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 -