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We have all seen youth who can spend hours perfecting complicated skateboarding feats, learning new computer games or mastering animation techniques – it is impossible to stop them from learning. Yet these same teens may struggle with learning in a classroom setting. Part of the problem is that classroom learning is often abstract, disconnected from any real-life application or the natural context for using new information.
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Although many people have begun to understand the importance of the [[early years]] to human development, achievement and lifelong success, we have been slow to recognize the elephant in our midst—the adolescent learner. Dropout statistics, plummeting rates of school connectedness, declining academic performance and an increased dislike of school are [[signs of trouble]] underlining a disturbing pattern of disengagement as youth enter their teens. It seems that we may be [[getting it wrong]] for adolescents learners more than anyone in our schools.
Read more If young people are to be equipped effectively to meet the challenges of the 21st century it is surely prudent to seek out the very best understandings from current scientific research into the nature of how humans learn before considering further reform of the current system.
This article by John Abbott and Terence Ryan appeared in the Spring, 1999 issue of Education Canada. Punished By Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes4/7/2008 In this groundbreaking book, Alfie Kohn shows that while manipulating people with incentives seems to work in the short run, it is a strategy that ultimately fails and even does lasting harm. Our workplaces and classrooms will continue to decline, he argues, until we begin to question our reliance on a theory of motivation derived from laboratory animals.Drawing from hundreds of studies, Kohn demonstrates that people actually do inferior work when they are enticed with money, grades, or other incentives. Programs that use rewards to change people’s behavior are similarly ineffective over the long run. Promising goodies to children for good behavior can never produce anything more than temporary obedience. In fact, the more we use artificial inducements to motivate people, the more they lose interest in what we’re bribing them to do. Rewards turn play into work, and work into drudgery.
Read more Over the past forty years, educators there have evolved a distinctive innovative approach that supports children’s well-being and fosters their intellectual development through a systematic focus on symbolic representation. Young children (from birth to age six) are encouraged to explore their environment and express themselves through many “languages,” or modes of expression, including words, movement, drawing, painting, sculpture, shadow play, collage, and music. Leading children to surprising levels of symbolic skill and creativity, the system is not private and elite but rather involves full-day child care open to all, including children with disabilities.
Read more New evidence from many branches of science has significantly added to our understanding of what it means to know, from the neural processes that occur during learning to the influence of culture on what people see and absorb.
How People Learn examines these findings and their implications for what we teach, how we teach it, and how we assess what our children learn. The book uses exemplary teaching to illustrate how approaches based on what we now know result in in-depth learning. Read more Every year, millions of parents trust that the professionals who teach their children know something about the brain and processes of learning. But most schools of education offer psychology, not neurology, courses. At best, these psychology courses provide indirect information about the brain and how children actually learn.
Teaching with the Brain in Mind fills this gap with the latest practical, easy-to-understand research on learning and the brain. Consider important questions such as - Biologically, can you truly expect to get and hold students’ attention for long periods of time? – How has research on rewards been misinterpreted? – Do students actually “forget” what we teach them, or do we ask them to recall information in the wrong way? – What are the surprising benefits for learning across the board when students participate in some sort of physical education or movement? Read more Sue Gerhardt considers how the earliest relationship shapes the baby’s nervous system, with lasting consequences, and how our adult life is influenced by infancy despite our inability to remember babyhood. The way that we respond to stress, in particular, depends on how our brains are set up to deal with it in early life. Gerhardt shows how the development of the brain can affect future emotional well being, and goes on to look at specific early ‘pathways’ that can lead to conditions such as anorexia, addiction, and anti-social behavior. Early experience leaves its mark, not only in our degree of confidence in other people, but also in the structure and functioning of the brain.
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