This Is Your Brain on College: Educating Students with the Brain in Mind

Recently, a colleague of mine posted the following on Facebook:

So, in one class I can only cover a fraction of what I have planned because everyone is so pumped for discussion—but then I immediately go to a class where silence dominates. Teaching friends, what strategies have you found work well with small & silent classes? I’ve tried freewritings [sic], having them create (and share) their own discussion questions, etc. One guy just gives me a zombie stare all class period.

(Bovaird-Abbo)

Chances are this scenario is nothing new to most of you. The struggle of getting uninterested or even recalcitrant students to engage in class is a common one for English instructors at all levels, and it is an important struggle to overcome for two reasons. The first reason is that the primary means of teaching students the skill of analysis is through discussion, and the second is that we are often unable to gauge a student’s level of engagement with a text if she won’t communicate that engagement to you. In this paper, I would like to discuss how understanding some of the brain processes can actually help us to engage our students more effectively.

It would be wonderful if discussion occurred spontaneously; if students were so excited about the content and so internally motivated that you could cover only a fraction of what you had planned to discuss. When that glorious moment does not occur, it is up to us in the front of the classroom—professors, leaders, educators—to create a climate in which students are encouraged to explore verbally their ideas because engagement in the English classroom matters. More so than many other subjects, English thrives on the exchange of ideas with students in what can be the zig-zag pattern of their ponderings. According to a Higher Education Report by Charles Bonwell and James Eison in 1991, students must “read, write, [and] discuss” if they are to be considered actively engaged (2; emphasis mine). If a group of students is not willing to exchange their ideas, then gauging how much learning is actually occurring becomes difficult. Granted, you can always read their papers, but we have all been through the hell that is reading papers written by students who have not had the wherewithal to develop their ideas before spewing them on a page and then turning to us eagerly for a good grade. So, regardless of whether it’s best for our students or best for our sanity, engagement and discussion need to happen. The tactics of managing engagement are very different from delivering lectures, and because managing engagement is more difficult, we often see teachers resort to lecturing. That is ineffective teaching in any classroom but especially the writing classroom, where communicating ideas is the ultimate goal. In this light, Craig Adamson and John Bailie discuss the differences between learning and lecturing: “[F]ar from a mere semantic difference, the concepts of education and learning in formal educational institutions bring contradictory assumptions about learners and the purpose of formal educational programming” (140). Adamson and Bailie are making a call to action for institutions of higher learning to reconsider their students and how it is that they learn. In turn, then, how is it that we teach for a deep level of engagement?

The engagement for which we aim is best defined by Helen Marks of Ohio State University, who researches academic engagement and defines the term “as a psychological process, specifically, the attention, interest, investment, and effort students expend in the work of learning” (154–55). Here, I will draw a distinction between classrooms as a place of knowing and classrooms as a place of learning. A place of knowing is an environment that is created through lecture where the professor, the one who does the talking, doles out the information and students are to receive the information. The outcome of a climate like this is that students do not speak because they do not feel that they hold information. This is the classroom to which most students are...