Published in:

Benally, A. (ed.) 2005. A Handbook for Teachers of Navajo Children. Training for All Teachers. Center for Indian Education, Arizona State University. Tempe,

AZ ______________________________________________________________________

Copyright – Contents herein may not be reproduced in any form or fashion without the written permission of the author.

“Re-wiring” Brain Functioning for Academic Talent Development:

Applying Non-Invasive Neural Research to Classroom Practice as a Means to Develop

Student Capacity to Learn.

Harold G. Begay, Ph.D.

Recent research in both laboratory and human brain morphology suggests that the way we teach

can alter the anatomical properties of the neural architecture associated with cognitive functioning and

ability. With the advent of multidimensional, non-invasive, and non-hazardous imaging technologies,

neuroscientists have been enabled to more thoroughly investigate the significance of the environment to

neural connectivity and associated cognitive functioning. For the educational sector, Diamond (2003),

one of the leading neuroscientist for the past quarter century, has been emphatic that these findings can

have a powerful impact on how learning may be optimized:

The message is clear: Although the brain possesses a relatively constant macrostructural

organization, the ever-changing cerebral cortex, with its complex microarchitecture of unknown

potential, is powerfully shaped by experiences before birth, during youth and, in fact, throughout

life. It is essential to note that enrichment effects on the brain have consequences on behavior.

Parents, educators, policy makers, and individuals can all benefit from

such knowledge. (para. Abstract)

In an extensive review of recent neural studies, Jensen (2002) noted that one of the most

important research developments in non-pathological neuroplasia is that classroom teaching changes the

neuronal brain architecture and its cognitive functioning correlates. Fletcher et al. (2000) further

summarizes the more significant findings in educational cognitive neurology that supports the malleability

of our brain as we interface with the environment. Cumulative empirical evidence from neural research

continues to document that each day in our schools teachers using certain instructional practices can

stimulate or inhibit neurological growth in brain regions that underlie cognitive functioning (Jensen, 2001).

Sylwester (1995), another leading advocate for linking neuroscience to classroom practice, challenges

educators today to become more creative in applying studies from the neural research community to

strengthen classroom practice:

…research involving an enriched environment is important for educators, …. and the enrichment

research indicates that the basic networks regulating a brain’s interactions with its environment

can maintain their plasticity and vigor throughout life if stimulated to do so. Because neurons

thrive only in an environment that stimulates them to receive, store, and transmit

information, the challenge to educators is simple: define, create, and maintain

an emotionally and intellectually stimulating school environment and curriculum (p. 129-130).

While discovery of brain region network association or disassociation with specific behavior and

cognition has drawn critical interest, the ability of the human brain to respond to one’s experiences and

organize or re-organize itself to accommodate and process multiple sensory inputs to functionality or

enhanced functionality is of crucial significance to the educational community, especially in changing and

strengthening classroom teaching and learning (Bransford et al., 2002). Diamond, Scheibel, Murphy,

and Harvey (1985) and Jacobs, Schall, and Scheibel (1993) from their studies

[To access the full article, please contact the author hgbegay@tcusd.org ]

The implications are that classroom teaching and learning experiences can be redesigned and

calibrated so as to neurologically enhance the intellectual and academic capacity of humans to learn at a

much more complex and higher level. Diamond (Diamond, 2003), captioned some recent advances in

neuroplasia as follows:

…these studies and what few human studies have been done, suggest that there are

measurable benefits to enriching an individual's environment in whatever terms that

individual perceives his immediate environment as enriched. At the very least, this work

indicates that there are many opportunities for enhancing brain activity and behavior at

all ages, and that they can have pronounced effects throughout the life span. (para. 14)

From cross-cultural research, the significance of the environment to enhance human learning and

performance in this regard corroborates the importance of providing appropriate “cultural amplifiers” and

“cultural transmitters” to enhancing intellectual and academic ability (Ogbu, 2002). Micro-environmental

stimulation is thus crucial not only to prenatal and early childhood development, but to lifetime brain

maturation, optimizing neural functioning and productivity (Begley, 2002; Diamond, 1999). The findings

that micro-environmental stimulation is crucial to brain activation and maturation adds a powerful

dimension to enhancing and strengthening classroom instruction, the nexus where teachers engage

directly with children and student learning on a daily basis.

All schools could benefit from use of certain enriched teaching modules to stimulate and

strengthen specific neural regions that have been found to correlate highly with cognitive functioning and

enhancement.

[To access the full article, please contact the author hgbegay@tcusd.org ]

Our Brain, A Dynamic, Evolutionary Organ: Implications for Enhancing Classroom Practice and

Academic Development.

Continuing scientific research developments in neurology indicate that our brain is a dynamic,

evolutionary organ, capable of responding to experiences and changes in the form of morphological

alterations in the most dramatic forms (Begley, 2002: Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 2002). The

generative and regenerative neuronal cell morphology has been referred to as neural plasticity or

neuronal transdifferentiation, which is essentially stem cell differentiation or unspecialized cells taking on

specialized neural physiological attributes and functions (National Institutes of Health, 2004; National

Institutes of Health, 2003a; National Institutes of Health, 2003b; Gaurav, K.V., 2002).

Quartz and Sejnowski (1997) from their extensive work in neurology, cognition, and direct

brain-environmental interface, concluded that there is a far stronger dynamics between human

performance, our neurological structures, and the environment than has been previously documented:

…learning is a dynamic interaction between a changing, structured environment and neural

mechanisms. The neural machinery is extensively shaped by activity stemming from the

environment, while its intrinsic properties also constrain this modulation and play an indispensable

role in shaping the resulting structures. … as a consequence, this makes the relation between

environmental changes---whether natural or cultural---and brain structure a direct one (para. 12).

For underachieving school and students, these recent findings on the importance of experience

to neuronal and cognitive optimization are particularly important as these findings reaffirm

underachievement issues as real challenges for the schools and the instructional staff, not so much that

of the learners, their families and background. These developments in brain science offer substantial

support to instructional practices that engage active teaching and learning where exemplary teachers in

particular stimulate and enhance the distributive functional powers [To access the full article, please

contact the author hgbegay@tcusd.org ]

more by experience and the environment in the form of evolutionary changes than simply

maturational innate changes in specialized neural circuitry:

Neural constructivism suggests that the evolutionary emergence of neocortex in mammals is a

progression toward more flexible representational structures, in contrast to the popular view of

cortical evolution as an increase in innate, specialized circuits. Human cortical postnatal development

is also more extensive and protracted than generally supposed, suggesting that cortex has evolved

so as to maximize the capacity of environmental structure to shape its structure and function through

constructive learning. (Abstract p.)

Based on these recent discoveries in cognitive neuroscience, some educators have begun

identifying effective, powerful teaching strategies to enhance student achievement and other desirable

schooling outcomes (Begay, 2005). More and more school districts are beginning to engage

well-renowned experts in neuroscience to apply the recent findings from neuroplasia to classroom

practice as documented by the Bransford et al., (2002) that: 1.) Learning actually changes the physical

structure of the brain (Bransford et al., 2002, p. 115); 2.) These structural changes alters the functional

organization of the brain; in other words, learning organizes and reorganizes the brain (Bransford et al.,

2002, p. 115); 3.) Different parts of the brain may be ready to learn at different times (Bransford et al.,

2002, p. 115); 4.) [To access the full article, please contact the author hgbegay@tcusd.org ]

The quality of information to which one is exposed and the amount of information one acquires is

reflected throughout one’s life in the structure of the brain (Bransford et al., 2002, p. 118); 5.) The brain

is a dynamic organ, shaped to a great extent by experience – by what a living being does, and has done

(Browning et al., 2002, p. 126); 6.) Environmental stimulation, nurturing, can and will greatly enhance

learning to a far greater degree than has been documented in behavioral and cognitive research; 7.)

Long-term potentiation, or exponential encoding, similar to creating a path in walking/running, provides for

ease and efficiency in information / knowledge acquisition. Information is learned multiple times each

time it is practiced (Bransford et al., 2002).

These findings in neuroscience should serve as an impetus in professional practice to build new

and/or different neurological pathways principally through carefully calibrated enriched instructional

teaching strategies to improve student academic performance. It is in the interest of pupil and student

intellectual enhancement that schools invest in classroom teachers to apply scientific findings from neural

research in the design of enriched instructional teaching

[To access the full article, please contact the author hgbegay@tcusd.org ]

learning, phonological and orthographic processing for reading and problem solving, and

mathematical reasoning and textual processing has been extensively documented (Demb, et al., 1995;

Gabrieli, Brewer, Desmond, & Glover, 1997; Illes, et al., 1999; Poldrack, & Gabrieli, 1997; Prabhakaran,

Rypma, & Gabrieli, 2001.; Prabhakaran, et al., 1997;. Seger, Desmond, Glover, & Gabrieli, 2000; Seger,

et al., 2000; Temple, et al., 2001; Thompson-Schill, Aguirre, D'Esposito, & Farah, 1999), the design or

identification of instructional strategies that will strengthen those neurological circuitry critical to higher

and advanced complex cognitive functioning continues to lag. Challenges remain for

educational researchers to now identify or design instructional practices that will lead to enhanced

complex cognitive functioning via neurological morphology.

The respective National Council for Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM, 2000), English (National Council

for Teachers of English, 2000), and Science (National Science Teachers Association, 2000), The College

Board (2000), and Cohen & Lotan (1997), although not engaged in neuroscience, offer the most

defensible instructional strategies wherein instructional programs use higher order critical thinking and

communication to cultivate deeper subject matter comprehension to achieve complex cognitive

functioning via neurological changes and neuronal functioning. Through use of these, and similar,

enhanced instructional practices emphasizing developing higher level cognitive processing skills, all

students should gain

[To access the full article, please contact the author hgbegay@tcusd.org ]

This is a way to more accurately determine and develop student’s intellectual capacities, abilities, and

potential, particularly language-minority students and school children.

Bilingualism and Giftedness.

While the challenges are great, advanced technology continues to improve making possible

anatomical neural mapping, image and morphometric analysis and the like as researchers explore our

brains at work, examining in vivo neural arborization, spining and bouton plasticity. Even with the

limited research activities with human subjects, there are strong promising signs that curricular programs

and instructional practices can be redesigned toward changing targeted cortical regions found to be

crucial to or associated with core academic growth and development. There continues to be increasing

interest in the dynamics of bilateral hemispheric progression, cellular signaling, and neuronal network

recruitment for lost or debilitating cognitive functions, as well

[To access the full article, please contact the author hgbegay@tcusd.org ]

neural network regions of interest for educators are the left frontal brain regions, activity in the left

temporo-parietal cortex, extrastriate cortex activity, especially in the occipito-parietal regions, which are

the neural regions associated with phonological and orthographic processing, the foundations for reading

(Temple et al., 2001). Other neural estates that have drawn critical interest are the bilateral frontal

regions, the frontal cortex, and temporal cortex. These neural regions are associated with

problem-solving tasks, mathematical reasoning, and text processing, and these cortical areas have been

documented to mediate and underlie much of the various known reasoning processes (Prabhakaran,

Rypma, & Gabrieli, 2001; Prabhakaran, Smith, Desmond, Glover, & Gabrieli, 1997). Another critical

neural region of interest is the right middle and superior frontal gyri, left middle frontal gyrus, and bilateral

cerebellum, which are associated with creativity, converging distant association and problem solving

(Seger, Desmond, Glover, & Gabrieli, 2000). [To access the full article, please contact the author

hgbegay@tcusd.org ]

with activity in the prefrontal lobe associated with executive functioning when gifted or bilingual subjects

are engaged in various cognitive and bilingual language tasks (O’Boyle, Benbow, & Alexander, 1995;

Fingelkurts & Fingelkurts, 2003; http://www.bm-science.com/team/chapt2.pdf ; Illes et al., 1999; Singh &

O’Boyle, 2004). The role of strong emotions and categories of memory has also drawn much interest

with profound giftedness. Gifted subjects are able to more efficiently process data sensory input using

these neural regions – they make better use of their brains regions simultaneously.

There is now strong interest to develop or further enhance these specific cortical regions with certain

external cueing, specifically enriched extended teaching practices and activities, which includes the arts,

music, and physical movement education (Begay, 2007; Begay, 2006). Using these studies in brain

research, related cognitive work, the teaching dynamics, and carefully calibrated educational

experiences, one can expect major dramatic positive changes in the academic performances of school

children, changes which can only enable and enhance students’ capacity for immediate and long-term,

life long learning.

Beyond neurocytology, experience and the environment are thus demonstrated as essential and critical

to neurocognitive functioning either to maturation or atrophic diminution. Cognitive scientists have now

established empirical evidence for the seminal neural theories originally advanced by Cajal and Golgi in

the late 1800’s and early 1900’s that the human brain is capable of continuous maturation and

reorganization given specific environmental stimulation and engagement (Bentivoglio, 1998; Nobel

Foundation, 2004).

For Native American students, if we are to see significant improvement in learner outcomes, a critical

mass of teacher-leaders must be trained as master teachers well versed in this form of scientifically

based teaching and learning strategies, and further, embedded in traditional indigenous epistemology

and ontology in human growth and development.

Indigenous Native American Epistemology as the Fundamental Framework for Sustained Effective

Professional Work in the Native Communities.

With Native schools, it is essential that teachers first cultivate their connections with indigenous

Native American epistemology and ontology in human growth as the fundamental framework for

sustained effective professional work in the Native communities. It is important that educators, parents,

policy makers address this fatal disconnection in education that has discredited American Indian

traditional philosophy of teaching and learning for too long (Jester, 2002). Professional development in

schools must recognize that the traditional Native philosophies of teaching and learning represents

another significant cultural educational genre in the global sphere of human learning, and that this cultural

framework is a source of human strength, not a weakness of the human mind.

Romero (2002) enunciates most distinctly the importance of reclaiming traditional Native

American epistemology to meaningful education and adult productivity for Native Peoples. In this spirit

of calling for schools to become more “organic”, it is essential that professional development re-educate

participants to understand that the primacy of indigenous thought and framework [To access the full

article, please contact the author hgbegay@tcusd.org ]

Jackson (2004) further describes how these traditional precepts can be infused into all facets of existing

curricular programs, noting, “This is how the SNBH paradigm has a direct connection to the College

philosophy of Sa’ah Naaghai Bik’eh Hozhoon. This paradigm is currently being used at Dine’ College

and can be used as part of a curriculum development process and also as an assessment tool (p. 8.)”

It becomes a cultural imperative that Navajo schools use their Dine’ traditional epistemic philosophy of

teaching and learning as the foundation for their teacher pre-service, in-service and induction programs.

Equally important, educators in Native communities must also acquire an international perspective on

quality effective teaching and learning to help validate and reaffirm that in classroom teaching, the cultural

foundation and framework are very important

[To access the full article, please contact the author hgbegay@tcusd.org ]

Japanese teachers also make the subject matter itself “inherently interesting” with little interest in

motivating students in non-mathematical ways typically characteristic of American teachers (Pinker, 1997;

Stigler et al, 1999). This pedagogy supports traditional Native American epistemology in teaching and

learning and serious thought must be given to these non-Western practices and perspectives. As

another example, making mistakes while making new connections in science lessons or math problem

solving, but reviewing, examining and understanding the basis for the mistake is another important

distinction with Japanese teaching and this pedagogy is very compatible with the Dine’ traditional

philosophy of learning.

Knowledge about the subject epistemology and motivation, the teaching process, about the students, the

importance of individual differences as well as the strength of group diversity in knowing, the sanctity of

the lessons, and the teacher’s pedagogic philosophy are thus all important to quality teaching with

Japanese education (Kyoshiyo, 1991; Hatano & Inagaki, 1991; Sasaki, 1997; Takemura & Shimnizu,

993; Shimahara & Sakai, 1995, in Stigler & Hiebert, 1999). These features from highly effective

instructional practices from an international perspective are very compatible with traditional teaching and

healing powers of the Navajo people. This approach to education in schools in Native communities is

very much in line with indigenous traditional philosophy of teaching and learning (Begay, 2007; Begay,

2005; Begay, 2004; Benally, 1987). In this vein, renewed thinking will result in system change or

improvement where [To access the full article, please contact the author hgbegay@tcusd.org ]

our schools will be enabled to improve and sustain instructional practices to enhance student

achievement and general life success.

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