The quality of education hinges on the quality of teachers (Barber and Mourshed, 2007; Engelbrecht and Ankiewicz, 2016; Boeren, 2019; Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, 2020). Teachers’ continual professional development (TCPD) covers a wide range of topics (e.g., pedagogy, evaluation, planning, classroom management, social–emotional learning), subject areas (e.g., art, reading, mathematics, STEM), life skills appreciation (e.g., collaboration, critical thinking, social–emotional learning), and should exists throughout one’s professional career (Sancar et al., 2021). There are few if any opportunities, however, for teachers to learn how these topics, subject areas, and life skills are supported by neural networks in the brain (Dubinsky et al., 2022), and fewer still about how to improve them (Peters et al., 2020). Understanding the neural underpinnings of knowledge building in the brain—or neuroconstructivism—may create useable knowledge for teachers.

Placing TCPD within the “messiness” of classrooms (Tokuhama-Espinosa, 2014) and the relevance of cultural contexts (Hammond, 2014) may also contribute to improved learning outcomes as it acknowledges the ways one’s learning is influenced by other actors. This dynamic exchange between students-to-students and students-to-teachers and vice versa influences what a learner takes from teaching and, consequently, changes what is learned (Bevilacqua et al., 2019). Recent research shows how individuals co-construct learning experiences (Vieluf and Klieme, 2023), which elevates the role of “others” in individual learning to the extent of deserving the label “radical” (Von Glasersfeld, 1995, 2013). Radical constructivism suggests that an individual’s ability to learn is changed by context. To unite neuroconstructivism with the dynamic exchange of learning between actors, we propose a new theory of radical neurocontructivism.

The transdisciplinary field of Mind, Brain, and Education is uniquely positioned to support research into the theory of radical neuroconstructivism as it encompasses micro-level research at the level of neurons, to consideration of individual genetic and epigenetics traits, to the individual in within classroom dynamics, and all the way to macro-level research that consider social and cultural influences on learning (see Figure 1).

Despite the growth of the International Mind, Brain, and Education Society founded in 2007, and the Neuroscience and Education Special Interest Group of the European Association for Research on Learning and Instruction founded in 2010, advancements in designing a curriculum for teachers’ professional development around concepts from neuroscience have been few and far between. To explore the potential contributions of radical neuroconstructivism theory to benefit teacher education, the first part of this paper defines and uses holonic thinking, a Greek word meaning something that is once a part and a whole. Holonic thinking is a newer conceptual framework to explain the relationships between the many elements in the educational process. This is followed by a brief historical overview of teachers’ professional development between the 1980s and today, which shows radical neuroconstructivism as a natural outgrowth of past advances. The second part of the paper offers an example of early childhood education in math and language using studies from neuroscience that are the puzzle pieces of learning trajectories in these two domains. The paper concludes by summarizing how the how (pedagogy), what (curriculum), and why (Mind, Brain, and Education science) of radical neuroconstructivism may improve teacher education (Figure 2).

In one of the most famous philosophical psychological undertakings, Arthur Koestler’s The Ghost in the Machine (Koestler, 1967) observes that all things are both parts and wholes, which he labeled holons. “A holon, as Koestler devised the term, is an identifiable part of a system that has a unique identity yet is made up of sub-ordinate parts and in turn is part of a larger whole” (Edwards, 2003, para. 19). Later, Ken Wilber used holons to explain his All Quadrants, All Levels framework (AQAL), which showed the hierarchical nature of each part and whole (Wilber, 2001). This allowed Gallifa (2019, p. 15) to describe “integral thinking” using a holonic approach to explain the complex nature of all learning through relationships build on hierarchies.

Based on Koestler’s definition, everything in the natural world is a holon. A child, for example, is a holon as he is a whole on his own, but he is also a part of a family. A leaf is a holon because it is a whole unto itself, but it can also be a part of a tree. A person’s brain is a holon as it is a whole entity on its own, but also part of the person’s body. Holonic thinking embraces the idea that not only can everything be a part of something bigger, but each holon can be broken down into smaller parts as well. The child is made up of body parts, which in turn are made of flesh, blood, bones, and muscles (that can themselves also be broken down into ever smaller parts). The leaf can also be broken down into fibers and chemicals, which in turn can also be broken down further. A person’s brain can also be broken down into different types of cells, proteins, and so on. In short, everything is a holon, a whole on its own and a part of bigger things that can also be broken down into smaller elements.

Constructivism has been used successfully as a framework to explain the way the mind orders the hierarchy of learning concepts, beginning with an approach from developmental psychology and spilling into education (Piaget, 1923). To construct new learning, people build on previous knowledge using the foundation of these core notions (Solis-Stovall, 2020). The individual does not live in the world alone, however, so many researchers, especially those in social learning theory (e.g., Bandura, 1977), raise the importance of constructivism within environments and social contexts. When the environment and the role of others is also incorporated into the constructivist learning model, this is called radical constructivism (Von Glasersfeld, 1995, 2013). Ernst Von Glaserfeld used the constructivist ideas suggested by Vico (1710), Ceccato (1964/1966), and Piaget (1968) to which he added on the cyclical, iterative processes that occurs as people try “to order the as such amorphous flow of experience by establishing repeatable experiences and relatively reliable relations between them,” (Von Glasersfeld, 1984, p. 5). Von Glaserfeld’s ideas were firmly grounded in strong philosophical roots but they carried over naturally into the teaching and learning environment as the means by which societies devise formal education. Von Glasersfeld (1984, p. 20) uses “radical” to emphasize the relationship of a person to reality and explains that rather than a “picture-like (iconic) correspondence or match, radical constructivism sees it as an adaptation in the functional sense.” This means that the very contact with others or with new information would change a person’s understanding of it. An idea in one’s head about how to approach a problem, a work of art, or a piece of literature, is changed by the simple act of articulating it out loud for another person. While words facilitate thinking, they are not the same thing as thinking. One’s understanding of one’s own ideas require no explanation to one’s self; once put “out in the world” one must modify the choice of words to meet others’ levels of understanding. Furthermore, teachers must modify this language use to meet a variety of learners’ needs in the same setting. This means that what is thought cannot always be articulated clearly to others, resulting in the voice in our heads being different than the one we hear as we speak (LaValley, 2022).

A second aspect of the “radical” nature of thinking and learning relates to the individual themselves in time. As all new learning passes through the filter of prior experience (Tokuhama-Espinosa, 2008), and the older we get the more experiences we have, our interpretation of the world becomes more colored by what we already know. For example, reading The Diary of Anne Frank at age 13 is different at age 18 or 30 or 50, not because the book is different, but you and your context are different.

Radical constructivism emphasizes the role that others can play in influencing how an individual thinks about information. A person may have one kind of idea in their mind, but when they articulate this in words to another person, the idea changes Hitchcock, (2018). And by listening to the response of the other to the idea, the idea is again changed. This dynamic process of idea transformation is what turns constructivism within the individual into a social exchange in the world (De Soto, 2022). Teachers know that classroom exchanges between students and with themselves modify the way they think about information.

After radical constructivism, a newer concept from neuroscience, neuroconstructivism, took hold. Neuroconstructivism, like its predecessor constructivism, requires that lower or base level concepts be learned before more complex ideas can be built upon them and that this occurs in a neurophysiological way structuring primary networks before secondary ones can be scaffolded upon them. Dekker and Karmiloff-Smith (2011) were some of the first to suggest that the combination of behavioral studies, neuroimaging, and genetics research in both typical and atypical populations pointed to the existence of neuroconstructivism. By Karmiloff-Smith et al. (2018) were able to formulate a new theory of human development based on neuroconstructivism.

“Neuroconstructivism” is a term used to explain the physical scaffolding of core notions and conceptual knowledge (Broadbent and Mareschal, 2019) “that influence the emergence of mental representations in postnatal development,” (Westermann et al., 2007, p. 75). The brain makes basic neural connections, then successively more complex ones based on experiences which are unique to the individual (Mareschal et al., 2007; Westermann et al., 2007, 2011; Karmiloff-Smith et al., 2018). As Westermann and colleagues pointed out in their seminal article Neuroconstructivism (Westermann et al., 2007, p. 75), “Cognitive development is explained as emerging from the experience-dependent development of neural structures supporting mental representations.” The scaffolding of conceptual understanding permits the construction of neural networks that eventually become the learning manifested in observable behavior, such as the ability to read a story or to do a math problem. Earlier studies in neuroconstructivism showed that when certain fundamental networks were missing, a child was unable to perform certain tasks and future tasks that relied on that initial task. For example, a child can scaffold a new understanding of subtraction upon the basis of addition. If the child knows how to add well, then learning to subtract takes relatively few steps to master. However, many children have gaps in core notions in mathematics and because they have missing conceptual knowledge in addition, they are unable to easily learn subtraction. This is not only true for math but for every other subject taught in school or experienced in the real world.

In 2019, Tokuhama-Espinosa suggested that this promising new idea could be merged with Von Glaserfeld’s thinking and coined the term radical neuroconstructivism. Building off both the dynamic, iterative exchange of an individual with his or her surroundings, and the constant co-construction of neural networks of the brain’s design and on a natural hierarchy of conceptual knowledge, this paper suggests that radical neuroconstructivism can potentially create the framework to explain how people learn.

The concept of core notions has been posited in philosophy (e.g., Schaffer et al., 2009), demonstrated in cognitive psychology (e.g., Tuominen and Kallio, 2020), and imaged in neuroscience (e.g., Skerry and Saxe, 2016). Core notions are pre-requisite knowledge at each stage of the learning process. Furthermore, each progressive level of knowledge has its own core notions and depends on those that proceed them (Sporns, 2022); counting has different core notions than calculus, for example, and calculus depends on counting. Similarly, higher order language depends on the lower notions that sustain them; the core notions within word choice are different from higher order language notions such as metaphorical thinking, for example. Metaphorical thinking, in turn, depends on word choice (Black, 1962). In the best-case scenario, the curriculum or order of subjects a child learns, should first introduce fundamental core notions and once mastered, advance to subsequently more complex notions.

Countries around the world use the evaluation of math and language as proxies for intelligence (Tokuhama-Espinosa, 2019) often in combination with more complex tools that depend on them, such as reasoning (Flanagan and McDonough, 2018). Both math and language are comprised of “core notions” or fundamental building blocks of knowledge, which permit the construction of learning and progressively more complex thinking (Hernández Armenta et al., 2019; Solis-Stovall, 2020). Examples of “core notions” include any fundamental or pre-requisite knowledge needed to complete a higher order task and are characterized by thinking states rather than process memorization. For example, zero (“0”) is a complex notion, which, if misunderstood, can lead to problems with understanding “ones” and “tens” and eventually decimals, negative integers, and other key notions in mathematics (Hansen et al., 2020). In a second example, the core notion of a mental number line can be used to see addition or subtraction problems inside one’s head (Dehaene, 2003; Haman and Lipowska, 2021). Problems like “1 + 2 = 3” are visualized in the mind’s eye and such visualization is vital to developing efficient, accurate and speedy arithmetic skills (Sari and Olkun, 2020). An understanding of zero combined with a mental number line permits a visualization and understanding of negative numbers, and eventually the addition and subtraction of both positive and negative integers (Vest and Alibali, 2021). If zero or the mental number line are not learned by children, they will be unsuccessful in early math, and consequently higher math. Missing core notions in children are a primary reason kids “hate math” (Liu, 2016); the inability of teachers to identify these gaps is exacerbated by the fact that teachers themselves often have missing core notions (Ball, 2017). Missing core notions in teacher knowledge are also responsible for poor math and language learning by their students (Loch et al., 2015), signifying a systemic problem.

Unfortunately, many students advance through the education system with progressively complex missing core notions (Rist, 2017) for which teachers are unprepared. Bartelet et al. (2014, p. 657) noted that learning difficulties in math can spring from at least six different origins: “(a) a weak mental number line group, (b) weak ANS (Approximate Number System) group, (c) spatial difficulties group, (d) access deficit group, (e) no numerical cognitive deficit group and (f) a garden-variety group,” suggesting that a more nuanced look at both gaps in mathematical instruction as well as diagnosis of mathematical sub-types of errors is necessary to help students achieve. If teachers do not know about core notions or their hierarchy in brains, they cannot easily identify the types of errors being committed by students. This is an example of what Dubinsky and colleagues meant by improving teacher Knowledge of Students “and what happens inside their brains,” (Dubinsky et al., 2022, p. 267).

Research into language has also identified many core notions which can go unattended in early childhood education. One area that has received a lot of attention is vocabulary. Educational research has demonstrated for years that rich, age-appropriate vocabulary lays the foundation for complex thinking (Hirsh-Pasek and Golinkoff, 2003) and that poor vocabulary is correlated with academic failure (Baker, 1995). Hart and Risley (2003) “The Early Catastrophe,” showed a “30 million word gap by the age of 3” for children from lower social economic status homes due to less exposure to rich conversational exchanges, fewer books in the home, and parental knowledge of language development (Johnson et al., 2017). Researchers warn that “denying the existence of the 30-million-word gap” suffered by underserved children “has serious consequences” (Golinkoff et al., 2019, p. 985). Therefore, explicit vocabulary instruction is a part of several early childhood training programs, but not all. Despite neuroscientific evidence showing that “children’s conversational exposure is associated with language related brain function,” (Romeo et al., 2018, p. 700) that do not exist without human conversation, other researchers have pointed out that “talk alone will not close the 30-million word gap” (Wasik and Hindman, 2015, p. 50) and that meaningful interactions with language use in varied contexts are necessary to fill in the gap. Appropriate word use in the right context with increasingly complex patterns is fundamental to language development but not all early childhood education programs emphasize this and not all teachers know vocabulary is a fundamental building block in learning.

Other core notions in language development relate to normal speech patterns, including the grammar and syntax that is acceptable in local cultural contexts. While all humans learn to speak from an innate language sense (Chomsky, 2000; Pinker, 2009), the parameters of acceptable speech differs by country (e.g., British to American), region (e.g., Hawaii to Texas), district (e.g., English in the Bronx versus English in upper Manhattan), and even neighborhood (e.g., East Los Angeles versus West). Furthermore, the way humans speak differs greatly from how they write, especially from informal to academic contexts (Chafe, 1985). This puts children whose core notions of grammar and syntax that differ from standard English in school at an academic disadvantage from the start (Au, 2009). When the school’s standard English differs greatly from the home language, students first need to learn the “foreign” language of school before they can be successful in other subjects. This sets up many for failure. Many find learning the school language a burden and decide they are not “cut out for school,” and/or “hate reading,” (Hale and Crowe, 2001), and too many drop out (Rumberger and Lim, 2008) for this reason. This paper proposes that teaching core notions in language in a more orderly trajectory may change students’ negative attitudes toward education as the neuroconstruction of core notions in an orderly way may ease the path by creating a more solid early learning foundation.

In this paper it is suggested that a deeper and better understanding of the radical neuroconstructivist building blocks of cognition may permit a more precise and orderly introduction of skills that would be coherent with the brain’s natural progression from lower-to-higher-level knowledge. This would improve the design of the curriculum, allowing more children to succeed.

While psychology has contributed to educational best practice for over 100 years (Berliner and Calfee, 2014), contributions from neuroscience have only recently been regularly incorporated into teacher professional development (Deans for Impact, 2015). Thanks to neuroscientific insights, there have been improvements in pedagogy, didactics, strategies, activities, and methodologies for learning at all levels of education (K-16). This is especially true of new knowledge about the dynamic exchange between cognition and affect (e.g., Immordino-Yang, 2015), meaning making (e.g., Zittoun and Brinkmann, 2012) at the crossroads of culture and cognition (Rawlings and Childress, 2021), and the importance of student-teacher relationships (e.g., Hattie and Zierer, 2017).

While how to teach has benefitted greatly from neuroscientific insights, what to teach has received less attention; the promise of neuroscientific insights into shaping the design of curriculum, such as in early literacy or math learning, is an underexplored area for educators. A key impediment to the use of neuroscientific knowledge in education is that the puzzle as a whole has not been constructed using all of the parts that are available.

The second part of this paper uses the examples of early years language and math to explain the holonic thinking from Neuroscience, Psychology and Education that can lead to a better neuroconstructivist curriculum design for schools. Education and Psychology have helped construct a relatively orderly curriculum (Tokuhama-Espinosa, 2019), which takes into consideration human variability (e.g., Mezirow, 2018). It is possible that additional evidence from Neuroscience can bring a more nuanced understanding of typical gaps in notions that children may experience. We propose that the ability to diagnose missing core notions earlier will allow more timely and accurate interventions in early childhood education.

Learning depends on the quantity, quality, and timing of exposure to learning objectives (Paolini, 2015). The literature suggests the earlier an academic competency is introduced to a learner, and the stronger its subsequent constructivist development, the more likely a positive learning outcome in that competency (Bakken et al., 2017) due to the quantity and quality of exposure. The literature also suggests that quality experiences at pre-school benefits both kids who had enriching home experiences and those who did not (Fuson et al., 2015). Klein and Starkey’s research showed that a broad socioeconomic gap in informational mathematical knowledge was present at the beginning of the pre-kindergarten year. This gap included not just numerical concepts and arithmetic reasoning, but also spatial concepts and geometric reasoning, knowledge of patterns, and nonstandard measurement (Klein and Starkey, 2004). One theory for this occurrence relates to the kinds of play experienced by different socio-economic groups (Missall et al., 2015). This means some kids arrive at school with missing core notions as compared with their peers due to the contexts in which they were raised. Quantity, quality, and timing are aided by exposure to core notions in a logical order which strengthens neural pathways for future learning (Karmiloff-Smith, 2009; Galván, 2010). Nowhere is this more evident than in research on early language development and early math.

The stimulation of language development (i.e., vocabulary, correct word order, social cues for interaction, and so on) begins in the home with the family and is generally developed further in regular school settings by trained educational professionals. Similarly, pre-numeracy skills (ordinality as parents count a child’s fingers and toes out loud; magnitude as he is given “more” or “less” of an object; symbolic numeric representation as he blows out the candles on a birthday cake, and so on) aid in the development of a child’s number sense (Dehaene, 2011) and are cultivated in a similar pattern (Campbell, 2014) through adult-child interaction. High-quality early childhood education can play an important role in the effective development of early academic skills development (Campbell et al., 2012) but requires a home (parent)-school (teacher) partnership with a shared plan (Missall et al., 2015). We suggest that by disaggregating math and language into sub-skills in a neuroconstructivist trajectory for mastery, we may potentially improve the diagnosis of problems and aid in the selection of more accurate remediating activities with the goal of ensuring all children have a successful start to school.

It is only since the turn of the century that neuroimaging studies have offered definitive proof of the changes in the brain during infant learning. This includes cognitive development such as typical growth rate, myelination, top-down modulation, and changes in cortical hubs, (Deoni et al., 2011; Fransson et al., 2011; Holland et al., 2014; Dempsey et al., 2015; Emberson et al., 2015). While teachers and parents generally understand that infants learn at an astounding rate, few are aware that infants have a preverbal early number sense that permits them to estimate quantities, gauge relative size and judge spatial orientation (Dehaene, 2011). One way to make these ideas clearer to parents and teachers is by showing neuroconstructivist studies alongside more familiar learning trajectories shared by pediatricians (Morris et al., 2020). To do this, it is important to update basic professional knowledge in the learning sciences for both math and language.

On the basis of evidence from the learning sciences, we present a novel theory called Radical Neuroconstructivism, which is supported by extensive research from psychology, neuroscience, and education (Von Glasersfeld, 1984, 1995, 2013; Westermann et al., 2007, 2011; Dekker and Karmiloff-Smith, 2011; Hitchcock, 2018; Karmiloff-Smith et al., 2018; Broadbent and Mareschal, 2019; Tokuhama-Espinosa, 2019; De Soto, 2022). To further explain Radical Neuroconstructivism, we incorporate the concept of Meaning Making (Postman and Weingartner, 1969; Gay, 2018; Immordino-Yang and Knecht, 2020; Nouri et al., 2022) and Core Notions as the fundamental building blocks of cognition (Skerry and Saxe, 2016; Rist, 2017; Hernández Armenta et al., 2019; Solis-Stovall, 2020; Tuominen and Kallio, 2020; Sporns, 2022). We also provide examples of Math and Language learning trajectories that can be designed using neuroconstructivist principles, with more than 100 sources supporting each trajectory. Each of these studies holds individual significance and, when synthesized, we consider them to establish a powerful foundation for the proposed theory. We propose that the theory of Radical Neuroconstructivism offers a new framework for teacher education.

We suggest that teacher education can be seen as a holon, a complex system that consists of different parts that are interrelated and interdependent. However, not all parts of this system have received equal attention from academic disciplines such as psychology and education. While the question of how to teach has been widely researched, followed by the question of what to teach, the why of teaching has been less explored. This is where Mind, Brain, and Education (MBE) science can offer valuable insights. In Figure 11, in the first panel (Figure 5 “From Invisible Core Notions to the Visible Educational Curriculum”), the child learns the core notions in their own brain, but that same child (second panel) interacts with other children and the teacher. This dynamic exchange in the classroom is combined with the genetics, social-economic status and cultural context of the learner (third panel).

Evidence from MBE science can integrate the different subparts of teacher education by providing a better understanding of the why, which has been often neglected in traditional educational and psychological approaches. Radical neuroconstructivism is one framework that can inform teachers’ professional development and complete the holonic perspective of teaching.

In relation to the how of teaching, radical neurosconstrutivism suggests that teachers should encourage active exploration and discovery in their students, rather than transmitting information passively. This approach allows students to engage with the material in a meaningful way, and to construct their own representations based on prior knowledge and experience. Evidence as to why this is important suggests that active exploration can improve students’ motivation, curiosity, creativity, and memory retention.

Regarding the what, radical neuroconstructivism suggests that teachers should be aware of students’ developmental trajectories and individual differences, and tailor instruction accordingly. Teachers should identify difficulties and provide appropriate scaffolding and support to help students overcome them. Moreover, teachers should integrate different domains of learning in their curriculum to facilitate the formation of more abstract and generalizable representations, as well as the transfer of skills and knowledge across contexts.

To extend this perspective to the why, teachers need a solid understanding of core notions and the trajectories through which neural networks are constructed. This approach improves the order of skill acquisition by using a neuroconstructivist hierarchy, which may help create a more orderly curriculum built on insights from MBE science. Compared with MBE advancements from 2007 to present, by integrating research from neuroscience, psychology, and education, this new idea has the potential to inform the design of curriculum and instructional strategies that not only consider the what and how of teaching, but also the why, ensuring alignment with the brain’s natural learning processes.

In conclusion, MBE science offers a hol(on)istic perspective on teacher education that takes into account the what, how, and why of teaching and learning. Radical neuroconstructivism is a useful framework for organizing teachers” professional development and applying insights from MBE science into curriculum design and instructional strategies. By using MBE science to inform teaching practices, teachers can create a more effective and engaging learning environment for students.

The original contributions presented in the study are included in the article/Supplementary material, further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding author.

All authors listed have made a substantial, direct, and intellectual contribution to the work and approved it for publication.

Authors TT-E and CB provide consultancy services via the Conexiones platform. Author CB is employed by The Decision Lab.

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