I recently had a guest post published on Edutopia’s Brain-Based Learning blog, inspired by some reflection on practices that were impacting my own learning at the time of writing. A short excerpt:
As students learn something new, electric or chemical signals move from neuron to neuron, traversing a route between locations in the brain. Like a tourist turning on unfamiliar city streets, these signals cross synapses to form a path that eventually connects the source to its destination. While identifying a route is slow going at first, students’ brains eventually make these connections, and learning begins.
Even after establishing a route, a student’s development of an optimal pathway takes time. Aside from leading them along the same path over and over again, how can we speed up our students’ navigation of neural pathways? What follows is a proposal for three actions that I believe can have a huge effect on accelerating student learning.
What I learned most from researching while writing: what the brain is actually does while we’re sleeping. It’s fascinating.
My story: I tend to write late at night, often during bouts of sleeplessness. I found that when I had something particular I was trying to understand, I would read / write / draw / think about it deeply (usually at some ungodly hour). Once things started to get ‘jumbled,’ I would go to sleep, setting an alarm to awaken me within 30-90 minutes. I noticed that when I awoke, everything was clear. Everything made sense. So I would write. And write. And write. Until I got stuck again. Once arriving to that “stuck” place, I would take another nap. And the cycle continued, until either I was finished writing or the sun came up, whichever came first. After doing a little research, I now understand is that while sleeping, my brain was clearing out / breaking down the less-used pathways, while the stronger network connecting my most recent thoughts remained strong.
This and so much more, all from trying to learn about my own learning. Hope you enjoy the rest of the post!