A rather explicit and optimistic view of the positive effects of joining the efforts of neurosciences and education, academic research and practice in the classroom comes from the Department of Education of the Darmouth College.
Extraordinary discoveries about how children grow, acquire language, think, reason, learn a variety of skills and knowledge (including reading, math, and science), and how they conceptualize their social, emotional, and moral worlds, have yielded a revolution within the discipline of Education. Researchers have begun to converge on an educationally important set of basic mechanisms that dynamically interact and change over time. This research has taught us the best points of entry for teaching, motivating, and learning specific content at specific ages across development. Much of this research is coming from our understanding of the developing and learning brain. Furthermore, contemporary research is showing us that the growing child’s social context is vital: Families, communities, and schools have the potential to influence positively children’s development through systematic and well-timed interventions. This exciting new research endeavor is called Educational Neuroscience.
The web site describes the existence, and the participation of the Department of Education of Darmouth College to, what is called the “MBE Approach”: Mind, Brain, and Education:
The interdisciplinary approach to understanding the developing and learning child from multiple perspectives taken by the Department is not unique, although Dartmouth may be the only undergraduate institution with a Department of Education committed to MBE. A number of leading schools have similar programs connecting psychology, neuroscience, and educational practice; for example, the Harvard University Graduate School of Education Mind, Brain, and Education Program, the Centre for Neuroscience in Education at the University of Cambridge, and the Learning in Informal and Formal Environments (LIFE) Center, a collaboration between the University of Washington and Stanford University, among others. Internationally, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is committed to fostering links between rigorous research and educational practice, as is the International Mind, Brain, and Education Society.
This trend seems to be considered as related to the recommendation made by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education, hence to an institutional indication to provide teachers with knwoledge concerning students’ mental development:
In June 2008 the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) convened an expert panel to make recommendations to teacher educators about how principles of child and adolescent development are taught, integrated, and applied within teacher education programs and to make recommendations to policymakers about “changing the culture of schools to include scientific knowledge about child and adolescent development.”