One hour public talk at the Melbourne Brain Centre

The Tribal Classroom: Optimizing Learning through the Social Neuroscience of Attachment

Louis Cozolino, Ph.D.

Over the last fifty years, the faith that past generations may have placed in education as a path to economic opportunity has been eroding. Many no longer view public education as a worthwhile investment, making it increasingly vulnerable to declines in resources and quality. This shift is reflected in rates of student dropout, teacher burnout, and a flight to private and home schooling. In some quarters, the perception of public schools has shifted from a solution to social and economic problems, to a problem in and of itself.

In this talk, Louis Cozolino will address this challenge and more, through the lens of human relationships. The goal of this workshop is to teach participants how an understanding of brain evolution, social neuroscience, and group behavior can inform, impact, and change our approach to education in powerful ways. By placing healthy and secure attachment at the center of learning, he argues, we can turbocharge plasticity, enhance learning, and improve schools.

The core message is that our brains have been shaped for tens of thousands of years to learn within a matrix of intimate relationships in dyads, families and tribes. The neurochemistry and primitive instincts that drives these basic social connections also stimulate the biochemistry and neural growth required for learning. In other words, relationships and learning have co-evolved – a reality that is largely ignored in contemporary education.

The establishment of secure attachments is of special importance for students from dysfunctional home environments, dangerous communities, or who possess brains that learn in “non-conventional” ways. For these students, the present public education system is an especially poor fit because they lack the safety, attachment security, and acknowledgement necessary to develop the self-esteem, emotional regulation, and motivation required to learn. Is it any wonder why so many students fail and/or drop out?

Interweaving the stories of some notably “successful” teachers and how they were able to reach “unteachable” students, Cozolino will reveal their big secret: they were able to create a classroom environment that simulated the context in the brain evolved to learn, where students feel connected and motivated and teachers feel rewarded by positive attachment and empowered by students’ success. This is the environment Cozolino hopes to reactivate by returning to some basic principles of evolution and neuroscience, giving teachers and students a new way to think about learning and a renewed hope of achievement.