"We must remember," writes poet Naomi Shihab Nye, "that the one flag that we all share is the beautiful flag of childhood that flies with hope in every country. This is the one flag we should work to serve no matter who we are or where we live."
Nye, one of my favorite optimists, was speaking to a broader audience than educators, but these comments strike me as the unspoken anthem of educators worldwide.
Great educators, of course, know this. They work to serve this flag - passionately. They want to nurture hope in children everywhere. They want to ensure that hope grows as children grow, that it guides them well. Great educators aim to fuel and buoy hope, connect it to the hope of others, link it with knowledge and engagement.
So it is no surprise, then, that so many educators are curious to know what the recent brain research reveals about their work. I hear these conversations everywhere I go these days. We're learning, for instance, about the centrality of play in early education - and now, with support from research, see schools turning away from those heartbreaking early academic programs. We now know more about the impact of excessive stress on the brain and, thus, on learning and health. We know that emotional engagement is essential for academic engagement. We know more about the value of the arts in developing creative, critical thinkers and all around empathetic people. We know more about the importance of relational learning - how to mentor as much as teach. Our view on what we mean by "intelligence" is shifting. We're talking more about brain plasticity. We use the word "myelination" freely. We're talking about metacognition - how thinking about thinking matters, too. We understand better what makes a quiet kid quiet - and why that's worth our attention in schools.
Even with all the new fMRI revelations, and all the new books and insights into how the brain learns, we also know that this is just the beginning. So we keep our own minds open. We continue to pay attention to the research so we can figure out what really matters and how it may help us improve our approaches to teaching and learning.
Another writer I admire, scientist E.O. Wilson, writes, "The human brain is the most complex system known in the Universe, either organic or inorganic." We may never understand everything there is to know about our brains. But it is good that it's in our nature to want to learn more, dismissing what is not useful and studying carefully what resonates with our own observations - aiming always to improve our own skills and the teaching profession.
My wish here is that this conversation on brain science and learning will take all of us a few steps further down the road in our quest for a better, happier, smarter future.
Michael Brosnan
Editor