By the Solometrix® Research Team at TAPE.

We believe we are at a transformational moment for the nation and the world, and our resilience will be measured by our ability to adapt and learn. In order to win, we must become the world’s best educators.

We cannot hack our way through the tall weeds of education systems dysfunction without a 30,000-foot view of learning science; any more than we can hack into the hundreds of millions of COVID-19 viral particles scattered throughout the world. We must do better to understand (at the molecular level) how and when human learning occurs, including all the multidisciplinary aspects of scientific, psychological, and environmental impacts for each individual.

“Social distancing” did not emerge happenstance as just a very clever idea; it has been derived from the mathematics of epidemiological research of how viruses are transmitted. We need to seize upon this moment to emphasize the need to embrace a similar multidisciplinary approach to education. We need to blend the scientific, evidence-based facts that have recently defined how the brain’s networks grow through experiences that translate into new branches of neural networks. Activating those networks is highly sensitive to the concept of “attentionality,” which manages our alert state and executive control (reasoning).

We need a strong focus on helping teachers and policy makers understand how this all fits together to build robust mental models of subject matter and decision expertise in our long-term memory. Understanding how this all works will enable us to develop more efficiently students’ “cognition loading” or complex thinking. It’s for those reasons that Tracey Tokuhama Espinosa, a professor of education at the Universidad San Francisco de Quito in Ecuador, (where she is the director of the University’s Institute for Research, Development and Educational Excellence and considered a thought leader in Mind Brain Education (MBE) added “health” to the concept of MBE science to create Mind Brain Education Health or MBEH; the idea being students will be inhibited from efficient accessing of attentional neural networks if they are hungry, sleep deprived, anxious about social networks, or worried about survival from COVID-19. These considerations are important as teachers and researchers work to refine effective learning methodologies.

“3-2-1-0”: Our brain weighs three pounds and has two hemispheres, but only one mind, and no two minds (zero) are alike. We don’t teach all brains in a class – we teach each brain individually. And that’s why it is so important to understand that each brain is different, how that brain works to learn, and ultimately, how each can develop the long-term objective of “learning transfer,” thinking, creating, and contributing to resolving the world’s most challenging problems through MBEH.