Why Getting Help for Kids with Dyslexia is Difficult

Pretty Simple Popovers

As the seasons change, a new one has begun for us. As of this week, both Alex and I are full-time A Couple Cooks. For years, we’ve both been working full-time at a technical writing business here in Indianapolis. I was at the company for 13 years and Alex for 10 years. (If you’re wondering, I was his boss!) We’re incredibly grateful for our time in the business world working with corporate clients, which gave us a huge amount of experience and knowledge. Our work in food started as a hobby seven years ago. As of this week, Alex and I are officially both creative entrepreneurs working in the food industry…and officially co-parenting little Mr. Larson. It’s a new chapter!

The focus of this new season is creating margin, space for exploration, and focusing on family. Our 20’s and early 30’s were full of work, work, and more work. Once Larson entered our life, we knew it was time to press the Reset button. Our passion for cooking, food writing, and photography has also grown to a place where we wanted more time and space to explore it further. This transition also coincides with the launch of our cookbook, Pretty Simple Cooking, and we’re thrilled to have more time to devote to A Couple Cooks endeavors. A few changes and updates to what we do here:

• Are you a blogger or creative who needs maintenance or WordPress backend help? We’ll now offer this as a service.
• Are you a brand or cookbook author who needs product photography or food photography? We’ll be increasing our freelance photography capacity.
• We’ll continue to offer recipe development and food photography services.
• We’ll have more capacity for events related to home cooking, healthy lifestyle, food photography, food writing, social media, and creative entrepreneurship. More to come!

Now for the recipe. To celebrate Pretty Simple Cooking, we wanted to share with you one of our simplest recipes: popovers! When we’re looking for a side item to go with a soup or salad, popovers are an easy way to get homemade bread on the table.

What’s a popover? It’s kind of like a dinner roll, but on the inside it’s custardy and filled with air! The name comes from literally “popping over” the sides of the pan. It’s perfect as a side roll for the holidays, and it couldn’t be simpler. (Honestly, it should be called Really Truly Simple Popovers, but we couldn’t resist the pun.) The recipe is easy to memorize: whisk 2 eggs, when whisk in 1 cup flour, 1 cup milk and 1/2 teaspoon salt. The popovers are baked in a hot oven until they “pop” up, then the temperature is lowered so the insides can finish baking. They go well alongside anything, especially a cozy soup or a main dish salad. For example, try them with this Tomato Artichoke Lentil Stew, which we eat each Christmas Eve!

Did you make this recipe?

If you make these pretty simple popovers, we’d love to hear how they turned out. Leave a comment below or share a picture on Instagram and mention @acouplecooks.

Supremely Simple Popovers

 

Print

by: a Couple Cooks

Serves: 12

What You Need

• 2 eggs
• 1 cup all-purpose flour
• 1 cup milk
• ½ teaspoon kosher salt
• Butter, for greasing

What To Do

1. Preheat oven to 450F. Grease a standard muffin tin.
2. Whisk the eggs slightly; beat in remaining ingredients until smooth (do not overbeat). When the oven is ready, remove the pan and fill each cup halfway with batter.
3. Bake about 17 minutes until puffed and golden brown. Flip the pan, then reduce the heat to 350F and continue baking 10 minutes or so until browned. Allow to cool for a minute or two, then remove from the cups (using a sharp knife to run around the edges) and serve hot. Best served immediately. (If making in advance, pop them in a 350F oven again until warm and crisp, about 5 minutes.)

3.5.3229

 

A Couple Cooks - Recipes for Healthy & Whole Living

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3 Reasons Why Your Dog is Scratching the Carpet

No matter how much you love your pet, it can still be frustrating to come home to a damaged carpet. Find out more about how to keep your furbaby from wreaking havoc at home by checking out the following:

Image Source: Flickr

Lack of exercise

Play with your pup and give him plenty of outlets to release his energy. While you may twiddle your thumbs when you’re bored, some dogs decide to give digging a try and go to town on your carpet. Releasing your dog’s energy through walks or playtime ends those sudden urges to dig and instead makes him plop his butt down and go to sleep when he’s bored. Source: Pets.TheNest

Getting comfortable

Dogs often dig, scratch and circle before they lie down as a way to get comfortable. Protect your carpet by providing your dog with a comfy bed, preferably one with raised edges so he can feel like he’s snuggling into a safe den. A pile of blankets on top of carpet also can help reduce the scratching problem and give your pup a more acceptable fabric to work with. Source: Cuteness

Fear and anxiety

You may find that your dog starts scratching and digging at the carpet whenever they hear something outside the home. It could well be their response to something they find threatening or worrying which triggers this kind of reaction. However, dogs often scratch at carpets when their owners leave the house, it’s their way of showing they are not happy at the fact they have been left on their own which is called separation anxiety. To help stop them from doing this, it might be worth working alongside a dog behaviourist who would be able to get to the root of the problem and then gently break the habit to prevent your dog from ruining all your carpets. Source: Pets4Homes

A damaged carpet should not come between you and your pet. It’s really easy to fix. Call us today!

The post 3 Reasons Why Your Dog is Scratching the Carpet appeared first on Curlys Carpet Repair.

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Are We Thinking About Reading Comprehension All Wrong?

Educators and parents are obsessed with reading; and the emphasis has only grown in recent decades as reading became a defining indicator of academic success on standardized tests. Yet despite the obsession with teaching reading in the early grades, many educators don’t fully understand how the brain reads, writes Daniel Willingham, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, in a New York Times op-ed.

Willingham has long studied the best ways to teach reading and has noticed that factual knowledge often gets left out of the reading comprehension equation. Well-intentioned teachers help kids learn to decode words, but can’t understand why so many kids have trouble comprehending what they read. Willingham contends that lack of knowledge about the subject of the reading is a big culprit.

Kids are generally tested on reading comprehension as a separate skill, divorced from any subject they’ve learned about, and that favors kids who come to school with more prior knowledge — often wealthier kids. Willingham has some concrete ideas about how districts and schools can rethink reading curriculum to solve this problem:

Current education practices show that reading comprehension is misunderstood. It’s treated like a general skill that can be applied with equal success to all texts. Rather, comprehension is intimately intertwined with knowledge. That suggests three significant changes in schooling.

First, it points to decreasing the time spent on literacy instruction in early grades. Third-graders spend 56 percent of their time on literacy activities but 6 percent each on science and social studies. This disproportionate emphasis on literacy backfires in later grades, when children’s lack of subject matter knowledge impedes comprehension. Another positive step would be to use high-information texts in early elementary grades. Historically, they have been light in content.

Second, understanding the importance of knowledge to reading ought to make us think differently about year-end standardized tests. If a child has studied New Zealand, she ought to be good at reading and thinking about passages on New Zealand. Why test her reading with a passage about spiders, or the Titanic? If topics are random, the test weights knowledge learned outside the classroom — knowledge that wealthy children have greater opportunity to pick up.

Read the full New York Times op-ed below for that third suggestion.

Opinion | How to Get Your Mind to Read

Knowledge also provides context. For example, the literal meaning of last year’s celebrated fake-news headline, “Pope Francis Shocks World, Endorses Donald Trump for President,” is unambiguous – no gap-filling is needed. But the sentence carries a different implication if you know anything about the public (and private) positions of the men involved, or you’re aware that no pope has ever endorsed a presidential candidate.

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What Teachers Must Consider When Moving to Flexible Seating

A Better Way to Study Through Self-Testing and Distributed Practice

As I prepared to write this column, I relied on some pretty typical study techniques. First, as I’ve done since my student days, I generously highlighted key information in my background reading. Along the way, I took notes, many of them verbatim, which is a snap with digital copying and pasting. (Gotta love that command-C, command-V.) Then I reread my notes and highlights. Sound familiar? Students everywhere embrace these techniques and yet, as it turns out, they are not particularly good ways to absorb new material. At least not if that’s all you do.

Researchers have devoted decades to studying how to study. The research literature is frankly overwhelming. Luckily for all of us, the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest published a review article a few years ago that remains the most comprehensive guide out there. Its 47 pages hold valuable lessons for learners of any age and any subject — especially now, with end-of-semester exams looming.

The authors examined ten different study techniques, including highlighting, rereading, taking practice tests, writing summaries, explaining the content to yourself or another person and using mnemonic devices. They drew on the results of nearly 400 prior studies. Then, in an act of boldness not often seen in academic research, they actually awarded ratings: high, low or moderate utility.

The study strategies that missed the top rating weren’t necessarily ineffective, explains the lead author John Dunlosky, a psychology professor at Kent State University, but they lacked sufficient evidence of efficacy, or were proven useful only in certain areas of study or with certain types of students. “We were trying to find strategies that have a broad impact across all domains for all students,” Dunlosky says, “so it was a pretty tough rating scale.”

In fact, only two techniques got the top rating: practice testing and “distributed practice,” which means scheduling study activities over a period of time — the opposite of cramming.

Practice testing can take many forms: flashcards, answering questions at the end of a textbook chapter, tackling review quizzes online. Research shows it works well for students from preschool through graduate and professional education. Practice tests are especially effective when they require “free recall” of learned content, as opposed to what researchers call “recognition tasks” such as true-or-false questions or multiple-choice. And that’s regardless of which format the final exam will follow.

Testing yourself works because you have to make the effort to pull information from your memory — something we don’t do when we merely review our notes or reread the textbook.

“We know that the act of retrieval is an extremely potent learning experience,” says cognitive psychologist Thomas Toppino, who chairs the department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Villanova University. “We have tons of evidence about the relative effectiveness of retrieval as opposed to restudying.”

As for distributed practice vs. cramming, Dunlosky and his fellow authors write that “cramming is better than not studying at all,” but if you are going to devote four or five hours to studying for your biology mid-term, you would you be far better off spacing them out over a several days or weeks. “You get much more bang for your buck if you space,” Dunlosky told me.

The reasons for this are not fully understood, but probably have to do with a process called memory consolidation. As we revisit information over time, the memory becomes more stable and less easily disrupted. Neuroscientists believe this partly reflects the transfer of the memory from the hippocampus in the mid-brain to areas in the cerebral cortex. Revisiting the content at different times on different days also means it may become attached to more cues — an idea called “encoding variability.” So, if you are sitting in the library with the sun pouring through the windows as you study the Krebs Cycle, and then you study it again a few days later with a classmate over snacks in your kitchen, you’ve attached that content to a range of associated memories that may help you retain it.

Combining self-testing with distributed practice is especially powerful. “Never test yourself immediately after you study,” Toppino says. “You’re going to grossly overestimate how well you know the information if you test yourself right away.”

Even better is to get some sleep between your study sessions. Memory consolidation is known to occur during sleep. A 2016 study by Toppino and several colleagues in France has shown that if you interpose sleep between two study sessions, you’ll remember more — and in a much more lasting way — than if you study for the same amount of time without a sleep break. In addition, when you come back and review material after sleeping, you’ll master it more quickly. In Toppino’s study, which involved learning Swahili words, the longer students slept, the faster they mastered the vocabulary words in their post-sleep study session and the better they remembered them one week later.

While much of this information has been known to researchers for years, it doesn’t seem to filter down to students or their teachers. A report released last year by the National Council on Teacher Quality found, shockingly, that 85 percent of the textbooks used to train teachers in how students learn had less than a page on validated strategies; 59 percent of the 48 education psychology textbooks surveyed offered not one sentence.

Students themselves are often misinformed or just plain disorganized. To take advantage of distributed practice and sleep, you’ve got to plan ahead and schedule your studying. As for self-testing, Toppino laments, “there’s a strong tendency for people to think that testing is for evaluation” and yet they miss the point that it is also for assessing their own knowledge gaps and where to focus their efforts.

Other study strategies besides the top two in Dunlosky’s paper can be useful. For example, there’s fairly good evidence to support “self-explanation” and something called “elaborative interrogation,” in which you ask yourself why the facts and concepts you’re learning are true. There’s even a place for highlighting. “The killer is that for many students the strategy they bring to the table to learn the content they’ve highlighted is just rereading it over and over again,” Dunlosky says. “They need to do more engaging things.”

Turns out that he’s a fond of highlighting as I am: “I still have my favorite highlighter,” he told me. “I would never give it up.”

This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our newsletter.

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5 Strategies to Demystify the Learning Process for Struggling Students

Barbara Oakley’s professional biography does not suggest that she was once a struggling math and science student: She is an engineering professor, author of A Mind For Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science and Mindshift: Break Through Obstacles to Learning and Discover Your Hidden Potential (which is not affiliated with this MindShift). Oakley co-created Coursera’s most popular course, “Learning How to Learn,” with Terrence Sejnowski, which has enrolled nearly 2 million students. 

But Oakley is a self-described “former math flunky” who “retooled” her brain — and who has since made it her life’s work to help others learn how to learn by explaining some key principles from modern neuroscience. 

The field of metacognition offers educators many techniques that are rooted in brain research, such as deliberate practice and interleaving. “But before you can even tackle these,” says Oakley, “you have to innoculate learners against the idea that they are stupid if they cannot figure things out first off. You have to teach them that faster is not always better.”

While her online course primarily enrolls adults, Oakley is now working on a book aimed at 10-to-14-year-olds. “I picked that age range because it is old enough that they can grasp the ideas but young enough that they don’t necessarily think ‘I’m bad at math. I can’t do it.’ We can get to them before they lock out possibilities.”

When students do not understand how their brains learn and retain material, they can develop misconceptions about themselves as learners — such as a faulty assumption that they are bad at a subject or that they suffer from performance anxiety. Oakley shares the common experience of students who reread their notes and think they know the material —  only to enter a test and find that they cannot retrieve the information. “They are horrified and think they must have test anxiety.” More likely, says Oakley, they simply haven’t been taught how to study in a way that allows them to retrieve the information.  

Oakley recognizes that “many educators are not at all comfortable with or trained in neuroscience,” so she breaks down a few key principles that teachers can use in the classroom and share with students to help them demystify the learning process.  

1. The Hiker Brain vs. The Race Car Brain

Start by teaching students the difference between focused and diffused thinking, says Oakley. When the brain is in focused mode, you can get started on the task at hand. But deep understanding is not fully accomplished in this mode.

Diffused thinking occurs when you allow your mind to wander, to imagine and to daydream. In this mode, the brain is still working —  consolidating information and “making sense of what you are trying to learn,” says Oakley. If a concept is easy for you to grasp right off, the focused mode might be sufficient, but if a new skill or concept “takes consideration, you have to toggle back and forth between these two modes of thinking as you get to true understanding of the material — and this doesn’t happen quickly.”

Because toggling is essential to learning, teachers and students need to build downtime into their day — time when learning can “happen on background” as you play a game, go on a walk or color a picture. It’s also one reason why sleep is so vital to healthy cognitive development.

Since students tend to equate speed with smarts, Oakley suggests sharing this metaphor: “There’s a race car brain and a hiker brain. They both get to the finish line, but not at the same time. The race car brain gets there really fast, but everything goes by in a blur. The hiker brain takes time. It hears birds singing, sees the rabbit trails, feels the leaves. It’s a very different experience and, in some ways, much richer and deeper. You don’t need to be a super swift learner. In fact, sometimes you can learn more deeply by going slowly.”

2. Chains and Chunks

In cognitive psychology, “chunking” refers to the well-practiced mental patterns that are essential to developing expertise in a topic.  Oakley prefers the image of a “chain” when she explains this to students.

Learning is all about developing strong chains. For example, says Oakley, when you are first learning how to back up a car, you have to consciously think about each step, from how to turn the steering wheel to how to use your mirrors. But “once that process is chained, it’s easy” — it becomes automatic. Similarly, once solving certain equations becomes automatic in math, students can apply these equations to more complex problems.

Teachers can help students identify the procedures in a unit of study that they need to master in order to take their learning to the next level —  from the steps of the scientific method to fundamental drawing techniques.

“Any type of mastery involves the development of chains of procedural fluency. Then you can get into more complex areas of fluency,” says Oakley. Here’s another way to think about it. We all have about four slots of working memory that we can use to problem-solve in the moment. One of those slots can be filled with an entire procedural chain —  and then you can put new information in the other slots.

3. The Power of Metaphor

“Metaphor and analogy are extraordinarily powerful teaching tools and very often underused,” says Oakley.  “When you are trying to learn something new, the best way to learn it is to connect it with something you already know.”

The formal term for this is “neural reuse” —  the idea that metaphors use the same neural pathways as the concept a metaphor is describing. So familiar metaphors allow a learner to draw on a concept they have already mastered and apply it to a new situation. Or as Oakley says, metaphors “rapidly on-board” new ideas. For example, says Oakley, comparing the flow of electrons to the flow of water is a way to “jump-start students’ thinking.”

As part of her research, Oakley reached out to thousands of professors who are considered top teachers in their fields. “Many of these professors had a secret that they used in their teaching: metaphor and analogy. It was like a secret shared handshake.” Oakley encourages teachers to not only use metaphor but to challenge students to develop their own metaphors as a study strategy.

4. The Problem of Procrastination

Oakley says that procrastination is the number one challenge facing most learners. To train the brain to systematically focus and relax — to toggle — she  recommends the “Pomodoro Technique.”

Developed by Francesco Cirillo, this strategy uses a timer to help the learner work and break at set intervals. First, choose a task to accomplish. Then, set a timer for 25 minutes and work until the timer goes off.  At that point, take a five-minute break: stand up, walk around, take a drink of water, etc. After three or four 25-minute intervals, take a longer break (15 – 30 minutes) to recharge. This technique “trains your ability to focus and reinforces that relaxing at the end is critical to the process of learning,” says Oakley.  Teachers and administrators can build a similar rhythm into the schoolday, providing brain breaks and movement time to help students toggle between focused and diffused thinking.

5. Expanding Possibilities

When we teach children and teenagers how they learn, we can blow open their sense of possibility, says Oakley. “I would tell students, you don’t just have to be stuck following your passion. You can broaden your passions enormously. And that can have enormous implications for how your life unfolds. We always say ‘follow your passions’ but sometimes that locks people into focusing on what comes easily or what they are already good at. You can get passionate about — and really good at — many things!”

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5 Strategies to Demystify the Learning Process for Struggling Students

Barbara Oakley’s professional biography does not suggest that she was once a struggling math and science student: She is an engineering professor, author of A Mind For Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science and Mindshift: Break Through Obstacles to Learning and Discover Your Hidden Potential (which is not affiliated with this MindShift). Oakley co-created Coursera’s most popular course, “Learning How to Learn,” with Terrence Sejnowski, which has enrolled nearly 2 million students. 

But Oakley is a self-described “former math flunky” who “retooled” her brain — and who has since made it her life’s work to help others learn how to learn by explaining some key principles from modern neuroscience. 

The field of metacognition offers educators many techniques that are rooted in brain research, such as deliberate practice and interleaving. “But before you can even tackle these,” says Oakley, “you have to innoculate learners against the idea that they are stupid if they cannot figure things out first off. You have to teach them that faster is not always better.”

While her online course primarily enrolls adults, Oakley is now working on a book aimed at 10-to-14-year-olds. “I picked that age range because it is old enough that they can grasp the ideas but young enough that they don’t necessarily think ‘I’m bad at math. I can’t do it.’ We can get to them before they lock out possibilities.”

When students do not understand how their brains learn and retain material, they can develop misconceptions about themselves as learners — such as a faulty assumption that they are bad at a subject or that they suffer from performance anxiety. Oakley shares the common experience of students who reread their notes and think they know the material —  only to enter a test and find that they cannot retrieve the information. “They are horrified and think they must have test anxiety.” More likely, says Oakley, they simply haven’t been taught how to study in a way that allows them to retrieve the information.  

Oakley recognizes that “many educators are not at all comfortable with or trained in neuroscience,” so she breaks down a few key principles that teachers can use in the classroom and share with students to help them demystify the learning process.  

1. The Hiker Brain vs. The Race Car Brain

Start by teaching students the difference between focused and diffused thinking, says Oakley. When the brain is in focused mode, you can get started on the task at hand. But deep understanding is not fully accomplished in this mode.

Diffused thinking occurs when you allow your mind to wander, to imagine and to daydream. In this mode, the brain is still working —  consolidating information and “making sense of what you are trying to learn,” says Oakley. If a concept is easy for you to grasp right off, the focused mode might be sufficient, but if a new skill or concept “takes consideration, you have to toggle back and forth between these two modes of thinking as you get to true understanding of the material — and this doesn’t happen quickly.”

Because toggling is essential to learning, teachers and students need to build downtime into their day — time when learning can “happen on background” as you play a game, go on a walk or color a picture. It’s also one reason why sleep is so vital to healthy cognitive development.

Since students tend to equate speed with smarts, Oakley suggests sharing this metaphor: “There’s a race car brain and a hiker brain. They both get to the finish line, but not at the same time. The race car brain gets there really fast, but everything goes by in a blur. The hiker brain takes time. It hears birds singing, sees the rabbit trails, feels the leaves. It’s a very different experience and, in some ways, much richer and deeper. You don’t need to be a super swift learner. In fact, sometimes you can learn more deeply by going slowly.”

2. Chains and Chunks

In cognitive psychology, “chunking” refers to the well-practiced mental patterns that are essential to developing expertise in a topic.  Oakley prefers the image of a “chain” when she explains this to students.

Learning is all about developing strong chains. For example, says Oakley, when you are first learning how to back up a car, you have to consciously think about each step, from how to turn the steering wheel to how to use your mirrors. But “once that process is chained, it’s easy” — it becomes automatic. Similarly, once solving certain equations becomes automatic in math, students can apply these equations to more complex problems.

Teachers can help students identify the procedures in a unit of study that they need to master in order to take their learning to the next level —  from the steps of the scientific method to fundamental drawing techniques.

“Any type of mastery involves the development of chains of procedural fluency. Then you can get into more complex areas of fluency,” says Oakley. Here’s another way to think about it. We all have about four slots of working memory that we can use to problem-solve in the moment. One of those slots can be filled with an entire procedural chain —  and then you can put new information in the other slots.

3. The Power of Metaphor

“Metaphor and analogy are extraordinarily powerful teaching tools and very often underused,” says Oakley.  “When you are trying to learn something new, the best way to learn it is to connect it with something you already know.”

The formal term for this is “neural reuse” —  the idea that metaphors use the same neural pathways as the concept a metaphor is describing. So familiar metaphors allow a learner to draw on a concept they have already mastered and apply it to a new situation. Or as Oakley says, metaphors “rapidly on-board” new ideas. For example, says Oakley, comparing the flow of electrons to the flow of water is a way to “jump-start students’ thinking.”

As part of her research, Oakley reached out to thousands of professors who are considered top teachers in their fields. “Many of these professors had a secret that they used in their teaching: metaphor and analogy. It was like a secret shared handshake.” Oakley encourages teachers to not only use metaphor but to challenge students to develop their own metaphors as a study strategy.

4. The Problem of Procrastination

Oakley says that procrastination is the number one challenge facing most learners. To train the brain to systematically focus and relax — to toggle — she  recommends the “Pomodoro Technique.”

Developed by Francesco Cirillo, this strategy uses a timer to help the learner work and break at set intervals. First, choose a task to accomplish. Then, set a timer for 25 minutes and work until the timer goes off.  At that point, take a five-minute break: stand up, walk around, take a drink of water, etc. After three or four 25-minute intervals, take a longer break (15 – 30 minutes) to recharge. This technique “trains your ability to focus and reinforces that relaxing at the end is critical to the process of learning,” says Oakley.  Teachers and administrators can build a similar rhythm into the schoolday, providing brain breaks and movement time to help students toggle between focused and diffused thinking.

5. Expanding Possibilities

When we teach children and teenagers how they learn, we can blow open their sense of possibility, says Oakley. “I would tell students, you don’t just have to be stuck following your passion. You can broaden your passions enormously. And that can have enormous implications for how your life unfolds. We always say ‘follow your passions’ but sometimes that locks people into focusing on what comes easily or what they are already good at. You can get passionate about — and really good at — many things!”

from MindShift http://ift.tt/2zV31Jt

5 Strategies to Demystify the Learning Process for Struggling Students

Barbara Oakley’s professional biography does not suggest that she was once a struggling math and science student: She is an engineering professor, author of A Mind For Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science and Mindshift: Break Through Obstacles to Learning and Discover Your Hidden Potential (which is not affiliated with this MindShift). Oakley co-created Coursera’s most popular course, “Learning How to Learn,” with Terrence Sejnowski, which has enrolled nearly 2 million students. 

But Oakley is a self-described “former math flunky” who “retooled” her brain — and who has since made it her life’s work to help others learn how to learn by explaining some key principles from modern neuroscience. 

The field of metacognition offers educators many techniques that are rooted in brain research, such as deliberate practice and interleaving. “But before you can even tackle these,” says Oakley, “you have to innoculate learners against the idea that they are stupid if they cannot figure things out first off. You have to teach them that faster is not always better.”

While her online course primarily enrolls adults, Oakley is now working on a book aimed at 10-to-14-year-olds. “I picked that age range because it is old enough that they can grasp the ideas but young enough that they don’t necessarily think ‘I’m bad at math. I can’t do it.’ We can get to them before they lock out possibilities.”

When students do not understand how their brains learn and retain material, they can develop misconceptions about themselves as learners — such as a faulty assumption that they are bad at a subject or that they suffer from performance anxiety. Oakley shares the common experience of students who reread their notes and think they know the material —  only to enter a test and find that they cannot retrieve the information. “They are horrified and think they must have test anxiety.” More likely, says Oakley, they simply haven’t been taught how to study in a way that allows them to retrieve the information.  

Oakley recognizes that “many educators are not at all comfortable with or trained in neuroscience,” so she breaks down a few key principles that teachers can use in the classroom and share with students to help them demystify the learning process.  

1. The Hiker Brain vs. The Race Car Brain

Start by teaching students the difference between focused and diffused thinking, says Oakley. When the brain is in focused mode, you can get started on the task at hand. But deep understanding is not fully accomplished in this mode.

Diffused thinking occurs when you allow your mind to wander, to imagine and to daydream. In this mode, the brain is still working —  consolidating information and “making sense of what you are trying to learn,” says Oakley. If a concept is easy for you to grasp right off, the focused mode might be sufficient, but if a new skill or concept “takes consideration, you have to toggle back and forth between these two modes of thinking as you get to true understanding of the material — and this doesn’t happen quickly.”

Because toggling is essential to learning, teachers and students need to build downtime into their day — time when learning can “happen on background” as you play a game, go on a walk or color a picture. It’s also one reason why sleep is so vital to healthy cognitive development.

Since students tend to equate speed with smarts, Oakley suggests sharing this metaphor: “There’s a race car brain and a hiker brain. They both get to the finish line, but not at the same time. The race car brain gets there really fast, but everything goes by in a blur. The hiker brain takes time. It hears birds singing, sees the rabbit trails, feels the leaves. It’s a very different experience and, in some ways, much richer and deeper. You don’t need to be a super swift learner. In fact, sometimes you can learn more deeply by going slowly.”

2. Chains and Chunks

In cognitive psychology, “chunking” refers to the well-practiced mental patterns that are essential to developing expertise in a topic.  Oakley prefers the image of a “chain” when she explains this to students.

Learning is all about developing strong chains. For example, says Oakley, when you are first learning how to back up a car, you have to consciously think about each step, from how to turn the steering wheel to how to use your mirrors. But “once that process is chained, it’s easy” — it becomes automatic. Similarly, once solving certain equations becomes automatic in math, students can apply these equations to more complex problems.

Teachers can help students identify the procedures in a unit of study that they need to master in order to take their learning to the next level —  from the steps of the scientific method to fundamental drawing techniques.

“Any type of mastery involves the development of chains of procedural fluency. Then you can get into more complex areas of fluency,” says Oakley. Here’s another way to think about it. We all have about four slots of working memory that we can use to problem-solve in the moment. One of those slots can be filled with an entire procedural chain —  and then you can put new information in the other slots.

3. The Power of Metaphor

“Metaphor and analogy are extraordinarily powerful teaching tools and very often underused,” says Oakley.  “When you are trying to learn something new, the best way to learn it is to connect it with something you already know.”

The formal term for this is “neural reuse” —  the idea that metaphors use the same neural pathways as the concept a metaphor is describing. So familiar metaphors allow a learner to draw on a concept they have already mastered and apply it to a new situation. Or as Oakley says, metaphors “rapidly on-board” new ideas. For example, says Oakley, comparing the flow of electrons to the flow of water is a way to “jump-start students’ thinking.”

As part of her research, Oakley reached out to thousands of professors who are considered top teachers in their fields. “Many of these professors had a secret that they used in their teaching: metaphor and analogy. It was like a secret shared handshake.” Oakley encourages teachers to not only use metaphor but to challenge students to develop their own metaphors as a study strategy.

4. The Problem of Procrastination

Oakley says that procrastination is the number one challenge facing most learners. To train the brain to systematically focus and relax — to toggle — she  recommends the “Pomodoro Technique.”

Developed by Francesco Cirillo, this strategy uses a timer to help the learner work and break at set intervals. First, choose a task to accomplish. Then, set a timer for 25 minutes and work until the timer goes off.  At that point, take a five-minute break: stand up, walk around, take a drink of water, etc. After three or four 25-minute intervals, take a longer break (15 – 30 minutes) to recharge. This technique “trains your ability to focus and reinforces that relaxing at the end is critical to the process of learning,” says Oakley.  Teachers and administrators can build a similar rhythm into the schoolday, providing brain breaks and movement time to help students toggle between focused and diffused thinking.

5. Expanding Possibilities

When we teach children and teenagers how they learn, we can blow open their sense of possibility, says Oakley. “I would tell students, you don’t just have to be stuck following your passion. You can broaden your passions enormously. And that can have enormous implications for how your life unfolds. We always say ‘follow your passions’ but sometimes that locks people into focusing on what comes easily or what they are already good at. You can get passionate about — and really good at — many things!”

from MindShift http://ift.tt/2zV31Jt

5 Strategies to Demystify the Learning Process for Struggling Students

Barbara Oakley’s professional biography does not suggest that she was once a struggling math and science student: She is an engineering professor, author of A Mind For Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science and Mindshift: Break Through Obstacles to Learning and Discover Your Hidden Potential (which is not affiliated with this MindShift). Oakley co-created Coursera’s most popular course, “Learning How to Learn,” with Terrence Sejnowski, which has enrolled nearly 2 million students. 

But Oakley is a self-described “former math flunky” who “retooled” her brain — and who has since made it her life’s work to help others learn how to learn by explaining some key principles from modern neuroscience. 

The field of metacognition offers educators many techniques that are rooted in brain research, such as deliberate practice and interleaving. “But before you can even tackle these,” says Oakley, “you have to innoculate learners against the idea that they are stupid if they cannot figure things out first off. You have to teach them that faster is not always better.”

While her online course primarily enrolls adults, Oakley is now working on a book aimed at 10-to-14-year-olds. “I picked that age range because it is old enough that they can grasp the ideas but young enough that they don’t necessarily think ‘I’m bad at math. I can’t do it.’ We can get to them before they lock out possibilities.”

When students do not understand how their brains learn and retain material, they can develop misconceptions about themselves as learners — such as a faulty assumption that they are bad at a subject or that they suffer from performance anxiety. Oakley shares the common experience of students who reread their notes and think they know the material —  only to enter a test and find that they cannot retrieve the information. “They are horrified and think they must have test anxiety.” More likely, says Oakley, they simply haven’t been taught how to study in a way that allows them to retrieve the information.  

Oakley recognizes that “many educators are not at all comfortable with or trained in neuroscience,” so she breaks down a few key principles that teachers can use in the classroom and share with students to help them demystify the learning process.  

1. The Hiker Brain vs. The Race Car Brain

Start by teaching students the difference between focused and diffused thinking, says Oakley. When the brain is in focused mode, you can get started on the task at hand. But deep understanding is not fully accomplished in this mode.

Diffused thinking occurs when you allow your mind to wander, to imagine and to daydream. In this mode, the brain is still working —  consolidating information and “making sense of what you are trying to learn,” says Oakley. If a concept is easy for you to grasp right off, the focused mode might be sufficient, but if a new skill or concept “takes consideration, you have to toggle back and forth between these two modes of thinking as you get to true understanding of the material — and this doesn’t happen quickly.”

Because toggling is essential to learning, teachers and students need to build downtime into their day — time when learning can “happen on background” as you play a game, go on a walk or color a picture. It’s also one reason why sleep is so vital to healthy cognitive development.

Since students tend to equate speed with smarts, Oakley suggests sharing this metaphor: “There’s a race car brain and a hiker brain. They both get to the finish line, but not at the same time. The race car brain gets there really fast, but everything goes by in a blur. The hiker brain takes time. It hears birds singing, sees the rabbit trails, feels the leaves. It’s a very different experience and, in some ways, much richer and deeper. You don’t need to be a super swift learner. In fact, sometimes you can learn more deeply by going slowly.”

2. Chains and Chunks

In cognitive psychology, “chunking” refers to the well-practiced mental patterns that are essential to developing expertise in a topic.  Oakley prefers the image of a “chain” when she explains this to students.

Learning is all about developing strong chains. For example, says Oakley, when you are first learning how to back up a car, you have to consciously think about each step, from how to turn the steering wheel to how to use your mirrors. But “once that process is chained, it’s easy” — it becomes automatic. Similarly, once solving certain equations becomes automatic in math, students can apply these equations to more complex problems.

Teachers can help students identify the procedures in a unit of study that they need to master in order to take their learning to the next level —  from the steps of the scientific method to fundamental drawing techniques.

“Any type of mastery involves the development of chains of procedural fluency. Then you can get into more complex areas of fluency,” says Oakley. Here’s another way to think about it. We all have about four slots of working memory that we can use to problem-solve in the moment. One of those slots can be filled with an entire procedural chain —  and then you can put new information in the other slots.

3. The Power of Metaphor

“Metaphor and analogy are extraordinarily powerful teaching tools and very often underused,” says Oakley.  “When you are trying to learn something new, the best way to learn it is to connect it with something you already know.”

The formal term for this is “neural reuse” —  the idea that metaphors use the same neural pathways as the concept a metaphor is describing. So familiar metaphors allow a learner to draw on a concept they have already mastered and apply it to a new situation. Or as Oakley says, metaphors “rapidly on-board” new ideas. For example, says Oakley, comparing the flow of electrons to the flow of water is a way to “jump-start students’ thinking.”

As part of her research, Oakley reached out to thousands of professors who are considered top teachers in their fields. “Many of these professors had a secret that they used in their teaching: metaphor and analogy. It was like a secret shared handshake.” Oakley encourages teachers to not only use metaphor but to challenge students to develop their own metaphors as a study strategy.

4. The Problem of Procrastination

Oakley says that procrastination is the number one challenge facing most learners. To train the brain to systematically focus and relax — to toggle — she  recommends the “Pomodoro Technique.”

Developed by Francesco Cirillo, this strategy uses a timer to help the learner work and break at set intervals. First, choose a task to accomplish. Then, set a timer for 25 minutes and work until the timer goes off.  At that point, take a five-minute break: stand up, walk around, take a drink of water, etc. After three or four 25-minute intervals, take a longer break (15 – 30 minutes) to recharge. This technique “trains your ability to focus and reinforces that relaxing at the end is critical to the process of learning,” says Oakley.  Teachers and administrators can build a similar rhythm into the schoolday, providing brain breaks and movement time to help students toggle between focused and diffused thinking.

5. Expanding Possibilities

When we teach children and teenagers how they learn, we can blow open their sense of possibility, says Oakley. “I would tell students, you don’t just have to be stuck following your passion. You can broaden your passions enormously. And that can have enormous implications for how your life unfolds. We always say ‘follow your passions’ but sometimes that locks people into focusing on what comes easily or what they are already good at. You can get passionate about — and really good at — many things!”

from MindShift http://ift.tt/2zV31Jt

5 Strategies to Demystify the Learning Process for Struggling Students

Barbara Oakley’s professional biography does not suggest that she was once a struggling math and science student: She is an engineering professor, author of A Mind For Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science and Mindshift: Break Through Obstacles to Learning and Discover Your Hidden Potential (which is not affiliated with this MindShift). Oakley co-created Coursera’s most popular course, “Learning How to Learn,” with Terrence Sejnowski, which has enrolled nearly 2 million students. 

But Oakley is a self-described “former math flunky” who “retooled” her brain — and who has since made it her life’s work to help others learn how to learn by explaining some key principles from modern neuroscience. 

The field of metacognition offers educators many techniques that are rooted in brain research, such as deliberate practice and interleaving. “But before you can even tackle these,” says Oakley, “you have to innoculate learners against the idea that they are stupid if they cannot figure things out first off. You have to teach them that faster is not always better.”

While her online course primarily enrolls adults, Oakley is now working on a book aimed at 10-to-14-year-olds. “I picked that age range because it is old enough that they can grasp the ideas but young enough that they don’t necessarily think ‘I’m bad at math. I can’t do it.’ We can get to them before they lock out possibilities.”

When students do not understand how their brains learn and retain material, they can develop misconceptions about themselves as learners — such as a faulty assumption that they are bad at a subject or that they suffer from performance anxiety. Oakley shares the common experience of students who reread their notes and think they know the material —  only to enter a test and find that they cannot retrieve the information. “They are horrified and think they must have test anxiety.” More likely, says Oakley, they simply haven’t been taught how to study in a way that allows them to retrieve the information.  

Oakley recognizes that “many educators are not at all comfortable with or trained in neuroscience,” so she breaks down a few key principles that teachers can use in the classroom and share with students to help them demystify the learning process.  

1. The Hiker Brain vs. The Race Car Brain

Start by teaching students the difference between focused and diffused thinking, says Oakley. When the brain is in focused mode, you can get started on the task at hand. But deep understanding is not fully accomplished in this mode.

Diffused thinking occurs when you allow your mind to wander, to imagine and to daydream. In this mode, the brain is still working —  consolidating information and “making sense of what you are trying to learn,” says Oakley. If a concept is easy for you to grasp right off, the focused mode might be sufficient, but if a new skill or concept “takes consideration, you have to toggle back and forth between these two modes of thinking as you get to true understanding of the material — and this doesn’t happen quickly.”

Because toggling is essential to learning, teachers and students need to build downtime into their day — time when learning can “happen on background” as you play a game, go on a walk or color a picture. It’s also one reason why sleep is so vital to healthy cognitive development.

Since students tend to equate speed with smarts, Oakley suggests sharing this metaphor: “There’s a race car brain and a hiker brain. They both get to the finish line, but not at the same time. The race car brain gets there really fast, but everything goes by in a blur. The hiker brain takes time. It hears birds singing, sees the rabbit trails, feels the leaves. It’s a very different experience and, in some ways, much richer and deeper. You don’t need to be a super swift learner. In fact, sometimes you can learn more deeply by going slowly.”

2. Chains and Chunks

In cognitive psychology, “chunking” refers to the well-practiced mental patterns that are essential to developing expertise in a topic.  Oakley prefers the image of a “chain” when she explains this to students.

Learning is all about developing strong chains. For example, says Oakley, when you are first learning how to back up a car, you have to consciously think about each step, from how to turn the steering wheel to how to use your mirrors. But “once that process is chained, it’s easy” — it becomes automatic. Similarly, once solving certain equations becomes automatic in math, students can apply these equations to more complex problems.

Teachers can help students identify the procedures in a unit of study that they need to master in order to take their learning to the next level —  from the steps of the scientific method to fundamental drawing techniques.

“Any type of mastery involves the development of chains of procedural fluency. Then you can get into more complex areas of fluency,” says Oakley. Here’s another way to think about it. We all have about four slots of working memory that we can use to problem-solve in the moment. One of those slots can be filled with an entire procedural chain —  and then you can put new information in the other slots.

3. The Power of Metaphor

“Metaphor and analogy are extraordinarily powerful teaching tools and very often underused,” says Oakley.  “When you are trying to learn something new, the best way to learn it is to connect it with something you already know.”

The formal term for this is “neural reuse” —  the idea that metaphors use the same neural pathways as the concept a metaphor is describing. So familiar metaphors allow a learner to draw on a concept they have already mastered and apply it to a new situation. Or as Oakley says, metaphors “rapidly on-board” new ideas. For example, says Oakley, comparing the flow of electrons to the flow of water is a way to “jump-start students’ thinking.”

As part of her research, Oakley reached out to thousands of professors who are considered top teachers in their fields. “Many of these professors had a secret that they used in their teaching: metaphor and analogy. It was like a secret shared handshake.” Oakley encourages teachers to not only use metaphor but to challenge students to develop their own metaphors as a study strategy.

4. The Problem of Procrastination

Oakley says that procrastination is the number one challenge facing most learners. To train the brain to systematically focus and relax — to toggle — she  recommends the “Pomodoro Technique.”

Developed by Francesco Cirillo, this strategy uses a timer to help the learner work and break at set intervals. First, choose a task to accomplish. Then, set a timer for 25 minutes and work until the timer goes off.  At that point, take a five-minute break: stand up, walk around, take a drink of water, etc. After three or four 25-minute intervals, take a longer break (15 – 30 minutes) to recharge. This technique “trains your ability to focus and reinforces that relaxing at the end is critical to the process of learning,” says Oakley.  Teachers and administrators can build a similar rhythm into the schoolday, providing brain breaks and movement time to help students toggle between focused and diffused thinking.

5. Expanding Possibilities

When we teach children and teenagers how they learn, we can blow open their sense of possibility, says Oakley. “I would tell students, you don’t just have to be stuck following your passion. You can broaden your passions enormously. And that can have enormous implications for how your life unfolds. We always say ‘follow your passions’ but sometimes that locks people into focusing on what comes easily or what they are already good at. You can get passionate about — and really good at — many things!”

from MindShift http://ift.tt/2zV31Jt

5 Strategies to Demystify the Learning Process for Struggling Students

Barbara Oakley’s professional biography does not suggest that she was once a struggling math and science student: She is an engineering professor, author of A Mind For Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science and Mindshift: Break Through Obstacles to Learning and Discover Your Hidden Potential (which is not affiliated with this MindShift). Oakley co-created Coursera’s most popular course, “Learning How to Learn,” with Terrence Sejnowski, which has enrolled nearly 2 million students. 

But Oakley is a self-described “former math flunky” who “retooled” her brain — and who has since made it her life’s work to help others learn how to learn by explaining some key principles from modern neuroscience. 

The field of metacognition offers educators many techniques that are rooted in brain research, such as deliberate practice and interleaving. “But before you can even tackle these,” says Oakley, “you have to innoculate learners against the idea that they are stupid if they cannot figure things out first off. You have to teach them that faster is not always better.”

While her online course primarily enrolls adults, Oakley is now working on a book aimed at 10-to-14-year-olds. “I picked that age range because it is old enough that they can grasp the ideas but young enough that they don’t necessarily think ‘I’m bad at math. I can’t do it.’ We can get to them before they lock out possibilities.”

When students do not understand how their brains learn and retain material, they can develop misconceptions about themselves as learners — such as a faulty assumption that they are bad at a subject or that they suffer from performance anxiety. Oakley shares the common experience of students who reread their notes and think they know the material —  only to enter a test and find that they cannot retrieve the information. “They are horrified and think they must have test anxiety.” More likely, says Oakley, they simply haven’t been taught how to study in a way that allows them to retrieve the information.  

Oakley recognizes that “many educators are not at all comfortable with or trained in neuroscience,” so she breaks down a few key principles that teachers can use in the classroom and share with students to help them demystify the learning process.  

1. The Hiker Brain vs. The Race Car Brain

Start by teaching students the difference between focused and diffused thinking, says Oakley. When the brain is in focused mode, you can get started on the task at hand. But deep understanding is not fully accomplished in this mode.

Diffused thinking occurs when you allow your mind to wander, to imagine and to daydream. In this mode, the brain is still working —  consolidating information and “making sense of what you are trying to learn,” says Oakley. If a concept is easy for you to grasp right off, the focused mode might be sufficient, but if a new skill or concept “takes consideration, you have to toggle back and forth between these two modes of thinking as you get to true understanding of the material — and this doesn’t happen quickly.”

Because toggling is essential to learning, teachers and students need to build downtime into their day — time when learning can “happen on background” as you play a game, go on a walk or color a picture. It’s also one reason why sleep is so vital to healthy cognitive development.

Since students tend to equate speed with smarts, Oakley suggests sharing this metaphor: “There’s a race car brain and a hiker brain. They both get to the finish line, but not at the same time. The race car brain gets there really fast, but everything goes by in a blur. The hiker brain takes time. It hears birds singing, sees the rabbit trails, feels the leaves. It’s a very different experience and, in some ways, much richer and deeper. You don’t need to be a super swift learner. In fact, sometimes you can learn more deeply by going slowly.”

2. Chains and Chunks

In cognitive psychology, “chunking” refers to the well-practiced mental patterns that are essential to developing expertise in a topic.  Oakley prefers the image of a “chain” when she explains this to students.

Learning is all about developing strong chains. For example, says Oakley, when you are first learning how to back up a car, you have to consciously think about each step, from how to turn the steering wheel to how to use your mirrors. But “once that process is chained, it’s easy” — it becomes automatic. Similarly, once solving certain equations becomes automatic in math, students can apply these equations to more complex problems.

Teachers can help students identify the procedures in a unit of study that they need to master in order to take their learning to the next level —  from the steps of the scientific method to fundamental drawing techniques.

“Any type of mastery involves the development of chains of procedural fluency. Then you can get into more complex areas of fluency,” says Oakley. Here’s another way to think about it. We all have about four slots of working memory that we can use to problem-solve in the moment. One of those slots can be filled with an entire procedural chain —  and then you can put new information in the other slots.

3. The Power of Metaphor

“Metaphor and analogy are extraordinarily powerful teaching tools and very often underused,” says Oakley.  “When you are trying to learn something new, the best way to learn it is to connect it with something you already know.”

The formal term for this is “neural reuse” —  the idea that metaphors use the same neural pathways as the concept a metaphor is describing. So familiar metaphors allow a learner to draw on a concept they have already mastered and apply it to a new situation. Or as Oakley says, metaphors “rapidly on-board” new ideas. For example, says Oakley, comparing the flow of electrons to the flow of water is a way to “jump-start students’ thinking.”

As part of her research, Oakley reached out to thousands of professors who are considered top teachers in their fields. “Many of these professors had a secret that they used in their teaching: metaphor and analogy. It was like a secret shared handshake.” Oakley encourages teachers to not only use metaphor but to challenge students to develop their own metaphors as a study strategy.

4. The Problem of Procrastination

Oakley says that procrastination is the number one challenge facing most learners. To train the brain to systematically focus and relax — to toggle — she  recommends the “Pomodoro Technique.”

Developed by Francesco Cirillo, this strategy uses a timer to help the learner work and break at set intervals. First, choose a task to accomplish. Then, set a timer for 25 minutes and work until the timer goes off.  At that point, take a five-minute break: stand up, walk around, take a drink of water, etc. After three or four 25-minute intervals, take a longer break (15 – 30 minutes) to recharge. This technique “trains your ability to focus and reinforces that relaxing at the end is critical to the process of learning,” says Oakley.  Teachers and administrators can build a similar rhythm into the schoolday, providing brain breaks and movement time to help students toggle between focused and diffused thinking.

5. Expanding Possibilities

When we teach children and teenagers how they learn, we can blow open their sense of possibility, says Oakley. “I would tell students, you don’t just have to be stuck following your passion. You can broaden your passions enormously. And that can have enormous implications for how your life unfolds. We always say ‘follow your passions’ but sometimes that locks people into focusing on what comes easily or what they are already good at. You can get passionate about — and really good at — many things!”

from MindShift http://ift.tt/2zV31Jt

5 Strategies to Demystify the Learning Process for Struggling Students

Barbara Oakley’s professional biography does not suggest that she was once a struggling math and science student: She is an engineering professor, author of A Mind For Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science and Mindshift: Break Through Obstacles to Learning and Discover Your Hidden Potential (which is not affiliated with this MindShift). Oakley co-created Coursera’s most popular course, “Learning How to Learn,” with Terrence Sejnowski, which has enrolled nearly 2 million students. 

But Oakley is a self-described “former math flunky” who “retooled” her brain — and who has since made it her life’s work to help others learn how to learn by explaining some key principles from modern neuroscience. 

The field of metacognition offers educators many techniques that are rooted in brain research, such as deliberate practice and interleaving. “But before you can even tackle these,” says Oakley, “you have to innoculate learners against the idea that they are stupid if they cannot figure things out first off. You have to teach them that faster is not always better.”

While her online course primarily enrolls adults, Oakley is now working on a book aimed at 10-to-14-year-olds. “I picked that age range because it is old enough that they can grasp the ideas but young enough that they don’t necessarily think ‘I’m bad at math. I can’t do it.’ We can get to them before they lock out possibilities.”

When students do not understand how their brains learn and retain material, they can develop misconceptions about themselves as learners — such as a faulty assumption that they are bad at a subject or that they suffer from performance anxiety. Oakley shares the common experience of students who reread their notes and think they know the material —  only to enter a test and find that they cannot retrieve the information. “They are horrified and think they must have test anxiety.” More likely, says Oakley, they simply haven’t been taught how to study in a way that allows them to retrieve the information.  

Oakley recognizes that “many educators are not at all comfortable with or trained in neuroscience,” so she breaks down a few key principles that teachers can use in the classroom and share with students to help them demystify the learning process.  

1. The Hiker Brain vs. The Race Car Brain

Start by teaching students the difference between focused and diffused thinking, says Oakley. When the brain is in focused mode, you can get started on the task at hand. But deep understanding is not fully accomplished in this mode.

Diffused thinking occurs when you allow your mind to wander, to imagine and to daydream. In this mode, the brain is still working —  consolidating information and “making sense of what you are trying to learn,” says Oakley. If a concept is easy for you to grasp right off, the focused mode might be sufficient, but if a new skill or concept “takes consideration, you have to toggle back and forth between these two modes of thinking as you get to true understanding of the material — and this doesn’t happen quickly.”

Because toggling is essential to learning, teachers and students need to build downtime into their day — time when learning can “happen on background” as you play a game, go on a walk or color a picture. It’s also one reason why sleep is so vital to healthy cognitive development.

Since students tend to equate speed with smarts, Oakley suggests sharing this metaphor: “There’s a race car brain and a hiker brain. They both get to the finish line, but not at the same time. The race car brain gets there really fast, but everything goes by in a blur. The hiker brain takes time. It hears birds singing, sees the rabbit trails, feels the leaves. It’s a very different experience and, in some ways, much richer and deeper. You don’t need to be a super swift learner. In fact, sometimes you can learn more deeply by going slowly.”

2. Chains and Chunks

In cognitive psychology, “chunking” refers to the well-practiced mental patterns that are essential to developing expertise in a topic.  Oakley prefers the image of a “chain” when she explains this to students.

Learning is all about developing strong chains. For example, says Oakley, when you are first learning how to back up a car, you have to consciously think about each step, from how to turn the steering wheel to how to use your mirrors. But “once that process is chained, it’s easy” — it becomes automatic. Similarly, once solving certain equations becomes automatic in math, students can apply these equations to more complex problems.

Teachers can help students identify the procedures in a unit of study that they need to master in order to take their learning to the next level —  from the steps of the scientific method to fundamental drawing techniques.

“Any type of mastery involves the development of chains of procedural fluency. Then you can get into more complex areas of fluency,” says Oakley. Here’s another way to think about it. We all have about four slots of working memory that we can use to problem-solve in the moment. One of those slots can be filled with an entire procedural chain —  and then you can put new information in the other slots.

3. The Power of Metaphor

“Metaphor and analogy are extraordinarily powerful teaching tools and very often underused,” says Oakley.  “When you are trying to learn something new, the best way to learn it is to connect it with something you already know.”

The formal term for this is “neural reuse” —  the idea that metaphors use the same neural pathways as the concept a metaphor is describing. So familiar metaphors allow a learner to draw on a concept they have already mastered and apply it to a new situation. Or as Oakley says, metaphors “rapidly on-board” new ideas. For example, says Oakley, comparing the flow of electrons to the flow of water is a way to “jump-start students’ thinking.”

As part of her research, Oakley reached out to thousands of professors who are considered top teachers in their fields. “Many of these professors had a secret that they used in their teaching: metaphor and analogy. It was like a secret shared handshake.” Oakley encourages teachers to not only use metaphor but to challenge students to develop their own metaphors as a study strategy.

4. The Problem of Procrastination

Oakley says that procrastination is the number one challenge facing most learners. To train the brain to systematically focus and relax — to toggle — she  recommends the “Pomodoro Technique.”

Developed by Francesco Cirillo, this strategy uses a timer to help the learner work and break at set intervals. First, choose a task to accomplish. Then, set a timer for 25 minutes and work until the timer goes off.  At that point, take a five-minute break: stand up, walk around, take a drink of water, etc. After three or four 25-minute intervals, take a longer break (15 – 30 minutes) to recharge. This technique “trains your ability to focus and reinforces that relaxing at the end is critical to the process of learning,” says Oakley.  Teachers and administrators can build a similar rhythm into the schoolday, providing brain breaks and movement time to help students toggle between focused and diffused thinking.

5. Expanding Possibilities

When we teach children and teenagers how they learn, we can blow open their sense of possibility, says Oakley. “I would tell students, you don’t just have to be stuck following your passion. You can broaden your passions enormously. And that can have enormous implications for how your life unfolds. We always say ‘follow your passions’ but sometimes that locks people into focusing on what comes easily or what they are already good at. You can get passionate about — and really good at — many things!”

from MindShift http://ift.tt/2zV31Jt

Easy Owl Cupcakes

Hoot Sweet! These cupcakes are owl-out adorable with their oreo eyes and plumes of buttercream.

And these cinnamon sugar cupcakes don’t hurt either. They’re the perfect canvas to decorate with just buttercream and a few edible add ons to make little owls. Want to see?

Start by using a small round #10 decorating tip. Pipe about 5-6 big dots of buttercream around the bottom edge of the cupcake top. Pipe and pull the frosting into a thin layer. Then pipe another row on top of the first row. Continue piping rows of dots into somewhat of a triangular shape.

For the wings, use a #18 tip to pipe frosting on either side of the owl’s chest (covering the rest of the cupcake surface) and then sprinkle cinnamon sugar over the wings for texture.

Now it’s time to put the faces on. Yep! We need some big eyes.

They’re made using Oreo Minis. And if you’ve ever opened a bag of these and separated the cookies, then you know they are dappled with cookie crumbs. To fix that, you can chill the cookies and then use a toothpick to gently brush or scrape off the crumbs.

Much better! Use black candy gems or M&M’s for the owl’s pupils. Just press one into the middle of each cookie creme center.

To bring it all together, use the round decorating tip again and pipe a line of frosting down the center of the cupcake, starting from the top row of chest feathers toward the top of the cupcake. Then press the cookie eyes in position on either side of the piped line and add a black sunflower seed for the beak. Finally pipe a buttercream brow over the top of the two cookie eyes and use a toothpick to add texture.

See… so cute!!!

The eyes have it!

Print Recipe

Yield: 12 cupcakes

Cinnamon Sugar Cupcakes

Ingredients:

Cupcakes:

• 1-1/2 cups all purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1-1/2 teaspoons cinnamon
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 cup butter, room temperature
• 1 cup sugar
• 2 eggs
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 2/3 cup milk

Frosting:

• 1 cup butter, room temperature
• 16 oz confectioners sugar
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 1-2 teaspoons milk

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit and line cupcake tray with paper liners.
2. Sift flour, baking powder, cinnamon and sugar together in a medium bowl and set aside.
3. Using a mixer, cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy.
4. Add eggs, mixing each until just combined. Add vanilla extract and mix.
5. Slowly add flour mixture in three additions, alternating with milk in two additions.
6. Divide batter into prepared paper liners and bake for 18-20 minutes. (Sprinkle a little cinnamon sugar mixture on top of the warm cupcakes if desired.)
7. For cinnamon sugar frosting: Beat butter and cinnamon on medium speed until combined. Add confectioners sugar in several additions starting on low and then increasing speed to medium. Scrape down sides in between each addition. Add vanilla and mix until combined. Add 1-2 teaspoons of milk until desired consistency.

Enjoy!

 

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