Having enjoyed LeAnn Nickelsen’s Nutrition presentation – not only for the content, but also for the way she modeled teaching and presenting – I returned the following day for Deeper Learning: Success for All by Differentiating (Part 1). LeAnn, a Jensen Learning Certified Brain Research Trainer, has co-authored a 328-page book with Eric Jensen about this topic. (I have not read it.) Her presentation was an in-depth preview of the book, and jam-packed with examples and handouts we were encouraged to use. Part 2 was offered in the second set of sessions, and the extensive handout covered the content of both parts in order to accommodate attendees who wanted to catch other presentations.

In retrospect, I should have stayed for Part 2. However, M. Layne Kalbfleisch’s session on High-Ability Children with Learning/Psychiatric Disabilities attracted me for the promise of learning more about dyslexia. Kalbfleisch had interesting content to share but spent so much time calmly answering questions and offering opinion on the state of her field that she never got to the portion of her talk on dyslexia. The good news is that a copy of her slides is available on the conference CD. The frustrating news is that many of her slides need elaboration to elucidate their meaning and impact. (Note to myself: teach or present less to permit ample time for questions, or manage the process more efficiently.)

Two keynotes followed lunch, and also provided a time when we could all gather for announcements and a sense of group closure prior to the last concurrent sessions. July Willis began with Increase Student Engagement, Motivation and Memory using RAD Strategies. Before you say ‘oh, another long title’, RAD stands for Reticular activating system, Amygdala, and Dopamine. Her talk focused on ways to make the most of these interrelated brain systems.

Dave Gray gave the second keynote, Introduction to Visual Thinking, and it was his Visual Thinking in Practice concurrent session that concluded my day. I will have more to share about his sessions in a future post.

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The pacing of this conference provided ample time between sessions to gather thoughts, a snack or engage in conversations with colleagues. Intentionally keeping the size around 200 or fewer and locating it on a country campus helped set the tone for relaxed give-and-take between attendees and presenters. Coming the week before many of us return to school for opening faculty meetings, I found this a much appreciated shot in the arm to help make the transition from summer to school!

Tomorrow you’ll be able to read about today’s second and final day of the CAIS conference. Last night I had a light and healthy dinner with a glass of pinot noir, followed by a not-as-thick-as-I’d-like hot cocoa and a scrumptious chocolate mascarpone cheesecake.

Be it the wine, caffeine, sugar, or something else, I didn’t manage to fall asleep till way after midnight (perhaps I should have practiced a thing or two from LeAnn Nickelson’s session on nutrition!) and was up at 6:15 in the morning (David Eagleman would grimace at my lack of quality sleep!)

After a full day in Connecticut and an almost two hour drive home, I have actually run out of steam and am falling back on this (hopefully) clever post. Clever, because both the last keynote and one of the last concurrent sessions (the one I attended) were presented by Dave Gray, founder and chairman of XPLANE, the visual thinking company.

I leave you with visuals of Avon Old Farms School, Avon Old Farms Hotel, and a page from my notes during Dave Gray’s keynote. Consider it some visual thinking, of sorts, to tide us over till tomorrow.

correction to my notes: The name of the Isotype designer is Otto Neurath.

Nestled in the scenic countryside of Avon, Connecticut, just south of Hartford, Avon Old Farms School is a boys boarding school, grades nine through twelve. It is also the location of the CAIS (Connecticut Association of Independent Schools) Brain Institute, being held for the second year in a row. There are about 160 of us in attendance and, small world that it is, one of my lunch mates is a VP at PIRI (Public Information Resources, Inc.), which just happens to be the company that puts on the Learning & the Brain conference!

This first day was filled with dynamic and content-rich presentations, beginning with David Eagleman’s keynote: Ten Unsolved Mysteries of the Brain, which you can conveniently read in the July, 2007 online issue of Discover. I followed the keynote by attending Eagleman’s session on Why is Sleeping so Important to Learning? More on this in a later post, but for now I can’t resist commenting that he looks so young for one who has accomplished so much!

After lunch I attended an informative and energetic session by LeAnn Nickelsen on Brain-Smart Foods that Maximize Learning. The information in this session really needs to be shared with students, teachers, administrators and parents. Most of us are aware of foods we should or should not eat, but now I know WHY and WHAT IMPACT they have on my body and brain functioning. I gobbled up her presentation and promise to share more in a future post.

My day almost concluded with the last of three sessions that James Zull gave today. He is the author of The Art of Changing the Brain and he discussed Knowledge and Neuronal Networks: Learning by Addition and Subtraction. It was a pleasure to meet him in person, and I even had time to ask his advice about where to go to further my study of the information presented in his book. (Harvard’s Mind, Brain, and Education program was his reply.)

Zull ended early in order to catch a plane, so I had the pleasure of popping in to Michael Kaplan’s session on How the Brain “Reads” Ritalin: A Survival Guide for Teachers. Kaplan is an Assistant Clinical Professor at the Yale Child Study Center. From the thirty minutes I heard, his presentation is one to which all teachers should be privy. Having missed the first two-thirds of his talk, I plan on contacting him for a copy of his slides, which he willingly offered to those who were interested.

More to come after tomorrow’s session, including pictures of the area. (I left the camera cable at home!)

Gever Tully and The Tinkering School first came across my radar thanks to his TED Talk: 5 dangerous things you should let your kids do. He has now come into view a second time thanks to an article in today’s NY Times.

Digital Designers Rediscover Their Hands caught my eye partially due to the title, but mostly because of this opening line:

Gever Tulley has only one qualification for training software designers how to become more creative.

Of course I had to read the rest of the article!

It’s all about the hands-on experience – both how it gets people to think outside of their [in this case digital] experience, and how the interaction with materials provides an enjoyable and much needed tactile engagement with the physical world.

Trying something different – getting your brain thinking along other tangents – helps promote conditions for creative thought. And hands-on experience helps inform the learning process. Ken Robinson, James Zull and John Dewey would all be pleased.

By the way, the CAIS Brain Institute is this Tuesday and Wednesday. You can read more about it in my previous post, and of course, I’ll be writing about it later in the week.

James Zull is a professor of Biology and also Director Emeritus of the University Center for Innovation in Teaching and Education (UCITE); both of these at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio. Coupled, this explains Zull’s approach to his 2002 book, The Art of Changing the Brain – Enriching Teaching by Exploring the Biology of Learning.

Zull is a biologist with a keen interest in how the brain learns. At its simplest form, our brains produce electrical and chemical signals in the process of creating synapses, and the result of this process is physical change in the brain. Thus it follows, according to Zull, that:

Teaching is the art of changing the brain.

and this is done by “creating conditions that lead to change in a learner’s brain.”

Zull begins by providing an overview of David Kolb’s Experiential Learning cycle, and equates it with related brain structures. (You can brush up on Kolb’s theory in this previous post.)

Kolb’s cycle provided the Ah ha moment for Zull to make “this natural connection between brain structure and learning.” With the above chart as a basis, Zull spends the remainder of his book delving into the learning process/cycle. More on this in future posts.

For more about James Zull:

• James Zull in his own words – New Horizons for Learning article: What is “The Art of Changing the Brain?”, May, 2003
• SharpBrains interview with James Zull: An ape can do this. Can we not?, October 2006
• Director Emeritus of UCITE (University Center for Innovation in Teaching and Education at Case Western Reserve University)

For more about David Kolb:

• Kolb’s faculty page at Case Western
• Kolb’s R&D company – Experience Based Learning Systems, Inc

For more about UCITE:

This fascinates me because it is professional development by and for faculty, providing “services for faculty which will enhance student learning”.

• As part of this initiative they have a Learning and Teaching page filled with links about teaching methods, assessments, getting student feedback, dealing with controversy, general classroom issues, cooperative learning, experiential learning coupled with the learning cycle and learning styles, and using technology in teaching.
• Some of the services provided by UCITE , including assistance with presentation skills!

Am pleased to point you to my third SharpBrains guest post.

Wait!

Before you click that link to check out the post, scope out the words below and take a gander at what YOU think the post is about.

A number of my recent posts have dealt with decision making, and here are two authors who take rather opposite views in their discussion of how and why people make some of their decisions.

Perhaps you have heard of Malcolm Gladwell and his book, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking? I have not read his book, but have heard enough about it to say he discusses the idea of decision making via intuition, or in the “blink” of an eye.

Madeleine Van Hecke, in her book Blind Spots: Why Smart People Do Dumb Things, takes a rather different perspective. She argues that decisions made quickly, on the spur of the moment, are often poorly made decisions. Sometimes we think we already know enough to make informed decisions but wind up getting side swiped by our “blind spots.” (I have not read her book, either.)

Both these authors explain themselves in places other than their books:

To Think or to Blink? – a SharpBarins post by Madeleine
Point of Inquiry interview with Madeleine

Gladwell.com – Malcolm’s blog
TED Talk by Malcolm

This seems to be my calendar year for attending conferences about the brain. In April I attended the Learning & the Brain conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts and later this month I’ll be attending the Connecticut Association of Independent Schools (CAIS) Summer Institute: The Brain, Learning & Applications.

This is CAIS’s second annual brain institute. I recall seeing the announcement of this conference for last summer but the timing did not work with my schedule. However, this year the timing is perfect, and there are a number of tidbits that tempt.

First tidbit: One of the presenters and sponsors is Robert Greenleaf, about whom I have written multiple times, as you can see from this tag.

Second tidbit: James Zull will be presenting. I am pumped to hear him in person, having first learned about him at the Learning & the Brain conference and also having just finished yesterday his most excellent book (about which I will be writing more) The Art of Changing the Brain: Enriching the Practice of Teaching by Exploring the Biology of Learning. I’ve written one prior post on Zull which turned out to be the perfect precursor to reading his book.

Third tidbit: Fay Brown is presenting. Fay is affiliated with Yale University and I first heard her at the Learning & the Brain conference, where she introduced Ken Kosik. She also introduced some of the keynote speakers. After Kosik’s talk I introduced myself to her and am eager to reconnect, as she struck me as a lively, engaging, and informed person who speaks with passion and humor.

Fourth tidbit: Dave Gray is presenting both a keynote and a session. Dave Gray is the Founder and Chairman of XPLANE which focuses on visual thinking. Check out the blog Visual Thinking Art for a view of visual thinking in action, Dave Gray’s blog Communication Nation or the Visual thinking school pages by Gray on Squidoo. For those of you who are regular readers of my blog, you know that I enjoy taking drawing classes. I’ve been wanting to take one of Gray’s seminars but the price was a bit steep to ask my school to fund for a one day class. His being at the CAIS Institute is definitely a treat! (CAIS costs about a third of his one day seminar.)

Fifth tidbit: Kim Carraway is presenting. No plans to take her sessions as I took a pre-conference workshop with her several years ago at yet another Learning & the Brain conference, but she impressed me then as being knowledgeable and personable.

Sixth tidbit: There will be a session on nutrition.

I think there will be much opportunity for intellectual stimulation, and you can be sure there will be multiple posts to come about this conference!

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p.s. Started swimming a mile a day as of July 27th! Read this post, especially the bottom, for further explanation.

As a child, when thinking about how my brain worked, I imagined tiny people racing around my brain carrying out  directions given by the command center. Now I know … the command center is my prefrontal cortex! 

Elkhonon Goldberg says that the prefrontal cortex is “the one part of your brain that makes you who you are.”

Particularly if you teach or are a parent, you have probably seen kids with less than prime functioning executive function. This is not so unusual, as the prefrontal cortex is the last area of our brains to get connected, and is not fully formed until we reach our mid-twenties.

Executive function issues are not limited to childhood and teenage years; they often can continue on to adulthood. Both children and adults who have issues with their EF can be “misunderstood as being willfully disorganized or lazy, possessing a bad attitude or, from a parental viewpoint, ‘doing this on purpose to drive me crazy.’” according to this New York Times article, Lack Direction? Evaluate Your Brain’s C.E.O.

More recently, Sandra Aamodt and Sam Wang, authors of Welcome to Your Brain, make the case in Exercise on the Brain that exercise is not only good for your body, but equally good for your brain.

In humans, exercise improves what scientists call “executive function,” the set of abilities that allows you to select behavior that’s appropriate to the situation, inhibit inappropriate behavior and focus on the job at hand in spite of distractions.

For a succinct delineation of EF’s impact on learning, along with suggestions for managing some of the issues that can arise when EF is not optimal, check out these two pages (mentioned in an early July post) at the National Center for Learning Disabilities.

Executive Function Fact Sheet
Executive Function: A Quick Look

For those who prefer listening, The Brain Science Podcast with Ginger Campbell, MD, has an in-depth discussion about executive function and our frontal lobes, based upon the book by Elkhonon Goldberg, The Executive Brain: Frontal Lobes and the Civilized Mind.

Do you ever put your hand or fingers to your forehead as you think something out? It’s like cupping or stoking the thought process in action. The area just behind your forehead is the prefrontal cortex, and it acts like a director, directing the recall of information stored in various parts of the brain. This recall is possible because the frontal lobes are very well connected, indeed, almost to all the other areas of your brain. The processes of planning, organizing and carrying out plans, collectively known as executive function, all rely on the prefrontal cortex.

AboutKidsHealth has a series of six articles that explain executive function at various developmental stages, the issues that arise when EF does not function properly, and discussion of ways to train EF.

What is executive function?
The development of executive function in infancy and early childhood
The development of executive function across the lifespan
Brain growth and the development of executive function
What happens when the development of executive function goes awry?
Training executive function

Along those last lines, I’ve previously referenced this June 2008 Newsweek article by Wray Herbert, Is EF the New IQ? Herbert mentions how students at the lower school level are being trained to manage their executive functioning, and postulates that perhaps this type of training is as important as basic subject and skills training.