Saturday, December 26, 2009

Scientific Interlude: Neuroscience

An enriched educational environment comes from matching teaching practice to the nature of how the brain learns. Basically, it learns in six ways:


a. by associating—e.g., in sensory cortex; it links new information to existing knowledge; it uses power of personal associations

(cf. difference between learning as information-processing and as transformation)

b. by shaping associations into patterns (sometimes forcing patterns that do not exist?)

c. by making meaning

d. through emotions (the limbic system works as a relevance-detector)

e. through the body

f. mostly beneath the level of awareness


(personal notes from “Teaching to the Teenage Brain” conference leader, Gessner Geyer, 25 July 2005, Sierra Nevada Mountains)

No comments:

Post a Comment