The Explorations course has provided a broad foundation of learning about many topics and made me more aware of less familiar aspects of cognitive and neuro-science research. They include, for example, the variety of applications of neuro-imaging, the neural bases of attending, the importance of developing effortful control for learning engagement, and the role of the arts in making learning more effective activating and connecting neural pathways in unique ways. These are all interesting areas I want and need to know more about. Thinking about questions that I would like to focus on throughout the program, however, I keep returning to three questions that emerged for me in our first week:
1.What is perception and what does it mean/take for a student to change his or her perception and be more open to learning?
2. How can a better understanding of the brain help us identify and address the wide range of variables that contribute to “magic moments” of teaching and learning?
3. How does the internal process of learning (memory or sense-making) differ when a student is actively connecting to previous knowledge and extending ideas in creative ways…vs. when a student is memorizing a fact?
Nine weeks later, I feel like have developed some understanding that helps me better define and more specifically consider all three of these questions.
The first question gets at ideas about emotion, I believe. Our work early in the course focused on BT-1 in Hardiman’s Brain-Targeted Teaching Model (2003) – creating that safe, supportive, engaging, empowering environment that can open students to learning. As I wrote in my week 4 post on the ELC: Emotional states can influence the way in which students engage in learning and/or the way in which they access, interact with, and interpret learning. For example, students who are angry, sad, scared, or whose negative emotions crowd their mind may find it difficult to attend – they may not hear or see or understand what is being taught. I think of a metaphor of a force field through which learning can’t penetrate. If learning does “go through” it may be filtered, fragmented, or altered by negative emotions. Positive emotions, research suggests, may have the opposite effect. Immordino-Yang and Damasio (2000) shed significant light on this, suggesting that even discussing cognition and emotion separately may be to make an artificial distinction. Most striking for me in their paper were the claims that 1) learning and recall simply won’t happen in a “purely rational” domain and 2) that by trying to isolate cognition from emotion the result may be that the kind of learning students do develop are those that aren’t applied or transferred effectively.
The second question is somewhat more elusive, but Hardiman’s model is a roadmap that seems likely to help increase the chance that those magic moments will occur. Her model is a powerful reminder of all the aspects that need to be considered and threaded together for effective learning. I connect it to a Six Traits Writing model for writing. Each of the traits can be isolated and skills developed, but only together can they help create a truly effective and beautiful piece of writing. I’m coming to think that the real answer to this question – how do you create magic moments? -- will not only be informed by research, but determined by how effectively we are able to translate it into effective learning experiences. The Brain-Targeted Teaching model itself may be the key to this.
The third question, which may be the one I am most interested in developing and exploring further, gets at how we can define, neurologically or physiologically, the learning differences we recognize when we discuss Blooms Taxonomy. On one level, this idea addressed by Hardiman’s BT4 and BT5 – teaching for mastery vs. teaching for extension and application. By splitting these into two separate strands, Hardiman is recognizing the difference between the two. In discussing mastery (website) she refers to mastery of knowledge, repeated rehearsal and recall. In discussing application and extension she uses words such as induction, deduction, problem-solving and analysis. Her summary suggests that there activities in the classroom that seem to require these different kinds of thinking. However, I still do not have a sense of what those different kinds of thinking really look like in the brain.
So many questions and so little time! I’m not sure I’m ready to narrow my focus too tightly to only a few goals, but I will set the following for myself. First, I will continue to consider all three of the questions I posed in week one. Second, I am specifically interested in the third question, whether/how different levels of thinking…different depths of thinking…are different. This interest intersects with my interests in learners who appear to have advanced potential – gifted and talented students – and also with my interest in creative thinking. As we build networks of ideas on previous networks of ideas, what is it that enables a person to bring together seemingly disparate ideas from distant networks – ideas that haven’t been connected by designed experience – and use those connections to develop truly creative experiences or innovative interpretations of the world? At the end of this program, I would like to be a resource for creating more effective learning experiences that serve advanced learners, including creatively gifted learners, with research-based understanding of how to more effectively foster their talents.
Hardiman, M. (2003). Connecting Brain Research With Effective Teaching: The Brain-Targeted Teaching Model. New York: Rowman & Littlefield Education.
Immordino-Yang, M. & Damasio, A. (2007.) We Feel Therefore We Learn: The Relevance of Affective and Social Neuroscience to Education. Mind, Brain, and Education, 1(1), 3-10. Retrieved from http:/olms.cte:jhu.edu/olms/data/resource/8038/Week4_ArticleWeFeelThereforeWeLearn.pdf
