The Hospital School at Westmead uses specialist knowledge to develop and apply neuroscience to education. We have been looking at evidence-based research, from neurological findings, to develop learning strategies to promote learning in alignment with the way the brain is naturally designed to learn.
When thinking about the brain, we have to understand that the brain grows from the bottom to the top. As the brain is naturally geared to survival, we as educators have to understand that to move our students from the brainstem to the cortex, we have to look at the effects of the environment. We need to understand that the human brain is moulded by the environment and the interactions we encounter in these environments.
With the support of a specialised teacher and brain-based teaching strategies, classroom spaces have been developed mindfully to create an optimal learning environment for our students.