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What Is Mind-Brain Education?
Education is full of buzzwords, but mind-brain education isn’t a passing trend—rather, it’s the culmination of decades of research in neuroscience, psychology, and pedagogy. With these 21st-century insights, it's time to rethink some of our core principles of school.
The Basics of Mind-Brain Education
Education is one of those fields that holds tightly to tradition and evolves slowly. Since the turn of the 20th century (over 100 years ago!), reformers and educational thinkers have criticized the standard "Prussian model" of schooling that defines "orthodox" education in the United States—a method based on rote learning, compliance, strict schedules, and fixed curriculum. Today, thanks to advances in neuroscience, we have a clearer picture of how students absorb, process, and retain information. Mind-brain education (also known as MBE, or neuroeducation) applies these findings to create evidence-based teaching strategies.
Key MBE Insights
Bringing MBE To The Classroom
So what does MBE look like in practice? Here's how teachers can apply MBE principles to their lessons:
The Big Idea
Mind-brain education isn’t just for scientists—it’s for teachers, parents, and even students themselves. Understanding how learning really works can help us ditch ineffective methods and replace them with strategies that actually improve retention, problem-solving, and critical thinking.
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Education is one of those fields that holds tightly to tradition and evolves slowly. Since the turn of the 20th century (over 100 years ago!), reformers and educational thinkers have criticized the standard "Prussian model" of schooling that defines "orthodox" education in the United States—a method based on rote learning, compliance, strict schedules, and fixed curriculum. Today, thanks to advances in neuroscience, we have a clearer picture of how students absorb, process, and retain information. Mind-brain education (also known as MBE, or neuroeducation) applies these findings to create evidence-based teaching strategies.
Key MBE Insights
- Brains aren’t fixed. Neuroplasticity is a key term in mind-brain education, but all it really means is that our brains have remarkable potential to grow and change as we learn new things. This isn't a metaphorical concept—our brains literally grow new neurons, prune old connections, and build different pathways as they take in information. What's more, our brains remain plastic well into old age—you may have heard the old chestnut that "your brain isn't fully developed until age 25," but that doesn't mean that it stops developing! The main takeaway, which is relatively self-explanatory, is that intelligence isn’t set in stone and students can develop their abilities with the right strategies.
- "Learning styles" are a myth. The notion that students have fixed learning styles (visual, auditory, kinesthetic, etc.) isn't supported by research, but it's persisted in the popular imagination and even in teacher training programs since at least the 1960s. Mind-brain education research shows us that people don’t have one single learning style, but they do benefit from multimodal instruction—that is, teaching that combines several different modes of instruction to reinforce a concept.
- An appropriate amount of struggle is necessary. Students learn better when they grapple with challenges rather than passively receiving information. Proponents of MBE encourage students to take risks, embrace failure, and struggle productively with material that stretches them appropriately. In the words of Ms. Frizzle, one of our finest fictional educators, "Take chances! Make mistakes! Get messy!"
- Mental health and social-emotional well-being matters—and that includes sleep. A stressed, sleep-deprived brain is much worse at absorbing new information. Schools that watch out for student mental health and invest in creating a safe and supportive learning environment see better academic outcomes.
- Flexibility is key. Just as today's research shifts the way we think about traditional schools, we must continuously be aware of future research to know how we can refine our practice. Teachers, administrators, parents, and students all can benefit from the latest developments in brain science, as long as we are flexible in our thought processes and ready to receive new information.
Bringing MBE To The Classroom
So what does MBE look like in practice? Here's how teachers can apply MBE principles to their lessons:
- Encourage a growth mindset and a healthy approach to mistakes. In an MBE-centered classroom, students should see effort as the path to success, rather than assuming their abilities are fixed or that intelligence is innate. Mistakes are key waystations on the journey to learning—and they're essential for growth.
- Practice active learning and multimodal instruction. Hands-on projects, interactive discussions, and authentic problem-solving outperform passive lectures. Incorporate different ways of presenting a topic across multiple modes of instruction.
- Spaced repetition and retrieval practice is key. Help students "hack their brains" and use research-based memory strategies. Students benefit from revisiting material over longer intervals (pulling the content out of brain storage periodically and polishing it up a little), and from learning/recalling little bits of information over time rather than trying to cram it all in one go.
The Big Idea
Mind-brain education isn’t just for scientists—it’s for teachers, parents, and even students themselves. Understanding how learning really works can help us ditch ineffective methods and replace them with strategies that actually improve retention, problem-solving, and critical thinking.
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