Educational Neuroscience

What? I looked up and found out a little information about Eric Jensen. Eric Jensen is a researcher and a speaker of Brain Based learning. He was a secondary teacher who decided to do some research on the affects of teaching and how we as teachers can help the students we teach understand and retain the information that is given to them. He focuses on how to teach children who may have some sort of difficulty in life, and how we can help those students learn with certain teaching strategies. He gives workshops and promises to lighten up the teacher development courses we all have to take.

So what does his studies have to do with education? Eric Jensen wants to share the methods of brain based teaching to all teachers. He has introduced a method of teaching that goes deep into the students minds and helps them to learn and focus. He teaches to the teachers, saying that by creating a learning environment in the classroom and in using his methods a teacher can control the classroom and be much more affective. Most of the information that he gives is through his seminars so of course he does not have much about the methods online, but he does say that stress can cause students not to learn. He states "Brain-based teaching is all about smarter, more purposeful teaching that can reach a greater number of students. It’s not any one single thing you do. It’s more about the on-going, purposeful aggregate of environment, instruction and curriculum strategies that makes it all work." I would love to have him come and instruct us sometime.

Now what? I wish I new more about the subject of Brain Based Learning. I understand the importance of teaching the students so that they learn. I am worried that too many students come to the classroom for no reason but to be there filling the desk space. It is my goal to teach so that all my students learn, and not only do they learn, but they enjoy doing it. Brain Based Learning encompasses a broad spectrum of learning,including the environment that is given and the attitude of the teacher and the students at any given time of the day. I want to learn and know how to teach the students with a strategy that works day in and day out. I am sure I will learn that here at UVU too.