While studying the biology of the brain over this past semester I often wondered how I could use this newly acquired knowledge in my everyday activities as a teacher. There have certainly been some valuable insights into the emotional nature of students and I feel that this will be most helpful to me not only as I create lesson plans but also as I guide student learning. So often during my student teaching I was forced to deal with emotional wrought students without any insight into the reasons behind their behavior. I wrote off most of it as childishness and this somewhat alleviated me of even having to deal with it. When a student acted out in class or refused to complete work, I would chastise them the same way I would some class clown who actively disrupted class in order to get attention. In retrospect, having read chapters by both Zadina and Zull on the nature of emotion and its impact on learning, I can imagine the necessity of several strategies when dealing with these types of situations in the future.

I realize this was the topic of discussion several weeks ago, but I’ve been thinking of it recently as I’ve been completing many interviews. I have been asked about my management plan as well as my classroom plans should I be hired and I always think about the emotional issues of my potential students. The relationship between the teacher and student should be such that the teacher can “read” the student and his/her emotional response on a day-to-day, class-to-class basis. There are many ways in which this can occur (it seems to me). The best and most efficient way I think it to simply maintain an open dialogue with students. Although I have had much time to think this through over the past several weeks since the end of my student teaching, when I was in charge of the classroom, the first thing I did was ask how everyone was. I attempted to engage the class in a small discussion at the beginning of each class, sometimes wholly unrelated to the topic or activity that day. I was trying to loosen them up. Zadina might say I was practicing something like “positive psychology,” reducing anxiety within my class, creating an environment suitable for maximum engagement with the content of that lesson. As She writes in ch.3 of Multiple Pathways, “emotions can affect thinking, memory, attention, and therefore learning” (64). It all ties together. And I think that really, most issues having to do with the brain seem to affect learning. Emotion seems little different than social structures. Is social anxiety that dissimilar from testing anxiety. I can remember both from when I was a young student and I would be hard pressed to explain the difference. Negative social situations at school such as bullying and rejection can register with the brain as actual, physical pain and therefore cause serious problems in the classroom (Zadina 192). For this reason, I think it’s important to maintain an air of positivity, the air of positive psychology, a positive environment that rewards good behavior more so than it punishes bad behavior. At least, I have explained as much in those aforementioned interviews.

Sensing Progress

During my time at Sherwood Middle, reading AR (Accelerated Reader) books was a major part of each ELA class period. My mentor kept a running total of each student’s AR points posted on the wall in plain view of the class. It was in the form of bar chart—similar to the one on p. 28 of the workbook. The more points a student had, the more bars would be colored in by the teacher.

In Zadina’s workbook, she urges us to come up with a measurable goal that students can work toward gradually over time. I agree that being able to literally see progress is great for motivation in a student. However, Zadina points out that “you would want to keep the progress private, unless it was a class goal.” I don’t fully agree with this statement. It seemed to me that at Sherwood, the fact that the AR point chart was public and in sight of the entire class created a healthy competition among the students. Each wanted to best their fellow classmates and be the first to reach their AR goal, which meant more reading.

The idea of a chart to mark the progress of students seems very useful in a classroom setting not only for student motivation but also for maintaining student attention over the long term or rather reminding students of the goal they are working toward. It is possible however that the chart may create undue pressure in the student, causing anxiety. As Zadina points out in Multiple Pathways to the Student Brain, “anxiety in any student can interfere with working memory.” (122). This statement is included in the book to make a point about the pressures of timed testing but anxiety and/or pressure could also have negative effects on the end goal of the student. Numerous times while working at Sherwood I observed students seeing how far behind the rest of the class they were on the AR chart and simply giving up. I would of course encourage them to continue, but to little avail. Perhaps a private progress chart would have been more effective in this regard, but then students might have forgotten to check it and keep up with their progress.

Sarcasm

Zull’s chapter 9 entitled, “Waiting for Unity” was very interesting. I recently responded to a post by Baumgartner about what we have learned so far in this class concerning the physical mass that is the human brain and its anatomy. In chapter 9, Zull articulates it perfectly when talking about language.

“Language comprehension is a function of a region of the cortex that is just behind the auditory cortex in the back cortex.” (Zull 171).

Alan Alda as Capt. Benjamin Franklin "Hawkeye" Pierce on M*A*S*H

I had stated in my response that I was surprised to learn that everything in the human brain is interrelated and interconnected and how each part of the brain has some function on some level of importance. The above quote is from a section on language comprehension. It seems obvious that language comprehension would be related to and wrapped up in your auditory senses, being that language is an audible medium of communication. But I have never considered it like that before. It made me start to think about how my students were perceiving me and my lectures, lessons, my directions. I started to think about the words I used, the sentence structures, what emphasis on what syllables I employed. I have often been accused of sounding sarcastic. My fiancée will often ask me if everything is alright to which I will respond, “Sure, everything’s fine.” She almost always responds, “Tell your tone.” I suppose this is an issue of what Zull identifies as prosody (171). I know what I mean when I say I am fine but my fiancée gets an entire different meaning from the words based on my intonation.

I think intonation and inflection, prosody in general is very important when teaching. I have noticed while guiding instruction that certain of my students will not catch on to a quick quip I make or some other piece of humor I attempt. This is perhaps because my sense of humor (somewhat dry, I like to think I model myself on Hawkeye Pierce) is taken as seriousness by these students. I have often seen the look of confusion, sometimes bordering on anger that arises in certain of my students’ faces when I make some off-hand comment about an assignment being “due immediately,” when in fact I had stated earlier in the class that the assignment would be due on Friday. They just aren’t getting it. They take my serious tone to mean that I have adopted some authoritative air. But my kids are adaptable and after a few lessons with me, they learned my sense of humor, either through repetition or through study of my body language and could tell very quickly when I was “only kidding.”

           As I have previously written on this blog, my interest in learning is concerned with how cinema can be used as a means of education. I do not limit this to a conventional understanding of what “educational films” are but rather believe that most all movies and TV can be educational in some way or another. I believe that Zull’s ch. 7 further proves this point. Take the example from the beginning of the chapter in which one of his students makes a connection between what she is studying and a childhood experience. I believe that these experiences are not limited to a student’s own memories of his/her actions but can extend to memories of images and content they have seen both on television and at the theater.

            Zull’s explanation of the problem as teachers beginning from their own knowledge rather than the student’s learning is apt. I think it is incredibly invaluable to realize that different students have different looking neuronal networks and therefore make use of existing connections rather than trying to create entirely new ones. Some of these connections are created and extended through the constant inundation of movies and TV that students absorb on a daily basis. I have seen this in my own classroom. My students are far more excited to discuss the latest episode of The Walking Dead or The Avengers than any conventional lesson plan I may have worked out. The idea is to make a connection between what you are trying to teach them or what they are trying to learn with what they are already learning at home and at the theater. These are 21^st century connections. Whereas students may still have real world experiences on which to draw, their experience with programming on TV or their computers is far more prevalent.