Thoughtful Learning Blog

Insightful articles about 21st century skills, inquiry, project-based learning, media literacy, and education reform.

Networking Your Students' Neurons

Submitted by King on Wed, 2012-05-09 14:31

The Internet began as a U.S. military computer network meant to survive a nuclear attack. ARPANET, developed in the 1960's, stored information in a broad network of computers linked by distributed hubs so that an attack against one or more hubs could not bring down the entire thing.

Decentralized. Interconnected. Robust. Nuke-Proof.

Wouldn't it be great if you could get your students to build the same kind of neural networks around the subjects you teach? How can you move beyond superficial, short-term learning to create learning that sticks? Modern brain science suggests one answer that you can apply in your classroom today.

Providing a Sensory Banquet

The key to creating robust neural networks in students' brains is to give them a rich sensory diet as they engage with material. Here's what Ronald Kotulak says in Inside the Brain:

The brain gobbles up its external environment in bites and chunks through its sensory system: vision, hearing, smell, touch, and taste. Then the digested world is reassembled in the form of trillions of connections between brain cells that are constantly growing or dying, or becoming stronger or weaker, depending upon the richness of the banquet.

By engaging many different senses, you lay the information down through multiple interconnected neural pathways, placing it in long-term memory and making it robust and "nuke-proof."

Map of the Reading Brain: Imagine that you ask your students to read a paragraph about the Treaty of Versailles. The information comes in through the eyes, imprints upon the retinas, and then travels through the optic nerves to the occipital lobe at the back of the brain. The information there is decoded into words, and impulses travel to the temporal lobes, where language processing occurs. The impulses then arc up to the frontal lobe meaning of the words is evaluated.

Your Class Calendar as a Meeting Place: Lessons from Stonehenge

Submitted by King on Wed, 2012-04-25 11:08

People say that Stonehenge was built to be a giant calendar that marks the winter and summer solstices. To me, that claim has always seemed a little odd. Who would spend 1,500 years building a calendar out of stone? Invent paper, people.

But let’s think of a calendar in deeper terms. A calendar doesn’t just track the days of a year. It tells which days are significant and why: Mardi Gras, Passover, Tax Day, Bastille Day, Election Day, New Years. . . . More than that—a calendar tells us what we ought to be doing on these special days. It is a meeting place where we can plan our future. In that sense, Stonehenge is very much a calendar. It wasn’t meant just to track time, but to provide a space for people to come together for meaningful activity.

Your Class Calendar as a Meeting Place

If you’re like most teachers, you’re used to thinking of your class calendar as an organizational tool that you create to guide you through presentation of the material. It’s your plan. But what if your calendar could be a meeting place? What if you invited students into the process of building the calendar—or at least part of it?

Understand that the students wouldn’t be building the class calendar on their own. They would be participating with you in building it. Here’s an example of how you could build a calendar together:

Display a calendar of the coming weeks. (Consider using a collaborative online program like Google Calendar.) Define the empty space that you and the students have to work in. “Over the next three weeks, we will be studying different biomes—or living environments for plants and animals.” Give your student an introduction to the topic—the more imersive and interactive the better.
Ask students what they want to know about the topic. Get them to activate their prior knowledge and to come up with interesting driving questions. “I want everyone to take the next five minutes to write at least five interesting questions you want to answer about biomes. Then your table groups will meet for five minutes and discuss your questions. Each table group will present the three questions that are most interesting and that give you the most room to explore the topic.” Write down the top three suggestions from each table group.

5 Keys to Successful Student Collaborations

Submitted by King on Thu, 2012-04-12 15:08

As you know, group work can give teachers headaches and students nightmares. If set up poorly, collaborative projects often result in one person doing all of the work, while others contribute minimally or actually disrupt. Arguments, inefficiency, mess, and chaos follow closely.

When set up well, though, group work taps into the power of collaboration. Here are 5 keys to setting up successful student collaborations.

Define group success. The first key to successful student collaboration is to make sure the group members have a common goal. They need to work together to accomplish a specific task. They will either succeed together or fail together. For everyday collaborations, make your expectations clear verbally: "Turn to your partner, discuss page 63, and answer the questions together." For large-scale group assignments, write out what success will look like for each group:

Download a free Word template.

Define individual success. The whole group succeeds or fails together, yes, but you should also establish expectations for individual contributions. For quick collaborations, specify what individual success is: "Each person needs to contribute one answer, and each person will report a different person's answer to the whole class." For larger-scale collaborations, write out what you expect of each group member:

Download a free Word template.

Bring Out the Teacher in Your Students

Submitted by King on Fri, 2012-04-06 10:49

“Look, Mom! See the turtle! He is scaly!”

Spend a day with a small child, and you will hear many such observations. That’s because all of us have an innate human desire to teach. Somehow what we learn isn’t real until we share it with someone else.

“Watch what I can do! Let me show you how!”

The exclamation points are almost mandatory, because we want to teach. “Show and tell” is one of the most popular times in elementary school—the chance for students to become teachers. And much of the appeal of social media is allowing middle and high school students to share what they have discovered.

“I want to show you something. You’ll never believe this—it’s so COOL!”

Teaching—Unique to Our Species

You’ve heard the expression, “Monkey see; monkey do.” It’s quite literally true. Great apes learn by mimicking what they see, but they don’t actively teach. Why not?

The act of teaching requires “triadic attention.” When you teach, you have to pay attention to three things—yourself, the other person, and the topic you are teaching. If you lose track of any of the three parts, the teaching moment is lost. Triadic attention is a hat trick that other species can’t maintain for long. Human beings, however, are capable of this feat even before they can speak. That’s why toddlers do so much pointing—to teach you about what they are seeing. Teaching is so central to who we are that perhaps our species should be renamed Homo pedagogues.

Creating a Growth Mindset in Your Students

Submitted by King on Mon, 2012-03-26 23:00

Belief that you can become smarter and more talented opens the doorways to success. That’s what twenty years of research has shown Carol Dweck of Stanford University. She has identified two opposing beliefs about intelligence and talent, beliefs that strongly impact our ability to learn.

Though the fixed mindset has traditionally held sway, many recent studies show that the growth mindset better represents our abilities. Our brains are much more elastic than previously thought, constantly growing new connections. IQ and talent are not fixed, but are mutable based on experience and attitude.

In her book Mindset, Dweck outlines the dramatic effect that these opposing beliefs have on learners:

Fixed Mindset	Growth Mindset
Wants to prove intelligence or talent.	Wants to improve intelligence or talent.
Avoids challenges for fear of failure.	Engages challenges to improve.
Gives up in the face of tough obstacles.	Persists in overcoming obstacles.
Avoids hard labor.	Sees labor as the path to success.
Treats criticism as an attack.	Treats criticism as an opportunity.
Feels threatened by others’ success.	Feels inspired by others’ success.

Crowdsourcing in Your Classroom

Submitted by Smith on Fri, 2012-03-23 12:51

How can you shift your classroom away from lecture and toward inquiry? You can get help from the modern phenomenon known as crowdsourcing—the practice of putting many minds to work on a single problem. Inquiry is, in effect, crowdsourcing in your classroom.

What Crowdsourcing Concepts Can Help Me?

The following four concepts from crowdsourcing can help you use more inquiry in your classroom.

Distributed Computing. While the term crowdsourcing is relatively new, the idea has been around for a while. One early example is the University of Berkley’s SETI project (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence), started in 1999, with over three million people devoting time on their personal computers to process radio signals. Other projects put crowds of human brains to work on even thornier problems. Just last September, over the course of three weeks, Fold.It gamers decoded an AIDS protein that scientists had been struggling with for 15 years. And inspired by the success of Fold.It, EyeWire.org recently launched a project asking people to help color-code neurons in the human retina.

Classroom Application
- A starting point for distributed computing in your classroom is to have students create their own unit overviews. Here’s how. Instead of lecturing to introduce a new unit, assign partners or groups to find out about specific topics in the unit. For example, to introduce a unit on the Civil War, you could list topics such as battles, generals, causes, public opinion, economics, technology, media, casualties, and so on. Then ask partners or groups to select a topic to investigate. Take the class to the library or media center for a half-hour inquiry into their topics. Afterward, have each group report briefly on what they discovered. This distributed-computing approach engages students and fosters research, collaboration, and presentation skills. It also covers the high points of the topic through crowdsourcing instead of lecture.
- A next step is to have students help develop the tools for assessing their work. Ask students what they want to accomplish—what excellent work would look like. Involve them in creating a rubric. This brainstorming process works even for young students, as is shown in this video about a bridge-building class. By involving students in creating the tools for their assessment, you get buy-in from them and often end up with a more rigorous assessment tool than you would otherwise have.
- When you and your students gain real comfort with distributed computing, you might have them participate in planning the semester’s syllabus. Have them brainstorm what makes a successful learning experience. Present the core standards on which they’ll be tested, and ask for project ideas to reach those goals. Gather student suggestions on the board and then guide a discussion analyzing how to implement them. By enlisting students in this part of their education, you show that they are responsible for their own learning. You also teach them the metacognitive skills they need to be lifelong learners.

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