Cool Brain Research

What?

I chose to read about Dr. Judy Willis. She is a neurologist who decided to get a degree in education as well. She now teaches, writes books, articles, and give presentations. Judy is currently researching the RAD teaching strategy. The R in RAD stands for Rectangular activating system, the A in RAD stands for Amygdala, and the D stands for Dopamine.

So What?

Her research has to deal with how the brain works and how we can better teach things in the core curriculum/in general to bring all test scores up, keep the students interested and yet have them get a better understanding of all the information that is being taught. It also talks about ways that we can make our classroom very low stress/non-threatening.

In order for students to learn, they must be engaged in a relaxed and enjoyable way. The reasons that most students don't learn is because they have a fear of failure and they become bored.

Now What?

In reading about RAD, I can try to do my best to make the environment/classroom a low stress/non-threatening place. I am going to try to make learning and what I teach as fun as I can and still teach the curriculum/information that I need to be teaching. I always learned better when it was a hands-on or interesting activity. I know that you can't always teach that way but you can do something more fun in everyway that you teach, you just need to be creative...