Books I highly recommend

Oakley and colleagues (2021) discuss the differences between working and long-term memory.

They believe that information stored in long term memory would never be forgetful. However, on the other hand, learning that is input in working memory is temporary and will be lost quickly if students do not retrieve it often.

Thus, the capacity of working memory is short, only holding roughly four pieces of information at a time. If too much information is crammed in all at once, all information will vanish.

Hence, the authors postulate that teachers must be aware when students think that they got the idea down but in fact, these ideas only stick in the working memory instead of long term. As a result, students are unable to recall what they have learned later.

When educators hear the word “neuroscience”, it may feel and sound like a complex specialist subject that we are not qualified to talk about.

But can a teacher or principal be considered highly effective without working knowledge of the research world? If we do not research to find strategies that would support our teaching, then we hinder our growth in a world of knowledge that is only accelerating. 

It is clear  that many of the unsolved problems of the classroom may be corrected if we are able to grasp the lessons emerging from pedagogical neuroscience.

Brain-based is vital for a student-centered teaching approach, and reciprocally, it helps educators understand how we as teachers learn. Tackling the full difficulty of human cognition allows us to approach our work with the deepest sense of empathy for the struggles of students.

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Punished by Rewards - Alfie

Classroom Management in the U.S education system.

I grew up in an environment where classroom corporal punishment was used. At that time, I did not know much about the negative effects it had on me due to the normalcy of how our culture views it. I just knew it was unpleasant and I learned nothing valuable at that moment except for how to jump through hoops to avoid punishment. 

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When I moved to the U.S, I found that corporal punishment is banned in California while I was at my training on mandatory child abuse reporting in the school district. This moment was a revelation where I gained a new perspective on punishment. Since then, I have been much more susceptible to arguments supporting positive discipline. I previously thought Skinnerian’s theory was at the core of my belief in helping a classroom stay under control. But after two years of working in public education, I was getting comfortable in identifying the functions of behavior and writing out plans to extinguish them. I thought to myself, what are the hidden truths contained within these contingency contracts? Is it serving the students interests first? What role does the easy convenience of top-down control play in teacher’s advocacy for implementation? 

These considerable questions come rushing in my quest to explore what would really make an impact on the students’ behavior for the long term. Once we take away the rewards, would their behaviors stay the same? How would they act if I am not in their presence? These notions are reflected by the meta-cognitive processes that would follow corporal punishment, that my teacher employed to make me fear failure. It served that purpose, and interfered with my sense of self-determination. I was consumed not with the prospects of success, and pursuit of the path that would lead me there. I instead focused only on performing the recital of facts, with no time left for reflection. It sent the latent message that “do what I ask, and you will be fine” which is consistent with the following reading excerpt:

Behavioral theorists contend that explanations for learning need not include internal events (e.g., thoughts, beliefs, feelings), not because these processes do not exist.., but rather because the causes of learning are observable environmental events” (Schunk, 2012, p.22).

I can’t disregard the student's thoughts, feelings and beliefs because simply that is “a fundamental law of human nature” (Kohn, 2018, p.4). Treating them as if they are non-human beings seems unrealistic and irrational in my view. Up to this point, I am not against or in favor of behaviorism. I am just in a mode of Aristotle’s proverb: “the more I know, the more I know I do not know”. For this reason, I can’t simply answer I am either or. I can only insist that my preferences in classroom management would be leaning toward a cognitive approach that intends to make learning meaningful, the consideration of learners’ self perceptions, and their conditions of learning (Schunk, 2012). Because these components influence one’s mental processing of information