We love Gabrielle Principe’s book, “Your Brain on Childhood: The Unexpected Side Effects of Classrooms, Ballparks, Family Rooms, and the Minivan.” Not only is her storytelling engaging and creative, it is also peppered with so much research that one almost needs an organizational chart to keep track of it all. While it is largely geared toward exploring the cognitive … Read More
The Myth of Average
Todd Rose’s brilliant talk at TEDxSonoma expands on a startlingly simple point: When you design for the average, you design for no-one. He suggests instead we to need design for the extremes. For anyone who has worked with students, it is an intuitive enough concept, in theory. Yet in application, it has proven challenging, especially in a climate fixated on norm reference test … Read More
Paradox of Students’ “Deficits” As Society’s Strengths
The Economist article, “In praise of misfits,” lays out the business-related benefits of what the author calls “creatives,” “anti-social geeks,” “oddball quants,” and “rule-breaking entrepreneurs.” While the entire article is well worth the read, we have pulled out a few quotes to help frame the idea that we should work tirelessly to help our school system to support these “misfits.” … Read More
On Cognition and the Bilingual Mind
In the past year there has been a flurry of articles on the cognitive advantages of the bilingual mind. Below is a selection of quotes from various pieces. The best of the articles comes from the Dana Foundation‘s Cerebrum publication (which includes a list of accompanying research for more exploration). In their piece, Viorica Marian, PhD and Anthony Shook conclude: The cognitive and neurological benefits … Read More
BRAIN POWER: From Neurons to Networks
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Teachers: What’s Your Framework?
By Craig Pohlman, Ph.D., Co-author of Schools for All Kinds of Minds and Director of MindMatters at Southeast Psych, a learning program in Charlotte, NC In some circles, All Kinds of Minds has become equated with the neurodevelopmental framework it uses, but this framework is only one aspect of their approach to understand learning and learners. All Kinds of Minds is … Read More
How to guarantee “learning”? Understand the learner AND the content
By Mary-Dean Barringer, CEO, All Kinds of Minds For several years, many of my colleagues have been urging me to pick a fight with Daniel Willingham, a well respected cognitive scientist: “He doesn’t believe in learning variation!” That may be, but having read his book Why Don’t Students Like School?, I find much in common with his recommendations and nine … Read More
Summer Blog Series Post #4: The Role of Attention and Temporal-Sequential Ordering in Time Management
When in school, students are expected to follow routines and complete assignments within certain time frames. Children must follow these same guidelines when continuing the learning process at home, managing their time and effort to complete homework assignments and projects on time. Time management is critical to many of the expectations placed on students, including initiating assignments, taking the appropriate … Read More
Survey Reveals A New Achievement Gap
By Mary Jo Dunnington, Vice President, Strategic Partnerships, All Kinds of Minds MetLife just published its annual survey, “The American Teacher.” Part 2, which synthesizes feedback from teachers, principals and students on student achievement, is chock-full of revealing data. For example: Most teachers (84%) are very confident that they have the knowledge and skills necessary to enable all of their … Read More
Sharing AKOM’s Research Base
I recently shared AKOM’s Research Base of the Schools Attuned Porgram, www.allkindsofminds.org/Research/Index.aspx, with colleagues. Several teachers asked for this information following our school wide Schools Attuned work. While we work exclusively with college bound students who have learning differences, prior to learning the neurodevelopmental constructs, our teachers possessed many varied understandings of the learning differences. These different interpretations were the … Read More
