The Changing Understanding of How We Learn–Part 3 : What’s next for Theological Education?

You are a seasoned professor who has taught countless numbers of first year students your particular discipline, capsule but this year you resolve to try a different approach to teaching, cialis one that includes brain-based strategies for helping students learn. In previous posts, sildenafil we’ve examined the shift from teaching to helping students learn and the nature of effective learning. How do you structure a seminary class/learning experience that makes this shift while continuing to communicate important content?

How can I Keep from Singing?

A church history professor began each class by inviting the class to sing a hymn together because he recognized the role music plays in preparing the brain to learn. Music wakes up your brain, especially your hippocampus, which is the ‘library’ for long-term memory, and trains your brain for higher forms of complex thinking. Listening to, and participating in music also creates new neural pathways in your brain that stimulate creativity. It also makes us feel good and relaxes us, opening the emotional connections in our brains.

• How could you incorporate music into the seminary classroom?
• What connections can you make between a piece of music and the content for the day?

We’ve got a Lot of Material to Cover Today….

If that’s the first thing heard in a classroom, it’s a recipe for disaster. Research indicates that our memory for information crammed into our heads doesn’t have much hope of longevity unless it is connected to prior knowledge, emotionally wired and visually stimulating.

John Medina, a molecular neurobiologist at the University of Seattle, has devised 12 Brain Rules which issue particular challenges to traditional learning environments in his book Brain Rules. Medina’s Rule #4 states that: People don’t pay attention to boring things. Neuroscience tells us that audiences check out of a primarily verbal presentation after about ten minutes, but you can keep grabbing their attention by telling narratives or creating events rich in emotion. State your central idea in one minute, then spend the next nine minutes describing it, illustrating it, explaining it, and helping others to experience it. At the ten minute interval insert a “hook.”

Here are some principles of hooks:

• Hooks must trigger an emotion. Narratives are especially strong if they are short and reinforce the central idea.
• Hooks have to be relevant and connect to your central idea. This is not the time for a story for story sake. Listeners will begin to disconnect; you lose your credibility as a source.
• Hooks can serve as transitions. Looking backward and summarizing material or repeating some material in the form of a narrative or looking forward to the next point, asking a surprising and unexpected question, or setting up anticipation for where you are heading are all effective hooks.

The person doing the most talking during an education session is the one doing the most learning. So that’s actually the speaker. We need to create more learning opportunities where the speaker talks for about ten minutes and then the class talks to each other. We talk so we can remember and so we can process.

Chunking content into ten minute segments and then allowing learners ten minutes to digest is the best way to learn. Most 60 minute classes could insert three breaks to allow time for discussion, reflection and application. The amount of learning directly aligns to the amount of thinking and reflection. We need to create more time for the learner to think and less pushing of content. The more the learner is allowed to reflect, the more they learn.

• What devices can be employed as “hooks” in the seminary classroom to re-engage students?
• Is the material able to be “chunked” into 10 minute segments?
• How will you allow them to talk to one another and to reflect?

Vision Trumps all Senses

Neuroscientists tell us that vision trumps all the other senses. We remember images. We forget words. Fifty to eighty percent of our brain’s natural processing power is devoted to processing sight. That’s more than all of our other senses. We actually see with our brains, not our eyes. When we hear a word, our brain translates it into an image.

If you are using a presentation software, such as PowerPoint, be sure not to use more than 30-33 words per slide. Check out alternative presentation software, such as Prezi, which utilizes a non-linear format. If possible use a visual image to reinforce the same information. Charts and graphs are not the same as visual images; they are more information. Visuals do not have to be restricted to the classroom. Perhaps a visit to a display of ancient artifacts or art in a nearby museum would enhance the study of ancient Mesopotamian cultures. Movies are also visual images which can be used effectively to increase student learning.

• What visuals are utilized in the seminary classroom?
• What are the challenges to increasing the use of visuals in your discipline?

Emotions Trump Facts

Emotional connections answer the “Why is this important?” question. Far from being manipulative or coercive, tapping into emotional memory is a powerful hook for new information. Inviting students to recall a significant baptism in their own lives or in the life of their family before beginning a study of the doctrine of infant baptism may create a more emotional connection for the information. Some researchers believe that emotions function as neurological Post-it notes. How we use emotion to aide learning determines learning’s success.

• What role does emotion play in the seminary classroom?
• What are the particular challenges your discipline might face in incorporating emotional connections in learning?

So how do we begin to implement brain-based learning strategies that have potential to help students learn? It will require changing some time-honored pedagogical approaches. It will require seminary professors to teach differently than the way in which they learned. As the philosopher Alan Watts suggests, “The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.”

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