Jessica Watkins's blog

“But what do you do?”

Thinking back on my three weeks spent at Bryn Mawr’s Summer Science Institute for K-12 Teachers, one of the most important things I learned was how to do a proper “brain drain,” a listing of words or phrases that immediately come to mind when a certain word is said. So why not start off with a bit of brain draining to help describe the Institute and what it accomplished?

Connected

Week 1 Observations

Week 2 Observations

Week 3 Observations

This week’s opening discussion about accepting diversity/problems before working toward unity/a solution was an appropriate one. Many of this summer’s participants have encountered problems when dealing with school administrators who are the “authority” on classroom management and techniques, even though they have not interacted enough with individual children on a personal basis to know that not all management styles work for every student. This kind of “authority problem” is often treated as just that: a problem. However, it should be seen as just another bit of diversity in an effort to create new dialogue out of conflicting views. Acknowledging that the opinions of those in higher positions are important to the process of making a lear

The past week has brought with it much talk of the brain, including discussions of the unconscious versus the conscious and the affects of both on student behavior in the classroom. Although a few of the institute participants are science teachers, it seemed as if the material Dr.

Going into the first week of the Summer Science Institute I was looking forward to a few things:

What We Can Learn From Babies

Taking a lesson from the world's youngest thinkers.

"The Moral Life of Babies" by Paul Bloom. Published May 3, 2010 in The New York Times Magazine.

 The Discovery

The Brain and Education
Below are some interesting links about the brain and its structure in relation to education and the classroom.

Until quite recently, understanding the mind--and the thinking and learning that the mind makes possible--has remained an elusive quest, in part because of a lack of powerful research tools.  Today, the world is in the midst of an extraordinary outpouring of scientific work on the mind and brain, on the processes of thinking and learning, on the neural processes that occur during thought and learning, and on the development of competence.(Bold font added)