The "brain drain" for the word "mini-project" brought about interesting results amongst our group members. For starters, that words that came to mind for me were exploring, learning, new. The results for the rest of our group are below:

Shoshana- Searching, Information, Exciting

Geneva-Building, Relevant, Infinite

Mattie-Uncertainty, Short (relating to the word "mini")

When we were discussing the mini-projects that amount of advice that was shared amongst group members was excellent. Geneva (who has attended the Brain Institute since the 1990's) had a lot to share with her peers. In particular, the advice that she offered Mattie was extremely encouraging and optimistic.

I found all of their mini-project topics very interesting and thought it was quite amazing that Geneva's has been a continual project for quite some time. She said that this is why she would use the term "infinite" to describe what she thinks of when she hears the word mini-project. Her project is working on receiving grant-funding to facilitate community work.  In particular, community-rehab and use for ministry and people who need a place to stay. One of her main aspirations is to create a sense of community amongst people regardless of ethnicity or background.

Shoshana's topic that she is interested in learning more about is ADHD in children and the effect of ADHD in the classroom.

Mattie's mini-project is still ongoing yet she wants to elaborate on the idea of science being an open-ended process. However, she does think that perhaps there are some boundaries that science should follow.

I look forward to reading their completed min-projects! Great ideas so far!

Our group consisted of myself, Shoshana, Geneva, and Mattie. After initiating a "brain drain" with the word sudoku, these are the responses that instantaneously came to mind:

Jenna- Frustrating, Challenging, Fun

Shoshana-Frustrating, Hard & Challenging, Confusing

Geneva-Fun, Learning, Challenge

Mattie-Interesting, Fun, Not so Easy

From these responses, there seemed to be a general trend amongst group members about their experiences with the game. While all group members said that their own experiences with sodoku were often frustrating, not easy, difficult, and challenging, all of the group agreed on the fact that they received an extremely rewarding and gratifying feeling after completing a puzzle. We also found that the time of day that the game was played and the mindset of the participants also largely influenced the outcome of the game. For example, if it was too late in the evening, group members often found themselves too lethargic to successfully complete a puzzle.

We completed our group puzzle in approximately ten minutes. It was interesting to see the different tendencies of the players while completing the game. For example, Mattie would often fill in whichever square she could regardless of which square it was in whereas Soshana liked to go in a particular order, that being block by block.

I would say the take home message of sodoku for this group is that although it is challenging to all, it also brings about a great amount of fun!

As I listened to Paul, Wil and the group throughout the week I came up with ideas and questions to which I plan to focus some attention.

MONDAY

Principles of Co-Constructive Dialogue:  Everyone needs to speak meaningfully, listen attentively:
Does it help to write down your thoughts (as we do as a device to remember our dreams), to help facilitate the process?
If we write it down and discuss the meaning with others can we get a better understanding of our behavior?
When I set out my expectations at the beginning of the year, I begin a process of training my students to partake in the culture to which I expect…however the culture, if I pay attention to my students needs, becomes a culture to which we all agree to participate within. I set up the boundaries initially but I can blur the lines occasionally to facilitate what may be necessary to help my students learn or at least be a little more open to new ideas.

TUESDAY

Science sometimes IS holding a rock and writing down what you notice about it, hopefully eventually stating what type of rock it is and being able to talk about the kind of environment that produced it. Rocks are boring, numbers are boring, even words are boring until you can manipulate them to deliver something powerful and that’s what education should do.

WEDNESDAY

Sudoku does not readily engage me, although I do see how it helps me to understand a student who has shut down in my class because the material just passes her/him by.

THURSDAY

Find out where my students are and then give them what they need to move.
Paul says that “they need to feel that there is a future that they can change”.

I think that teaching methods are not “tricks”; they are strategies or experimental methods used to evoke student thinking, participation and learning.

FRIDAY

Evolution is what works, not necessarily a human sense of what works.
How does the legal and educational system define “Mindful Behavior”?
I need to post Crick’s “Astonishing Hypothesis” on my bulletin board for my students to analyze.
I am fascinated by the idea of “random noise” in our brains.

There have been so many ideas generated this week that remind me I still can't settled down with my ideas and think that is that. I always thought that someday I would come to an understanding of life- not just evolution but even the fine grained day to day interactions of people. In my seventh decade of life, I still haven't figured it out, but I am happy about that. It just means that life will continue to be interesting, and I will continue to experience the frustration of not knowing and the joy of learning. It was a good week, and I feel better about making the next year of teaching a better one.

Every time I stand before a class, I must remember that I can not predict the output from each student based on my input. Each student processes the ideas generated in our class via different pathways. The output is affected by both the pathways traveled by the input and the output generated by the students' brains without input that affect the input. What tools do I have?

I need to listen carefully to what my students say and give them as much opportunity to speak as possible. I also need to move the conversation away from myself as the central processor and get the students to converse with each other. This will not be easy as their conversational skills are not always respectful in the formal setting of the classroom. By shifting the students away from speaking to me and directing them to the other students, I could get some insight into two or three students and not just one at a time. I will continue to look carefully at the facial expressions and body language of students to gain some insight into their reaction to the classroom environment. The unconscious rules.

Joyce's discussion of her Mini Project on the development and evolution of the Brain Drain techniques she uses in her classes generated a lot of discussion about unconscious/conscious situations such as dreaming, sleep walking, night terrors, and sleep paralysis. It was a leap from developing mechanisms to get to where your students are with the course ideas to brain activity during sleep. We shared personal experiences, worked to understand these, and then attempted to relate our discussion to the classroom. Susan described her article on blindsight and blindsight of emotions and we related this to our classroom. Joyce shared a story about a lone and quiet student who became a significant presence in the classroom without any change of his pleasant but quiet personality. The only change was that Joyce, in fun, made notice of his silence by telling him he would have to change his noisy ways. The other students became aware of him and included him in the ambiance of the classroom. Every time something happened, students would turn and say it was this student. He would smile. He was still silent, but went from being alone to being a valued member of the group. Joyce brought attention to the two students who helped him with his work by communicating the observation to the parents of the two students.

Keeping students in vacillating state of equilibrium is essential to providing learning opportunities. I enjoy when my students resist my verbalized ideas and feel strongly that they MUST prove that there understanding is correct.

I developed this process throughout the year using “brain drains” that went from simple to more complex and found that by the end of the year during my last unit on Light and Color that my students realized that I expected them to tell me why they disagreed with me and exactly what was there thinking about how I could not be correct with my introduction of Light.

I enjoyed that unit the most of any during the year because I saw the confidence and wiliness of my classes to defend their positions and most of all because the strongest ideas were posed by female students.

Parent involvement is what I will be talking about, the pros and cons of it. I have had much conversation about this topic with some of my class mates and I have heard many things. I am gathering information on this topic so that I will have more than just my opinion. I will be writing a lot about it next week :).

It was refreshing to hear about Kim's and Jack's work.  It was also helpful to have some imput from Will.  I do not like open-ended assignment where there is no "right answer".  I become easily overloaded with too much information and self-doubt.  My topic is to address a subgroup of passive learners and to explore the possible options of helping these students to become engaged learners.  I am currently trying to incorporate the work of Maslow and his hierarchy of needs to be a basis of my approach.  I do not know if I will be successful, but hopefully this exploration will lead to new insights.

I love it in a group.

The first thing that I would say is very valuable for this week is the idea of conversating. I was able to listen to other teachers and learn about them and their experiences with teaching. Hearing their thoughts was helpful. I have realized that I am not going to ask "why are you doing this?" instead I will say (in a nice way) "what you are doing is wrong....can you please stop?".

Today espcially, we learned that the brain is always processing and changing. That means that we always have the opportunity to learn new things. In order to learn more we must be active and engaged learners. This creates more learning and input. Even if we know this information, it is important as teachers to be aware of the idea of allowing our students to be active learners and to encourage the students to be active learners.

 Brain Drain

Sudoku:

Cleat's and Ashley's thoughts on Sudoku varied...perhaps the Brain Drain words that came to mind will explain.

Cleat: "I don't like it. I don't like puzzles. It bores me."

Ashley: "It's better on paper."
Teal: "purple, Japanese characters"

Cleat, a self-proclaimed "letter" person (as opposed to numbers) prefers games like crossword puzzles, possibly because they involve prior knowledge/some trivia knowledge, while each Sudoku puzzle requires a fresh take.  Additionally, he hasn't made any connections between the material we've been discussing and the skills needed to solve a Sudoku puzzle; he prefers feeling over logic. We made a connection between his attitude toward Sudoku and getting students interested in topics they initially find boring or unnecesssary.  How do you get a child to try something out for long enough to make connections or start to like the material?  In Cleat's case, it might be useful to try playing a Sudoku puzzle that uses letters or colors, rather than numbers.  Ashley finds it harder to solve the puzzle online, and thinks it would be easier to solve on paper so she could have a space to write her notes directly next to the puzzle instead of on a separate piece of paper.

Mini-Projects

Brain Drain results: 

Cleat: work, small, make it interesting

Ashley: interesting, new, anything

Teal: birds, words, pictures

The mini-projects thus far have been useful in that they provide a creative outlet for participants to apply our material to topics that interest them.  They have the potential for being a useful classroom tool in that students can apply what they learn in a structured setting to something more free-form and personal, thus giving them more authority to use what they have learned.

Cleat's project is going to connect our discussions on thought to theater and performance, particularly the notion of actors trying to reach a definite truth and bring a certain reality to their audience.  He argues that in science, observations are constantly being made and truth is never attained; in theater, observations are always being made but a certain truth has to be reached in order to complete a performance in a way that truly reaches the feelings of the audience.  Ashley commented on how theater, unlike other subjects, can be enjoyable even if you're not participating but rather just observing. Her mini project concerns quantum tunneling and the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, a physical enigma that involves objects existing in two states at once up until they are observed (at which point they choose to be in either one state or another).  Her aim is to further understand this phenomenon in terms of practical applications (such as pressure-sensitive touch phones) and helping society.

General Thoughts on Discussion So Far

Brain Drain Results:

Cleat: interesting, thoughtful, truth

Ashley: culture

Culture and the way it is reflected in student behavior in the classroom has been an interesting point of discussion this week.  Ashley acknowledged that she needs to be more understanding and open to students' culture in the classroom, regarding how it influences their behavior.  It's hard to understand their behavior sometimes, she says, because she was raised in a disciplined environment. For example, she finds it hard to understand how some students wish to call their teachers by their first names because she was raised in a household where calling adults by their last name was a sign of respect.  Cleat was also raised  in this type of environment and asks his students to call him by his last name, but doesn't think that a first name basis would affect the learning environment; "you learn if you want to learn."  Both are interested in the way upbringing and culture lead to certain behaviors in the classroom (they can both identify which students come from which types of homes) and learning how to further their dialogue/communication with students from all different backgrounds on an individual basis.

The first day I was miserable with the task of playing Sudoku. The idea of calling this "play" was ridiculous to me. Many people have brains that automatically and quickly see the patterns and love this game as a result. Relative to education, I see why some students are angry when given a task or content which doesn't easily sit in their mind's experiences. Time is needed to develop the new skill and I should recognize what comes easily to many in my class could perhaps cause the few who can't fathom meaning to get angry or depressed or just generally shut down.

Group: Kim, Regina, Jack and Wil

Brain Drain result:

Fun, challenging, Relaxing

Done, unhappy, winner

Puzzle, square, challenge

Half of the group finds Sudoku relaxing and enjoyable. The other half of the group finds it frustrating because of the time it takes; feels like not the best use of time.

All members of the group found the group solving of Sudoko to be enjoyable and even more enjoyable to solving it individually. Some reasons for enjoying the collaboration was the social aspect of talking and learning from one another as well as not feeling stuck and frustrated.

BRING IT ON!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!