How Kids Learn Better By Taking Frequent Breaks Throughout The Day Excerpted from Teach Like Finland: 33 Simple Strategies For Joyful Classrooms (c) 2017 by Timothy D. Walker. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton. Schedule brain breaks Like a zombie, Sami*—one of my fifth graders—lumbered over to me and hissed, “I think I’m going to explode! Yikes, I thought, what a way to begin my first year of teaching in Finland. Throughout this first week of school, I had gotten creative with my fifth grade timetable. I didn’t see the point of these frequent pit stops. Come to think of it, I wasn’t sure if the American approach had ever worked very well. Once I incorporated these short recesses into our timetable, I no longer saw feet-dragging, zombie-like kids in my classroom. At first I was convinced that I had made a groundbreaking discovery: frequent breaks kept students fresh throughout the day. In Finland, primary school teachers seem to know this intuitively. Timothy D. *The names used for students in this book are pseudonyms.
Visible Thinking Purpose and Goals Visible Thinking is a flexible and systematic research-based approach to integrating the development of students' thinking with content learning across subject matters. An extensive and adaptable collection of practices, Visible Thinking has a double goal: on the one hand, to cultivate students' thinking skills and dispositions, and, on the other, to deepen content learning. By thinking dispositions, we mean curiosity, concern for truth and understanding, a creative mindset, not just being skilled but also alert to thinking and learning opportunities and eager to take them Who is it for? Visible Thinking is for teachers, school leaders and administrators in K - 12 schools who want to encourage the development of a culture of thinking in their classrooms and schools. Key Features and Practices At the core of Visible Thinking are practices that help make thinking visible: Thinking Routines loosely guide learners' thought processes and encourage active processing. License
EdTech Series: 6 PowerPoint Alternatives for Presentations | English Teaching 101English Teaching 101 Are you looking for powerpoint alternatives for presentations? PowerPoint has become the default software when it comes to digital presentations. Being the most common type of slideshow presentation tool, many teachers prefer to use it. Why not, it is easy to use and it has a lot of handy features that make presentations simple. However, there are many similar programs available on the market for FREE and make a better alternative to Microsoft PowerPoint when it comes to the presentation quality and interactivity. Nearpod and Pear Deck are very similar to a slide show, like PowerPoint or Google Slides. Both apps’ concept is simple. Both have FREE versions as well which allow you to create polls, interactive quizzes, open-ended questions, beautiful slideshows. PresentationTube Recorder helps you to record and share quality video presentations in a new way. The FREE version is fully working with Unlimited video uploading and streaming. Visme is pretty awesome! Their library is HUGE too!
What Children Can Teach Us About Paying Attention Thinking like a five-year-old can help you learn more in a new environment. Young children have one cognitive talent that most adults have forgotten. That is the ability to pay attention to everything. As adults we learn to focus our attention and block out distractions. But, sometimes being distracted means noticing and learning more. Professor Vladimir Sloutsky, study co-author, explained: “We often think of children as deficient in many skills when compared to adults.But sometimes what seems like a deficiency can actually be an advantage.That’s what we found in our study.Children are extremely curious and they tend to explore everything, which means their attention is spread out, even when they’re asked to focus.That can sometimes be helpful.” The study had adults and children watching a series of shapes appearing on a screen. Some, they were told to look for; others (‘non-target shapes’), they were supposed to ignore. Professor Sloutsky continued:
To Remember a Lecture Better, Take Notes by Hand Psych 101 was about to start, and Pam Mueller had forgotten her laptop at home. This meant more than lost Facebook time. A psychology grad student at Princeton, Mueller was one of the class teaching assistants. It was important she have good notes on the lecture. So she put pen to paper—and found something surprising. Class just seemed better. “‘I had a similar experience in a faculty meeting the other day,’” Mueller remembers him saying. It turns out there is. A new study—conducted by Mueller and Oppenheimer—finds that people remember lectures better when they’ve taken handwritten notes, rather than typed ones. What's more, knowing how and why typed notes can be bad doesn't seem to improve their quality. The study comes at a ripe time for questions about laptop use in class. The study was conducted in three parts. Students watched the video, completed difficult mental tasks for 30 minutes, then took a quiz on the content. So students in the second group were given a warning.
Interacting with women can impair men’s cognitive functioning - ScienceDirect <div pearltreesdevid="PTD138" role="alert" class="alert-message-container"><div pearltreesdevid="PTD139" aria-hidden="true" class="alert-message-body"><span pearltreesdevid="PTD140" style="display: inline-block;" class="Icon IconAlert"><svg pearltreesDevId="PTD141" style="width: 100%; height: 100%;" width="24" height="24" focusable="false" tabindex="-1" fill="currentColor"><path pearltreesDevId="PTD142" fill="#f80" d="M11.84 4.63c-.77.05-1.42.6-1.74 1.27-1.95 3.38-3.9 6.75-5.85 10.13-.48.83-.24 1.99.53 2.56.7.6 1.66.36 2.5.41 3.63 0 7.27.01 10.9-.01 1.13-.07 2.04-1.28 1.76-2.39-.1-.58-.56-1.02-.81-1.55-1.85-3.21-3.69-6.43-5.55-9.64-.42-.52-1.06-.83-1.74-.79z"></path><path pearltreesDevId="PTD143" d="M11 8h2v5h-2zM11 14h2v2h-2z"></path></svg></span><!-- react-text: 58 -->JavaScript is disabled on your browser. Please enable JavaScript to use all the features on this page.<!-- /react-text --></div></div> Abstract Keywords Mixed-sex interaction Cognitive functioning Self-presentation
Six-Month-Old Babies Have Connected Vocabularies No matter how many words you can define, your vocabulary isn’t like a dictionary. Your mind stores language not as a list of words, but as a network of categories, properties, and meanings, with stronger connections between related words, like newspaper and magazine, than unrelated ones, like wallet and avalanche. At six months old, a baby probably doesn’t know what wallet or avalanche means—but even at such a young age, months before children start talking, they do understand some basic nouns, like ball and dog. And a new study suggests that the few words infants know are structured in their minds the same way as an adult’s vocabulary, in a complex web of related concepts. The evidence: When words have similar meanings, babies can get confused. That confusion hints that babies know more about language, at a younger age, than scientists have found before. Outside of the lab, the study’s authors analyzed the infants’ exposure to common objects in their own homes.
How To Use Games in the ESL Classroom Whether you teach children or adults, teaching ESL grammar and vocabulary in a fun and effective way can be so tough sometimes, can't it? Lesson planning for grammar concepts can definitely be a challenge. Well, today's post is about how to deal with exactly that! I'm going to share my top 5 ways to use games in the ESL classroom. If you've met me (over at The Teaching Cove), you know I LOVE using games to spice up learning. Sometimes, they look at me like I'm a tiny bit insane. You bet! Actually, one of my professors in the TESL program at McGill University had a three-part recipe for success for the ESL classroom that I find quite clever: Water (hydration), Laughter, and Movement. Games do a pretty good job of covering 2 of 3! So, I primarily use games in ESL teaching in three ways: First, for grammar concepts: Use games as review for concepts students have already studied. Second, for vocabulary development: Third, for speaking fluency: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 1. 2. 3. Happy Teaching!
The Power of Overlearning When you want to learn something new, you practice. Once you get the hang of it, you can hopefully do what you learned—whether it’s parallel parking or standing backflips—on the next day, and the next. If not, you fall back to stage one and practice some more. But your brain may have a shortcut that helps you lock in learning. In the experiment, participants were asked to look at a screen and say when they saw a stripe pattern. Next, the participants took a break before spending another twenty minutes learning a similar “competitor” task where the stripes were oriented at a new angle. The next day, researchers tested the participants to see which stripe patterns they could still detect. Practicing something new seems to activate a period of learning (and unlearning) as the balance of neurotransmitters changes in the brain. Overlearning is probably helpful for quick motor sequences as in basketball or ballet. Years of research point to sleep as essential for entrenching memories.
Men Say 'Uh' and Women Say 'Um' Um, guys. I have some information to share with you, and fair warning, it's, uh, going to make you scrutinize your speech for several days. You know when you're searching for a word, or trying to say something more nicely than you actually mean it, or trying to make up your mind after you've already started speaking? Whether you reach for an "um" or an "uh" in those situations might depend on whether you're male or female. Our verbal pauses actually speak volumes: "Like," as eighth-grade English teachers will tell you, makes the speaker sound young or ditzy; "sort of" smacks of uncertainty. But according to the linguist Mark Liberman, who works at the University of Pennsylvania and blogs at Language Log, even a difference as subtle as the one between "um" and "uh" provides clues about the speaker's gender, language skills, and even life experience. Back in 2005, he found that usage of "uh" increases with age, but at every age, men say it more than women do.
Contact with attractive women affects the release of cortisol in men. Why Students Forget—and What You Can Do About It Teachers have long known that rote memorization can lead to a superficial grasp of material that is quickly forgotten. But new research in the field of neuroscience is starting to shed light on the ways that brains are wired to forget—highlighting the importance of strategies to retain knowledge and make learning stick. In a recent article published in the journal Neuron, neurobiologists Blake Richards and Paul Frankland challenge the predominant view of memory, which holds that forgetting is a process of loss—the gradual washing away of critical information despite our best efforts to retain it. According to Richards and Frankland, the goal of memory is not just to store information accurately but to “optimize decision-making” in chaotic, quickly changing environments. In this model of cognition, forgetting is an evolutionary strategy, a purposeful process that runs in the background of memory, evaluating and discarding information that doesn’t promote the survival of the species.
Make and Do – Collocation Revision This is a quick lesson, including a couple of games, to practise and revise collocations with ‘make’ and ‘do’. There’s very little preparation required and it’s highly adaptable for use with other lexis or grammar points. The example below is with a group of intermediate teenagers, some stages could be skipped or extended depending on your students’ level and the support they need. Preparation Before the lesson, or while my students are working on something else, I write the following on the board: Students work in pairs to review the words on the board and make short sentences using them (just speaking, no writing at this stage). Team Game I write ‘make’ and ‘do’ on the board and circle them using different coloured pens. Students have two minutes to work in pairs and decide whether ‘make’ or ‘do’ goes before each word. For a bigger class you could have four teams and four colours, so there would be two ‘make’ teams and two ‘do’ teams. Practice and production Reflection and review Finally