Education, RattleBag and Rhubarb

Born to Explore: Nine things we need to know about the brain

In his new book, psychologist Louis Cozolino applies the lessons of social neuroscience to the classroom. And here are his head (!) lines excerpted from The Social Neuroscience of Education: Optimizing Attachment and Learning in the Classroom The human brain wasn’t designed for industrial education. It was shaped over millions of years of sequential adaptation in response to ever-changing environmental demands. Over time, brains grew…

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Art, Film, Photography, Education, RattleBag and Rhubarb

“Not where the light is”: Schools and Creativity

There’s a really useful article in  Education Week that reviews, summarizes and connects the basic thinking and research out there on what helps promote creativity and helps children incubate the curiosity that leads to innovation, discovery and invention. There’s little here that is new and indeed I have written on all of these topics many times but it is encouraging…

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Education, RattleBag and Rhubarb

Box? What box? Breaking the mind-forged manacles.

Probably the only two responses to constant change are to ignore it (shrink back, retrench, go off the grid, become irrelevant, turn inwards, stay put, get run over, and so on) or keep on keeping on with the learning life. But what happens if the mantra of: Keep moving, just try it, have a go, fail-fail-fail and then succeed and…

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RattleBag and Rhubarb

Brain Surgery

Can you tell the anterior cortex, amygdala, and  parietal lobe from  the optic chiasma and  the corpus collosum? If not then you could benefit from Tanya’s Cognitive Science course. I visited this week. I was not up to speed on the science, but I did learn that the students in this  elective are incredible well-informed. The task was the dissection…

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RattleBag and Rhubarb

Give Joy a Chance: An 11-Step Program

It’s the 21st century. So what happens when we shut children down and disconnect them from wonder, creativity, curiosity and natural love of learning? The disengagement that is epidemic in high school starts much earlier. And if we actually believe in that cliche about the importance of lifetime learning then it must take joyful root in school. And when it…

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RattleBag and Rhubarb

Connect Joy to Neuroscience

In their zeal to raise test scores, too many policymakers wrongly assume that students who are laughing, interacting in groups, or being creative with art, music, or dance are not doing real academic work. The result is that some teachers feel pressure to preside over more sedate classrooms with students on the same page in the same book, sitting in…

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