Masters and doctoral programs in Education typically culminate in a research project that's basically an apprenticeship in how to carry out and interpret educational research. Most graduate students worry through the process of identifying and executing their project. What's strange (and foolish) is that after all that effort, many never again engage in the kind of research investigations they went to so much trouble to master.

A variety of significant developments in science and technology are now emerging that could spark an extended career-long research agenda for imaginative educators who realize that their profession is at the edge of a major research-driven transformation.

The School Administrator is the journal of the American Association of School Administrators. Its December 2006 issue focused on educationally significant developments in the cognitive neurosciences that pose research possibilities.

I wrote an article for the issue that identified and discussed seven developing brain systems and processes that I thought would impact educational policy and practice within the next 10 years — mirror neurons, neuroplasticity, emotion and attention, hemispheric specialization, the arts and humanities, intelligence, and consciousness.

All of these pose challenging research possibilities for graduate students in education, but the discovery of mirror neurons seems most intriguing to me (especially since they are functionally related to the other six areas I identified). Mirror neurons are a class of neurons that prime a specific motor behavior, but they also activate when we observe someone else carry out the same action. Our tendencies to yawn when we observe someone else yawn, and to reciprocate a smile are examples. Mirror neurons thus create a template in our brain of the behavior we observe, and so provide a vehicle for children to automatically master many important childhood behaviors that are difficult for adults to explain, such as how to smile, grasp, or talk.

The renowned neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran has suggested that mirror neurons may provide the same powerful unifying framework for our understanding of teaching and learning that the 1953 discovery of DNA did for our understanding of genetics. Credible 21st century theories of teaching and learning will thus incorporate mirror neurons.

Neuroscience researchers currently use imaging technologies to identify the brain areas and systems that regulate a cognitive function. Their post-discovery challenge is to determine how to enhance that function, or to intervene if the function is not robust. My January 2007 Brain Connection column focused on recent significant discoveries related to our attention system, and Fast ForWord software is an example of how the discovery of basic knowledge about a system can be transformed into a successful intervention.