ANDOVER — Interim Head of School Steve Wilkins joins the Proctor community this year and is writing a weekly blog series on how the human brain learns. This lesson from early September interviews Dean of Teaching and Learning Derek Nussbaum Wagler, as Steve explores the role of engagement in learning.

Engagement is #1: active brains are learning brains. Passive brains are not. That’s not debatable. We see that so wonderfully and annoyingly in three-year-old humans who incessantly ask “why?” and fiddle with anything they can get their hands on. 

We are innately curious as we seek to understand patterns in our world. Even MIT proudly promotes a program in its Media Lab called Lifelong Kindergarten, which is designed to fuel innovation and creativity. Why, I ask, do so many high school students transfer that curiosity out of the classroom, art studio, or athletic venue into less productive activities, such as, for example, social media?

Derek: “When students are occupied in a classroom, art studio, or athletic field, not only are they too busy to be on social media, they forget about their social media.”

That answer is both simple and complex. It all has to do with brain chemistry. Simply, traditional schools can kill the curiosity instinct by failing to find the flow zone (enough challenge combined with high prospects for success) for each student, punishing trial and error by grading down for mistakes, and offering mind-numbing classroom routines. Complexly, finding ways to truly engage the adolescent brain is not easy. 

Proctor exists as an antidote to education that incarcerates students to desks in antiseptic classroom environments. Yet, even at a school dedicated to experiential learning and “learning to live,” keeping some teenagers engaged in a college prep education is a challenge.

Derek: “Sometimes, schoolwork is “work.” It is not always easy, and there is not always an obvious reward; particularly if grades are not a motivator and cajoling does not work. What does work is putting more (not less) of the work into the students’ hands. 

“Ask them to run a lab to answer the question about solubility in Chemistry. Engage them in a historical simulation instead of asking them to read about a particular historical period.”

Elements of neuroscience can help us understand these dynamics. French Neurologist Stanislas deHaene argues that engagement is one of the four pillars of “How We Learn.”  If we placed the highest priority on engaging students in their own learning, student outcomes would improve significantly. Some students seem to be pre-wired for success in school, while others are not. 

DeHaene explains that “the appetite for learning passes through the dopamine circuit.” Dopamine is a neurotransmitting chemical associated with reward, motivation, and a sense of accomplishment. Researchers study the activation of brain regions in the dopamine circuit with subjects under different experimental conditions. 

A key brain principle is that the lower in the brain the activation occurs, the more essential the function is for our overall well-being, in this case in the nucleus accumbens and the ventral tegmental area in our brainstem. The more curious you are, the more these regions light up when doing a task. Exciting the dopamine circuit is essential for effective learning.

The second component of the motivation circuits has to do with a student’s perception of the likelihood of success. Educational ventures into pure discovery learning have failed to deliver improved student outcomes — unless the student has the necessary underlying skills to make good use of experiential learning opportunities. Therein lies some of the brilliance of Proctor’s educational model: experiential learning combined with learning skills instruction. 

Humans have powerful mirror neurons that detect patterns and build neural networks based on models we experience. Successful replication of models, in turn, excites dopamine transmission.

So here’s the question for us: how do students and their teachers get these dopamine-generating regions to activate optimally? How’s that for a question to pique the curious three-year-old in all of us? deHaene provides us with some guidance on a promising approach to creating engagement among our students:

Make active student engagement our number one priority; don’t worry initially about right/wrong answers but rather feed the curiosity circuit.
Engage students’ intelligence with challenges in their flow zone.
Elicit and feed students’ own questions; reward curiosity in educational pursuits.
Undergird curiosity with structured pedagogy that allows for mirroring of essential skills which can make their pursuits rewarding.
Feed the three-year-old in all of us.
Design learning to be a socially rewarding experience.
Focus on making students’ experiences joyful — nothing triggers the dopamine rush like success!

Derek: “Students in metal engineering class walk in the door, grab their projects, put on their safety glasses, and get to work. The same can be said for students in many of our other arts courses. Why are they so engaged? 

“Not because it is easy, not because there are clear right answers, and not because students think these classes are their ticket to a great college. They are engaged because these courses are within reach of their skill set and reward experimentation, creativity, and curiosity.”

What is exciting is that this is not only happening in the visual arts. It is also happening in science classes, where students run their own experiments and discussions and stay after class talking about what they learned, long past when class is over. It is happening in English classes where students passionately discuss a book, in history classes where they participate in historical simulations, and in our world language department where they speak, dance, sing, and create in a different language. 

We know our students are open to putting themselves out there and trying new, uncomfortable things. If not, they wouldn’t be willing to start their Proctor experience with five days of backpacking in the White Mountains. Our responsibility is to continue to craft experiences in all of our classes where students experience the thrill of learning through their work on a topic, task, or project.