LSU EDCI 7055 Progress Blog

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...