September 19th, 2009
Frank Furedi has written in The Austrailian , 02 September, 2009 an article called “Specialist Pleading”. It can be found on www.ALDaily.com under tyranny of experts …
This is an article that should be read by any teachers feeling the dread of the experts and policy makers, who are out of touch with themselves, but feel a need to impose on your own practical knowledge. One of the messages is that in our education systems we have too many ‘experts’ who often take away from the teachers and pupils their own inner learning.
It is appropriate that ‘whole body learning’, that is encouraged in www.synapselearning.co.nz material, allows the whole body to feel the excitement, fear, enthusiasms, challenges in the daily lives of our young in well run and resourced early childhood education and up to seven years of age junior teaching. This, of course, leads on to open learning that can be expressed with their creative energies as life long learners.
Let us as educators allow the challenges, mistakes and feelings in our learnings be there as guides to the rest of our lives. Allow the synapses to retain these memories in our cells.
August 3rd, 2009
A.C. Grayling’s essay on Gopnik’s book is summed up in the experiments and scientific observations :
“This is despite the fact that, at times, it seems as if developmental psychology provides arduous scientific confirmation for what parents and preschool teachers have always long known; but Gopnik is skilled at producing the rabbit of insight from an apparently old hat.”
“Gopnik describes how imagination contributes to the vast amount of knowledge that children acquire in their first few years.
This learning proceeds, says Gopnik, in ways that a scientist would recognize as familiar: by experimentation and recognition of statistical patterns. In the child the application of these methods is unconscious and instinctive, and it is aided by the presence of caregivers who provide active instruction. But the basis of child learning is no different from the more conscious and deliberate methodology of adult enquirers.”
Gopnik is providing a basis for the use of imagination as a way of opening up the synapses for full body learning to allow the child to begin growing their full potential.
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/bn-review/note.asp?note=23611818
July 21st, 2009
Recently Kerry Spackman was talking about his work with high achievers. He has studied and practiced at the highest level. What is interesting is that for young people using the whole body enables them from birth to be able to keep the synapses fully open.
The learning and confidence you gain allow you to have all parts of your Self growing and developing.
Kerry is primarily working with adults, but the materials in our readers and writers are catalysts to the opening up of using all parts of your Self in growing your full potential.
It really is worthwhile for all in the learning business to spend 30 minutes or so listening carefully to his interview:
http://podcast.radionz.co.nz/ntn/ntn-20090715-1010-Feature_guest_-_Dr_Kerry_Spackman-048.mp3
May 31st, 2008
One of the goals of The Bridge is to give teachers material to work with and to connect with the children they teach.
Essentially enabling them to be good teachers.
Visit the Human Givens site and find out about their view of what good teachers do.
The Human Givens approach enables people to think more clearly about a wide range of social issues to do with the running of society and the future and physical survival of our species, including how we bring up children to live in a rapidly changing environment.
The essence of what good teachers do is that they enter each pupil’s world to discover what they already know, then find ways to connect up new knowledge and/or skills to what already exists in the pupil’s mind, thus expanding the learners model of reality. In other words, what is already in them has to be drawn out and extended.
http://www.hgi.org.uk/archive/education.htm
March 8th, 2008
An educational experiment in 1989 pitted a group of students with high reading scores, selected especially for their lack of interest in baseball, against a group of low-scoring students who happened to be avid baseball fans. The two groups were asked to demonstrate their reading comprehension of a passage on baseball. Can you guess which team won?
Synapselearning aims to increase academic achievement and general cognitive competence. We recognise that kids learn to read because of the pleasure of the story. This pleasure is hightened when it connects to their lives, their experiences and their knowledge base.
Breadth of knowledge is the single factor within human control that contributes most to academic achievement and general cognitive competence. In contradiction to the theory of social determinism, breadth of knowledge is a far greater factor in achievement than socioeconomic status. . . . This little-known and quite momentous fact means that imparting knowledge to all children is the single most effective way to narrow the competence gap between demographic groups through schooling.
If this is the case, then why are American schools, unlike those of nations with more effective education systems, so excessively focused on teaching reading as a merely formal, abstract skill?
Albert B Fernandez review of The Knowledge Deficit by ED hirsch reveals the importance of The Almighty Facts.
http://www.thecommonreview.org/spotlight.html
November 19th, 2007
The exciting challenges for the post digital age will be at the interface of computers and hands on reality. “We’ve already had the digital revolution we don’t need to keep having it; the next big thing in computers will literally be outside the box”
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/gershenfeld03/gershenfeld_index.html
June 14th, 2007
Research into synapse reveal networks of weak, random and chaotic impulses lay down the foundations for learning. “the simple notion that some domains of knowledge contain vast numbers of weak interrelations that, if properly exploited, can greatly amplify learning by a process of inference”. We as teachers can take this model and provide a broad network of experiences for students to make the connections.
http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/connectivism.htm
September 26th, 2006
Building Bridges presentation at the Ulearn Conference in Christchurch in September 2006 will introduce the concept of Synapse Learning, a timely event given this month’s worldwide call for renewed valuing of childhood.
www.ulearn.org.nz
September 22nd, 2006
“Children do not need to be made to learn to be better, told what to do or shown how. If they are given access to enough of the world, they will see clearly enough what things are truly important to themselves and to others, and they will make for themselves a better path into that world then anyone else could make for them.”
sandradodd.com/johnholt
September 22nd, 2006
Dr Martin Westwell:
An excerpt from the 891 ABC Adelaide’s interview with Dr Martin Westwell, Deputy Director, Oxford University’s Institute for the Mind Date: 04 Sep, 2006
Cameron:
Have you actually studied what happens to our brain whilst we are learning, especially when we are young and developing, have you looked at what’s going on as far as the … connections are concerned?
Dr Martin Westwell:
Yeah, this is something that’s really … the subject of some really new research …
www.learningtolearn.sa.edu.au/about/pages/media/mw_abc891/
