How The Brain Works--And How Students Can Respond In a continued effort to bring you the very best, most expert and diverse education content anywhere, in addition to the ideas of Grant Wiggins, Bena Kallick, Art Costa, and Nathan Jurgenson among others, TeachThought is also proud to share the ideas of Dr. Judy Willis, neuroscientist, Ph.D., and middle school teacher. By Dr. Judy Willis Although the brain is an amazing organ, it’s not equipped to process the billions of bits of information that bombard it every second. Filters in your brain protect it from becoming overloaded. The Thinking Brain and the Reactive Brain Once sensory information enters the brain, it’s routed to one of two areas: (1) The prefrontal cortex, what we might call the thinking brain, which can consciously process and reflect on information; or (2) the lower, automatic brain, what we might call the reactive brain, which reacts to information instinctively rather than through thinking. RAS:The Gatekeeper What You Can Do The Limbic System: Your Emotional Core
Q&A with Daniel Goleman: How the Research Supports Social-Emotional Learning Daniel Goleman is best known for his 1995 bestseller Emotional Intelligence: Why It Matters More Than IQ. It was a groundbreaking book in its day, in that it completely redefined our understanding of our emotions. It was one of the seminal works advocating social and emotional literacy. Goleman's work still examines the unconscious influences on our conscious mind, and gives us tools to understand and harness these influences to positive ends. I talked to him about cognitive control and the research that supports social and emotional learning (SEL). Edutopia: What does the research say about how social and emotional learning impacts academic achievement? Recently there was a meta-analysis of different studies analyzing schools that have SEL programs and those that don't. Prosocial behavior (e.g. behaving appropriately in class, liking school, and good attendance) increased by 10 percent. And the benefits were most significant in schools that needed them the most. Absolutely.
Formula for success in learning If you have found this place in the vast cyberspace of the web, you are probably not the one to convince that knowledge is power, and that solutions to most problems facing humanity could be found if we were armed with more understanding of how the world works. While knowledge is power, information can be overpowering. An increasing proportion of the population suffers from Information Fatigue Syndrome, i.e. from stress related to being overwhelmed with an unmanageable glut of information. This text introduces you to simple steps toward managing information and toward rock-solid knowledge. No cheap miracles. I have been working on the problem of effective learning for 16 years now since, as a student of molecular biology, I first understood how I could greatly change the quality of all my actions were I able to improve the recall of what I studied for exams (and not only). You may find the first three points obvious. This is the shortest path to empowering knowledge: Further reading
Better Teaching: Why You Bore Students & What You Can Do About It Preface: You don’t mean to bore students. In fact, sometimes you’re downright interesting–the students are engaged, the buzz in the room is palpable, and even the hesitant students are asking questions. But the fact of the matter is, even the most charismatic and experienced teachers bore students sometimes. by Judy Willis M.D., M.Ed., radteach.com Better Teaching: Why You Bore Students & What You Can Do About It A few thousand years ago, in 360 B.C., Plato advised against force-feeding of facts to students. “Elements of instruction…should be presented to the mind in childhood; not, however, under any notion of forcing education. We now have neuroscience of learning research to support these recommendations to avoid forced instruction and provide children with the best environment and experiences for joyful learning. Social, emotional, hormonal, and nutritional influences are overtaking the attribution of intelligence to primarily genetic factors. Now What? Curiosity
The Science of Fear What are you afraid of? Snakes? Turbulence? Spiders? Thunder? Speaking in front of a crowd? All of us get scared, and all of us have different thresholds for what makes us afraid. Whatever it is that scares you, what we can agree on is that fear causes our bodies to react. Well, if you are experiencing these symptoms, you have your amygdala to thank. Consider the amygdala as your own onboard 911 operator. We can learn quite a lot from animals about how we respond when we are frightened. Parts of Our Body's Fear System Amygdala: scans for threats and signals body to respond Brain Stem: triggers the freeze response Hippocampus: turns on the fight-or-flight response Hypothalamus: signals the adrenal glands to pump hormones Pre-Frontal Cortex: interprets the event and compares it to past experiences Thalamus: receives input from the senses and "decides" to send information to either the sensory cortex (conscious fear) or the amygdala (defense mechanism) Your Amygdala at Work: A STEM Activity
Variety is the key to learning On a number of occasions I have reported on studies showing that people with expertise in a specific area show larger gray matter volume in relevant areas of the brain. Thus London taxi drivers (who are required to master “The Knowledge” — all the ways and byways of London) have been found to have an increased volume of gray matter in the anterior hippocampus (involved in spatial navigation). Musicians have greater gray matter volume in Broca’s area. Other research has found that gray matter increases in specific areas can develop surprisingly quickly. For example, when 19 adults learned to match made-up names against four similar shades of green and blue in five 20-minute sessions over three days, the areas of the brain involved in color vision and perception increased significantly. This is unusually fast, mind you. But how quickly brain regions may re-organize themselves to optimize learning of a specific skill is not the point I want to make here. A rat study suggests the answer.
How The Human Brain Works No, Your Brain Isn’t Divided By Creativity And Logic by TeachThought Staff How the human brain works is a topic of considerable chatter, but not much in-depth discussion outside of neuroscience and psychology. There is indeed an undercurrent of learning (that should perhaps be an over-current) regarding brain-based learning and research, but very little understanding of what is happening in all those folds of gray matter. Whether you’re studying engagement, curriculum, or the cultural impact of mobile learning, it all starts in the brain. But in pursuit of more direct study, neuroscience is stepping in, itself is becoming of a pedagogical mainstream artifact as educators stop guessing what might work, and head straight to the brain to figure out how it functions, and how best to leverage its natural inclinations. The Left Brain vs Right Brain Division Is Bunk One notion of neurology that has worked its way into popular culture is the idea that the brain is divided cognitively.
Metacognition: The Gift That Keeps Giving Editor's note: This post is co-authored by Marcus Conyers who, with Donna Wilson, is co-developer of the M.S. and Ed.S. Brain-Based Teaching degree programs at Nova Southeastern University. They have written several books, including Five Big Ideas for Effective Teaching: Connecting Mind, Brain, and Education Research to Classroom Practice. Students who succeed academically often rely on being able to think effectively and independently in order to take charge of their learning. Many teachers we know enjoy teaching students how to wield one of the most powerful thinking tools: metacognition, or the ability to think about your thoughts with the aim of improving learning. A student who is excited about being in the driver's seat and steering toward learning success may well be destined to become an independent thinker on the way to charting a responsible course for school, career, and life. Metacognition in the Brain How to Teach Students to Be More Metacognitive Reference Stephen M.
Gesturing to improve memory, language & thought I recently reported on a study showing how the gestures people made in describing how they solved a problem (the Tower of Hanoi) changed the way they remembered the game. These findings add to other research demonstrating that gestures make thought concrete and can help us understand and remember abstract concepts better. For example, two experiments of children in late third and early fourth grade, who made mistakes in solving math problems, have found that children told to move their hands when explaining how they’d solve a problem were four times as likely to manually express correct new ways to solve problems as children given no instructions. Even though they didn’t give the right answer, their gestures revealed an implicit knowledge of mathematical ideas, and the second experiment showed that gesturing set them up to benefit from subsequent instruction. And in a demonstration of improved memory, an earlier study had participants watch someone narrating three cartoons.
Home Addressing Our Needs: Maslow Comes to Life for Educators and Students In the mid-1950s, humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow created a theory of basic, psychological and self-fulfillment needs that motivate individuals to move consciously or subconsciously through levels or tiers based on our inner and outer satisfaction of those met or unmet needs. As a parent and educator, I find this theory eternally relevant for students and adults, especially in our classrooms. After studying it over the past couple of years, my graduate and undergraduate students have decided that every classroom should display a wall-sized diagram of the pyramid, as students and teachers alike place pins and post-its on the varying tiers based on their own feelings, behaviors and needs. Tier One Meeting Physiological Needs in the Classroom These elements contribute to brain-compatible learning by creating a physical environment that is inviting, warm and friendly! Questions to Ask Myself What do I need? Tier Two Stability, Safety and Security, Freedom from Fear Tier Three Tier Four
People learn better when brain activity is consistent | About memory An intriguing new study has found that people are more likely to remember specific information if the pattern of activity in their brain is similar each time they study that information. The findings are said to challenge the long-held belief that people retain information more effectively when they study it several times under different contexts, thus giving their brains multiple cues to remember it. However, although I believe this finding adds to our understanding of how to study effectively, I don’t think it challenges the multiple-context evidence. The finding was possible because of a new approach to studying brain activity, which was used in three experiments involving students at Beijing Normal University. In the second experiment, 22 participants carried out a semantic judgment task on 180 familiar words (deciding whether they were concrete or abstract). In the third experiment, 22 participants performed a different semantic judgment task (living vs non-living) on 60 words.
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