The three of us scoured through thirty-one pages of breakout session listings to find some really terrific sessions, and today's post will give you a few tidbits from two of them.
On Monday, May 27, the first full day of the conference, I attended two back-to-back workshops led by Dr. Janet Zadina, an educational neuroscientist and adjunct associate professor at Tulane University's School of Medicine. I hadn't planned on attending Zadina's second session ("The Multiple Pathways Model: Using Brain Research to Orchestrate Teaching and Learning"), but during her first session ("Tapping Into the Brain's Reward Pathway to Energize Instruction") I quickly recognized that she was a presenter with great content and great style; so I decided to attend her second workshop.
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| Dr. Zadina and a brain (not her own) |
Zadina gave tips for addressing this:
- Give students some background information (a YouTube video clip, a newspaper or magazine article that's slightly below reading level) on course content before they start a new reading or project; this will help them to create a meaningful context for the material and will help them dip their toes into water that may be very cold and very unfamiliar
- Use visuals whenever you can (we use emoticons and emojis in text messages and casual e-mails to signal meaning [especially sarcasm], so why not use images and pictures with students to help communicate the meaning behind the words and concepts?)
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| Cookies & photos by Bee In Our Bonnet--maybe a perfect project for a pastries class...? |
During the second workshop, which focused on the brain's frontal lobe (a good frontal lobe = a good life!), Zadina gave some great tips for helping students learn those all important "executive" (higher level) brain functions:
- Teach students the process of doing the tasks by modeling them ahead of time during class
- Show students how to take good notes (on days one or two of the semester, show them your own notes from a seminar or workshop, and spend a minute talking about your own process)
- Show students how to study for tests and quizzes (use small groups or in-class study sessions to model good studying)
- Start with short-term, concrete projects before moving on to long-term higher-learning function projects
- Require meta-cognition (before an assignment or quiz/exam, ask students to answer questions like How much time do I plan to spend preparing for this assignment/quiz? and What techniques will I use to complete this assignment/study for this quiz? After assignments, students can answer questions like Am I satisfied with my final product? and What will I do differently to prepare for the next assignment/quiz?)
