Teaching With the Brain in Mind

Teaching with the Brain in Mind
direct phonics instruction more brain compatible?
Research suggests there is value in each; a combination
is best.
The Sudbury Valley School in Framingham,
Massachusetts, is an example of a school that
understands how reading readiness and the differences
in learners’ brains can coexist. Their K-12
program does not force reading on any student.
They believe that youngsters are already exposed
to thousands of vocabulary words in the world.
Instead of teaching them reading, the school simply
lets students choose to do it when they are
ready. As a result, some children read at age 5, others
at 6, some as late as 10. But according to the
school’s founder, Daniel Greenberg, the school has
100 percent truly functional, literate graduates.
There are no reading disorders or dyslexia, and
everyone likes to read. It’s an approach that says,
“Wait until the brain’s ready to read, then you can’t
stop it!” (Greenberg 1991).
Sweet Dreams
Teachers often complain about kids falling asleep in
school. Is it the parent’s fault or the school’s? Studies
asking why kids seem to fall asleep so often in
middle and high school classes have now turned to
biology. Researchers had already looked at two possible
culprits that, in the end, didn’t seem to matter
much: part-time work and going to bed late. The
answer wasn’t social pressure, either. It was puberty.
Sleep is regulated by many chemicals, including
amines, glutocorticoids, and oleamide, a
drowsiness-inducing chemical substance, says Dale
Boger, a molecular biologist at Scripps Research
Institute in La Jolla, California. A delayed accumulation
of oleamide means a teen’s natural sleep
clock generates a natural bedtime closer to midnight
with a waking time closer to 8 a.m. This
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change is believed to be stimulated by the hormonal
changes of puberty. Sleep expert Mary
Carskadon, formerly of Brown University, confirms
that most teenagers are affected by this critical
biological change in their internal sleep clocks (in
Viadero 1995). “We have kids so sleep-deprived,
it’s almost as if they’re drugged. Educators like
myself are teaching walking zombies,” says Cornell
University sleep disorder expert James Maas (in
L. Richardson 1996, p. E-1). Sleep experts discovered
that teens simply couldn’t fall asleep early, as
their frustrated parents suggested. Carskadon calls
it a “delayed phase preference,” and the body’s
changing chemistry is the culprit. While many
researchers are unsure of the direct cause, the
results are easy to see. They should be able to get
to sleep earlier, but they can’t. It’s like the biological
clock injected amphetamines into the brain.
Milton Erman, professor at the University of California
in San Diego, says, “High school kids are
grossly sleep deprived. . . . [I]t makes very little
scientific sense to make these kids function at
these very early hours” (in L. Richardson 1996,
p. E-1). Richard Allen of the Sleep Disorder Center
at Johns Hopkins University studied two groups of
teens. The later risers performed better academically.
One started school at 7:30 a.m., the other at
9:30 a.m.
Researchers have discovered that at night, the
first few minutes and the last few minutes of our
four-part sleep cycle take us into a theta state.
That’s our own “twilight zone,” when we are half
awake and half asleep. Brain wave cycles here are
about 4–7 per minute as we drift randomly in and
out of sleep. Ordinarily, our waking hours are spent
in alpha and beta time, from 8–25 cycles per second.
During theta state, we can be awakened easily
and often rehash the day or think of things we have