Blog entry 1

Watching the video from Edutopia I found the information covered

very informative ranging from the functionality of the brain, basic survival instincts in regards to learning, appealing to the sensors of students and minimizing stress in the classroom.

One key part of Dr. Willis’ video that has stuck with me since watching the video was the way in which she explained how the Reticular Activating System (RAS) works in simple understandable terms. The RAS is the filtering system that all humans use to distinguish what has changed. Is there danger or a stressful situation? What new information is there for me to acknowledge? Does it provoke curiosity?

After the RAS has acknowledged there is no danger, the learner can relax and learn in a comfortable environment going into a reflective mind stance. However if a student feels uncomfortable in the environment, they go into a reactive thought process and either Fight, Freeze or Flight state of mind occurs.

The student going into an oppositional defiant mood characterises Fight mode.  Freeze state can range from social anxiety syndrome to OCD and seizures. Flight mode is usually characterised with ADHD. The main causes of stress within school touched on by Dr. Willis was fear of being wrong, test taking anxiety (I’ve have certainly suffered with this), embarrassment with reading aloud and physical and/or language differences, bullying of any type, frustration with difficult material and boredom from lack of stimulation.

Appealing to the senses of students can be done in a number of ways as stated by Dr. Willis. This stimulus may include by not limited to:

Adding colourful posters with different shadings to the classroom walls, costumes and theme days, smells such as cooking and other interesting smells through science, audio stimulation can be a song or tune relating to the subject or even a small object that creates a sound just to get the attention of the students and thinking creatively and curiosity for the lesson ahead. Take a lesson that is traditionally taught inside outside to catch the children off guard.

During the lesson personalise every 10 minutes to help the learners, encourage them and help enrich the students with asking questions and being personal.

While winding up the lesson do something different to engage them again. Have the students throw a ball to one another to say a word each they remember from the lesson.

The benefits of using ICT’s within my classroom would be being able to link articles relating to the curriculum that are not available within the schools library for the students to access online. These articles would also include performance video of great artists performing a tune (shown on Youtube), which would be worked on in class, either in theory or for performance the students would be performing themselves.

The shortcomings of the traditional classroom and curriculum are that it does not factor student’s diversity, experiences and ambitions, socioeconomic back grounds, their life goals, dreams and desires or even some students learn best with one on one learning. As Dr. Willis pointed out she recommended a designated “sleeping area” which is some pillows under some desks on the side of the classroom. Some students may need a lie-down some days, but as she acknowledges the curriculum does not factor this in. 

I will finish with this statement by Grace Rubenstein (April 1, 2009), which I have thought about a lot over the last few days and it would certainly help eliminate the stress from tests: “Who knows: Maybe in some far off future, we could supplement the narrow results of standardized tests with images of changes in the brain.”