The Teaching Brain and the End of the Empty Vessel

Abstract

I am excited to present this special section that explores the teaching brain. The goal of the series is to facilitate a transition in the lens on teaching from an empty vessel to a phenomenon as dynamic, variable, and context‐dependent as learning. This transformation will likely push all of us to reevaluate our understanding and research on teaching. Over the coming year, each issue will provide several articles that seek to shed light on a different aspect of this burgeoning new area of research. This issue opens the series with a piece designed to lay out the conceptual framework and evidence base for a new way to think about teaching: the teaching brain. Next, Michael Chazan gives an archeological grounding for the existence of teaching in the earliest ancestors of Homo sapiens. Sidney Strauss and Margalit Ziv then describe how teaching is a fundamental human cognitive ability. Together, these articles begin to create a paradigm shift in the definition of teaching. We look forward to an exciting journey.

Content Based Lesson Plans inside the English Rural Classrooms

“…Results confirm the theory that students are not empty vessels (Rodríguez, 2012); rather, they come to class with a full variety of personal, cultural, social and academic experiences that they are expecting to connect with the new knowledge. Rural high school students require clear aims to learn a language, related to their own previous knowledge, interests and context.…”

An Integrated Course Design Model for Beginning Faculty

“…Each encounter, each personal engagement results in some learning and some change. The learning of both the students and the instructor can be informed by recent emergent research from the new interdisciplinary field of mind, brain, and education (Rodriguez, 2012;Tokuhama-Espinosa, 2010a, 2010b. The brain remains plastic throughout the entire human life span (Damasio, 2010;Schwartz & Begley, 2002).…”

“…Faculty ongoing pedagogical development leads to the idea of the instructor as a dynamic learner (Rodriguez, 2012) time. From course to course and even from class session to class session, the instructor is never the same person, nor are the students.…”

“…They are the situational context (programmatic, institutional, and societal) within which the course takes place, the temporal context to represent both the evolving and socially constructed nature of the course content and the dynamic process nature of learning for students within the course, and the instructor as an active chooser of course features as well as an active learner-in-process (Rodriguez, 2012). The starting points of the model are the course learning objectives, goals, or outcomes as chosen by the instructor or a group of instructors for multiple section courses.…”

“…Keep in mind that those interrelationships are iterative within the course design process and subject to revision as the faculty member gains in experience and becomes a more accomplished pedagogical learner (Rodriguez, 2012).…”