Knowledge does not equal Understanding

Recently, Shorecrest’s Board of Trustees endorsed the school’s philosophy of education that articulates what we believe are the hallmarks of a strong educational experience for our children. The philosophy includes the belief that students learn best when engaged in active, challenging and in-depth study. Our approach goes well beyond the practice of serving as the dispenser of knowledge from teacher to student. It embraces a learning environment that puts children in the driver’s seat of their knowledge acquisition—and therefore their understanding—by including activities that are both challenging and relevant. This approach recognizes that knowledge of a subject does not necessarily equal the understanding of it.

“Smarter Every Day” is a YouTube channel created by a man named Destin Sandlin. It has 3.6 million subscribers and features a variety of scientific experiments. One of the episodes is called The Backward Brain Bicycle https://youtu.be/MFzDaBzBlL0. In this episode, Destin introduces us to a bicycle that has been re-engineered so that when you turn the handlebars left, the bike turns right, and when you turn the handlebars right, the bike turns left. Showing video after video of people trying, and failing, to ride this bike, Destin powerfully demonstrates that knowledge of how to ride this bike does not equal understanding of how to do it. The reason is that once you have a pathway in your brain that has learned something at a very deep level, it can be very difficult to “unlearn” it. This is especially true for adults as our brains are much less “plastic” than children. In fact, Destin tells us that it took him 8 months to learn how to ride the backwards bicycle, while it only took his young son 3 weeks.

Every day as children leave the Shorecrest campus, they bring home brains with neurons that are connected slightly differently than when they arrived at school that morning. Shorecrest teachers want to ensure that the neural pathways being developed will serve the students well. They leverage what they have learned about brain research to support greater student understanding. Using strategies such as “pair and share” where students pair up and discuss a topic, or having them go through a design-thinking exercise as part of their research investigation are just two examples of techniques that Shorecrest teachers use to promote greater student understanding of a topic. The project approach to learning is another example of how teachers are structuring a learning environment to support greater understanding, not just book knowledge of a topic.  

Recent all-faculty readings have included books that have had deep threads related to brain research and there is a Middle School faculty professional learning community (PLC) whose year-long focus is on teaching and brain science. This group meets monthly and leads the Middle School faculty on discussions related to what they have learned. Last year they attended a conference on learning and the brain and they are in the process of setting up a Haiku page for teachers that will have a vast array of useful, adolescent-focused, brain-related resources that the faculty can read.

As adults and parents, we can also benefit from what is known about learning and the brain to improve our conversion of knowledge to understanding. It is the simple “use it or lose it” principle. When we use our brain in an active, engaged way, synapses are increased and strengthened, and when we don’t, those synapses stay silent, become weak and eventually are trimmed or removed. So encourage your child to get engaged in hands-on activities that he or she is passionate about—then take your own advice.