Memory

My favorite article from this week of Neuroscience in Education: Braining up Your English Lessons was “How the Memory Works in Learning” by Judy Willis. The most interesting section of this article was entitled “Memory is Constructed and Stored by Patterning.” This article is written especially for educators.

One point the author stressed in this section of the article was the need to link new information to prior knowledge. Taking a pre-quiz, making a prediction, or brainstorming about the topic may all be methods of setting up the connection between old and new information. If we consider this EVO session, one of the first tasks in week one was to take a neuromyths quiz.

In this section of the article, Willis also claims that teachers should work to make links between information clear. One practical suggestion she makes is to use graphic organizers. The classic K-W-L chart comes to mind because it includes the following three columns: what I know, what I want to know, what I learned. In my class, I like to use a variety of graphic organizers, such as time lines or charts, to analyze reading content.

The last point from this section of Willis’ article that caught my attention was the importance of reflecting on experience. In both this EVO session and in my classes, learners write reflections on each topic. Through writing, students can clarify their understanding and draw connections between their experiences.

Throughout all of these activities, peer and teacher feedback also play an important role!

Paying Attention

The topic for week three of our EVO session was attention and memory. 
 
How important is attention to the learning process?  
Of course attention is an important part of the learning process. Incidentally, last year, I surveyed my students on what they thought the benefits of reading literature were. One student remarked that her ability to concentrate improved. Paying attention to a lecture in class, to the pages of a novel, or the scenes of a movie are all important because these are ways for us to obtain new information.

How hard is it to keep students' attention engaged in what is happening in the classroom?
It can be difficult to keep students’ attention in the class. Even if the teacher does his/her best to keep learners engaged, they may still not pay attention because students have full lives and they can get distracted by personal problems, lack of sleep, or other matters that are outside the realm of the classroom.

What can we do to help our students pay attention?
Although I haven’t tried it extensively, we could encourage students to lead healthy lives (get enough sleep, exercise, manage stress, eat healthful foods, use time management strategies, etc.). As previously mentioned, although we cannot control what happens to students outside the classroom, we could give students some tips to help them. I once listened to a talk by an expert in ESP (English for Specific Purposes) who mentioned that he uses life skills information as content for his grammar lessons. I wrote several sample sentences below that could be included in a lesson about sentence structure and variety.

• Simple Sentence: Sleep is important.
• Compound Sentence: Sleep is important, for people who don’t get enough sleep will have difficulty paying attention in class.
• An adequate amount of sleep is necessary for paying attention and consolidating memories; therefore, sufficient rest aids learning.
• Complex Sentence: When a students are sleep-deprived, they may become irritable or forgetful.
• Compound-Complex Sentence: Although getting a good night’s sleep is important, many people do not sleep enough, so they have difficulty paying attention and learning new information.

In this way, while learning about sentence structure and variety, students are also exposed to some information that may help them to become more successful learners. Before writing the above sentences, I read Sleep, Learning, and Memory. Please consult the article for more information.

What effective strategies do you use with your groups to help the students to pay attention?    
I try to choose interesting, engaging, and useful materials and activities for the classroom. Also, I try to vary the types of activities students perform during the class period, for example, silent reading followed by discussion or desk work followed by movement.

Annotation

I'm getting ready for the new school year that starts in April and I have been thinking about my upcoming lessons. One of the skills that students learn during the first few weeks of my class is annotation. While reading fiction and nonfiction texts, I encourage students to mark important information and take notes. Although each student is free to develop his or her own system of annotating, I do provide some instruction on the basic methods. In general, it seems like a skill that students tend to improve by practicing and comparing annotations. Peer and teacher feedback on annotation can also help students refine their system. 

During our EVO session, Carla, Karen, and I have been discussing this general topic through blog posts and comments. Carla wrote a post, Learning by Retrieval: Forget Highlighting. I started thinking that annotating is a step above highlighting because the reader is more engaged with the text and can use these annotations at a later date to help prepare for an examination or essay. Karen's post, Are Tags the Answer further explored the ideas of marking texts and retrieving online information though tagging. Although everyone has different preferred methods, the key point is that students need to USE their annotation! By simply asking students to compare annotations, summarize main points of the text, or write review questions, they can revisit the content. Furthermore, students need to take one more step and reflect on their readings and annotations too. By engaging in class discussions, writing responses, or even dramatizing scenes from a novel, students need to revisit the text, their notes, and their understanding; these will lead to deeper processing.

I think annotating and notetaking serve several important purposes. One is to be an active reader. Another is to make thinking visible through writing questions, connections, summaries, or ideas. Annotating can even be a way to communicate with others. Most of us have the experience of borrowing a book from a friend, buying a used textbook, or paging through an old, forgotten book in the family library. These books and their notes are windows to the minds of those who read the words before us.

Surprises and Stories

Recently I was a co-moderator of the EVO session, Neuroscience in Education: Braining up your English Lessons.  Some people asked me how I became interested in this topic and one of the reasons was attending First Annual Brain Days: Connecting Neuroscience with ELT Conference. This event was held in 2011 (Osaka) and 2012 (Kitakyushu), and when I attended TESOL 2012 in Philadelphia, I discovered that Carla had also developed an interest in the brain. We discussed the possibility of developing an EVO session on neuroscience with Denise as content expert. In this post, I’ll briefly describe last year's Neuroscience and ELT conference and make some connections to our EVO session.

At the 2012 Neuroscience and ELT conference, there were many presentations, and here is a sampling of the presentations I attended:
R. Murphy: Neuromyth-busters, Brain Anatomy for TEFL, Memory & Learning
C. Oana: Why is music helpful in teaching English: Some cognitive neuroscience evidences
C. Kelly: The neuroscience of lesson design
D. Paul: Personal Construct psychology and it’s implications in the classroom
M. Broide & I. Shiloh: Harnessing the narrative brain: An account of a learning experiment

I found Kelly’s presentation on the Neuroscience of Lesson Design to be interesting and practical. He discussed factors of learning. Students need to have physiological and psychological needs met, such as getting enough sleep and not having too much stress. Also, the lesson should be meaningful and relevant to the students and should include some emotion and challenge. For deep-processing, repetition, engagement, problem solving, and multi-sensory input can be taken advantage of. Finally, he highlighted that for brain compatibility, the lesson could include elements such as surprise and stories or songs. Audience members were encouraged to think about how to get dopamine into the class!

For me, the most interesting points from this session were surprise and stories. Since hearing Kelly’s presentation last summer, I’ve become more aware of the element of surprise in the classroom. For example, last semester, I was able to observe one of my colleagues teaching a humanities class. When I looked at the class handout, I noticed that it included some numbers and names, but there were no explanations and this was surprising! The teacher asked the students to speculate about what these meant within the context of the short story and the themes that they were studying. This led students to be curious and to engage with the material. Also, I noticed that when I’m teaching my humanities class, students are interested in novels, stories, and films when they’re surprised by the plot or characters. As previously mentioned, including a blank slide in a presentation is another way to surprise the audience. Just doing a little something different is enough to catch everyone's attention.

In addition to surprise, stories are also brain compatible. In his presentation, Kelly delivered some information in lecture style and then in story form. He asked the audience questions about the content, and everyone remembered the details of the story more readily. I think that not only telling stories, but also reading or writing stories can engage learners and their emotions. During our EVO session, Carla brought up the topic of attention hooks and stated that she often uses stories to illustrate grammar points, even keeping the same characters throughout the semester. These strategies also allow space for creativity in the classroom.

Finally, check out this information on DIY Neuro-ELT from M. Helgesen. If you remember, I blogged about his ELT and Happiness site at the end of 2007.

Karen, a participant in the EVO session, wrote an excellent post on attention hooks.

I hope to be able to attend another conference on neuroscience to continue learning and sharing with others!

Week Two: Emotion and Learning

Week two of our session, Neuroscience in Education: Braining up your English lessons, covered the topic of emotion and learning.


From James Zull book, The Art of Changing the Brain, page 58
Narrated by Mary Hillis
Images by Brazilian educator Cleide Frazão


When recording the above video, My Student Tony and Me, before the session started, I started thinking more and more about the role of emotion and learning, so for the “expanding your learning” task, I chose to research this area.

After all, I’m not only a teacher, but also a learner. I’m always learning about something and recently I’ve been studying Japanese, neuroscience, literature, and writing pedagogy just to name a few. However, since I’m a language teacher, I’ll focus on my recent experiences as a learner of the Japanese language. Actually, this is why I chose the topic of emotion and learning because I have complex emotions about studying and using Japanese and these affect my motivation and performance.

Living in Japan, I have felt frustrated when I get a cafe mocha everytime I think I’ve ordered a cafe americano. I have felt left out when I’m talking with a group of Japanese mothers. This frustration has even led me to take breaks from studying. On the other hand, these examples cannot be classified purely as negative because they helped me to identify my weaknesses and reinforced the need to continue studying. As a result, these so-called negative experiences could lead me to be motivated. In contrast with the real world, during my private Japanese lesson, my teacher is extremely supportive and creates a positive learning environment. Nevertheless, my experiences and emotions come with me every time I attend Japanese lesson.

From the various readings I’ve done recently, I’ve learned that negative emotions are linked to the amygdala and the fight or flight response while positive emotions are linked to dopamine and the frontal cortex. As the previous example demonstrates, emotions are not always easy to classify as positive or negative and there may be some interplay between the two.

For practical tips on emotion and learning, this pdf file was useful. Because I teach a literature themed course, I was particularly drawn to the following tips from the list which inspired me to consider my current teaching practice from a new perspective: emotion.  

“Discuss people’s and literary characters’ motivations”

“Incorporate storytelling, myths, legends, parables, and metaphors”

“Try role-playing, skits, and debates”

“Incorporate suspense, cliffhangers, and things left open-ended and unresolved”

There are some other aspects of emotion and learning that I will leave for further research and many more useful resources and points to consider about emotion and learning. This is just the beginning!

Art

In preparation for Neuroscience in Education: Braining up your English Lessons EVO sessions, I read The Art of Changing the Brain by James Zull. As you can see, the title of this book includes the word “art.” Although the field of education can be informed by science and quantitative research, I believe that teaching remains an art. When I read “Plenary: Neuroscience and teaching” in the IATEFL 2012 Glasgow Conference Selections, Zull discusses the question of how to change the brain and I found the following quotations that speak to the idea of teaching as an art:

“This is why the title of our first book is The Art of Changing the Brain. The skill of generating such change in learners remains an art. Many teachers have discovered their own art through years of experience, but still cannot explain or define its elements. And despite the intense interest in neuroscience, the art is not revealed there either.”

I think this is one of the main reasons I enjoyed Zull’s book so much; he incorporates the science of the brain with the art of teaching. Furthermore, he acknowledges the complexity of learners, teachers, and classrooms. As an educator, it makes sense to look at education in this way and I’m happy to have been a co-moderator of the EVO session Neuroscience in Education: Braining up your English Lessons.

Chapter 8: Sense Luscious

Note: This post relates to Chapter 8 of The Art of Changing the Brain by James Zull. It was originally posted on Braining-up your English Lessons Posterous blog. Since this service closed in April 2013, I have copied the post here. If you’d like to know more about the one-minute paper and similar activities, please refer to Engaging Ideas: A Professor’s Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom by John C. Bean. If you’d like to know more about teaching The Great Gatsby, I highly recommend The Great Gatsby in the Classroom: Searching for the American Dream by David Dowling.

The brain receives input from concrete experiences and enters the body through sense organs (eyes, nose, mouth, ears, skin). The input from these organs goes to different parts of the brain, so for example, input from the ears will go to the auditory cortex or input from the eyes will go to the visual cortex, and input from the skin, muscles, bones, etc. is related to the somatosensory cortex. The brain can detect little bits and see many details, but we can make mistakes because of barriers to paying attention or general misunderstanding. However, if the sensory input is threatening or dangerous, instead of going to the sensory cortex, it will go to the amygdala which will trigger instinct, and although the resulting response is fast, it misses details.

Zull uses the term “sense luscious” to describe experience which involves data from all the senses. He suggests that teachers should make use of concrete learning experiences and active learning methods, such as internships, research projects, collaboration, role playing and other active learning methods. Although Zull focuses on visual input, such as the use of pictures and diagrams to show concepts, he states that all senses--sound, smell, taste, touch, body position, as well as emotion--have a powerful role to play in learning.

I think that many of the activities that teachers set up in the English language classroom involve the pictures, senses, and active learning techniques. As you know, I primarily teach academic writing and literature, so here are a few activities that came to mind when I read this chapter.

Using pictures to show concepts: In a writing class, it might be useful to use images to represent the construction of different sentence types (compound, complex, compound/complex). Also, asking students to take photos or draw pictures to accompany their written work can be effective. When teaching literature, ask students to draw pictures of specific scenes, characters, or settings. At first, students might balk at the task and think it is easy or childish; however, once they realize how closely they have to re-read the text to gather details, most understand the value of this task.

Engaging all the senses: Sometimes when I teach compare/contrast essays, I teach the basics of the essay and then use a candy theme for skill practice. I bring in two different kinds of chocolates, like Snickers and Kit Kats. The students should look at the label design and information, taste/smell the different flavors, think about memories related to the candies, and anything else they can think of. Then, in pairs, students make a chart detailing the similarities and differences they found. Finally, they write a comparison/contrast paragraph.

Research Projects: Students conduct research projects on various topics. This semester, in preparation for reading The Great Gatsby, students conducted a 1920’s research project on topics such as flappers, prohibition, baseball, and jazz music. The did internet research, created documents with written text and pictures, and presented the information to their classmates. I had always thought that this project required students to learn/use a variety of skills, but now I’ve discovered that it is also brain-friendly!

Collaboration: Pair and group work is often used in any English language class. Asking students to make or discuss questions, brainstorm in groups, do peer review, participate in literature circles, perform jigsaw tasks, do think/pair/share, compare work, and so on are all examples of collaboration.

Role Playing: Thinking of The Great Gatsby again, students act out some of the scenes from the book. This requires them to read carefully to understand the situation and the movement of characters; also, students must grasp the voice and personality of each character in order to play the role effectively. I think role play is not only limited to speaking activities, however, Students can write diary entries, letters, and blog entries as if they were characters from a book.

Other active learning methods: I was curious to find out about other active learning methods, so I did a Google search and looked through a few of the top links. I came across something called “Just in Time Teaching.” This is something I’m not really familiar with, but it might be useful, especially for content based courses.

And a suggestion here (#6) is to insert a blank slide into the presentation to catch students off guard. This use of surprise and curiosity was mentioned many times at the Neuroscience in EFL Conference I attended earlier this summer.

The One-Minute Paper: This is something I learned about when I was doing my MA when I took a class on Writing Across the Curriculum. Students write for a short period of time of the topic of the class. Writing is one way that teachers can see a student's thought process. Often, I ask students to spend about 10 minutes writing a reflection about what we did in class that day. This is an open question, so sometimes they summarize the topic, ask questions, reflect on the various opinions from the discussion, and so on.

Do you have any additions or corrections to my summary of Chapter 8? How do you use the senses, images, and other active learning techniques in your classes?

New beginnings

This year I'm a co-moderator for the 2013 EVO session, Neuroscience in Education: Braining up your English lessons. This morning as I was reading and commenting on participants blogs, I realized that it has been over four years since I've written a blog post. Time for a new beginning! Here is my new online introduction on about.me