Fast forward to today and distant learning, now we have even less time to teach but we are expected to adapt the district curriculum to fit into a 2 ½ hour window. I have two students that miss ½ hour of instruction per day to work with SPED. The SPED teacher told me to make their homework assignments easier because some students were complaining. I asked my two students and their families to contact me if they were having difficulty completing the homework assignments that I assigned. Not only did these students not ask for accommodations, they are the ones that I can rely on to actually do their homework!
Back to Darling-Hammond's recommendations to "redesign ...schools to meet the challenges they face in serving their students and families." Integration "of early childhood education, parent education, social services, and health care" are equally important. I have been very impressed with the Family Resource Center that operates at my school. They act as a liaison to connect our families to the resources in our community. These are the same parents that in any other school would be active in the PTA/PTO. But they are too busy taking care of the most needy at our school to have the time for fundraising and community building. So our neediest families continue to be minimally supported relying on charitable donations. The school is underfunded and the teachers work in isolation. Little PLC time is spent planning and students don't spend enough time in the classroom. One teacher actually worked really hard to keep her class together as she moved from 3rd to 4th grade, only to be upended by Phase 2.
Now onto Pat Wolfe's articles. Reading about the impact of stress and diet on the brain's development has been a continuing source of interest to me. In my class I teach what is a healthy diet. No sneaky sugar. However, I remember that when I went to Nicaragua, I learned that once a female dog becomes pregnant, the owner will routinely stop feeding the dog. Seems only male dogs are valued. I mentioned this to my class and stated the importance of prenatal care in the development of healthy, intelligent puppies. One of my students asked if this was also true with humans. His mom was pregnant at the time. Talk about a teachable moment.
If I had time I would look for peer reviewed evidence of the effectiveness of the medical school education model.The article "Brain Scientists Offer Medical Educators Tips On The Neurobiology Of Learning" Posted on RedOrbit: Thursday, 31 March 2011, 13:22 CDT , leaves me with many questions. I have always wondered why the structure of medical school training seems counter to turning out well educated doctors. It seems more like a frat initiation process. Who can function with reduced intermittent sleep? This was not designed in the best interest of the patient surely. In the article they mention that fatigue and too much stress do not promote brain function. While the brain is plastic, it has it's limits. I also have questions as to the gender of the people being studied in the article. Based on the comments regarding multitasking: "Multitasking is a distraction from learning, unless all of the tasks are relevant to the material being taught. The challenge is to integrate information from multiple sources, such as a lecture and a hand-held device" makes me think the study was based on males only. It would be interesting to see if that statement holds true amongst women.
From this article I teach my students with the following strategies:
- "Active involvement: Doing is learning. And success at doing and learning builds confidence."
- "Active engagement: "...learning occurs best when the learner is actively engaged.. Learners' having multiple opportunities to assume the role of teacher also invoke neural motivation and reward pathways -- and another major biological component of the learning process: stress." but not too much
- "Reward and reinforcement: Reward is a key component of learning at all stages of life."
- "Repetition: ...repetition, many components of the neural processes become more efficient, requiring less energy and leaving higher-order pathways available for additional cognitive processing. However, repetitions must be appropriately spaced.
Even with limited time, following these tenets seems to yield the most learning in our compressed time. While Darling-Hammond recommends many great policies, I have to operate in the reality I am now in. The 21st century is knocking and my students need a seat at the table. We will all be better for it.