montessori ed

I love neuroscience and more precisely the possibilities for education and human development that are created by increasing our understanding of how our brains work.  Stanislas Dehaene is a neuroscience researcher in France specifically studying how we think mathematically.  This New Yorker article has some interesting ideas for anyone teaching mathematics to children.

Here is a particularly exciting excerpt to whet your appetite…

And if evolution has equipped us with one way of representing number, embodied in the primitive number sense, culture furnishes two more: numerals and number words. These three modes of thinking about number, Dehaene believes, correspond to distinct areas of the brain. The number sense is lodged in the parietal lobe, the part of the brain that relates to space and location; numerals are dealt with by the visual areas; and number words are processed by the language areas.

….

For Dehaene, numerical thought is only the beginning of this quest. Recently, he has been pondering how the philosophical problem of consciousness might be approached by the methods of empirical science. Experiments involving subliminal “number priming” show that much of what our mind does with numbers is unconscious, a finding that has led Dehaene to wonder why some mental activity crosses the threshold of awareness and some doesn’t. Collaborating with a couple of colleagues, Dehaene has explored the neural basis of what is known as the “global workspace” theory of consciousness, which has elicited keen interest among philosophers. In his version of the theory, information becomes conscious when certain “workspace” neurons broadcast it to many areas of the brain at once, making it simultaneously available for, say, language, memory, perceptual categorization, action-planning, and so on.

And here is a sample of the type of brain scans scientists are now able to perform

On Friday, September 18, 2009, Dr. Steve Hughes inspired hundreds of Montessori parents and professionals at the Auckland University Campus with a presentation he calls Good At Doing Things.

Dr. Hughes began by sharing the simple story of how he first heard about Montessori, in passing, from a friend over dinner.  This simple story, complete with slides, engaged everyone in the audience from first time parents seeking to learn more about this Montessori-thing, to  professionals with decades of expertise, because everyone has a similar story about being introduced to Montessori or sharing it with others.  Stories are a powerful tool that Dr. Hughes utilized here to engage the entire audience, which is crucial for maximum effect as a public speaker, before he shared more specific scientific information.  His story, and the triggered personal memories, created an emotional context that helps focus a listener’s attention and gives the extra incentive to stick with academic material that may become challenging.

Dr. Hughes however, did not present challenging academic material.  Instead he presented solid scientific evidence in a clear and direct way that was comprehensible for everyone.  As anyone who has ever attempted to describe the Montessori Method can attest, it is very difficult to condense complex ideas into digestible bits, but this is exactly what Dr. Hughes managed with a seemingly effortless charm and humor.

I won’t discuss too many specifics of his talk, as a screencast is available on his website.  However, I did want to specifcally mention two things.

Dr. Montessori described “Normalization” a century ago, at the birth of the field of psychology and before the invention of MRI and brain imaging technologies, and Dr Hughes, modern neuropsychologist would call this phenomenon “mature executive function”.

There was a palpable buzz of energy in the room as the lecture let out, a shared feeling that anything is possible.   As wonderful as the screencast is, the internet is as yet incapable of communicating the electricity that was in the air as we poured out to our cars.