Science of Teaching & Learning
At Country Day, we're leveraging research-informed learning strategies to empower every student to reach their peak learning potential.
How can we best educate the brain? What helps students learn? What should excellent teaching be? These questions that have been at the forefront of our professional learning efforts in recent years. As educators, we continually strive to inform and improve our work to best serve the children we teach. As a school-wide initiative, we have immersed ourselves in understanding the latest research on how the brain best learns through a field of study called mind, brain, and education (MBE) science. As a result of their expertise in the field of MBE, we chose to partner with Glenn, Ian, and their team of teacher-researchers at the Center for Transformative Teaching and Learning (CTTL) at St. Andrew’s Episcopal in Bethesda, Maryland.
With over 10 years of experience implementing research-informed strategies in the classroom, the CTTL team supplied expertise and offered our faculty an invaluable teacher perspective on how to bridge the gap from research to practice. The primary goal of the CTTL is to intentionally link the growing body of research in MBE science to how teachers teach and students learn, as they continually look at research on how the brain learns from the strongest research universities, including Stanford, the University of Virginia, and Johns Hopkins.
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Why Now? What's Changed?
The scientific community has learned more about how the brain learns in the past ten years than in the previous hundred (Whitman and Kelleher). While we have always used research-informed learning strategies in our classrooms, this professional learning path allows us to help students meet their peak learning potential while simultaneously understanding themselves better as learners.
Our goal, which we have committed to achieving over the next few years, is to train all our faculty in these research-informed teaching strategies and to provide our students with a research-informed toolkit to help them become more efficient, confident, and independent learners.
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Bridging the Gap: From Research to Practice
At Country Day, we’ve always been lifelong learners, dedicated to meeting the growing needs of our students by drawing connections between our existing knowledge and new research findings. As we entered the 2022-2023 school year, we asked ourselves how we could create an all-school professional learning program that would bridge the gap between our existing knowledge and the latest advances in Mind, Brain, and Education (MBE) research, while keeping it all centered around student success.
In Neuroteach: Brain Science and the Future of Education, authors Glenn Whitman and Ian Kelleher explain, “The most important tool that each student brings to learning is his or her brain … but even with their brain there is no assurance that learning will happen.”
As we gain a better understanding of how the brain functions during the learning process, it is essential for educators to be research-informed to best serve their students. In recent years, huge advances in technology have provided insight into how the brain works and helps us better understand attention, memory formation, and the link between emotion and cognition. As a result, research has grown in the fields of neuroscience, education, and psychology. Mind, Brain, and Education Science is at the intersection of these fields, and educational institutions are tapping this knowledge to improve teaching and learning.
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Goal Setting
At the beginning of this learning experience, we identified three attainable goals. Our first goal was to share the latest and most promising research in the fields of neuroscience, education, and psychology with every teacher at Country Day. Second, to build a common vocabulary of MBE terminology. And finally, to set a “10% goal” for the school year in which our faculty would intentionally implement an MBE strategy to positively impact their students.
With clear goals defined, this all-school professional learning built teacher efficacy and has had a profound impact on our community of diverse learners. This work also supported the school’s mission statement, the Portrait of a Graduate, and the school’s progressive roots by prioritizing the cultivation of each child and employing innovative approaches to teaching.
Primer
Over the summer of 2022, our entire faculty — Early Childhood through Upper School — read Neuroteach as a primer for understanding MBE and why we would focus our professional learning time on it.
Beginning with our August workshops, Glenn and his colleagues spent time with our faculty, sharing some of the latest and most promising brain science research. Each teacher was challenged to create a goal centered around an MBE research topic to be implemented in their classrooms.
During our Wednesday morning professional learning time, teachers shared their goals and progress with colleagues, offered suggestions, and brainstormed novel approaches in their work with students. The CTTL team also continued to visit multiple times throughout the year to share more research and provide support for our faculty.
Reflections
For many teachers, this process confirmed what they were already doing aligned with the latest research. However, even the most seasoned teacher had the opportunity to reflect on their teaching practices and supplement or reinforce their work with new strategies that were research-informed.
Some teachers created new lesson plans with embedded strategies like retrieval practice or more intentional formative assessments, while others focused on providing more effective feedback to students. Many students were taught the importance of metacognition as teachers offered time for their students to reflect on their learning, an essential step in the connection between learning and retention.
Continuous Learning: Focusing on Belonging in 2024
This year, we are narrowing our focus on the theme of “Belonging,” and the intersection of MBE and DEIB. Experts from the CTTL joined us once again for our back-to-school workshops to share research and provide time for reflection and goal-setting for the upcoming school year. This year, faculty will spend their Wednesday morning meeting time sharing their progress and offering feedback to their colleagues. We’re excited to continue this work and look forward to seeing how our students benefit from this powerful professional learning.