Beyond School

2 Cents Worth » Take it away! Take it All Away!

• It would cause a major faculty evacuation, but what a nice core group it would leave behind. And what a difference it would make to school budgeting and purchasing! How many schools have seen the light and started (or finished) pursuing a “no more textbooks” and “far less paper” policy? I’m just appalled at how much our textbooks cost–and how little so many of us teachers and students actually use them. (Thanks to Diane Quirk for this!) A clip:
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By textbook standards, this Fall 2006 “news” is “current.” By web-text standards, I’m behind the times, only learning about the “School of the Future” opening in Philadelphia five long months ago.

It will take the educational publishing industry a good two or three more years to publish about this old news. And charge extortionate prices for it.

Textbooks: a soon-to-be-relic of the “School of the Past”? We can only hope. Imagine how much more effectively school funds could be applied to learners’ learnings.

Anyway…

The following blog post is from a woman who spent three years “willing” the School of the Future into being. She only posted about once a month in those years, and the post below attests to her determination to distill her journey’s lessons into the fewest, and most eloquent, words.

As my school takes its first steps toward becoming a “school of the future” as well, I find the following unspeakably encouraging. It’s worth reading the whole post–written less than a week before the new school opened its doors. Before reading, maybe watching this 10-minute PBS NewsHour feature on the school and its vision will increase your appreciation. Like the New American Schoolhouse and the Science Leadership Academy, this school fills me with a heady mix of ideas and emotions. (Even if it is sponsored by Microsoft instead of Apple )

http://blogs.msdn.com/phillyhi/default.aspx

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If anybody out there has advice for the do’s and don’ts of implementing a 1:1 Laptop policy, I’m all ears. Especially on these questions:

1. One grade at a time, or all at once?
2. Macs or PCs?
3. Pedagogical and professional development groundwork before the shift?
4. Tech considerations?
5. The business end: beyond initial price tags?
6. Other lessons from experienced travelers?

I would really appreciate input on this one.

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One of the 21st Century skills Friedman pinpoints in The World is Flat is what I’ll just call “green habits of mind”: finding energy- and resource-saving alternatives to traditional ways of doing things.

Web-based reading, writing, assessment, and research are all obvious examples of this new habit. Think of all the energy (and time) saved by going paperless.

But students are as “addicted” to 20th Century learning as teachers are to ditto teaching. Some of them chafe at the absence of the reams of paper they’ve been habituated to wasting for their schoolwork. Their habits have fossilized too.

So I threw this little Zen koan at 15-year-old Jennifer and Sarah yesterday:

“Do you love your children and grand-children?”

You can imagine their look–it’s one I get often–and the unriddling that followed.

And you (and they) can also get the point: daily headlines about global warming point to another educational responsibility for 21st Century schools, which is, namely, that sometimes student convenience has to take the back-burner to more front-burning (and globally destructive) considerations.

It’s not like we’re just here to get them into good colleges. Fat good that will do if that college happens to be coastal, and under water. (And again, there’s still their children to think of.)

Footnote: Along these lines, my school admissions director, Robin Berting, has just announced that the monthly school newsletter–traditionally a “read-and-toss” convenience–will soon find a new home: a school community wiki. That type of leadership is what it’s all about. (Robin’s recently taken up blogging, too!)

(Photo: Original: Volcano National Park, Hawaii, summer 2005)

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More wanderings to share with Diigo (and I’m partly experimenting with Diigo’s “Blog this” settings in combo with Blogger’s).

New American School homepage

• I blogged about this school. I want to either teach there, or create a similar reality.
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Quizlet › The End of Flashcards

• Online flash cards.
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How The Brain Rewires Itself — Friday, Jan. 19, 2007 — Printout — TIME

• Wow. Imagining doing something re-wires the brain as much as actually doing it. TRUE “mind over (gray) matter.”
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[click "read more" for full post]

The finding was in line with a growing number of discoveries at the time showing that greater use of a particular muscle causes the brain to devote more cortical real estate to it. But Pascual-Leone did not stop there. He extended the experiment by having another group of volunteers merely think about practicing the piano exercise. They played the simple piece of music in their head, holding their hands still while imagining how they would move their fingers. Then they too sat beneath the TMS coil.

When the scientists compared the TMS data on the two groups–those who actually tickled the ivories and those who only imagined doing so–they glimpsed a revolutionary idea about the brain: the ability of mere thought to alter the physical structure and function of our gray matter. For what the TMS revealed was that the region of motor cortex that controls the piano-playing fingers also expanded in the brains of volunteers who imagined playing the music–just as it had in those who actually played it.

“Mental practice resulted in a similar reorganization” of the brain, Pascual-Leone later wrote. If his results hold for other forms of movement (and there is no reason to think they don’t), then mentally practicing a golf swing or a forward pass or a swimming turn could lead to mastery with less physical practice. Even more profound, the discovery showed that mental training had the power to change the physical structure of the brain…..

THINKING ABOUT THINKING

AS SCIENTISTS PROBE the limits of neuroplasticity, they are finding that mind sculpting can occur even without input from the outside world. The brain can change as a result of the thoughts we think, as with Pascual-Leone’s virtual piano players. This has important implications for health: something as seemingly insubstantial as a thought can affect the very stuff of the brain, altering neuronal connections in a way that can treat mental illness or, perhaps, lead to a greater capacity for empathy and compassion. It may even dial up the supposedly immovable happiness set point.

In a series of experiments, for instance, Jeffrey Schwartz and colleagues at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) can quiet activity in the circuit that underlies obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), just as drugs do. Schwartz had become intrigued with the therapeutic potential of mindfulness meditation, the Buddhist practice of observing one’s inner experiences as if they were happening to someone else.

When OCD patients were plagued by an obsessive thought, Schwartz instructed them to think, “My brain is generating another obsessive thought. Don’t I know it is just some garbage thrown up by a faulty circuit?” After 10 weeks of mindfulness-based therapy, 12 out of 18 patients improved significantly. Before-and-after brain scans showed that activity in the orbital frontal cortex, the core of the OCD circuit, had fallen dramatically and in exactly the way that drugs effective against OCD affect the brain. Schwartz called it “self-directed neuroplasticity,” concluding that “the mind can change the brain.”

The same is true when cognitive techniques are used to treat depression. Scientists at the University of Toronto had 14 depressed adults undergo CBT, which teaches patients to view their own thoughts differently–to see a failed date, for instance, not as proof that “I will never be loved” but as a minor thing that didn’t work out. Thirteen other patients received paroxetine (the generic form of the antidepressant Paxil). All experienced comparable improvement after treatment. Then the scientists scanned the patients’ brains. “Our hypothesis was, if you do well with treatment, your brain will have changed in the same way no matter which treatment you received,” said Toronto’s Zindel Segal.

But no. Depressed brains responded differently to the two kinds of treatment–and in a very interesting way. CBT muted overactivity in the frontal cortex, the seat of reasoning, logic and higher thought as well as of endless rumination about that disastrous date. Paroxetine, by contrast, raised activity there. On the other hand, CBT raised activity in the hippocampus of the limbic system, the brain’s emotion center. Paroxetine lowered activity there. As Toronto’s Helen Mayberg explains, “Cognitive therapy targets the cortex, the thinking brain, reshaping how you process information and changing your thinking pattern. It decreases rumination, and trains the brain to adopt different thinking circuits.” As with Schwartz’s OCD patients, thinking had changed a pattern of activity–in this case, a pattern associated with depression–in the brain.

HAPPINESS AND MEDITATION

COULD THINKING ABOUT THOUGHTS IN A new way affect not only such pathological brain states as OCD and depression but also normal activity? To find out, neuroscientist Richard Davidson of the University of Wisconsin at Madison turned to Buddhist monks, the Olympic athletes of mental training. Some monks have spent more than 10,000 hours of their lives in meditation. Earlier in Davidson’s career, he had found that activity greater in the left prefrontal cortex than in the right correlates with a higher baseline level of contentment. The relative left/right activity came to be seen as a marker for the happiness set point, since people tend to return to this level no matter whether they win the lottery or lose their spouse. If mental training can alter activity characteristic of OCD and depression, might meditation or other forms of mental training, Davidson wondered, produce changes that underlie enduring happiness and other positive emotions? “That’s the hypothesis,” he says, “that we can think of emotions, moods and states such as compassion as trainable mental skills.”

With the help and encouragement of the Dalai Lama, Davidson recruited Buddhist monks to go to Madison and meditate inside his functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) tube while he measured their brain activity during various mental states. For comparison, he used undergraduates who had had no experience with meditation but got a crash course in the basic techniques. During the generation of pure compassion, a standard Buddhist meditation technique, brain regions that keep track of what is self and what is other became quieter, the fMRI showed, as if the subjects–experienced meditators as well as novices–opened their minds and hearts to others.

More interesting were the differences between the so-called adepts and the novices. In the former, there was significantly greater activation in a brain network linked to empathy and maternal love. Connections from the frontal regions, so active during compassion meditation, to the brain’s emotional regions seemed to become stronger with more years of meditation practice, as if the brain had forged more robust connections between thinking and feeling.

But perhaps the most striking difference was in an area in the left prefrontal cortex–the site of activity that marks happiness. While the monks were generating feelings of compassion, activity in the left prefrontal swamped activity in the right prefrontal (associated with negative moods) to a degree never before seen from purely mental activity. By contrast, the undergraduate controls showed no such differences between the left and right prefrontal cortex. This suggests, says Davidson, that the positive state is a skill that can be trained.

For the monks as well as the patients with depression or OCD, the conscious act of thinking about their thoughts in a particular way rearranged the brain.

Guide to writing in Wordpress | learning.mrbelshaw.co.uk/blogs

• Doug’s tutorial on how to drive WordPress! Great resource for training learners. THANKS, DOUG!
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