Click below to explore OpenColleges’s interactive Brain Map. Filled with facts about the brain as well as strategies for leveraging those brain features to take ownership over learning. Enjoy.
An interactive infographic by Open Colleges
Tag Archives: Learning
Using Validation to Help Regulate Emotions
This post by Sara Caitlyn Deal was originally posted on Southeast Psych’s blog.
Have you ever said something mean when you were angry that you later regretted? Or sent an email when you were really upset that later you wished was never sent? We have all done these things but communicating when overwhelmed with emotion does not usually work well. Validation, the recognition and acceptance of another person’s internal experience as being valid, can help emotionally sensitive people manage their emotions effectively. So, why is validation important?
Validation…
Communicates acceptance- it is human nature to want to belong, being accepted and acknowledging the value of yourself and others is very calming
Helps a person know when they are on the right track- feedback from others that your thoughts and feelings are normal and make sense lets you know you are understood
Helps regulate emotions- knowing that you are understood reduces feelings of being left out or not fitting in. Validation helps to soothe people that are emotionally upset.
Builds an identity- Validation is a reflection of your values, beliefs, and patterns and helps others better understand your personality.
Builds relationships- Feelings of connection are expressed when someone is validated which helps to build and strengthen relationships.
Increases understanding and forms effective communication styles- Everyone sees, thinks, and hears things differently; two people can look at the same picture and interpret it in completely opposite ways. Validation is a way of understanding others viewpoints.
Shows others they are important- communicates to others that they are important and you care about their thoughts, feelings, and actions.
Validation is a simple concept to understand, but can be difficult to apply in practice. However, if you care about someone who is emotionally sensitive, validation is one of the most important and effective skills you can learn. Similar, if you are an emotionally unstable person, learning to validate yourself will help you manage your own emotions. For more information on validation and how to use validation check out the DBT website or blog.
Image: Southeast Psych
Bruce Springsteen on Education
This Bruce Springsteen quote is from an old video interview, which was reported on author David Shenk’s Genius Blog. The image was put together by the folks over at We Are Teachers.
In our books, this just reaffirms that he is, in fact, The Boss.
Image source: We Are Teachers Pinterest
Memory, Social Cognition, and Predicting the Future
A recent article in Harvard Magazine reports on the research of psychology professor, Daniel Schater, who is delving into memory, social cognition and how the mind imagines the future.
From the article:
During the past decade, Schacter says, a revolution has occurred in the field of memory science: researchers have shown that memory is responsible for much more than the simple recall of facts or the sensation of reliving events from the past. “Memory is not just a readout,” he explains. “It is a tool that’s used by the brain to bring past experience to bear when thinking about future situations.”
In fact, Schacter continues, memory and imagination involve virtually identical mental processes; both rely on a specific system known as the “default network,” previously thought to be activated only when recalling the past.
Of course, this makes sense. Why wouldn’t the brain utilize its resource of past experiences to anticipate the future and to imagine possibilities? Schater and colleagues began to wonder if these processes applied to social cognition and how individuals might predict other people’s behaviors.
They developed and implemented an experiment to determine what parts of the brains were activated when participants were tasked with thinking about how a person might behave in a variety of different situations.
Again, from the article:
The researchers concluded that memory and social cognition therefore work in concert when individuals hypothesize about the future behavior of others. The brain regions responsible for forming “personality models” and assigning them identities are intrinsically linked to the memory/imagination systems that simulate the past and future.
While it is too premature to draw any conclusions about possible implications for education and learning environments, it is worth noting that students, who are deeply embedded in dynamic and sometimes quite challenging social situations, are employing a number of cognitive functions throughout their day. When considering the complexity of the mental processes being utilized, it is no wonder that so many students find the kind of schooling that focuses primarily on fact memorization to be mind numbingly boring.
Perhaps this vein of research can lead to a better understanding of empathy and what types of experiences might build up students’ brains with the sorts of memories that help them better predict and imagine the future they want for themselves.
Photo Credit: Flavio~ via Compfight cc
The Myth of Average
Todd Rose’s brilliant talk at TEDxSonoma expands on a startlingly simple point:
When you design for the average, you design for no-one. He suggests instead we to need design for the extremes.
For anyone who has worked with students, it is an intuitive enough concept, in theory. Yet in application, it has proven challenging, especially in a climate fixated on norm reference test scores, where average is king (or queen). How do we design and deliver for the wide variability of students’ learning profiles when there is so much pressure to get all students to the same level in all subjects? The default has become education policies that claim to race to the top, but instead stagger for the middle, effectively limiting the extremes.
As Rose so eloquently demonstrates with a story from military history, in trying to target the average, we invariably isolate everyone.
What makes him an expert in this topic? He was a high school dropout with a 0.9 GPA who is now an author of “Square Peg” and a professor at Harvard Graduate School of Education.
He says,
I’ve been to the very bottom of our educational system. I’ve been to the very top. I’m here to tell you that we are wasting so much talent at every single level. And the thing is, because for every single person like me, there are millions who worked as hard, who had the ability, but who were unable to overcome the drag of a educational environment designed on average. And their talent is forever lost to us.
Watch his talk above for more. We guarantee you will be even more inspired to cultivate that which makes your students unique, wonderful, and valuable to the well being of our communities.
RSA of Steven Johnson’s “Where Good Ideas Come From” Talk
In the video below, the clever folks over at RSA Animate give visual engagement to Steven Johnson’s brief talk on Where Good Ideas Come From, an excerpt from his TEDtalk.
One of the things we love about this talk is that it confirms what we intrinsically know to be true — innovation is more about interaction and engagement than sitting and listening.
Why is this important?
When we think about involving and investing all learners in education, we run up against the contrast between the traditional practices that sustain a factory “batch and queue” model of education with the reality of how people actually learn. Out of this contrast is born the dichotomous tension between focusing on efficiency and “teacher effectiveness” (an inherently top-down approach geared toward achievement on standardized tests) with that of focusing on the learners and their strengths/affinities/needs as a starting point (an inherently bottom-up approach focused on the whole child).
That the top-down version is currently the dominant paradigm is easy to see. There is more talk about accountability and outcomes than student engagement or motivation. Yet this video lays out the simple truth: innovation, via creativity, necessitates interaction and connections. If we want the strengths of dyslexia and other learning differences to be harnessed and applied, we need to think differently about how we involve students in learning. What is the role of the teacher? What is the role of the student? What patterns, norms, and habits of mind do we want for our graduates and what kind of learning experiences will help cultivate those?
Such questions will not be quickly answered. So, in the meantime, check out the clever video below.
Photo Credit: zetson via Compfight cc
The Toll of High Stakes Tests on Non-Traditional Learners
This guest post by Bobbi Snow, co-founder of The Community Public Charter School in Charlottesville, VA, exposes the impact high stakes testing has her school’s neuro-diverse students and the teachers who work with them. It was originally published on Washington Post’s Answer Sheet blog.
He was already exhausted and had 58 questions to go. On the second problem of the 8th grade math exam he was stuck for almost 30 minutes. This is the state standardized test given to all 8th graders in Virginia. Jim is a visual learner and needed to draw the answers for each possible option. Pausing a moment Jim reached into his snack bag and announced “Help me out here Pringles.” Turning to me he commented, “I hear salt helps the brain.” I smiled.
I was drained watching Jim’s agony, as he thought out every problem and bounced from question to question. But if I was drained, Jim was miserable. He wanted to do well. He stayed at it for five hours. The computer doesn’t fit Jim’s style of learning or showing what he knows. He is a hands-on, multitasking young man who likes to verbalize aloud what he thinks and figure out multiple solutions. He is an outside-the-box big thinker.
Melissa had a similar experience taking her SOL test. Melissa thinks like an artist and has the kinds of skills we will need in this century. She asks questions that connect to other questions and has trouble with information that is separated into decompartmentalized chunks. She just kept drifting off the test into some other world more interesting to Melissa. She tried to engage me in pondering some of these bigger interesting questions but I am a seasoned proctor and I gave my Buddha look and reminded her I could not have discussions during the testing. I brought my sewing in to establish a calm environment and stitched away. In the middle of the test Melissa said in a panic, “What if I fail this?” My heart felt touched knowing how scared she was at that moment. She returned to the test muttering, “This is a disaster.”
These are two students who do their work, have good analytical skills, and an intense desire to do well in school. Their families support them to use their minds well. Teachers did adequate review and they were well prepared for the tests. They both felt like terrible failures. So many of their peers felt the same.
And so did I. I know as a charter school we are being judged by the outside world to do well on high stakes testing. The mission of our school is to help students who have been unsuccessful in their previous schools become thinkers and creative problem solvers. Our goal is to prepare young people for the real world and as a public school we also accept the responsibility of preparing students for their testing lives.
But there are so many consequences that come with this acceptance. One of our first year teachers reviewed the results of the writing tests and felt devastated by a few of her student’s scores. She felt that she had let them down by not preparing them well enough to pass. She sunk into her own feelings of failure as a teacher and considered shoring up the curriculum to be more aligned to the test. This was because three perfectly wonderful students who are able thinkers and creative beyond what most adults we know could ever contribute to a conversation much less a class were deemed not worthy of scoring the necessary 400 points to pass the essay test. They were close. But no cigar. Was their prompt they were given too off target for their life experience? Was it their anxiety that day that kept them from a good sequencing of ideas? What exactly was their issue?
One test, one day of a test, made this gifted teacher second-guess her whole year of teaching. How will it affect her next year when she has to make decisions about our arts infused project-based activities? Will she want to reduce the class to worksheets and drill to review concepts and skills?
I believe in accountability and knowing what works for students to be successful. There are better ways than this one-size-fits-all testing to assess and record what students know.
As educators, are we seen as so limited that we cannot be trusted to create our own rigorous assessment tools and be judged by them? Let us become the agents of our own work and design how to define mastery and be held accountable to our standards. We will invest ourselves to figure out the mysteries of what a quality education means and can provide. Until then we are held hostage to a system that is archaic, harmful for many students and teachers and missing an opportunity to involve local stakeholders in addressing the crisis in education.
For now we will just have to hope that Pringles can help.
Photo Credit: albertogp123 via Compfight cc
(Re)Defining Dyslexia
In a recent New York Times op-ed, Defining My Dyslexia, physician and author Blake Charlton explores some of the emerging research and trends related to dyslexia while also sharing his own story about his struggles growing up a dyslexic. At the heart of his piece is the growing understanding that along with the challenges associated with dyslexia, are a collection of cognitive strengths that are too often under appreciated. He writes,
Last month, at the Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation Conference on Dyslexia and Talent, I watched several neurobiologists present evidence that the dyslexic brain, which processes information in a unique way, may impart particular strengths. Studies using cognitive testing and functional M.R.I.’s have demonstrated exceptional three-dimensional and spatial reasoning among dyslexic individuals, which may account for the many successful dyslexic engineers. Similar studies have shown increased creativity and big-picture thinking (or “gist-detection”) in dyslexics, which correlates with the surprising number of dyslexic entrepreneurs, novelists and filmmakers.
The conference’s organizers made a strong case that the successes of the attending dyslexic luminaries — who ranged from a Pulitzer-winning poet to a MacArthur grant-winning paleontologist to an entrepreneur who pays a dozen times my student loans in taxes every year — had been achieved “not despite, but because of dyslexia.”
It is a powerful message for everyone, especially students struggling to understand their dyslexia within the context of a world that sees their differences as deficits. He goes on to illuminate this point,
Today’s educational environment exacerbates dyslexic weaknesses. Schools misidentify poor spelling and slow reading as a lack of intelligence; typically diagnose the condition only after students have fallen behind; and too often fail to provide dyslexic students with the audio and video materials that would help them learn. Until these disadvantages are removed, “disability” most accurately describes what young dyslexics confront.
This heartbreaking reality further demonstrates what many of us already know: we must design educational spaces and experiences not to just accomodate, ahem, all kinds of minds but to intentionally leverage the mosaic of strengths that such diversity brings to the table. There’s a considerable difference between tolerating diversity and embracing it. Perhaps a good place to start is in how we define and diagnose such “disabilities” as dyslexia. To this point, Charlton concludes,
A more precise definition of dyslexia would clearly identify the disabilities that go along with it, while recognizing the associated abilities as well. If the dyslexic community could popularize such a definition, then newly diagnosed dyslexics would realize that they, like everyone else, will face their futures with a range of strengths and weaknesses.
We could not agree more.
Photo Credit: The Nikon Guru via Compfight cc
11 Characteristic of Meaningful Work (and Learning)
In a recent repost of Shawn Murphy’s “11 Characteristics of Meaningful Work,” the editors at QED’s blog noted that,
While this piece by Shawn Murphy is related to business practices and targeted to managers and business leaders, the parallels to education and student learning are striking. Teachers, curricula developers, and education leaders can find plenty herein to ponder, reflect on, and apply in practice.
We couldn’t agree more. Switch a few key words (for example: “work” to “learning experiences,” “employees” to students,” and “the organization” to “school.”) and, voila!, some great advice for educators and education leaders.
Below are the 11 characteristics of meaningful work in title only. To read the explanations for each, you can visit Shawn’s original post here, or QED’s repost here.
1. Basic needs are met
2. Strengths are leveraged
3. Pull personal satisfaction from work
4. Being in on things
5. Treated with respect by peers and managers
6. See how one’s work fits into the bigger picture
7. Personal sense of independence and interdependence
8. Employees believe they are valued by the organization, by management
9. Opportunities to know self
10. Promotion of other’s satisfaction
11. Recognized — give recognition for good work
Image: Shawn Murphy
The Mind Matters Show: Study Tip — The Format Shift
Here is the latest video from Dr. Craig Pohlman’s “The Mind Matters Show.” Ben Berg describes the video on this blog post as such,
When it comes to studying for a test, some methods give you a better chance for success. On this episode of the Mind Matters Show, Dr. Craig Pohlman explains the difference between active and passive studying (and how a strategy called the “format shift” can help):
- Passive Studiers –simply go over the material and let it skim across their minds
- Active Studiers – engage with the information, such as by transforming it so it embeds into long term memory
This is where the format shift comes in. An active studier would take information they are studying and re-organize it. For example, they would take the content from a textbook paragraph and create a schematic diagram, pictorial diagram, or a compare/contrast table.
The key to the format shift is the process. The act of transforming the information from one format to another embeds the information much more deeply. The multiple formats are more compelling than a plain paragraph in a textbook, so this also makes studying more interesting!
The next time you have to study for a test, consider the format shift in order to get the most out of your study session.
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All Kinds of Minds 
