LSU EDCI 7055 Progress Blog

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...