By Charlotte and Melinda

At Syncreate, we’re interested in what the brain has to teach us about how to grow connections, transform communities, and foster adaptability.  So far our investigations have lead us into discussions and presentations about the neuroscience of creativity, and the ways in which educators and leaders can strategically build creative communities. As community college professors, we are currently exploring the ways neural pathways grow, strengthen, and become pruned.  

We constantly keep these questions in mind:

• Can educators take inspiration from neural networks to create relational links that weave students and content more tightly together?

• If we encourage students to see themselves and their peers as resources, could we create a buzz within learning communities that encourages new and meaningful connections between people, ideas, and real-world challenges?

• How can play, ritual, and community-building exercises create new neural pathways through kinesthetic, embodied learning?

We don’t necessarily have all these answers to these questions, but we believe asking the questions may reveal the path to becoming more effective, engaged, and collaborative in our educational work.

New insights into neural architecture, (also known at the connectome) such as the work of Dr. Van J. Wedeen of the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at Massachusetts General Hospital, reveal the deeply interwoven quality of the brain’s structure (see “New Discoveries in Brain Structure and Connectivity”). In addition, current neuroscience research offers exciting insights, such as the brain’s incredible ability to artfully enhance helpful connections or prune away unused pathways.  Every synapse creates a connection and the more times a neuron fires, the stronger a synaptic connection becomes. In other words, the brain changes with every new experience and nothing exists in isolation. We’d like to suggest that with every experience in the classroom (and within the institution itself), the student’s brain, thinking process, and understanding of the world changes. Educators who embrace this idea become empowered to skillfully plan classroom lessons, discussions, and activities to facilitate more powerful and lasting connections.

Each student is part of the classroom “brain,” if you will. It’s not that teachers stand in the front of the classroom and transmit ideas; instead, teachers can facilitate connections and pathways between students. However, in order for this to work well, we first have to acknowledge the creativity, unique perspectives, and resiliency of each student present. If we don’t, we might unwittingly “prune” the student from the necessary pathways he/she needs to connect, comprehend, and succeed. For example, the website Mindfulness Starts Here states, “Neural pruning is the process of removing neurons that are no longer used or useful in the brain.”  For those students who don’t have a positive family history or positive personal experiences with school and/or higher education, the figurative neural connection to the classroom may be shallow or tenuous, and therefore it only takes a few experiences of isolation to “prune” the student from engaging in the classroom.

Educators interested in enhancing connection can welcome a sense of play and associative thinking by conceptualizing the classroom as a type of extra-neural network that fosters meaningful connection, encourages empathy, honors student well-being, implements strategic collaboration, and emphasizes creative problem solving. At the heart of the neural classroom is a faith in creativity to forge new pathways and to connect students in meaningful ways so that each person is woven into the fabric of the learning environment. Many teachers already do this by encouraging students to work together outside of the classroom on collaborative projects. Learning to work with others isn’t just a social skill; it’s essential in both drawing out the strengths of each student and interlacing individuals to ensure the resiliency of the entire classroom.

We suggest that promoting creative/associative thinking can teach students how to value their own ideas and learn to enjoy the process of thinking. How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci author Michael Gelb offers many creativity-enhancing activities, including an exercise of comparing two seemingly unrelated items or concepts. Taking this into the classroom, teachers can ask students to consider what two disparate ideas have in common and write all of their answers on the board. Students thus learn to take risks (for example, a bird is like a typewriter because they both can involve pecking; the array of typebars is similar to a bird’s rib cage) and create connections to other students who resonate with their analogies. If educators can prioritize a portion of teaching time to making creativity a daily exploration, students learn courage, adaptability, and collaboration. Indeed, Linda Smarzik, author of The Mind of Thuse!! Thriving With Effortlessness, observes, “Taking small risks, and doing so consistently, shifts us out of our comfort zones into the process of creativity.”

Additionally, the instructor who emphasizes collaboration, active listening, and dialogue might, in fact, be using neural mimicry to weave together a classroom that breeds student success. Creativity can enhance neuroplasticity (the dynamic process of brain rewiring), which can serve as a classroom strategy for reaching all students and weaving them into the fabric of engagement and success.

If you find this concept worthy of further exploration, please vote for our proposed “The Classroom as a Neural Network” topic at the 2014 SXSW Education Conference (SXSWedu) PanelPicker forum. It will take about two minutes of your time. Voting opens Monday, August 19 and closes Friday, September 6, 2013. Thank you for your support!

By Charlotte

In the creative process, so many challenges arise, and as a writing teacher, these challenges seem to boil down to two essential cries of the critic:

1)    what you want to create has no value, and/or

2)    you don’t have the skills to deliver on the idea that has come to you

What I have learned to live and learned to teach centers on this concept: since the idea has come to you, there is no one other than yourself to birth the message to the world. It is through your own five senses that you will be able to bring forth the vision–it is the air you breathe, the road under your own specific feet, the smell of cumin in the Israeli souq that epitomizes your year in Tel Aviv—it is these exact things that will bring forth the idea that has been born within your private landscape. There is no other filled with the sense of this specific story, this specific sculpture, this painting. What you sense is worth bringing forward has arrived singly to you, and it is this singularity that both thrills and terrifies us.

Once a person can accept that the idea, the vision, is worthwhile, he or she has to come to terms with the reality that the necessary skills may not be available in one’s current tool kit. I would offer that it is only through time and practice that one can find the insight necessary to birth the message.

More specifically, I am thinking of my friend Amy, who lived for a year in Israel, working for a time at the Diaspora Museum, the Museum of the Jewish People. She lived in an apartment that held a sentinel tree in the courtyard and a door barred by a large piece of furniture. One night she decided to re-arrange and moved the wardrobe. To her surprise, she discovered a small room and in it, a box of letters from a woman to her brother, both political refugees from Russia; the sister resolved to be part of the Jewish settlement in Israel, and the brother went to Paris to cultivate his screenwriting/directing (and when the Nazis invaded he had to flee France, being on a list of most wanted of theirs. He made it to the US and finally to Hollywood where he continued his career).

I won’t give away all the electrifying details, but Amy’s discovery of that box has led her to meet new people and to know the world through an important, altered lens, and yet, the book that is waiting to be born remains unborn because Amy needs to arrive—to the place within herself that understands process, the development of skills, and the power of drafts. There is no one else to tell this story, and I firmly believe she is only one to bring this story to the world.

Like so many of us, Amy struggles with her faith in her ability to do justice to the story. Perhaps we sometime confuse humility with doubt—perhaps there’s more comfort in discounting our ideas because we sense the amount of learning we will have to embrace. Amy’s experience is profound and worth sharing; I only hope she comes to the point where she allows process to teach her what she needs to know about the story, about the nature of the human experience.

I’m ready to read the book of her experience. I’m trusting she will write it when both the confidence and the faith in process combine to give her the courage to pen the story.