or sharing evidence widely. That means the most important evidence is “locked” up in journals, which are often behind paywalls, and does not get to the people who need it—in this case, educators, managers, and parents.
Changing Perceptions and Brains
It is the lack of opportunities for important knowledge to get to the people who need it that prompted Cathy Williams and me to start youcubed. This is a Stanford center and website (youcubed.org) dedicated to getting research evidence on learning to the people who need it—especially teachers and parents. We are now in a new era, and many neuroscientists and doctors are writing books and giving TED Talks in order to bring people new information. Norman Doidge is one of the people who has done a great deal to change perceptions and share the new and important brain science.
Doidge is a medical doctor who has written an incredible book with the title The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science. The book is exactly what the title describes; it is filled with inspiring examples of people with severe learning disabilities or medical conditions (such as a stroke) who, although written off by educators and doctors, have undergone brain training and recovered completely. Doidge works to shatter a number of myths in the book, such as the idea that separate brain areas are compartmentalized and don’t communicate or work together and, most important, the idea that brains don’t change. Doidge describes the “dark ages” when people believed that brains were fixed, says that he is unsurprised that people are slow to understand the plasticity of the brain, and suggests that it will take an intellectual “revolution” for them to do so.8 I agree, because over the last few years in my teaching about the new brain science I have met many people who seem unwilling to make the shift in their understanding of the brain and human potential.
The vast majority of schools are still inside the fixed-brain regime. Schooling practices have been set over many years and are very difficult to change. One of the most popular is tracking, a system in which students are placed in groups based on their supposed ability and then taught together in those groups. A study in Britain showed that 88 percent of students placed into tracks at the age of four remained in the same track for the rest of their school lives.9 This horrific result does not surprise me. Once we tell young students they are in a lower-track group, their achievement becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The same is true when teachers are told which tracks students are in; they treat students differently whether they intend to or not. Similar results were found in a study of nearly twelve thousand students from kindergarten to third grade in more than twenty-one hundred schools in the US.10 None of the students who started out in the lowest reading group ever caught up to their peers in the highest group. Such policies of placing students in groups based on their supposed level of ability may be defensible if it resulted in higher achievement for the low-, middle-, or high-achieving students, but it does not.
Studies of schools’ tracking policies in reading show that those schools that use tracked reading groups almost always score lower on average than schools that do not.11 These results are echoed in mathematics. I have compared students learning mathematics in middle and high schools in England and the US, and in both school levels and countries the schools that taught students in mixed achievement groups outperformed those that used ability groups.12
San Francisco Unified is a large and diverse urban school district whose school board voted, unanimously, to remove advanced classes until eleventh grade. This prompted a lot of controversy and opposition from parents, but within two years, during which all students took the same mathematics classes until tenth grade, algebra failure rates fell from 40 to 8 percent of students in the district and the number of students taking advanced classes after tenth grade went up by one-third.13
It is hard to imagine that the teaching practices of the district teachers changed dramatically in two years, but what did change were the opportunities students received to learn and the ideas students believed about themselves. All students, instead of some students, were taught high-level content—and the students responded with high achievement. International studies of achievement in different countries across the world show that countries that use tracking the latest and the least are the most successful. The US and the UK, two countries in which I have lived and worked, have two of the most highly tracked systems in the world.
Nobody knows what children are capable of learning, and the schooling practices that place limits on students’ learning need to be radically rethought. Someone whose story illustrates most clearly for me the need to change our expectations of young children is Nicholas Letchford. Nicholas grew up in Australia, and in his first year of school his parents were told that he was “learning disabled” and had a “very low IQ.” In one of his mother’s first meetings with teachers, they reported that he was the worst child they had seen in twenty years of teaching. Nicholas found it difficult to focus, make connections, read, or write. But over the next few years Nicholas’s mother, Lois, refused to believe that her son could not learn, and she worked with Nicholas, teaching him how to focus, connect, read, and write. The year 2018 was an important one for Lois Letchford. It was the year that she published a book describing her work with Nicholas, called Reversed,14 and it was also the year Nicholas graduated from Oxford University with a doctoral degree in applied mathematics.
Research and science have moved beyond the fixed-brain era, but fixed-brain schooling models and limited-learning beliefs persist. As long as schools, universities, and parents continue to give fixed-brain messages, students of all ages will continue to give up on learning in areas that could have brought them great joy and accomplishment.
The new brain science showing that we have unlimited potential is transformative for many—and that includes those diagnosed with learning disabilities. These are individuals who are born with or develop, through injury or accident, physical brain differences that make learning more difficult. For many years, schools have traditionally put such students into lower-level classes and worked around their weaknesses.
Barbara Arrowsmith-Young takes an entirely different approach. I was fortunate to meet Barbara on a recent visit to Toronto, during which I toured one of the incredible “Arrowsmith” schools she has set up. It is impossible to spend time with Barbara and not realize that she is a force to be reckoned with; she is passionate not only about sharing her knowledge of the brain and how we develop it, but in using her knowledge to change the neural pathways of those diagnosed with special educational needs through targeted brain training.
Barbara is someone who was herself diagnosed with severe learning disabilities. As she was growing up in Toronto in the 1950s and 1960s, she and her family knew she was brilliant in some areas, but they were told she was “retarded” in others. She had trouble pronouncing words and could not engage in spatial reasoning. She could not follow cause-and-effect statements, and she reversed letters. She was able to understand the words “mother” and “daughter,” but not the expression “mother’s daughter.”15 Fortunately for Barbara, she had an amazing memory and was able to memorize her way through school and hide what she knew was wrong.
As an adult her own disabilities prompted her to study child development, and eventually she came across the work of Alexander Luria, a Russian neuropsychologist who had written about stroke victims who had trouble with grammar, logic, and reading clocks. Luria worked with many people with brain injuries, produced an in-depth analysis of the functioning of various brain regions, and developed an extensive battery of neuropsychological tests. When Barbara read Luria’s work, she realized she herself had brain injuries, became quite depressed, and started to consider suicide. But then she came across the first work on neuroplasticity and realized that particular activities could produce brain growth. She began months of detailed work on the areas she knew she was weakest in. She made herself hundreds of cards with clock faces and practiced so much she was reading them faster than “regular” people. She started to see improvements in her symbolic understanding and
