Our Social Education

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 even more important than I knew. Students need to feel accepted in the social hierarchy of any classroom, and it's my opinion that the teacher and administration are solely responsible for this. It becomes even more important when we look at bullying, which can compare to the trauma of child physical and sexual abuse (Zadina p191)! Going forward, I will be sure to create classroom norms with my students (which I already do) but be sure to refer back to those norms regularly (which I struggle to do).

Another interesting takeaway from our reading this week was on mirroring. Because more areas of the brain light up on imaging when students are expected to copy a behavior (as opposed to just watching), it certainly makes sense to apply the "I do, we do, you do" strategy in a math classroom. Modeling a skill (such as long division) before a gradual release strategy can help students really start the "firing and wiring" process in the brain!

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Emotion and Learning

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 ...

The Emotion Pathway

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 ...

The Journey from Brain to Mind

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...

LSU EDCI 7055 Progress Blog

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