Mind, Brain, and Education: Using Neuroscience to Teach Students Living in Poverty

Introduction

“My student has been having angry and emotional outbursts in class. These outbursts seem to come out of nowhere!”

“I cannot get my student to grasp what I am teaching. It seems as though she understands it one day and the next day, it is gone!”

These remarks may be heard frequently while walking down a school hallway but perhaps especially, in a Title I school, in which the majority of students are from low-income homes. Teacher turnover rates tend to be much higher in Title I schools than schools serving mostly middle- and upper-class students (Simon & Johnson, 2015). Carver-Thomas and Darling-Hammond (2017) recently collected data and found that teacher turnover rates are in fact approximately 50% higher in Title I schools. Some teachers find themselves at a loss for how to understand, support, and teach their students. Pre-service teachers spend their undergraduate careers taking courses on important educational topics such as classroom management, curriculum, educational theories, and practicum courses within the various subjects. This training; however, is often geared toward teaching the majority population of students with little focus on specific instructional and classroom management strategies or theories for teaching students who live in poverty.

Research cites a lack of teacher preparation regarding the implications of poverty on learning as one of the major reasons teachers not only leave Title I schools, but sometimes the teaching profession altogether (Carver-Thomas & Darling-Hammond, 2017; Simon & Johnson, 2015). Simon and Johnson (2015) found that teachers who worked in high-poverty schools expressed feeling ill-prepared to teach students whose socioeconomic status and cultural backgrounds were different from their own. The authors also noted that even teachers of the same backgrounds as the students they served asked for help regarding classroom management and discipline. Clearly, both pre-service teachers and current classroom teachers need to be provided with opportunities to learn how to design trauma-sensitive instruction and classroom management systems for their students who live in poverty. The question is: What exactly do classroom teachers need to know about how their students learn and how the stressors of living in poverty could be impacting their learning and behavior?

Learning occurs within the brain. Since it is the teacher’s job to facilitate learning, why do most teachers lack training on the brain and how its different components work together to create learning? Glenn Whitman and Ian Kelleher (2016), the authors of Neuroteach: Brain Science and the Future of Education, provide a powerful image of going to a surgeon who is passionate about his or her work, but has never been taught about the body part on which he or she will be performing surgery. Most patients would immediately run the other way. The authors explain that while many educators express passion for their job, most have never actually been trained in how learning takes place in the brain.

During the late 1980s, conversations sparked regarding the exploration of the possible connections between the cognitive neurosciences and education (Schwartz, 2015). Special groups were formed and the movement grew as it received national attention from leaders, including President Bush in the United States (Schwartz, 2015). From this, “Mind, Brain, and Behavior” developed out of Harvard, which has served as one of the leading universities in the field (Fischer, 2009; Schwartz, 2015). The initial focus of this group was to look at various disciplines, such as political science and economics, through the lens of the cognitive and neurosciences.

This initiative branched out soon after when Kurt Fischer of Harvard urged that there needed to be a greater research focus on how the brain and mind influence learning. Fischer also argued that educators could offer essential viewpoints when developing future research between the disciplines. Thus, “Mind, Brain, and Education” (MBE) was born (Schwartz, 2015). In 2004, MBE spread to Japan and France and the International Mind, Brain, and Education Society (IMBES) was established, as well as the Mind, Brain, and Education academic journal (Fischer, 2009; Schwartz, 2015).