Learning

HOW WE LEARN

Watch the video and fill in the gaps (between 1 and 3 words). Check your answers in "comments".

Your brain weighs about ____________________________ (1) and accounts for about 20% of your body's ____________________________ (2) and energy usage. The brain houses 100 billion neurons, with each neuron having between a thousand and ____________________________ (3) synapses or connections to other neurons.

Every thought, every action and every memory is ____________________________ (4) in these neural pathways. Every brain is unique and uniquely organized.

Historically schools have educated students as if they had ____________________________ (5). The establishment of Education systematically disassembles our students ____________________________ (6). Students engage with new learning less and less and are not retaining learning and long-term memory.

Educators need to design learning to facilitate this ultimate goal of long-term memory penetration. We begin by hijacking their brains with a ____________________________ (7) experience or a ____________________________ (8) one. Unfortunately the more powerful of the two is pain and if the student is experiencing pain, that will hold their attention rather than the learning.

When introducing new information, teachers must provide students with multiple entry points. Then students often need multiple solution paths ____________________________ (9) with the new learning.

When new information is introduced the brain has to find a way to reconcile it with ____________________________ (10). This process is called cognitive conflict and it can be ____________________________ (11), but to truly ensure that the information ____________________________ (12) students must be allowed to struggle and resolve their cognitive conflict.

There are three key ingredients to intrinsic motivation:

- Autonomy: giving students opportunities to make ____________________________ (13) gives them a sense of empowerment.

- Connection, which satisfies a ____________________________ (14)

- The pursuit of ____________________________ (15) in the progression towards Mastery. This requires ____________________________ (16) between two variables. When the brain finds ____________________________ (17) that is perfectly balanced with ability the result is called flow and it is the most intense ____________________________ (18)  that the brain can experience.

When the three ingredients are mixed together in the brain, the result is a ____________________________ (19),

The brain still has two other key needs:

-    Activity: passive learning has little chance of being encoded in ____________________________ (20). By activating the students biology through ____________________________ (21) and multi-sensory experience the brain begins to experience active learning, which is much more memorable.

-  Self reflection

When these brain compatible ____________________________ (22) are applied every day in every class, the result becomes exponential.

LEARNING STYLES

Watch the video. Do the quiz and find out what kind of learning style suits you best. Answer the question and complete these sentences that appear at the end of the video (check your answers in "comments").

1. What's her top tip for making sure you never forget things?

2. The more ____________________________ we use, the less likely we are to ____________________________ ,

3. The more of ____________________________ we use to learn information, ____________________________  we remember it.

4. The more clues we have, the ____________________________  we have of finding the treasure. 

5. Although we may have a learning ____________________________ , we might find this varies from ____________________________ . We might learn best for ____________________________  through making models or listening to ____________________________ to Spanish and drawing ____________________________ for history.