Creative Teaching Ideas
Brain Based Learning
Behind the Scenes of Your Awareness

By Chris Laliberte

Brain based learning is a topic that we always get around to any time we try to share or explain Wilderness Awareness School's approach to education, and is one of the main creative teaching ideas we use all the time. We call it "brain patterning", an inquiry into how the brain actually works. Modern neurological brain research in perception, memory, and learning corroborate many of the indigenous approaches to education that Wilderness Awareness School uses as models, and helps us explain why our Coyote Mentoring model is so phenomenally powerful and successful.

Every aspect of learning, every aspect of our conscious experience, is in large part connected to the way the nerve cells in our brains are interrelated. So in essence, all learning is brain based learning. We call the particular ways that our neurons are connected brain patterns. You can actually take a snapshot of your brain activity at a particular moment, and how that unique pattern of energy is moving through your brain cells represents your experience at that moment-sensations, thoughts and emotions.

Where do our brain patterns come from? Not a simple question, but basically, from our guided experiences. We create brain patterns from only two sources: what our senses take in and what our mind focuses on. One definition of "culture" might be "a set of agreements about how to guide sensory input and mind focus to shape the development of brain patterns." The language you speak, the customs and manners you learn, and what you do and do not pay attention to are brain patterns that cultures guide every individual to develop.

Here's where brain based learning gets kind of tricky. What we perceive about our experience of the world is strongly shaped by the brain patterns that are used to process our sensory input. We see what our brain patterns let us see. This should not come as a surprise.

Have you ever bought a new car, and suddenly start seeing that car, in that color, everywhere you go? This is an example of a brain pattern that we call a "search image." We see this all the time at Wilderness Awareness School with Red-tailed Hawks. After a day out watching a hawk soar and discussing hawk habits, people consistently return to us with something like the following: "It must be hawk migration time, because there are suddenly tons of hawks hanging around my neighborhood. They're on all the highway lampposts." No, there's no migration. The hawks have always been there, scoping out rodents and rabbits. People are just seeing them for the first time, because they finally have a brain pattern (caused by the guided sensory input and mind focus of a day in the woods with Coyote mentors) that allows that sensory input to become part of their conscious experience.

When a culture doesn't guide individuals to develop brain patterns for perceiving certain aspects of the environment, we call this "cultural blindness." Here's the rub: when we don't perceive something, we don't take it into account in our decisions, or when considering the consequences of our actions. If we literally don't see the environment, brain based learning tells us that we certainly can't perceive our effects on it, and that's why we believe our contemporary culture makes choices that tend to degrade the environment. Quite literally, "out of sight, out of mind," even when it's right in front of our face: frogs, salmon, birds disappearing, habitat being destroyed and degraded. And of course, if we are not "patterned" to see nature, we do not surround our children with a culture that facilitates the development of brain patterns to see nature, and now we're in a vicious cycle of nature blindness.

We could be angry with people for being blind and blame them for all the things they are doing wrong. Or we can help them to see what they are unable to see. Wilderness Awareness School is dedicated to helping others to see the natural world, and themselves and their communities as essentially connected to it. In our efforts to help people develop brain patterns for intimately perceiving and experiencing the natural world, we look to cultures the world over that never lost their strong ability to develop these kinds of brain patterns, and we experiment with bringing these cultural traditions into the modern context of brain based learning.

One thing that indigenous traditions understand well is the scientifically corroborated observation that creating new brain patterns is most effectively facilitated when the "student" is either very curious, or in adrenalated state. Curiosity is familiar to all of us. Consider how easy it is to learn something you are really curious about - for kids it may be how to play a new video game or use a new toy. Then, consider how hard it is to "force" yourself to learn something because you "should", either in school or at work. Often with modern schooling, it is considered an extra bonus if you can get the students curious. At Wilderness Awareness School, and for effective brain based learning, it is essential. If they are not interested, we won't start until we have around their interest.

The adrenalated state is something much less familiar to teachers in the modern context (unless you count the threat of bad grades as an attempt to utilize this dynamic), and has been steadily removed from our toolbox with the advent of the litigious society that tries to keep everyone "safe." But across the world, young people are encouraged to seek out adventurous experiences, events that get the hearts pounding and the adrenaline flowing, because very effective new brain patterning can occur in these situations. HOWEVER, there's a major downside to this dynamic called "downshifting".

Basically, human respond to an adrenalated state in two way: we can perceive it as a threat, or a challenge. If we perceive it as a challenge, we are able to access our "higher" brain functions in neo-cortex and develop new brain patterns and learn from the experience. If we perceive it as a threat, an entirely different process occurs in the brain whereby the neo-cortex is bypassed entirely, and the response is processed by the very ancient part of the brain often referred to as the reptilian, or limbic, brain. This is the "fight or flight" response, and if this takes over, you are basically on autopilot. This is downshifting, and we've all experienced some form of it: something threatens us, and we respond in a rigid, rote way, the same way we always do, which is often a very childish way (since the patterns were built very early in life). Sometimes, if it is particularly traumatic, we don't even remember our response, because it is so automatic. No significant brain based learning occurs when we have downshifted.

Creating challenging situations for students requires that you know your students thoroughly. You can work with curiosity with anyone. But if you don't know your students, what you set up as a challenge (for example, leaving a student alone to find their way back to camp in the woods) might work great for one student, and immediately threaten another into a downshifted panic. Know your student, come to understand that line between challenge and threat for them, and your Coyote Mentoring can effectively include the awesome learning potential of challenging adventures.

This is probably the most important point of all when considering the mechanics of brain patterning in Coyote Mentoring: we have to stretch the brain, through guided sensory input and guided mind focus, to build brain patterns that attend to more and more subtle patterns and interactions in the natural world. Lead out the student's curiosity - it is your strongest ally in building new brain patterns. Get to know your students well, how they respond to threats and challenges, and then find ways to present them with challenging situations in which they can thrive.

More creative teaching ideas and thoughts about brain based learning can be found in:
Coyote's Guide for Connecting with Nature




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