Week
#1: Engagement Activity 1
Know Your Learner
Hello! How are you today? I spent
the morning planting fruit trees, not the most pleasant job in this heat and
humidity! So I'm actually glad I've set this afternoon aside to do my first
blog post (in the air-conditioning). So here goes!!
Cells that Fire Together Wire
Together!!
After spending time over the last few
days digesting the information contained in the article and webinar supplied in
the first half of the Week #1 course content, the concept that struck me most
was that we are all individuals with different strengths and weaknesses, but
that our brain is perfectly capable of making improvement in our weaker areas.
In the webinar, Dr Judy Willis used the
phrase "cells that fire together, wire together". This intrigued me,
and I decided to do a little Googling to see exactly where the phase came
from and what it meant. Turns out the phase was coined in 1949 by the
Canadian neuroscientist Donald Hebb (1). Basically it means that each time we
make cells fire and "talk" to each other, we strengthen the
relationship between those cells and it gets easier to do whatever it is that
requires the interaction between those cells.
This was all starting to remind me of
my recent foray into the world of Pilates. When I first started, I could
barely do most of the moves, and then some other people in the class seemed to
find those same moves really easy. I thought that maybe I just wasn't
coordinated enough, and became discouraged. However, luckily I have an amazing
Pilates instructor. She said its ok, this isn't a race or a competition;
it is a personal journey. She taught me to slow down, think about the
individual muscle I needed to engage to do a particular move, and focus on
getting it to engage. With time, those muscles don't just engage when I consciously
think about them, they do it automatically and I can focus on the next
challenge!
So now I am beginning to understand how
this relates to me as a teacher. I am to
be a Pilates instructor for kids brains!
I should not dismiss the kid that "just isn't very good at
math", or "is not very creative". As a Brain Pilates Instructor,
there are methods I can employ to encourage more "firing cells" in
the areas of the brain that are not so active and are resulting in less proficiency
in a certain area, while at the same time letting the brain have fun by using
the parts of it that are already strong and enjoyable to exercise.
I’m
sure over the course of my formal “teacher” training and my career I’ll learn
many methods of encouraging a learners brain to exercise its weak spots and
build on their strong spots, but for now these are major ones I have picked up:
- Get to know my learners so that I can
design a brain workout (class) that can be easily tailored to suit each of the brains
in attendance.
- Build lessons that lead in using the
already strong areas and with topics that the student finds interesting as a
warm up, and then follow this with something that challenging the weaker area.
- Reduce stress to enable ensure that the
RAS doesn’t filter out the information I want to get through, and then make the
topic interesting and new to make sure the Amygdala sends the information to
the “thinking brain".
Reflecting on how all of this applies to "ICTs in Learning
Design", I can see that by using a medium that appeals to most of the
current generation of formal learners, ICT, I will be helping to ensure that
the information passes through the RAS and is directed to the "thinking
brain" by the Amygdala.
Facebook is an ICT tool that is sure to immediately get information past
a teenager’s RAS, I wonder how I can work Facebook into a Science or Maths
class? Can anyone comment on what you think of this idea?
On that note, I’m off to check Facebook!
I hope my reflection has either reinforced learnings you have made
yourself, or triggered new ones.
- Isabel -
