My blogging goal is to engage the Proctor Community in a yearlong conversation about how the human brain learns. Each blog will feature a member of the Proctor faculty responding to my thoughts on neuroscience and learning. Shauna Turnbull, Head of the English Department, is my co-thinker for this blog.
Lesson #9: The Salience Network
My favorite question when providing professional development to educators is: What is the role of the teacher? My favorite answer is: To believe that every student in your care has the capacity to grow and change in significant ways. That answer applies the concept of neuroplasticity to our classroom practice.
Shauna: One of my favorite things about teaching high school, and often teaching both 9th graders and 12th graders at the same time, is seeing the enormous growth students experience between those academic years. And this growth isn’t just in the difference between concrete thinking and abstract reasoning, but in the confidence students have that their ideas matter, that they can articulate their arguments and questions in new and sophisticated ways that will engage their teacher, their peers, and their own curiosity. One of the ways we help foster that change is by continually asking questions, starting with our 9th graders: “Who are you? What do you value? How do you protect, embrace, and celebrate your sense of self as you navigate an increasingly complex world?” As we move through the next three years, we begin shifting to a more outward perspective: “How does this particular text teach us something about the universal human condition, and then what do we do with that knowledge?” The literature we read, the essays we write, the projects we complete, and the presentations we give allow all of us, students and teachers alike, myriad ways to explore our ideas of what it means to be human and how to use that knowledge to move through this world with empathy and curiosity.
The role of the teacher, though, is changing rapidly before our eyes. We are firmly enmeshed in an age when Claude and artificial intelligence can provide answers- and even well-constructed essays- that a high school student might think satisfy their academic obligations. It has gotten a lot harder to engage a teenager in academic achievement when there are so many stimuli competing for their attention.
Shauna: There have always been shortcuts to which students gravitate (remember those racks of Cliff’s Notes in bookstores?), which is why it is imperative we continue to show how our authentic, original ideas have merit and power. Regular opportunities to reflect informally on what they’ve read (like in the short, daily, analog journaling exercises I saw in Jen Summers’s English Seminar this week), or holding multiple formal Harkness discussions throughout the year are just two examples of avenues for inquiry, but they’re important. Students have agency in these moments, and that power to engage has ripple effects beyond the sixty minutes in the classroom.
In addition to shortcuts, there have also always been distractions - I’m reminded of those days teaching in lower Maxwell Savage 11, before we put up frosted window decals, when the FedEx truck would roll up while students were in the middle of taking an exam (imagine trying to write an essay on Chaucer while that might be your package coming in on the dolly!) Adhering to the Threshold Rule (no laptops or phones out past the threshold of the room, even before class begins) can be difficult for some students at the beginning of the year, but it becomes second nature for most pretty quickly, and I love walking into a room full of student conversation and social buzz. It may feel like an onerous directive, but allowing students the space to disconnect from the online world and reconnect with the palpable, human world in front of them can be both grounding and empowering.
Enter “The Salience Network” of the human brain. The role of this complex system of neural connections is to determine which incoming stimuli are worthy of our attention. Perhaps that is the job of the teacher. Teach students what is worthy of their attention.
Shauna: This is the age-old question, isn’t it? And while entertaining stimuli may have become easier to access, the innate curiosity of young people remains, and the purpose of an educator, especially at this point in our history when so many things are vying for their attention, is to help them access, focus, and feed that curiosity. The distractions have most certainly evolved, but so have the tools to expand our understanding of the world. We are so fortunate to live and work in a community that provides such incredibly diverse options for our students (and adults) to learn more about and invest in the things that matter to them most.
Or perhaps it is the other way around. Focus our efforts on what today’s teenagers think is worthy of their attention. Undoubtedly, the job of the teacher is to strive to intrigue their students by emphasizing the meaning, beauty, utility, wonderment, joy, and importance of the task at hand.
Shauna: When we make a connection, when we see something new where earlier we saw nothing, there is a joyful sense of discovery that transcends that particular moment. I had a student stop in between classes last week who just wanted to tell me how much the end of The Great Gatsby had affected him. He said that previous books he had read for school seemed very surface level, but that the ending of Gatsby changed the way he thought about literature and what it could offer him. As a teacher, I couldn’t be happier to hear that, as I’m often telling students that despite the number of times I have read a novel, I’m always learning something more about a text, and often it’s because of the conversations I have with students - like last year when Lily Zhang ‘24 and Ben Biagiotti ‘24 finally explained the Calculus equation embedded in the final act of Grendel, a section of the novel that has eluded me for years!
We talk a lot about engagement at Proctor. Engagement in learning requires activation of the salience network which causes people to pay more attention to certain types of information and to disregard others. Creating learning experiences for today’s teenagers that activate their salience networks is definitely the job of the teacher: (1) Capture student attention, (2) Connect to student emotions, (3) Foster metacognitive skills, (4) Provide useful feedback, and (5) Cultivate curiosity.
Shauna: I used to have a poster on my classroom wall with a quote from Goethe: “If I accept you as you are, I will make you worse. However, if I treat you as if you are that which you are capable of becoming, I will help you become that.” Meeting students where they are is the cornerstone of our pedagogy. But recognizing who students are while simultaneously believing in the promise of who they can become is the most important part of what we do. Helping them eschew extraneous noise while identifying that which will help them become their best selves is what makes our jobs so important - and rewarding. Thanks, Steve, for inviting me into the conversation!
Read more from Steve Wilkins' "Learning and the Brain" blog post series
- Academics
- Head of School
- Learning and the Brain