How Children Learn

From Stone Age paintings to technological wizardry, humans have demonstrated their remarkable ability to extend—and ponder—their own intelligence.

The coauthor of Making Connections: Teaching and the Human Brain discusses why it is necessary to eliminate emotional threats and immerse students in relevant learning.

With magnetic resonance imaging comes an ability to see inside the human brain—and a corresponding need for educators to become familiar with new theories about how we learn.

By not recognizing practical and creative intelligence to the degree we foster analytic skills, we may be disenfranchising multitudes of students from learning.

Instead of organizing the curriculum around the intelligences, organize it around the child, this author advises.

Suggestions for constructivist teachers who are struggling to fuse the knowledge students develop on their own with what experts know.

Whereas neural pruning helps us to handle an overwhelming amount of stimuli, neural branching opens up the minds to new perceptions.

Ten guiding principles for a reading styles program, and how to implement each.

A learning styles approach has improved achievement levels for all students in a 3rd grade inclusion classroom.

These vignettes illustrate traits of imaginative, analytic, common-sense, and dynamic learners.

How to develop a multidisciplinary curriculum around a focused problem that interests students.

In more than 22 U.S. and Canadian classrooms, Schools for Thought students work on real-life problems as they learn science, match, technology, and language arts.

Teachers plan their own questions to mesh with what 6th graders want to know about why some soaps float and some don't.

In an urban district that was in danger of state takeover, Reciprocal Teaching raised hopes, expectations, and student achievement in less than one year.

Combining the basic elements of a story, students "create" history and explore what it might have been like to live in a different time.

While discovering the secrets of a volcano, children learn strategies for innovative thinking.

Schools are broadening their literacy efforts to help children learn to respond to e-mail and convey meaning through images as well as text.

The author agrees to points made by Karp, Molnar, Rifkin, and Murnane and Levy (February 1997) but argues that our best way to sustain democracy, justice, and economic opportunity is through service learning.