Connecting Minds to Learning

You have not heard from me for a while because I have been out and about working with teachers at the Sussex Children’s Centre, ACS Hillingdon International School and the International School of Basel.  It is always wonderful to work with teachers who are so focussed on learning and dedicated to supporting their students.

While I was away Bruno della Chiesa provided some insight on the field of educational neuroscience and why it is important to the future of learning. He and his colleagues have published a book entitled Understanding the Brain: The Birth of a Learning Science.  This book which is partially available online provides new insights about learning. It synthesises existing and emerging findings from cognitive and brain science.  It will be interesting to see how this book aligns with the work that we are doing.

A second thing that caught my eyes was a really terrific article that Jenny Wood has written about How to Get a Grip on Your Professional Learning Network (PLN).  This is a great article for all educators who are keen to extend your professional development through new technologies.  

The Usable Knowledge website at the Harvard Graduate School of Education is aimed at connecting the research conducted by their academics with educators working in schools. It features a diverse set of media – text, video, and audio – which has been organised around the following five topic areas:

• teaching and curriculum
• community and family
• learning and development
• leadership and policy
• decisions through data 

It is certainly worth a look.

>click here to visit the Usable Knowledge website…

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?

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…