Mr. Rennie's Class

  The year and this current field study are drawing to a close. I am always reminded how weird it is that at their core, what I have the students do and what I'm doing are very similar. This week the students reflected on math, namely polygons and related geometric concepts. It was helpful to see how their logs demonstrate their understanding and often lack thereof. They serve as both a metacognitive opportunity and a chance for me to formatively assess. Also this week the kids put into practice their questioning skills explored a few weeks back as we added questioning to the repetoire of responses used in literature circles. The questions are mostly either "right there" or "think and search" questions but many are doing quite well with them.

  The class overall, as with anything I guess, has had mixed success with their log entries. I of course hoped that over time all their reflections would increase in depth and complexity as well as in the variety of ways in which they represented. While this is the case for over half, I have to say that a good number are still writing brief, quick responses to the questions and prompts given. I still think the practice is valuable for all but it hasn't impacted some of the students I would most liked it to have.

  On anothe topic, I've been reading a book called Brain Rules by John Medina. The book explores 12 Brain Rules each in it's own chapter and is easy to read. The information is expressed for the average person and though extensive it is accessable. I really connected as a teacher,  to a couple recent assertions by the author. While explaining Brain Rule #4  "We Don't Pay Attention To Boring Things', Medina says that the brain works from general to specific, from meaning first to specific details. That it actually stores the big ideas that are associated with concepts, especially if they were emotionally significant (sad, horrible, funny surprising etc.) That way we remember the gist of things or in school of material first and most importantly, not the minute details about it. So to increase recall and learning we need to link new infromation to these big ideas stored in our brains. We also need to approach tasks from a meaning first perspective. It is the same way we seem assessment materials, reading materials in content areas organized these days. First identify the big ideas which the brian would store and then connect and add details to the main concepts to flesh out and extend the learning. Our districts schoo and district wide assessments like DART and DMA DRA all are organized along these lines. The research approach we have kids practice during inquiry is also questions, big ideas, details driven. I'm really enjoying this book.

 Another Brain Rule #4 idea I found surprising was the Medina's ideas about how "the brain cannot multitask". Having always considered my self a multitasker and given how our society values the trait, I was at first doubtful but as he explains it I see that he's right. He states that "we are biologically incapable of processing attention-rich inputs simultaneously." This refers to complex thinking not walking and talking and chewing gum at the same time. A theorist named Michael Posner has ideas about attention functioning along a Trinity Model, "three seperabel but integrated systems in the brain". These systems are: The Alerting and Arousal Network, The Orienting Network the third of these sytems the Executive Network.. This third network is the decision maker, the what do I do now?system. When we try to do a task we are often interupted by sensory inputs that cause the three systems to disengage, activate or reactivate in response. It may only take fractional seconds but it is still linear and sequential following the same pattern each time and so we focus on the one task at a time. So what seems like multitasking is really starting and stopping different tasks over and over again. Medina saysthat  what we think of as multitaskers are actually people "with good working memories capable of paying attention to several inputs one at a time." The reason he says this is important is "a person who is interrupted takes fifty percent longer to accomplish a task,,,he or she makes up to 50 percent more errors". That has huge implications for the school and classroom environments.HUGE.