0.3 Theories/approaches to learning  (Page 6/12)

The three instructional techniques associated with brain-based learning are:

• Orchestrated immersion - creating learning environments that fully immerse students in an educational experience;
• Relaxed alertness - eliminating fear in learners, while maintaining a highly challenging environment;
• Active processing - allowing the learner to consolidate and internalize information by actively processing it.

How Brain-Based Learning Impacts Education

Curriculum - Teachers must design learning around student interests and make learning contextual.

Instruction - Educators let students learn in teams and use peripheral learning. Teachers structure learning aroundreal problems, encouraging students to also learn in settings outside the classroom and the school building.

Assessment - Since all students are learning, their assessment should allow them to understand their own learning stylesand preferences; students monitor and enhance their own learning process.

What Brain-Based Learning Suggests

How the brain works has a significant impact on what kinds of learning activities are most effective. Educators need to helpstudents have appropriate experiences and capitalize on those experiences. Educator Renate Caine illustrates this point by describingthree interactive elements essential to this process:

• Teachers must immerse learners in complex, interactive experiences that are both rich and real. One excellent example isimmersing students in a different culture to teach them a second language. Educators must take advantage of the brain's ability toparallel process.
• Students must have a personally meaningful challenge. Such challenges stimulate a student's mind to the desired state ofalertness.
• In order for a student to gain insight about a problem, there must be intensive analysis of the different ways to approach it, and aboutlearning in general. This is what's known as the "active processing of experience."

A few other tenets of brain-based learning include:

• Feedback is best when it comes from reality, rather than from an authority figure.
• People learn best when solving realistic problems.
• The big picture can't be separated from the details.
• Because every brain is different, educators should allow learners to customize their own environments.
• The best problem solvers are those that laugh!

Designers of educational tools must be artistic in their creation of brain-friendly environments. Instructors need torealize that the best way to learn is not through lecture, but by participation in realistic environments that let learners try new thingssafely.

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Learning styles

Definition

This approach to learning emphasizes the fact that individuals perceive and process information in very different ways. Thelearning styles theory implies that how much individuals learn has more to do with whether the educational experience is geared toward theirparticular style of learning than whether or not they are "smart." In fact, educators should not ask, "Is this student smart?" but rather " How is this student smart?"