ABSTRACT
Much of what has preceded has focused on teaching, especially how so many current approaches to teaching and assumptions about education do not foster the learning goals we aspire to achieve. A better understanding of what's happening in the brain when we learn makes even clearer why teaching so often fails to motivate learning. It also makes it easier to understand the kind of changes that need to be made. Current developments in neuroscience reveal more than we previously knew about how the brain is structured and the functional implications of that structure. Both brain architecture and operation determine how we learn which has all sorts of implications for how we teach. Not everything we know about brains and learning is easily understood, especially in light of the prevailing assumptions about both, but examples help, and so I have decided to launch this exploration of how brains learn using my experiences learning to read.
