Habituation and Novelty

Beginning in infancy and throughout the life span, humans are motivated by newness, change, and excitement. Habituation, the tendency to lose interest in a repeated event and gain interest in a new one, is one of the most fundamental human reflexes. If the thermostat were to suddenly turn the air conditioning on, you would hear the loud humming sound begin, but within minutes you couldn’t even hear it if you tried. Habituation, a fundamental property of the nervous system, provides mechanis...

 The Case for the Gamified Classroom

Gamified instruction empowers students to own their learning. Students who learn in a gamified classroom have a better capacity for persistence. Gamified instruction helps students develop a capacity for selfdirection. Gamified classrooms impart critical social skills. Gamification of learning enables students to build and sustain learning communities. Gamified instruction is inherently democratic and meritocratic and hence encourages risk taking. Gamified instruction helps students maintain ...

 Teaching with Pokemon Go

Learning objectives that ask students to assemble and integrate data (like a language or math class) are well-suited to the capture and find aspects of Pokémon Go!. Imagine setting up a variety of PokéStops around your campus. Each one can be visited by students as they go about gathering the data they need to accomplish the learning objective you set. Perhaps after traveling about campus, they have to return to your classroom and use the data they’ve gathered like PokéBalls to solve mor...

 Teaching as Gardening

If a teacher is a gardener, than a student is the seed. The classroom serves as the greenhouse creating a warm, safe environment for growth. An administrator is the soil, serving as a strong nutrient base for the seed to root. The parents are the water, providing live and maintaining it. When the water/parent is not plentiful, the seed will suffer. The curriculum is the sun. It shines knowledge to ensure growth. The aspects of the curriculum that some students do not make sense of can be cons...

 The Baby's Brain is Interested in Surviving

Many well-meaning moms and dads think their child’s brain is interested in learning. That is not accurate. The brain is not interested in learning. The brain is interested in surviving. Every ability in our intellectual tool kit was engineered to escape extinction. Learning exists only to serve the requirements of this primal goal. It is a happy coincidence that our intellectual tools can do double duty in the classroom, conferring on us the ability to create spreadsheets and speak Fre...