Remember
when you started teaching and you had to go to all sorts of professional
development sessions when you really needed to spend time planning and grading? Remember how few of them spoke to your needs? Remember feeling frustrated that you truly wanted
to learn and think about these things but you were just trying to keep your
head above water? I remember those days…barely. I consider myself fortunate now to be skilled
enough in planning and teaching that I get to go to PD sessions and enjoy
them. Recently I had the opportunity to
attend PD sessions by two speakers who were excellent. Rather than attempt to tell you everything
they said, I would just like to share my take-aways.
1. Read his book ASAP
2. The brain is designed to solve problems
outside while moving in varying meteorological conditions. Certainly begs the question…Why do we have
schools designed as we do if we want to maximize learning?
3. We really don’t understand much about how
memory works.
4. It really takes 10 years of thinking about and
re-encountering information to truly learn it.
Stop and think about this and consider how fast we cover curricula in
schools. Consider how quickly young
teachers frequently leave the profession.
Consider how little support we give young teachers over the course of their
first decade. Consider how proficient we
expect any professional to be after just a couple years. Being good at something takes a while. Being great?
See Malcolm Gladwell and Outliers.
5. The brain doesn’t really allow multi-tasking;
the medial parietal lobe doesn’t allow it.
I don’t actually know what this means, but I like knowing the brain
doesn’t allow multi-tasking. Now I can
focus on one thing and have evidence to support me!
6. A 26 minute nap begun 12 hours after the
midpoint of the prior night’s sleep helps your brain reset itself, and you can
then be more aware, better rested, and ready to learn. I really like this idea for everyone. And you don’t even have to sleep…simply
getting horizontal helps. Rosenkind at
NASA measured the effects of this and saw a 34% increase in performance.
7.
Generally speaking, we are all either larks,
hummingbirds or owls – morning people, day people, and night people. This is hardwired for most of us. What would happen if we aligned students’
types and their school schedules? What
if we did the same for teachers? Imagine
lark teachers, teaching lark students from 7 to noon.
8.
Longevity, youthfulness and aging are determined
by your degree of being sedentary. You can
change this. Regular aerobic exercise
for 16 weeks can improve executive functioning of the brain. However, it takes three years of aerobic
exercise to see improvement in memory.
And anaerobic exercise has no impact on brain function.
9. The single greatest predictor of academic success
is the emotional condition and stability of the home.
10. Stress isn’t the problem; it’s our ability to
handle it. We all have stress. Improved brain functioning allows us to
handle the stress better.
My
greatest take-away was more of a validation.
The way the brain learns and the way we organize school are in
opposition. We could improve schools, learning
and over-all achievement if we applied what we know about the brain and child
development more effectively.
In my next
post I will share what I learned from three sessions with Dr. Youn Zhao, author
of World Class Learners: Educating Creative
and Entrepreneurial Students.
