Tag Archives: TED Talks

The Myth of Average

Posted in Affinities, Differentiated Instruction, Differentiated Learning, Learning, Learning about Learning, Learning Challenges, Research, School Culture, Strategies for teachers, Teacher Effectiveness, Whole Child by

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.

Oh, The Places You’ll Find Yourself — Spatially Speaking

Posted in Brain Facts, Graphomotor Function, Learning, Spatial Ordering, Whole Child by

Below is a TED Talk by Neil Burgess, a neuroscientist at the University College in London, who researches, as described on the TED website, “how patterns of electrical activity in brain cells guide us through space.”

Supplemental to the grid cells Dr. Burgess discusses are additional neurological systems that give us a sense of our surroundings. Dan Peterson, who writes a fascinating blog (Sports are 80 Percent Mental) about the body-mind connection in sports, recently posted “Spatial Awareness on the Football Field” (where we found the above TED Talk — Thanks, Dan!) in which he writes,

Jeffrey Taube, a professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Dartmouth, has been studying our sense of direction and location. “Knowing what direction you are facing, where you are, and how to navigate are really fundamental to your survival,” said Taube.

In his research, he has found there are head direction cells, located in the thalamus, that act as a compass needle tracking the direction our head is currently facing.  At the same time, in the hippocampus, place cells determine and track our location relative to landmarks in the environment, say the football field sideline or the end zone.  These two sets of cells communicate with each other to guide our movement.

“They put that information together to give you an overall sense of ‘here,’ location wise and direction wise,” Taube explained. “That is the first ingredient for being able to ask the question, ‘How am I going to get to point B if I am at point A?’ It is the starting point on the cognitive map.”

It reminds us once again that strengths and affinities can be left at the door of our schools and classrooms if we don’t incorporate movement, action, and an intentional use of our bodies in our lessons and activities. Research continues to indicate that taking advantage of the neurological links between spatial ordering, graphomotor functioning, attention, and memory can help nurture achievement among a broader diversity of learners than the traditional sit-n-git approach (which leaves too many students itching for something more engaging).

Your Brain on Improv

Posted in Brain Facts, Nonverbal thinking by

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The below TEDx Talk by surgeon, researcher, and musician Charles Limb, unpacks some of his emerging hypotheses about the brain during improv, and how those might translate into understanding creativity. Or at least one small slice of it.

If he is correct, there are probably a broad range of implications for education. How might improv be used in the classroom to help students construct meaning, brainstorm, and build communication skills? What might educators do to help students develop skills at improv and can those skills help students as adults?

You can view the original on the TED Talks website.

Want to know more about the brain on improv?

Image: Nature.com

The Mysterious Workings of the Adolescent Brain

Posted in Brain Facts, Higher Order Thinking, Student Strengths, Student Weaknesses by

There is a common thread that connects the earliest parents to the current ones. It isn’t walking to school uphill in snow both ways, negotiating screen time, or bedtime battles. At some point or another we have all thought the same thing about our kids: “What in the world were they thinking?!”

While neuroscience still has a long way to go to truly and completely answer that question, the mental processes involved (or not) in making decisions in the adolescent mind are coming to light. Check out this great TED Talk by Cognitive neuroscientist Sarah-Jayne Blakemore who studies “the social brain . . . and how it develops in the adolescent brain.” (From her TED Talk bio.)

Want to know more about the mysterious (and vexing) adolescent brain? Check out Dr. Judy Willis’s ASCD webinars archived here.