HOW WE LEARN by Stanislas Dehaene is subtitled “Why Brains
Learn Better Than Any Machine . . . for Now.”
Dehaene, a professor of experimental cognitive psychology at the Collège
de France, has clearly taken steps to make his material approachable and
memorable, including providing several colored diagrams and images which illustrate
brain and neural development. However, HOW WE LEARN is not a light and easy
read. Dehane begins on a more theoretical level with Part One (What is
Learning?) and offers seven definitions; continuing to Part Two (How Our Brain
Learns) where he devotes an entire chapter to the role of nurturing.
As an educator and librarian, I struggled with finding a
target audience for this text amongst my peers, primarily due to its scholarly
nature and somewhat limited practical applications. For example, I do think they
would be interested in his comments on grades; he says: “Grades alone, when not
accompanied by detailed and constructive assessments, are therefore a poor
source of error feedback.” Other colleagues would likely disagree with his clear
favoritism for explicit teaching over constructivism (or discovery learning) with
further comments like, “The most efficient teaching strategies are those that
induce students to be actively engaged while providing them with a thoughtful
pedagogical progression that is closely channeled by the teacher.” These ideas are developed in Part Three, the
Four Pillars of Learning: Attention, Active Engagement, Error Feedback and
Consolidation. Overall, I am pleased to see so many positive reviews and hope
that Dehane (and the many other scholars he cites) will next turn attention to how
one makes remote learning more effective, especially in these uncertain times. As
Dehane notes, “Numerous studies, both in humans and animals, confirm that
stress and anxiety can dramatically hinder the ability to learn.” For those
seeking more detail, HOW WE LEARN contains over 50 pages
of notes and bibliography, plus an index.
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