Week 5 - Theory to Practice Statement

How does the brain work? This is a critical question when considering how best to optimize a learner's opportunity to learn.  From a physiological perspective, teenager's brains are undergoing dramatic reorganization.   Teenagers are at a phase in their development when their brains are pruning away neural connections that are not reinforcing and reinforcing other neural connections that correspond to personal interest.  Therefore, if a teenager has lost motivation to learn, then the teacher must strive to find a context in which the learning goals of the class mesh with the interests of the teenager, because teenagers are intrinsically motivated to learn that which interests them.

In addition, during the teenage years, the prefrontal cortex (the "risk taking") portion of the brain is not yet developed.  This is necessary and valuable to the human race as a species, somebody has to go where we haven't gone before or do what hasn't been done before.  But how should this information about the teenage brain be integrated into a learning opportunity in the classroom setting.  If students are interested in that which sets free their personal directive to explore and experiment, then a teacher must include self-directed learning opportunities and collaborative and free exploration opportunities into the curricula because these types of opportunities, combined with effective content-driven discussions and skill-building activities, will synergistically affect the student's interest, and, therefore, success in learning.