During my career, I maintained an interest in the science behind learning. One of the later concepts to emerge was cognitive load. Are you old enough to recall when telephones were fixed to a wall socket?

The amygdala is immensely powerful. It can shut off access to higher-order thinking so it can focus on keeping you angry. Or making you angry. Or keeping you safe.

Happy, contented brains learn well. That sentence is double-edged. We teachers can extract maximum learning from happy students. Conversely, in a class of 25 learners, what are the odds that 100% of them are in that state of mind?

I loved teaching my classes about the human brain. They, in turn, loved hearing about brain parts and how they worked. 

Water skiing is a lot of fun. For other people. I spent some of the recent school vacation watching other people do it. I’ve tried it, but it wasn’t for me. I’d rather speed down a black run on a pair of snow skis than hitch myself to a speeding boat.

Woo hoo! Holidays! It's time to kick back for a day or two and take stock. Does that mean a review? Yep, and it also means preparing for the next term. Nah, maybe not yet.

Emotions play a pivotal role in how our students learn and retain information. Dopamine has been called a feel-good chemical. Human brains are hooked on it. The poker machine player gets a dopamine shot when the numbers line up. A sportsperson receives a dose of it if they score the winning goal, basket, touchdown, or point. Musicians live on it. Anyone who performs in front of a crowd thrives on dopamine (yes, you teachers, I’m talking to you). 

The hypothalamus decides our responses to situations that lead to anger. It also determines our reactions to situations that cause us to love.  

Brain scientists have found strong links between the emotional state of a learner and the amount a learner retains. We teachers have known that for ages—that student who arrives at school with a wattle tree-sized chip on their shoulder. 

Getting a grip on anything worthwhile isn’t easy. Higher-order thinking isn’t easy, but it’s worthwhile. Engaging learners with it isn’t easy. Is it worthwhile? 

Critical thinking? If you’re a modern, hip, with-it, switched-on teacher (and who isn’t?), you’ve heard, seen, or workshopped something about critical thinking. It’s not a new concept. We’ve all participated in undergrad and postgrad degree courses. 

Organising is the key to becoming a critical thinker. We’re talking 21st-century skills here. Critical thinking, creativity, cooperation and collaboration underpin or should underpin modern teaching and learning.

There are many ways to gather data/information. If you’re a science teacher, you’ll be right across it. If you teach kindergarten, your students still gather information. It’s more of a teacher-directed process than a Year 10 student’s approach, but it is still called gathering.

Organising information is a discrete skill that needs to be explicitly taught. And, it is truly where the magic happens. I’ve had students who prefer organising over the other two. Of course, you can’t organise without information, so they accept that gathering is a necessary evil.

We could spend an entire school year with our students and do nothing more than gather information. What would we have at the end of it? Pages and pages of … not much.

Making sense of our world is something we do daily. As adults, teachers specifically, we not only make sense of our world, we unwrap the world so our students can get a handle on it.

Gather, organise, and communicate. As a process, we use it more than we realise. And we use it without thinking about it. Think weekly shopping–gather a list of items needed at the supermarket.

We humans are great at telling stories. We’ve told each other stories for as long as we’ve had language. Even before that–think of cave drawings and paintings.