's your job to develop the mind, shouldn't you know how the brain works?"

Kenneth Wesson works as a keynote speaker and educational consultant for pre-school through university-level institutions and organizations. He speaks throughout the world on the neuroscience of learning and methods for creating classrooms and learning environments that are "brain-considerate."

For the greater part of the mid-20th Century, the theoretical positions of behaviorists (psychologist B.F. Skinner and others) dominated our thinking in the psychology of learning. Whether the spotlight was on pigeons depressing a lever to receive food pellets or the multifaceted questions related to the complex process of language acquisition, the deliberations were commonly forced to fit into the “stimulus-response” context. Conversations about teaching and learning were frequently reduced to the Stimulus Response model in order to proceed with all discussions surrounding the learning process, although they completely ignored all of the discrete internal neural systems involved.

However, we now recognize an exceptionally long list of additional factors that undeniably influence the mindful activities (including human learning and/or behavior) of the organ we call the brain. Kindergarten through graduate school education consistently records evidence that learners never obediently “respond” to new content information simply because they have been exposed to it. The desired responses in learning are never guaranteed. Formal education, to say nothing about parenting, has never been an effortless venture met with the instantaneous learning successes implied by the S _ R model. Educators might wish that the Skinnerian approach was an automatic teaching expectation, especially on those challenging days with the most difficult of students.

According to the distinguished educator, Art Costa, teaching is considered to be one of the most demanding professions in the contemporary world, because of the innumerable variables that are not captured in the S _ R framework. The challenges facing educators instead are sporadically found in the genetic, social and brain-based obstacles that stand firmly between one's optimal teaching efforts and the sometimes-unpredictable student results.