BrainCanDo

To celebrate Brain Awareness Week we held our bi-annual BrainCanDo conference ‘Pathways from Neuroscience to the Classroom’. This was an excellent day in which we welcomed leading figures in the field of educational neuroscience to Queen Anne’s School to share their insights into how the latest findings in the fields of neuroscience and psychology can be brought into teaching and learning. The opening talk was delivered by Professor Michael Thomas from the Centre of Educational Neuroscience in London. In this talk Professor Thomas questioned the value of psychology and neuroscience to educators and debunked some of the ‘neuromyths’ that have found their way into education. Next up we had Dr Dean Burnett, neuroscientist, comedian and Guardian columnist speaking to us about emotional contagion in teenagers. This lively and entertaining presentation was followed by our second panel discussion of the day in which Professor Patricia Riddell and Dean Burnett discussed the impact that emotional contagion has on teenagers both within and outside of the classroom. Unfortunately our keynote speaker for the afternoon was unable to make it, but our own Amy Fancourt, Head of Psychology at Queen Anne’s School delivered the talk in her place. This talk explored the importance of working memory to learning and the impact that working memory difficulties can have on pupil progress. We rounded off the day with a series of short research updates from each of our BrainCanDo University collaborators working on projects that are investigating the role of self-affirmation in cognitive performance, the impact of music on academic achievement and the power of emotional contagion on motivation to learn. It was an excellent day all round!