NEW YORK, NY — On a mid-July Thursday at Columbia’s Zuckerman Institute, a large meeting room was abuzz with a dozen New York City middle school teachers. They were the students this time. All week they had been immersed in a first-of-its-kind bootcamp that trained them in the emerging field of Neuroscience & Society: four full days devoted to the relevance of leading-edge neuroscience to everything from how we understand who we are, to how we teach and learn, even to how we might formulate public policy.
“We’ve been learning how everybody’s brain is different,” said Mary Marks, a special education teacher at the East New York Middle School of Excellence in Brooklyn, during a break in this inaugural class of the Teacher Institute for Neuroscience and Society (TIFNAS). “Now I want to teach my students about the brain, how it affects our behavior and how we each learn in our own ways. I also hope to apply what I’m learning to teach more effectively.”
This was a theme echoed by many of the attendees. They left the training revved up with the challenge of bringing their newfound expertise in neuroethics into their classrooms rife with adolescent minds in the throes of development. It’s exactly what the Zuckerman Institute’s public programs team had hoped to hear and see during this rollout of their teacher-training program, which the team and the program’s funder, the Dana Foundation, hope to further develop and then replicate widely.
“We want to empower teachers with confidence in addressing multi-faceted current events at the intersection of neuroscience, ethics and society with greater knowledge, skill and confidence,” said neurobiologist Diana Li, PhD, associate director of education and training initiatives at the Zuckerman Institute and TIFNAS’s lead facilitator.
What became TIFNAS was a mere gleam in the eye of the Zuckerman Institute’s public programs team in the summer of 2023. It took a turn toward the real last October when the Dana Foundation’s Education program funded the team’s proposal with a seed grant.
In July, the program took on life when this first class of TIFNAS teachers spent the week at Columbia’s Zuckerman Institute. There, Dr. Li and assistant facilitator Pooja Bhaskar, a former middle and high school biology teacher, took the educators through a rigorously planned curriculum of panel discussions; collaborative, hands-on classroom exercises; demonstrations, including an opportunity to handle actual human brains; and lesson-planning workshops. A key goal was to send the teachers off with a mindset, skillset and ready-to-use lessons and classroom materials so they could immediately apply a neuroethics lens to their teaching practice.
“We love that this program provides teachers with tools, resources, knowledge and evidence-based lessons that they can use to facilitate discussion with their students about real-world issues in neuroscience and challenging topics at the intersection of neuroscience, ethics and society,” said Kathleen Roina, director of the Dana Education program. “It fits so well with the program’s goal to spark interest in and support education around neuroscience, especially how it interfaces with our everyday lives,” said Roina, who attended two days of the course.
Among the real-world issues Roina referred to is the challenge teachers have in accommodating neurodiversity among their students. That was the focus of one of the panel discussions that anchored the first three mornings of the course. Drawing upon expertise from Columbia researchers in psychiatry, cognitive science and the neurobiology of touch, the TIFNAS attendees learned how sensations and perception differ dramatically across the spectrum of neurodiversity, which includes students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). They also got up to speed on how the environment and stress influence attention and learning.
Neuroethics Teacher Institute attendees. (Credit: Diane Bondareff/Columbia’s Zuckerman Institute)
With these issues in mind, the teachers brainstormed later in the day about how they could rearrange and re-equip their own classrooms in ways that acknowledge and manage these challenges to deliver more effective teaching and learning experiences. They took advantage of their mutual experience to test out their ideas with one another.
“It is so important for teachers and students to accept who they are and the differences they bring into the classroom, because when this doesn’t happen it can lead to problems like anxiety and addiction,” said Melina Melendez, who teaches at the Young Women’s Leadership School in Upper Manhattan. ”Now I want to start this coming year teaching my students about neurodiversity, so they can better see that they, me and all of us have different brains.”
Another one of the big-idea panel discussions centered on the classroom challenges that generative artificial-intelligence technologies, such as chatbots that compose essays from a verbal prompt, pose for students. The neuroscience and society issues come in with questions about how AI could both help and hinder learning, how there might be both positive aspects of AI that middle school teachers should embrace and negative aspects they should resist, and how AI will influence the 21st century skillsets students will need to succeed in high school and after they graduate.
“This is something very current and I think will engage my students because we can easily relate it to their lives,” said Tim Carlin, who teaches 8th grade at Mott Hall II, just a short walk from Columbia’s Morningside Heights campus. “It’s been helpful for me to learn about the neuroscience underlying AI as well as neurodiversity,” said Carlin, who works in an Integrated Co-Teaching classroom that brings together students with individualized learning needs and their general education peers in a collaborative learning environment.
The third expert panel addressed how adolescent and adult brains differ and why that matters in an era dominated by online content and electronic screens. One of the lively ethics-rich discussion topics in this session focused on how memory and learning work differently between adolescent students and the adults in their lives at home and at school. Another focus was on how interactions mediated by screens impact cognitive, social and emotional processes differently than in in-person interactions.
“So much of what goes on socially and what seems most important to my students seem like barriers to me as a teacher,” said Jenna Denino, a seventh grade general science teacher at Quest to Learn middle and high school in midtown Manhattan. “I have to be responsive to their developing minds and what is behind their behaviors, their frustration with learning, their priorities. I hope to use what I learned this week about my students’ brains so that I can be a better teacher.”
This is just the beginning of what could become a model for bringing leading edge neuroscience into classrooms that benefit teachers, students and society at large, said Alissa Mayers, the director of public programs at Columbia’s Zuckerman Institute.
“In the coming months, we will be eager to hear from our teachers about what worked and what didn’t for them, especially as we prepare to recruit our second cohort of teachers in February and refine the TIFNAS curriculum,” Mayers said. Her team will post the application for the 2025 TIFNAS course on their website this fall. “At the end of the school year, we’ll bring everyone back for a summit, so we can build what we all learn during this pilot stage into a successful model for us in New York and for others across the country,” Mayers said. 
Neuroethics Teacher Institute attendees. (Credit: Diane Bondareff/Columbia’s Zuckerman Institute)
