Helping Shy Students All teachers have had shy students in their classroom. These children are the ones who keep to themselves and quietly complete their work, often hiding from the attention of the teacher or their classmates. However, some of these children are not just shy or quiet but may have social anxiety disorder. How do teachers know if a student is suffering from social anxiety? Disproportion—Is the stress unrealistic for the situation? What specific behaviors should teachers look for in the classroom? Teachers can make important observations that can help to identify a child who is suffering from social anxiety. In order to alleviate their anxiety, most children with social anxiety try to actively avoid anxiety-producing situations. It is important to realize that teachers and parents can play a role in unwittingly fostering this avoidance. What can be done to help students with social anxiety? There are three components that can be targeted to decrease the social anxiety a child experiences.
Schools, High School, Public Schools, School District, Public High Schools - SchoolMatters Glow and Grow Strategy A few weeks ago I read about a GREAT strategy for assessment over at Beth's Thinking of Teaching blog. You can read her original post HERE. As soon as I saw it, I knew it was something I wanted to try. Similar to stars and wishes, the "glow and grow" strategy is a perfect tool for my students to use when reflecting and assessing their own, or a peer's work, or for me to use during formal or summative assessments. Yellow highlighters were easy to find, but green highlighters were nowhere to be found. OK - armed with our new strategy, my students began to use it to assess some exemplars from our provincial testing (they had actually just completed the same writing prompt earlier today). I then had them go back to their own original writing (the same topic as the exemplars they just assessed). I don't know if you can tell from this picture, but I turned the "o" in glow into a sun, and the "o" in grow into a flower (the same images on our anchor chart to help them visualize and remember).
Learning Techniques One of the things that we expect you to pick up by osmosis, but almost never mention explicitly, is techniques for learning itself. After you leave university, you will be expected to be able to learn by yourself for the rest of your life. And an hour spent addressing the meta-issue of learning skills pays off in reduced time to actually learn. A lot of work has been done over the past few decades about how people learn. I recommend the work on accelerated learning by Colin Rose and Brian Tracy. You can learn anything if you have a goal that requires it. There are a number of stages to learning, each of which involves a number of aspects. The right state of mind There are six aspects to being in the right state of mind to learn. Here are the six aspects: Find a personal reason to want to learn this material. A variety of ways of input Here is a list of ways you can use variety in getting new material: Play to your strengths in terms of how you process information. Memorising Showing you know
Brain-based learning, ideas, and materials Johns Hopkins University: New Horizons for Learning Welcome to New Horizons for Learning - a leading web resource for identifying and communicating successful strategies for educational practice. The Johns Hopkins School of Education does not vet or endorse any information contained on the New Horizons website. Information posted on New Horizons prior to January 1, 2014 can be repurposed as long as the repurposing party provides attribution to the original author of the material being used. Information posted on New Horizons after January 1, 2014 is considered open access information and can be repurposed without attribution to the original author. Our first journal issues feature articles on neuroscience, creativity, counseling, technology, data-driven decision making, museum education, arts integration, special education, early education, cultural literacy, action research, Universal Design, international exchange programs, higher education, teacher preparation and more: New! Vol.X No. 2, Special Edition: Focus on Autism Vol. It's Here!
The Brain and Learning The Organ of Learning To many, the term “brain-based learning” sounds redundant. Isn’t all learning and teaching brain-based? Advocates of brain-based teaching insist that there is a difference between “brain-compatible” education, and “brain-antagonistic” teaching practices and methods which can actually prevent learning. In his book, Human Brain and Human Learning (1983), Leslie Hart argues that teaching without an awareness of how the brain learns is like designing a glove with no sense of what a hand looks like–its shape, how it moves. Hart pushes this analogy even further in order to drive home his primary point: if classrooms are to be places of learning, then “the organ of learning,” the brain, must be understood and accommodate: All around us are hand-compatible tools and machines and keyboards, designed to fit the hand. Granted, the brain is infinitely more complex than the hand. Like Hart, Caine and Caine choose to interpret brain research holistically. (Caine and Caine 1997)
Elementary Matters: Ten Brain Based Learning Strategies If you have been reading my blog for a while, you know that I'm absolutely fascinated by the brain, and am particularly fascinated by the research that's been done to prove the best learning strategies. There's some great stuff out there! I read about the brain and learning daily, and just can't get enough. I've taught a few workshops about it, too. Even though I'm a second grade teacher, this stuff applies to all learners, from newborn babies to adult learners. 1. 2. 3. 9. These are some books I recommend if you're interested in Brain Based Learning:
Learning theory Photo by Antenna on Unsplash Contents: introduction · what do people think learning is? · learning as a product · learning as a process · experience · reflective thinking · making connections · committing and acting · task-conscious or acquisition learning, and learning-conscious or formalized learning · the behaviourist orientation to learning · the cognitive orientation to learning · the humanistic orientation to learning · the social/situational orientation to learning · the constructivist/social constructivist orientation to learning · further reading · references · how to cite this article See, also, What is education? Over the last thirty years or so, ‘learning’ has become one of the most used words in the field of education. Yet, for all the talk of ‘learning’, there has been little questioning about what it is, and what it entails. There has been a similar situation in the field of education. [O]ther kinds of social learning are more sophisticated, and more fundamental. Taxonomies
Brain-Friendly Teaching (1): Putting Brain-Friendly Strategies To Work How can the findings of current brain research be applied in the classroom to help students perform best on standardized tests? Marilee Sprenger details seven steps to move information from sensory memory to long-term memory. "In the United States, most schools prepare for standardized tests by spending a large amount of time a few months prior to testing on review," observes brain expert Marilee Sprenger. "Although that has been known to raise test scores in comparison to schools that do not follow that process, it does not put information into long-term memory. Because working memory can hold information for just days or weeks, most of the time, the information is forgotten after the test." According to Sprenger, meaning and emotion are key to placing information into long-term memory. "Within those two laws are four central ideas; therefore, there are four bits of information. For Sprenger, step one in this process is to reach students. No clear and present dangers.