About Lawrence Academy’s Interest in Applying Brain Science to Teaching and Learning

By Alden Blodget, Former Assistant Head of School

Starting in 1987, Lawrence Academy began to question and change its assumptions about how adolescents learn.  We moved from the traditional lecture-regurgitation, teacher-knows-best classrooms to classrooms in which students take more responsibility for learning.  Essentially, we invited the students' "self" into the learning process.  Students became the ones responsible for making meaning instead of memorizing the meanings that teachers made for them.  We spent more time teaching students the intellectual skills they need to become masters of their own learning; we emphasized deeper understanding with less broad content coverage; we asked students to look at the world through the lens of their own experience and to figure out how new knowledge affected their beliefs. 

To achieve these goals, we redesigned our entire curriculum and our teaching methods.  Then in the late 1990s, thanks to the fMRI's effect on brain research and cognitive science, we began to look at the changes we had made at Lawrence Academy in the light of the explosion of new knowledge and theories about learning.  In 2001, Howard Gardner and Kurt Fischer at Harvard introduced us to a young, new researcher named Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, who was working on her EdD at Harvard. 

Dr. Immordino-Yang shared our interest in bringing researchers and teachers together to learn from each other, and thus began a conversation that has continued for the past six years, first with workshops during the school year for the teachers at Lawrence Academy and then with summer workshops both for teachers at Lawrence Academy and for educators from other schools.

You can read about some of the content of these workshops in the Spring '07 issue of Independent School magazine (a publication of the National Association of Independent Schools).

At the most recent ('07) workshop, Dr.Immordino-Yang added a new, powerful layer to this continuing conversation: her theory about the connection between emotion and learning, based on the research she is now doing with Antonio Damasio at the University of Southern California.

Many of the teachers at Lawrence Academy continue to design their lessons and teaching based on the ideas from these workshops/discussions.

From a Letter to Dr. Immordino-Yang

"Your presentation has continued to inspire enthusiastic conversation at our school.  Our small group follow-up discussions on the morning after you were here were probably the best conversations
about teaching we have ever had."

Nasif Iskander
Interim Dean of Faculty
San Francisco University High School