Learning: the best approaches for your brain
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, Linda Rising
Do you mentor, coach, teach or just help other people? Do you wonder why after your greatest teaching moments people just don’t get it? In recent years neuroscience has started to provide us with a number of insights in what happens when we’re teaching. These insights make it clear that learning is really about building and reinforcing existing neural networks. Instead of providing lots of new ideas out of the blue, we need to understand the learners existing context and work with that. Instead of focusing on mistakes and errors, we need to focus on what good solutions look like.
Proposed Agenda (This will definitely change as the presentation evolves)
Introduction
Top 5 Reasons that traditional approaches to learning and mentoring fail:
- Lead with the Abstract
- Not Grounded in the Listeners experience
- Passive students – i.e. Those just listening and taking notes, aren’t using all of the brain. They retain knowledge but don’t really understand it.
- Habituation
- Rewards don’t work
Survey the audience for:
- Background
- Motivation
- Prior Knowledge
The play: At the end of the session, tables (groups of 5-6 people) will be asked to present a short play (1-2 minutes) representing what they’ve learned. After each 10 minute lecture section we will ask the audience to prepare a little bit of the play. Along with sharing our experiences the goal is help attendees integrate what they’ve learned. Even if you’re not comfortable in helping to stage the play you can still gain the benefits by planning for it. With the help of the audience we will summarize the plays and include the insights gained in article that we will publish after the conference.
Introduction to Neuroscience 15 minutes – just a very brief summary of some basics - with the intent of building on what we discover the audience already knows
- Neural Networks
- Kolb’s Learning Cycle
- What are memories/things we learn?
- Role of Hippocampus
Introduce an Idea & Explore with a Discussion and Play preparation 60 minutes (alternating 10 minutes of Lecture and 10 minutes of discussion/preparation) .
The audience will choose 3 of the following 5 sections
- David Ausubel. explains, “The most important single factor influencing learning is what the learner already knows. Ascertain this and teach accordingly”
- Mistakes/Misunderstandings are prior knowledge (i.e. neural networks), focus on the error and you might reinforce the incorrect network.
- Appeal to the senses sight/sound, even use smells. Maybe we should open a bag of fresh roasted coffee beans at this point.
- Role of Emotion - Fear is a great inhibitor of learning - who do we reduce fear?
- Integration - until its fully integrated knowledge is just a series of facts that may or may not be useful to us. How do we help our students make the knowledge their own.
Wrapup
- Reiterate key points
- Top x further ideas (no supporting details)
- References/Further reading
Retrospective 5 minutes
- When we’re done the audience should have a basic understanding of: the learning cycle, how memories are formed, what limits their formation and what helps.
- 3 of the following 5 (depending on what the audience chooses)
- Prior knowledge and it’s role - new knowledge always builds on existing knowledge (i.e. existing neural networks) we have to learn to take advantage of this.
- Mistakes and what to do so we don’t reinforce them - Mistakes are existing neural networks do the wrong thing and we just reinforce them
- Images and the importance of pictures
- The Role of Emotion, the effects of fear and how to avoid the problems
- Integration - the final step in learning. How to help our students integrate the things they’ve learned