“Give a man
a fish and he eats for a day, teach a man how to fish and he can feed himself
for life.”
This
proverb speaks to education. While content is important, it is more impactful
to teach students how to learn. Instilling
that motivation, drive, perseverance and curiosity about the world we live in
will make a student successful in life.
Giving a student a task and the tools to complete the task without
giving them step-by-step instructions gives students the opportunity to think
and problem-solve. We need to let our
students think, make decisions and create a variety of ways to show us, the
educators, what they know about a topic.
Students
need experiences to develop their brain in order to make connections to the
world around them. During a course I
took called Reading Research in Education
I read many articles pertaining to
education, but there was one article that the professor apologized for having
us read because it was quite dry. It was
about the “white matter” of the brain where the myelin is developed. Myelin is a white fatty substance that coats
the cables, known as axons that are found in the brain where the “white matter”
is located. Myelin is considered to be
the conductor for the brain’s signals. It was found that the myelin plays a
greater role in transferring information than once believed. The layers of
myelin develop over time and are not finished developing until between the ages
of 25 to 30.
Since this
myelin is still developing throughout early adulthood there is a question of
whether it has an impact on intelligence.
There is a correlation between the complexity of skills being learned and
the degree of changes in the white matter that occur. It became one of the most
interesting articles the class read and we brought it up throughout the
semester because it described how the experiences the students have now will
impact them the most for their future.
We came to realize that as teachers we contribute in large part to
developing students‘ myelin. We became the
“myelinators.” As educators, we are so important to students’ lives, and what
we present to them in one year are the foundations on what they will build to
the next. One way to build these
experiences is to keep curiosity alive!
How do you
keep curiosity alive? Curiosity is the
root of learning. When a student is
curious they begin to ask questions.
When children are very young, they are in the natural state of asking
“why?” They want to know about
everything. How can we bottle that and
keep it as children grow older and become students? How can we spark that
curiosity in the classroom?
What
sparks your curiosity?
By: Karen Wilson, STEM Coach
By: Karen Wilson, STEM Coach
Reference:
Fields,
Douglas R. (2008). White Matter
Matters. Scientific American, March, 54-61.