How do teachers mediate information about the brain?

If we accept that knowledge of the brain is of value to teachers, it follows that we need to develop our understanding of how teachers mediate this type of information. The research summarised below is less concerned with precisely what teachers know about the brain and more concerned with how they come to know it and how they make sense of it. Katzir and Paré-Blagoev (Katzir and Paré-Blagoev, 2006) declare that productive collaboration needs to meet two essential conditions: collaborations should be ‘guided by the goal of fostering inter-professional interactions that enhance the practice of each discipline’, (my italics) and they should ‘be based on mutual understanding and respect for the actual and potential contributions of the disciplines’. However, Anderson and Della Sala (Anderson and Della Sala, 2011) caution that the ‘interaction’ of neuroscientists and teachers is ‘nearly always constituted by the former patronising the latter’. In any case, Paul Howard-