Two interesting articles related to children's brains crossed my inbox today.Tiffany Lewis wrote a nice article on the importance of identifying and understanding what's going on with children's cognitive realities, rather than defaulting to the over-simplification of labels, in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, which is something we often talk about at TBS. The question of when to tell or inform a child about his or her unique cognitive structure is a very interesting one, as here at TBS we tend to wait to do this until sometime in middle school, when children have the capacity to process the information intellectually, and also the emotional implications that come from realizing one's unique gifts and challenges.
Wendi Pillars documented five effective tenants of teaching based on neuroscience. Four of her recommendations are well-trod at this point: return to information over time, slow down, develop close relationships with students (to relieve their stress), and establish the relevance of the ideas in connection with prior knowledge. It was the fifth idea - the fact that information that is presented first or last has a greater chance of being retained (the primacy-recency effect) - that jumped out at me for its implications about lesson structures.
Wendi Pillars documented five effective tenants of teaching based on neuroscience. Four of her recommendations are well-trod at this point: return to information over time, slow down, develop close relationships with students (to relieve their stress), and establish the relevance of the ideas in connection with prior knowledge. It was the fifth idea - the fact that information that is presented first or last has a greater chance of being retained (the primacy-recency effect) - that jumped out at me for its implications about lesson structures.
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