Teacher conversations about professional development often include the terms worthless and waste of time, and a general disdain for typical approaches is often evident. The back-and-forth can be a bruising arena for those who actually provide professional development, and I’ve been feeling a bit bruised recently. Don’t worry. The bruises have only been blows . . . → Read More: Professional Development: A Defense
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In this series of posts, I’ve tried to raise awareness of executive function processes, examine their role in successful learning and thinking, and begin exploring how they can receive greater emphasis in education. In this final post, I want to investigate these ideas within the framework of a commonly taught topic. I’m choosing my . . . → Read More: Making the Shift, Part 4: From “Target Future” to Teaching Let’s begin with a story. Once upon a time, twenty years in the future, Jaime works in the office of an influential nonprofit. The organization is regularly consulted by local and state officials on matters related to the nonprofit’s focus. One day the organization’s leader explains that the governor just called to request an . . . → Read More: Making the Shift, Part 3: A Focus, a Form, and a Frame While their research and associated technology can be complicated, the discoveries of neuroscientists often reveal simple principles of brain functioning. For example, neuroscientists recently traced the flow of auditory data through the brain. As sound waves spark our nervous system into action, auditory data gets sent from lower functioning areas of the brain to . . . → Read More: “What” and “Where” Enable Learning and Higher Thinking The Architecture of Learning Instructional Design Model recognizes four cognitively-distinct processes: experience, comprehension, elaboration, application. These four represent learning’s core processes—processes that optimize each other’s contribution to learning. (A fifth process, intention, involves responding to current, “real-world” circumstances with previously learned content and/or skills.) In Teaching for Wisdom, Intelligence, Creativity, and Success, Sternberg, Jarvin, . . . → Read More: Practical Skills & Application After describing memory thinking as cognition that provides “something in your head to reason about,” Sternberg, Jarvin, and Grigorenko (2009) suggest analytical skills as another type of thinking (p. 19). Analytical skills involve sorting or ordering ideas into valid schemata and are “sometimes referred to as critical thinking skills” (p. 22). Verbs associated with . . . → Read More: Analytic Skills & Comprehension |
 
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