Uncommon Sense Teaching: Learning Habits & Community

This module covers motivation, stress, and character change—vitally important topics for teachers. It explores the importance of surprise in learning, the role of curiosity in education, how the amygdala underpins subconscious biases, insights on cramming effectiveness, approaches to unreachable students, dealing with bullying among students and teachers, and strategies to help students navigate stressful situations.

Skills you'll gain

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This module explores how the brain decides whether to make mental or physical tasks conscious or nonconscious based on frequency of use. It covers both declarative and procedural learning systems, including their advantages and drawbacks. The module explains how information stored in procedural links can help speed student learning by enabling automatic access to movements or thoughts without conscious processing of each component. It also demonstrates how leveraging the procedural system can improve classroom management, making classrooms run efficiently with minimal active intervention.

Skills you'll gain

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This module explores the advantages and disadvantages of faster and slower types of learning. It examines how struggling learners ("hikers") can demonstrate greater accuracy and flexibility in changing their minds when faced with contradictory evidence, while faster learners ("race cars") may find it more difficult to accept when they're wrong. The module connects these learning styles to critical thinking abilities and examines biases, fixed mindsets in research and education, the challenges of innovative teaching approaches, and strategies for resolving group dysfunction in team settings.

Skills you'll gain

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This module examines how learning differences like dyslexia and attention deficit disorder can affect students' learning experiences, sometimes subtly or without formal diagnosis. It highlights the importance of adapting teaching approaches to students' natural learning styles rather than forcing conformity with the majority. The module emphasizes teaching more toward the procedural system for some students and more toward the declarative system for others. It provides a template and guidelines for lesson planning, including setting objectives, creating assessments, designing engaging introductions ("bell ringers" and "hooks"), structuring the main lesson content, and crafting effective conclusions.

Skills you'll gain

This course includes: