Week 9

How do emotions affect thinking?

Emotion has a lot to do with thinking. Mainly because the amygdala's main role is to encode emotional messages into the long-term memory. Therefore noticing that emotions can easily assist into the cognitive learning because if we learn about things we like, we are more likely to maintain attention and interest and move to a higher level of thinking.

What teaching have you observed that promotes higher order thinking?

Sousa states that if we challenge our students them with activities that require higher level thinking, we as teachers will spark interest of positive feelings. Students have occurred where learners generate positive emotions, attention broadens, and critical thinking skills enhance. I noticed this in my math classroom at Edmund's. The teacher handed out a worksheet full of problems about percentages and other questions pertaining to a pie graph. The students were challenged by this assignment, however the students were very engaged and determined to get the assignment completed. This promoted a higher order of thinking which also made the students understand these concepts a lot easier.

Week 8

What are the arguments for teaching the Arts?

Sousa makes several different arguments for teaching the arts in schools. Basically, the arts play an important part in human development, enhancing the growth of cognitive, emotional, and psycho motor pathways. Schools are also obligated to expose the children to the arts at a young age and consider arts as fundamental, not optional, curriculum areas. Lastly, learning the arts provides higher quality human experience through a person's lifestyle.

How does art education develop cognitive growth?

Sousa provides several ways art education develops cognitive growth. First and foremost, students exposed to well-designed art experiences produce positive academic and social effects and assist in the development of critical development of critical academic skills, basic and advanced literacy, and numeracy. Students also develop essential thinking tools like: pattern recognition and development ;mental representation; careful observed or imagined; symbolic, allegorical, and metaphorical representations; careful observation of the world; and abstraction from complexity. Students also learn to work more diligently and learn from each other.

Week 7

What impact does hemispheric preference have on learning style?

Hemispheric preference has to do with how each student's brain processes the information. Since the brain is divided into two pieces, each side processes different information. The left side of the brain mainly deals with verbal concepts and the right side of the brain deals with things like mathematical concepts. Therefore when students use their more dominant side for learning, they tend to learn things easier and also remember them a lot better. However, they can still learn with their less dominant side, their more dominate side just makes it easier to comprehend different information.

Week 6

What is meant by the statement " Today's learning is tomorrow's transfer?"

Today's learning is tomorrow's transfer. This statement is meant that students will learn the knowledge that is taught in class and then tomorrow it will either transfer into their working memory, long term memory, or just go right out the door. A transfer is when a student's brain decides on what to do the the information. When teachers teach their students while they are engaged for example just by acting by doing or teaching others, the information being processed transfers over to the long term memory. Other wise like if teachers teach in a lecture format, it is less likely for the student to transfer the information into the long term memory. Usually it will just go out.
This is very important for a teacher to be aware of this and should be reminded to teach where students are engaged as well as making sure they are teaching more effectively.

Week 5

How will the current view of intellegence impact you teaching and learning?

Since there are many different kinds of intelligences, it is important to teach using these ways of teaching. It is best in different styles and keeping the students brains working all around. Having consistent lectures everyday will bore your students, it is best to teach in a variety. Some students also have more background knowledge than other students so it is important to not expect that all students will know certain information. It is also wise to go at a steady pace where fasting learners are still learning while the slower learners are not feeling rushed.

Week 4

Does "Practice make perfect?"

This is a very broad question. For me, practice does make perfect. I find the more I work at something the better I get at it. However at times, practice can worsen your skills. I used to be on my high school golf team and I would often practice outside of school. When I did I would practice but get into bad habits in my swing. Therefore, the more I practiced, the worse I got at golf.

Practicing is good if you are practicing the right skills. It is important that before you go and practice, you know what and how to do the skills that you are working on.

Week 3

What metaphors could you use for an information processing model?

There are a couple different metaphors you can use for an informational model. If you look in our textbook, there are different objects used to represent different parts of our brain. For starters, to represent the immediate memory for a clipboard, a table to represent the working memory, and lastly filing cabinets for long-term storage.

Along with our textbook, anyone could make up any kind of metaphors for the informational processing model. For example the immediate memory could be a poster board as well as a clipboard, so someone can just post the information and determine what to send out or bring to the working memory. The working memory could also be an organizer to sort our what information should be stored and what should go out. Lastly, for long-term storage, a perfect metaphor would be a safe. This way someone can save the information for storage and also retrieve it if necessary.

What are teaching implications in regards to the capacity of working memory?

One implication that teachers can use is to keep the number of items in a lesson objective within the appropriate capacity limit. This will increase the likelihood that students will remember more of what they learned. Time also has a lot to do with the working memory. Our books states that the working memory can process items intently for up to 45 min before the students becoming fatigued. It also is important for teachers to apply a lot of meaning to lessons. This is important because if the students can relate to the lessons and apply meaning, they will be able to remember things easier.