Sections
Section
9:
New lenses, eternal questions
Previous: Section 8
| Next: Section 10
Over the six units of this course, you will be encouraged to formulate and understand principles or hypotheses from research and use these to explore classroom and institutional issues. The course asks you to imagine implications of the research for how we teach and then to create lessons and design schools. While exploring the relationship between emotion and cognition, the course examines some specific biology and functions of the brain:
- How the brain recruits its many parts to accomplish different tasks (right-brain/left-brain facts and fiction)
- Developmental differences and individual profiles of cognitive strengths and weaknesses
- The interplay of emotion with the mind and body
- Mirror neurons, empathy, and the self
- The biology of social emotions like compassion and admiration
- The relationship between performance and context in learning
- Skill development via the construction of webs and neural networks
- The critical role of regression in learning (top)
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All of which have significant implications for education:
- Motivation, attention, engagement, and memory
- How different students perceive and solve problems
- Learning differences and disabilities
- Policy and practice issues involving all aspects of school—such as homework, grading, course loads, and graduation requirements
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| Eric Baylin |
| "It's important for teachers to know about the research because it can support great intuitive teaching. It can also help us to understand how we can align our teaching to the ways in which..." – Eric Baylin |
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"It's important for teachers to know about the research because it can support great intuitive teaching. It can also help us to understand how we can align our teaching to the ways in which the brain is functioning and to the ways in which teachers and students are learning." – Eric Baylin
Eric Baylin has been a teacher for 36 years, working with a variety of age levels in both public and private schools in New York and North Carolina. He currently works at Packer Collegiate Institute in Brooklyn, NY, a K–12 independent school established in 1854. In addition to teaching art and photography to middle- and high-school students, Baylin coordinates a program of collaborative faculty study groups in Packer's professional development program.
