How to Stuff an Empty Brain

By Mark Heydon

Okay, I’m not smart and what little hiccup of intelligence I have left will, without a doubt, hiccup in the middle of the night when I’m too lazy to get up and write it down.  Thankfully, I have outsourced my thinking.  A smartphone now handles any heavy lifting that could cause my gray cells to sweat.  In fact, in my idle moments, I can even hear the little device sucking and slurping away my thoughts.

It occurs to me, though, that what we’re trying to do in education is just the opposite of what our devices are doing for us. While our devices are trying to remove thinking from our minds, we are trying to shove thinking into our students’ minds. This would work if we didn’t make it so difficult for ourselves. Wouldn’t it be easier if we could open up their brain and go inside?  Better yet, what if we could open up our brains and just have our students wander inside?  After all, the brain we really want them to be inside is our own.

Brains

The fact is, on any given day, the teacher’s mind is pretty interesting—at least that’s what the state believes when it credentials a teacher.  A teacher teaches what’s on her mind: the third act of Hamlet, a theorem by Pythagoras, the velocity of a falling object. Ideally, a student enters the teacher’s brain, explores it, wiggles it around a bit, and then leaves with a full memory, understanding and practical application of that experience. It’s not a stretch to see that the classroom is, in real ways, an extension of the teacher’s mind. A student enters, sees, and experiences the mind of that teacher.

What does that have to do with us?  Simply put, technology serves the classroom by recreating the teacher’s mind. We configure the technology that provides the teacher’s mind. But how does a teacher stuff an empty brain if that empty brain is the classroom itself?

Classrooms

Traditional classroom walls are educational dartboards, pinioning the wandering eyes of distracted students to various facts of human history, culture, or science. Walls are often dead space—neglected learning units that are stationary, stale and limited to creating what is usually a vague notion of mood in a classroom. A wall’s chief user is the wandering eye of the recalcitrant student and not the disciplined learner who enters, sits, takes out books and paper and stares straight ahead, unfazed by any change in the environment.

What if we repopulated the walls? Four projectors. Four screens. Four walls.  And a lot in between. It doesn’t take much for the imagination to see Peter Green’s The Elegant Universe being played on one wall as the teacher presents the fundamentals of string theory on another; the visual stills, charts, and images and talk of The God Particle on another; and—what?—Star Wars on the fourth; and the teacher moving easily among the screens and walls. There is nowhere for the distracted eye to wander.  No place, but, well….

Sadly, it doesn’t work. Yes, I’ve tried, but it’s overkill. Worse than lightshow overkill, prepping a single class period is a teacher killer. But for students, the central cause of failure is the lack of interactivity, not interest. The key to learning is taking in the info and testing it out and playing with knowledge. Where can the student wiggle the information around a little, test it out, throw the spaghetti against the wall to see if it sticks?

So what I’m talking about is 360-degree inclusion, where the learning environment is absolute and student involvement is continuous. The holy grail of learning. Teacher’s brain, interactivity, and wowie-zowie!  (And let’s remind ourselves that interactivity doesn’t have to be fancy, just social. I’m partial to a long streak of white paper sheet taped to the wall and a couple of felt tipped markers. Some realia. And pins. Maybe some paint…)

Okay, true, because of failure this teacher’s brain classroom is currently more concept than production.  We’re going to have to wait a bit for more interactive, presentation-friendly devices such as multiple screen projectors and multiple display consoles—and maybe a little more for some Darwinian evolution of the teacher brain to cope with it all. Patience. Patience.  But we can begin imagining it now.

Hallways

There is a place 360-degree tech works and that place is here now. Stuffing works in the hallway.  Teachers use hallways to temporarily store students while they prepare for their next class.  Students use hallways as an intergalactic transportation system, shifting from academic thought to social interaction, then reentering five minutes later into a completely different academic planet.  Ideally, the artificial separation of disciplines, the frustrating disconnecting of English from math or science from art, all severed from coherent, comprehensive thinking, would be minimized by simple reconceptualizing our hallways as learning tubes—hallways designed to contain students in an envelope of continuing learning.

Imagine two projectors (or, better yet, two 70-inch touch-screen TVs) in the hallway, one showing Nosferatu on a wall, the other showing Twilight next to it. Students vote on a kiosk for which vampire they prefer, the scary one or the sexy one and then answer “Why?”  The result is the creation of a flash-learning community made up of students, teachers, anyone casually or purposefully walking through the hall.

Goodness knows, our hallways could use some content.  Sure, there are always the ubiquitous “kiosks of wonder” fashioned out of old, recycled computers built on a let’s-have-a-conversation interaction that take students beyond one-off directions to the cafeteria.  And there’s virtual labs (e.g., Stanford’s http://virtuallabs.stanford.edu/).  Soon there will be interactive wall panels and chairs in the hallways because schools have more to do with their halls than waste space.  “Content is king,” of course, so what goes up in a hallway should be worthy of giving pause to a student who risks being late for a class.  “Sorry, teacher, I was late because we were posting critiques of the Postdam Agreement to our friends in Berlin.”  Has a nice ring to it, eh?

Museums

Yeah, you heard me. Museums. Near as I can tell, they’re the future. I’m not talking about the museums of our childhood made out of stuffed lions and rock dinosaur eggs.  This is the 21^st century. Info screens are in the toilet stalls. Sound and light study carrels run the length of hallways. If you want directions on how to use an entire building for a building-size brain, read Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History’s Nina Simon’s “Museum2 blog” (museumtwo.blogspot.com). My head hurts every time she posts.

Oh where, oh where has my little phone gone?

So, about this future, the future of the brick-and-mortar school?  Apple’s not going there.  Samsung sure ain’t.  They’re busy working on erasing our thoughts.  What we’ve got, though, is what they haven’t got.  We’ve got a place the size of classroom, a social center the size of a school, and we’ve got thoughts that need to occupy the student’s brain.  We’ve got the whole building to use.

So maybe we’ve got to lose the phone.  We’ve got an empty brain to stuff.

About the Author

Mark Heydon is an English teacher and Tech Advisor at Shoreline Unified School District in Sonoma County and a Certified Chief Technology Officer as a member of the CTO Mentor Program Class of 2008. He can be reached at mheydon@shorelineusd.org.