Free Why Do I Need a Teacher When I’ve Got Google by Ian Gilbert Page A

where constant improvements are sought, collected and distributed. It should be like this in education too.
    As told to the
New Scientist
by Manfred Spitzer from the University of Ulm in Germany:
    In medicine, we have an excellent system in place to go from basic research to clinical practice, while in neuroscience we have the basic understanding of how the brain learns but still need to figure out how to translate this into the classroom.
    (Same Sex, Different Rules,
New Scientist
, 29/04/06)
    According to the article, one of the big things to come from the symposium is that you can improve how well children learn by improving the child’s ‘executive function’. This, although the exact definition varies between the experts, is the way they approach the things they are approaching at a neurological level. According to Sheldon H. Horowitz, Ed.D, director of professional services at the National Center for Learning Disabilities (NCLD),
    Executive functioning involves activating, orchestrating, monitoring, evaluating, and adapting different strategies to accomplish different tasks. … It requires the ability to analyze situations, plan and take action, focus and maintain attention, and adjust actions as needed to get the job done.
    ( www.greatschools.net/LD/identifying/executive-function-lens-to-view-your-child.gs?content=1017 )
    To what extent, then, are you helping your struggling learners to do better by improving their executive functioning? Are you helping them with organizational and planning skills? Are you helping them learn how to focus, pace themselves, manage their time and resist distraction? Do you teach them how to respond when they feel themselves becoming frustrated?
    And to what extent are you tapping into other insights about the human brain to help your students be the best they can be? For example, do you ‘differentiate by gender’? And by that I don’t mean have single sex lessons; after all, recent research found that one in ten women have male-type brains and one in five men have female-type brains. 6 According to the previously mentioned article entitled, ‘Same Sex, Different Rules’ in the
New Scientist
:
    Men and woman differ from each other, statistically at least, in cognitive traits such as visuospatial skills, navigational strategies, verbal fluency, memory skill and mathematical reasoning and in aspects of personality such as aggressiveness, competitiveness, self-esteem, risk-taking, neuroticism, emotional sensitivity, agreeableness, interest in casual sex and pornography and jealousy.
    (Same Sex, Different Rules,
New Scientist
, 29/04/06)
    Or, are you aware of the specific differences noticeable in MRI scans between the brains of children and adults with ADHD and those without? 7 And have you read the US National Institute of Health report that, according to the Financial Times, ‘seems to suggest that ADHD is a neurological reality, but does not establish that it is, in the long term, either abnormal or permanent’? 8
    With all the fuss about water in the classroom, are you aware there is no proper academic research to substantiate any claims about its efficacy in helping young people concentrate? Or that, with all the pressure on children to have a good breakfast to help with learning, different foods have different effects on their brains anyway, depending on their genetic makeup and that there is a naturally occurring hormone, grehlin, that we produce when we are hungry that actually increases concentration and learning? 9
    And are you tapping into the growing field of evolutionary psychology and understanding that, due to what is called the ‘environment of evolutionary adaptedness’, some of the problems you are facing in the classroom, with ‘naughty boys’ for example, have been millions of years in the making? We are like we are because of how we’ve been. Your job isn’t to squash such behaviours so much as to channel them in new ways.
    And what about the fact that