So, this has been my first semester back at college. I've been an engineer, a teacher, and a lifelong learner. I had success as a math teacher, I believed, primarily because I loved being in the classroom and my students knew that. They knew I loved my work and that I loved them. What I have learned through this course is that my success was actually in large part due to using strategies that are proven effective because of how the brain operates! I've always tried to stay up to date on what works with students, but now understanding WHY these strategies work I am so thankful for the insight. Going forward I will be more explicit with my students. Yes, taking breaks during lessons works, but now I can explain WHY (frontal lobe fatigue and time for the brain to wire!). Exercise and movement helps learning (oxygen flow is increased and movement is a pathway for learning!). Discussing strategies is metacognitive work, and isn't metacog...
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One thing both Zull and Zadina talk about are how much the brain "loves a pattern"! From birth, the brain is constantly scanning for patterns, and it prefers complete patterns. This helps us in math class because math is ALL ABOUT PATTERNS! Zull states "If we expose students to incomplete images, charts, or graphs where progressions are not finished, students become motivated to work on them." (p132) Does your brain automatically try to place the puzzle piece where it belongs in the picture below? Incomplete patterns are something that I have seen motivate students time and time again. Math guru and blogger Dan Meyer ( http://blog.mrmeyer.com/ ) advocates to use that motivation by providing problems without all necessary information. As he puts it - "be less helpful". By providing only the framework (image or context) and the question, students are forced to think deeply about the problem and what information they need in order to solve ...
Zull and Zadina both engage in lengthy discussions about emotions and the importance of emotion in learning. In the base, our brains through the amygdala are constantly assessing our surroundings. If the brain senses a safety issue, the brain is flooded with chemicals that place the body on high alert - ready to fight, run, or shut down. In this scenario, learning is impossible. On a higher level, when our students have a safe, supportive learning environment, their brains are ready to process new information and build new neural networks. This is the learning environment we need to create for our students. Once we have established this type of classroom and have engaged our students in active learning, their brains will reward them for learning! "In time, a rewarding experience is remembered through the feelings it generates." (p62) "Thinking is rewarding. It is work, but is also fun - as long as there is movement and ...
As we continued along with James Zull's book From Brain to Mind: Using Neuroscience to Guide Education , he discusses the idea that we are all born with a brain . That brain is simply another organ in the human body - it is full of cells, blood flow, and chemicals. He continues his discussion by making the point that as we sense, experience, and act, the brain changes itself into a mind that can think and make decisions that move to actions. Our goal as educators is always to help students move from simply reacting to making thoughtful decisions - personally as well as academically. I have discussed in previous posts how I have worked with students in the past to engage their brains and work to "think about their thinking" so I certainly agreed with Zull as he stated "Without trying there will be no progress in the journey toward mind." (p28) I may have previously shared one of my favorite pieces from my classroom - a giant poster stating Math is n...
We recently started James Zull's book From Brain to Mind: Using Neuroscience to Guide Change in Education. I admit to having some reservations about the book when, in the Introduction, the author says "...without some dramatic intervention, mental capabilities we attribute to the mind will be weakened or lost. If we continue to count on education for development of the mind, we need to change education itself." (p3) It seems to me that the author is over-dramatizing the state of education - "mental capabilities...will be weakened or lost" - really?? I see evidence of metacognition and growth mindset in classrooms daily. I imagine the author is attempting to make a point to prove his book is worth reading, but comments like this do no justice to the hard work of educators in the classroom who are working to incorporate brain learning strategies in their classes. The author also states: "Our goal should be a spontaneous demonstration of hab...
Sometimes this semester I learn something through our readings and think.... "Wow, that's a great idea. I wish I'd used that in my classroom." or... "Yeah, I knew that was a good idea but now I know why!" This week, however, I find myself thinking: "Ooooooh that was fortuitous!" We have talked a bit over the past semester about the importance of movement and learning; that movement is one way a student can learn and make connections, and that movement introduces more oxygen and fuel to the brain which also helps learning. That little "brain breaks" aren't really a "break" at all - that they are part of the learning process! In our reading this week of the last chapter of Zadina's Multiple Pathways to the Student Brain book, I came across a statement that really struck me: Harvard psychiatrist John Ratey designed an intervention in which students who exercised at the beginning of the scho...
I love this poem by Haim Ginott: I have come to a frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element in the classroom. It's my personal approach that creates the climate. It's my daily mood that makes the weather. As a teacher, I possess a tremendous power to make a child's life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration. I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis will be escalated or de-escalated and a child humanized or de-humanized. Teachers, in truth any adult who encounters children, "possess tremendous power" to effect the climate, especially in a classroom. As any well learned teacher will tell you, setting up a good classroom climate the first few weeks of school is well worth the time it takes. What I am learning from my reading in EDCI 7055 is that focusing on establishing safe norms for student-student and teacher-student interactions is...
Isn't the human brain fascinating?!? We have focused on the frontal lobe of the brain this past week. I think we hear a lot about executive functions, higher order thinking, and metacognition (all skills that originate in the frontal lobe) as part of our learning as teachers, but really understanding how the brain grows and developing these skills seems far more important than I initially realized. Reading the research presented by Zadina regarding executive function and how it is a better predictor of school readiness than IQ, and how it even can predict SAT scores, makes me wonder why we don't focus more on "brain training" than we do. Yes, the three "r's" are important, but if you cannot control your behavior, you can't go about learning reading, writing, and arithmetic anyhow! Zadina states that the frontal lobe is the last part of the brain to come fully online, so our job as teachers must include helping students develop stra...
One way I like to start a class or tutorial is with a puzzle. I have found that all students, especially ones who struggle in math class, love puzzles. The pressure is low, the fun is high...what could be better?!? Some of my favorites are puzzles by Naoki Inaba , many of which can be found for free on the internet. My students also love brain teasers such as Math Perplexors or soduku puzzles. These puzzles and patterns, especially solving the "tricky" ones, help activate what Zadina calls 'The Reward Pathway', and is just another way for us to help our students do the hard work of learning! Once we have solved our puzzle, the students are usually ready to go on with a more traditional math discussion. I like to call this part "turning our brains on!". Zadina says that "If the person is attending to a stimulus, the firing will be stronger than if the person is simply aware of the stimulus." (p113) A big part of o...
I'd like you to think of a time when you were mad. Like, everything-is-red and you feel like you are going to explode M-A-D. Really pull it up and FEEL it. Now let's learn how to do calculus. Exactly. Our students who come to us with emotional baggage in the form of anxiety, trauma, and/or high stress may find it nearly impossible to learn new information, or even to recall information they have previously learned. Zadina says that "emotion and learning cannot be separated". One young man I worked with came to the 5th grade with significant emotional trauma. It took a good 6 months of keeping a safe, positive learning environment for him to truly engage and put forth significant effort, but WOW WHEN HE DID! He sat by my side for an entire school day while his peers were enjoying a 'free day,' to pull his grades up. He worked and worked and worked until he had an A in mathematics, and he was SO PROUD of himself. I will ...
"If the answer is DYSCALCULIA , what is the question?" What are you wondering? Have you heard of dyscalculia? How about dyslexia? I'd like you to take a journey with me. Let's travel to understood.org to imagine what it feels like to have dyscalculia. Please click here . As a mathematics teacher of elementary and middle school students, I was fascinated to feel the frustration and confusion of a student with dyscalculia (a specific learning disability in mathematics) through the understood.org application. We know that dyscalculia is as prevalent as dyslexia or ADHD (3 - 6% of the population), and yet relatively little is known about dyscalculia ( click here for an NIH study on dyscalculia ). So often we hear children and adults say "I just can't do math" when in fact they may simply have a form of dyscalculia. My focus this semester is on brain development and how we can best help our students with dyscalculia. In our m...
This blog will be used to log some of my personal thoughts and growth in the area of human development and the brain, and how it specifically relates to education. As a math teacher interested in students with specific learning disabilities in math, I am thrilled to be learning about brain plasticity and how we can take advantage of the fact that the brain can change an adapt. We have recently watched a TEDx talk about a woman who claims she "changed her brain". https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=o0td5aw1KXA Barbara Arrowsmith-Young claims that she cured herself of certain debilitating special needs she called a "brain block". Ms. Arrowsmith-Young believes that the brain can grow new pathways to not just work around, but CURE deficiencies such as those seen in schools. I think this is a fascinating field of study, however, if it were as easy as simply exercising targeted areas of the brain to grow a new pathway, why can we not yet c...