Dr. Grauer's Column - “Aha!” (or, Small Schools Sparks)

“Aha!” (or, Small Schools Sparks)
I Didn’t Need a Brain Scan
by Stuart Grauer

Two weeks in Los Angeles. Family, friends, work—busy, engaging, loving. A whole new world. I didn’t want to be there. The city had its sparks, but I felt a dissonance getting under my skin every time I wrestled my way up there on roads called “The…”. Of course, I couldn’t say much of this out loud. There had to be something in LA for me, in addition to the museum.

So, I made a plan: I’d rise at 5:15 a.m., drive through the dark, and be the first one at Malibu Surfrider Beach. Malibu, the “’Bu,” is arguably the best longboard wave in the continental U.S. — a machine wave, so to speak. Except, in my case, every visit had been a bit of a wreck. Crowds of surfers jockeying for position, boards colliding, people dropping in on waves you thought were yours. I’d never had a great day at the great Bu.

This time I was determined.

It was drizzling as I was tailgated and bright headlamped through the very dark, drizzly backstreets from the Valley down to the Pacific Coast Highway. Thunderheads built over the water like dark foreboding. Lightning was a possibility. But I was already suited up, waxed up, stretched out. No turning back. I was the first one to arrive, a half hour before opening.

When the ranger finally opened the gate, a small handful of us paddled out. The surface was choppy, unsettled. “Would I stay out if lightning struck?” I wondered. (Hint: I’d already made it this far.)

Then magic.

The wind backed off. The ocean smoothed out like glass. Sunlight leaked through the clouds in ribbons of silver, though there was still on and off drizzle. Then the sets began lining up, long and clean, breaking from First Point all the way down the beach towards the pier. I’d never seen Malibu like this, only seen the pictures. For two and a half hours, with just a small crew of diehards, I rode the best waves of my life but, more, everything seemed like part of an infinite pattern.

The rides became a dive into dopamine. The long, fast, perfect peaks—a trance situation. “The locals don’t like rain,” a surfer finally confided in me. A dull, involuntary smile crept across my face and stayed there as I changed, as I drove back into the city, as I greeted my family.

I didn’t need a brain scan to know something had shifted: It was a peak moment. And it stayed for three days and still revisits now and then.

And as a teacher, I began asking myself: What does this eureka have to do with education? With teaching and learning? Is there an acknowledged place for peak moments in schooling? Is that tragic if there’s not?

But I know there is.

Over the years, I’ve experienced flashes of synchronicity with students and teachers — days when lessons felt alive, when time fell away, when everyone was fully present. We don’t talk much about these states in education. They don’t show up on the lesson plan or the standardized test. They don’t come up in graduate school. But they’re real. They’re the times students remember years later, the moments that open them up. Malibu moments.

The Grauer School's teachers have all seen it: the student’s eyes widen, their posture shifts, a half-smile spreads across their face. An “aha!” moment strikes. It’s the instant when a puzzle resolves even if you did not know it was a puzzle. It’s when a new connection clicks, when something that once felt out of reach suddenly feels like you must have known it all along. But it’s also the moment the student comes back or writes back after years, recalling the vibe.

These moments may feel like magic or unusual, and yet neuroscience is showing us they’re some of the most powerful catalysts for learning and retention.

Epiphany

A new brain-imaging study from Duke University and Humboldt and Hamburg Universities[1] shows that “aha!” moments don’t just feel good; they literally rewire the brain. In Dr. Roberto Cabeza’s experiment, when participants solved puzzles in a flash of insight, their hippocampus—the brain’s memory hub—lit up. Neurons reorganized, visual-processing regions shifted, and connections between different brain areas grew stronger. Puzzles! Dr. Cabeza, if you are reading this, let me show you Malibu in the rain.

Students remember solutions they reached through epiphany almost twice as well as those worked out by slow, methodical reasoning. As psychologist Roberto Cabeza put it: “There are few memory effects that are as powerful as this.” Teachers use these moments as well. As Grauer research specialist and psychology teacher Dr. Tricia Valeski explains:  “These aha moments also impact each teacher, perhaps setting up a cycle that is rewarding for both the teacher and the student.”

So. What if… what if schools can set the stage for insight, not just help students pass a test or race through a curriculum. When we do this, student knowledge endures and teachers benefit in every way.

How Small Schools Create Aha Moments

Due to sheer numbers, large schools rely a lot more on lecture, set curricular guides, and test prep. But in smaller, “human-scale” environments like The Grauer School, the conditions for “aha!” moments can be built into daily life. Here’s where they happen most often around campus:

• Expeditions & Outdoor Learning: When a student suddenly spots a great blue heron by the lagoon or deciphers how to navigate the Narrows in Zion, they aren’t just acquiring facts. They’re experiencing nature as teacher—flashes of realization born from risk, wonder, and reflection.
• Small Classes with Better Questions: In seminars of 12 students, teachers can probe and find just the right questions until the idea dawns: in a student’s own words, when a student feels discovered. Let’s call them Socratic sparks. According to Cabeza, these are the essence of long-term understanding.
• Capstone Defenses: When seniors and 8th grade middle school graduation candidates present and defend their projects, like with expeditions, many come back years later and tell us about feeling fully seen as thinkers. They are discovering who they are (and where they’re going).
• Arts & Performance: Whether stepping on stage at Grauerpalooza or finishing a sculpture surrounded by supportive people who are no threat, the realization “I can do this” turns into an indelible memory. Epiphanies happen in high trust, low threat environments.
• Trust and Autonomy: Cabeza also describes a quiet, personal kind of aha. Even something as simple as our Rosie Policy—allowing students to walk the school dog when they need space, or finally achieving your own mastery learning level after a week of upgrades—can trigger insights about self-regulation, trust, and responsibility.

We all have our own examples from around campus.

It Matters

Science confirms what small schools have known intuitively: insight flashes are the glue of memory. When learning environments are designed to allow for curiosity, surprise, lots of choices, and discovery, students carry their knowledge for life. What once felt like digressions in my large, State exam-driven classes became pure moments of discovery and curiosity when we gathered in a Socratic circle in small classes. No wonder so many new schools are popping up around the country based on the concept of “self-directed education.” 

Of course, the impact spark goes beyond academics. Aha moments can be formative, fun, and profound: it’s where our students build confidence, resilience, and a sense of belonging in a world where school too often feels transactional and forced.

At The Grauer School, we don’t measure success by how many facts our students recall on command—although if a student opts for this, we can measure it more that way! We measure success by the curiosity in their eyes, the confidence they exude as seniors graduating, the stories they tell us years later—all earned through sudden flashes of understanding. The fact that this now can be shown on a brain scan is worthy of another: Aha!

I don’t believe schooling should be one long adrenaline rush. But I do believe it must make space for immersion, for flow, for authentic engagement with the natural and human world — the conditions under which peak moments can happen. And I do believe the best teachers are fully aware of this and experience it with their students. I wish this for every teacher I know. Somehow!

Sometimes you have to get up early, paddle out when it’s drizzling, and take a risk on lightning to find the moment that lifts you. Education is no different. We can’t always engineer peak experiences, but we can create the conditions for them, take chances, chase down unlikely spaces and places and ideas—rather than call them off-the-curriculum digressions. “Learning environments that encourage insight boost long-term memory and understanding,” says Cabeza.  Aha moments sear learning into our brains and, if you don’t want an MRI to see this, let’s paddle out.

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[1] "Insight Predicts Subsequent Memory via Cortical Representational Change and Hippocampal Activity," Maxi Becker, Tobias Sommer, Roberto Cabeza. Nature Communications, May 9, 2025.

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