Week 2

Week 3

Week 2 Wrap Up - Welcome to Week 3

Dear ALL,

Wow! Week 2 has been amazing! Lots of sharing! We are delighted to read your thoughts and reflections about emotions and their implications to the teaching and learning process. Here you can check the main conversations that took place about the emotional brain, besides the ones in our Edmodo group. 

Learning about how the emotional brain works does not give us magical powers to solve all or most of the problems we face in our classes. But it does help us to see many of problems from a new perspective. As we understand better about the influence of the amygdala on behavior, we might be able to help many of our students to learn better.

Learning about emotions in the brain reminds us that as we plan our lessons, we should start at our students, by considering their characteristics and their needs, not at the content we are going

 to teach. It reminds us that our students are the ones who have to be in control - in control of doing, of learning - because learning is pleasurable to the brain. Our amygdala is constantly monitoring our experience to see how things are. For example, when we see happy faces, the amygdala becomes less active than normal. It drops its guard a little. The same thing happens when we are engaged in cognitive tasks - the amygdala becomes less active. If we learn how to get our students more involved in their work, they will feel less nervous, less afraid. This might be one of the ways through which we may gain more control over students’ behavior. So, instead of focusing on misbehavior, we might want to consider engaging our students in work that will give them the pleasure of learning.

As the Brazilian Educator Paulo Freire said, “No one starts to become an educator on a certain Tuesday at 4 pm. No one is born an educator. We make ourselves an educator; we become an educator, permanently, in our practice and in the reflection about the practice.” The Neurosciences - together with many other sciences - does not miraculously give us a manual about how to be a teacher, but it does empower us with important knowledge that may orient our practice.

As we move on to week 3, we will see that equally important is to understand how attention and memory operate in the brain. James Zull explains that “Different sensory signals physically compete for attention in the brain, and those that are the strongest win out... We all pay the most attention to the things that matter the most in our life.” Attention, memory, feelings and learning are intrinsically interconnected. Feelings affect attention, reasoning and memory. Feelings can help us remember or make us forget. Much of what is involved in learning depends on the feelings of our students.

So, are you ready for more sharing and learning? Week 3, here we come!

Week 2 Highlights

To check if you've finished the tasks for week 1, access our Week 2 Benchmarks. 

Participants have been going through an amazing reflective journey in their digital portfolios. We've compiled here our community reflections at Week 2_Participants Reflections . 

The Neuroscience in Education EVO Team