In among the minor distractions of a pandemic, an exam-system meltdown and considerations of how to sanitise your board rubber, you may have missed a leading professor of psychology prodding the hornet’s nest of Twitter by asking whether all teachers should “do some neuroscience” and study the science behind cognition.

Professor Daniel Willingham linked to a short interview with another scientist, who had reviewed a scholarly article titled Infusing Neuroscience into Teacher Professional Development.

The replies that followed were instructive. “Yes!” some exclaimed. “Absolutely!” This meant that the professor was forced to reply: “A number of people responding to this with an enthusiastic ‘yes!’ makes me think they perhaps did not watch the video. Our answer is mostly ‘no’.”

It was these “Yes!” responses that set me thinking. They reveal a deep reflexive desire, surely resident in all teachers, to somehow solve the “problem” of learning. What if we could finally understand how to get knowledge into a student’s mind? What if there were a set of evidence-based practices that really made facts stick for good?

For teachers searching for this holy grail, neuroscience seems to hold the best hope - the thinking being that if only we could understand the mechanics of the brain, we would be able to optimise our engagements with it.

However, this idea suggests a model of the brain as an engine or some other mechanical device for which we can tune the air flow, adjust the timing belt and ensure that all parts are sufficiently lubricated. And because, with machines, one can tinker inputs in order to optimise outputs, there is a popular notion that it must be possible to do something similar with the brain. A little cooler in the room, a little longer on a starter, a little more caffeine to act as a fixer for thoughts - each of these has been proposed as hacks to improve learning outcomes.

The belief that ideas from neuroscience should be able to impact learning is very high. A recent study by the Wellcome Trust into how neuroscience is changing education found that “more than nine out of 10 teacher respondents say their understanding of neuroscience influences their practice, and more than eight out of 10 say they would collaborate with neuroscientists doing research in education”.

Yet many of the techniques that teachers then report using are unproven. And, though teachers said that these interventions they had used had impacted academic performance, the perceived impact was difficult to measure.

I know this neuro-temptation for myself. During the summer, my sister bought me a copy of Iain McGilchrist’s seminal work, The Master and His Emissary. McGilchrist’s thesis is that the cliché of “left brain analytical versus right brain creative” is false. But he is also very clear that something must be going on, because the asymmetry evident in the brain’s physical shape is so striking.

His book - the result of some 20 years of research - concludes that the two hemispheres function to pay attention in very different ways: the right side of the brain focuses on the whole while the left is tasked with detail. Because the right side is connected more keenly with our whole physical selves and our interactions with the senses that connect us to the outside world, it tends to be the most powerful influence on our experience.

Yet, McGilchrist argues, it is within the tense dance of these two contrasting modes of perception that culture has developed in the West. Or, at least, it did develop, because he believes we have entered a time when the scientific, laser-focused, analytical side of our brains has become overly dominant.

Extravagant claims, little evidence

Having read the opening section (and the great gushing of praise that was heaped upon it on publication) I scoured the index for mentions of education. It was this reflexive “Yes!” coming out in me: if only I could adjust the kinds of attention that my students were paying to things, then I could hack some deeper functioning of correctly balanced brain activity and see dramatic improvements in their cognition.

In fact, this is, to a large degree, what the Brain Gym movement, which became very popular in the 1980s, was based on. The theory underlying what was more technically known as “educational kinesiology” was that body movements, matched with simple learning exercises, helped to integrate the left and right sides of the brain which, in turn, enhanced learning and reduced the stresses that students experienced when learning in other, more traditional ways.

I have featured in this publication previously on this topic. I wrote an essay here, in collaboration with the eminent anthropologist Professor Trevor Marchand, about his work on the importance of the whole body to learning (“The whole world in your hands”, 12 April 2019). We argued there that the more senses we bring to a task, the more memorable it is. And, speaking specifically about my own subject of mathematics, we recognised that it is vital that it isn’t reduced to an entirely abstract subject, devoid of any connection to our physical environment.

However, Brain Gym’s claims went beyond this. As their website promised in 2008, subscribers could “Learn ANYTHING faster and more easily, perform better at sports, be more focused and organised, start and finish projects with ease, overcome learning challenges and reach new levels of excellence”.

In other words, this wasn’t about the importance of not allowing learning to disappear into a single-sense on-screen experience but about making claims that these kinetic techniques could open up miraculous levels of performance.

A comprehensive paper looking at these claims to be an effective educational intervention concluded that, while Brain Gym made “extravagant claims for improved intellectual and physical development…to date, there is little empirical evidence validating the approach”.

Research like this demonstrates why McGilchrist avoided specific mentions of educational application in his book, and indeed why many neuroscientists are cautious about connecting their work to practical educational applications: it’s a complex process of transition that requires teachers to do the translation, as Jared Cooney Horvath writes for Tes (“Emergent complexity…or why lab-based education research tells only half the story”, 14 June 2019). But this has not stopped others trying to make a connection.

The study, Infusing Neuroscience into Teacher Professional Development, is a good case in point. Teachers who took part in the programme did an impressive 160 hours of professional development on this, over three years. During this time, they studied some neuroscience. They were then followed up by independent researchers to see if they had a) learned this science, b) had, themselves, reported learning it, and c) had changed their pedagogy as a result. The answer to all three was yes. But did this mean that learning neuroscience had improved these teachers’ ability to instil learning in their students?

The key point made by Willingham in the video critique he tweeted about is that, without a proper control group in the study, all it really proves is that a significant amount of professional development is a darned good thing.

When teachers are given time to reflect on their own practice, they will perform better, whether they are focusing on neuroscience or on something else entirely. This is a significant finding in itself: science very definitely tells us is that continuing professional development (CPD) is vital and, with the annual numbers of hours of CPD among England’s teachers some of the lowest in the world, this should be a major area of investment.

But, rather than spend money giving teachers time to develop, the dream remains of finding some neuroscientific hack that would dramatically improve the efficiency (and thus lower the cost) of delivering learning.

Too big a leap

Why do neuroscientists themselves remain deeply sceptical about this prospect? They confirm that there is a cellular basis for learning and memory, and that neural pathways are strengthened or weakened through patterns of use.

The complexity, as Cooney says, is in the translation. Each time we move up a level of interaction - from neurons to circuits and all the way up to cognition - the number of factors that comes into play rises significantly. Raise this to the power of 30 students in a classroom and what you have is a complex ecosystem of behaviours that makes any neural-level “trick” almost entirely insignificant.

Sadly, our innate desire to see this leap made makes us an easy target for flashy edtech companies with glossy claims about super-efficient learning. It is unsurprising that we believe their promises.

With computing power now reaching levels that make our own brains hurt, and with the mystical language of “neural networks”, “artificial intelligence”, and “machine learning” bandied around all too easily, the idea that a digital system might very well hold the key to implanting knowledge in students’ brains doesn’t seem too outlandish.

While there are many digital learning platforms that really do help us to enhance learning, those that claim to be using brain science to vastly improve the efficiency of student performance should make us sceptical because, as one study starkly concludes, “no classroom-ready knowledge from neuroscience is ever likely to exist”.

Yet - especially at a time where hybrid lessons and so much online guided home learning is being pushed - this conclusion should actually be a source of great encouragement. It is precisely because a classroom is such a sophisticated and unique ecosystem that it cannot be reduced easily, and cannot be managed adequately, by a machine.

Digital machines work on an individual level but this atomisation of students presents a narrow perspective on understanding. What experienced teachers are doing day in, day out is something far more incredible. Without always knowing it, teachers are performing high-level skills and adapting myriad techniques in real time, as they respond to a whole room of students.

This is perhaps the best answer to the question of whether all teachers should study neuroscience. Yes, they should, because they will then immediately see that there is no neuroscience hack that can magically transform their teaching. What they will realise, instead, is just how incredible their own invisible skills are. Working within a massively complex ecosystem of 30 individual brains in a room, teachers perform miracles of pedagogy as they push down through the macro levels of cognition and begin to affect the electrochemical state of neurons.

Rather than investing in the mythic holy grail of developing software that will open some shortcut to understanding, the education system should put much more money into the professional development of teachers. It’s not brain surgery, but the science backs it up.

Kester Brewin has taught mathematics across a wide variety of schools for the past 20 years. He tweets @kesterbrewin

This article originally appeared in the 2 July 2021 issue under the headline “Stop seeking the cognitive holy grail”