Connecting Minds to Learning

As promised, during this holiday season I intend to share a couple of my favourite online resources with you.

Not surprisingly,  my favourite online resource is this online interactive Neurodevelopmental Framework.  

http://www.allkindsofminds.org/researchreviews.aspx

The developer, All Kinds of Minds, actively gathers the latest advances in research from the educational, psychological, medical, and clinical fields and puts it into this interactive online framework. There are eight constructs presented in this framework:  attention, memory, language, higher-order cognition, spatial ordering, temporal sequential ordering, neuromotor function and social cognition.  If you click on attention, for example,  the next page explains the three parts of attention (mental energy controls, processing controls and production controls) and then behind each of these links are research articles that relate to these functions.

Yes, I am slightly biased in recommending this to you.  But seriously, is there anything out there that connects teachers, students and parents to neurodevelopmental information that is better than this?

I recently met Dr. Tracey Tokuhama-Espinosa who is the Director of the Center for Educational Development in Quito, Ecuador and Professor of Education, at the University of San Francisco de Quito.  She is the author of several books, Living Languages: Multilingualism Across the Lifespan (Praeger, 2007), Raising Multilingual Children: Foreign Language Acquisition and Children (Bergin and Garvey, 2000) and The Multilingual Mind: Issues Discussed by, for, and about People Living with Many Languages (Praeger, 2003).  I have been a fan of her writing for a number of years.

Tracey was telling me that the focus of her new work is in the areas of Mind, Brain, and Education.  In 2009 she will have a new book published entitled The Scientifically Substantiated Art of Teaching.

There seem to be so many natural synergies between her work and research and the work that we are doing.  I am looking forward to the publication of her new book.

While I was in Nice last week, I had the chance to chat with Dr. Craig Pohlman about a podcast he recently recorded with Dr. Stephen Hooper, a professor in psychiatry, pediatrics, education, and psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In this podcast Dr. Pohlman and Dr. Hooper discuss some compelling ideas that support a non-labelling approach to assessment that is highly specific in its findings and solidly based on students’ strenghts. 

>listen to this podcast…