Week 1: Know your Learner

This week’s tasks started with a webinar by psychologist and teacher Judy Willis.  The Key features she talked about in “How the Brain Learns Best” was what causes stress in classrooms; how to de-stress students so they learn better and ideas to get the course materials through students ‘RAS’, into the Limbic System and finally into the Pre-Frontal Cortex or “Thinking Brain”.

Ok, so I know all of that sounds a little scary.  And it is.  Until it gets broken down into sections, so here goes:

First with stress. I found the stress part of the webinar interesting because –although she went into stress only briefly – she talked about ways to de-stress situations and related back to simple human nature.  Or should I say, Mother Nature.  Judy Willis used the analogy that students are like baby foxes. A fox will pop its head out of its home to discover if anything has changed. It smells sees and feels danger. The same goes for students. If something is different, they will immediately begin to stress.  

When the RAS closes because a student gets stressed, it has been recorded that students react in three main ways.  They fight back with the teacher, they flee from the stressful situation or they freeze completely.  In the webinar, Judy Willis provides ways to prevent the Fight, Flight or Freeze reactions with easy steps that any teacher can do periodically within a class. The de-stressing prevention methods that I would use in a classroom to keep stress levels low would be to include individual whiteboards in my classes. This way, when you ask a question, all of the students write the answer on their whiteboard and hold it up so only I can see what they have said. The students aren’t worrying about being wrong or being embarrassed to talk in front of their classmates and stress levels are already significantly lower. 

I will also use frequent feedback as a way to prevent stress because the students will have a chance to discuss amongst themselves and with me what they are struggling with, what they want to know more of and they will be able to help each other understand the content from the lessons, further ingraining the knowledge in their own brain.  As a teacher I will also use the student’s strengths to help them combat fear.  If a student is very tech-savvy I will request for them to find additional information online to share with the class.  If they are very artistic, I will ask them to create a poster/diagram/sculpture/etc. to do with the topic that will be engaging for the whole class.

Another technique that I would use is individualisation of the students, whether they are falling behind or getting bored because they already know the content. I would let the students falling behind know that the expectations I have for them isn’t to understand all of the information right away because they will pick up key words and pieces of information and I will discuss with them later in the class the topics that they are struggling with. I would individualise the students who are excelling and getting bored by informing them that they can go on in the textbooks or go online and do some extra research or give them activities to engage them in learning while I teach the rest of the students.

Now onto the “thinking brain”.  Judy Willis highlighted that this was where all of the conscious thought takes place and that information needs to travel through the RAS, into the amygdala which then passes information onto the pre-frontal cortex allowing the students to learn and develop their knowledge on course topics. A few techniques I will be using – that was mentioned in the webinar – to gain the attention of my students and to stimulate curiosity (allowing information through the RAS) will be to surprise the students. Whether this is by dressing up as Johann Sebastion Bach (can you imagine a 20 year old female in that costume – yikes!!), or advertising future lessons in a fun way that makes the students guess what is to come.  

I will use movement, if I dance around the class or have the students repeat specific movements that relate to a certain topic or idea that has just been said, or I could use colour, maybe I’d have the kids paint all of the keywords they hear during a lesson on a big canvas to be hung in the classroom.  I could also use different technologies to keep their brains engaged, have them create a blog and write reflections on each weeks classes (:P) or have them discover the meaning of words as I teach them the topic so that they can share extra content that they have found by themselves.

No matter what techniques I use or what topic I teach, I will make sure that the information gets through to the students in a fun way, so they never feel like they are learning, but that they feel involved and so that they show up to the next class with bright smiles, their pre-frontal cortex wide awake, open for business and ready to receive information, and their stress levels are down so that they welcome learning as if it was play time.

With all of the above in mind I have come to the conclusion that the shortcomings of traditional classrooms and the way curriculum was taught before the age of modern technologies brought a negative effect on students learning and information retention as they were given one chance to take in all of the information in topics. This shortcoming differs today as the materials for learning is online, giving students multiple opportunities to catch up on things they might have missed or to clarify what they didn't understand. Because of this digital age, instead of students being forced to learn at the same speed, a students learning can be self-paced and self-directed so that they are involving themselves in their learning more than if they were i a classroom setting.

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