Into the Driver's Seat

When a teacher noticed her kids fighting at recess, she turned to neuroscience and mindfulness practice to help them take control of their emotions.

In today’s information-obsessed world, our minds are in constant overdrive.

Your brain is a living, inventive, and rapidly renewing organ that needs all the care and maintenance it needs to function well and deliver everyday.

Brain recharge can help you recalibrate your energy for better focus, creativity and resilience.

Harold Kushener once said, “Think of life as a good book. The further you get into it, the more it begins to make sense.”

We can adapt this to making the most of our brains; the further we get into understanding and recharging our brains, the more it works better, and thus comes our creativity.

Change your brain, change your life. If you want to be in control of your life, control the command center of your body.

“[Adolescence is] a stage of life when we can really thrive, but we need to take advantage of the opportunity,” said Temple University neuroscientist Laurence Steinberg at a Learning and the Brain conference in Boston. Steinberg has spent his career studying how the adolescent brain develops and believes there is a fundamental disconnect between the popular characterizations of adolescents and what’s really going on in their brains.

Because the brain is still developing during adolescence, it has incredible plasticity. It’s akin to the first five years of life, when a child’s brain is growing and developing new pathways all the time in response to experiences. Adult brains are somewhat plastic as well — otherwise they wouldn’t be able to learn new things — but “brain plasticity in adulthood involves minor changes to existing circuits, not the wholesale development of new ones or elimination of others,” Steinberg said.

The adolescent brain is exquisitely sensitive to experience,” Steinberg said. “It is like the recording device is turned up to a different level of sensitivity.” That’s why humans tend to remember even the most mundane events from adolescence much better than even important events that took place later in life. It also means adolescence could be an extremely important window for learning that sticks. Steinberg notes this window is also lengthening as scientists observe the onset of puberty happening earlier and young people taking on adult roles later in life. Between these two factors, one biological and one social, adolescence researchers now generally say the period lasts 15 years between the ages of 10 and 25.

Learn more / En savoir plus / Mehr erfahren:

http://www.scoop.it/t/21st-century-learning-and-teaching/?tag=Brain

Use #Andragogy UP from 11 years:

 https://gustmees.wordpress.com/2015/05/13/andragogy-adult-teaching-how-to-teach-ict/

Free resource of educational web tools, 21st century skills, tips and tutorials on how teachers and students integrate technology into education

— Breaking up and spacing out study time over days or weeks can substantially boost how much of the material students retain, and for longer, compared to lumping everything into a single, nose-to-the-grindstone session.

— Varying the studying environment — by hitting the books in, say, a cafe or garden rather than only hunkering down in the library, or even by listening to different background music — can help reinforce and sharpen the memory of what you learn.

— A 15-minute break to go for a walk or trawl on social media isn’t necessarily wasteful procrastination. Distractions and interruptions can allow for mental “incubation” and flashes of insight — but only if you’ve been working at a problem for a while and get stuck, according to a 2009 research meta-analysis.

— Quizzing oneself on new material, such as by reciting it aloud from memory or trying to tell a friend about it, is a far more powerful way to master information than just re-reading it, according to work by researchers including Henry Roediger III and Jeffrey Karpicke. (Roediger has co-authored his own book, “Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning.”)

Learn more / En savoir plus / Mehr erfahren:

https://gustmees.wordpress.com/2016/03/14/time-the-most-important-factor-neglected-in-education/

http://www.scoop.it/t/21st-century-learning-and-teaching/?tag=Brain