Neuroscience 101: Might Your Teaching and Their Learning Benefit?

Abstract

This paper's purpose is to explore the idea that if faculty members acquire significant knowledge of brain basics, much of which has been discovered and/or documented in the past few decades, they can be even better teachers. They can use that knowledge to improve student advising --show students how to be more effective and efficient --and, when opportunities arise, enable students to achieve higher levels of creativity and innovation.The presentation begins with a summary of brain features and functions, not at a brainsurgery level of detail, but rather from the perspective of immediate application outside of medicine and inside of engineering education. Building on that foundation, many practical advising and teaching suggestions are offered.The paper then describes whole-brain methods discovered by the author, that is, methods available to assist individuals or teams engage both cranial hemispheres and their conscious and subconscious minds. Suggestions, reinforced with examples/exercises, are offered for ways in which faculty can use the whole-brain tools to help students, especially student teams, be morer creative, innovative, and entrepreneurial.