Effective Curriculum Development With Applied Neuroscience

As an educator for 15 years teaching at colleges and universities, there was a point early in my career when I had a great concern about traditional teaching. I had been taught about different learning theories and experienced the traditional teaching classroom of lecturing and exams. I repeated what I was taught, but I believed that my students could be learning more. Sometimes I felt that my students weren’t trying hard enough. Other times, I felt that I wasn’t doing enough to help my students pass their exams, so I kept trying to improve my classrooms by bringing in newer technology and interesting discussions and debates, but I could tell that it still wasn’t enough. Something was missing.

You may relate to my own experience where I felt my degree in education provided me with theories of learning and how to develop curriculum, but it failed to specifically teach how to lecture and develop curriculum that leads to true student academic success. One day while preparing for a class, I ran across some research about teaching to how the brain learns. It quickly caught my attention.

The problem I encountered was that the theories of brain-based learning were primarily targeted to k-12 grade, but I was still intrigued because I teach psychology and concepts about the brain. I began a journey of locating neuroscience articles about what happens in the brain while learning and what happens in the brain while learning and what improves learning. What I discovered for myself was that I could take the science about learning and apply it to all aspects of my classroom – from my lectures to my assessments and grading. I finally found a holistic approach to teaching that was missing in secondary schools and in my classrooms.

There are many great learning theories and strategies, but none are robust for a whole course approach. Most theories taught in education are important but outdated. Once I changed my teaching strategy to being neuroscience based, I saw the changes in my students’ learning and attitudes. I started gathering anecdotal research by comparing my own students’ learning outcome scores from my traditional teaching methods to my new improved neuroscience-based strategies. The jump was significant. Average learning outcome scores had increased anywhere from 10-30%. Some outcome scores were 100%.

After seeing for myself the dramatic changes in my students’ learning, I wanted to share this teaching style within the educational arena – to educators like yourself.

Are you ready for an upgrade to your teaching? I will show you the foundation of good teaching. It’s easy to learn and you can get started today.

With a solid foundation, you can start implementing strategies in a few short weeks. After you learn how easy it is to apply neuroscience to your classrooms, you will know how to continue improving your teaching for the long haul and feel confident that you are transferring your knowledge to the student. You can “be your best educator” starting today.