Sev­eral recent arti­cles and news:

Brain Gain: the under­ground world of “neu­roen­hanc­ing” drugs (The New Yorker)

- “Alex remains enthu­si­as­tic about Adder­all, but he also has a slightly jaun­diced cri­tique of it. “It only works as a cog­ni­tive enhancer inso­far as you are ded­i­cated to accom­plish­ing the task at hand,” he said. “The num­ber of times I’ve taken Adder­all late at night and decided that, rather than start­ing my paper, hey, I’ll orga­nize my entire music library! I’ve seen peo­ple obses­sively clean­ing their rooms on it.” Alex thought that gen­er­ally the drug helped him to bear down on his work, but it also tended to pro­duce writ­ing with a char­ac­ter­is­tic flaw. “Often, I’ve looked back at papers I’ve writ­ten on Adder­all, and they’re ver­bose. They’re bela­bor­ing a point, try­ing to cre­ate this air­tight argu­ment, when if you just got to your point in a more direct man­ner it would be stronger. But with Adder­all I’d pro­duce two pages on some­thing that could be said in a cou­ple of sen­tences.” Nev­er­the­less, his Adderall-assisted papers usu­ally earned him at least a B. They got the job done. As Alex put it, “Pro­duc­tiv­ity is a good thing.”

Eschew Enhance­ment: Memory-boosting drugs should not be made avail­able to the gen­eral pub­lic (Tech­nol­ogy Review)

- “Who might use them? Stu­dents will be tempted, as might play­ers of any game involv­ing count­ing or remem­ber­ing (chess, bridge, and even poker and black­jack). Cer­tain pro­fes­sion­als might desire a boost in atten­tion or memory”

- “But these poten­tially pow­er­ful med­i­cines should not be made avail­able to every­one, for two rea­sons. The first is safety. The last sev­eral years have pro­vided many exam­ples of side effects, some life-threatening…The sec­ond rea­son is that we still know rel­a­tively lit­tle about learn­ing and mem­ory and how they are inte­grated to make judg­ments and decisions.”

Kel­logg Set­tles with FTC over Health Claims on Cereal (Promo Magazine)

- “The FTC said that Kel­logg pro­moted the cereal as “clin­i­cally shown to improve kids’ atten­tive­ness by nearly 20%,” when in fact the study referred to in the ads showed dif­fer­ent results.”

- “The study found that only about half the chil­dren who ate Frosted Mini-Wheats for break­fast showed any improve­ment in atten­tive­ness, and only about one in nine improved by 20% or more, the FTC said.”

Brain shock: The new Gulf War syn­drome (New Scientist)

- “The US army also screens for symp­toms of mTBI when sol­diers return from a tour of duty, and again three months later. The army is also car­ry­ing out neu­rocog­ni­tive tests on recruits before they are sent into com­bat so that doc­tors can check for dete­ri­o­ra­tion in later tests.”

- “When it comes to com­bat trauma, unpick­ing the phys­i­cal from the psy­cho­log­i­cal is bound to be highly com­plex. As Barth says, per­haps the great­est dan­ger could be in try­ing to sim­plify the pic­ture too much. “I rec­om­mend that we get com­fort­able with the com­plex­ity,” he says, “and treat it as a challenge.”

Wel­come to the 186th edi­tion of the Car­ni­val of Edu­ca­tion, the weekly vir­tual gath­er­ing of dozens of blog­gers to dis­cuss all things education.

Q: Why do you say this edi­tion is “brain-based”?
A: Because the Q&A frame we are using is inspired by how Chris at Ouroboros recently hosted Encephalon Brain and Mind blog car­ni­val. (Is clas­sic Greek mak­ing a comeback?).

Q: As edu­ca­tors, what inspires us to do what we do?
A: Tracy sug­gests, “Hope for the future”.

Q: And what may hap­pen in the future?
A: Eric pro­poses that the field can learn much about how ath­letes train their minds and bod­ies to max­i­mize performance.

Q: What should not hap­pen in the future?
A: Dave hopes we stop the Text­book Insan­ity, killing trees to cre­ate books not every­one uses.

Q: What comes first, sub­ject or learner?
A: Bogu­sia has “switched sides”. She now cen­ters her teach­ing around her stu­dents, to make sure they appre­ci­ate the beauty of the subject.

Q: How do you know if some­thing is devel­op­men­tally appro­pri­ate?
Read the rest of this entry »

Schools are begin­ning to offer an increas­ing num­ber of courses in social and emo­tional intel­li­gence, teach­ing stu­dents how to bet­ter under­stand their own emo­tions and the emo­tions of others.

It sounds warm and fuzzy, but it’s a trend backed up by hard data. Today, new stud­ies reveal that teach­ing kids to be emo­tion­ally and socially com­pe­tent boosts their aca­d­e­mic achieve­ment. More pre­cisely, when schools offer stu­dents pro­grams in social and emo­tional learn­ing, their achieve­ment scores gain around 11 per­cent­age points.

That’s what I heard at a forum held last Decem­ber by the Col­lab­o­ra­tive for Aca­d­e­mic, Social, and Emo­tional Learn­ing (CASEL). (Dis­clo­sure: I’m a co-founder of CASEL.) Roger Weiss­berg, the organization’s direc­tor, gave a pre­view of a mas­sive study run by researchers at Loy­ola Uni­ver­sity and the Uni­ver­sity of Illi­nois, which ana­lyzed eval­u­a­tions of more than 233,000 stu­dents across the country.

Social-emotional learn­ing, they dis­cov­ered, helps stu­dents Read the rest of this entry »

As promised in my pre­vi­ous post (10 Brain Train­ing Tips To Teach and Learn), here are some of the resources that inform my under­stand­ing of the brain: books, con­fer­ences, and websites.

BOOKS

There are a mul­ti­tude of books about the brain. For edu­ca­tors, the best of these are books that demys­tify the lan­guage of neu­ro­science while pro­vid­ing infor­ma­tion applic­a­ble to the teaching/learning process.

Among the more pro­lific or well-known authors of this type include Jeb Schenck, Robert Syl­wester, Bar­bara Givens, Robert Marzano, Mar­ilee Sprenger, and Eric Jensen.

I have found books Read the rest of this entry »

We read today how Panel Urges Schools to Empha­size Core Math Skills (Wash­ing­ton Post). Now, there is a more fun­da­men­tal ques­tion to con­sider: what should the schools of the XXI cen­tury look like and do?.

To cre­ate a much needed dia­logue, I asked one the most thought­ful edu­ca­tion blog­gers around to share her (I guess it’s “her”) impres­sions with us. Enjoy!
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What do we want our schools to do, and for whom? 

–By edu­won­kette

“Schools,” Stan­ford his­to­rian David Laba­ree wrote, “occupy an awk­ward posi­tion at the inter­sec­tion between what we hope soci­ety will become and what we think it really is.” What do we want our schools to do, and for whom?

Schools, like most orga­ni­za­tions, have many goals. These goals often com­pete with and dis­place each other. Rely­ing heav­ily on the work of David Laba­ree, I will dis­cuss three cen­tral goals of Amer­i­can schools – social effi­ciency, demo­c­ra­tic equal­ity, and social mobil­ity. Through­out the his­tory of Amer­i­can edu­ca­tion, these goals have been run­ning against each other in a metaphor­i­cal horser­ace. While they are not mutu­ally exclu­sive, the three goals intro­duce very dif­fer­ent met­rics of edu­ca­tional suc­cess. More often than not, they sit uncom­fort­ably with each other.

Read the rest of this entry »

Joanne Jacobs, edu­ca­tor, blog­ger and author of Our School: The Inspir­ing Story of Two Teach­ers, One Big Idea and the Char­ter School That Beat the Odds, par­tic­i­pates today in our Author Speaks Series with an excel­lent arti­cle on how “Schools won’t improve until admin­is­tra­tors and teach­ers can admit the prob­lems, ana­lyze what’s going wrong and try new strate­gies. Stu­dents won’t improve if they think they’re “spe­cial” just the way they are.” Enjoy, and feel free to add your com­ment to engage in a stim­u­lat­ing conversation.

Sev­eral recent news pieces, includ­ing this New York Times arti­cle, have reported on an emerg­ing trend: schools using tech­niques such as yoga and med­i­ta­tion to help stu­dents man­age anx­i­ety and stress. To bet­ter under­stand what is going on, we are pleased to bring you this arti­cle thanks to our col­lab­o­ra­tion with Greater Good Mag­a­zine.

–Alvaro

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Mind­ful Kids, Peace­ful Schools

With eyes closed and deep breaths, stu­dents are learn­ing a new method to reduce anx­i­ety, con­flict, and atten­tion dis­or­ders. But don’t call it meditation.

— By Jill Suttie

At Toluca Lake ele­men­tary school in Los Ange­les, a cyclone fence encloses the asphalt black­top, which is teem­ing with kids. It’s recess time and the kids, who are mostly Latino, are play­ing tag, yelling, throw­ing balls, and jump­ing rope. When the bell rings, they reluc­tantly stop and head back to their class­rooms except for Daniel Murphy’s sec­ond grade class.

Murphy’s stu­dents file into the school audi­to­rium, each car­ry­ing a round blue pil­low dec­o­rated with white stars. They enter gig­gling and chat­ting, but soon they are seated in a cir­cle on their cush­ions, eyes closed, quiet and con­cen­trat­ing. Two teach­ers give the chil­dren instruc­tions on how to pay atten­tion to their breath­ing, telling them to notice the rise and fall of their bel­lies and chests, the pas­sage of air in and out of their noses. Though the room is chilly the heat­ing sys­tem broke down ear­lier that day the chil­dren appear com­fort­able, many with Read the rest of this entry »