The Evolved Classroom
An Intro to How Evolutionary Theory Can Improve our Schools
Welcome to my Substack!
I am a third grade teacher in a Hudson Valley, New York public school district. I currently teach third grade, but have also taught fifth and kindergarten. I have a master’s degree in education, I have worked in several diverse districts, I taught a college course, and I taught virtually through the Covid-19 pandemic. Like most teachers, I have a “toolkit” I pull from when designing lessons or making decisions in my classroom. Yet, my favorite tool is one that not many teachers are aware of. It has the power to help understand student motivations and behavior, differentiate material, increase engagement, and overall lead to better outcomes for students. So what is this magic tool? Well, my favorite tool is the ideas that come from evolutionary psychology as it applies to how children have evolved to learn.
Evolutionary psychology, for those new to the topic, is centered on the idea that human behavior and motivations are shaped by our evolutionary history (see Geher, 2013). By understanding this evolutionary history, I am able to design lessons that are effective because they are in line with evolved learning mechanisms and preferences. I was very privileged to have the opportunity to research this topic and publish in a major journal while in my undergrad (Gruskin & Geher, 2018). But, that work has since lived in the ivory towers of academia and my classroom exclusively because I have not been able to share with those who it impacts the most: teachers. Hence, this Substack. I want to spread the word about these ideas and give practical advice about what works, or doesn’t, from an evolutionary perspective. This article is primarily about the theory, the rest will be practical.
The Evolution of Learning and Schooling
It is important here to make the distinction between learning and schooling. Learning can be anything that causes a change in behavior or thoughts. Schooling is formal and exclusively happens in a school building.
Learning has taken place for all of human history. When thinking about evolution and adaptations, we must think of the past. Evolution happens incredibly slowly, but culture changes rapidly. For the vast majority of human existence, humans lived as hunter-gatherers. In these cultures, children would have been left to their own devices and spent the day with the other children in their small, nomadic group. These children would have been of all different ages and abilities, but coexisting and playing together. The older children would have cared for and taught the younger children, and the younger children would have provided an opportunity for the older children to practice and develop their skills. There were no formal schools, but children would have learned essential and relevant skills through their play and by imitating what they saw from the adults around them. Adults sometimes provided guidance, but primarily only when it was requested. Everything was hands-on and the kids drove their own learning. Much of this we know from the work of researchers like Peter Gray (2013). Gray studied extant hunter gatherer cultures across the globe and found that while learning is universal, schooling is a uniquely westernized concept.
Contrast learning with the ideas of schooling, where kids spend the majority of their waking day with a single unrelated adult and two dozen peers of their exact same age. They sit at desks or tables and learn what the teacher says, when the teacher says, without much real-world connection. Kids only play during recess. Work is done with pencil and paper (or computers now), and high-stakes assessments are common.
This type of school-based learning is incredibly novel in evolutionary history and really only dates back a few hundred years to the period of Industrialization when the printing press was invented and the majority of people began to be expected to learn to read. It is not a coincidence that many schools function similar to factories. On the other hand, learning as described by Peter Gray has been around for hundreds of thousands of years. There is an idea known as evolutionary mismatch. Essentially, our brains expect one thing because of the conditions in which we evolved, but we often find ourselves in very different modern conditions. Schools and learning are a prime example of evolutionary mismatch. Kids evolved to learn primarily through self-guided, hands-on, collaborative play. Schools remove much opportunity for this.
While the skills kids now need to know are different and more complex than what was expected of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, these evolved learning preferences still exist. My stance is that by using teaching and learning methods related to how our ancestors evolved to learn, we can create better outcomes for modern students.
My Research
I wouldn’t say all this without proof. My thesis in college centered on these ideas. Myself and my mentor, Glenn Geher, surveyed college students about their elementary experiences. Participants reflected on how much they recalled things like collaboration, play, hands-on opportunities, etc. in their early education. Without getting into the weeds of the statistics, what we found was that students who had experiences that were more relevant to how humans evolved to learn did, in fact, do better than their peers who had an education that was more evolutionarily unnatural. They enjoyed school more at all levels and they had better GPAs in high school and college than their peers (Gruskin & Geher, 2018). Similar work has been done by many other researchers (see Bjorklund, 2022).
The Takeaway
It is important to note that nothing I have mentioned in terms of pedagogy is revolutionary. Many teachers already do a plethora of these things (although there is a push away from play and for increased rigor at earlier ages that concerns me). There are folks who believe schools are inherently bad and cannot be fixed. There are even some really wonderful examples of alternative schools using these evolutionary-based ideas. However, so much of our society is based around free public education for all children. I don’t see that going away any time soon. My belief is that small-scale changes based on evolutionary principles can help to shift the needle and improve existing schools.
Each post moving forward will cover specific topics or teaching methods as well as the evolutionary reasoning associated with them. I have plans to talk about topics such as student behavior, classroom set-up, scripted curriculums, Science of Reading, high-stakes testing, computer literacy and so much more. As I mentioned above, the goal of this Substack is to share these ideas with those in education and empower teachers to add these powerful tools to their own toolkits. I hope you’ll join me as we use these tools from the past to better our classrooms for the future!
References
Bjorklund, D. (2022). Children’s Evolved Learning Abilities and Their Implications for Education. Educational Psychology Review, 34, 2243-2273.
Geher, G. (2014). Evolutionary Psychology 101. New York: Springer.
Gray, P. (2013). Free to learn. New York, NY: Basic Books.
Gruskin, K., & Geher, G. (2018). The Evolved Classroom: Using Evolutionary Theory to Inform Elementary Pedagogy. Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences, 12, 1-13.