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.

Week 2

Why is it important to include novelty in a lesson?

There are many different kinds of benefits for using novelty in a lesson. First, using novelty in a lesson means to add something unique that most teachers don't normally do when teaching. So when a teacher does use novelty in a lesson, they are using their creative ideas and incorporating them to get across to their students. Why is this important? Well, it is important because it will keep your students engaged. Keeping students engaged is one of the most important parts when teaching a lesson. If the students are engaged during your lesson, the more they will get out of it and learn.

Did you see novelty used during your classroom observation?

I was in a 7th and 8th grade math class. As I was taking notes, I tried to observe my teacher's teaching style and how engaged the students were. My teacher started off by asking questions about their last class and reviewed their past homework assignment. Some students raised their hands but most students were bored and not really engaged. Soon the teacher noticed that some students were not paying attention, so she started picking on students and asking them certain questions so she could see which students were following along and which were not. As the class went on the teacher used an over head projector to write the class notes on. She frequently asked questions and had the class repeat the answers several times so it would stick in their head. This shows that the students may have memorized something but may not have understood. The students were to write their own notes in their notebooks, but most didn't.

As I look back on this particular lesson, there was not much out of the ordinary and not a lot of novelty was used. We, as observers did walk around the room and tried to help students who were falling behind but this still was not exciting for the students. Since the students were learning about different class in this particular lesson, maybe the teacher could have used examples and shown the students flashy and exciting graphs rather than just discussing them. This may have engaged the students a little more.

Week 1

How do you define your intelligence?

I would define my intelligence by being skilled in many different areas. I am musically intelligent because I can read music on the violin and the piano, I love art and painting, I play many different kinds of sport ranging from golf to cheer leading, and lastly I also am a student learning more information for not only my future career path in math and science but for my own intelligence. Therefore, I think my intelligence can be subjective in many areas and I feel as though I am moderately advanced in these subject areas.

Do think your attitude towards your own learning would have changed, if you had taken part in the Stanford University experiment when you were in middle school? Explain Why?

Yes, but for only a certain extent. I received very good grades throughout middle school and felt like I could achieve good grades for working hard. I was always a conscientious student and on top of my homework assignments, projects, and exams. Therefore, if I would have taken part in the experiment, I would have realized more about what my brain was doing when I was learning but it wouldn't have changed my actions or attitude towards my education. I was always taught that my education is important so my head was always in the right direction. I think the experiment would have opened my eyes to a better understanding about how learning effects my brain, but my own learning would have not changed dramatically.