The Learning and Developing Brain

Thank You for Being a Friend 🎤🎵🎶🎤🎵🎷 Traveled down a road and back again __________________________________________________________ Social learning is an important component of education. Vygotsky, an important theorist in education, proposed social learning and the importance of social skills in a person's development; I believe that is why homeschooling is less appealing, since the students are less exposed to the social aspect of learning.  Here are some ways students benefit from social skills and social interaction: child can tutor others students in need child can be tutored if they are in need learning through play and/or the opportunity to free play vocabulary expansion exposure to different religions, races and/or ethnicity, and cultures exposure to new people  exposure to new information, thoughts, and ideas But ... should social interaction be strictly monitored with younger children? Clearly, that can be very evasive to a child's dev

The Frontal Lobe The frontal lobe is one the of the most important regions in the brain for learning. The functions of the frontal lobe include: memory, language, decision-making, and problem solving. It can be said that the frontal lobe is like the remote control of the brain because it controls how we communicate and our personalities.  Damage to the frontal lobe can result in: loss of motor movements - partial paralysis inability to speak and process language loss of problem solving skills reduced attention and awareness changes in personality  In education, the frontal lobe determines whether a child will retain the information or not, based on their working memory. If educators focused on the different regions of the brain and provided activities that cultivated that region's functions, students would be actually receiving instruction that 100% is tailored to what is in their ability. Below will be activities provided for each specific function. 

Chapter 6 of the Janet Nay Zadina book, Multiple Pathways to the Student Brain", focuses on how language and math is processed by the brain. The thalamus and corpus callosum are the two parts of the brain that heavily focuses on language. The thalamus recognizes incoming data and send its to the auditory cortex, which determines what type of sound it is. If the sound is recognized as language, it is sent elsewhere in the brain to be further processed. Math is processed differently than language because it is different processes strung together to complete the math task. For math, you need to be able to retrieve the memory/information of the basic math skills before targeting higher quality math like algebra and geometry. Knowing how the brain processes language and math is important because educators have to know the possible misconceptions they face with teaching both reading/language and math. If the educator can spot these misconceptions or have prepared responses for certain m

The attention and memory pathway are the neural networks that control what information is retained into the memory and your attention span. Chapter 5 of the Janet Nay Zadina book, Multiple Pathways to the Student Brain , focuses on the attention and memory pathways. Zadina (2014) states, "Attention and memory may be two of the most critical brain processes with regard to learning." (pp. 109). Attention has three networks in the brain: alerting, orienting, and executive. The alerting network is the the alerts we receive from the brain when we need to pay attention. The orienting network is where we decide if we continue paying attention of not. The third network is the executive attention network. This network engages your attention pathway to focus on something that you desire to. Zadina (2014) writes, "This network is impaired in attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, autism, and anxiety and has been associated with lower socioeconomic status." (pp. 112).

Like other information processed by the body, emotions follow the same trajectory. All of the regions of the brain that are associated with emotions include: thalamus, hypothalamus, cingulate gyrus, amygdala, hippocampus, and basal ganglia. The frontal lobe is involved, but it only controls the emotion and evaluates potential threats made to the person. As educators, it is our job to make sure students have a healthy emotional standing because it heavily affects their learning. Emotion can affect memory and attention, two things heavily relied upon in education. Zadina's Multiple Pathways to the Student Brain has a chapter that evaluates the effects on emotion on learning. Zadina (2014) states, "Emotion can have positive or negative effects on learning. The effect we most often think about in regard to learning is that strong negative emotions impair thinking and, therefore, learning in general." (pp. 66) Educators need to remind themselves to model positive emotion and i

The sensory motor pathway is the trajectory a sensory takes from being inflicted on the body to its' processing in the brain and body. Each of the five senses is introduced to the body in a different way: sight for the eyes, smell for the nose, taste for the tongue, touch for any appendages, and hearing for the ears. One the sense is detected by the body, how it travels through is differently. For example, according the Janet Nay Zadina book Multiple Pathways to the Student Brain (2014), "The eyes are the conduit for visual information sent to the thalamus, the relay station. The thalamus evaluates the information. If it is recognized as visual stimuli, it is sent to the visual cortex in the back of the brain for further processing." (pp. 36) Like vision, the other senses follow a similar path. Everything is relayed at the thalamus to determine what type of stimuli it is. If you look at the visual below, you will see that the thalamus is located at the center of all of th