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The Frontal Lobe



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 strategies to strengthen their higher order skills and think about their thinking (metacognition).

One strategy I have employed in the past (without realizing exactly what I was doing or why it worked) was to teach my students that their brains are like an iceberg.  The thinking that they are aware of is just the little bit on top of the water, but there is a lot more to their brains than just what we can see!  I encouraged my students, when they got stuck on a math problem, to simply move on and not think about the problem.  After a while, when they came back to the problem, it's likely that they would know how to solve it because their brains had continued to process the information in the background.



Our frontal lobes get tired and need a rest from time to time to help process and solidify the information we are taking in.  When we give our frontal lobes time to rest, the unconscious mind can process and consolidate students' learning.  It turns out that research proves what I suspected, but didn't understand!



In the future, I'll enjoy teaching my students more explicitly about how their brains are working.  We have so much power we can harness if we understand our brains and how they learn!

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